The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

II

In all that summer Edwin scarcely saw a patch of living green except the leprous plane-trees that sickened in the hospital square. The current of his life flowed slowly through the culverts of grimy brick that led from Lower Sparkdale to the Infirmary. He became part of the stream of dusty humanity that set citywards and back again with the regularity of a tide. In December he came to the end of his penance. The final examination was fixed for the beginning of January, and before he could sit for it, he was compelled to take a course of practical midwifery, twenty cases in all, which compelled his residence for a couple of weeks in the neighbourhood of the Prince’s Hospital, the institution to which this department was attached. Matthew Boyce and he had decided a year before that they would do this work together, and though the unusual strain of the fortnight in Easy Row would be a doubtful preliminary to the effort of the final examination, the two friends had always looked forward to the experience.

The authorities of the Prince’s Hospital, lacking obstetrical wards, had made this course the opportunity for establishing an Out-patient Department that could deal with ten cases a week at the nominal charge of five shillings each. The students worked in pairs, and though they could never be sure of attending their cases together, the resident staff of the hospital, and, if necessary, a consultant physician, were always available in case of an emergency. Edwin and Boyce were housed in one of the faded Georgian buildings that faced the hospital. Its lower stories, like those of all its neighbours, were devoted to theatrical lodgings; but a special night-bell, polished by the moist hands of forty anxious husbands every month, communicated with the upper room in which the resident students attempted to sleep. The house was as well known to all the poorer people in the neighbouring warrens as were the faces pale with sleeplessness of the students who issued from it, carrying the black bags that were symbolical of their labours, a source of mysterious speculation to the children of the district, and of amusement to the “professionals” who inhabited the front rooms.

On a Monday morning in December the landlady received Edwin and Boyce and installed them in a small room at the back of the ground-floor infested with portraits of smiling young ladies in tights, inscribed, with the most dashing signatures imaginable, to herself. Mrs. Meadows was evidently very proud of these decorations and called attention to the most blatant pair of legs by polishing the glass of their frame with her apron.

“I hope you gentlemen will be comfortable,” she said. “Not that I doubt it. I don’t have many complaints.” The statement was a challenge, and implied that if there should be any complaints the lodgers might look to themselves.

“It’s a nice fresh room,” she said, throwing open a French window that disclosed a small patch of black earth that had once been covered with grass but was now untenanted by any living organisms but cats and groundsel.

“I like them to keep the window open. It takes away the smell of the gentlemen’s disinfectant. Not but what it’s clean, I dare say.”

Edwin and Boyce would have assented in any case if it were only to release the composite lodging-house smell that penetrated the room from the adjoining “domestic offices,” and Mrs. Meadows’s kitchen where, it would be imagined, turnip-tops simmered day and night upon a gas-ring.

“Then there’s a pianoforte,” she said, hesitating at the dusty portiere. “I find that professionals like a pianoforte. It’s cheery like.”

In a little while it became apparent that the professionals liked a pianoforte, in every one of the thirty odd houses within earshot, even if they could not play one. From the hour of midday, when they rose, until six o’clock, when they betook themselves to their various theatres, the pianos of Easy Row were never silent.