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Riceyman Steps

<hr />[Pg 264] <h2>VI</h2> <h3>THE SECOND REFUSAL</h3> She was running up the Steps (not as early as she hoped, owing to a quick succession of requisitions from her two patients at the last moment) to find a messenger in the Square to dispatch for the doctor, when a sharp "Hai! Hai!" from behind caused her to turn. The summons came from Dr. Raste, who had appeared round the corner from King's Cross Road. Elsie ran back and unlocked the shop-door. The ink of her scrawled notice of closure to the public had been weeping freely in the weather of the last twenty-four hours. "You were leaving your patient, Elsie," said the doctor, in a prim, impartial voice, expressing neither disapproval nor approval nor anything, but just holding up the mere fact for her consideration. She explained. "He's worse, of course," the doctor remarked, his tone not asking for confirmation—almost forbidding it. He was impenetrable; or, as Elsie thought: "You couldn't make anything out of him." He might be tired; he might not be tired. He might have been roused from his bed at 2 A.M.; he might have slept excellently in perfect tranquillity. You didn't know; you never would know. The secrets of the night were locked up in that trimly dressed bosom. He was the doctor, exclusively. But one thing showed him human; he had once again disturbed the sequence of his daily programme in order to visit T. T. Riceyman's. They passed through the shop, on whose floor more letters were lying. At the door of Mr. Earlforward's bedroom, the doctor paused and murmured:[Pg 265] "I'd better hear what you've got to say before I go in." She took him to the dining-room, where he sat down on a dusty chair. To Elsie's mind the dining-room was in a disgraceful state, and indeed, though the shop and office had not yet seriously deteriorated from last night's terrific cleansing, the only presentable rooms in the house were the two bedrooms. All the rest was as neglected and forlorn as a pet animal forgotten in the stress of a great and prolonged crisis. Elsie, standing, gave her report, which the doctor received like a magistrate. She wanted to ask about Mrs. Earlforward, but it was not proper for her to ask questions. Nor could she frame any formula of words in which to broach to the steely little doctor the immense fact of Joe's presence in the building. "Been to bed?" he inquired coldly. "Oh no, sir!" "Had any sleep?" "Oh no, sir!" "Not for two nights, eh?" "No, sir—well, nothing to mention." When at length they passed into the bedroom, Elsie was shocked at the condition of the sick-bed. She had left it unimpeachably smooth, tidy and rectangular; it was now tossed and deranged into a horrible confusion, as though it had not been made for days, as though for days the patient had been carrying on in it a continuous battle with some powerful enemy. And in the midst of it lay Mr. Earlforward (whom also she had just "put to rights," and who after her tending had somehow not seemed to be very ill), unkempt, hot, wild-eyed, parchment-skinned, emaciated, desiccated, creased, anxious, at bay, nearly desperate, mumbling to himself. Yet the moment he caught sight of the doctor he altered his demeanour, becoming calm, still, and even a little sprightly. The change was pathetic in its failure to deceive; and it was also heroic.[Pg 266] "Well, my friend," the doctor greeted him, staccato, with his characteristic faint, nervous snigger at the end of a phrase. "You're here very early, doctor," said Mr. Earlforward composedly. "At least it seems to me early." He did not know the time; nor Elsie either; not a timepiece in the house was going, and the church-clock bell was too familiar to be noticed unless listened for. "Thought you might like to know something about your wife," said Dr. Raste, raising his voice. He made no reference at all to Henry's exasperating refusal to go to the hospital on the previous day. "They tell me at the hospital that a fibroid growth is her trouble. I suspected it." "Where?" "Matrix." The doctor glanced at Elsie as if to say: "You don't know what that word means." She didn't, but she divined well enough Mrs. Earlforward's trouble. "Change of life. No children," the doctor went on tersely, and nodded several times. Mr. Earlforward merely gazed at him with his little burning eyes. "There'll be an operation this morning. Hope it'll be all right. It ought to be. An otherwise healthy subject. Yes. Hold this in your mouth, will you?" He inserted a clinical thermometer between Mr. Earlforward's white, crinkled lips, took hold of the patient's wrist and pulled out his watch. "Appears you can't retain your food," he said, after he had put the watch back. "Comes up exactly as it goes down. Mechanical. You're very strong." He withdrew the thermometer, held it up to the light, washed it, restored it to its case. "Well, we know what's the matter with your wife, but I shouldn't like to say what's the matter with you—yet. I'm not a specialist." He uttered the phrase with a peculiar intonation, not entirely condemning specialists, but putting them in their place, regarding them very critically and rather condescendingly, as befitting one whose field of work and knowledge was the whole boundless realm of human pathology. "You'll[Pg 267] have to be put under observation, watched for a bit, and X-rayed. You can't possibly be nursed properly here, though I'm sure Elsie's doing her best. And there's another great advantage of your being in hospital. You'll know how Mrs. Earlforward's going on. You can't expect 'em to be sending up here every