the wind drove the smoke downwards and the air was full of its acrid
taint. Johnson felt chilled to the bone, though rather by his
apprehensions than by the weather. He crouched over the fire with his
thin white hands held out to the blaze. At ten o'clock Jane brought in
the joint of cold meat and laid his place for supper, but he could not
bring himself to touch it. He drank a glass of the beer, however, and
felt the better for it. The tension of his nerves seemed to have reacted
upon his hearing, and he was able to follow the most trivial things in
the room above. Once, when the beer was still heartening him, he nerved
himself to creep on tiptoe up the stair and to listen to what was going
on. The bedroom door was half an inch open, and through the slit he
could catch a glimpse of the clean-shaven face of the doctor, looking
wearier and more anxious than before. Then he rushed downstairs like a
lunatic, and running to the door he tried to distract his thoughts by
watching what was going on in the street. The shops were all shut, and
some rollicking boon companions came shouting along from the
public-house. He stayed at the door until the stragglers had thinned
down, and then came back to his seat by the fire. In his dim brain he
was asking himself questions which had never intruded themselves before.
Where was the justice of it? What had his sweet, innocent little wife
done that she should be used so? Why was Nature so cruel? He was
frightened at his own thoughts, and yet wondered that they had never
occurred to him before.
As the early morning drew in, Johnson, sick at heart and shivering in
every limb, sat with his great-coat huddled round him, staring at the
grey ashes and waiting hopelessly for some relief. His face was white
and clammy, and his nerves had been numbed into a half-conscious state
by the long monotony of misery. But suddenly all his feelings leapt into
keen life again as he heard the bedroom door open and the doctor's steps
upon the stair. Robert Johnson was precise and unemotional in everyday
life, but he almost shrieked now as he rushed forward to know if it were
over.
One glance at the stern, drawn face which met him showed that it was no
pleasant news which had sent the doctor downstairs. His appearance had
altered as much as Johnson's during the last few hours. His hair was on
end, his face flushed, his forehead dotted with beads of perspiration.
There was a peculiar fierceness in his eye, and about the lines of his
mouth, a fighting look as befitted a man who for hours on end had been
striving with the hungriest of foes for the most precious of prizes. But
there was a sadness too, as though his grim opponent had been
overmastering him. He sat down and leaned his head upon his hand like a
man who is fagged out.
"I thought it my duty to see you, Mr. Johnson, and to tell you that it
is a very nasty case. Your wife's heart is not strong, and she has some
symptoms which I do not like. What I wanted to say is that if you would
like to have a second opinion I shall be very glad to meet any one whom
you might suggest."
Johnson was so dazed by his want of sleep and the evil news that he
could hardly grasp the doctor's meaning. The other, seeing him hesitate,
thought that he was considering the expense.
"Smith or Hawley would come for two guineas," said he. "But I think
Pritchard of the City Road is the best man."
"Oh yes, bring the best man," cried Johnson.
"Pritchard would want three guineas. He is a senior man, you see."
"I'd give him all I have if he would pull her through. Shall I run for
him?"
"Yes. Go to my house first and ask for the green baize bag. The
assistant will give it to you. Tell him I want the A.C.E. mixture. Her
heart is too weak for chloroform. Then go for Pritchard and bring him
back with you."
It was heavenly for Johnson to have something to do and to feel that he
was of some use to his wife. He ran swiftly to Bridport Place, his
footfalls clattering through the silent streets, and the big dark
policemen turning their yellow funnels of light on him as he passed. Two
tugs at the night-bell brought down a sleepy, half-clad assistant, who
handed him a stoppered glass bottle and a cloth bag which contained
something which clinked when you moved it. Johnson thrust the bottle
into his pocket, seized the green bag, and pressing his hat firmly down
ran as hard as he could set foot to ground until he was in the City Road
and saw the name of Pritchard engraved in white upon a red ground. He
bounded in triumph up the three steps which led to the door, and as he
did so there was a crash behind him. His precious bottle was in
fragments upon the pavement.
For a moment he felt as if it were his wife's body that was lying there.
