A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping (ap literature book list .txt) 📖
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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of deepening shadows.
“Is Dr. Steel in, Symons?”
It was his wife’s voice, and Parker Steel slipped into
his coat and unlocked the door.
“Tea nearly ready, dear?”
“Parker, are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Any one with you?”
“No. I will be with you in a minute.”
He groped for a box of matches on the mantelshelf and
lit the gas. Turning, he was startled by the reflection of
his own white face staring at him mistrustfully from the
mirror over the fire. It was as though Parker Steel shirked the glance of his own eyes. He had a sense of unflattering discomfort and deceit as he walked to a glassfronted cabinet fitted with drawers that stood in one
corner of the room.
They were in the middle of tea when Betty Steel glanced
at her husband’s hand.
“Have you hurt yourself, Parker?”
“I?”
“Yes. Ah, the bathotic chilblain, of course! Has it
broken?”
Her husband felt afraid behind his mask of casual indifference.
“I must have rasped the skin and got some dirt into
the place,” he said. “A mere nothing. I have just put
on this finger-stall. So you have heard that the De la
Mottes are leaving, eh? They were not much good in
the town, so far as the practice was concerned?”
Parker Steel’s reply to his wife’s question had flashed
a suggestive gleam across his mind. Very probably it
was too late for him to defend her against himself. And
even if his fears proved true, he could swear absolute
ignorance as to the presence of the disease. No guilt
attached to him. He was merely striving to neutralize
the effects of a damnable and undeserved misfortune.
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.
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