“If yer goin’ downstairs, Nuss, you’d better take that there scuttle with yer, for the coals is gittin’ low an’ it ull save yer a journey!”

Marcella looked with amusement at her adviser ­a small bandy-legged boy in shirt and knickerbockers, with black Jewish eyes in a strongly featured face.  He stood leaning on the broom he had just been wielding, his sleeves rolled up to the shoulder showing his tiny arms; his expression sharp and keen as a hawk’s.

“Well, Benny, then you look after your mother while I’m gone, and don’t let any one in but the doctor.”

And Marcella turned for an instant towards the bed whereon lay a sick woman too feeble apparently to speak or move.

“I aint a goin’ ter,” said the boy, shortly, beginning to sweep again with energy, “an’ if this ’ere baby cries, give it the bottle, I s’pose?”

“No, certainly not,” said Marcella, firmly; “it has just had one.  You sweep away, Benny, and let the baby alone.”

Benny looked a trifle wounded, but recovered himself immediately, and ran a general’s eye over Marcella who was just about to leave the room.

“Now look ’ere, Nuss,” he said in a tone of pitying remonstrance, “yer never a goin’ down to that ’ere coal cellar without a light.  Yer’ll ’ave to come runnin’ up all them stairs again ­sure as I’m alive yer will!”

And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still masterfully considering her, let her go.

Marcella groped her way downstairs.  The house was one of a type familiar all over the poorer parts of West Central London ­the eighteenth-century house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr. Johnson, now parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air, water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.

Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade.  Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that the house added one more to the standing shames of the district ­an opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.

The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed a sleepless night.  The evening before she had been sent for in haste to a woman in desperate illness.  She came, and found a young Jewess, with a ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women friends in a state of raging delirium.  The room, was full to suffocation of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns.  It had been Marcella’s first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an instant.  The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse; while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as best she could, in the midst of the poor thing’s wild shrieks and wrestlings.

It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their utmost.  After her year’s training Marcella took it simply in the day’s work.  Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the husband looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and that ­she could hardly have told how.

“Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!” said the husband, rising and shaking himself.  He was a Jew from German Poland, and, unlike most of his race, a huge man, with the make and the muscles of a prize-fighter.  Yet, after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of perspiration.

“You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on again,” said Marcella.

The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the nurse.

“You will not go away, mees,” he implored, “you will not leaf me alone?”

Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.

“No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor comes.  You had better go to bed.”

It was close on three o’clock.  The man demurred a little, but he was in truth too worn out to resist.  He went into the back room and lay down with the children.

Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her patient.  Her quick ear caught every sound about her ­the heavy breaths of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the crowded house.  Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances for pulling the woman through ­for it was what a nurse calls “a good case,” one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty ­partly on the extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman’s illness; and partly ­in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought ­on the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother and her child!

The year in hospital had rushed ­dreamless sleep by night, exhausting fatigue of mind and body by day.  A hospital nurse, if her work seizes her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of herself.  Now, for some six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as a district nurse, under the control of a central office and superintendent.  Her work lay in the homes of the poor, and was of the most varied kind.  The life was freer, more elastic; allowed room at last to self-consciousness.

But now the night was over.  The husband had gone off to work at a factory near, whence he could be summoned at any moment; the children had been disposed of to Mrs. Levi, the helpful neighbour; she herself had been home for an hour to breakfast and dress, had sent to the office asking that her other cases might be attended to, and was at present in sole charge, with Benny to help her, waiting for the doctor.

When she reached the sick-room again with her burdens, she found Benjamin sitting pensive, with the broom across his knees.

“Well, Benny!” she said as she entered, “how have you got on?”

“Yer can’t move the dirt on them boards with sweepin’,” said Benny, looking at them with disgust; “an’ I ain’t a goin’ to try it no more.”

“You’re about right there, Benny,” said Marcella, mournfully, as she inspected them; “well, we’ll get Mrs. Levi to come in and scrub ­as soon as your mother can bear it.”

She stepped up to the bed and looked at her patient, who seemed to be passing into a state of restless prostration, more or less under the influence of morphia.  Marcella fed her with strong beef tea made by herself during the night, and debated whether she should give brandy.  No ­either the doctor would come directly, or she would send for him.  She had not seen him yet, and her lip curled at the thought of him.  He had ordered a nurse the night before, but had not stayed to meet her, and Marcella had been obliged to make out his instructions from the husband as best she could.