But the run had freshened his wits and he saw that the mischief might be
repaired. He pulled vigorously at the night-bell.
"Well, what's the matter?" asked a gruff voice at his elbow. He started
back and looked up at the windows, but there was no sign of life. He was
approaching the bell again with the intention of pulling it, when a
perfect roar burst from the wall.
"I can't stand shivering here all night," cried the voice. "Say who you
are and what you want or I shut the tube."
Then for the first time Johnson saw that the end of a speaking tube hung
out of the wall just above the bell. He shouted up it--
"I want you to come with me to meet Doctor Miles at a confinement at
once."
"How far?" shrieked the irascible voice.
"The New North Road, Hoxton."
"My consultation fee is three guineas, payable at the time."
"All right," shouted Johnson. "You are to bring a bottle of A.C.E.
mixture with you."
"All right! Wait a bit!"
Five minutes later an elderly, hard-faced man with grizzled hair flung
open the door. As he emerged a voice from somewhere in the shadows
cried--
"Mind you take your cravat, John," and he impatiently growled something
over his shoulder in reply.
The consultant was a man who had been hardened by a life of ceaseless
labour, and who had been driven, as so many others have been, by the
needs of his own increasing family to set the commercial before the
philanthropic side of his profession. Yet beneath his rough crust he was
a man with a kindly heart.
"We don't want to break a record," said he, pulling up and panting after
attempting to keep up with Johnson for five minutes. "I would go quicker
if I could, my dear sir, and I quite sympathise with your anxiety, but
really I can't manage it."
So Johnson, on fire with impatience, had to slow down until they reached
the New North Road, when he ran ahead and had the door open for the
doctor when he came. He heard the two meet outside the bedroom, and
caught scraps of their conversation. "Sorry to knock you up--nasty
case--decent people." Then it sank into a mumble and the door closed
behind them.
Johnson sat up in his chair now, listening keenly, for he knew that a
crisis must be at hand. He heard the two doctors moving about, and was
able to distinguish the step of Pritchard, which had a drag in it, from
the clean, crisp sound of the other's footfall. There was silence for a
few minutes and then a curious drunken, mumbling sing-song voice came
quavering up, very unlike anything which he had heard hitherto. At the
same time a sweetish, insidious scent, imperceptible perhaps to any
nerves less strained than his, crept down the stairs and penetrated into
the room. The voice dwindled into a mere drone and finally sank away
into silence, and Johnson gave a long sigh of relief for he knew that
the drug had done its work and that, come what might, there should be no
more pain for the sufferer.
But soon the silence became even more trying to him than the cries had
been. He had no clue now as to what was going on, and his mind swarmed
with horrible possibilities. He rose and went to the bottom of the
stairs again. He heard the clink of metal against metal, and the subdued
murmur of the doctors' voices. Then he heard Mrs. Peyton say something,
in a tone as of fear or expostulation, and again the doctors murmured
together. For twenty minutes he stood there leaning against the wall,
listening to the occasional rumbles of talk without being able to catch
a word of it. And then of a sudden there rose out of the silence the
strangest little piping cry, and Mrs. Peyton screamed out in her delight
and the man ran into the parlour and flung himself down upon the
horse-hair sofa, drumming his heels on it in his ecstasy.
But often the great cat Fate lets us go, only to clutch us again in a
fiercer grip. As minute after minute passed and still no sound came from
above save those thin, glutinous cries, Johnson cooled from his frenzy
of joy, and lay breathless with his ears straining. They were moving
slowly about. They were talking in subdued tones. Still minute after
minute passing, and no word from the voice for which he listened. His
nerves were dulled by his night of trouble, and he waited in limp
wretchedness upon his sofa. There he still sat when the doctors came
down to him--a bedraggled, miserable figure with his face grimy and his
hair unkempt from his long vigil. He rose as they entered, bracing
himself against the mantelpiece.
"Is she dead?" he asked.
"Doing well," answered the doctor.
