Chapter VI: The Dresser

I

IN the following June the second professional examination was held. On a stifling morning, when the blue brick pavements of North Bromwich reflected a torrid heat, and a warm wind, blowing like a sirocco from the black desert outside, swept the streets with clouds of dust, Edwin, Maskew, and W.G. waited in the cloakroom outside the Dean’s office to see the results of the examination posted. Maskew was the only one of the three who showed no signs of nervousness; for W.G. could never overcome the difficulty of expressing his thoughts on paper, and Edwin had passed ten minutes of purgatory with an outside examiner in the anatomy _viva_. He knew, on the other hand, that his Physiology had been extraordinarily good, and put his faith in the general impression of intelligence that he hoped he had created.

The porter came out with the lists, and W.G., striding to meet his fate like some Homeric hero, snatched the paper from his hands. He went very white as he read it.

“Good God—” he said. “Well, I’m damned—”

“Rotten luck if you’re down, W.G.,” said Maskew sympathetically.

“Down? . . . I’m not down. I’m through.”

He still looked bewildered. Edwin took the paper from his trembling hands. As he had expected Maskew was first, but he saw that he himself was second on the list. Martin had ambled through respectively somewhere about the middle. W.G. and Harrop were last and last but one. He pinned the list on the notice-board. It was an exhilarating moment in which he was conscious of the herculean, sweaty handgrip of W.G. who was muttering: “Well, I’m damned if we don’t all deserve it.”

Talking and laughing together, they went out to lunch at Joey’s and caught the next train down to Evesham, where the coolness of the glassy Avon made the June heat more tolerable, and in the evening, blistered with rowing and sunshine, they came back to North Bromwich, dined together, and afterwards went to a music-hall. It was wonderful to Edwin to see the physical elation of W.G. The big man wanted to dance like a child, and it was with difficulty that Maskew restrained him from smashing a plate-glass window in Sackville Row. “You’re a cold-blooded swine, Maskew,” he said indignantly. “God, man, don’t you feel you want to do something? You must let off steam in some way, and it’s just as well to do it decently.”

Next morning the Dean sent a message to Edwin and Maskew, asking them to call at his office during the morning. They went together, and were received with his usual urbane politeness.

“Good-morning, Mr. Maskew . . . Mr. Ingleby. . . . You had better sit down. I am very pleased to see your names at the top of the list. Yes . . . very pleased. I’ve consulted Dr. Moon, and he approves your appointment as prosectors. It is an office that you will be very wise to undertake if you have any surgical ambitions, and I am very pleased to offer it to you. Perhaps you will let me know to-morrow? Thank you, gentlemen. . . . Good-morning.”

“Shall you take it?” said Edwin, as soon as they were outside.

“Of course I shall. I’m rather keen on Anatomy. It only means putting one back a year, and it’s worth it a hundred times over, if one gets the primary Fellowship. You’ll be a fool if you don’t do it. We should have a topping time together. No lectures . . . just a year of research work.”

“I shall have to think about it,” said Edwin.

It was the financial side of the question that had to be considered. To add another year to a course that was already expensive in pursuit of an elusive Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons: was it worth while? To begin with, he might easily fail. The primary examination was notoriously fluky, the results depending on the individual caprices and preferences of examiners. Edwin knew very well that better men than himself had failed in it. If, after draining his father’s pockets for another year, he should be ploughed, the situation would be altogether too pathetic.

Anything that affected his father’s purse seemed to Edwin, in those days, a matter for delicacy and shame. He hated to receive money from him. It was an acute embarrassment to see him write a cheque. He wrote slowly, with a regular, formal hand, and all the time Edwin, watching him, would think how many small, degrading sales of tooth paste and castor oil and pennyworths of camphor had gone to the making of that tenuous bank-account, and how easily and carelessly the painful accumulations would be spent. He hated asking his father for money, and for this reason had compelled himself to refrain from asking for the perfectly reasonable and necessary allowance that he had been wanting to settle for the last year.

And so he did not dare to tell his father that he had been offered the prosectorship and the opportunity of taking the Fellowship. If he had done so he was almost certain that Mr. Ingleby would have consented, and his father’s sacrifice would have thrown such a weight of obligation on him that life would not have been worth living. Indeed, if, in the end, he should have failed, his shame would have been intolerable. These reflections on the humility and penury of his father always plunged Edwin into a debauch of sentiment in which he would return with the zeal of a prodigal to the resolutions that he had made at the time of his mother’s death. They filled him with a kind of protective fervour that might easily have been mistaken for love, but was, in reality, an excuse for its absence. Still, even if the sentiment harrowed, it consoled, and Edwin was heroically elated by the performance of a sacrifice that he had not been brave enough to refuse.

