A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗

CHAPTER XXVI

JAMES MURCHISON, walking along the pavement of Wilton High Street with the sharp, savage

strides of a man tortured by his own thoughts, turned

into Dr. Tugler’s surgery as the clock struck eight, finding in this stern routine a power to steady him against

despair. He slipped off his overcoat, folded it slowly

and methodically over the back of a bench, and hung his

hat on one of the gas brackets projecting from the wall.

To John Tugler, who was seated at one of the tables,

examining a girl with a red rash covering her face, there

was something in the big man’s slow and restrained

patience that betrayed how sorrow was shadowing his

assistant’s home.

 

John Tugler pushed back his chair, and crossed the

room to the corner where Murchison was bending over

his open instrument bag. The droop of the shoulders,

the whole pose of the powerful figure, told of the burden

that lay heavy upon the father’s heart.

 

“Murchison.”

 

The face that met John Tugler’s was haggard and

stupid with two sleepless nights.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Any news?”

 

“Oh worse,” and he snapped the bag to with an

irritable closure of the hands.

 

John Tugler looked at him as he might have looked

at a refractory friend.

 

“Come now, Murchison, you’re feeling damned bad.

Knock off to-day. Stileman and I can manage.”

 

“Thanks. I must work.”

 

“Must, eh?”

 

“It helps.”

 

“Like punching something when you’re savage. Perhaps you’re right.”

 

Tugler returned to the girl with the red rash, while

Murchison passed on to the surgery, where some halfscore patients were waiting to be treated.

 

“Goodmorning,” and he glanced round him like a

man in a hurry; “first case. Well, how’s the leg?”

 

A scraggy, undersized individual with a narrow, swarthy

face was pulling up a trousers leg with two dirty, drugstained hands. He was a worker in a chemical factory,

and his ugly, harsh, and suspicious features seemed to

have taken the low moral stamp of the place.

 

“No worse, doct’r.”

 

“No worse! Well, have you been resting?”

 

“Half an’ half.”

 

“I suppose so. You may as well come here and grumble for months unless you do what we tell you. It is

quite useless continuing like this.”

 

He bent down and began to unwind the dirty bandage

from the man’s leg. The chemical worker expanded

the broad nostrils of his carnivorous nose, sniffed,

and cocked a battered bowler onto the back of his

head. Manners were not mended in Dr. Tugler’s surgery.

 

“God’s truth, doct’r, easy with it—”

 

Murchison had stripped a sodden pad of lint and

plaster from the ulcer on the man’s leg.

 

“Nonsense; that didn’t hurt you.”

 

“Beg to differ, sir.”

 

“When did you dress this last?”

 

The patient hesitated, eying Murchison sulkily as

though tempted to be insolent.

 

“Yesterday.”

 

“Speak the truth and say three days ago. You’re on

your ‘club* of course.”

 

“Well, what’s the harm?”

 

“And you don’t trouble much how long you draw clubmoney, eh?”

 

“That’s your business, I reckon.”

 

“My business, is it? Well, my friend, you carry out

my instructions or there will be trouble about the certificate. You understand?”

 

The man cast an evil look at Murchison’s broad back

as he turned to spread boracic ointment on clean lint.

 

“I don’t know as how I come here to hear your sauce,”

he remarked, curtly.

 

Murchison faced him with an irritable glitter of the

eyes.

 

“What do you mean!”

 

“I suppose some of us poor fellows cost you gentlemen

too much in tow and flannel.”

 

“There you are just a little at sea, my friend. What

we do is to prevent the Friendly Societies being imposed

upon by loafers. Dress your leg every day. Rest it,

you understand, and keep out of the pubs. You had

better come by some manners before next week.”

 

The chemical worker snarled out some vague retort,

and then relapsed into silence. Such shufflers had no

pity from James Murchison. He was in no mood that

morning to bear with the impertinences of malingerers

and humbugs.

 

The clock struck eleven before the last patient passed

out into Wilton High Street with its thundering drays

and clanging trams. Murchison had done the work of

two men in the surgery that morning, silent, skilful, and

determined, a man who worked that the savage smart of

sorrow might be soothed and assuaged thereby. With

the women and the children he was very gentle and very

patient. His hands were never rough and never clumsy.

Perhaps none of the people whose wounds he dressed

guessed how bitter a wound was bleeding in the heart of

this sad-eyed, patient-faced man.

