“You were leaving your patient, Elsie,” said the doctor, in a prim, impartial voice, expressing neither disapproval nor approval nor anything, but just holding up the mere fact for her consideration.
She explained.
“He’s worse, of course,” the doctor remarked, his tone not asking for confirmation—almost forbidding it.
He was impenetrable; or, as Elsie thought: “You couldn’t make anything out of him.” He might be tired; he might not be tired. He might have been roused from his bed at 2 a.m.; he might have slept excellently in perfect tranquillity. You didn’t know; you never would know. The secrets of the night were locked up in that trimly dressed bosom. He was the doctor, exclusively. But one thing showed him human; he had once again disturbed the sequence of his daily programme in order to visit T. T. Riceyman’s.
They passed through the shop, on whose floor more letters were lying. At the door of Mr. Earlforward’s bedroom, the doctor paused and murmured:
“I’d better hear what you’ve got to say before I go in.”
She took him to the dining room, where he sat down on a dusty chair. To Elsie’s mind the dining room was in a disgraceful state, and indeed, though the shop and office had not yet seriously deteriorated from last night’s terrific cleansing, the only presentable rooms in the house were the two bedrooms. All the rest was as neglected and forlorn as a pet animal forgotten in the stress of a great and prolonged crisis. Elsie, standing, gave her report, which the doctor received like a magistrate. She wanted to ask about Mrs. Earlforward, but it was not proper for her to ask questions. Nor could she frame any formula of words in which to broach to the steely little doctor the immense fact of Joe’s presence in the building.
“Been to bed?” he inquired coldly.
“Oh no, sir!”
“Had any sleep?”
“Oh no, sir!”
“Not for two nights, eh?”
“No, sir—well, nothing to mention.”
When at length they passed into the bedroom, Elsie was shocked at the condition of the sickbed. She had left it unimpeachably smooth, tidy and rectangular; it was now tossed and deranged into a horrible confusion, as though it had not been made for days, as though for days the patient had been carrying on in it a continuous battle with some powerful enemy. And in the midst of it lay Mr. Earlforward (whom also she had just “put to rights,” and who after her tending had somehow not seemed to be very ill), unkempt, hot, wild-eyed, parchment-skinned, emaciated, desiccated, creased, anxious, at bay, nearly desperate, mumbling to himself. Yet the moment he caught sight of the doctor he altered his demeanour, becoming calm, still, and even a little sprightly. The change was pathetic in its failure to deceive; and it was also heroic.
“Well, my friend,” the doctor greeted him, staccato, with his characteristic faint, nervous snigger at the end of a phrase.
“You’re here very early, doctor,” said Mr. Earlforward composedly. “At least it seems to me early.” He did not know the time; nor Elsie either; not a timepiece in the house was going, and the church-clock bell was too familiar to be noticed unless listened for.
“Thought you might like to know something about your wife,” said Dr. Raste, raising his voice. He made no reference at all to Henry’s exasperating refusal to go to the hospital on the previous day. “They tell me at the hospital that a fibroid growth is her trouble. I suspected it.”
“Where?”
“Matrix.” The doctor glanced at Elsie as if to say: “You don’t know what that word means.” She didn’t, but she divined well enough Mrs. Earlforward’s trouble. “Change of life. No children,” the doctor went on tersely, and nodded several times. Mr. Earlforward merely gazed at him with his little burning eyes. “There’ll be an operation this morning. Hope it’ll be all right. It ought to be. An otherwise healthy subject. Yes. Hold this in your mouth, will you?”
He inserted a clinical thermometer between Mr. Earlforward’s white, crinkled lips, took hold of the patient’s wrist and pulled out his watch.
“Appears you can’t retain your food,” he said, after he had put the watch back. “Comes up exactly as it goes down. Mechanical. You’re very strong.” He withdrew the thermometer, held it up to the light, washed it, restored it to its case. “Well, we know what’s the matter with your wife, but I shouldn’t like to say what’s the matter with you—yet. I’m not a specialist.” He uttered the phrase with a peculiar intonation, not entirely condemning specialists, but putting them in their place, regarding them very critically and rather condescendingly, as befitting one whose field of work and knowledge was the whole boundless realm of human pathology. “You’ll have to be put under observation, watched for a bit, and X-rayed. You can’t possibly be nursed properly here, though I’m sure Elsie’s doing her best. And there’s another great advantage of your being in hospital. You’ll know how Mrs. Earlforward’s going on. You can’t expect ’em to be sending up here every ten minutes to tell you. Nor telegraph either. Something else to do, hospitals have!” Another faint snigger. “If you’ll come now, I mean in half an hour or so, I’ve arranged to get you there in comfort. It’s all fixed.” (He did not say how.) “I hear you can walk about, and you made your bed yesterday. Now, Elsie, you must—”
“I won’t go to the hospital,” Mr. Earlforward coldly interrupted him. “I don’t mind having a private nurse here. But I won’t go to the hospital.”
The doctor laughed easily.
“Oh, but you must! And
