It was a wet evening in June, and a steady downrush of rain purred on
the tiled roofs of the old town and set the broad eaves and high-peaked
gables dripping. A summer sweetness breathed in the gardens where the
fallen petals of rhododendrons lay like flame upon the green grass. The
roses were weighed down with dew, and each leaf diamonded with a
glimmering tear. In Lombard Street the tall cypresses stood like solemn
monks cowled and coped against the rain.
The downpour had lessened a little, and Jack Murchison, flattening his
nose against the nursery window, saw a country cart driven by a man in a
white mackintosh swing into Lombard Street from the silver,
rain-drenched sheen of St. Antonia’s trees. The man’s big white body
streamed with wet, his face shining out like a drenched peony under the
brim of his hat, that dripped like the flooded gutter of a house.
Tremulous rain-drops fell rhythmically from the big man’s nose, and the
apron that covered his legs was full of puddles.
The country cart drew up outside the doctor’s house, and Master Jack saw
the big man in the white mackintosh climb out laboriously, the cart
tilting under his weight. He threw the leather apron over the horse’s
loins, and swung the water out of his hat, disclosing to the boy above a
round bald patch about the size of a saucer.
The bell rang, a good, rattling, honest peal that told of a
straightforward and unaffected fist. Jack heard Mary’s rather nasal
treble answering the big man’s vigorous bass. The white mackintosh was
doffed and hung considerately on the handle of the bell. There was much
wiping of boots, while the man Gage appeared at the side gate in the
garden wall, and came forward to hold the farmer’s horse.
“Sorry to bother you, doctor, on such a beast of an evening.”
“Come in, Mr. Carrington.”
“You remember me, sir?”
“I don’t forget many faces. Come into my study.”
The doffing of the white mackintosh had uncovered a robust and rather
corpulent, thick-set figure in rough tweed jacket and breeches and
box-cloth leggings. The farmer had one of those typically solid English
faces, fresh-colored though deeply wrinkled, and chastening its good
humor with an alert, world-wise watchfulness in the rather deep-set
eyes. Mr. Carrington was considered rather a masterful man by his
friends, a man who could laugh while his wits were at work bettering a
bargain. He was one of the most prominent farmers in the neighborhood,
and one of the few who confessed to making money despite the times.
“My trap’s waiting outside, doctor. I want you to come back with me
right away to Goldspur Farm.”
Mr. Carrington was sitting on the extreme edge of a chair, and wiping
the rain from his face with a silk handkerchief.
“Anything much the matter?”
“Well, doctor, you know I have taken to growing a lot of ground-fruit,
and I’ve had about fifty pickers down from town this year.”
Murchison nodded.
“They’re camped out in two tin shanties and a couple of tents down at
Goldspur Farm. East-enders, all of them; and you never quite know,
doctor, what an East-ender carries. Well, to be frank, I’m worried about
some of ’em.”
Mr. Carrington sat squarely in his chair, and tapped the floor with the
soles of his boots. He looked thoughtful, and the corners of his big,
good-tempered mouth had a melancholy droop.
“There’s one woman in particular, doctor, and her youngster, who seem
bad. Sick and sweating; won’t take food; they just lie there in the
straw like logs. My foreman didn’t tell me anything about it till this
afternoon, but when I’d seen the woman I had the horse put in, and came
straight here.”
Murchison glanced at his watch, and then crossed the room and rang the
bell.
“Can you have me driven back?” he asked.
“Certainly, doctor.”
“Good. Ah, Mary, will you ask your mistress to have dinner postponed
till eight. And tell Gage to take these letters to the post. Now, Mr.
Carrington, my mackintosh and I are at your service.”
“You’ll need it, doctor, and an old hat.”
A slender vein of gold gashed the dull west as they left the outskirts
of the town behind. As the rent in the sky broadened, long rays of light
came down the valley, making the woods and meadows a glory of shimmering
green, and firing the rain pools so that they shone like brass. The
farmer took the private road that ran through Ulverstone Park, a rolling
wilderness of beeches and Scotch firs, whose green “rides” plunged into
the glimmering rain-splashed umbrage of tall trees. Here were tangled
banks of purpling heather, and great stretches of sweet woodland turf.
Old yews brooded in the deeps of the domain, solemn and still, most
ancient and wise of trees.
“Get up, Molly,” and Mr. Carrington shook a raindrop from his nose, and
flicked the brown mare with the whip. “Clearing a little. Sorry for the
people who cut their hay yesterday.”
“Somewhat damp. How is the fruit doing?”
“Oh, pretty fair, pretty fair, as far as our strawberries are concerned.
The finest year, doctor, is when you have a first-class crop and your
neighbors can only put up rubbish. It’s no good every one being in
tip-top form. I’ve got rid of tons, and at no dirt price, either.”
Mr. Carrington’s British face beamed slyly above his angelic white
mackintosh. It was a face in which stolid satisfaction and stolid woe
were easily interchanged, for the heavy lines thereof could be twisted
into either expression.
Murchison was listening to the hoarse rattle of the clearing shower
beating upon a myriad leaves. The gold band in the west was broadening
into a canopy of splendor. Had Mr. Carrington been educated up to more
pushing and aggressive methods of making money, he would have seen in
that sky nothing but a magnificent background for some silhouetted
sky-sign shouting “Try Our Jam.”
“And these pickers of yours, how long have they been with you?”
