ve
flights of stairs for nothing. The cases ranged from a cut finger to a cut
throat. Boys came in with hands mangled by some machine, men were brought
who had been knocked down by a cab, and children who had broken a limb
while playing: now and then attempted suicides were carried in by the
police: Philip saw a ghastly, wild-eyed man with a great gash from ear to
ear, and he was in the ward for weeks afterwards in charge of a constable,
silent, angry because he was alive, and sullen; he made no secret of the
fact that he would try again to kill himself as soon as he was released.
The wards were crowded, and the house-surgeon was faced with a dilemma
when patients were brought in by the police: if they were sent on to the
station and died there disagreeable things were said in the papers; and it
was very difficult sometimes to tell if a man was dying or drunk. Philip
did not go to bed till he was tired out, so that he should not have the
bother of getting up again in an hour; and he sat in the casualty ward
talking in the intervals of work with the night-nurse. She was a
gray-haired woman of masculine appearance, who had been night-nurse in the
casualty department for twenty years. She liked the work because she was
her own mistress and had no sister to bother her. Her movements were slow,
but she was immensely capable and she never failed in an emergency. The
dressers, often inexperienced or nervous, found her a tower of strength.
She had seen thousands of them, and they made no impression upon her: she
always called them Mr. Brown; and when they expostulated and told her
their real names, she merely nodded and went on calling them Mr. Brown. It
interested Philip to sit with her in the bare room, with its two
horse-hair couches and the flaring gas, and listen to her. She had long
ceased to look upon the people who came in as human beings; they were
drunks, or broken arms, or cut throats. She took the vice and misery and
cruelty of the world as a matter of course; she found nothing to praise or
blame in human actions: she accepted. She had a certain grim humour.

"I remember one suicide," she said to Philip, "who threw himself into the
Thames. They fished him out and brought him here, and ten days later he
developed typhoid fever from swallowing Thames water."

"Did he die?"

"Yes, he did all right. I could never make up my mind if it was suicide or
not.... They're a funny lot, suicides. I remember one man who couldn't