a green baize door and seen a fat common little man with smooth sly eyes standing waiting for her in a dark stuffy room smelling of creosote? Even if she had always been to good ones they were not Mr. Hancock. They were dentists. Cheerful ordinary men with ordinary voices and laughs, thinking about all manner of things. Or apparently bland, with ingratiating manners. Perhaps a few of them, some of his friends and some of the young men he had trained were something like him. Interested in dentistry and the way it was all developing, some of them more enthusiastic and interested in certain special things than he was. But no one could be quite like him. No other patients had the lot of his patients. No other dentist was so completely conscious of the patient all the time, as if he were in the chair himself. No other dentist went on year after year remaining sensitive to everything the patient had to endure. No one else was so unsparing of himself … children coming eagerly in for their dentistry, sitting in the chair with slack limbs and wide open mouths and tranquil eyes … small bodies braced and tense, fat hands splayed out tightly on the too-big arms of the chair in determination to bear the moment of pain bravely for him. … She wandered to the corner cupboard and opened it and gazed idly in. But none of them knew what it cost. … “I think you won’t have any more pain with that; I’ll just put in a dressing for the present”—she was Lady Cazalet again, without toothache, and that awful feeling that you know your body won’t last … they did not know what it cost. What always doing the best for the patient meant. Perhaps they knew in a way; or knew something and did not know what it was … there would be something different in Mr. Hancock’s expression, especially in the three quarters view when his face was turned away towards the instrument cabinet, if he saved his nerves and energy and money by doing things less considerately, not perpetually having the instruments sharpened and perpetually buying fresh outfits of sharp burs. The patient would suffer more pain … a dentist at his best ought to be more delicately strong and fine than a doctor … like a fine engraving … a surgeon working amongst live nerves … and he would look different himself. It was in him. It was keeping to that, all day, and every day, choosing the best difficult tiresome way in everything that kept that radiance about him when he was quietly at work … I mustn’t stay here thinking these thoughts … it’s that evil thing in me, keeping on and on, always thinking thoughts, nothing getting done … going through life like—a stuck pig. If I went straight on things would come like that just the same in flashes—bang, bang, in your heart, everything breaking into light just in front of you, making you almost fall off the edge into the expanse coming up before you, flowers and light stretching out. Then you shut it down, letting it go through you with a leap that carries you to the moon—the sun, and makes you bump with life like the little boy bursting out of his too small clothes and go on choking with song to do the next thing deftly. That’s right. Perhaps that is what they all do? Perhaps that’s why they won’t stop to remember. Do you realise? Do you realise you’re in Brussels? Just look at the white houses there with the bright green trees against them in the light. It’s the air, the clearness. Sh—If they hear you, they’ll put up the rent. They were just Portsmouth and Gosport people, staying in Brussels and fussing about Portsmouth and Gosport and Aunt this and Mr. that. … I shan’t realise Brussels and Belgium for years because of that. They hated and killed me because I was like that. … I must be like that … something comes along, golden, and presently there is a thought. I can’t be easy till I’ve said it in my mind, and I’m sad till I have said it somehow … and sadder when I have said it. But nothing gets done. I must stop thinking, from now, and be fearfully efficient. Then people will understand and like me. They will hate me too, because I shall be absurd, I shan’t be really in it. Perhaps I shall. Perhaps I shall get in. The wonder is they don’t hate me more. There was a stirring in the chair and a gushing of fresh water into the tumbler. Why do I meet such nice people? One after another. “There,” said Mr. Hancock, “I don’t think that will trouble you any more. We will make another appointment.” Miriam took the appointment book and a card to the chair-side and stayed upstairs to clear up.
When she reached the hall Mr. Orly’s door was standing wide. Going into the surgery she found the head parlourmaid rapidly wiping instruments with a soiled serviette. “Is it all right, James?” she said vaguely, glancing round the room.
“Yes miss,” answered James briskly emptying the half-filled tumbler and going on to dry and polish it with the soiled serviette … the housemaid spirit … the dry corner of a used serviette probably appeared to James much too good to wipe anything with. Telling her would not be any good. She would think it waste of time. … Besides, Mr. Orly himself would not really mind; and the things were “mechanikly clean” … that was a good phrase of Mr. Leyton’s … with his own things always soaking even his mallets, until there was no polish left on the handles; and his nailbrush in a bath of alcohol. … Mr. Orly came in, large and spruce. He looked at his hands and began combing his beard, standing before the overmantel. “Hancock busy?”
“Frightfully busy.”
Miriam looked judicially round the room. James hovered. The north wind howled. The little strip of sky above the
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