In spite of himself, he was beginning to like Charles Altrincham-Harris. He didn’t for one moment alter his opinion of the degradation to which the man had subjected the nobilities of his calling, his meanness and his avarice. In his dealings with the unfortunate people who came to the shilling doctor for treatment, he still abhorred him; he knew him to be a person whose mind was a sink of pseudo-professional prurience, and whose body and habits were unkempt and unclean; but for all this, he could not deny the fact that in his relations with his dispenser he displayed a curious vein of natural kindness, and that his ideals, apart from his loathsome business, were of a touching simplicity.
Every morning they met at breakfast. The doctor believed in good food as a basis for work, and his housekeeper, a small, shrewish woman of fifty, was an excellent cook. At the breakfast table he would impart to Edwin the more salacious paragraphs of the morning paper, which he always opened at the page that contained the records of the divorce-court. He took no notice of politics. “They can do what they like as long as they don’t legislate aboutus.” And though Edwin felt sincerely that the sooner his kind were legislated for, the better, he was thankful that his employer was not a political bore or bigot.
After breakfast Dr. Harris always smoked a clay pipe in his carpet slippers, a present from a patient who, for some unimaginable reason, had beengrateful. Then they would walk down to 563 Lower Sparkdale together in the fresh morning air, and the combination of gentle exercise with deeper breathing would impel the little man to make Edwin the confidant of his ambitions.
“Twelve thousand pounds,” he would say, “that’s all I want. Twelve thousand pounds. Five hundred a year. Then I shall find a quiet little place in the country and have a rest. Keep bees and poultry: that’s what I shall do, and smoke a pipe in the garden in the evening when the poor devil that buys my practice is going down to the surgery to rake in the shillings.”
In these moments he would reflect on the beginning of his career. “I took a good degree, you know. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, would you? No . . . I had bad luck, and a bad wife, which is the worst sort of luck. She lost me my practice, and so I grew sick of medicine. I couldn’t be bothered with the social side of it. Money was what I wanted: money and quiet. And so I took a dose of medicine: fifteen years at a shilling a bottle, with advice thrown in, and then a quiet life. That was all I wanted. And I’ve very nearly got it. Another year or two will make me secure. Security . . . that’s what I wanted. Well, here we are. . . .”
So the morning’s work began, and no morning, as far as Edwin could see, was different from any other. He was thankful when the clock struck ten, and Dr. Harris ruthlessly locked his surgery door. Then, fortunately, he was obliged to take the next tram to the hospital; for if he had lingered, as hewas sometimes forced to do on Sundays, Dr. Harris would have lit his pipe and proceeded to regale him with anecdotes of medical experiences that always related to sex, on which he dwelt with a slow, deliberate satisfaction, like a dog that nuzzles a piece of garbage.
The aspects of medical science that related to sex were the only ones in which he was really interested. He possessed an expensive and eclectic library of books on these subjects, to which he was always adding others that he bought from the colporteurs of medical pornography who are continually pestering the members of his profession. These he would pore over at night, when Edwin was providentially engaged in reading for his final. “Medicine is an extremely interesting profession from that point of view,” he would say, and indeed the dispenser soon discovered that this aspect of the medical profession supplied Dr. Harris with a great number of his patients. In the squalid underways of the city he had established a reputation for skill and discretion in the treatment of contagious disease, and the unfortunate victims who came to Lower Sparkdale from more reputable suburbs were ready to pay through the nose for his advice.
One night, hearing behind his curtain the overtures of one of these cases that he knew so well, he suddenly became aware of a tone that was familiar in the patient’s voice. Listening more closely he could have sworn it was the voice of Griffin. Evidently it was a person of some consequence, for Dr. Harris devoted as much as five minutes to his examination.
“I suppose you wouldn’t like a prescription?”
“No, you’d better make it up for me,” said the voice that resembled that of Griffin.
“Certainly . . . delighted.”
Dr. Harris breathed heavily, as he always did when writing a prescription, and then passed the slip of paper behind the curtain to Edwin. Edwin, looking at once for the name at the head of the prescription, was disappointed. The patient had preferred to remain anonymous. He dispensed the medicine, and when Dr. Harris had said good-bye to the patient he could not resist the temptation of looking from behind the curtain to verify his suspicions. He could only see the back of the departing patient, but the suspicion filled him with a queer sensation of awe.
It showed him a new aspect of medicine that had never occurred to him in hospital life, but would, no doubt, be present often enough in private practice. Griffin was a person well known to Edwin and his friends, a person about whose adventures and their consequences he would easily and naturally have spoken. If he had retailed the incident to Maskew and W.G. in the Dousita, it would have been the occasion of a little pity and probably some irreverent mirth. But he saw at once that he could do nothing of the sort. He had become, for the first time in his life, the keeper of a professional secret. For the rest of the world, however interested, Griffin and Griffin’s disease must not exist.
Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, reflecting that in his future life he would in all probability become possessed of many such secretsand that there might be occasions on which his sense of duty would be divided between the traditional discretion of Hippocrates and the instincts of humanity. He invented a hypothetical case for his own confusion. Supposing he had a sister to whom Griffin was engaged: supposing that they were going to be married in a week after this uncomfortable knowledge had come into his possession, endangering the whole of her future happiness and perhaps her life: what, in that case, should be his attitude towards the question of professional secrecy? What would he do? Would he be justified in telling her what he knew? Hippocrates said “No”; but Hippocrates’ refusal narrowed the field of possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own shame and threatening him with . . . what? Not with exposure—for that Hippocrates forbade. Obviously with death. And that would be murder. . . .
Balancing the relative heinousness of murder and perjury, Edwin began to laugh at himself, and while he did this a curious reminiscence came into his mind: the picture of a small boy, who resembled him in very little but had been himself, lying in the hedge side of Murderer’s Cross Road, on the downs above St. Luke’s, reflecting on the same problem of the justification of homicide and saying to himself as he brooded on his wrongs: “I can quite easily understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.” And this picture tempting him further, he relapsed into a dream of those strange, remote days tinged with extremes of happiness and misery, and both of them unreal. . . .
He thought no more of Griffin.
Fora whole year Edwin inhabited the room above the lock-up surgery in Lower Sparkdale. It was a happy year, for into it was crowded a great wealth of experience and elevating discovery to which the mechanical drudgery of Dr. Harris’s dispensing room acted as ballast. In his medical studies he began to feel for the first time the fruits of his earlier labours: to realise that all medicine was little more than an intelligent application to life of the theoretical subjects that he had mastered without reasoning. From the very first day of his experience in the dissecting room there was nothing in all that he had learnt that had not its direct bearing on his present practice; and the reflection that he possessed all this essential knowledge ready for use was exhilarating in itself. Again, the fact that he was now standing on his feet, actually earning his own living, gave him a greater happiness than he had ever known in his days of dependence; it made him accept the routine of Lower Sparkdale as a penance, cheering him with the thought that so much sacrifice was really necessary before he should be master of himself.
