smoke-splashed buildings became more splendid because amongst them he had his being.
As she drew slowly nearer to this enchanted place Mary, in spite of her crushing anxiety, felt actually a breathless anticipation. Although it was not her intention to see Denis, she could not suppress a throb of excitement as drawing near to him in his own environment.
When the train steamed into Darroch station she quickly left her compartment, surrendered her ticket, and was amongst the first of the small handful of passengers to leave the platform. Walking without hesitation, and as rapidly as her strength permitted, she passed along the main street, inclined sharply to the left, and entered a quieter residential locality. None of the persons she encountered knew her; her appearance caused neither stir nor interest. Darroch, though lacking the county atmosphere, was as large a township as Levenford; was, indeed, the only other large town within a radius of twelve miles, and it was easy for Mary to slip unnoticed through the busy streets and to submerge her identity beneath that of the crowd which thronged them. It was for these very reasons that she had chosen Darroch for her present purpose.
When she had proceeded halfway along the secondary street she observed, to her relief, that her memory had served her correctly, and, confronted by a crescent of terrace houses, she advanced resolutely to the end house and at once rang the bell loudly. A diminutive maid in a blue cotton overall opened the door.
"Is the doctor at home?" asked Mary.
"Will you please to come in," replied the small domestic, with the indifferent air of one who is tired of repeating the formula endlessly.
Mary was shown into the waiting room. It was a poor room with dull walls and a thin, worn carpet upon the floor, furnished by an array of chairs in varying degrees of decrepitude and a large oak table bearing several tattered, dog-eared, out-of-date periodicals and a pink china pot containing a languishing aspidistra.
"What is the name?" apathetically inquired the slave of the door.
"Miss Winifred Brown," replied Mary distinctly.
Clearly she was, she now saw, a liar! Whilst she should have been in Levenford, sitting in amiable conference with her brother's legitimately engaged fiancee, here she was, having cast her mother's parcel from her, four miles away, giving a false name and waiting in the house of a strange doctor, whose name and domicile she had recollected only by fortunate chance. The faint colour which had entered her face as she enunciated the fictitious name now violently flushed it at these thoughts, and it was with difficulty that she essayed to thrust the feeling of guilt from her as she was ushered into the consulting room.
The doctor was a middle-aged man, bald, untidy, disillusioned, and the possessor of an indifferent, cheap practice. It was not his usual consulting hour, which caused him a justifiable annoyance, but his economic position was such as to compel him to see patients at any hour. He was a bachelor and his housekeeper had just served him up a midday meal of fat boiled beef with suet puddings, which he had eaten hurriedly, and, as a result, the chronic indigestion, due to
badly cooked food, irregular hours and septic teeth, to which he was a martyr, was beginning to gnaw at him painfully. He looked surprisedly at Mary.
"Is it a call?" he enquired.
"No! I have come to consult you," she replied, in a voice which seemed far away and unrecognisable as her own.
"Be seated then," he said abruptly. Immediately he sensed the unusual and his irritation deepened. He had long ceased to derive interest from the clinical aspect of his cases, and any deviation from the humdrum routine of ordinary practice associated with the rapid issuing of bottles, containing dilute solutions of cheap drugs and colouring agents, always dismayed him; he was, in addition, anxious to get back to his couch and lie down; a spasm of pain gripped his middle as he remembered that his evening surgery would be heavy this night.
"What is it?" he continued shortly.
Haltingly she began to tell him, blushed, faltered, went on again, speaking in a daze. How she expressed herself she did not know, but apparently his aroused suspicions were confirmed.
"We must examine you," he told her coldly. "Will it be now, or shall you return with your mother?" Hardly understanding what he meant, she did not know how to reply. His impersonal manner discouraged her, his callous air chilled her, and his general slovenly appearance, with ragged, untrimmed moustache, uncared-for finger nails, and grease spots on his waistcoat, affected her equally with a sense of strong antipathy. She told herself, however, that she must go through with her ordeal, and in a low voice she said, "I cannot come back again, Doctor."
"Take your things off, then, and prepare yourself," he told her bluntly, indicating the couch as he went out of the room.
In her awkward timidity she had barely time to loosen her clothing and lie down upon the shabby, torn settee before he returned. Then with eyes shut and clenched teeth she submitted herself to his laboured and inexpert examination. It was agony for her, mentally and physically. She shrank in her fastidious mind from his coarse and uncouth presence and the touch of his unskilful fingers made her wince with pain. At last it was over and, with a few short words, he
again left the room.
Inside the space of five minutes she was back again in her chair, dressed, and gazing dumbly at him as he lumbered back to his desk.
The doctor was for once slightly at a loss. He had met this calamity frequently in women of a different class, but he was, despite his obtuse, case-hardened intellect, aware that this girl, who was nothing more than a frightened child, was uninstructed and innocent. He felt that her unconscious defloration had undoubtedly coincided with her conception. He realised why she had so self-consciously given him an assumed name and in his dry, empty heart a vague pity stirred. At first, with all the anxiety of the unsuccessful practitioner jealous of his meagre reputation, he had suspected that she desired him to apply some means of terminating her condition, but now he realised fully the extent of her sublime ignorance. He moved uncomfortably in his chair, not knowing how to begin.
"You are not married?' he said at length, in a flat voice.
She shook her head with swimming, terrified eyes.
"Then I advise you to get married. You are going to have a baby."
At first she hardly understood. Then her lips contorted with a quivering spasm, her eyes overflowed and tears ran soundlessly down her face. She felt paralysed, as though his words had bludgeoned her. He was talking to her, trying to tell her what she must do, what she must expect, but she scarcely heard him. He receded from her; her surroundings vanished; she was plunged into a grey mist of utter and incomparable dejection, alone with the obsessing horror of certain and inevitable calamity. From time to time fragments of his meaning came to her, like haggard shafts of daylight glancing suddenly through the swirling wreaths of fog which encircled her.
"Try not to worry," she heard him say; then again through the enveloping pall came the words, "You are young; your life is not wasted."
What did he know or care? His well-meant platitudes left her untouched and cold. Instinctively she realised that to him she represented merely a transient and unwelcome incident in his monotonous day, and, as she rose and asked to know his charge, she detected instantly in his eye a half -veiled flicker of relief. Her intuition had not deceived her, for, having taken his fee and shown her to the door, he fled immediately to his bismuth bottle, took a large dose, settled himself down, with a sigh of relief, to rest and straight away completely forgot her.
As she passed out of the house into the street it was just three o'clock. She had an hour to wait for her train if ever she would take it. In a lorture of mind she walked down the street whispering to herself, "God! Oh God! Why have You done this to me? I've never done You any harm. Stop this from happening. Stop it!" A blind unreason possessed her as to why and how her body had been singled out by the Almighty for this obscene experiment. It struck her as a supremely unjust manifestation of the Divine omnipotence. Strangely, she did not blame Denis; she felt herself simply the victim of some tremendous, incomprehensible fraud.