The crowd poured into an immense, well-heated room paved with white flag-stones and painted white. The light beat down hard through a row of bay-windows. At the far end presided a handsome old man in a white smock, an immaculate nurse at his side. "The doctor!" whispered the women in a tone of awed hostility. The man did indeed seem indifferent and just as God should be.
Spread out symmetrically on the bare table in front of him among other instruments was a complete apparatus of justice, bright and glittering—a set of scales with a basket and a row of copper weights drawing clamorous notes from the straggling music of the sunshine.
With remarkable dexterity the women undid the swaddling-clothes, turning, tucking up, unwrapping. The blonde swelled out her bosom as she stuck it full of pins; the ogress held her pins between her teeth. A suffocating odor of warm wool, sour milk, perspiration, and stale flesh arose amid the cries.
The line began to move. One after the other they went up tendering their children like poor plucked bruised flowers, with the idolatrous, skulking faith of believers approaching God.
From my bench, my heart frightfully wrung, I saw each showing me what I might make of my child ... a baby with its neck seamed with a reddish crack ... a baby with tiny, tiny limbs beneath an abdomen swelling like a bagpipe ... a baby whose ribs striped its body like a zebra's hide ... a baby with a back all covered with boils....
"He has green movements." "He has a swollen stomach." "He has ringworm." "He coughs." And the same slack answers to the doctor's questions: "I don't know.—I don't know.—I don't know."
The man cast his sovereign glance over the printed form held out to him, handled the little body, remained impassive while pronouncing his rapid decision, and took up the next case.
Among the lethargic flock who went away with bowed heads, some, to rally their spirits, mumbled the flesh of their babies with fierce kisses as if to take revenge and show that this man after all had done them harm....
I got up, dragging my double weight.