He was lonely; but this seemed inevitable, forno person in his senses could be expected to grind along in a steam-tram to Lower Sparkdale for the sake of his company; and the final year was too full of strenuous studies for all of them to allow of much indulgence in the joys of friendship. Matthew Boyce made a few heroic attempts. He even spent several evenings in Harris’s dispensary, finding the shilling doctor’s clinical and commercial methods something of a joke. They were no joke to Edwin: he had recognised long ago that they were no more than Harris’s solution of the problem of living. The doctor saw nothing unworthy in them. He did his best, within his limited knowledge, for his patients. He was kind, and even, on occasion, generous. If there were fault to be found it must be with the State that allowed such ignorant men to deal with precious human bodies, and not with him. When the first humour of the experience was exhausted Boyce came to the surgery no more. Little by little Edwin’s insulation became more complete, and in the end he relapsed into the degree of loneliness that he had known in his early days at St. Luke’s.
Given the opportunity, he almost enjoyed it. There was something remote and secret about this little room in the corner house above the grinding trams, and when the surgery emptied at night and he went upstairs to work he would find himself suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of thankfulness for the fact that it was so peculiarly his: that his own books and pictures and clothes had made it individual and different from any other room in the whole of the city. And when the town slept,and he sat on reading into the early hours of the morning, the lonely chamber was like a lighthouse set in seas of night, and dreams of the misty lands beyond Severn, of Mendip couched in darkness, or of the sleeping wolds by Overton, would beat at his lighted window like seabirds in the night.
At first the sacrifices that his poverty demanded had seemed no more than part of a new and exciting game. It was some months before he realised that, literally, he could not afford the indulgence of a single pleasure that cost money. If he were to free himself from the bondage of Dr. Harris’s dispensary it was absolutely necessary that he should save enough money to pay his examination fees. He began to find a new delight in carefully hoarded shillings, and this practice threw him into a curious sympathy with his employer. Each of them, on a different scale, was committed to a present sacrifice for the sake of future freedom; and this reflection reconciled him in some degree to the inconveniences that Dr. Harris’s miserly ways inflicted on him.
It was galling, none the less, to find that he could mot afford to buy a single new book, to hire a piano, or to hear any music except the free recitals by which the municipal organist convinced the citizens of North Bromwich that they were getting something for their money, in debauches of sound that reminded them how much the organ had cost. Sometimes, to Edwin’s joy, he played the fugues of the Well-tempered Clavier, and on their wide streams he would be carried from springs of mountain sweetness, by weir and cataract to solemn tidalwaters and lose himself at last in seas of absolute music. Time after time he thanked God for Bach, and walked home to his garret like a man who has gazed upon the splendour of a full sea and carries its tumult in his mind far inland.
Through all these experiences Edwin was so possessed by the one idea of holding on until his final exam. was over that he scarcely missed the society of his friends. He knew that his friendship with Boyce was founded too deeply in common experience ever to be shaken by his own changed circumstances: it might lapse, but it could never be broken. He always felt that the future held more for them than the past had ever given; but his other friends, Maskew and Martin in particular, seemed to have been translated to another place of existence. In the wards and in the lecture theatres he would meet them; but elsewhere they had nothing in common with his way of existence.
Even W.G. seemed gradually to be slipping away from him—an unreasonable state, for Edwin, after all, was now for the first time sharing something of the big man’s early experience. For several months they had scarcely spoken, and then, one day, nearly ran into each other’s arms in Sackville Row, and almost mechanically wandered off to the Dousita together. In the shades of the smoking-room nothing had changed. When they sank into the cushions of their favourite corner Miss Wheeler approached them with an exact replica of the smile with which, four years before, she had engaged the heart of Maskew; and when she took their order, she stood on one leg in exactly the same position,leaning, with a hint of tiredness that was not surprising in a young woman who habitually breathed tobacco smoke in place of oxygen, with her hand on the curtain at the side of their settee.
“I never see Mr. Maskew now,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t think whatever ’as happened to all you boys, I’m sure.”
She brought them coffee, and W.G., who had scarcely spoken, but whose knitted brows testified to the pressure of some urgent problem, said:—
“Well, how do you like it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Being on your own.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” said Edwin.
“I never thought you’d stick it,” W.G. confessed. “I didn’t think you had it in you. You see, in your case there was never the least necessity for it.”
“There was, you know—”
“I could have understood it if you’d had a regular bust-up. I should certainly have stayed at home if the governor hadn’t booted me out. You never had anything of that kind.”
“No . . . not exactly. But the position was the same. I had a sort of . . . of emotional cold-douche. I was awfully sensitive about my mother. My father and I were all wrong. We’d really nothing in common. And it’s turned out all right. That’s the main thing.”
“You’re a quixotic ass, my son. No . . . that’s not the word, but it’s the same sort of thing. It was really damned foolish of you.”
“It’s jolly sound to stand on your own feet. You know where you are for the first time. It was onlyuncomfortable because he was really awfully decent. He is now: but he hasn’t the faintest glimmering of my point of view.”
“They rarely have,” said W.G. gloomily. “Still, you haven’t made such an ass of yourself as I have.”
“Something new?”
“Yes . . . I’m married.”
“Good God!”
“It isn’t as bad as that,” W.G. chuckled. “I thought it would come as a bit of a shock to you.”
“But why on earth—?”
“Well, you see she was awfully unhappy at home. Brute of a father. And we simply got tired of waiting. That’s all. You must come and see us. She always remembered your clerking in her ward. We’re living in furnished rooms in Alvaston. It’s an amazing experience, you know, marriage. Quite different from anything else of the kind.” In view of W.G.’s experience in these matters Edwin was ready to take this for granted.
“I should think it is a damned funny thing,” he said.
They parted. There was something almost pathetic to Edwin in W.G.’s hot handclasp. He felt that W.G. was up against something far bigger than anything that had happened to him before: a strange, momentous adventure, yet one that was thrilling and, in a way, enviable. Once again he found himself admiring the big man’s desperate daring. W.G. with a wife, and probably, in a few years, children! . . . Assuredly they were all growing old.
In all that summer Edwin scarcely saw a patch of living green except the leprous plane-trees that sickened in the hospital square. The current of his life flowed slowly through the culverts of grimy brick that led from Lower Sparkdale to the Infirmary. He became part of the stream of dusty humanity that set citywards and back again with the regularity of a tide. In December he came to the end of his penance. The final examination was fixed for the beginning of January, and before he could sit for it, he was compelled to take a course of practical midwifery, twenty cases in all, which compelled his residence for a couple of weeks in the neighbourhood of the Prince’s Hospital, the institution to which this department was attached. Matthew Boyce and he had decided a year before that they would do this work together, and though the unusual strain of the fortnight in Easy Row would be a doubtful preliminary to the effort of the final examination, the two friends had always looked forward to the experience.
