Robert Johnson was an essentially commonplace man, with no feature to
distinguish him from a million others. He was pale of face, ordinary
in looks, neutral in opinions, thirty years of age, and a married man.
By trade he was a gentleman's outfitter in the New North Road, and the
competition of business squeezed out of him the little character that
was left. In his hope of conciliating customers he had become cringing
and pliable, until working ever in the same routine from day to day he
seemed to have sunk into a soulless machine rather than a man. No
great question had ever stirred him. At the end of this snug century,
self-contained in his own narrow circle, it seemed impossible that any
of the mighty, primitive passions of mankind could ever reach him. Yet
birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when
one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of
the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilisation
and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.
Johnson's wife was a quiet little woman, with brown hair and gentle
ways. His affection for her was the one positive trait in his
character. Together they would lay out the shop window every Monday
morning, the spotless shirts in their green cardboard boxes below, the
neckties above hung in rows over the brass rails, the cheap studs
glistening from the white cards at either side, while in the background
were the rows of cloth caps and the bank of boxes in which the more
valuable hats were screened from the sunlight. She kept the books and
sent out the bills. No one but she knew the joys and sorrows which
crept into his small life. She had shared his exultations when the
gentleman who was going to India had bought ten dozen shirts and an
incredible number of collars, and she had been as stricken as he when,
after the goods had gone, the bill was returned from the hotel address
with the intimation that no such person had lodged there. For five
years they had worked, building up the business, thrown together all
the more closely because their marriage had been a childless one. Now,
however, there were signs that a change was at hand, and that speedily.
She was unable to come downstairs, and her mother, Mrs. Peyton, came
over from Camberwell to nurse her and to welcome her grandchild.
Little qualms of anxiety came over Johnson as his wife's time
approached. However, after all, it was a natural process. Other men's
wives went through it unharmed, and why should not his? He was himself
one of a family of fourteen, and yet his mother was alive and hearty.
It was quite the exception for anything to go wrong. And yet in spite
of his reasonings the remembrance of his wife's condition was always
like a sombre background to all his other thoughts.
Dr. Miles of Bridport Place, the best man in the neighbourhood, was
retained five months in advance, and, as time stole on, many little
packets of absurdly small white garments with frill work and ribbons
began to arrive among the big consignments of male necessities. And
then one evening, as Johnson was ticketing the scarfs in the shop, he
heard a bustle upstairs, and Mrs. Peyton came running down to say that
Lucy was bad and that she thought the doctor ought to be there without
delay.
It was not Robert Johnson's nature to hurry. He was prim and staid and
liked to do things in an orderly fashion. It was a quarter of a mile
from the corner of the New North Road where his shop stood to the
doctor's house in Bridport Place. There were no cabs in sight so he
set off upon foot, leaving the lad to mind the shop. At Bridport Place
he was told that the doctor had just gone to Harman Street to attend a
man in a fit. Johnson started off for Harman Street, losing a little
of his primness as he became more anxious. Two full cabs but no empty
ones passed him on the way. At Harman Street he learned that the
doctor had gone on to a case of measles, fortunately he had left the
address--69 Dunstan Road, at the other side of the Regent's Canal.
Robert's primness had vanished now as he thought of the women waiting
at home, and he began to run as hard as he could down the Kingsland
Road. Some way along he sprang into a cab which stood by the curb and
drove to Dunstan Road. The doctor had just left, and Robert Johnson
felt inclined to sit down upon the steps in despair.
Fortunately he had not sent the cab away, and he was soon back at
Bridport Place. Dr. Miles had not returned yet, but they were
expecting him every instant. Johnson waited, drumming his fingers on
his knees, in a high, dim lit room, the air of which was charged with a
faint, sickly smell of ether. The furniture was massive, and the books
in the shelves were sombre, and a squat black clock ticked mournfully
on the mantelpiece. It told him that it was half-past seven, and that
he had been gone an hour and a quarter. Whatever would the women think
of him! Every time that a distant door slammed he sprang from his
chair in a quiver of eagerness. His ears strained to catch the deep
notes of the doctor's voice. And then, suddenly, with a gush of joy he
heard a quick step outside, and the sharp click of the key in the lock.
In an instant he was out in the hall, before the doctor's foot was over
the threshold.
"If you please, doctor, I've come for you," he cried; "the wife was
taken bad at six o'clock."
He hardly knew what he expected the doctor to do. Something very
energetic, certainly--to seize some drugs, perhaps, and rush excitedly
with him through the gaslit streets. Instead of that Dr. Miles threw
his umbrella into the rack, jerked off his hat with a somewhat peevish
gesture, and pushed Johnson back into the room.
"Let's see! You <i>did</i> engage me, didn't you?" he asked in no very
cordial voice.
"Oh, yes, doctor, last November. Johnson the outfitter, you know, in
the New North Road."