The lines in the farmer’s face rearranged themselves abruptly.
“Poor devils, they look on this as a sort of yearly picnic, doctor.
There are about fifty of them, and they’ve been at Goldspur about ten
days.”
“Many children?”
“Children? Plenty. If they were Irish, they’d bring the family pig out,
doctor, just to give him some new sort of dirt to wallow in. But then,
what can you expect—what can you expect?”
They had left the park by the western lodge, and came out upon a stretch
of undulating fields closed in the near distance by woods of oak and
beech. A tall, gabled farm-house of red brick rose outlined against the
sky with a great fir topping its chimney-stacks like the flat cloud seen
above a volcano in full eruption. Near it, fronting the road, were a few
nondescript cottages; farther still a jumble of barns, outhouses, and
stables. In the middle of a fourteen-acre field Murchison could see two
zinc-roofed sheds and a couple of old military tents standing isolated
in a waste of sodden, dreary soil.
Mr. Carrington pointed to them with his whip.
“There’s the colony. Will you come in first, doctor, and have—” he
reconsidered the words and cleared his throat—“and have—a cup of tea?”
Murchison had noticed the break in the invitation, and had reddened.
“No, thanks. We had better walk, I suppose?”
“Sit light, doctor; we have a sort of road, though it ain’t exactly
Roman.”
The farmer passed Murchison the reins, and climbed down, the trap
swaying like a small boat anchored in a swell. He opened a gate leading
into the field, his white mackintosh flapping about his legs.
“Not worth while getting up again,” he said, laconically. “Drive her on,
doctor, I’ll follow.”
Murchison heard the click of the gate, and the squelch of Mr.
Carrington’s boots in the mud, as the trap bumped at a walking pace
towards the zinc sheds in the field. The larger of the two resembled a
coach-house, and could be closed at one end by two swinging doors. The
rain was still rattling on the roof as Murchison drove up, and a thin
swirl of smoke drifted out sluggishly from the darkness of the interior.
The two tents had a soaked and slatternly appearance. Empty bottles, old
tins, scraps of dirty paper, and miscellaneous rubbish littered the
ground. On a line slung between two chestnut poles three dirty towels
were hanging, either to wash or to dry?
As the trap stopped at the end of the rough road, Murchison could see
that the larger shed was like a big hutch full of live things crowded
together. A litter of straw, ankle deep, lay round the walls. A fire
burned in the middle of the earth floor. The faces that were lit up by
the light from the fire were coarse, quick-eyed, and hungry, the faces
seen in London slums.
Half a dozen children scuttled out like a litter of young pigs, and
stood in the slush and rain, staring at the trap. Murchison’s appearance
on the scene seemed to arouse no stir of interest among the adult
dwellers in the shed. They stared, that was all, one or two breaking the
silence with crude and characteristic brevity.
“’Ello, ’ere’s the b——y doctor.”
“There’s ’air!”
“Look at the hold boss, with a phiz like a round o’ raw beef stuck hon
top of a sack of flour.”
Mr. Carrington arrived with his boots muddy and the lines of his face
emphatic and authoritative.
“Some one hold the mare. Why don’t you keep the kids in out of the wet?
This way, doctor, the second tent.”
Mr. Carrington opened the flap, and, letting Murchison enter, contented
himself with staring hard at two figures lying on an old flock mattress
with a coat rolled up for a pillow. One was a woman, thin, still pretty,
in a hollow-cheeked, hectic way, with a ragged blouse open at the
throat, and a couple of sacks covering her. The other was a child, a
girl with flaxen hair tossed about a flushed and feverish face. The
child seemed asleep, with half an orange, sucked to the pulp, clutched
by her grimy fingers.
Murchison remained for perhaps half an hour in that rain-soaked tent,
while Mr. Carrington stumped up and down impatiently, kicking the mud
from his boots and eying the rubbish that marked the presence of these
London poor. The eastern sky was filling fast with the oblivion of night
when Murchison emerged. The woman had been able to answer his questions
in a dazed and apathetic way.
Mr. Carrington met him with a squaring of his sturdy shoulders and a
bluff uplift of the chin.
“Well, doctor?”
“I’m glad you sent for me.”
“As bad as that, is it?”
“Typhoid, or I am much mistaken.”
The farmer thrust his hands into the side pockets of his mackintosh, and
flapped them to and fro.
“Well, I’m damned!” was all he said.
The cold sky rose dusted with a few stars in the west when the farmer’s
cart set Murchison down in Lombard Street before his own door. Dinner
had been waiting more than an hour. Catherine’s face, bright, yet a
little troubled, met him in the shaded glow of the hall.
“You must be soaked to the skin, dear,” and she felt his clothes.
“No, nothing much. I’m more hungry than wet.”
“A long case. Dinner is ready.”
They went into the dining-room together, Murchison’s arm about her body.
“Some responsibility for me at last,” he said, quietly; “I believe it is
typhoid.”
“Where, at Goldspur Farm?”
“Yes, among Carrington’s pickers.”
“Poor things!”
“They are cooped up like cattle in a shed.”
He was silent for some minutes, for Mary had set a plateful of hot soup
before him, and even doctors are sufficiently human to enjoy food.
“There is a child ill,” he said, staring at the bowl of roses in the
middle of the table.
“Poor little thing!”
“Strange, Kate, but she reminds me—wonderfully, very wonderfully—of
Gwen.”