Benny looked up at her with a wink as she went back to the fire.

“I didn’t let none o’ them in,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.  “They come a whisperin’ at the door, an’ a rattlin’ ov the handle as soon as ever you gone downstairs.  But I tole ’em just to take theirselves off, an’ as ’ow you didn’t want ’em.  Sillies!”

And taking a crust smeared with treacle out of his pocket, Benny returned with a severe air to the sucking of it.

Marcella laughed.

“Clever Benny,” she said, patting his head; “but why aren’t you at school, sir?”

Benjamin grinned.

“‘Ow d’yer s’pose my ma’s goin’ to git along without me to do for ’er and the babby?” he replied slily.

“Well, Benny, you’ll have the Board officer down on you.”

At this the urchin laughed out.

“Why, ‘e wor here last week!  Ee can’t be troublin’ ’isself about this ‘ere bloomin’ street every day in the week.”

There was a sharp knock at the door.

“The doctor,” she said, as her face dismissed the frolic brightness which had stolen upon it for a moment.  “Run away, Benny.”

Benny opened the door, looked the doctor coolly up and down, and then withdrew to the landing, where his sisters were waiting to play with him.

The doctor, a tall man of thirty, with a red, blurred face and a fair moustache, walked in hurriedly, and stared at the nurse standing by the fire.

“You come from the St. Martin’s Association?”

Marcella stiffly replied.  He took her temperature-chart from her hand and asked her some questions about the night, staring at her from time to time with eyes that displeased her.  Presently she came to an account of the condition in which she had found her patient.  The edge on the words, for all their professional quiet, was unmistakable.  She saw him flush.

He moved towards the bed, and she went with him.  The woman moaned as he approached her.  He set about his business with hands that shook.  Marcella decided at once that he was not sober, and watched his proceedings with increasing disgust and amazement.  Presently she could bear it no longer.

“I think,” she said, touching his arm, “that you had better leave it to me ­and ­go away!”

He drew himself up with a start which sent the things he held flying, and faced her fiercely.

“What do you mean?” he said, “don’t you know your place?”

The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.

“Yes ­I know my place!”

Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she had to say.  She knew ­and he could not deny ­that he had endangered his patient’s life.  She pointed out that he was in a fair way to endanger it again.  Every word she said lay absolutely within her sphere as a nurse.  His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.

Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for an instant he would have struck her.  Finally he turned down his shirt-cuffs and walked away.

“You understand,” he said thickly, turning upon her, with his hat in his hand, “that I shall not attend this case again till your Association can send me a nurse that will do as she is told without insolence to the doctor.  I shall now write a report to your superintendent.”

“As you please,” said Marcella, quietly.  And she went to the door and opened it.

He passed her sneering: 

“A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare say.  I’d sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of you!”

Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening.  “Will you go?” she said.

He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside, breathing threats.

Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath.  There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth and strain.

Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above were beginning to fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking.  In another minute or two she would be besieged by them.  She called sharply, “Benny!”

Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses to right and left.

“What is it you want, Nuss?  No, she don’t want none o’ you ­there!”

And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in all their faces, but that Marcella said to him ­

“Let in Mrs. Levi, please.”

The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was admitted, and then the key was turned.  Marcella scribbled a line on a half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with it.

“I have sent for a new doctor,” she explained, still frowning and white, to Mrs. Levi.  “That one was not fit.”

The woman’s olive-skinned face lightened all over.  “Thanks to the Lord!” she said, throwing up her hands.  “But how in the world did you do ’t, miss?  There isn’t a single soul in this house that doesn’t go all of a tremble at the sight of ’im.  Yet all the women has ’im when they’re ill ­bound to.  They thinks he must be clever, ’cos he’s such a brute.  I do believe sometimes it’s that.  He is a brute!”

