Miss, Matron Mitchie wants you to meet her in the parlor. Toot sweet, she says.
The parlor was reserved for medical officers—nurses were permitted in but had rarely taken the chance until recently when the season’s first columns of sand rose in the deserts and were blown along in the khamsin. The room reminded Sally of pictures she had seen in the Mail of Sydney clubs—themselves based on the clubs of London. The overupholstered chairs and the small tables of mahogany or some such wood for waiters to place drinks on were left over from the hotel days of this building. So were the racks for newspapers, the spine of each newspaper screwed between two varnished rods and hanging heavy with the weight of tidings from France, Russia, Serbia, Mesopotamia. Now there were twenty-four women or so in the room. Sally’s sister and Carradine and the sculpted Freud and Slattery and Leonora Casement and prune-faced Nettice—all marvelously changed by the expectation of what would be said. Matron Mitchie was there not in the ward clothes she seemed to have been wearing seconds earlier but in her traveling suit with her gray cape. The transmutation might serve to show what serious powers resided in Mitchie.
Well, ladies, she said to them. New nurses are on their way, their ship just in at Suez. So you are hand-selected by arrivals and fate and what I know of you. Now we are to take ship. If you have any patients for whom you have a special concern, leave notes for those who are on their way. You must gather everything you have—your bedrooms now are marked for others. You may leave behind in a shared tea chest all your sandalwood camels and filigree work—everything you bought in bazaars. You should be dressed comme ça.
She indicated her own formal wear.
But you must pack your on-duty uniforms and other effects. The question arises—the question of whither. Well, I can tell you the start of that whither.
On the edge of illumination, the women still laughed at her.
She raised and consulted a paper she had in her hand.
Our new station is the hospital ship—our friend the Archimedes. Archimedes being a Greek who liked baths and who sank himself to displace water, let us hope he looks down upon his ship and its sisters with a gentle gaze. But à propos earlier remarks, let me assure you, you have been chosen for your sobriety and nursing skills. You must not depart from those strengths.
Honora cried out, Our destination, Matron? I mean, once on Archimedes?
Mitchie leaned towards them.
Because we are a hospital ship and there will be news of all that’s happened there in days past in the papers by tomorrow, there is no prohibition placed on me against telling you it is to the region of the fabled Hellespont—the mouth of that passage where things have begun to happen, that gate running between the Greeks and the Ottomans.
Women frowned. The atlases in their brains were inexact on that geography.
The ancients knew it forwards and backwards, said Mitchie, but the world was smaller then. We’ll nurse boys who come to grief there and who certainly don’t know it any better than we do. The omens of the campaign have been excellent, and so, I warn you, it may be the Turk himself that you must nurse. His flesh is human too. He too is born of woman.
She looked around the room inviting contradiction of this humane theorem.
She made a motion as if clearing the room of small talk.
Wear your coat, for it will be cold tonight between Cairo and Alexandria and we should leave pneumonia to the soldiers, who have more excuse for it.
The charabancs took them through a city to which they had become so quickly habituated that it had begun to lose some of its power to startle and appall them. Men still—heedless of traffic—led camels loaded with firewood for sale, or donkey carts. The stubborn poor came close to hurling themselves beneath the wheels of military trucks, water wagons, the white limousines of the rich, and the women’s vehicles in an attempt to sell something or to be compensated with a coin for some maiming they had suffered.
The light was still hazy from the recent unseasonal sandstorm. The sun had frayed into a ball of tasseled edges as the charabancs arrived at the central Ramses Station. This—despite its concessions to Arabic style—was built like a fortress against the Arabic world. But of course Arab peddlers had penetrated it.
A truckload of medical orderlies—themselves assigned to Alexandria and perhaps to the Archimedes—followed the charabancs in trucks with all the nurses’ luggage. So Mitchie and her women carried simply their valises and their immediate needs as they entered beneath the archways and moved amongst soldiers, Egyptian businessmen, and the poor. A person could damn well get used to this, said Honora.
Carradine, Sally, Naomi, and Mitchie had a compartment. Naomi offered Sally a seat by the cramped window of the carriage which seemed as designed to keep the world out as much as to allow sight of it.
Sally said, No, you take it.
Still there lay a distance between the sisters and it struck her that the other women could see it and were making surmises about it. But for distraction from that awkward thought, there were antimacassars to lay the back of their heads against and the seats were of the softest leather. A superior foot-warming device—a canister with hot coals over which a carpet cover had been laid—was placed on the floor for their use. The women were barely settled when a conductor in a tarboosh told them respectfully that the dining carriage was open now. Matron Mitchie asked Sally, Would you be so kind as to fetch down my valise?
Untroubled by the gentle lurch of the ambling train, Sally got the scuffed leather thing down. Matron Mitchie took an envelope from it and turned to Carradine and Naomi.
Will you take those—be dears for poor old Matron!—and give them to the girls in the compartments? Meal tickets. Be warned and warn them. They do not cover beer and wine and certainly not whisky!
The stipulation implied the women would fall to whisky very easily.
Come, Sally, said Mitchie, after Sally had been handed her white meal card.
Sally followed Mitchie as she made her broad-bottomed way down the corridor of the train towards the dining car and bounced a hip off the walls on one side and then on the other. There is useful flesh, thought Sally.
They came into the dining room and found lamps held in lotus-like bulbs burning above each table. The tables themselves were set with brilliant, flashing cutlery and filigree-work tablecloths. The women who did the fine work earned very little, and here the grace of things sat balanced on want. And here too—as Lieutenant Maclean had said—all justice had to await the defeat of the enemy and mightn’t even happen then.
The dining room windows seemed better placed for viewing. For a time—as they rolled beside the Nile—Sally could see feluccas as black shapes on the deep-blue night-time river. By lanterns in the bows and hung from masts, the faces of men moving along the deck were vivid for an instant then gone. Members of the same humanity she shared in and carriers of the same kind of blood. Yet their lives were unreachable to her. What did they say to their wives? What did they say to their children? And what was said in return? That was travel, she supposed. A dance across surfaces to see the face of everything and learn the meaning of very little.