To the south of this wilderness of brick and stone rose the chimneys and cage wheels of the Wilton collieries. Here the sketch had been worked in charcoal, black wharves beside a black canal, hillocks of coal, black smoke, black faces. The whirr of wheels, the grinding of shovels, the banging of trucks being shunted to and fro along the sidings. The eternal spinning of the cage wheels, the panting and screaming of engines, the toil and travail of a civilization that disembowels the very earth.
In Wilton High Street, where electric trams sounded their gongs all day, and cheap shops ogled the cheap crowd, there was a broad window that had been colored red and topped by a line of gold some eight feet above the pavement. On this sanguinary window ran an inscription in big, black letters:
Dr. Tugler, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
Consulting hours, 8 to 10 and 6 to 9
Consultations one shilling. Medicines included.
Those be-shawled ladies who carried their rickety infants into Dr. Tugler’s shop, might find the doctor and one of his two professional assistants seated in the two cheap, cane-bottomed arm-chairs before two baize-topped tables. There were wooden benches round the room, a glass-fronted cabinet in one corner, medical almanacs on the walls, a placard over the mantel-piece instructing patients “To bring their own bottles.” An inner door with ground glass panels led to a dingy surgery, a white sink in one corner, and a dresser littered with instrument cases, packages of lint, reels of plaster, and boxes of bandages. A third door opened from the surgery into the dispensary, a veritable bower of bottles, lit by a skylight, a ledger desk under the gas-jet in one corner, medicine glasses standing on the sloppy drug-stained dresser, a spirituous reek filling the little room. Oil-cloth, worn patternless, covered all the floors. The gas-jet in the surgery flared perpetually through all the winter months, for the sky-light was too small and dirty to gather much light from the December skies.
It was Saturday night at Wilton, and hucksters were shouting up their wares in High Street, despite the fine and almost impalpable rain that wrapped everything in a dismal mist. The gongs of the tram-cars clanged impatiently past Dr. Tugler’s surgery, where a row of stalls ranged beside the pavement gathered a crowd of marketers under their naphtha lamps. Trade had been busy behind the red window that Saturday evening. Piles of shillings and sixpences lay in the drawer of Dr. Tugler’s consulting-table, small change left by anæmic, work-worn women, who needed food and rest more than Dr. Tugler’s cheap and not very effectual mixtures. The room had been full of the bronchitic coughing of old men, the whining of children, the scent of wet, warm, dirty clothes.
The front room had emptied itself at last, an old woman with a cancerous lip being the last to go. Dr. Tugler was sitting at the table nearest to the red window, counting up the miscellaneous and greasy pile of small coins, and packing them pound by pound into a black hand-bag that lay across his knees. He was a vulgar little man with a cheerful, blustering manner, and a kind of plump and smiling self-assurance that was never at a loss for the most dogmatic of opinions.
Among the Wilton colliery folk he was known distinctively as “the doctor.” A man of finer fibre might have been wasted amid such surroundings. Dr. Tugler, florid, bumptious, ever ready with a semi-decent joke, and boasting an aggressive yet generous aplomb, contrived to impress his uncultured clients with a sense of sufficiency and of rough-and-ready power. But for his frock-coat, and for the binoral stethoscope that dangled from the top button of his fancy waistcoat, he might have been taken for a prosperous publican, a bookmaker, or a butcher.
Dr. Tugler swept the remaining small change into his bag, locked it, and jumped up with the air of a man eminently satisfied with the day’s trade. The assistant at the other table was pencilling a few notes into a pocket-book, and humming the tune of a popular, music-hall song. The surgery door opened as Dr. Tugler deposited the black bag on the mantel-shelf, and a swarthy collier, with one hand bandaged, came slouching out, swinging an old cap.