Of Human Bondage (76 page)

  "Has he asked you to give me the message?" asked
Philip.

  "Oh, no. I'm saying this entirely on my own," said
Ramsden. "He's awfully sorry for what he did, and he says you
always behaved like a perfect brick to him. I know he'd be glad to
make it up. He doesn't come to the hospital because he's afraid of
meeting you, and he thinks you'd cut him."

  "I should."

  "It makes him feel rather wretched, you know."

  "I can bear the trifling inconvenience that he feels
with a good deal of fortitude," said Philip.

  "He'll do anything he can to make it up."

  "How childish and hysterical! Why should he care?
I'm a very insignificant person, and he can do very well without my
company. I'm not interested in him any more."

  Ramsden thought Philip hard and cold. He paused for
a moment or two, looking about him in a perplexed way.

  "Harry wishes to God he'd never had anything to do
with the woman."

  "Does he?" asked Philip.

  He spoke with an indifference which he was satisfied
with. No one could have guessed how violently his heart was
beating. He waited impatiently for Ramsden to go on.

  "I suppose you've quite got over it now, haven't
you?"

  "I?" said Philip. "Quite."

  Little by little he discovered the history of
Mildred's relations with Griffiths. He listened with a smile on his
lips, feigning an equanimity which quite deceived the dull-witted
boy who talked to him. The week-end she spent with Griffiths at
Oxford inflamed rather than extinguished her sudden passion; and
when Griffiths went home, with a feeling that was unexpected in her
she determined to stay in Oxford by herself for a couple of days,
because she had been so happy in it. She felt that nothing could
induce her to go back to Philip. He revolted her. Griffiths was
taken aback at the fire he had aroused, for he had found his two
days with her in the country somewhat tedious; and he had no desire
to turn an amusing episode into a tiresome affair. She made him
promise to write to her, and, being an honest, decent fellow, with
natural politeness and a desire to make himself pleasant to
everybody, when he got home he wrote her a long and charming
letter. She answered it with reams of passion, clumsy, for she had
no gift of expression, ill-written, and vulgar; the letter bored
him, and when it was followed next day by another, and the day
after by a third, he began to think her love no longer flattering
but alarming. He did not answer; and she bombarded him with
telegrams, asking him if he were ill and had received her letters;
she said his silence made her dreadfully anxious. He was forced to
write, but he sought to make his reply as casual as was possible
without being offensive: he begged her not to wire, since it was
difficult to explain telegrams to his mother, an old-fashioned
person for whom a telegram was still an event to excite tremor. She
answered by return of post that she must see him and announced her
intention to pawn things (she had the dressing-case which Philip
had given her as a wedding-present and could raise eight pounds on
that) in order to come up and stay at the market town four miles
from which was the village in which his father practised. This
frightened Griffiths; and he, this time, made use of the telegraph
wires to tell her that she must do nothing of the kind. He promised
to let her know the moment he came up to London, and, when he did,
found that she had already been asking for him at the hospital at
which he had an appointment. He did not like this, and, on seeing
her, told Mildred that she was not to come there on any pretext;
and now, after an absence of three weeks, he found that she bored
him quite decidedly; he wondered why he had ever troubled about
her, and made up his mind to break with her as soon as he could. He
was a person who dreaded quarrels, nor did he want to give pain;
but at the same time he had other things to do, and he was quite
determined not to let Mildred bother him. When he met her he was
pleasant, cheerful, amusing, affectionate; he invented convincing
excuses for the interval since last he had seen her; but he did
everything he could to avoid her. When she forced him to make
appointments he sent telegrams to her at the last moment to put
himself off; and his landlady (the first three months of his
appointment he was spending in rooms) had orders to say he was out
when Mildred called. She would waylay him in the street and,
knowing she had been waiting about for him to come out of the
hospital for a couple of hours, he would give her a few charming,
friendly words and bolt off with the excuse that he had a business
engagement. He grew very skilful in slipping out of the hospital
unseen. Once, when he went back to his lodgings at midnight, he saw
a woman standing at the area railings and suspecting who it was
went to beg a shake-down in Ramsden's rooms; next day the landlady
told him that Mildred had sat crying on the doorsteps for hours,
and she had been obliged to tell her at last that if she did not go
away she would send for a policeman.

  "I tell you, my boy," said Ramsden, "you're jolly
well out of it. Harry says that if he'd suspected for half a second
she was going to make such a blooming nuisance of herself he'd have
seen himself damned before he had anything to do with her."

  Philip thought of her sitting on that doorstep
through the long hours of the night. He saw her face as she looked
up dully at the landlady who sent her away.

  "I wonder what she's doing now."

  "Oh, she's got a job somewhere, thank God. That
keeps her busy all day."

  The last thing he heard, just before the end of the
summer session, was that Griffiths, urbanity had given way at
length under the exasperation of the constant persecution. He had
told Mildred that he was sick of being pestered, and she had better
take herself off and not bother him again.

  "It was the only thing he could do," said Ramsden.
"It was getting a bit too thick."