It pleased him also to find that W.G. was thankful for his decision. “You see, it would have been rotten for me,” he said, “if you and Maskew had both been left behind. When you’ve got into the habit of working with a fellow in your first two years, it’s a bit of a break to have to go on by yourself. Of course, I should never have the least earthly chance of getting the Fellowship, and even if I had, I couldn’t afford to waste a year over it. I’m damned glad you’re coming on with me, Ingleby.”

The tribute was flattering. Edwin, always rather pathetically anxious for friendship, was particularly pleased to have it offered so frankly by a creature as unlike him in every way as W.G. There was something stable and reliable about the big man’s simplicity. He felt that he would be as loath to give offence to W.G. as to his father; and though he still felt some indefinite hankerings after the atmosphere of culture that he would have enjoyed in the society of Boyce, he couldn’t deny the fact that W.G. was a sound and splendid fellow, and a good man to have by his side in an emergency. Together they plunged into the new world of hospital life.

II

Two general hospitals supplied the clinical needs of the North Bromwich Medical School. The older, from which the school had originated, was a small institution, the Prince’s, with which Edwin had become acquainted on the occasion of his first panto-night. It stood in the upper and healthier part of the city, in the middle of the slums that lie upon the fringe of the fashionable suburb of Alvaston: a solid building of early Victorian red brick, with a stone portico facing upon a thoroughfare of rather older houses that had once been reputable but had now degenerated into theatrical lodging-houses.

The hospital itself was small enough to be homely, and W.G. and Edwin soon became accustomed to its narrow entrance hall, and the lodge in which porters, who already knew all that was to be known about the reception of casualties, were housed.

Edwin would arrive at the hospital early in the morning, when no sign of life was to be seen in the “professional” lodgings sleeping with drawn blinds upon the other side of the road. At this time of the day the hospital porch smelt clean and antiseptic, for the stream of stinking humanity had not yet begun to trickle through. He would hang his coat in the narrow passage that served for cloakroom and lounge with a cigarette in his mouth before the glass-fronted notice-boards on which the lists of operations for the day were exhibited, and exchange greetings with the night porter departing in a state of drowsy ill-temper, or the day-porter coming on duty with a military swagger and his grey hair plastered down with vaseline, from the casualty department, and cold water.

Here, too, the members of the consulting staff would arrive in their frock-coats and top-hats: great men, such as Lloyd Moore, the outstanding surgical genius of the Midlands; old Beaton, the professor of surgery, with his long, grey beard, and Hartley, the ophthalmologist, whose reputation was European. These giants would pass on through the swinging doors to their wards or consulting rooms, and on the very stroke of nine, W.G., who was a bad riser, and always cut things fine, would plunge in, carrying with him the strenuous atmosphere of a cold sponge and breezy enthusiasm. Then the clock would strike nine, and they would pass on together arm in arm, into the huge, airy waiting-hall with innumerable benches set crosswise like the pews in a church; and, at the same moment, the military porter, who had been marshalling the queue of out-patients, would release them, and a bewildering crowd of poorly-clad human wreckage would drift in behind them, settling patiently into the benches opposite the door of the department from which they were seeking relief.

The work of Edwin and W.G. lay in the Casualty Department, a small room full of pleasant morning light. On one side of it ran a long counter with shelves for bottles, and drawers in which plasters, dressings, and ointments were kept. On the other, half a dozen chairs were ranged for the reception of patients. The medical staff consisted of four persons only: two professionals, a young and enthusiastic surgeon named Mather who held the post of Assistant Surgeon to Out-patients, and an elderly sister who had been on the job for years, and two amateurs in the shape of Edwin and W.G.

All of them were clothed in white overalls; for the work of the casualty department was of a dirty nature, and these long garments also served as some protection from the swarming parasites that lived upon the bodies of their patients. Edwin, who suffered agonies of irritation from their attacks, also armed himself with a glass-stoppered bottle of ether with which he would drench the seat of irritation in the hopes of inflicting death or at least unconsciousness upon his tormentors.

Then, one by one, the patients would file in, and plant themselves upon the wooden chairs: old men whose skins were foul with the ravages of eczema and dirt combined; women, exhausted in middle age by child-bearing, and the accepted slavery of housework; sturdy mechanics who had been the victims of some unavoidable accident; pale young women, made anxious for their livelihood by illness that its conditions had caused, and, more terrible than all, the steady stream of wan, transparent children, the idols of maternal care, the victims of maternal ignorance.

In the human wreckage of the casualty department there was no great variety; but all of it was new to Edwin and W.G., and they threw themselves into the labour with enthusiasm, working so hard from nine o’clock till one, that their backs ached and they lost all sense of the passage of time. Mather himself seemed to them a prodigy of skilfulness, so swift in his decisions, so certain and adroit in the work of his hands. Even the sister, whom Edwin had originally regarded as a mere woman, aroused their admiration by the ease with which she worked and her invincible good humour. Edwin found that she could teach him more than his male superiority would ever have dreamed.

