“I wonder whether holding down people suffering from delirium tremens is my job,” said I.  “If so, I’m afraid I shan’t like it.”

“If it’s really your job,” replied Campion, “you will.  You must.  You can’t help it.  God made man so.”

It was only an hour or two later when, for the first time in my life, I came into practical touch with human misery, that I recognised the truth of Campion’s perfervid optimism.  No one could like our task that night in its outer essence.  For a time it revolted me.  The atmosphere of the close, dirty room, bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, bathroom, laundry—­all in one, the home of man, wife and two children, caught me by the throat.  It was sour.  The physical contact with the flesh of the unclean, gibbering, shivering, maniacal brute on the foul bed was unutterably repugnant to me.  Now and again, during intervals of comparative calm, I was forced to put my head out of the window to breathe the air of the street.  Even that was tainted, for a fried-fish shop across the way and a public-house next door billowed forth their nauseating odours.  After a while access to the window was denied me.  A mattress and some rude coverings were stretched beneath it—­the children’s bed—­on which we persuaded the helpless, dreary wife to lie down and try to rest.  A neighbour had taken in the children for the night.  The wife was a skinny, grey-faced, lined woman of six-and-twenty.  In her attitude of hopeless incompetence she shed around her an atmosphere of unspeakable depression.  Although I could not get to the window, I was glad when she lay down and spared me the sight of her moving fecklessly about the room or weeping huddled up on a broken-backed wooden chair and looking more like a half-animated dish-clout than a woman.

The poor wretch on the bed was a journeyman tailor who, when sober, could earn fair wages.  The cry of the wife, before Campion awed her into comparative silence, was a monotonous upbraiding of her husband for bringing them down to this poverty.  It seemed impossible to touch her intelligence and make her understand that no words from her or any one could reach his consciousness.  His violence, his screams, his threats, the horrors of his fear left her unmoved.  We were there to guard her from physical danger, and that to her was all that mattered.

In the course of an hour or so the nausea left me.  I felt braced by the grimness of the thing, and during the paroxysms I had no time to think of anything but the mechanical work in hand.  It was all that Campion and I, both fairly able-bodied men, could do to keep the puny little tailor in his bed.  Horrible shapes menaced him from which he fought madly to escape.  He writhed and shrieked with terror.  Once he caught my hand in his teeth and bit it, and Campion had some difficulty in relaxing the wretch’s jaw.  Between the paroxysms Campion and I sat on the bed watching him, scarcely exchanging a word.  The