The authorities of the Prince’s Hospital, lacking obstetrical wards, had made this course the opportunity for establishing an Out-patient Department that could deal with ten cases a week at the nominal charge of five shillings each. The students worked in pairs, and though they could never be sure of attending their cases together, the resident staff of the hospital, and, if necessary, a consultant physician, were always available in case of an emergency. Edwin and Boyce were housed in one ofthe faded Georgian buildings that faced the hospital. Its lower stories, like those of all its neighbours, were devoted to theatrical lodgings; but a special night-bell, polished by the moist hands of forty anxious husbands every month, communicated with the upper room in which the resident students attempted to sleep. The house was as well known to all the poorer people in the neighbouring warrens as were the faces pale with sleeplessness of the students who issued from it, carrying the black bags that were symbolical of their labours, a source of mysterious speculation to the children of the district, and of amusement to the “professionals” who inhabited the front rooms.
On a Monday morning in December the landlady received Edwin and Boyce and installed them in a small room at the back of the ground-floor infested with portraits of smiling young ladies in tights, inscribed, with the most dashing signatures imaginable, to herself. Mrs. Meadows was evidently very proud of these decorations and called attention to the most blatant pair of legs by polishing the glass of their frame with her apron.
“I hope you gentlemen will be comfortable,” she said. “Not that I doubt it. I don’t have many complaints.” The statement was a challenge, and implied that if there should be any complaints the lodgers might look to themselves.
“It’s a nice fresh room,” she said, throwing open a French window that disclosed a small patch of black earth that had once been covered with grass but was now untenanted by any living organisms but cats and groundsel.
“I like them to keep the window open. It takes away the smell of the gentlemen’s disinfectant. Not but what it’s clean, I dare say.”
Edwin and Boyce would have assented in any case if it were only to release the composite lodging-house smell that penetrated the room from the adjoining “domestic offices,” and Mrs. Meadows’s kitchen where, it would be imagined, turnip-tops simmered day and night upon a gas-ring.
“Then there’s a pianoforte,” she said, hesitating at the dusty portiere. “I find that professionals like a pianoforte. It’s cheery like.”
In a little while it became apparent that the professionals liked a pianoforte, in every one of the thirty odd houses within earshot, even if they could not play one. From the hour of midday, when they rose, until six o’clock, when they betook themselves to their various theatres, the pianos of Easy Row were never silent.
“It’s no good trying to do any work in this place,” said Edwin.
“There won’t be any time, anyway,” said Boyce. “You wait till the fun begins.”
They lunched together on steak-and-kidney pudding and turnip-tops with a brand of bottled beer in which Mrs. Meadows showed an admirable taste, and in the early afternoon the fun began.
From the beginning, Fate had decreed a complication by deciding that Mrs. Hadley, back of number four, court sixteen, Granby Street, and Mrs. Higgins over number fifty-four Rea Barn Lane, should conspire to increase the population of North Bromwich at the same moment. Mr. Hadley andMr. Higgins achieved a dead heat, arriving on the doorstep together in a dripping perspiration with messages of an equal urgency.
“This is rather rotten,” said Boyce. “Which of these ladies will you take?”
“I’ll have Mrs. Higgins,” said Edwin. “I suppose the bag’s all right?”
The bag was right enough, though it contained very little that could do any harm, and smelt abominably of Lysol. Mr. Higgins, still out of breath, with beads of sweat sweeping an alluvium of metal dust into the furrows of his cheeks, carried the bag for Edwin. For all his exhaustion, Mr. Higgins wanted to run, and Edwin, walking with long strides beside him, was in danger of losing his dignity by being swept into the same degree of panic. The reflection that this would betray his inexperience held him back.
“The nurse said very urgent, doctor,” Mr. Higgins panted.
“Yes . . . yes. You mustn’t excite yourself. It’ll be all right.”
“I suppose,” said Mr. Higgins doubtfully, “you’re well up in these sort of cases, doctor? I expect you’ve seen a lot of them?”
Edwin wished he had been able to grow a moustache for the occasion.
“Hundreds,” he said.
Mr. Higgins gave a sigh of relief. “That’s a good thing. That’s a very good thing. You see, I’m nairvous, doctor. I lost my fairst over it, and I don’t want to lose this one. Very young she is.”
“Is this her first?”
“Yes, doctor.”
Another bit of bad luck!
Through a maze of gritty streets they hurried, reaching, at last, a house beside a corner “public” which a cluster of women, gossiping in their aprons on the doorstep, proclaimed as the site of this momentous birth. One of them snatched the black bag from Mr. Higgins. “You get away, ’Iggins, and ’ave a pint of beer quiet like. This baint no place for an ’usband. This way, doctor. Here she is, poor lamb.”
She pushed her way up the stairs, breathing heavily. Her bunchy skirts filled the staircase, which was no wider than a loft-ladder and very dark.
“’Ere ’e is,” she cried triumphantly, as she pushed open a matchboard door. “’Ere ’e is. ’Ere’s the doctor. Now you won’t be long, my lover. ’E’ll ’elp you. You’ll ’elp ’er, won’t you, doctor?”
She deposited the talismanic bag triumphantly on the foot of the bed; then she winked at Edwin: “I’ll go and keep ’Iggins out of the way,” she said.
“I’m that glad you’ve come, doctor,” said the nurse. She was a little shrivelled woman, with a nervous smile and her hair packed into a black net with a wide mesh that made her whole bead sombre and forbidding. Her lips twitched when she smiled, and Edwin, who had been counting on the moral support of her experience, saw at once that she was even more anxious than himself. He was soon to know that the women who acted as professional midwives in the North Bromwich slums were usually widows left without means, who adoptedthis profession with no other qualification than a certain wealth of subjective experience, on which they were careful to insist. The claim “I’ve had eight of them myself, soIought to know,” did not atone for the fact that they didn’t actually know anything at all. Mrs. Brown, the lady to whose mercies the trustful Mr. Higgins had committed his second, was a timid specimen of the class. Beneath her protestations of experience her soul quaked with terror, and a hazy conviction that if anything went wrong, she, the unregistered, would probably be committed for manslaughter, reduced her to a state of dazed incompetence in which she heard without hearing Edwin’s none too confident directions. She went downstairs tremulously to bring hot water, and Edwin was left alone with his patient.
“It won’t be long, doctor, will it?” she said.
“Of course not . . . of course not,” said Edwin. He felt very much of a fraud, for he hadn’t the least idea how long it would be. The whole picture was moving: the patient, a girl of twenty-four or five, her honey-coloured hair drawn back tightly from a face that was blotched already with tears, but not ill-looking: the humility of the little bedroom with its hired furniture and certain humble attempts at ornamentation: pink ribbon bows upon the curtains, a ridiculous china ornament on the mantelpiece, and brass knobs at the foot of the bedstead, so polished that they had already become loose. No doubt Mrs. Higgins the second had been in respectable suburban service, and these worthy efforts were the signs of an attempt to introduceinto Rea Barn Lane the amenities of Alvaston. She lay quietly on the bed, gazing at nothing while Edwin unpacked his bag. He did not look at her, but became suddenly conscious that her body had given a kind of jump and that her hands were desperately clutching a towel that Mrs. Brown had knotted to the rail at the bottom of the bed. Then he heard the joints of the bedstead creak. “It’s all right. Cheer up. . . . It won’t be long,” he said.
