menial tasks for them, to wash them and dress
them and undress them, to carry them in my arms. I was to see them
suffer and to learn to respect their gameness, and the wry, "grousing"
humour which is their almost universal trait. In my own wards, and
elsewhere in the hospital, I came in close contact with many cockneys of
the slums. Even when one had not precisely "placed" a patient of this
description, the relatives who came to him on visiting days gave the
clue to the stock from which he sprang. The mother was sometimes a
"flower girl"; the sweetheart, with a very feathered hat, and hair which
evidently lived in curling pins except on great occasions, probably
worked in a factory. These people, if the patient were confined to bed,
sat beside him and talked in a subdued, throaty whisper. But I have seen
the same sort of patient, well enough to walk about, meet his folks on
visiting afternoons at the hospital gate. There is a crowd at the
hospital gate, passing in and going out; hosts of patients are waiting,
some in wheeled chairs and some seated on the iron fence which fringes
the drive. The reunions which occur at that gate are exceedingly public.
Our East Ender is perhaps accustomed to publicity; his slum does not
conceal its feelings--it quarrels, and makes love, without drawn blinds,
and privacy is not an essential of its ardours. Be that as it may, these
meetings at the hospital gate, which are not lacking in pathos, have
sometimes manifested a tear-compelling comicality when the actors in the
drama belonged to the class which produced Bert.

In a higher class there is restraint and a rather stupid bashfulness. I
have seen a wounded youngster flush apprehensively and only peck his
mother in return for her sobbing embrace. That is not Bert's way. He
knows--he is not a fool--that his mother looks a trifle absurd as, with
bonnet awry, she surges perspiringly past the sentries, the tails of her
skirt dragging in the dust and her feet flattened with the weight of
over-clad, unwholesome obesity they have to bear. But he hobbles sprily
to meet her, and his salute is no mere peck, but a smacking kiss, so
noisy that it makes everyone laugh. He laughs too--perhaps he did it on
purpose to raise a laugh: that is his quaint method; but the fact
remains that, whatever his motive, he has managed to please his mother.
She is sniffing loudly yet laughing also, and one could want no better
picture of human affection than this of Be