And at the words that little conventional spirit which had never known
until that night the capacity for fierce agony which lay within it,
learned for the second time that there were springs of joy also which it
had never tapped before. His impulse was to fall upon his knees, but he
was shy before the doctors.
"Can I go up?"
"In a few minutes."
"I'm sure, doctor. I'm very--I'm very----" he grew inarticulate. "Here
are your three guineas, Doctor Pritchard. I wish they were three
hundred."
"So do I," said the senior man, and they laughed as they shook hands.
Johnson opened the shop door for them and heard their talk as they stood
for an instant outside.
"Looked nasty at one time."
"Very glad to have your help."
"Delighted, I'm sure. Won't you step round and have a cup of coffee?"
"No, thanks. I'm expecting another case."
The firm step and the dragging one passed away to the right and the
left. Johnson turned from the door still with that turmoil of joy in his
heart. He seemed to be making a new start in life. He felt that he was a
stronger and a deeper man. Perhaps all this suffering had an object
then. It might prove to be a blessing both to his wife and to him. The
very thought was one which he would have been incapable of conceiving
twelve hours before. He was full of new emotions. If there had been a
harrowing, there had been a planting too.
"Can I come up?" he cried, and then, without waiting for an answer, he
took the steps three at a time.
Mrs. Peyton was standing by a soapy bath with a bundle in her hands.
From under the curve of a brown shawl there looked out at him the
strangest little red face with crumpled features, moist, loose lips, and
eyelids which quivered like a rabbit's nostrils. The weak neck had let
the head topple over, and it rested upon the shoulder.
"Kiss it, Robert!" cried the grandmother. "Kiss your son!"
But he felt a resentment to the little, red, blinking creature. He could
not forgive it yet for that long night of misery. He caught sight of a
white face in the bed and he ran towards it with such love and pity as
his speech could find no words for.
"Thank God it is over! Lucy, dear, it was dreadful!"
"But I'm so happy now. I never was so happy in my life."
Her eyes were fixed upon the brown bundle.
"You mustn't talk," said Mrs. Peyton.
"But don't leave me," whispered his wife.
So he sat in silence with his hand in hers. The lamp was burning dim and
the first cold light of dawn was breaking through the window. The night
had been long and dark but the day was the sweeter and the purer in
consequence. London was waking up. The roar began to rise from the
street. Lives had come and lives had gone, but the great machine was
still working out its dim and tragic destiny.
XII
A MEDICAL DOCUMENT
Medical men are, as a class, very much too busy to take stock of
singular situations or dramatic events. Thus it happens that the ablest
chronicler of their experiences in our literature was a lawyer. A life
spent in watching over death-beds--or over birth-beds which are
infinitely more trying--takes something from a man's sense of
proportion, as constant strong waters might corrupt his palate. The
overstimulated nerve ceases to respond. Ask the surgeon for his best
experiences and he may reply that he has seen little that is remarkable,
or break away into the technical. But catch him some night when the fire
has spurted up and his pipe is reeking, with a few of his brother
practitioners for company and an artful question or allusion to set him
going. Then you will get some raw, green facts new plucked from the tree
of life.
It is after one of the quarterly dinners of the Midland Branch of the
British Medical Association. Twenty coffee cups, a dozen liqueur
glasses, and a solid bank of blue smoke which swirls slowly along the
high, gilded ceiling gives a hint of a successful gathering. But the
members have shredded off to their homes. The line of heavy,
bulge-pocketed overcoats and of stethoscope-bearing top hats is gone
from the hotel corridor. Round the fire in the sitting-room three
medicos are still lingering, however, all smoking and arguing, while a
fourth, who is a mere layman and young at that, sits back at the table.
Under cover of an open journal he is writing furiously with a
stylographic pen, asking a question in an innocent voice from time to
time and so flickering up the conversation whenever it shows a tendency
to wane.