Little by little the astounding confusion of their work began to seem more simple. Bandages, that had seemed condemned to unsightly ruckles, or liable to fall unrolled upon the dirty floor, began to fold themselves in symmetrical designs. Edwin and W.G. vied with one another in the neatness of their dressings. The smell of the place, that had seemed at first to fester beneath an unconvincing veil of carbolic and iodoform, now seemed natural to their nostrils, even pleasant in its familiarity.

Edwin began to have time to look about him, to form individual attachments to the patients who came there every day, to take a particular interest in cases that he regarded as his own. Gradually, from the mass of evil-smelling humanity, personalities began to emerge and even intimacies that were flattering because they implied a trust in his own imperfect skill.

He did not know the names of his patients any more than they knew his. To him they were grouped under conventional generics: Daddy, Granny, Tommy, Polly, and the like. To them he was always “Doctor”; but the thing that made them human and lovable to him was the sense of their dependence on him; and the preference for his attentions that was sometimes timidly expressed, gave him a flush of gratification deeper than any he had ever known. It pleased him to think that it was true when his patients told him that he dressed them more gently than the other workers in the casualty department. Such confidences almost convinced him that he had found a vocation.

After lunch Edwin and W.G. would talk over their cases together in the lounge of the Dousita. Maskew, who still met them every day at this resort, found their conversation boring, and fell back more and more upon the charms of Miss Wheeler, who did not seem to have varied by a single hairpin since the day of their first acquaintance. And from the discussion of their individual cases, W.G. would sometimes pass on to the more general questions that their work aroused.

“This life’s worth living,” he would say. “When you first take up medicine and spend a couple of years over learning the atomic weights of heavy metals or dissecting the stomach of an earthworm, you begin to wonder what the devil you’re getting at; by Gad, this hospital work opens your eyes. You’re doing something practical. What’s more, you’re doing a job that no professor of classics or stinks could touch, and you see the actual results of your treatment on your patients.”

“Thank God, I’m not one of them, W.G.,” said Maskew morosely. “As a matter of fact, it’s no more than when an electrical engineer finds a short circuit and makes a new connection, or when a carpenter makes a job of a rickety staircase.”

“That’s all you know about it, my friend,” said W.G. “In our job you’re dealing with human life; you’re relieving physical pain—and sometimes you get thanked for it, which is damned pleasant. And you’ve a responsibility too. If you make a slip the poor devil you’re experimenting on is going to suffer. You may even kill him. And the extraordinary thing is that he trusts you . . .”

To Edwin also that was the most extraordinary thing, and, indeed, the most pathetic. It showed him that the practice of medicine imposed an actual moral discipline on those who followed it: an obligation of the most meticulous honour and devotion. But if the discipline of practice demanded much, it repaid a thousandfold. He had his reward not only in the thanks of the scabrous old men whose varicose ulcers, or “bad legs,” as they called them, he dressed, but in the rarer consciousness of actual achievement which came to him more frequently as the scope of his work extended.

One case in particular he always remembered, principally because it was the first of the kind. She was a little Jewish tailoress who laboured at piecework in some sweater’s den in the rookeries on the southern side of the hospital. She was not beautiful. Her face had the peculiar ivory pallor, and her whole body the unhealthy brittleness, of plants that have sprouted in a cellar. But her voice was soft, and her hands, the fingertips of which were made callous by the plucking of threads and rough with innumerable needle pricks, were beautifully shaped. A week or so before she had stabbed her left forefinger with an infected needle, and lit a focus of suppuration in the tendon sheath. She had to live, poor thing! and so, for a week she had worked in a state of agony, while the tissues grew tense and shiny with compression, and the pain would not let her sleep. At last, when she could work no longer, she had come to the casualty department, nursing her poisoned hand in a bandana handkerchief. She had not slept for four nights, and was very near to tears.

Edwin, who saw that surgery was needed, showed the case to Mather. The surgeon stripped the sleeve from her thin, transparent arm and showed him the red lines by which the poison was tracking up the lymphatics towards the glands of the axilla that stood like blockhouses in the way of bacterial invasion.

“Why didn’t you come before?” he said, with a roughness that was not unkind. How many times was Edwin to hear those very words!

“I couldn’t, doctor. There was my work—”

“There’d be no more work for you, my dear, if you went on much longer,” said Mather: and then, to Edwin, “Yes . . . you’d better incise it at once, I’m busy putting up a fracture. Straight down in the middle line. Don’t be afraid of it.”

“Oh, you’re not going to cut me, doctor?” she said. “Not till to-morrow. . . . Oh, please . . . when I’ve had a night’s sleep.”

