Kindling (7 page)

He studied the occupants of the beds for a time. They lay inert, a gaunt and listless crew. One or two were reading newspapers and tattered books; most of them were lying still, staring at the ceiling, as though they were already dead. For all his weakness and his discomfort, Warren felt himself to be the only virile man in the whole ward.

He turned his head, and met the eyes of the man in the next bed. A tall, gaunt man of fifty years or so with a grey face; he lay quite motionless.

Warren saw that he was watched. “Morning,” he said.

There was silence for a moment, and then the man said:

“What’s your name?”

“Warren. What’s yours?”

“Petersen. Jock Petersen, they call me. Ye’re no from these parts?”

“I’m from America,” said Warren. “I had a job in Philadelphia.”

The grey face showed a flicker of animation. “Is things good in America? Would a man as was a charge-hand riveter get work oot there?”

“I don’t think so. It’s pretty bad.”

“Not even holding up?”

“I shouldn’t say so. There’s over ten million out of a job already over there.”

The animation died from the thin face. Listlessly the next question came.

“What brought ye back to England?”

“I was in a bank,” said Warren. “I got laid off with fifteen others, last September. Then I bummed around and spent my money, looking for a job. And then they picked me up, and put me on a boat for Glasgow. That’s what they do, unless you’ve taken out your papers.”

“Ye came by Glasgie?” said Petersen. “Eh, I’d like fine to be in Glasgie again.”

There was a pause, and presently the riveter said:

“What ails ye?”

“A twisted gut,” said Warren. “They cut out a bit and joined it up again. They say I’ll be as good as ever when it’s healed, but I wouldn’t trust to that.”

“Aye, I wouldna say that’s no a fact. Ye’ve made a fine recovery.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I had the colic awfu’ bad. They took me in for obsairvation, as they say.”

“Have you had it long?”

“Twa three months. It took me sair after eating or drinking. I couldna sleep nights for the colicky pain of it. I come to out-patients, and the wee doctor laddie he said to me to drink three pints o’ milk each day—the domned fool. Did ye ever hear o’ sich daft talk, with milk threepence a pint! And that wasn’t the end to it. There was baby’s food and all sorts I was to take—oot o’ thirty-one an’ six a week for the four of us, an’
nine an’ three gaeing for rent. I got nae better, so they took me in for obsairvation.”

“You’ll be getting the milk now?” said Warren.

“Aye. An’ weary stuff it is.”

On the other side of Warren was a younger man, a dock labourer by the name of Thompson, making a slow recovery from appendicitis. He was largely inarticulate, and apparently had little interest beyond the football pools. He did, however, give one sound piece of advice.

“See here, chum,” he said hoarsely, “you want to watch that Miss MacMahon. She’ll try an’ make you pay for what they done to you, but don’t you do it. If you got any o’ the dibs, don’t let on, see? You got a right to be here, same as anyone.”

Warren gathered that Miss MacMahon must be the Almoner.

The bed beyond Thompson was the corner bed; there was a screen around it and an intermittent babble of incoherent talk. From the screen, the delirium, and the movements of the nurses Warren gathered that the case was serious; he asked the ward nurse when she came to him with a drink.

“He’s a young man called Tinsley,” she said. “I think he’s a carpenter when he’s in work. He ruptured himself lifting some weight or other, and came in for the operation. The wound healed nicely and we thought he was all right, but then it broke out septic. He’s very ill.”

Warren wrinkled his brows in perplexity. “What made it go like that?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. He had terribly neglected
teeth. Doctor Miller thinks it might have been from that.”

She went away, and Warren lay puzzling what she had said until he fell asleep. It didn’t make sense to him. Bad teeth could not infect a healed wound, unless you turned and bit it. There must be something else wrong with the man; he could not have had an ordinary constitution. But then, were any of these listless people ordinary?

He did not think they were.

That night the young man died. The screen was taken from around the bed, the bed made up, and by lunch time the next day it was occupied again by a man with a crushed foot.