The three men are all of that staid middle age which begins early and
lasts late in the profession. They are none of them famous, yet each is
of good repute, and a fair type of his particular branch. The portly man
with the authoritative manner and the white, vitriol splash upon his
cheek is Charley Manson, chief of the Wormley Asylum, and author of the
brilliant monograph--"Obscure Nervous Lesions in the Unmarried." He
always wears his collar high like that, since the half-successful
attempt of a student of Revelations to cut his throat with a splinter of
glass. The second, with the ruddy face and the merry brown eyes, is a
general practitioner, a man of vast experience, who, with his three
assistants and his five horses, takes twenty-five hundred a year in
half-crown visits and shilling consultations out of the poorest quarter
of a great city. That cheery face of Theodore Foster is seen at the side
of a hundred sick-beds a day, and if he has one-third more names on his
visiting list than in his cash-book he always promises himself that he
will get level some day when a millionaire with a chronic complaint--the
ideal combination--shall seek his services. The third, sitting on the
right with his dress-shoes shining on the top of the fender, is
Hargrave, the rising surgeon. His face has none of the broad humanity of
Theodore Foster's, the eye is stern and critical, the mouth straight and
severe, but there is strength and decision in every line of it, and it
is nerve rather than sympathy which the patient demands when he is bad
enough to come to Hargrave's door. He calls himself a jawman, "a mere
jawman," as he modestly puts it, but in point of fact he is too young
and too poor to confine himself to a specialty, and there is nothing
surgical which Hargrave has not the skill and the audacity to do.
"Before, after, and during," murmurs the general practitioner in answer
to some interpolation of the outsider's. "I assure you, Manson, one sees
all sorts of evanescent forms of madness."
"Ah, puerperal!" throws in the other, knocking the curved grey ash from
his cigar. "But you had some case in your mind, Foster."
"Well, there was one only last week which was new to me. I had been
engaged by some people of the name of Silcoe. When the trouble came
round I went myself, for they would not hear of an assistant. The
husband, who was a policeman, was sitting at the head of the bed on the
further side. 'This won't do,' said I. 'Oh yes, doctor, it must do,'
said she. 'It's quite irregular, and he must go,' said I. 'It's that or
nothing,' said she. 'I won't open my mouth or stir a finger the whole
night,' said he. So it ended by my allowing him to remain, and there he
sat for eight hours on end. She was very good over the matter, but every
now and again _he_ would fetch a hollow groan, and I noticed that he
held his right hand just under the sheet all the time, where I had no
doubt that it was clasped by her left. When it was all happily over, I
looked at him and his face was the colour of this cigar ash, and his
head had dropped on to the edge of the pillow. Of course I thought he
had fainted with emotion, and I was just telling myself what I thought
of myself for having been such a fool as to let him stay there, when
suddenly I saw that the sheet over his hand was all soaked with blood; I
whisked it down, and there was the fellow's wrist half cut through. The
woman had one bracelet of a policeman's handcuff over her left wrist and
the other round his right one. When she had been in pain she had twisted
with all her strength and the iron had fairly eaten into the bone of the
man's arm. 'Aye, doctor,' said she, when she saw I had noticed it. 'He's
got to take his share as well as me. Turn and turn,' said she."
"Don't you find it a very wearing branch of the profession?" asks Foster
after a pause.
"My dear fellow, it was the fear of it that drove me into lunacy work."
"Aye, and it has driven men into asylums who never found their way on to
the medical staff. I was a very shy fellow myself as a student, and I
know what it means."
"No joke that in general practice," says the alienist.
"Well, you hear men talk about it as though it were, but I tell you it's
much nearer tragedy. Take some poor, raw, young fellow who has just put
up his plate in a strange town. He has found it a trial all his life,
perhaps, to talk to a woman about lawn tennis and church services. When
a young man _is_ shy he is shyer than any girl. Then down comes an
anxious mother and consults him upon the most intimate family matters.
'I shall never go to that doctor again,' says she afterwards. 'His
manner is so stiff and unsympathetic.' Unsympathetic! Why, the poor lad
was struck dumb and paralysed. I have known general practitioners who
were so shy that they could not bring themselves to ask the way in the
street. Fancy what sensitive men like that must endure before they get
broken in to medical practice. And then they know that nothing is so
catching as shyness, and that if they do not keep a face of stone, their
patient will be covered with confusion. And so they keep their face of
stone, and earn the reputation perhaps of having a heart to correspond.