He was very nervous. He assured her that he would give her no pain; but while he left her to fetch the scalpel and the dressings he heard a queer drumming noise and turned to see that it was made by the heels of his patient trembling on the floor. He was nearly as tremulous himself.

“I promise you I won’t hurt you,” he said, and she returned him a painful smile. It was a look he knew. “Just like the eyes of a dog,” W.G. had said.

He sprayed the finger with ethyl chloride, that froze into a crust like hoarfrost on the fingertip and blanched the skin that was already pale with the pressure inside it. All the time the girl was making little nervous movements, and sometimes her heels began to drum again until she tucked them under the bar of her chair.

“I’m sorry, doctor, I can’t help it,” she said.

Then, with his scalpel, he made a clean longitudinal cut through the tense skin down to the bone of the phalanx. She gave a start and clutched his hand so that he nearly gave it up. “I’ve got to do it,” he thought. “I must do it.” It was the first time that he had ever cut with a knife into living flesh. A strange sensation. . . . But the bead of matter that escaped showed him that he had got to the root of the trouble, and the sight of it filled him with a new and curious exultation.

It was a long business, for the neglected pressure had impaired the vitality of the bone and the wound would not heal until the dead spicules had been separated from the living tissue. Edwin dressed the finger every morning. The patient would have been a poor subject at the best of times, and he knew that the fact that she was now out of work probably meant that she was starving. It would have been easy for him to tell her that she must have plenty of nourishing food; but he knew well enough that the words would have been no more than a mockery. In the hospital wards, he reflected, she might have been well fed; but the wards at the Prince’s were full of more serious cases who could not walk to the hospital to receive their treatment. On occasions of this kind he wished that he were a millionaire: an extravagant idea—for doctors are never millionaires. He could only ram iron into her and dress her and try to get her well so that she might travel back around the vicious circle to the conditions that had been responsible for her illness. It seemed to him that people who were not doctors could never really know anything about life.

In a little while there were others, many of them, in whose cases he knew that he had been privileged to effect some positive good: notably an old woman, always dressed in black and loaded with crepe as though she were attending her own funeral, who had fractured her wrist by slipping on an icy pavement one evening when she was fetching her husband’s supper beer, an office that she appeared far too ladylike ever to have performed. She had put out her hand to save herself, and a Colles fracture of the ulna and radius had been the result.

She called Edwin “My dear,” and the first thing that he noticed about her was the amazing cleanliness of her withered skin. He remembered the fortitude that she had shown when first he reduced the fracture; how her bony fingers, on one of which was a wedding ring worn very thin, had clasped his. For some curious reason he felt very tenderly towards her, and when the bones were set and he had passed her on to the massage department, he felt quite lost without her early “Good-morning!” That was another strange thing about medical practice: the way in which people with whom he was thrown into an intimate sympathy for a few days passed completely and irrevocably out of his life.

W.G. and Edwin found their experience so intriguing that they took turns to visit the casualty department in the afternoons when the work was light, and the absence of Mather gave them a free hand in the performance of minor surgery. At this time of the day the work of the department was more suggestive of its name; for the people who came there were nearly all the victims of sudden illness or accident that needed diagnosis and immediate treatment. It pleased Edwin to deal with these off his own bat, and he spent the long afternoons that were free from lectures in suturing wounds, removing brass filings or specks of cinders from eyes, extracting teeth, gaining confidence every day and suffering the mingled emotions of pain, pity, and violent indignation. Not infrequently the last . . . for he saw so much suffering that might easily have been prevented but for the ignorance or callousness of humanity. These things aroused his anger; but he soon realised that anger was the one emotion that a doctor is most wise to suppress.

Sometimes a woman from one of the neighbouring slums would enter in a state of hollow-eyed terror, carrying in her shawl a child that was obviously dying from broncho-pneumonia.

“Why, in the name of Heaven, didn’t you come up before?” he would ask indignantly.

“The neighbours said it was only the teething, doctor,” she would reply.

Edwin would try to suppress an inclination to damn the neighbours upside down. “Surely you could see the child was ill?” he would say.

“Yes, doctor, but how could I get away? There’s seven of them, bless their hearts, and me going with another, and the house looking like a pigsty, and the master’s dinner to cook. I haven’t got no time to spare for hospitals.”

And he knew that she spoke the truth, contenting himself, as he filled in the form for admission to the children’s ward, with telling her that the diet of bread-crusts soaked in beer, which she had been giving it, was not ideal for a baby eight months old.