That afternoon the Almoner came to him. He had seen her once or twice before, a slim, dark woman about thirty years of age distributing books and papers in the ward. She came and drew a chair up to his bed; she had a notebook and a pencil in her hand.

“How are you feeling now, Mr. Warren?” she enquired.

“Better, thanks. I’d feel better still if I could get some real food.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll get that for some time. Now, Mr. Warren, I’ve come to talk to you about paying for the treatment that you’ve had. You’ve had a very big operation that would have cost a great deal of money if a surgeon had done it for you privately, and on top of that there’s your expense of living here for at least three weeks.”

“Boiled water,” said Warren.

“Yes,” said Miss MacMahon firmly. “Later on you’ll
get expensive foods when you are able to take something—patent milk foods out of tins, white fish, chicken, all that sort of thing, until you are able to get on to a normal diet. It all costs a great deal of money, at least thirty-five shillings a week.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got that much,” said Warren. “You see, I’m out of a job at the moment.”

She looked at him critically. “What is your job?”

“I’m a bank clerk,” he said. “I was over in America, in Philadelphia. Then I fell out of work and the Federal authorities shipped me back here, because I was an Englishman. I was walking down to Hull. I might be able to pick up something there. Otherwise I was going on down to London.”

“Have you got any relations who could help you with this expense?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“You must make good money when you’re in a job.”

He said, “I was making five pounds ten in England seven years ago, and over in America I was drawing two hundred a month. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to dodge this expense. I’ll be able to pay it off when I get work again. But I haven’t got it now, I’m afraid.”

She looked at him searchingly. “How much money have you got?”

“Less than a pound,” he said.

She smiled. “We won’t take any of that if you’ve got to walk to Hull and London. But you must give me an address before you go, and I shall tell you what the treatment has cost the hospital. We shall want you to sign a note acknowledging that you owe the hospital
that money. And then you must pay it off in instalments when you get a job.”

“That’s right,” said Warren. “I’ll do that.”

Her pencil poised above the pad. “How much a week will you be able to pay?”

“If I get a job at five pounds a week or more, I could manage ten bob.”

She calculated for a moment. “That would do.” She smiled at him. “All right, Mr. Warren—we’ll leave it at that for the time being. I shall want you to sign that note before you go, and of course I’ll tell you how much we have to charge you. And then you’ll pay it off at the rate of ten shillings a week when you get in work again.”

Warren nodded, his conscience more painful than his abdomen. “I might be able to pay it off quicker than that,” he said. “If I can, I will.”

She smiled again. “That’s very nice of you. It’s not that we want to press you when you’re out of a job, but the hospital does need every penny it can get. The poorer a town gets the more it needs its hospital, and of course, the harder it is to make ends meet.”

He was interested, having had to do with hospitals from time to time—generally when they were
in extremis
. “What’s the subscription list like?”

“Terrible. When I came here first Barlows were going. Twopence a week per man and three thousand men—that made twelve hundred pounds a year from Barlows alone. And then there were the rolling-mills, and the little firms—they all had weekly contributions to the hospital. But all that’s gone now. And of course the patients can’t pay much, either.” She smiled. “That’s why we have to get it back out of them when they get into
work again. But in the meantime, you see, the hospital has to do without the money.”

“I see that,” said Warren. “Are there endowments?”

“Very few.”

He wrinkled his brows. “What are you using for money then?”

“We get along. Lady Swarland is our sheet anchor; she helps us out each year with a subscription to put us on our feet again. I’m afraid it’s a great drain on her, but she keeps on. Year after year.”

“Lady Swarland,” said Warren. “Isn’t her son Lord Cheriton?”

“Yes—he’s in the Army, I think. But he lives down in London—we never see him up here.”

She left him, and went down to the little office that she occupied beside the Secretary. She went into the Secretary’s office; Mr. Williams was checking invoices at his desk.

“I’ve seen that man Warren, in the surgical,” she said.

“Can he pay?”

“Not a halfpenny. He’s a clerk, out of a job and walking south.”

The little man clicked his tongue in consternation.

