You cannot expect a married woman to be very cheerful at the best of times, and when there is the place to tidy and the rent man expected, and the children will soon be coming home for their slabs and what not, and you have slipped out just for half a tick to get that dizzy feeling seen to, it is more than usually dull to be sat in a row with twenty other females, similarly cursed—some of them having babies at their breasts or little squalling things what hold fast to their skirts, and the place that stuffy and all, and a stink of iodine coming out of the doctor's room. Taking one consideration with another, it is not to be wondered at that the morning patients do not wear that air of curiosity and pleasure which a visit to the doctor should properly occasion.
The morning patients have an absent-minded look—a dull, foreboding look, as of people who are too busy really to enjoy themselves. Some of them, also, are accompanied by their button-holes or other objects of light and profitable home employment, at which they work with assiduity whilst waiting for the doctor's call. Others, upon the other hand, bring peppermint drops. One lady has brought some literature—the outward wrapper of an ancient issue of a paper called The Pilot. So there they loll, all silent, many of them yawning—out of rudeness, or boredom, or fatigue, or something, one supposes.
If you sit upon the gas-stove, you can watch them all as they come into the consulting-room. You can watch, for instance, the experienced matron, who enters with the baby that won't get well, and dumps it down, in a business-like manner, upon the doctor's table.
"There you are," she says in the manner of one who has successfully completed a conjuring trick, "look at that tongue. Did ever you see sich a thrush?"
"M'yes!" admits the doctor. "It's pretty bad. I'll give you a powder and some syrup."
"Powder? Syrup?" echoes the matron. "H'm! Pity you can't give 'im a corfin. That's the on'y treatment what'll give any peace to this pore little swine. What mercy, I say, is there in letting a thing like this live on? Look at it."
When, to your great relief, the experienced matron goes away, you will be very lucky if you do not wish her back again, for it is ten to one that she will be followed by an apprentice to the trade, a poor wild thing whose senseless, shiftless, screaming mother-agony will hurt you ever so much more than the grim philosophy of the veteran.
"It seems to grip 'im, Doctor," the apprentice will say, "and throw 'im down, pore lamb, an' wrestle with 'im, Doctor, same's there was a fish-bone in 'is little throat, and 'im so weak, 'e don't have strength enough to 'oller, and 'im so blue and mottled, Doctor, and strangled-looking in the face, and the powder, that ain't doin' 'im no good. The Irishwoman down below, she dreamt she seed 'im in a shroud, and, Doctor, I see meself as 'e gets thinner, and I believe me milk 'as got some poison in it, along of some oysters what I eat one Sunday, and so I see 'im gettin' thinner, Doctor, and there's the strangled look a-comin' now! Won't you give 'im somethink, Doctor? What did you say I was to take 'im to the breast for? I tell you my milk 'as got the microbes in it. Oh, Christ! what can a woman do? And Mine he comes 'ome late and stands and swears at me wiv no more feelin' than a 'og. Me gran'father Murphy's eyes 'e's got. There, then, sonny; there, then. What'll you do for 'im, Doctor? I seed a black cat on our winder-sill last night. My Gawd!—see 'ow it grips 'im!"
By the time you feel disposed to come back to the gas-stove again it will be seen that the apprentice mother has given place to a grandmamma, who has looked in, as a friend, to mention that much gossip is arising in consequence of the extreme youth of Dr. Brink's apothecary.
Far be it from her—Elizabeth Tebbings—to be one as would carry idle tales or utter idle plaint, but the fact remained and could be very solemnly attested by many honest witnesses from Mulberry Buildings that the medicine which she, Elizabeth Tebbings, had last Tuesday week received from the apothecary possessed a strange, unusual, and forbidding flavour—a nasty-nice sort of flavour which gave you shivers down your back.