“Take the baby along to ward fourteen,” he would say, “they’ll do what they can for it,” and be met, as likely as not, with a volume of tigerish abuse from a wild-eyed woman who swore that if her baby was going to die it wasn’t going to do so in any bloody hospital, was it, my pretty?—the last words sinking to a maternal coo and being accompanied by a paroxysm of kisses on the baby’s lips that were already blue for want of breath. And then Edwin would control his indignation and resort to wheedling and coaxing, feeling that if the baby were left to the mercies of maternal instinct, he himself would be little better than a murderer.

Indeed, the responsibilities of his calling and its immense obligations impressed themselves on him more deeply every day. He saw that this profession of medicine was not to be taken lightly; that his work in it would be useless, almost impious, if it were not religiously performed. Even from the earliest ages this had been so. One day, idly reading a back number of the _Lancet_, he came upon a historical article that contained a translation of the Hippocratic oath, which had been administered to all those who were initiated in the mysteries of medicine two thousand years ago. It seemed to him that it might have been written on the day that he read it. Thus it ran:—

“I swear by Apollo the Healer, and Æsculapius, and Hygieia, and
Panacea; and I call all Gods and Goddesses to witness, that I will,
according to my power and judgment, make good this oath and covenant
that I sign. I will use all ways of medical treatment that shall be
for the advantage of the sufferers, according to my power and
judgment, and will protect them from injury and injustice. Nor will
I give to any man, though I be asked to give it, any deadly drug, nor
will I consent that it should be given. But purely and holily I will
keep guard over my life and my art.

“And into whatever houses I enter, I will enter into them for the
benefit of the sufferers, departing from all wilful injustice and
destructiveness, and all lustful works, on bodies, male and female,
free and slaves. And whatever in practice I see or hear, or even
outside practice, which it is not right should be told abroad, I will
be silent, counting as unsaid what was said.

“Therefore to me, accomplishing this oath and not confounding it, may
there be enjoyment of life and art, being in good repute among all
men for ever and ever: but to me, transgressing and perjured, the
contrary.”

Fine reading, Edwin thought. . . . The only deity of whom he was not quite certain was Panacea. Obviously the classical representative of Mother Siegel. It seemed to him a pity that the modern student was not bound by the formulæ of the Physician of Cos.

His three months in the casualty department passed away quickly, and in the spring of the year he found himself attached as dresser to that startling surgeon, Lloyd Moore. The appointment, as he soon realised, was a privilege; for Lloyd Moore was the one man of unquestionable genius in the North Bromwich Medical School. At first the experience was rather alarming, for the vagaries of his chief, and, not least, his genial vulgarity, seemed at first as though they were going to destroy the pretty edifice of ideals that Edwin had constructed on the basis of the Hippocratic oath and his experience in the casualty department. Lloyd Moore, to begin with, was no respecter of persons, ancient or modern; his wit was ruthless and occasionally bitter, as Edwin had reason to know; his language, particularly in moments of stress, was unvarnished and foul, even in the presence of women.

On the surface, indeed, he seemed a person whom Hippocrates would have regarded as undignified and improper. Sometimes in the out-patient department Edwin would blush for his chief’s violence and cruelty, but, in the end, all these things were forgotten in the realisation that the little man was a great surgical genius, to whom diagnosis was a matter of inspired, unerring instinct, and practice a gift of the gods. Nor were his virtues merely professional. L.M. (as he was always called) was a man of the people, one who had fought his way inch by inch into the honourable position that he held as the greatest of surgeons and the wealthiest practitioner in the Midlands. The unpaid work of the hospital absorbed him even to the neglect of private practice, and every doctor in the district knew that he could count on the very best of the great man’s skill for a nominal fee in any case of emergency. Far more than any consultant in the Midlands, he was regarded as the general practitioner’s friend, and, as a result of this confidence, all the most interesting surgical material of the district found its way into his clinic.

In a little time Edwin became wholly subject to the spell of this amazing personality, until it seemed strange to him that he could ever have doubted the propriety of anything that L.M. said or did. He wondered more and more at the man’s titanic energy, for Lloyd Moore was a little fellow, so pale that he always looked as if he were fainting with exhaustion. His patients also adored him, and more than once Edwin was told in the wards by elderly female admirers that Mr. Lloyd Moore was the very image of Jesus Christ.

In the days of the casualty department Edwin’s main concern had been with the alleviation of immediate pain. The problem of the wards was graver, being no less than the balance of life and death. In the achievements of L.M.’s scalpel, he saw the highest attainment of which surgery was capable. In a hundred cases offhand he could say to himself that but for Lloyd Moore’s skill the patient would have died, and when he saw the fragile figure of the surgeon with his pale face and burning eyes enter the theatre, Edwin would think of him as a man worn thin by wrestling with death . . . death in its most cruel and invincible moods.

