"I began at the wrong end," he acknowledged. "But let me put Dillon's case before you dismiss me."
She softened. "It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow that I am here——"
"Because you think he needs help—and that you can help him?"
But she held back once more. "Please tell me about him first," she said, walking on.
Amherst met the request with another question. "I wonder how much you know about factory life?"
"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to pick up in these two days at the hospital."
He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair, and said, half to himself: "That might be a good deal."
She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well, I won't try to put the general situation before you, though Dillon's accident is really the result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the accident his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later."
Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do you say?"
"That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon hasn't been in it long—he worked his way up at the mills from being a bobbin-boy—and he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man must be in there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch."
"But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?"
"To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and then."
"I see. Go on," she murmured.
"That's the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb this morning that Dillon's hand would certainly be saved, and that he might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would present him with an artificial finger or two."
Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. "Mr. Amherst—who gave you this version of Dr. Disbrow's report?"
"The manager himself."
"Verbally?"
"No—he showed me Disbrow's letter."
For a moment or two they walked on silently through the quiet street; then she said, in a voice still stirred with feeling: "As I told you this afternoon, Dr. Disbrow has said nothing in my hearing."
"And Mrs. Ogan?"
"Oh, Mrs. Ogan—" Her voice broke in a ripple of irony. "Mrs. Ogan 'feels it to be such a beautiful dispensation, my dear, that, owing to a death that very morning in the surgical ward, we happened to have a bed ready for the poor man within three hours of the accident.'" She had exchanged her deep throat-tones for a high reedy note which perfectly simulated the matron's lady-like inflections.
Amherst, at the change, turned on her with a boyish burst of laughter: she joined in it, and for a moment they were blent in that closest of unions, the discovery of a common fund of humour.
She was the first to grow grave. "That three hours' delay didn't help matters—how is it there is no emergency hospital at the mills?"
Amherst laughed again, but in a different key. "That's part of the larger question, which we haven't time for now." He waited a moment, and then added: "You've not yet given me your own impression of Dillon's case."
"You shall have it, if you saw that letter. Dillon will certainly lose his hand—and probably the whole arm." She spoke with a thrilling of her slight frame that transformed the dispassionate professional into a girl shaken with indignant pity.
Amherst stood still before her. "Good God! Never anything but useless lumber?"
"Never——"
"And he won't die?"
"Alas!"
"He has a consumptive wife and three children. She ruined her health swallowing cotton-dust at the factory," Amherst continued.
"So she told me yesterday."
He turned in surprise. "You've had a talk with her?"
"I went out to Westmore last night. I was haunted by her face when she came to the hospital. She looks forty, but she told me she was only twenty-six." Miss Brent paused to steady her voice. "It's the curse of my trade that it's always tempting me to interfere in cases where I can do no possible good. The fact is, I'm not fit to be a nurse—I shall live and die a wretched sentimentalist!" she ended, with an angry dash at the tears on her veil.
Her companion walked on in silence till she had regained her composure. Then he said: "What did you think of Westmore?"
"I think it's one of the worst places I ever saw—and I am not unused to slums. It looks so dead. The slums of big cities are much more cheerful."
He made no answer, and after a moment she asked: "Does the cotton-dust always affect the lungs?"
"It's likely to, where there is the least phthisical tendency. But of course the harm could be immensely reduced by taking up the old rough floors which hold the dust, and by thorough cleanliness and ventilation."
"What does the company do in such cases? Where an operative breaks down at twenty-five?"
"The company says there was a phthisical tendency."
"And will they give nothing in return for the two lives they have taken?"
"They will probably pay for Dillon's care at the hospital, and they have taken the wife back as a scrubber."
"To clean those uncleanable floors? She's not fit for it!"
"She must work, fit for it or not; and there is less strain in scrubbing than in bending over the looms or cards. The pay is lower, of course, but she's very grateful for being taken back at all, now that she's no longer a first-class worker."
Miss Brent's face glowed with a fine wrath. "She can't possibly stand more than two or three months of it without breaking down!"
"Well, you see they've told her that in less than that time her husband will be at work again."
"And what will the company do for them when the wife is a hopeless invalid, and the husband a cripple?"
Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he had met her suggestion of an emergency hospital. "I know what I should do if I could get anywhere near Dillon—give him an overdose of morphine, and let the widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start."
She looked at him curiously. "Should you, I wonder?"
"If I saw the suffering as you see it, and knew the circumstances as I know them, I believe I should feel justified—" He broke off. "In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?"
She mused. "One might … but perhaps the professional instinct to save would always come first."
"To save—what? When all the good of life is gone?"
"I daresay," she sighed, "poor Dillon would do it himself if he could—when he realizes that all the good is gone."
"Yes, but he can't do it himself; and it's the irony of such cases that his employers, after ruining his life, will do all they can to patch up the ruins."
"But that at least ought to count in their favour."