ten minutes to tell you. Nor telegraph either. Something else to do, hospitals have!" Another faint snigger. "If you'll come now, I mean in half an hour or so, I've arranged to get you there in comfort. It's all fixed." (He did not say how.) "I hear you can walk about, and you made your bed yesterday. Now, Elsie, you must——" "I won't go to the hospital," Mr. Earlforward coldly interrupted him. "I don't mind having a private nurse here. But I won't go to the hospital." The doctor laughed easily. "Oh, but you must! And one nurse wouldn't be enough. You'll need two. And even then it would be absolutely no good. You can't be X-rayed here, for instance. It's no use me telling you how ill you are, because you know as well as I do how ill you are." The battle was joined. Dr. Raste, in addition to being exasperated, had been piqued by the reports of his patient's singular obstinacy; he had now positively determined to get him into the hospital, and it was this resolve that had prompted him to give special attention to Mr. Earlforward's case, disorganizing all his general work in favour of it. He could not allow himself to be beaten by the inexplicable caprice of a patient who in all other respects had struck him as a man of more than ordinary sound sagacity, though of a somewhat miserly disposition; and the caprice was the more enigmatic in that to enter the hospital would be by far the cheapest way of treating the illness. Mr. Earlforward's obstinacy, on the other hand, was exasperated and strengthened by the disdainful reception given to his marvellous, his perfectly reckless suggestion about having a private nurse. These people were ridiculously concerned about his health. They had their own[Pg 268] ideas. He had his. He had offered an extremely generous compromise—a compromise which would cost him a pot of money—and it had not even been discussed; the wonder of it had in no way been recognized. Well, on the whole he was glad that the suggestion had not been approved. He withdrew it. He had only made it because he felt—doubtless in undue apprehension—that he was not yet beginning to progress towards recovery. He admitted to himself, for example, that whereas on the previous day he had been interested in his business, to-day his business was a matter of indifference to him. That, he knew, was not a good sign. But, then, to-morrow would certainly show some improvement. Indigestion—and he was suffering from nothing but acute indigestion—invariably did yield to a policy of starvation. As for hospitals, he had always had a horror of hospitals since once, in his insurance days, he had paid a visit to a fellow-clerk confined in a fever-ward. The vision of the huge, long, bare room, with its rows of beds and serried pain and distress, the draughts through the open windows, the rise and fall of the thunder of traffic outside, the semi-military bearing of the nurses, the wholesaleness of the affair, the absence of privacy, the complete subjection of the helpless patients, the inelasticity of regulations, the crushing of individuality: this dreadful vision had ineffaceably impressed itself on his imagination—the imagination of an extreme individualist with a passion for living his own life free of the obligation to justify it or explain it. He had recalled the vision hundreds of times—and never mentioned it to a soul. He did not intend to die of his illness; he knew that he would not die of it, but he convinced himself that he would prefer anything, even death, to incarceration in a great hospital. Were he wrenched by force out of his bed, he would kick and struggle to the very last, and his captors should be stricken with the fear of killing him while trying in their misguided zeal to save him. He read correctly the pertinacity in the doctor's face. But he had never encountered a pertinacity stronger than his own, and illness had[Pg 269] not weakened it, rather the reverse; his pertinacity had become morbid. "I don't think I'll go into a hospital, doctor," he said quietly, turning his face away. The words were mild, the resolution invincible. The doctor crossed over to look him in the face. Their eyes met in fierce hostility. The doctor was beaten. "Very well," said he, with bitter calm. "If you won't, you won't. There is nothing else for me to do here. I must ask you to be good enough to get another adviser. And"—he transfixed Elsie with a censorious gaze, as though Elsie was to blame—"and, please remember that if the worst comes to the worst, I shall certainly refuse to give a certificate." "A certificate, sir?" Elsie faltered. "Yes. A certificate of the cause of death. There would have to be an inquest," he explained, with implacable and calculated cruelty. But Mr. Earlforward only laughed—a short, dry, sardonic laugh. The sun shone into the silent room and upon the tumbled bed and the sick, triumphant man, and made them more terrible than midnight could have made them. The doctor, with the pompous solemnity of a little man conscious of rectitude, slowly picked up his hat from the chest of drawers. "But what am I to do?" Elsie appealed. "My good woman, I don't know. I wish I did. All I know is, I've done what I could; and I can't take the private affairs of all Clerkenwell on my shoulders. I've other urgent cases to attend to." A faint snigger, which his will was too late to suppress! "Elsie'll be all right," muttered Mr. Earlforward. "Elsie'll never desert me, Elsie won't. She promised me." The doctor walked majestically out of the room, followed by Elsie. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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