Mrs. Mappin surveyed me.  “Ah!” she sighed—­she was given to sighing.  “He’s a good ’un, is Private Wood.”  The inference was plain.  There was little hope of my becoming such a good ’un.  In any case, my natty grey tweeds were against me.  One could never make an orderliesque impression in those tweeds.  “Better take your jacket off,” sighed Mrs. Mappin.  I did so, chose a dishcloth, and started to dry a pyramid of wet plates.  For a space Mrs. Mappin meditated, her hands in soapy water.  Then she withdrew them.  “I think,” she sighed, “you an’ me could do with a cup of tea.”

And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin.

I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin’s part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree reprehensible.  But I was also to learn that faithful, selfless, honest, and diligent scrub-ladies are none too common; and the Sister who discovers that she has been allotted such a jewel as Mrs. Mappin is seldom foolish enough to exact from her a strict obedience to the letter of the law in discipline.  Mrs. Mappin, in her non-tea-bibbing interludes, toiled like a galley-slave, was rigidly punctual, and never complained.  Her sighs were no index of her character.  They were not a symptom of ennui (though possibly—­if the suggestion be not rude—­of indigestion caused by tannin poisoning).  She was the best-tempered of creatures.  It is a fact that if I had been so disposed I need never have given Mrs. Mappin any assistance, though it was within my province to do so.  She would, without a murmur, shoulder other people’s jobs as well as her own.  Having finished with bearing children (one was at the Front—­it was Mrs. Mappin who, on being asked the whereabouts of her soldier son, said, “’E’s in France; I don’t rightly know w’ere the place is, but it’s called ‘Dugout’"), she had settled down, for the remainder of her sojourn on this plane, to a prospect of work, continuous work.  A little more or a little less made no difference to her.  She had nothing else to do, but work; nothing else to be interested in, except work—­and her children’s progress, and her cups of tea.  Her ample figure concealed a warm heart.  Behind her wrinkled old face there was a brain with a limited outfit of ideas—­and the chief of those ideas was work.

Our cup of tea was refreshing, but it would be incorrect to convey the notion that I was allowed to linger over such a luxury.  There are few intervals for leisure in the duty-hours of an orderly in an officers’ ward.  Had the Sister and her nurses not been occupied elsewhere, I doubt whether I should have been free to drink that cup of tea at all—­a circumstance of which perhaps Mrs. Mappin was more aware than I. At any rate the call of “Orderly!” from a patient summoned me from the kitchen and into the ward long before I had finished drying Mrs. Mappin’s dishes.