The Interior Castle
JEAN STAFFORD
P ANSY VANNEMAN,
injured in
:n
automobile accident, often woke
up before dawn when the night noises of the hospital still came, in
hushed hurry, through her half-open door. By day, when the nurses ·
talked audibly with the internes, laughed without inhibition, and
took no pains to soften their footsteps on the resounding composition
floors, the routine of the hospital seemed as bland and commonplace
as that of a bank or a factory. But in the dark hours, the whispering
and the quickly stilled clatter of glasses and basins, the moans of
patients whose morphine was wearing off, the soft squeak of a
stretcher as it rolled past in its way from the emergency ward-these
suggested agony and death. Thus, on the first morning, Pansy had
faltered to consciousness long before daylight and had found herself
in a ward from every bed of which, it seemed to her, came the be–
wildered protest of someone about to die. A caged light burned on
the floor beside the bed next to hers. Her neighbor was dying and a
priest was administering Extreme Unction. He was stout and elderly
and he suffered from asthma so that the struggle of his breathing, so
close to her, was the basic pattern and all the other sounds were
superimposed upon it. Two middle-aged men in overcoats knelt on the
floor beside the high bed. In a foreign tongue, the half-gone woman
babbled against the hissing and sighing of the Latin prayers. She
played with her rosary as if it were a toy: she tried, and failed, to
put it into her mouth.
Pansy felt horror, but she felt no pity.
An
hour or so later, when
the white ceiling lights were turned on and everything-faces, count–
erpanes, and the hands that groped upon them-was transformed
into a uniform gray sordor, the woman was wheeled away in her
bed to die somewhere else, in privacy. Pansy did not quite take this
in, although she stared for a long time at the new, empty bed that
had replaced the other.
The next morning, when she again woke up before the light,
this time in a private room, she recalled the woman with such sorrow
that she might have been a friend. Simultaneously, she mourned the
driver of the taxicab in which she had been injured, for he had died
at about noon the day before. She had been told this as she lay on a
