AT THE SIGN OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN

“That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or by water . . . all sick persons, and young children.”—­The litany.

“I love my love with a H’aitch, because he’s ’andsome—­”

Tilda turned over on her right side—­she could do so now without pain—­ and lifting herself a little, eyed the occupant of the next bed.  The other six beds in the ward were empty.

“I ’ate ’im, because—­look ’ere, I don’t believe you’re listenin’?”

The figure in the next bed stirred feebly; the figure of a woman, straight and gaunt under the hospital bedclothes.  A tress of her hair had come uncoiled and looped itself across the pillow—­reddish auburn hair, streaked with grey.  She had been brought in, three nights ago, drenched, bedraggled, chattering in a high fever; a case of acute pneumonia.  Her delirium had kept Tilda—­who was preternaturally sharp for her nine years—­awake and curious during the better part of two night-watches.  Thereafter, for a day and a night and half a day, the patient had lain somnolent, breathing hard, at intervals feebly conscious.  In one of these intervals her eyes had wandered and found the child; and since then had painfully sought her a dozen times, and found her again and rested on her.

Tilda, meeting that look, had done her best.  The code of the show-folk, to whom she belonged, ruled that persons in trouble were to be helped.  Moreover, the long whitewashed ward, with its seven oblong windows set high in the wall—­the smell of it, the solitude, the silence—­bored her inexpressibly.  She had lain here three weeks with a hurt thigh-bone bruised, but luckily not splintered, by the kick of a performing pony.

The ward reeked of yellow soap and iodoform.  She would have exchanged these odours at the price of her soul—­but souls are not vendible, and besides she did not know she possessed one—­for the familiar redolences of naphtha and horse-dung and trodden turf.  These were far away:  they had quite forsaken her, or at best floated idly across her dreams.  What held her to fortitude had been the drone and intermittent hoot of a steam-organ many streets away.  It belonged to a roundabout, and regularly tuned up towards evening; so distant that Tilda could not distinguish one tune from another; only the thud of its bass mingled with the buzz of a fly on the window and with the hard breathing of the sick woman.

Sick persons must be amused:  and Tilda, after trying the patient unsuccessfully with a few jokes from the repertoire of her own favourite clown, had fallen back upon “I love my love”—­about the only game known to her that dispensed with physical exertion.

“Sleepin’, are you? . . .  Well, I’ll chance it and go on.  I ’ate ’im because he’s ’aughty—­or ’igh-born, if you like—­”

The figure beneath the bedclothes did not stir.  Tilda lifted herself an inch higher on the elbow; lifted her voice too as she went on: