A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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the sofa and the table, and was watching Murchison out
of the angles of his eyes. He was accustomed to dealing
with ignorant people, but here he had to satisfy a man
whose professional education had been far better than his
own.
“Why didn’t you tell me of this before, Murchison?”
“Tell you what?”
“About the child.”
Murchison glanced at him blankly.
“Well, it was my own affair.”
“Didn’t like to bother any one, eh? You never ought
to have kept the youngster in this beast of a town. I
could have told you a lot about Wilton if you had asked.”
John Tugler, like many amiable but rather coarsefibred people, was often most brusque when meaning to
be kind. Moreover, he had a certain measure of authority to maintain, and for the maintenance of authority
it was customary for him to wax aggressive.
“I tried to get the child away.”
Murchison spoke monotonously, yet with effort.
“We wrote to her grandmother, but the old lady was
ill, and put us off with excuses. The child was only ailing then. It was a matter of money. The only money
I could lay my hands on was a small sum deposited with
the post-office in the child’s own name. And when I
got the money I saw that it would be no good.”
The florid little man looked sincerely vexed.
“You ought to have mentioned it,” he said “you ought
to have mentioned it. I’m not so damned stingy as not
to give a brother practitioner’s child a chance.”
Murchison lifted his head.
“Thanks,” he said. “I suppose it is too late now?”
His eyes met Dr. Tugler’s. The grim question in that
look demanded the sheer truth. John Tugler understood
it, and met it like a man.
“We can’t move her now,” he said.
“No.”
It is incredible what meaning a single word can carry.
With Murchison that “no” meant the surrender of a life.
Dr. Tugler stared out of the window, and rattled his
keys.
“Did you notice the squint?” he asked, softly.
“Yes.”
“And the retraction of the head? She’s been sick, too:
cerebral vomiting. Damn the disease, I’ve seen too
much of it!”
Murchison’s face might have been sculptured by
Michael Angelo.
“Then you think it is that?” he asked, dully.
“Tubercular meningitis?”
“Yes.”
John Tugler nodded.
There was a short and distraught silence before the
little man picked up his hat. He smoothed it gently with
the sleeve of his coat. Murchison stood motionless, staring at the floor.
“Look here, Murchison.”
He glanced up and met the other man’s dull eyes.
“You can’t work to-day. It doesn’t signify. And
about the cash—”
“Thanks, but”
“Now, now, we’re not going to quarrel, are we? The
work’s been pretty thick this winter. I’m rather thinking you’ve done rather more than your share. It would
make things more comfortable, now wouldn’t it?”
Murchison gave a kind of groan.
“It’s good of you, Tugler.”
“Oh, bosh, man! Am I a bit of flint? Call it another
pound a week. It isn’t much at that. I’ll send you a
fiver on account.”
He gave his hat a last rub, crammed it on his head, and
walked hurriedly towards the door.
“It’s good of you, Tugler. I —”
“All right. I don’t want it talked about.”
The little man was already in the hall, and fumbling
for the handle of the front door. He opened it, slipped
out like a guilty debtor, and crunched down the gravel,
swearing to himself after the manner of the egregious
male.
THE windows of Parker Steel’s consulting-room looked out on the garden at the back of the house, where
Lent lilies were already swinging their golden heads over
borders of crocuses, purple, yellow, and white. The lower
part of the window was screened by a wire gauze blind,
and the red serge curtains were looped back close to the
shutters.
However drab and dismal it may be, a physician’s consulting-room has much of the mystery that shadows the
confessional of the priest. The uninitiated enter with a
pleasurable sense of awe. Wisdom seems to admonish
them from her temple of text-books piled up solemnly in
the professional bookcase. There is an air of suave confidence and quiet reserve about the room. Even the
usual Turkey carpet suggests comfortable sympathy and
the touch of the healing hand.
Even as it is unnatural to suspect a priest of the sins
he rebukes in others, so to the lay mind the physician
appears as a being above the diseases that he treats.
There is always something illogical in a doctor needing
his own physic. And yet of all men he is the last that
can boast of the bliss of ignorance. He knows the curses
that afflict man in the flesh, how grim and inevitable his
own end may be. He is too well aware of the malignant
significance of symptoms, and a month of dyspepsia may
reduce him to a state of morbid and half hypocondriacal
self-introspection. It is told of a great surgeon how he
lay awake all through one night imagining that he had
discovered an aneurism of his aorta. It is dangerous to
know too little, but on occasions it may be desperately
unpleasant to know too much.
It was a serious and rather worried figure that moved
to and fro in the lofty room, as the March day drew towards
a dreary close. The house was silent, a depressing silence,
suggestive of stagnation and cynical melancholy. A fitful wind set the tops of the cypress-trees swaying and
jerking in the garden. The only living thing visible from
Dr. Steel’s window was a black cat stalking birds under
the shadow of a bank of laurels.
Parker Steel had taken off his coat and folded it carefully over the back of a chair. He stood by the window,
fumbling at his cuff-links, a preoccupied frown pinching
up the skin of his forehead above the thin, acquisitive
nose. After turning up his shirt-sleeves, he picked up a
pocket-lens from the table and focused the light upon
the forefinger of his right hand.
The hand that held the lense trembled very perceptibly.
On the right forefinger, immediately above the base of the
nail, a dull red papule stood out upon the skin. It was
clearly circumscribed in outline, and hard to the touch.
Parker Steel noticed all these details with the strained air
of a man scrutinizing an unpleasant statement of accounts.
Presently he laid the lens down on the flap of the
bureau by the window, and, unbuttoning his waistcoat,
passed his left hand under his shirt and vest. The deft
fingers half buried themselves in the hollow of his right
armpit. Parker Steel’s eyes had a peculiar, hard, staring
look, the expression seen in the eyes of the expert whose
whole intelligence is concentrated for the moment in the
sense of touch. His lower lip fell away slightly from his
teeth. Sharp lines of strain were visible upon his forehead.
“Good Lord!”
The words escaped from him involuntarily as he drew
his hand out from under his shirt. The smooth face had
grown suddenly haggard and sallow, and there was a
glint of ugly fear in the eyes. Parker Steel stood staring
at his hand, his mouth open, the lips softening as the lips
of a coward soften when his manhood melts before some
physical ordeal. The dapper figure has lost its alertness,
its neat and confident symmetry, and had become the
loose and slouching figure of a man suffering from shock.
Parker Steel roused himself at last, forced back his
shoulders, and walked slowly towards the door. He turned
the key in the lock, and stood listening a moment before
picking up a hand-mirror from among the multifarious
books and papers on the table. Returning to the window,
he peered at the reflection of his own face, furtively, as
though dreading what he might discover. The sallow
skin was blemishless as yet. Not a spot or blur showed
from the line of the hair to the clean curve of the wellshaven chin.
In another minute Parker Steel was turning over the
leaves of his journal with impetuous fingers. He worked
back page by page, running a finger down each column of
names, stopping ever and again to recollect and reconsider. It was on a page dated “February I2th” that he
discovered an entry that gave him the final pause.
“Mrs. Rattan, 10 Ford Street. Partus, 5 A.M.”
A foot-note had been added at the bottom of the page,
a foot-note whose details were significant to the point of
proof.
Parker Steel threw the book upon the table.
“Good Lord!”
He looked round him like a man who has taken poison
unwittingly, and whose brain refuses to act under the
paralyzing pressure of fear. He, Parker Steel, a !
Physician and egoist that he was, he could not bring himself to think the word, to brand himself with the poor
fools who crowd the hospitals of great cities. The very
vision, a hundred visions such as he had seen in the
dingy “out-patient rooms” of old, made the instinct of
cleanliness in him sicken and recoil. For Parker Steel
had much of the delicate niceness of a cat. This sense
of unutterable pollution struck at his vanity and his selfrespect.
He moved close to the window, and stood staring over
the wire blind into the garden.
Was it not possible that he might be mistaken? He
could consult an expert. And yet in the inmost corners
of his heart he knew that the truth was merciless towards
him.
What then?
The question threw him into a more desperate dilemma.
He remembered his wife.
Again, his profession? He would have to abandon it
for one year, perhaps for two. And Parker Steel knew
that success in professional life is largely a matter of personality. Withdraw that individual power, and the whole
structure, like the city of an Eastern fable, may melt
abruptly into mist.
Baffled and irritated, a man with no great moral hold
on the deeper truths of life, he moved aimlessly about the
room, holding his right hand a little from him like one
with bleeding fingers, who fears the blood may stain
his clothes. The leather-padded consulting-chair stood
empty before the table. Parker Steel dropped into it by
the casual chance of habit, and sat staring dully at the
patterning of the paper on the wall.
It was the ordeal of an egoist unlightened by a signal
sense of self-abnegation or of public duty. Mercenary
motives and professional ambition prompted a compromise at any hazard. The temptation to procrastinate
is ever with us, and the man of the polite world is the
most ingenious of sophists. For more than half an hour
Parker Steel sat silent and almost motionless in his chair.
When he at last left it, it was with the air of a man to
whom sanity, the sanity of the self-centred ego, had returned after the hideous doubt and discord of a dream.
The wisest course was for him to temporize, seeing
that it was possible that he might be mistaken.
He recognized no immediate need for trusting any one
with mere suspicions.
Was he not a physician, and therefore wise as to all
precautions?
As for his wife? That was a problem that might have
to be considered.
The sound of the front door closing roused him to the
needs of
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