“Ugly little b—,” she said, with a happy laugh. “Looks as if ’e’d been on the booze.”
“I shan’t forget the way you ’elped me, doctor,” she said again, when Edwin left the house. Although it was still dark, the workmen’s trams had begun to run, and lights appeared in the lower windows of public houses where hot soup was on sale. When he entered the bedroom of their lodging, Edwin found, and envied, Boyce sleeping stertorously with the blankets pulled over his head and an overcoat on his feet. Three hours later, when the landlady came to call them, he woke, and explained to Edwin the excitements of his own night: how, in the middle of it, Edwin’s own Mrs. Higgins had called him out (“decent little woman,” said Boyce), and how, from sixteen Granby Street, he had been called to a case at the other end of the district in a common lodging-house kept by a Pole.
“No hot water . . . no soap . . . nothing but a bucket that they’d used for scrubbing the floors. Not even a bed! Just a straw mattress with a couple of grey blankets on it. Two other children and a man in the room. And crawling! I’ve stripped and had a rub down with a towel, but I feel as if they were all over me now. You couldn’t see them on the grey blankets, you know.”
“Sounds dismal. Had they a capable woman? My Mrs. Perkins wasn’t up to much.”
“Midwife? My dear chap, they didn’t run to luxuries like that. It is a bit thick, isn’t it? when a modern surgeon-accoucheur is reduced to washing the baby with his own soap. As a matter of fact, it was an extraordinarily interesting performance. The thing felt as if it would break. But seriously, you know, this sort of thing teaches you a bit about twentieth century housing.”
“Yes, it’s pretty bad,” said Edwin. “There’s one thing about it: working all night like this gives you a terrific appetite.”
III
For a few days the extreme novelty of their adventure sustained them, but after five nights of broken or obliterated sleep, the presence of the night-bell at their bedside stood for a symbol of perpetual unrest. Their days were spent in visiting patients whom they had attended. All examination work was made impossible by the fatigue that follows want of sleep, and the fact that they were committed to a kind of enforced idleness made their sojourn in Easy Row almost as much a holiday as the great summer days at Overton.
Both of them found that they could not even read for pleasure; and so the undisturbed hours of the day were passed in talk and in music. Mrs. Meadows’s piano had suffered under the fingers and thumbs of countless guests; but Edwin and Boyce shared the cost of a tuner and worked together through the Wagner scores and the subtler treasures that lay hidden in the songs of Hugo Wolf. They had few visitors, for this community of taste had already begun to isolate them from their student friends; but Boyce’s father, the poet, often came to have tea with them and to share their music, a man as versatile and sanguine as Meredith’s Roy Richmond, and yet so versed in every variety of knowledge and so reverent of beauty that Edwin felt there was no such company in the world: one who took all beauty and knowledge for his province.
One afternoon a message came to the house in Easy Row from the hospital, and as Mrs. Meadows was engaged in some obscure adjustment of her toilet, Edwin went to the door to receive it. He took the message, and was returning when another figure appeared on the path. It was that of a young girl of his own age, or, perhaps, a little older, and she hurried forward when she saw that he was closing the door. He waited.