I suppose nothing would shake _your_ nerve, Manson."
"Well, when a man lives year in year out among a thousand lunatics, with
a fair sprinkling of homicidals among them, one's nerves either get set
or shattered. Mine are all right so far."
"I was frightened once," says the surgeon. "It was when I was doing
dispensary work. One night I had a call from some very poor people, and
gathered from the few words they said that their child was ill. When I
entered the room I saw a small cradle in the corner. Raising the lamp I
walked over and putting back the curtains I looked down at the baby. I
tell you it was sheer Providence that I didn't drop that lamp and set
the whole place alight. The head on the pillow turned, and I saw a face
looking up at me which seemed to me to have more malignancy and
wickedness than ever I had dreamed of in a nightmare. It was the flush
of red over the cheek-bones, and the brooding eyes full of loathing of
me, and of everything else, that impressed me. I'll never forget my
start as, instead of the chubby face of an infant, my eyes fell upon
this creature. I took the mother into the next room. 'What is it?' I
asked. 'A girl of sixteen,' said she, and then throwing up her arms,
'Oh, pray God she may be taken!' The poor thing, though she spent her
life in this little cradle, had great, long, thin limbs which she curled
up under her. I lost sight of the case and don't know what became of it,
but I'll never forget the look in her eyes."
"That's creepy," says Doctor Foster. "But I think one of my experiences
would run it close. Shortly after I put up my plate I had a visit from a
little hunch-backed woman, who wished me to come and attend to her
sister in her trouble. When I reached the house, which was a very poor
one, I found two other little hunched-backed women, exactly like the
first, waiting for me in the sitting-room. Not one of them said a word,
but my companion took the lamp and walked upstairs with her two sisters
behind her, and me bringing up the rear. I can see those three queer
shadows cast by the lamp upon the wall as clearly as I can see that
tobacco pouch. In the room above was the fourth sister, a remarkably
beautiful girl in evident need of my assistance. There was no wedding
ring upon her finger. The three deformed sisters seated themselves round
the room, like so many graven images, and all night not one of them
opened her mouth. I'm not romancing, Hargrave; this is absolute fact. In
the early morning a fearful thunderstorm broke out, one of the most
violent I have ever known. The little garret burned blue with the
lightning, and the thunder roared and rattled as if it were on the very
roof of the house. It wasn't much of a lamp I had, and it was a queer
thing when a spurt of lightning came to see those three twisted figures
sitting round the walls, or to have the voice of my patient drowned by
the booming of the thunder. By Jove, I don't mind telling you that there
was a time when I nearly bolted from the room. All came right in the
end, but I never heard the true story of the unfortunate beauty and her
three crippled sisters."
"That's the worst of these medical stories," sighs the outsider. "They
never seem to have an end."
"When a man is up to his neck in practice, my boy, he has no time to
gratify his private curiosity. Things shoot across him and he gets a
glimpse of them, only to recall them, perhaps, at some quiet moment like
this. But I've always felt, Manson, that your line had as much of the
terrible in it as any other."
"More," groans the alienist. "A disease of the body is bad enough, but
this seems to be a disease of the soul. Is it not a shocking thing--a
thing to drive a reasoning man into absolute Materialism--to think that
you may have a fine, noble fellow with every divine instinct and that
some little vascular change, the dropping, we will say, of a minute
spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of
his brain may have the effect of changing him to a filthy and pitiable
creature with every low and debasing tendency? What a satire an asylum
is upon the majesty of man, and no less upon the ethereal nature of the
soul."
"Faith and hope," murmurs the general practitioner.
"I have no faith, not much hope, and all the charity I can afford," says
the surgeon. "When theology squares itself with the facts of life I'll
read it up."
"You were talking about cases," says the outsider, jerking the ink down
into his stylographic pen.
"Well, take a common complaint which kills many thousands every year,
like G.P. for instance."
"What's G.P.?"
"General practitioner," suggests the surgeon with a grin.