Mrs. Brown emerged panting from the stairway with hot water. “That’s right, my lover, that’s right. . . . That’s another one less. Now, let the doctor have a look at you.”
A strange business. . . . It was a moment that might have been difficult; but Edwin soon realised that the seriousness of the occasion, the fact that this young creature’s life was veritably in his hands, made modesty seem a thing of no account. In the eyes of this woman Edwin was not a young man but an agency of relief from pain. In the body that pain dominated there could be no room for blushes. Edwin, trying to summon all his hardly learned theory to his aid in practice, was suddenly impressed with the obligations that this confidence imposed on him. He remembered the terms of the Hippocratic oath. Yea . . a goodly heritage!
“Is it all right, doctor?” said the anxious voice of Mrs. Brown.
“Yes, it’s all right.”
“Thank the Lord for that! You hear what the doctor says, my lover—”
“But it will be a long time yet.”
“Oh, don’t say that, doctor, don’t say that,” Mrs.Higgins wailed. “You aren’t going to leave me?”
“It’s no good staying here now,” he said, as gently as he could. “It’s really all right. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Can’t you help her a bit, doctor?”
Of course he couldn’t. A business of that kind would mean calling in the house-surgeon from the Prince’s. He was determined not to be driven into a panic, though this would have been easy enough, when he was convinced that the case was taking a normal though inevitably lengthy course.
“I expect you’ll want me again some time this evening,” he said.
Mrs. Brown showed him downstairs. “You’resureit is all right, aren’t you, doctor?” she said.
“Perfectly all right. You know what a first case is.”
“I’d ought to,” said Mrs. Brown proudly. “I’ve had eight myself.”
He trudged back to Easy Row, where the professionals’ pianos, tuned in quarter-tones, were already combining to show their catholicity in musical taste. Boyce was drowsing in an easy-chair with the Greek Anthology open in his lap.
“Well, how’s your Mrs. Higgins?” he asked lazily.
“Oh, she’s all right. Aprimip. Is Mrs. Hadley through her little troubles?”
“B.B.A. Born before arrival. A soft job. Saves a lot of trouble.”
“My good lady will haul us out in the middle of the night, damn her!” said Edwin. A conventional mode of expression, for he didn’t in the least feel like damning Mrs. Higgins. In his mind he stillcarried the picture of her plain hair and blotched face: he could hear the sound of that sudden shudder and the noise of the bedstead creaking.
The evening passed quietly. They tried to read, but found the feeling of suspense made that impossible. No message came from Mrs. Higgins, and as they were almost certain to be called out in the night, they went to bed early. While they were undressing, Boyce humming softly the Liebestod from Tristan, the bell in their bedroom rang.
“Mrs. Higgins,” said Edwin. “I’d better go and see.”
He groped his way downstairs. In the front room a party of music-hall artistes were making a noisy supper. Before he could reach the door the bell rang again, and when he opened it, a big man whose breath smelt of liquor, lurched into the hall.
“Are you the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“You’re to come at once to thirty-four Greville Street. It’s the missus. The nurse says it’s urgent.”
The nurse always said it was urgent. Boyce came downstairs grumbling.
“We’d better go together.”
“What about my friend, Mrs. Higgins?”
“Oh, damn Mrs. Higgins!” said Boyce.
It was a clear and frosty night, in which all points of light, whether of starshine, or street-lamps, or of blue sparks crackling from the tramway cables, shone brightly. The Greville Street husband lurched along beside them, just sufficiently awake to show them the way through a maze of rectangular byways to a street that lay upon theouter edge of the district that the hospital covered. The chill clarity of the air dispelled sleep. It was even pleasant to be walking there, for at this time of the night the town was so empty that they might almost have been walking over a country road.
“Here it is,” said the husband thickly.
Boyce and Edwin entered together. The front room of the house was crowded with people who should have been in bed. They sat clustered about a table on which stood a number of bottles from one of which the messenger had evidently extracted his peculiar perfume. In the corner chair, next to the window, an old woman in a lace cap had fallen asleep. Opposite her a very dirty old man toasted his shins in front of the fire. A strapping girl with dark, untidy hair, and an almost aggressive physical beauty was holding forth shrilly to a group of three women who had wandered in to drink and gossip from a neighbouring court.
“Here they are,” said the husband sullenly, “two on ’em.”
“My God! . . . Two of them? Is that all?” said the dark girl, examining and, as it seemed, approving.
Upstairs they found a midwife of another but equally characteristic type: a fat woman whose attention was divided between the patient in bed and the cheerful company in the front room. On the surface she was a little patronising, an attitude that the two students’ inexperience made it difficult for them to resent. “I know what you doctors want,” she said, standing with her sleeves rolled up over her red forearms. “Plenty of hot water,that’s what you want. I’ve got some disinfectant too. I’ve often been with the ’ospital doctors. Now we shan’t be long.”
She bustled downstairs, looking into the front room for a drink on her way to the kitchen. Boyce, confident in the completion of his first case, took the lead in questioning the patient, a slightly older version of the dark sanguine girl they had seen below. Her whole attitude towards the business, though less pathetic than that of the unforgotten Mrs. Higgins, was equally moving. It implied such a cheerful and courageous acceptance of life and this most uncomfortable of its experiences. Her amazing vitality pervaded the room. It could be seen in her masterful smile, in the grip of her red fingers on the knotted towel, in the deep suffusion of her face. A jolly woman, built in the mould of a fighter, who would neither take quarter nor give it. When Boyce had examined her she smiled, disclosing a fine set of teeth, and solemnly winked.
“Well, doctor, what about it?”
“Listen to ’er,” said the midwife, chuckling. “That’s the way to take it!”
“Well, it’s all right, you know, but it won’t be just yet awhile.”
“My God . . . I didn’t pay the ’ospital five bob for you to tell me that. Look ’ere, doctor, my elder sister ’ad a horrible time with her first. ’Ad to ’ave it took off ’er. Be a sport, doctor, and give us a smell of chloroform. Come on, now! There’s two on you. . . . ’Ard-’earted devils all you doctors are. Bain’t they, Mrs. Perkins?” She smiled at the midwife, and then, suddenly, her face changed andshe clutched at the knotted towel. “Oh, my!” she said, and Edwin saw the veins in her neck swell, and heard her clench her teeth.
“That’s the way, dearie. That’s the way,” said Mrs. Perkins, gritting her own teeth in sympathy and smoothing back the hair from the patient’s brow.
