The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Listen to ’er,” said the midwife, chuckling. “That’s the way to take it!”

“Well, it’s all right, you know, but it won’t be just yet awhile.”

“My God . . . I didn’t pay the ’ospital five bob for you to tell me that. Look ’ere, doctor, my elder sister ’ad a horrible time with her first. ’Ad to ’ave it took off ’er. Be a sport, doctor, and give us a smell of chloroform. Come on, now! There’s two on you. . . . ’Ard-’earted devils all you doctors are. Bain’t they, Mrs. Perkins?” She smiled at the midwife, and then, suddenly, her face changed and she clutched at the knotted towel. “Oh, my!” she said, and Edwin saw the veins in her neck swell, and heard her clench her teeth.

“That’s the way, dearie. That’s the way,” said Mrs. Perkins, gritting her own teeth in sympathy and smoothing back the hair from the patient’s brow.

Edwin and Boyce were debating as to whether it were worth while staying when a messenger from the hospital arrived from below to say that Mrs. Hadley, Boyce’s patient of the afternoon, was “took worse,” and so Edwin was left alone once more in the squalor of the patient’s room. He sat waiting in a chair that was supposed to be easy, listening to the conversation of the woman and her nurse. Most of it was family history of a scandalous kind, and the manner of its expression was extremely frank. In the course of his hospital work he had never before realised the extraordinary contradictions of the code by which the talk of the working-class is governed. In its mixture of delicacies and blatancies it amazed him. Both the women were fluent gossips, and the conversation never ceased, except in those moments of acute and sudden tension when the patient’s hands clutched at her towel and the midwife mopped her brow. Then, when the upstairs room was silent, a murmur of laughter and loud voices would come up the stairs from below. In this family, at any rate, the occasion of a birth did not lack celebration. Even the patient was curious about what was happening downstairs. “What’s our Susan doing?” she said from time to time.

An interminable business. As the night wore on it grew very chilly, and Edwin shivered in his chair. The case hung fire unaccountably, and in this, the first of many such cold vigils, he fell into a strange mood, often to be repeated, in which the sublime influences of night and solitude combined to purge his reflections of pettiness and showed him what an unimaginable mystery his own life was. The patient fell into an uneasy doze. The midwife nodded in her chair, snatching up her head with a conscious jerk whenever it lolled over her fat bosom. The smelly oil-lamp on the mantelpiece gave an occasional sputter when a drop of water was sucked up into the wick. In the room below the excited talk had petered out and only a sound of soft snoring was heard, like the breathing of cows in a byre.

Edwin thought of many things. It seemed to him that his mind burned clear as frosty starlight lighting forgotten memories of his childhood. He thought of his own mother. He wondered if she had lain like the woman on the bed on the night when he was born. He wondered if it had been in the least like this, and whether another doctor, whose name he did not even know, had sat by the fireplace in the little room at Halesby waiting and seeing his own life stretched out before him in this light of perilous clarity. He thought of St. Luke’s—of a thousand small things that had lain submerged for years and now appeared unbidden. The strangeness of his own experience, the elements of linked circumstance that had combined to twist his life into its present state and make him what he was. He thought of his father, with an unusual degree of charity, realising that this man too was no more than a slave of the same blind influences driven hither and thither in spite of his innate goodwill. Edwin was ashamed to think that he had been angry with him. In his present mood it seemed to him an unreasonable thing that one should be angry with any human creature. Pity . . . yes, and love—but never anger. So, like a devotee in a Tibetan lamasery, he saw his fellow creatures, his father, himself, the midwife, and the woman on the bed, bound helpless to the revolving wheel which is the earth. And the earth seemed very small beneath the stars. . . .

At two o’clock in the morning the handsome girl from downstairs, who was the patient’s sister, came softly into the room and asked the midwife if she would like a cup of tea. The patient blinked at het with red eyes.

“How is it going, Sally?” said the sister.

“Oh, it’s all right. I suppose it’s got to be worse before it’s better,” she said, with a laugh. “Ask the doctor if he’ll have some tea too.”