Marcella was bending over her patient, trying so far as she could to set her straight and comfortable again.  But the woman had begun to mutter once more words in a strange dialect that Marcella did not understand, and could no longer be kept still.  The temperature was rising again, and another fit of delirium was imminent.  Marcella could only hope that she and Mrs. Levi between them would be able to hold her till the doctor came.  When she had done all that was in her power, she sat beside the poor tossing creature, controlling and calming her as best she could, while Mrs. Levi poured into her shrinking ear the story of the woman’s illness and of Dr. Blank’s conduct of it.  Marcella’s feeling, as she listened, was made up of that old agony of rage and pity!  The sufferings of the poor, because they were poor ­these things often, still, darkened earth and heaven for her.  That wretch would have been quite capable, no doubt, of conducting himself decently and even competently, if he had been called to some supposed lady in one of the well-to-do squares which made the centre of this poor and crowded district.

“Hullo, nurse!” said a cheery voice; “you seem to have got a bad case.”

The sound was as music in Marcella’s ears.  The woman she held was fast becoming unmanageable ­had just shrieked, first for “poison,” then for a “knife,” to kill herself with, and could hardly be prevented by the combined strength of her nurse and Mrs. Levi, now from throwing herself madly out of bed, and now from tearing out her black hair in handfuls.  The doctor ­a young Scotchman with spectacles, and stubbly red beard ­came quickly up to the bed, asked Marcella a few short questions, shrugged his shoulders over her dry report of Dr. Blank’s proceedings, then took out a black case from his pocket, and put his morphia syringe together.

For a long time no result whatever could be obtained by any treatment.  The husband was sent for, and came trembling, imploring doctor and nurse, in the intervals of his wife’s paroxysms, not to leave him alone.

Marcella, absorbed in the tragic horror of the case, took no note of the passage of time.  Everything that the doctor suggested she carried out with a deftness, a tenderness, a power of mind, which keenly affected his professional sense.  Once, the poor mother, left unguarded for an instant, struck out with a wild right hand.  The blow caught Marcella on the cheek, and she drew back with a slight involuntary cry.

“You are hurt,” said Dr. Angus, running up to her.

“No, no,” she said, smiling through the tears that the shock had called into her eyes, and putting him rather impatiently aside; “it is nothing.  You said you wanted some fresh ice.”

And she went into the back room to get it.

The doctor stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the patient.

“You will have to send her to the infirmary,” he said to the husband; “there is nothing else for it.”

Marcella came back with the ice, and was able to apply it to the head.  The patient was quieter ­was, in fact, now groaning herself into a fresh period of exhaustion.

The doctor’s sharp eyes took note of the two figures, the huddled creature on the pillows and the stately head bending over her, with the delicately hollowed cheek, whereon the marks of those mad fingers stood out red and angry.  He had already had experience of this girl in one or two other cases.

“Well,” he said, taking up his hat, “it is no good shilly-shallying.  I will go and find Dr. Swift.”  Dr. Swift was the parish doctor.

When he had gone, the big husband broke down and cried, with his head against the iron of the bed close to his wife.  He put his great hand on hers, and talked to her brokenly in their own patois.  They had been eight years married, and she had never had a day’s serious illness till now.  Marcella’s eyes filled with tears as she moved about the room, doing various little tasks.

At last she went up to him.

“Won’t you go and have some dinner?” she said to him kindly.  “There’s Benjamin calling you,” and she pointed to the door of the back room, where stood Benny, his face puckered with weeping, forlornly holding out a plate of fried fish, in the hope of attracting his father’s attention.

The man, who in spite of his size and strength was in truth childishly soft and ductile, went as he was bid, and Marcella and Mrs. Levi set about doing what they could to prepare the wife for her removal.

Presently parish doctor and sanitary inspector appeared, strange and peremptory invaders who did but add to the terror and misery of the husband.  Then at last came the ambulance, and Dr. Angus with it.  The patient, now once more plunged in narcotic stupor, was carried downstairs by two male nurses, Dr. Angus presiding.  Marcella stood in the doorway and watched the scene, ­the gradual disappearance of the helpless form on the stretcher, with its fevered face under the dark mat of hair; the figures of the straining men heavily descending step by step, their heads and shoulders thrown out against the dirty drabs and browns of the staircase; the crowd of Jewesses on the stairs and landing, craning their necks, gesticulating and talking, so that Dr. Angus could hardly make his directions heard, angrily as he bade them stand back; and on the top stair, the big husband, following the form of his departing and unconscious wife with his eyes, his face convulsed with weeping, the whimpering children clinging about his knees.

How hot it was! ­how stifling the staircase smelt, and how the sun beat down from that upper window on the towzled unkempt women with their large-eyed children.