 

John Tugler sidled in when Murchison had pinned up

the last bandage. He swung the door to gently, sighed,

and pretended to examine the entries in the ledger. Murchison was washing his hands at the sink, staring hard at

the water as it splashed from the tap upon his fingers.

 

“Not much visiting to-day.”

 

“No.”

 

“I’ll hire a cab, and drive down to Black End. Most

of them seem to lie that way.”

 

Murchison was looking for a clean place in the rollertowel.

 

“I can manage the visiting down there,” he said.

 

John Tugler surveyed him attentively over a fat shoulder.

 

“You’ll knock up, old man,” he remarked, quietly.

 

Murchison started. The familiarity had a touch of

tenderness that lifted it from its vulgar setting.

 

“Thanks, no.”

 

“Very bad, is she?”

 

“Comatose.”

 

“Oh, damn!”

 

The little man whipped over the leaves of the ledger,

as though looking for something that he could not find.

 

“It seems a beastly shame,” he said, presently.

 

“Shame?”

 

“Yes, this sort of smash-up of a youngster’s life. They

call it Providence, or the Divine Will, or something of

that sort, don’t they? Must say I can’t stick that sort

of bosh.”

 

Murchison was wringing his hands fiercely in the folds

of the rough towel.

 

“It is a natural judgment, I suppose,” he said.

 

“A judgment?”

 

“It was my fault that the child ever came here. It

need not have been so ” and he broke off with a savage

twisting of the mouth.

 

John Tugler ran one finger slowly across a blank space

in the ledger.

 

“Don’t take it that way,” he said, slowly; “it doesn’t

help a man to curse himself because a damned bug of a

bacillus breeds in this holy horror of a town. Curse the

British Constitution, the law-mongers, or the local money

shufflers who’d rather save three farthings than clean

their slums.”

 

James Murchison was silent. Yet in his heart there

burned the fierce conviction that the father’s frailty had

been visited upon the innocent body of the child.

 

Four o’clock had struck, and the houses were casting

long shadows across the waters of the canal, before Murchison turned in at the gate of Clovelly after three

hours visiting in the Wilton slums. He let himself in

silently with his latchkey, hung his hat and coat in the

hall, and entered the little front room where tea was laid

on the imitation walnut table. On the sofa by the window he found Catherine asleep, her head resting against

the wall. It was as though sheer weariness, the spell of

many sleepless nights, had fallen on her, and that but

a momentary slacking of her self-control had suffered

nature to assert her sway.

 

Murchison stood looking at his wife in silence. Sleep

had wiped out much of the sorrow from her face, and she

seemed beautiful as Beatrice dreaming strange dreams

upon the walls of heaven. A stray strand of March sunlight had woven itself into her hair. Her hands lay open

beside her on the sofa, open, palms upward, with a

quaint suggestion of trustfulness and appeal. To Murchison it seemed that if God but saw her thus, such

prayers as she had uttered would be answered out of pity

for the brave sweetness of her womanhood.

 

If peace lingered in sleep, there would be sorrow in her

waking. Murchison was loath to recall her to the world

of coarse reality and unpitying truth. A great tenderness, a strong man’s tenderness for a woman and a wife,

softened his face as he watched the quiet drawing of her

breath. And yet what ultimate kindness could there be

in such delay? Life and death are but the counterparts

of day and night.

 

Catherine awoke with a touch of her husband’s hand

upon her cheek. She sighed, put out her arms to him,

a consciousness of pain vivid at once upon her face.

 

“You here!”

 

She put her hands up to her forehead.

 

“I never meant to sleep. What a long day you must

have had!”

 

“It is better that I should work.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“How is she?”

 

“The same; I can see no change.”

 

Catherine rose with a suggestion of effort, and leaned

for a moment on her husband’s arm. The impulse seemed

simultaneous with them, the impulse that drew them to

the room above. They went up together, hand in hand,

silent and restrained, two souls awed by the mysteries of

death and life.

 

On the bed by the window lay Gwen, with childishly

open yet sightless eyes. A flush of vivid color showed on

either cheek, her golden hair falling aside like waves of

light about her forehead. Her breathing was tranquil

and feeble, and spaced out with a peculiar rhythm. The

pupils of the eyes were markedly unequal; one lid drooped

slightly, and the right angle of the red mouth was a little

drawn.

 

It is a certain pitiful semblance of health that mocks

the heart in many such cases.