  "Is it all over then?" asked Philip.

  "Oh, he hasn't seen her for ten days. You know,
Harry's wonderful at dropping people. This is about the toughest
nut he's ever had to crack, but he's cracked it all right."

  Then Philip heard nothing more of her at all. She
vanished into the vast anonymous mass of the population of
London.

  At the beginning of the winter session Philip became
an out-patients' clerk. There were three assistant-physicians who
took out-patients, two days a week each, and Philip put his name
down for Dr. Tyrell. He was popular with the students, and there
was some competition to be his clerk. Dr. Tyrell was a tall, thin
man of thirty-five, with a very small head, red hair cut short, and
prominent blue eyes: his face was bright scarlet. He talked well in
a pleasant voice, was fond of a little joke, and treated the world
lightly. He was a successful man, with a large consulting practice
and a knighthood in prospect. From commerce with students and poor
people he had the patronising air, and from dealing always with the
sick he had the healthy man's jovial condescension, which some
consultants achieve as the professional manner. He made the patient
feel like a boy confronted by a jolly schoolmaster; his illness was
an absurd piece of naughtiness which amused rather than
irritated.

  The student was supposed to attend in the
out-patients' room every day, see cases, and pick up what
information he could; but on the days on which he clerked his
duties were a little more definite. At that time the out-patients'
department at St. Luke's consisted of three rooms, leading into one
another, and a large, dark waiting-room with massive pillars of
masonry and long benches. Here the patients waited after having
been given their `letters' at mid-day; and the long rows of them,
bottles and gallipots in hand, some tattered and dirty, others
decent enough, sitting in the dimness, men and women of all ages,
children, gave one an impression which was weird and horrible. They
suggested the grim drawings of Daumier. All the rooms were painted
alike, in salmon-colour with a high dado of maroon; and there was
in them an odour of disinfectants, mingling as the afternoon wore
on with the crude stench of humanity. The first room was the
largest and in the middle of it were a table and an office chair
for the physician; on each side of this were two smaller tables, a
little lower: at one of these sat the house-physician and at the
other the clerk who took the `book' for the day. This was a large
volume in which were written down the name, age, sex, profession,
of the patient and the diagnosis of his disease.

  At half past one the house-physician came in, rang
the bell, and told the porter to send in the old patients. There
were always a good many of these, and it was necessary to get
through as many of them as possible before Dr. Tyrell came at two.
The H.P. with whom Philip came in contact was a dapper little man,
excessively conscious of his importance: he treated the clerks with
condescension and patently resented the familiarity of older
students who had been his contemporaries and did not use him with
the respect he felt his present position demanded. He set about the
cases. A clerk helped him. The patients streamed in. The men came
first. Chronic bronchitis, "a nasty 'acking cough," was what they
chiefly suffered from; one went to the H.P. and the other to the
clerk, handing in their letters: if they were going on well the
words Rep 14 were written on them, and they went to the dispensary
with their bottles or gallipots in order to have medicine given
them for fourteen days more. Some old stagers held back so that
they might be seen by the physician himself, but they seldom
succeeded in this; and only three or four, whose condition seemed
to demand his attention, were kept.

  Dr. Tyrell came in with quick movements and a breezy
manner. He reminded one slightly of a clown leaping into the arena
of a circus with the cry: Here we are again. His air seemed to
indicate: What's all this nonsense about being ill? I'll soon put
that right. He took his seat, asked if there were any old patients
for him to see, rapidly passed them in review, looking at them with
shrewd eyes as he discussed their symptoms, cracked a joke (at
which all the clerks laughed heartily) with the H.P., who laughed
heartily too but with an air as if he thought it was rather
impudent for the clerks to laugh, remarked that it was a fine day
or a hot one, and rang the bell for the porter to show in the new
patients.

  They came in one by one and walked up to the table
at which sat Dr. Tyrell. They were old men and young men and
middle-aged men, mostly of the labouring class, dock labourers,
draymen, factory hands, barmen; but some, neatly dressed, were of a
station which was obviously superior, shop-assistants, clerks, and
the like. Dr. Tyrell looked at these with suspicion. Sometimes they
put on shabby clothes in order to pretend they were poor; but he
had a keen eye to prevent what he regarded as fraud and sometimes
refused to see people who, he thought, could well pay for medical
attendance. Women were the worst offenders and they managed the
thing more clumsily. They would wear a cloak and a skirt which were
almost in rags, and neglect to take the rings off their
fingers.

  "If you can afford to wear jewellery you can afford
a doctor. A hospital is a charitable institution," said Dr.
Tyrell.

  He handed back the letter and called for the next
case.

  "But I've got my letter."

  "I don't care a hang about your letter; you get out.
You've got no business to come and steal the time which is wanted
by the really poor."

  The patient retired sulkily, with an angry
scowl.

  "She'll probably write a letter to the papers on the
gross mismanagement of the London hospitals," said Dr. Tyrell, with
a smile, as he took the next paper and gave the patient one of his
shrewd glances.