“Hasn’t he got any money?”

“If he had, I’d have got it. I asked the sister what he had when he came in. He’s only got a little silver.”

“What sort of a man is he?”

“A very good type. He’s a payer all right—when he gets in work. But there’s no saying when that will be.”

“Aye,” said the Secretary. He stood staring out of the window into the yard, short and rubicund. “I suppose the men will get in work again—some day.”

“I wouldn’t bank on that,” said Miss MacMahon.

Next day a consultation was held upon the riveter in the next bed to Warren. A screen was put around the bed while it was in progress; presently the screen was removed and the doctors and the nurses went away. The riveter leaned over towards Warren.

“Eh, mon,” he said. “They say I’m to have an operation the morn.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Warren.

“ ’Tis the Lord’s will, and we must say naething against it.”

“What’s the operation for?”

“For the colic I was telling you about. A something ulcer, they was calling it just now. But I don’t know.”

He lay back upon his pillows, inert and listless.

“Duodenal ulcer,” said the nurse in response to Warren’s enquiry, when she brought him his milk food for lunch. “Doctor Miller’s doing it tomorrow.”

That afternoon the riveter’s wife came to sit with him, a woman as tall and gaunt as Petersen himself, dressed in a faded black costume, with straggling grey hair and with appalling shoes. She brought with her a present of a sixpenny packet of cigarettes; the man in the bed smoked one gravely and in perfect silence. The woman stayed with him for about an hour until they told her it was time to go; so far as Warren could detect they exchanged no words at all after the preliminary brief greetings. She came, and sat with him, and went away.

Perhaps, thought Warren, there was nothing to be said.

Next morning there was the bustle of preparation
about the riveter in the next bed. They took him to the theatre about half-past ten; an hour later he was back again with the screen drawn close around the bed.

Warren did not see him again. That the case was critical was evident from the attention of the doctors and the nurses. In the middle of the night Warren was roused by what was evidently a consultation of some sort; from behind the screen he heard a laboured breathing that was new to him. All the next day the sound of breathing grew in loudness with a rasping quality, as if the man were gasping for his breath.

“Pneumonia,” said the nurse. “He’s very ill.”

That night the riveter died.

“What did he die of?” Warren asked his nurse. “How did he come to get pneumonia from an ulcerated stomach?”

She shook her head. “It just happens. When you’re weak enough you can get anything, you know.”

She brought around the packet of cigarettes, from which only one was taken. “His wife said I was to give these away. Would you like one?”

Warren lay and smoked in meditative silence. He found that he had a great deal to think about.

Three days later, two more patients died on the same day. One was a man of forty-five or so with peritonitis, the other a boy of seventeen who had had an operation on his neck and jaw for some strange bone disease. To Warren, totally unused to hospital routine, there was no apparent reason for the deaths—the men went for operation, and then just died.

The Almoner came down the ward next day distributing her papers and books. He stopped her by his bed.
“Have you got time to stop a minute? I want to know a bit more about this hospital.”

“Why—yes. For a very few minutes.”

She sat down by his bed.

He fixed her with his eyes, cold and purposeful; he was becoming very much himself again. “I don’t want to ask anything that you can’t answer, or that you ought not to tell me. But there’s something wrong here, and I’d like to know what it is.”

“Something wrong?”

“All these deaths.”

She was silent. He went on, “I’ve been here ten days now. In that time four people have died in this ward, out of the nineteen beds—all after operations. I suppose there may have been eight or nine operations in that time, counting my own. The way I see it, that’s about fifty per cent of deaths. Surely that’s not right?”

“I think your figures are a little high. I should have said forty per cent, myself.”

“You mean, that when one has an operation here it’s little better than an even chance if one gets through?”

She hesitated. “I suppose that’s what it comes to.”

He was silent for a minute. Then he smiled at her. “I don’t want you to think I’m prying into what isn’t my business. After all, I seem to be getting over mine all right, and I suppose that’s all that matters to me. But I’d like to understand the reason for these casualties.”