But in the theatre, at the time of one of L.M.’s emergency operations, there was no time for dreaming or for romantic speculation. An atmosphere of materialism, of pure, sublimated action, filled the room as surely as the sweet fumes of chloroform and ether. Everything about the place was clean and bright and hard, from the frosted-glass of the roof and the porcelain walls to the shining instruments that lay newly sterilised in trays on the glass-topped tables. Even the theatre sister in her white overall gave an impression of clean, bright hardness. Indeed, in this white temple of sterility, everything was clean except those parts of the patient’s body that the nurses in the wards had not scrubbed with nail-brushes and shaved and painted with iodine, and the language of L.M., whose physical lustrations had no effect whatever on his vocabulary.

Even L.M.’s language was at times a relief, for it seemed to be the only human thing that ever gained admission to the theatre, and the sister was so inhuman as never to take the least notice of it. Not a smile, nor even the least compression of the lips marked her appreciation or disapproval of the surgeon’s sallies. Physically she was an extremely attractive woman, with very beautiful eyes that were not without their effect upon Edwin; but the influence of the place robbed her of any sexual attributes; so that she became no more than a monosyllabic automaton, intent, devoted, faultlessly prepared for any of the desperate emergencies of surgery. From the first Edwin had noticed that the more embarrassing physical details of the patients had no disturbing effect upon her modesty. He soon saw that if she had permitted herself for one moment to be a woman she could not have remained the wholly admirable theatre-sister that she was. “But I can’t imagine,” he thought, “how any man could marry a nurse—”

From such reflections he would be roused by the anæsthetist’s laconic “Ready.” On one side of the operating table he would stand, and on the other L.M. with the theatre-sister ready at his elbow. The surgeon would pick up a scalpel carelessly, as a man picks up a pencil to write, and then, apparently with as little thought, he would make a long, clean incision through the skin and superficial fatty tissues of the abdomen, putting his head on one side to look at it like an artist whose pencil has described a beautiful curve. Then, sharply: “Swabs . . . Ingleby, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” And Edwin would press a swab of gauze to the incision to absorb the blood that escaped from the subcutaneous veins.

“Right.”

Layer by layer the various planes of fascia, muscle, and peritoneum would be opened and neatly laid aside, every one of them slipped in its own pair of artery forceps. Then, from the gaping wound, that L.M. probed with his thin finger, a sickening odour would rise . . . one that Edwin never remembered apart from the other sickening smell of ether.

“Pus. . . I thought so,” L.M. would say. “The brute’s perforated, damn him.” And Edwin knew that yet another creature had been snatched out of the jaws of death.

In the hands of L.M. surgery seemed so simple. His scalpel—for he used fewer instruments than any surgeon Edwin ever knew—was a part of him in the same way as a perfect rider is part of his horse. There was never any hesitation in his surgery, never any room for doubt; everything was straightforward and self-evident from the first incision to the last suture; and he was at his best when he threw into it a touch of bravura, rejoicing in the amazing virtuosity of his own technique and playing, a little, to the gallery.

“There you are,” he would say, “you see there’s nothing in it. Nothing at all but a working knowledge of anatomy and a dollop of common-sense. That’s all surgery. Why on earth should they pay me a hundred guineas for doing a simple thing like that? There’s nothing in it, is there?”

Edwin knew that there was a great deal in it: genius, and more than genius: a life of devotion to one end only; infinite physical strains; cruel disappointments; harrowing mistakes. For even L.M. had made mistakes in his time; and a doctor pays for his mistakes more heavily than any other man.

Apart from the performance of emergency operations, that might take place at any hour of the day or night, the surgeon only occupied his theatre on three mornings in the week; and the greater part of Edwin’s time was devoted to the work of the wards. Here he performed his proper function as dresser, being, under the house-surgeon, responsible for the after-treatment of the patients on whom L.M. had operated This business kept his hands full. Nearly all the acute surgical cases needed dressing daily, and some more than once a day. It was usual for the dresser to leave the second dressing to be done by the house-surgeon on his evening round, or by the sister of the ward, who would doubtless have performed it, as well as either of them; but nothing could induce Edwin, in his newest enthusiasm, to drop a case into which his teeth were fixed.

The morning visits were ceremonial. The great floors of the wards shone like the faces of such patients as were fit to be scrubbed, with a soapy flannel; the rows of beds were set with a mathematical correctness, the sheets turned down at exactly the same level; the water in the jugs stood hot, awaiting the dresser’s hands, his towel lay folded in the jug’s mouth; a probationer, pink-faced and red-armed, stood waiting to do his professional pleasure; morning sunlight flickered over the leaves of aspidistras that flourished in pots on the central tables, and on the trays of dressing instruments that were ready for his hand.

