The morning went on. It seemed as though there was to be no opportunity of telling Mr. Hancock until lunch had changed the feeling of the day. He knew there was something. Turning to select an instrument from a drawer she was at work upon he had caught sight of her mirth and smiled his amusement and anticipation into the drawer before turning gravely back to the chair. Perhaps that was enough, the best, like a moment of amusement you share with a stranger and never forget. Perhaps by the time she was able to tell him he would be disappointed. No. It was too perfect. Just the sort of thing that amused him.
He had one long sitting after another, the time given to one patient overlapping the appointment with the next so that her clearings and cleansings were done with a patient in the chair, noiselessly and slowly, keeping her in the room, making to-day seem like a continuation of yesterday afternoon. Yesterday shed its radiance. The shared mirth made a glowing background to her toil. The duties accumulating downstairs made her continued presence in the surgery a sort of truancy. She felt more strongly than ever the sense of her usefulness to him. She had never so far helped him so deftly and easily, being everywhere and nowhere, foreseeing his needs without impeding his movements, doing everything without reminding the patient that there was a third person in the room. She followed sympathetically the long slow processes of excavation and root treatment, the delicate shaping and undercutting of the walls of cavities, the adjustment and retention of the many appliances for the exclusion of moisture, the insertions of the amalgams and pastes whose pounding and mixing made a recurrent crisis in her morning. She wished again and again that the dentally ignorant dentally ironic world could see the operator at his best; in his moments of quiet intense concentration on giving his best to his patients.
2
The patients suffering the four long sittings were all of the best group, leisurely and untroubled as to the mounting up of guineas and three of them intelligently appreciative of what was being done. They knew all about the “status” of modern dentistry and the importance of teeth. They were all clear serene tranquil cheerful people who probably hardly ever went to a doctor. They would rate oculists and dentists on a level with doctors and two of them at least would rate Mr. Hancock on a level with anybody.... Tomorrow would be quite different, a rush of gas cases, that man who was sick if an instrument touched the back of his tongue; Mrs. Wolff, disputing fees, the deaf-mute, the grubby little man on a newspaper ... he ought to have no patients but these intelligent ones and really nervous and delicate people and children.
3
“I sometimes wish I’d stuck to medicine.”
“Why?”
“Well—I don’t know. You know they get a good deal more all round out of their profession than a dentist does. It absorbs them more.... I don’t say it ought not to be the same with dentistry. But it isn’t. I don’t know a dentist who wants to go on talking shop until the small hours. I’m quite sure I don’t. Now look at Randle. He was dining here last night. So was Bentley. We separated at about midnight; and Randle told me this morning that he and Bentley walked up and down Harley Street telling each other stories, until two o’clock.” “That simply means they talk about their patients.”
“Well—yes. They discuss their cases from every point of view. They get more human interest out of their work.”
“Of course everybody knows that medical students and doctors are famous for stories. But it doesn’t really mean they know anything about people. I don’t believe they do. I think the dentist has quite as much opportunity of studying human nature. Going through dentistry is like dying. You must know almost everything about a patient who has had much done, or even a little——”
“The fact of the matter is their profession is a hobby to them as well as a profession. That’s the truth of the matter. Now I think a man who can make a hobby of his profession is a very fortunate man.”
4
How surprised the four friendly wealthy patients, especially the white-haired old aristocrat who was always pressing invitations upon him would have been, ignoring or treating her with the kindly consideration due to people of her station, if they could have seen inside his house yesterday and beheld her ensconced in the most comfortable chair in his drawing-room ... talking to Miss Szigmondy.
5
Each time she came downstairs she sat urgently down to the most pressing of her clerical duties and presently found her mind ranging amongst thoughts whose beginnings she could not remember. She felt equal to anything. Every prospect was open to her. Simple solutions to problems that commonly went unanswered round and round in her head presented themselves in flashes. At intervals she worked with a swiftness and ease that astonished her, making no mistakes, devising small changes and adjustments that would make for the smoother working of the practice, dashing off notes to friends in easy expressive phrases that came without thought.
6
Rushing up towards lunch time in answer to the bell she found Mr. Hancock alone. He turned from the washstand and stood carefully drying his hands. “Are they showing up?” he murmured and seeing her, smiled his sense of her eagerness to communicate and approached a few steps waiting and smiling with the whole of his face exactly as he would smile when the communication was made. There was really no need to tell. Miriam glanced back for an incoming patient. “Miss Szigmondy” she began in a voice deep with laughter.
He laughed at once, with a little backward throw of his head just as the patient came in. Miriam glided swiftly into her corner.
