Cherry Ames 04 Chief Nurse by Helen Wells Page B

stumble. “Besides, I 106
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    should think nurses would have more consideration!
    Good night!”
    In the darkness of the Ritz Stables, Cherry felt several hands nudge her and she was hastily escorted outside for a whispered conference.
    “Boss, we’d better tell you. We’ve been working in the wards next to Bessie’s and we know what’s the matter with her.”
    “She’s been cross like this for some time, only you haven’t been with her to see it.”
    “Look here, Cherry, you must do something! We’ve tried and failed. Now, you’re the boss—you insist! ”
    “Cherry Ames, you must do something about poor Bessie immediately.”
    Cherry whispered back frantically, “Do what, for goodness sake? What’s wrong?”
    “Bessie is dieting—she’s not eating anything to speak of,” the girls told the Chief Nurse. “Bessie is cranky because she’s hungry!”
    “So that’s it!” Cherry sighed with relief. “If that’s all, we’ll just feed her. You had me worried there! I thought Bessie was planning mutiny, or something.” But it was not so simple to persuade Bessie to eat.
    The girls tried, in a group; Ann and Bertha tried, individually; Cherry tried. But Bessie persisted in staying away from Mess. The girls brought her trays of food, from Mess to the Ritz Stables. Bessie refused B E S S I E
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    everything, except black coffee and green vegetables, which were not enough nourishment.
    “From hippopotamus to sylph, by the easy road of starvation,” Bessie insisted, with a gleam of her old humor.
    “You’ll be neither a hippo nor a sylph if you don’t eat,’’ Cherry warned her. “You’ll be sick.”
    “Pooh! Me, sick? I’m as strong as a horse—but I’m tired of looking like a horse. No, boss. No, fellow nurses.
    Bessie diets!”
    “I’ll tell Major Pierce on you!” Cherry threatened.
    “Why, the Major himself teased me about being so big,” Bessie retorted. But her usual merry smile was missing. And now Cherry understood.
    Bessie might joke about her size but she was sensitive about it all the same. Cherry wanted to talk to her sensibly about her wrong ideas of her appearance. But to do so in front of the assembled nurses would be tactless. She would have to do it the next day.
    When the next day came, Cherry remembered excitedly that this was the day the wounded flier was to be brought in for an operation.
    Cherry herself had scheduled this operation, at Captain Willard’s request. She assigned two of the gentlest corpsmen to carry the still-silent flier from his bed to Surgical, on a field stretcher mounted on bicycle 108
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    wheels. Cherry herself was going to administer the anaesthetic.
    In the little draped-off section that was the ether room, Cherry stood talking quietly to the silent airman.
    His eyes, fastened on her face, slowly closed as the preliminary morphine relaxed him. Cherry kept her hand on his pulse, from time to time lifting the flap to peer into the bigger room.
    The Operating hut was in readiness. The inner wall, and even the outer wall, had been scrubbed. The high operating table under its powerful center lamps was draped with sterile sheets and blankets. A sterile (or germ-free) nurse, her face and hair masked with gauze, sterile rubber gloves on her hands, lifted from the sterilizers gauzes and sutures for the surgeon’s use.
    There were heaps of white gauze, white swabs, white sheeting, bandages, towels. Marie Swift came in quietly, also masked. Cherry had asked her to be operating nurse, for Marie was excellent, and Cherry, who wanted to be with the flier when he lost consciousness under ether, would not have time to scrub up to be operating nurse herself. A corpsman, and Bessie Flanders, masked too but in non-sterile garb, worked around the end of the hut as circulating nurse, adjusting lights and faucets and spraying antiseptic on the canvas-covered dirt floor. The air in here was