Читать книгу Seven Men Came Back - Warwick Deeping - Страница 10

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Dr. Pitt, his fingers on the lady’s wrist allowed his attention to pass from the minute to the hour hand of his watch. Three minutes to eleven in a St. John’s Wood bedroom. A perfectly normal pulse, and so far as his patient, Mrs. Silver was concerned—a perfectly normal fug. Pitt would have written the prescription as follows: “Recipe.—One huge coal fire, Fleur de Trefle, face powder, cigarette smoke. Mix. To be taken daily with little drinks—Dubaret, gin and bitters, whisky flam—ad infinitum.” Mrs. Silver’s hand flopped gracefully and languidly over the edge of the pink quilt. She was as plump and black-eyed and sleek as the most desired of any oriental harem beauty.

“I get such awful heads, doctor.”

“Quite.”

“I’m at my worst in the morning. I don’t want to get up.”

“Let’s see your tongue.”

Its pinkness was but faintly furred. Dr. Pitt left his chair beside the bed, and walked across the Chinese carpet to the window. He stood there, looking out at the bare branches of two plane trees and the grey fronts of the houses across the way. Boom! The maroons!

“Doctor, you’re not going to tell me——”

His voice was curt.

“Eleven o’clock. Armistice Day. Excuse me.”

But how absurd! Should celebrations be allowed to intervene between doctor and patient? Mrs. Silver had experimented with doctors in sequence. She was rich, and in a sense—famous. She sometimes appeared at charity matinées. Her taste in doctors rather resembled her taste in wine. She liked her vintage to be rich and fruity.

She examined the finger-nails of her right hand. She was aware of Dr. Pitt’s uncompromising back. She decided that he would soon be bald. He had that sort of head. Two minutes’ silence. She would get up presently and go down to Ravel’s and try on some new frocks.

Meanwhile, to Dr. Pitt the grey faces of the houses opposite had become a clay bank, part of a sunken road. There was a roofing of some grey substance. Twilight, deep gloom under that improvised shelter, and protruding from the dimness a row of feet and of legs, mud-stained boots with the toes everted, dirty puttees. The feet and legs of dead men.

Boom!

The silence was broken. He seemed to extract himself from the deeps of it as he had pulled field-boots out of glutinous, tragic mud. He moved.

“Doctor, I’m always getting palpitation.”

He went and stood at the foot of the bed. His face had the whimsical bleakness of some other memorable and macabre occasion. For the moment he was the battalion M.O.—yes, wilfully so.

“What you want is exercise.”

She stared at him.

“Yes—exercise, dear lady, work. You’re living a perfectly rotten life. Cut your cigarettes to ten a day. Drop all your little drinks.”

Her shocked and offended face delighted him.

“Doctor—really!”

“You pay me to tell you the truth, I suppose.”

“I’ve never been so—— Rotten—did you say?”

He nodded. He was not dreaming. He had uttered those words. She wanted spanking. And he, in a moment of fierce and mischievous candour was allowing himself the liberty of saying just what he wished to say.

“You don’t like my medicine?”

She sat up suddenly in bed. He expected an explosion. Instead of that she smiled at him.

“You are—a truculent fellow! Must I—really—be good?”

He returned her smile. He had brandished a brick, and she seemed to like it. How unexpected!

“If you want me to look after you—you—must—do-what—I tell you.”

She lay back on the pillows. She looked at him as she might have looked at a Paris model or a puppy while exclaiming—“How perfectly sweet!” Seductive severity! Ravishing rudeness! Something bitter and fresh to the palate. No other medical man had ever dared——

She smiled at him.

“Really—you are rather a lamb. I’ll be good.”

He gave her another flip.

“You’d better. Remember the wolf in Red Riding Hood.”

“But it was the grandmother who——”

“You’re not a grandmother, dear lady. Get up and go for a walk.”