The Challenge of Love. Victorian Romance Novel
blessed and the damned. To his assistants—such as they were—had been given the river alleys and their hovels, the sots and incurables, the miserable old men and women, the strumous, rickety children. Dr. Threadgold moved in the upper regions. He did not climb dirty stairs and knock his head against sloped ceilings. That chubby little hand of his went gliding up mahogany banister rails, and felt pulses under skin that was white and clean.
“Mr. Wolfe, sir, have you nearly finished with that case?”
There was some asperity in the elder man’s voice as his head and one check-patterned leg appeared round the edge of the door that led from the consulting-room into the surgery. Wolfe was seated on a chair by the window with a baby howling on his knees. A thin woman stood beside him, blinking away tears, and the crowded bottles on the shelves seemed to blink in sympathy.
“In one minute, sir.”
“My carriage has been waiting for half an hour.”
“I can’t leave the child for the moment, sir.”
Nor could he, since he was in the act of snipping an over-tight ligament that tied down the baby’s tongue.
Wolfe found Dr. Threadgold warming his feet at the fire. He turned briskly, and began to speak with a certain forced rapidity.
“Mr. Wolfe, I have drawn you out a list of patients who will be under your charge. And since you are new to the place I have ordered Samuel, the surgery boy, to go round with you and act as guide. Here are the list and the addresses.”
Threadgold handed Wolfe a strip of paper, and turned rather hurriedly towards the door. There were some twenty names on the list, and against each name Dr. Threadgold had written a diagnosis—in red ink.
“I shall be glad if you will be guided by my experience, Mr. Wolfe. If you have any suggestions to make as to treatment, I shall be pleased to consider them.”
He swung the door open, and then turned as though he had suddenly remembered something.
“And, by the way, sir, Mrs. Threadgold has asked me to tell you that she cannot allow the smell of tobacco about the house.”
Wolfe glanced up from the list that he had been scanning.
“Mrs. Threadgold, sir, is exceedingly sensitive to the smell of tobacco. Moreover, this house is a house of very frequent entertainment. In fact——”
Wolfe cut him short.
“I quite understand, sir. I’ll smoke in the garden—or in the stable.”
Threadgold gave a mild stare.
“Anywhere you please, Mr. Wolfe, in private. But of course not in public. I could not see a representative of mine walking the streets of Navestock——”
“No, sir, I quite understand you.”
Threadgold bounced out like a timid man who has been ordered to say his say, leaving Wolfe standing by the window with a queer and thoughtful smile upon his face.
The people of Navestock stared a good deal at John Wolfe as he spent his first morning striding about the town with fat Samuel plodding at his side. Most of the patients on the list that Dr. Threadgold had given him belonged to the lanes and alleys near the river. The very names of these places were suggestive—Bung Row, Bastard Alley, Dirty Dick’s, Paradise Place. The lanes were mere crevasses into which very little sunlight fell, and in winter, when the Wraith was in flood, half the low-lying ground would be under water. The whole neighbourhood was like a rabbit-warren, full of winding ways, black holes, and dark entries, and to judge by the condition of the yards and gutters—the art of scavenging was unknown.
Wolfe had to visit three cottages in Bung Row, and he felt himself back in the familiar London slums. In the first cottage, he found a frowsy woman sitting before a bit of fire, holding a baby to her breast, and trying to smother a cough. Wolfe sat down on a chair that had lost its back and talked to her with the ease of a man who is too interested and too much in earnest to be self-conscious. The woman was pitiably servile, and seemed surprised that this new doctor was not in a curt and casual hurry.
“It’s me soide, sir, I’ve got such a pain in me soide.”
She reiterated the cry, screwing her mouth into a queer triangular slit, so that Wolfe, struck by some ludicrous memory, had to get up and appear interested in her back.
“Much coughing?”
“It’s the coughing as pulls me to bits, sir. I coughs until I retches, and the pain in me soide, sir, is fair awful. Sleep? Wish I could, sir. It’s cough, cough, cough the whole blessed night. And my man—he’s that disagreeable, talks of stuffing a stocking in me mouth. And I’m getting that thin.”
A lean girl of twelve came and took the baby, and Wolfe examined the woman’s chest. Dr. Threadgold had given a diagnosis of bronchial catarrh. Wolfe very soon satisfied himself that the woman must have been suffering from consumption for months.
“Ever spat blood?”
“Blood, sir? Pints, sir.”
“You told Dr. Threadgold?”
“He only saw me once, sir, and he was that hurried. It was after Mr. Timmins left. He didn’t thump me and listen, like you do, sir.”
“No?”
“He said I’d caught a bit of a cold.”
Wolfe sat in silence a moment, his grave eyes fixed on the woman’s face. One of those flashes of understanding that strike suddenly across a man’s mind touched him as he looked at her. He realised what it was to be in the hands of an indifferent, bungling, careless old man, to have one’s miserable life curtailed amid such miserable surroundings. It was as though Navestock lay betrayed before him in the body of this woman; betrayed with all its inward sores, its ugly outward blemishes. Wolfe was a man who was very open to impressions, and almost like an artist in the way he caught the atmosphere of his surroundings.
“Did Dr. Threadgold give you any medicine?”
“Some pinky stuff, sir. But it’s the pain in me soide!”
Wolfe no longer had any desire to laugh. He gave the woman what advice he could, picked up his hat, and went out into Bung Row.
It seemed that his first impressionist sketch was to have the details blackened in that morning with heavy and emphatic lines. In three more cases Wolfe found that old Threadgold had blundered badly. The picture of the plump, spruce, affable little man kept jigging before Wolfe’s eyes as he realised how people were doctored in these Navestock alleys. He began to get a surer grip of Dr. Threadgold’s character. He could imagine this soft and incompetent little man pottering here and there with affable indifference, bungling glibly, too easily satisfied with the good things of life to realise perhaps that he was bungling. How did a man come to such a state? Wolfe, with all his grim and almost fanatical thoroughness, could hardly glimpse the psychology of the thing.
Genial cynicism! He supposed such a state of mind existed. And in such a town as this! And it was here that another side-gleam of understanding struck slantwise across his consciousness. Ignorance and cynical indifference may produce identical results, and the dirt and the insanity squalor of these Navestock lanes were facts to be laid at somebody’s door. Who was responsible? Who owned these rat holes in the river bank? Wolfe asked himself these questions, and in the asking the beaming face of Dr. Threadgold assumed another meaning. He remembered the good lady’s remarks in the drawing-room over night. Old Sir Joshua Kermody was her ideal—was he? And Navestock was the most Conservative of towns! Faugh! His nostrils contracted as he followed fat Sam past a slaughter-house yard that was an abomination even in winter.
He turned into Bread Street, and stopped to glance at Dr. Threadgold’s list and to consult with Master Sam. Bread Street ended at the river in a narrow old red-brick bridge that gave room for only one cart to pass at a time. At this moment the bridge happened to be choked with a group of children who had gathered round a girl who was wheeling a couple of infants in a very