A diary without dates.

  • Bagnold, Enid.
Date:
[1918]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A diary without dates. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by University of California Libraries where the originals may be consulted.

    129/168 (page 113)
    Everjrthing in the dispensary is beautiful— its glasses, its flames, its brass weights, its jars and globes ; but much more beautiful because it is half a floor higher than the corridor in which we stand and look up into it, through a hatchway in the wall. There is something in that : one feels like Gulliver. No woman has ever been into this bachelors' temple. On tapping at a small square panel set in the wall of the corridor the panel flies up and a bachelor is seen from the waist to the knees. If he feels well and my smile is humble he will stoop, and I see looking down at me a smaU worn face and bushy eyebrows, or a long ascetic face and bleached hair, or a beard and a pair of bearded nostrils. Between them the three old things, priests in their way, measure and weigh and mix and scold and let up the panel and bang it down through the long day, filling the hospital with their coloured bottles, seaJed packets of pills, jars and vaccines, and precious syringes in boxes marked ''To be returned at once (I never knew a Sister fail to toss her head when she saw this message). It is a very social spot outside the panel of the dispensary : each V.A.D. goes there each morning as one might do one's market-