"Get out of here!" he was shouting, roughly. "All of you but the child's mother and Mrs. Atkins. Haven't I told you it is dangerous? Do you want to spread this thing about and kill off all your children? And you, Mrs. Barnett, must give the example. I won't have you running chances with those babies of yours. Do get out, like a dear woman, and chevy these other ones out with you."
He was bustling them all out like a lot of hens, in his effective, energetic way, and then he saw me.
"I want you to get out too, Miss Jelliffe," he ordered me. "This is a bad case of diphtheria. The child is choking and I must relieve it at once."
I took a few steps back, rather resentfully, because I had never been spoken to in that way before, and I thought it very rude of him, but I did not leave the place. The doctor was very busy with some instruments and perhaps had forgotten my presence.
He made the woman sit on a stool, with the little girl wrapped in a sheet and sitting on her lap. I saw him take up a shiny instrument, which he fastened in the baby's mouth, notwithstanding her struggles.
"Now hold her firmly," he ordered, "and you, Mrs. Atkins, get behind her and take her head. Hold it steady, just this way. Never mind her crying."
But the little one wrenched herself away from the woman's grasp. The breath entered its lungs with an awful long hoarse sound and the poor little lips were very blue.
"For God's sake, hold her better," he cried again.
"I'm all of a tremble," said Mrs. Atkins, weeping. "She's sure goin' ter die. I kin never hold her, she do be fightin' me so."
Of course there was only one thing to do. I ran out of the corner to which I had retreated and pushed the foolish woman away and seized the baby's head so that it could not move.