“What about my friend, Mrs. Higgins?”
“Oh, damn Mrs. Higgins!” said Boyce.
It was a clear and frosty night, in which all points of light, whether of starshine, or street-lamps, or of blue sparks crackling from the tramway cables, shone brightly. The Greville Street husband lurched along beside them, just sufficiently awake to show them the way through a maze of rectangular byways to a street that lay upon the outer edge of the district that the hospital covered. The chill clarity of the air dispelled sleep. It was even pleasant to be walking there, for at this time of the night the town was so empty that they might almost have been walking over a country road.
“Here it is,” said the husband thickly.
Boyce and Edwin entered together. The front room of the house was crowded with people who should have been in bed. They sat clustered about a table on which stood a number of bottles from one of which the messenger had evidently extracted his peculiar perfume. In the corner chair, next to the window, an old woman in a lace cap had fallen asleep. Opposite her a very dirty old man toasted his shins in front of the fire. A strapping girl with dark, untidy hair, and an almost aggressive physical beauty was holding forth shrilly to a group of three women who had wandered in to drink and gossip from a neighbouring court.
“Here they are,” said the husband sullenly, “two on ’em.”
“My God! . . . Two of them? Is that all?” said the dark girl, examining and, as it seemed, approving.
Upstairs they found a midwife of another but equally characteristic type: a fat woman whose attention was divided between the patient in bed and the cheerful company in the front room. On the surface she was a little patronising, an attitude that the two students’ inexperience made it difficult for them to resent. “I know what you doctors want,” she said, standing with her sleeves rolled up over her red forearms. “Plenty of hot water, that’s what you want. I’ve got some disinfectant too. I’ve often been with the ’ospital doctors. Now we shan’t be long.”
She bustled downstairs, looking into the front room for a drink on her way to the kitchen. Boyce, confident in the completion of his first case, took the lead in questioning the patient, a slightly older version of the dark sanguine girl they had seen below. Her whole attitude towards the business, though less pathetic than that of the unforgotten Mrs. Higgins, was equally moving. It implied such a cheerful and courageous acceptance of life and this most uncomfortable of its experiences. Her amazing vitality pervaded the room. It could be seen in her masterful smile, in the grip of her red fingers on the knotted towel, in the deep suffusion of her face. A jolly woman, built in the mould of a fighter, who would neither take quarter nor give it. When Boyce had examined her she smiled, disclosing a fine set of teeth, and solemnly winked.
“Well, doctor, what about it?”