At ten o’clock precisely, Edwin, an older and more experienced Edwin whose shaves were no longer a luxury, whose clothes no longer looked as if he were in the act of growing out of them, and whose collars were adorned by the very latest thing in ties, would enter the ward, roll up his shirtsleeves, and be helped on with a white overall by the obedient probationer—whose main function in life this office seemed to be—or sometimes by the sister herself. The new Edwin, product of six months in hospital, was no longer afraid of these attentions because they happened to be performed by women. In a mild way he was even an amateur of the physical points exhibited by the _genus_ probationer, and had arrived at a touching intimacy with the sisters, who found in him a clean and pleasant mannered youth, and on occasion hauled him out of the difficulties into which his inexperience landed him. Thus attired, he would begin his progress of the ward, followed, wherever he went, by the females who had robed him, the junior pushing before her the wheeled glass table on which the dressings and instruments were kept. For the time being he was, or imagined himself to be, the most important person in the ward, until, perhaps, the house-surgeon entered, and his attendants forsook their allegiance and hastened to put themselves at the service of this superior person.

In the duties of the wards Edwin became far more familiar with his cases than in the casualty department. The work was less hurried, and the patients themselves were less fully armed with the conventional social gestures by which men and women protect and hide themselves. They lay in bed helpless, dependent on the hospital staff for every necessity and amusement; and the stress of physical pain, or the catastrophe of a major operation had generally shaken from them the little superficialities that they had gathered to themselves in the course of everyday life. Edwin noticed that, even at their worst, the women were hardly ever too ill to be a little concerned for their personal appearance, and, as they grew better, the patients of both sexes would make an heroic attempt to appear as they wished themselves to seem rather than as they were; but he realised, none the less, that the doctor gets nearer to the bed-rock of human personality than any other man who ministers to humanity. With him, the person into whose hands their suffering bodies were committed in an almost pitiful confidence, they were concerned to hide themselves far less than with any other; and in this triumphant discovery Edwin flattered himself that he was becoming richly learned in human nature. He did not realise how little he had learned.

One thing, however, that these days taught him, he never lost in after life: an intense appreciation of the inherent patience and nobility of human beings, the precious ore that the fire of suffering revealed. Even the worst of his patients—in North Bromwich as elsewhere disease is an impartial enemy, falling on the virtuous and abandoned alike—revealed such amazing possibilities of good. In these hospital wards the fundamental gregarious instinct of mankind, with the unselfishness and sympathy that go along with it, asserted itself. The common life of the ward was happy, extraordinarily happy. Removed from the ordinary responsibilities of wage-earning and competition, fed and housed and tended without question, the patients lived together as happily as a community of African savages, supported by the female labour of the nursing staff, obedient to the unquestioned authority of the sister in charge.

And in Edwin’s eyes these, too, were wonderful people. At first he had taken them more or less for granted; but gradually he realised the tremendous sacrifices that their life implied: the long hours: the unceasing strain of keeping their temper: the clean, efficient materialism for which they must have sacrificed so much of the obvious beauty of life, committing themselves—for most of them were middle-aged—to an abnegation of the privileges of marriage and motherhood in a cloistral seclusion as complete as that imposed on the useless devotee of some mystical religion. He took it for granted that the life of a nun was useless to any one except herself. . . . Well, this was a religion worth some sacrifice: the religion of humanity. They themselves would only have called it a profession. At first it had seemed to him that their interests were narrow and their lives, of necessity, mean. He had been astonished at the small things that gave them pleasure: a bunch of primroses from a grateful patient; a ride on the top of a bus; a word of commendation from one of the consulting staff; a house-surgeon’s or even a student’s compliment; and, above all, the passionate attachments and enmities that made up the life of the nunnery in which they lived: but in the end he began to sympathise with them in the humility of their pleasures, to feel that anything might be forgiven to creatures who had made so great a sacrifice. In a mild way he idealised them; and for this reason they decided that he was “quite a nice boy.”

III

In the winter of his third year Edwin’s newly formulated enthusiasm for humanity in the bulk suffered something of a check. The hospital absorbed him so completely that in those days he saw very little of the city, going to and from his lectures and his work in the Pathological Laboratory at the University without taking any real share in the life of North Bromwich, or being aware of the passions and interests that swayed the city’s heart. Coming down from the hospital, one evening in December, he suddenly became conscious of a constriction in the traffic which grew more acute as it reached the narrows that debouch upon the open space in front of the town hall; and while he was wondering what could be the cause of this, a huge rumour of voices, not unlike that which proceeds from a Midland football crowd when it disapproves of a referee, but deeper and more malignant, reached his ears.