Edwin and Boyce were debating as to whether it were worth while staying when a messenger from the hospital arrived from below to say that Mrs. Hadley, Boyce’s patient of the afternoon, was “took worse,” and so Edwin was left alone once more in the squalor of the patient’s room. He sat waiting in a chair that was supposed to be easy, listening to the conversation of the woman and her nurse. Most of it was family history of a scandalous kind, and the manner of its expression was extremely frank. In the course of his hospital work he had never before realised the extraordinary contradictions of the code by which the talk of the working-class is governed. In its mixture of delicacies and blatancies it amazed him. Both the women were fluent gossips, and the conversation never ceased, except in those moments of acute and sudden tension when the patient’s hands clutched at her towel and the midwife mopped her brow. Then, when the upstairs room was silent, a murmur of laughter and loud voices would come up the stairs from below. In this family, at any rate, the occasion of a birth did not lack celebration. Even the patient was curious about what was happening downstairs. “What’s our Susan doing?” she said from time to time.
An interminable business. As the night wore on it grew very chilly, and Edwin shivered in his chair. The case hung fire unaccountably, and in this, the first of many such cold vigils, he fell into a strange mood, often to be repeated, in which the sublime influences of night and solitude combined to purge his reflections of pettiness and showed him what an unimaginable mystery his own life was. The patient fell into an uneasy doze. The midwife nodded in her chair, snatching up her head with a conscious jerk whenever it lolled over her fat bosom. The smelly oil-lamp on the mantelpiece gave an occasional sputter when a drop of water was sucked up into the wick. In the room below the excited talk had petered out and only a sound of soft snoring was heard, like the breathing of cows in a byre.
Edwin thought of many things. It seemed to him that his mind burned clear as frosty starlight lighting forgotten memories of his childhood. He thought of his own mother. He wondered if she had lain like the woman on the bed on the night when he was born. He wondered if it had been in the least like this, and whether another doctor, whose name he did not even know, had sat by the fireplace in the little room at Halesby waiting and seeing his own life stretched out before him in this light of perilous clarity. He thought of St. Luke’s—of a thousand small things that had lain submerged for years and now appeared unbidden. The strangeness of his own experience, the elements of linked circumstance that had combined to twist his life into its present state and make him what he was. He thought of his father, with an unusualdegree of charity, realising that this man too was no more than a slave of the same blind influences driven hither and thither in spite of his innate goodwill. Edwin was ashamed to think that he had been angry with him. In his present mood it seemed to him an unreasonable thing that one should be angry with any human creature. Pity . . . yes, and love—but never anger. So, like a devotee in a Tibetan lamasery, he saw his fellow creatures, his father, himself, the midwife, and the woman on the bed, bound helpless to the revolving wheel which is the earth. And the earth seemed very small beneath the stars. . . .
At two o’clock in the morning the handsome girl from downstairs, who was the patient’s sister, came softly into the room and asked the midwife if she would like a cup of tea. The patient blinked at het with red eyes.
“How is it going, Sally?” said the sister.
“Oh, it’s all right. I suppose it’s got to be worse before it’s better,” she said, with a laugh. “Ask the doctor if he’ll have some tea too.”
Edwin accepted gratefully. It was harsh stuff that had been standing on the hob downstairs for some hours already. Mrs. Perkins was easily persuaded into doctoring hers with a tablespoonful of brandy from the bottle that is a regular constituent of the working classlayette. The sister sat at the foot of the bed and stared lazily at Edwin.
“You look tired, doctor,” she said.
Edwin admitted that he had had a biggish day. “You ought to get a bit of sleep,” said the darkgirl. “Sorry there bain’t no spare beds in the house; but you can turn in with me if you like.”
She looked so daringly provocative that Edwin had a horrible suspicion that she meant it; but it was evidently the sort of joke that Greville Street understood, for the patient on the bed cried, “Ethel, you are a cough-drop, you’ll make the doctor blush,” and Mrs. Perkins rocked with laughter until she spilt her tea.
“Well, why should you have all the fun, Sally? It isn’t every day we get a nice young man in the house.”
“Fun. . .,” said the patient wryly. “You’ll know all about this sort of fun some day.”
“Not just yet, thank you,” said Ethel. “I can look after myself better than that.”
She went downstairs again. Edwin was beginning to feel a little unhappy about the case. To his inexperience the long delay seemed abnormal, and his imagination presented to him a series of textbook disasters. While he stood doubting whether he should give himself away by sending to the hospital for the house-surgeon, he was startled by a sudden cry. Now, at any rate, there was no doubt about it. At this rate, he thought, it could not be long. But it took three hours: three hours of desperate struggle in which he could give no help, though the thing was so fierce that he found his sympathies snatched up into it: so that he held his breath and clenched his hands and felt his own temples bursting with effort. There had been no experience like it. As he sat at the bedside with the patient’s fingers clasped about his wrist, hehad the feeling that this woman, who had joked with him half an hour before with the dry, courageous cynicism that colours the philosophy of her class, was not an individual human soul any longer; not a woman at all, but a mass of straining, tortured muscle animated by the first force of life. So it had been since the first woman cried out in the night under the tangles of Caucasus: so it would always be: the most sublime and terrible of all physical experiences, a state of sheer physical possession, more powerful than any spiritual ecstasy imaginable.
At five o’clock the baby was born—a boy, and Mrs. Perkins, standing by with a skein of twisted thread in her hand, danced with nervousness. Edwin’s hands also trembled; but his heart was lightened with a sudden relief, as though the labour had been his and his also the accomplishment. A palpably ridiculous state of mind . . . but it took him like that.
The dark girl put her head in at the door. She was very pale now. Had the whole household shared in these physical throes?
“Is it all right?” she said.
“Yes . . . it’s a boy. A beautiful boy.”
“Hallo, Eth,” said a quiet voice from the bed. “Go and tell Jim.”
It was the first word the patient had spoken.
A moment later she opened her eyes and stared in a dazed way at Edwin. She smiled. She was a woman again—an extraordinarily chastened woman—and somehow strangely beautiful. “Thank you,doctor,” she said. “You ’elped me ever so. Did I be’ave very bad, Mrs. Perkins?”
“Bad? You be’aved fine,” said Mrs. Perkins, wrapping the baby in a blanket and putting it in the fender.
The patient gave a deep sigh and seemed to relapse into her thoughts. From time to time she would say a couple of words in a weak-contented voice.
“’As Eth told Jim?” she asked several times, and then: “What’ll mother think?”
“You be quiet, my lover,” said the midwife. “Don’t you disturb yourself with talking.”
At last she said suddenly: “I’m better now,” and asked if she might see the baby. Mrs. Perkins unwrapped the blanket from a red and frowning forehead and showed it to her. She touched its cheek with her finger and smiled miraculously. The action seemed to bring her submerged personality to the surface again.
“Ugly little b—,” she said, with a happy laugh. “Looks as if ’e’d been on the booze.”