7
At tea-time she found herself happily exhausted, sitting alone in the den waiting for the sound of footsteps. For the first time the gas-stove was unlit. The rows of asbestos balls stood white and bare. But a flood of sunlight came through the western panes of the newly washed skylight. The little low tea-table with its fresh uncrumpled low hanging white cover and compact cluster of delicate china stood in full sunshine amidst the comfortable winter shabbiness. The decorative confusion on the walls shone richly out in the new bright light. It needed only to have all the skylights open the blue of the sky visible, the thin spring air coming in, the fire alight making a summery glow, to be perfect; like spring tea-time in a newly visited house. The Wilsons’ sitting-room would be in an open blaze of shallow spring sunshine. She saw it going on day by day towards the rich light of summer ... jealously. One ought to be there every day. So much life would have passed through the room. Every day last week had been full of it, everything changed by it, and now, since yesterday it seemed months ago. It seemed too late to begin going down again. One thing blots out another. You cannot have more than one thing intensely. Quite soon it would be as if she had never been down; except in moments now and again, when something recalled the challenge of their point of view. They would not want her to go down again unless she had begun to be different. Until yesterday she might have begun. But yesterday afternoon they had been forgotten so completely, and waking up from yesterday she no longer wanted to begin their way of being different. But other people had already begun to identify her with them. That came of talking. If she had said nothing, nothing would have been changed; either at Wimpole Street or with the girls. Did they really like reading “The Evolution of the Idea of God” or were they only pretending? Sewing all the time, busily, like wives, instead of smoking and listening and thinking.
Which was the stronger? The interest of getting the whole picture there, and struggling with Mr. Wilson’s deductions or the interest of getting the girls to grasp and admire his conclusions even while she herself refused them....
“Why can’t I keep quiet about the things that happen? It’s all me, my conceit and my way of rushing into things.” ... But other people were the same in a way. Only there was something real in their way. They believed in the things they rushed into. “Miss Henderson knows the great critic, intimately.” He had thought that would impress Miss Szigmondy. It did. For a moment she had stopped talking and looked surprised. There was time to disclaim, to tell them they were being impressed in the wrong way; to tell them something, to explain in some way. The moment had passed, full of terrible far-off trouble, “decisive.”
There is always a fraction of a second when you know what you are doing. Miss Szigmondy would have gone on talking about bicycling until Mr. Hancock came back. There was no need to say suddenly, without thinking about it “I am dying to learn.” Really that sudden remark was the result of having failed to speak when they were all talking about Mr. Wilson. If, then, one had suddenly said “I am dying to learn bicycling” or anything they would have known something of the truth about Mr. Wilson. It was the worrying thought of him, still there, that made one say, without thinking, “I am dying to learn.” It was too late. It linked up with the silence about Mr. Wilson and left one being a person who knew and altogether approved of Mr. Wilson and wanted to learn bicycling. Altogether wrong. “You know—I don’t approve of Mr. Wilson; and you might not if you heard him talk, and ... his marriage ... you know....”
... If I had done that, I should have been easy and strong and could have ‘made conversation’ when she began talking about bicycling. I was like the man who proposed to the girl at the dance because he could not think of anything to say to her. He could not think of anything to say because he had something on his mind....
And Miss Szigmondy would not have called this morning.
“No one can pgonounce my name. You had better call me ThÉgÈse my dear girl. Yes, do; I want you to.” She had said that with a worried face, a sudden manner of unsmiling intimacy. She certainly had some plan. Standing there with her broken hearted voice and her anxious face she seemed to be separate from the room, even from her own clothes. Yet something within her was moving so quickly that it made one breathless. She was so intent that she was unconscious of the appealing little figure she made huddled in her English clothes. She stood dressed and determined and prosperous her smart little toque held closely against her dark hair and sallow face with the kind of chenille-spotted veil that was a rampart against everything in the world to an Englishwoman. But it did not touch her or do anything for her. It gave an effect of prison bars behind which she was hanging her head and weeping and appealing. One could have laughed and gathered her up. Why was she forlorn? Why did she imagine that one was also forlorn? The sight of her made all the forlornness one had ever seen or read about seem peopled with knowledge and sympathy and warm thoughts that flew crowding along one’s brain as close and bright as the texture of everybody’s everyday. But the eyes were anxious and preoccupied, blinking now and then in her long unswerving appealing gaze, shutting swiftly for lightning calculations between her rapid appealing statements. What was she trying to do?
She tried to stand in front of everything, to put everything aside as if it were part of something she knew. Laughing over it with Mr. Hancock would not dispose of that. After the fun of telling him, she would still be there, with the two bicycle lessons that were going begging. He knew already that she had been and would assume that she had suggested things and that one was not going to do them. If one told him about the lessons he would say that is very kind and would mean it. He was always fine in thinking a “kind” action kind ... but she does not come because she wants me. She does not want anybody. She does not know the difference between one person and another.... He knows only her social manner. She has never been alone with him and come close and shown him her determination and her sorrow ... sorrow ... sorrow....
He could never see that it was impossible without forcibly crushing her, to get out of doing some part of what she desired....
If one were drawn in and did things, let oneself want to do things for anyone else, there would be a change in the atmosphere at Wimpole Street. That never occurred to him. But he would feel it if it happened. If there were someone near who made distractions there would be a difference, something that was not given to him. He was so unaware of this. He was absolutely ignorant of what it was that kept things going as they were.