He wondered what was the matter, and since it looked as if the traffic were now completely blocked on the main road, he cut down the quiet street that faces the university buildings and overlooks the paved court in which the statue of Sir Joseph Astill inappropriately dispenses water to a big stone basin. Almost immediately he found himself upon the fringes of an immense crowd over which the waves of threatening sound that he had heard at a distance were moving like catspaws on a sullen sea. The windows of the town-hall itself blazed with light, making the outlines of the Corinthian pillars that surrounded it almost beautiful. He edged his way into the black crowd. It was composed for the most part of workers in iron and brass, and exhaled an odour of stale oil. In a moment of relative silence he asked the man who stood in front of him, a little mechanic who had not troubled to change the oily dungarees in which he worked, what was the matter.

“It’s Lloyd George . . . the b—,” he said, and spat fiercely. Edwin was not sure where he had heard the name before. He seemed to remember it as that of a Welsh member of Parliament who had come into notoriety during the debates on the South African War. He inquired what Lloyd George was doing.

“Come to speak agen’ Joe,” said the mechanic savagely; and, as a wave of sound that had started somewhere in the middle of the crowd came sweeping towards them, he suddenly began to squeal hoarsely like a carnivorous beast in a cage: a ridiculous noise, that seemed, nevertheless, to express the feelings of the multitude. From scraps of conversation that he heard beneath the crowd’s rumour, Edwin began to understand that this beggarly Welshman, who had spent the last few years in vilifying the workmen of North Bromwich generally, and their political idol in particular, had actually dared to bring his dirty accusations to the political heart of the city: the town-hall in which their favourite had delivered his most important speeches; that, at this very moment, the meeting which popular feeling had proscribed, was beginning behind the Corinthian pillars, and that the just indignation of North Bromwich had determined that he should not escape with his life.

It struck Edwin that whatever else the Welshman might be, he was certainly not lacking in courage; but, for all that, he found it difficult to prevent his own feelings in the matter from being swamped and absorbed and swept away by the crowd’s vast, angry consciousness. Almost in spite of himself, his heart palpitated with vehement malice against the intruder. He felt that he would have experienced a brutal satisfaction in seeing him torn limb from limb.

A yell of extraordinary savagery, in which he found it difficult not to join, rose from the square.

The meeting, it seemed, had begun. Edwin saw members of the crowd scattering in all directions. A cry of “stones!” was raised, and he saw that men, women, and children were streaming towards an area of slum that was being dismantled to make room for some monument of municipal grandeur, returning with caps and hands and aprons full of stones and broken brick. Soon the air was full of flying missiles, and though the crash of glass could not be heard, ragged holes were torn in the frosted glass of the town-hall windows.

A body of police, tremendous strapping fellows, marched by, followed by impotent jeers and hooting, and planted themselves in front of all the doors with truncheons drawn. Their presence seemed to enrage the crowd, inflaming that suppressed hate of the forces of order that slumbers in most men’s hearts. The volleys of stones increased as the supplies of ammunition grew more plentiful. A little dark man with a red tie monotonously shouting the words: “Free speech!” was caught up, and, as it seemed to Edwin, trampled to death. Somewhere in the middle of the struggling masses people began to sing the revivalist hymn: “Shall we gather at the river?” It reached Edwin in an immense and gathering volume, with words adapted for the occasion:—

“Shall we gather at the fountain,
The beautiful, the beautiful, the fountain?
We’ll drown Lloyd George in the fountain.
And he won’t come here any more.”

The very volume of sound was impressive and inspiring.

Suddenly the crowd was parted by the arrival of a new body. It was a phalanx of university students who had dragged an immense beam of oak from the debris of the dismantled slum and were hurling it forward as a battering ram against one of the principal doors. Edwin could see amongst them the towering shoulders of W.G., and the mouth of the elder Wade, the hero of the hansom cab, wide open and yelling. It seemed as though the savagery of the crowd had reached its height: they tore a way through it, trampling the fallen as they went. And then the police, who had been held in reserve, charged at right angles to them, hitting out right and left with their loaded batons. The less courageous part of the crowd tried to scatter. The wave of a stampede spread outwards till it reached the edge on which Edwin was standing. He was thrown violently from his feet into the chest of a stranger, who shouted, “Hallo, Ingleby—” It was Matthew Boyce. “I think we’d better get out of this,” he said.

The words seemed to pull Edwin back into sanity. Together they forced their way into a street that was empty but for a stream of people hurrying to the square with stones. They stood panting in the quiet.

“God . . . what animals men are!” said Boyce. “I suppose it was something like this a hundred years ago, when they burned Priestley’s house.”

“Yes, it’s pretty rotten,” said Edwin, “but didn’t you feel you wanted to join in it?”

“Yes, that’s the amazing part of it,” said Boyce. “What’s happening to you in these days? We seem to have lost sight of one another.”

They walked down to the station together. “It’s an extraordinary thing, isn’t it?” said Edwin, “that ordinary peaceable men should go mad like that?”

“They aren’t men,” said Boyce. “They’re a crowd.”