“I shan’t forget the way you ’elped me, doctor,” she said again, when Edwin left the house. Although it was still dark, the workmen’s trams had begun to run, and lights appeared in the lower windows of public houses where hot soup was on sale. When he entered the bedroom of their lodging, Edwin found, and envied, Boyce sleeping stertorously with the blankets pulled over his head and an overcoat on his feet. Three hours later, when the landlady came to call them, he woke, and explained to Edwin the excitements of his own night: how, inthe middle of it, Edwin’s own Mrs. Higgins had called him out (“decent little woman,” said Boyce), and how, from sixteen Granby Street, he had been called to a case at the other end of the district in a common lodging-house kept by a Pole.
“No hot water . . . no soap . . . nothing but a bucket that they’d used for scrubbing the floors. Not even a bed! Just a straw mattress with a couple of grey blankets on it. Two other children and a man in the room. And crawling! I’ve stripped and had a rub down with a towel, but I feel as if they were all over me now. You couldn’t see them on the grey blankets, you know.”
“Sounds dismal. Had they a capable woman? My Mrs. Perkins wasn’t up to much.”
“Midwife? My dear chap, they didn’t run to luxuries like that. It is a bit thick, isn’t it? when a modern surgeon-accoucheur is reduced to washing the baby with his own soap. As a matter of fact, it was an extraordinarily interesting performance. The thing felt as if it would break. But seriously, you know, this sort of thing teaches you a bit about twentieth century housing.”
“Yes, it’s pretty bad,” said Edwin. “There’s one thing about it: working all night like this gives you a terrific appetite.”
For a few days the extreme novelty of their adventure sustained them, but after five nights of broken or obliterated sleep, the presence of the night-bell at their bedside stood for a symbol of perpetual unrest. Their days were spent invisiting patients whom they had attended. All examination work was made impossible by the fatigue that follows want of sleep, and the fact that they were committed to a kind of enforced idleness made their sojourn in Easy Row almost as much a holiday as the great summer days at Overton.
Both of them found that they could not even read for pleasure; and so the undisturbed hours of the day were passed in talk and in music. Mrs. Meadows’s piano had suffered under the fingers and thumbs of countless guests; but Edwin and Boyce shared the cost of a tuner and worked together through the Wagner scores and the subtler treasures that lay hidden in the songs of Hugo Wolf. They had few visitors, for this community of taste had already begun to isolate them from their student friends; but Boyce’s father, the poet, often came to have tea with them and to share their music, a man as versatile and sanguine as Meredith’s Roy Richmond, and yet so versed in every variety of knowledge and so reverent of beauty that Edwin felt there was no such company in the world: one who took all beauty and knowledge for his province.
One afternoon a message came to the house in Easy Row from the hospital, and as Mrs. Meadows was engaged in some obscure adjustment of her toilet, Edwin went to the door to receive it. He took the message, and was returning when another figure appeared on the path. It was that of a young girl of his own age, or, perhaps, a little older, and she hurried forward when she saw that he was closing the door. He waited.
“You weren’t going to shut me out, were you?” she said. She smiled, and Edwin saw that her eyes were of a warm hazel such as sunshine reveals in peaty river water. Before them Edwin found himself blushing.
“No, indeed,” he said. “Do you want Mrs. Meadows? I’ll go and tell her.”
“Mrs. Meadows? This is thirty-seven, isn’t it?”
“Yes . . . thirty-seven.”
“I’ve come to see my friend, Miss Latham. She’s lodging here.”
“I’m so sorry. Of course. I expect she’s in the front room.”
“Thank you.” She spoke very demurely. He stood aside to let her pass and with her a faint fragrance of white rose.
By this time Miss Latham herself had emerged, a blowsy woman who was taking a small part in the Christmas pantomime at the theatre, and had introduced herself to the friends through Mrs. Meadows a few days before.
“Why, Rosie, my dear, isn’t this just sweet of you? Fancy finding you on the step flirting with Doctor . . . Dr. Ingleby! That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Oh, what a shame, Hetty! We weren’t, were we?” Ingenuously she turned her eyes on Edwin again. Were they hazel? Perhaps they were almost amber. A matter of light . . .
“No . . . I’m afraid we weren’t. She didn’t give us time.”
“Two doctors in the house! Think of that!” said Miss Hetty Latham, whose conversation habituallyran from one note of exclamation to another. “Imagine how safe we feel, Rosie!”
And Rosie surveyed Edwin seriously.
“Aren’t you awfully young?”
“I suppose I am rather. I’m not qualified yet. But I expect to be next week.”
“Then you must be awfully clever too—”
“What on earth are we all doing talking here in the passage? Come along in and have a cup of tea,” said Miss Latham boisterously.
“As you two are such great friends already, I suppose it’s waste of time introducing you.”
“Really—” Edwin protested.
“Very well, then. Dr. Ingleby: Miss Rosie Beaucaire. I never get the order right. You can take it or leave it. May he come to tea with us, Rosie?”
“Of course he may.”
“Come along then, both of you . . .”
Itwas the first of many amazing adventures, to which Matthew Boyce supplied a calculated and cynical commentary, watching Edwin as though he were the subject of a physiological experiment—as indeed he was. But lack of sympathy in one quarter was scarcely likely to worry Edwin when he had found it so overwhelmingly in another. In a few days Miss Latham, the most tactful of duennas, had withdrawn from the scene. On the first night of their acquaintance Edwin had taken the hazel-eyed Miss Beaucaire back to her lodgings in Prince Albert’s Place at the back of the theatre, where the pantomime was in rehearsal. All the way through the squalid, lamp-lit streets they had talked of things that were entrancing, simply because they had to do with her. Edwin thought that no companionship in all his life had been so natural and so easy; and this was not surprising, for the young woman, in addition to physical charms that were armoury enough in themselves, had developed the faculty commonly acquired by ladies of her profession, of devoting herself entirely to the companion of the moment and giving theimpression that she had never known, and would never want to know, any other person in the world. Rosie was only twenty-four, but had given at least the last third of her life to studying male of the species of which Edwin was a peculiarly ingenuous example. At the door of her lodgings she had conjured an atmosphere of mysterious intimacy. Speaking in a voice that was low and of a thrilling tenderness, she had said:—
“I mustn’t ask you to come in to-day. It’s a dreadful shame; but mother has one of her headaches, and the noise might disturb her. You understand, don’t you?”
Edwin, with a vision of an elderly and delicate version of Rosie herself lying on a sofa with a handkerchief dipped in eau-de-cologne over her eyes, assented. He thought it a very beautiful consideration on Rosie’s part. A small black and tan terrier came dancing into the hall with a friendly yelp.
“Be quiet, Imp . . . oh,dobe quiet! Isn’t he a duck?” she said. “Now, I must really go.” She held out her hand. A moment before she had taken off her glove, and Edwin, who had scarcely ever touched the hand of a woman before, thought that her fingers were the softest and most delicate things on earth.
“You’ll come and have tea with us, won’t you? I should like you to meet mother.”
“Of course, I’d like to. When?”