"Yes, yes. It's a bit overdue," said the doctor, glancing at a list of
names in a note-book with a very shiny cover. "Well, how is she?"
"I don't----"
"Ah, of course, it's your first. You'll know more about it next time."
"Mrs. Peyton said it was time you were there, sir."
"My dear sir, there can be no very pressing hurry in a first case. We
shall have an all-night affair, I fancy. You can't get an engine to go
without coals, Mr. Johnson, and I have had nothing but a light lunch."
"We could have something cooked for you--something hot and a cup of
tea."
"Thank you, but I fancy my dinner is actually on the table. I can do
no good in the earlier stages. Go home and say that I am coming, and I
will be round immediately afterwards."
A sort of horror filled Robert Johnson as he gazed at this man who
could think about his dinner at such a moment. He had not imagination
enough to realise that the experience which seemed so appallingly
important to him, was the merest everyday matter of business to the
medical man who could not have lived for a year had he not, amid the
rush of work, remembered what was due to his own health. To Johnson he
seemed little better than a monster. His thoughts were bitter as he
sped back to his shop.
"You've taken your time," said his mother-in-law reproachfully, looking
down the stairs as he entered.
"I couldn't help it!" he gasped. "Is it over?"
"Over! She's got to be worse, poor dear, before she can be better.
Where's Dr. Miles!"
"He's coming after he's had dinner." The old woman was about to make
some reply, when, from the half-opened door behind a high whinnying
voice cried out for her. She ran back and closed the door, while
Johnson, sick at heart, turned into the shop. There he sent the lad
home and busied himself frantically in putting up shutters and turning
out boxes. When all was closed and finished he seated himself in the
parlour behind the shop. But he could not sit still. He rose
incessantly to walk a few paces and then fell back into a chair once
more. Suddenly the clatter of china fell upon his ear, and he saw the
maid pass the door with a cup on a tray and a smoking teapot.
"Who is that for, Jane?" he asked.
"For the mistress, Mr. Johnson. She says she would fancy it."
There was immeasurable consolation to him in that homely cup of tea.
It wasn't so very bad after all if his wife could think of such things.
So light-hearted was he that he asked for a cup also. He had just
finished it when the doctor arrived, with a small black leather bag in
his hand.
"Well, how is she?" he asked genially.
"Oh, she's very much better," said Johnson, with enthusiasm.
"Dear me, that's bad!" said the doctor. "Perhaps it will do if I look
in on my morning round?"
"No, no," cried Johnson, clutching at his thick frieze overcoat. "We
are so glad that you have come. And, doctor, please come down soon and
let me know what you think about it."
The doctor passed upstairs, his firm, heavy steps resounding through
the house. Johnson could hear his boots creaking as he walked about
the floor above him, and the sound was a consolation to him. It was
crisp and decided, the tread of a man who had plenty of
self-confidence. Presently, still straining his ears to catch what was
going on, he heard the scraping of a chair as it was drawn along the
floor, and a moment later he heard the door fly open and someone come
rushing downstairs. Johnson sprang up with his hair bristling,
thinking that some dreadful thing had occurred, but it was only his
mother-in-law, incoherent with excitement and searching for scissors
and some tape. She vanished again and Jane passed up the stairs with a
pile of newly aired linen. Then, after an interval of silence, Johnson
heard the heavy, creaking tread and the doctor came down into the
parlour.
"That's better," said he, pausing with his hand upon the door. "You
look pale, Mr. Johnson."
"Oh no, sir, not at all," he answered deprecatingly, mopping his brow
with his handkerchief.
"There is no immediate cause for alarm," said Dr. Miles. "The case is
not all that we could wish it. Still we will hope for the best."
"Is there danger, sir?" gasped Johnson.
"Well, there is always danger, of course. It is not altogether a
favourable case, but still it might be much worse. I have given her a
draught. I saw as I passed that they have been doing a little building
opposite to you. It's an improving quarter. The rents go higher and
higher. You have a lease of your own little place, eh?"
"Yes, sir, yes!" cried Johnson, whose ears were straining for every
sound from above, and who felt none the less that it was very soothing
that the doctor should be able to chat so easily at such a time.
"That's to say no, sir, I am a yearly tenant."
"Ah, I should get a lease if I were you. There's Marshall, the
watchmaker, down the street. I attended his wife twice and saw him
through the typhoid when they took up the drains in Prince Street. I
assure you his landlord sprung his rent nearly forty a year and he had
to pay or clear out."
"Did his wife get through it, doctor?"
"Oh yes, she did very well. Hullo! hullo!"
He slanted his ear to the ceiling with a questioning face, and then
darted swiftly from the room.
It was March and the evenings were chill, so Jane had lit the fire, but
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 anyone
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 Dr. 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 bed-room,
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, Dr. 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.