“Oh . . . quite soon. Any day this week. Promise me you won’t forget . . .” As if he could ever forget! Her exquisite humility quite bowled him over. When she had closed the door behindher he walked away dazed with an unfamiliar emotion that made the mean street, with its uniform row of mid-Victorian houses on one side, and on the other the blank wall of the theatre and huge, sooty warehouses, seem a holy place. The Halesby Road, with its streaming traffic, shared the same transfiguration. The speed and strength of the horses enthralled him; the faces of men and women walking homeward from their work in the city seemed triumphantly happy; the smooth wood-pavement, polished by the rolling of innumerable wheels, shone like a street in heaven. It seemed to Edwin as if the whole world had somehow been uplifted by a secret knowledge of his own experience. A night of wonder. . . .
“Well, what is the young woman’s name?” asked Boyce, when he returned to Easy Row.
“Beaucaire. She’s principal girl in the pantomime at the Queen’s.”
“H’m. . . . Attractive little piece. But she can’t be up to much if she’s a pal of the Latham woman’s. I’ve seen her there several times.”
“Oh, that means nothing,” Edwin explained. “I don’t think she’s at all keen on her. They acted together somewhere years ago. You can’t drop people when they’ve been kind to you. I don’t think she’s at all keen on her. She’s quite all right. Lives with her mother in Prince Albert’s Place.”
“Pretty rotten sort of street. Got a bad name, you know. I believe, as a matter of fact, it’s considered rather the thing to lug an official mother about with you.”
“You don’t mean—” Edwin began, going very white.
“Of course I don’t. I don’t know anything about her. Only, for God’s sake, take care of yourself. A young woman of that kind generally has a fair share of experience, and you . . . well, youhaven’texactly. Besides, it’s just as well to remember that the final’s coming off in ten days.”
The less said about the final the better.
“She isn’t a chorus girl, you know. If you’d met her I think you’d admit that she’s a lady. She told me that her mother—”
Boyce chuckled.
“As a matter of fact,” said Edwin, clinching the argument, “her father was a country parson in low circumstances.”
“I understand they usually are,” said Boyce with a yawn.
Their night was complicated by two new cases. Next morning they appeared at breakfast with slightly ruffled tempers. They sat at opposite ends of the table, Edwin reading, without understanding, one of Oldham’s caustic critiques on a symphony concert the night before, his friend glued to his beloved anthology.
“What did you say her name was?” said Boyce, apropos of nothing. “Rosie, wasn’t it?”
Edwin grunted.
“Have you ever sampled theSortes Virgilianae? I sometimes try that trick with the anthology. There are plenty of generalisations, so it often comes off rather well. How’s this for last night?”
“H’m—”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes, fire away.”
Boyce quoted:—
Ή τὰ ῥόδα, ῥοδόεσσαν ἔχες χαῤίν, ἀλλὶ τί πωλἔςσαντήν, ἢ τἃ ῥόδα, ἠὲ συναμφοτερα;
Ή τὰ ῥόδα, ῥοδόεσσαν ἔχες χαῤίν, ἀλλὶ τί πωλἔςσαντήν, ἢ τἃ ῥόδα, ἠὲ συναμφοτερα;
“Rather neat, isn’t it? While I was hanging about that case in Craven Street, I made a translation for you. Tell me what you think of it.
‘You of the roses, rosy-fair,Sweet maiden, tell me whetherYou or the roses are your ware,Or both of them together.’”
“Damned rotten, anyway,” said Edwin. “Maiden’s the wrong word . . .”
It comforted him, none the less, to find that Rosie did not revisit Miss Latham, though this lady pointedly rallied him on the doorstep, suggesting that his intimacy with Miss Beaucaire had reached a stage to which he had not yet attained but aspired devoutly. The work at Easy Row, that had slackened for a few days, came on with a rush; and though the image of this delicate creature now filled his nightly vigils, being even more precious for the squalid surroundings in which it came to him, he found it impossible to visit the lodgings in Prince Albert’s Place, to which his thoughts with tantalising regularity returned.
The flood of work held until their fortnight was out, leaving them both washed-out and irritable. To speak frankly, the last few days of their comradeship had not been a success. Although Edwinmade it clear that he didn’t wish to discuss the affair of Rosie with Boyce, the incident of the Greek epigram rankled. He found it impossible to take the matter lightly, feeling that it was necessary to convince himself at all costs that he wasn’t making a fool of himself, and finding it difficult to do so.
On the Monday next before the final examination he found himself a free man. It was a questionable liberty, for its enjoyment really depended on the result of this ordeal. He had definitely severed his connection with Dr. Harris, intending to devote all his spare time at Easy Row and the week after to preparations for the exam. A big gamble. . . . Ten pounds and a few shillings was all he possessed in the world, except a problematical degree in medicine which, in another seven days, might make him certain of four guineas a week as long as he chose to work. The margin seemed so small and the chance so desperate that he burned the last of his boats, selling his microscope to a pawnbroker for twelve pounds. Twenty-three pounds. . . . One could do a lot with twenty-three pounds . . . supposing nothing went wrong.
He found a cheap bed-sitting-room in a quiet street at the back of the University buildings. Here, and in the museums, he would be able to put in a week of intensive cramming. He found that he couldn’t do it. He had reckoned without the unreasonable quantity of Rosie. The first night on which he settled down to read in his new lodging the thought of her would not let him rest. It was ridiculous. What he wanted was a hard walk. He would go up to Alvaston and rout Boyce out of hisstudy for a tramp in the moonlight towards Southfield Beeches. He would apologise to Boyce for his bearishness during the last few days. Hadn’t they assured each other on one of their ambrosial evenings at Overton more than a year ago, that the friendship of two men was a more precious and lasting experience than anything that the love of a woman could give? The whole thing was just the result of physical staleness: a symptom of the monotonous fatigue of the last year. He was going to get rid of it at all costs. He turned out the gas and went downstairs.
It was a discouraging night. A soft winter drizzle had set in from the West, and in the jaded Halesby Road nebulous street lamps were reflected in a layer of black slime that covered the wood-pavement. The shop windows were misted with rain, and the few people who had ventured out into the street trod carefully as though they were afraid of slipping. A brutal night if ever there was one. Plodding up the street with the rain in his face he found that he was passing the end of Prince Albert’s Place. He passed it by twenty paces, and then, almost against his will, turned round again. It was no good. There she was, for certain, within forty yards of him. If he were to walk along the road on the opposite side under the blank walls of the warehouses, he would be able to see the very room that held her exquisiteness. He did so. There was a light in the front room of the lower story, but the blinds were down, and he could not see any one inside. He crossed the road boldly and stood for a moment on the doorstep. It gave him a peculiarstab of happiness to feel so near her. He railed against the combination of shyness and convention that held him; for if he were to do the thing that was reasonable and downright, he would have walked straight into the house and told her the thousand things that choked his heart—he would have kissed her soft hands and gazed into her shy, adorable eyes. Yes, he would have kissed her eyes too. No doubt it would rather have taken the mother’s breath away. Probably Rosie had never given him another thought since he left her on the doorstep. That was the funny part of it. He laughed at himself, and the sound of his laugh must somehow have penetrated the hall, for the black and tan terrier barked shrilly. “Really, I’m off my head, you know,” he said to himself, and wandered off again into the wet streets, walking, until the small hours, those unimaginable slums in which his labours of the last fortnight had lain. “God . . . it’s ridiculous!” he thought, “but a man can’t help falling in love.” It seemed to him that the phantom of Dorothy Powys regarded him seriously.
Next afternoon he presented himself at Prince Albert’s Place. A landlady who might well have been Mrs. Meadows’s sister took in his card, and after a little buzz of conversation that might have been explained in a dozen sinister ways, he was admitted to the little room, whose lighted windows he had surveyed the night before. Rosie came forward to meet him. Once again, trembling, he took herhand. He even fancied—divine flattery!—that she blushed.
“This is my friend Dr. Ingleby, mother,” she said.
“Very pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Beaucaire. “Won’t you come and sit over here?”
In the shadow of Mrs. Beaucaire Edwin took his seat. She was a large woman with a husky voice and a big, dissipated face that had once been handsome. If she had any place in the scheme of things it was surely as a foil to the fragile grace of her daughter. Rosie, with an occasional sideways glance, was busy talking to a little man with a blue shaven chin and an immense mobile mouth, who looked like a bookie.
“I suppose you know Mr. Flood?” said Mrs. Beaucaire.
Edwin confessed that he did not.
“TheMr. Flood, you know. Bertie, this is Mr. Ingleby. . . . I beg your pardon,Dr.Ingleby,” and the great comedian shook hands with Edwin and hoped he was well.
The atmosphere of the lodgings was very easy and familiar. Bertie Flood, the Mirth-maker of Three Continents, as the newspapers described him, devoted himself in an easy paternal manner to Rosie. It became apparent to Edwin, overshadowed by the bulk and impressiveness of Mrs. Beaucaire, that whenever Mr. Flood could make an opportunity of handling Rosie, he did so, and also that Rosie did not in any way resent the process. It even seemed to him that she invited Mr. Flood’s attentions.
“We’re very unconventional people, you know, Dr. Ingleby—quite Bohemian,” said Mrs. Beaucaire in a thick voice.
Edwin agreed that the relation was delightful. It was only by an effort of concentration that he could hear what the mother was saying. All the time his eyes were on Rosie, so divinely fragile in her white muslin blouse. He shuddered when Bertie Flood touched her. Nothing but the delightful innocence of the girl could have induced her to suffer the presence of this satyr. And yet it seemed to him that she was doing all that she could to please him. . . .
“Yes, my poor husband: the vicar I always call him—habit, you know—had a small parish in the North of England. I have a son in the church too. Both he and Rosie really take after the father.”
“Yes. . . . Exactly,” said Edwin. In that moment Rosie had smiled at him, and the smile was enough. God, what a woman!
“The vicar came from a very old family. In the North it is recognised, but in a place like North Bromwich it is very difficult for us to meet the right sort of people. I have to be very careful for Rosie’s sake. The child is so trusting. I was so glad, you know, when she told me that she had met you at Miss Latham’s. One feels so safe with a doctor. You’ll be able to look after her a bit . . . see that she don’t get too tired. Pantomime is very tiring, you know. I myself suffer agonies from indigestion. What with that and my headaches, I’m afraid I’m a poor companion for her. As I say,both the children take after the dear vicar. Rosie isn’t a bit like me.”
“No,” said Edwin, still dazed by the memory of her smile; but, as he spoke, his eyes met those of Mrs. Beaucaire, and he saw to his amazement that they were really the eyes of Rosie, that her discoloured nose had once been of the same shape as her daughter’s, that the sagging, sensual mouth was in fact a degraded version of Rosie’s too. It was a revelation, blasphemous but prophetic. He would not consider it. He dared not look at her.
A moment later Bertie Flood left them. Tea wasn’t much in his line, he said, and his complexion confirmed the assertion. Mrs. Beaucaire saw him to the door. Edwin and Rosie were alone.
It was a wonderful minute. He felt that she could never seem more beautiful, more delicate, more exquisite than at this moment standing in her pale loveliness against the grimy lodging-house wallpaper, with her hands clasped before her.
“I had to come,” he said.
“I had been expecting you. I’m awfully glad you found time.”
Found time! . . . He wanted to tell her of his strange adventure of the night before: how he had stood in the dripping rain beneath her window, hungry for the sight of her, unsatisfied. She stood as though she would be glad to listen; but there was no time. Mrs. Beaucaire, after a noisy and pointed demonstration in the hall, re-entered. It seemed that there was nothing left for him but to take his departure.
“Surely you’re not going so soon?” she said.
And he stayed. It was all delightfully intimate and domestic. These people seemed to possess the rare faculty of putting a visitor as shy as Edwin at his ease. Mrs. Beaucaire did most of the talking, enlarging on Rosie’s devotion to the parson brother, regretting that circumstance, and possibly the unreasonable prejudice of country people against theatrical connections, had deprived him of the family living: and Rosie listened quietly, more compelling in her demure silences than Mrs. Beaucaire at her most impressive.
Once or twice in the afternoon that lady tactfully left them, returning, each time with a renewed vigour and a scent that suggested the combination of eau-de-cologne and brandy. These solitary moments were very precious to Edwin. Neither of them spoke more than a few words, but the air between them seemed charged with emotion. It was six o’clock when he left Prince Albert’s Place.
“You won’t forget us, will you?” said Mrs. Beaucaire with enthusiasm. “It will be so nice for Rosie to have some one to take her to rehearsal. I don’t like her mixing with the boys in the company. It isn’t the thing. And we don’t happen to have any really nice friends in the Midlands. In the North it would have been quite different.”
A delirious week slipped by. In spite of every resolution Edwin had found it impossible to work. His new lodging was not inspiring; but this was only one of the excuses that he invented to salve his conscience. He knew the real reason for this divine, unreasonable restlessness. Even if it were to wreck his chances in the final examination itcould not be avoided, and there was no reason why it should be excused. He knew that he was in love, and before this unquestionable miracle he abased himself.
Mrs. Beaucaire, now satisfied that she could indulge a “headache” and take to her bed as often as she chose, did not question his presence at Prince Albert’s Place: she was even ready on occasion to treat it with a mild facetiousness. Rosie, who lapped up adoration as naturally as a kitten takes to milk, treated it as a matter of course. Edwin rather wished that she wouldn’t take as a matter of course the most wonderful thing in the world. There was a passivity in her acquiescence that filled him with a fear that she was used to this sort of thing or even a little bored by it. She mopped up his devotions with an ease that would have been disconcerting if he had not always been bemused by her beauty. Surely it was enough that she should be beautiful!