Chapter 95 Chapter 95

When they got back to London from Brighton Philip went to the surgical ward to do dressings.He was not as interested in surgery as he was in internal medicine, because internal medicine is a science based on experience, which gives people more room for imagination, and besides, the work of surgery is correspondingly more tiring than that of internal medicine .He has to go to lectures from nine to ten in the morning.As soon as the class was over, I went to the ward to bandage the wound, remove the stitches, change the bandage, and I was busy.Philip boasted that he was good at putting on bandages.Whenever the guardian said a word of approval, he always felt a sweet feeling in his heart after hearing it.There are always several afternoons of surgical operations every week. At this time, Philip will wear a white coat and stand in the assistant's position in the operation demonstration room, handing over the instruments needed by the surgeon at any time, or using a sponge to absorb the dirty blood. Let the surgeon see where to start.Once an operation is performed on an uncommon and difficult disease, the operation demonstration room is full of people, but usually only five or six students are present.The operation then proceeded in an orderly manner, in an atmosphere of tranquility which Philip admired.At that time, the world seemed to love appendicitis, and how many patients were sent to the operating room to have their cecum removed!Philip was working as a dresser for a surgeon who was engaged in a friendly contest with a colleague of who could remove the cecum faster and who would make the smaller incision.

Soon, Philip was assigned to be in charge of accident emergency patients.The packers took turns to take on this job, and they were on duty for three days in a row.During this time, they have to stay in the hospital and eat three meals a day in the common room.There was a room near the temporary containment room on the ground floor of the building that contained a bed that was folded up and stored in a closet during the day.No matter day or night, the dresser on duty has to be on call, ready to take care of the injured patients who are brought in, and is exhausted from morning till night.At night, every hour or two, the bell above the head rang non-stop; when the bell rang, the dresser on duty jumped out of bed instinctively.Saturday night was of course the busiest, especially when the taverns were closed and the hospital was extremely busy.The police sent in drunks one by one.At this point, they have to quickly get the wine out of their stomachs with stomach pumps.The women who were sent in were in a worse condition than those drunks. Their husbands either broke their heads or beat their noses to bleed.Some of the women swear by big swears and will go to court to sue their husbands;Faced with all these situations, the dresser will do his best if he can handle it, and if he can't handle it, he will invite the resident doctor.The packers, however, were wary of calling in the resident doctor only as a last resort, because the resident doctor would never go down five flights of stairs to see a doctor without any benefits.The patients who were sent to the hospital ranged from broken fingers to severed throats, all kinds of patients.Boys came to demand bandages for hands that had been run over by machines; passers-by who had been run over by carriages, and children who had either broken their legs or dropped their hands while playing, were sent to the hospital.Occasionally, the police brought in suicide attempts.Philip saw a man with a pale face, a pair of crazy eyes, and a mouth that was spitting out big mouthfuls of blood.After weeks of working in the ward, Philip was tasked with looking after one officer at a time.Seeing that he was still alive, the police officer didn't say a word all day, with an angry and fierce look on his face, and publicly yelled that he would commit suicide as soon as he was discharged from the hospital.The wards are full of patients, and if the police send patients in at this time, the resident doctors will be in a dilemma.If they were asked to carry the patient to the train station for treatment elsewhere, if the patient died at the train station, the newspapers would publish sensational remarks.But sometimes it is difficult to determine whether the patient is dying or drunk.Philip did not go to bed until he was too tired to be able to bear it, so that he would not have to get up again after lying down for an hour.He went to the emergency room to chat with the female nurse on night shift during his work break.This woman is a masculine, gray-haired woman who has been a nurse in the emergency department for twenty years.She likes this job very much, because no matter what she does, she can decide on her own, and there are no other nurses to bother her.She was clumsy at work, but very competent, and never made a mistake in dealing with a critical patient.The dressers were either fledgling and inexperienced, or panicked whenever something happened, but when they saw her present, they suddenly felt infinite strength added to their bodies.She had seen hundreds of dressers but never had a single impression in her mind of whoever they were she called Mr. Brown.When they advised her not to call them Mr. Brown and told her their real names, she just nodded and continued to call them Mr. Brown afterwards.Her room was unfurnished, with only two horsehair-like benches and a gas lamp that glowed brightly.Philip sat listening to her talk with interest.She had long ceased to treat the patients brought into the hospital as human beings.In her eyes, they were just drunks, broken arms, and slit throats.She took sickness, misfortune, and the cruelty of the world for granted, and felt neither praise nor blame in the actions of men.She acquiesced.She has a certain dry sense of humor.

"There was a man who committed suicide that I remember vividly," she said to Philip. "The man jumped into the Thames. They fished him out and brought him here. But ten days later he got typhoid from drinking the Thames." "Is he dead?" "Yes, he's dead. I've never been sure if he committed suicide... It's funny too, and he's committing suicide. I remember a guy who couldn't get a job and his wife died, so he took Pawned all the clothes and bought a revolver with the money. He disfigured himself and knocked out one eye, but he didn't die. And guess what he did, he was blind in one eye and a piece of his skin was shaved off, but he came to the conclusion that the world wasn't so bad after all. He's been doing pretty well since. One thing I've been keeping an eye on is that People don't kill themselves for love like you think. It's pure fiction. People commit suicide because they don't have money. I don't know why."

"It seems that money is more important than love," Philip said. At that time, the matter of money was circling in his mind from time to time.He used to say that two people spent about the same as one, but now it seemed that that was too frivolous, when in fact it was not the case at all.He was more and more worried about his expenses.Mild found that De was not a good housekeeper. It would cost a lot for her to manage the house, as if they were eating in restaurants several times a day.Besides, the boy had to buy clothes, and Mildred had to buy boots, and other odds and ends she couldn't live without them.When they got back to London from Brighton, Mildred kept saying she was going out and looking for work, but she didn't act.A few days later, a bad cold caused her to be bedridden for half a month.After she recovered, she went out and tried several times according to the job advertisements, but the result was either that her seat was taken because she was late, or she gave up because the work was too heavy for her.Once, a place offered her to work for fourteen shillings a week, but she didn't think she should be paid just that.

"It doesn't do you any good to accept whatever the offer is," she said plausibly. "If you are too self-deprecating, people will look down on you." "I don't think fourteen shillings a week is a lot," remarked Philip dryly. Philip could not help thinking that the fourteen shillings would ease the expenses of the family.But Mildred was already hinting to Philip that the reason she couldn't get a job was that she didn't have a decent dress on when she went to see her employer.Philip bought one for her.Although she went out and tried several times, Philip thought that she was not sincerely looking for a job at all, and she didn't want to do anything.The only way of making money that Philip knew was the stock exchange.He got the sweetness from his first try in summer, and now he is anxious to have another good luck.But fighting broke out in the Transvaal and everything in South Africa came to a standstill.Macalister told Philip that within a month Redvers Buller would be coming into Pretoria and the market would be bullish then.Now they can only wait patiently, waiting for the British counterattack to make prices fall, and then they may be able to buy stocks.Philip was impatiently turning the pages of the "Market Tales" column in his usual paper.He was worried and irritable, and he lost his temper at every turn.Once or twice he spoke sharply to Mildred, but Mildred, who had neither tact nor patience, retaliated in the face of an outburst of temper, which resulted in a quarrel.As usual, Philip felt extremely remorse for what he had done, but Mildred had no tolerance for life. For several days in a row, she didn't show Philip a little bit of color, and she pretended to eat and didn't clean the room on purpose. Throwing clothes and other things all over the living room, trying to irritate Philip in different ways, disturbing him for a moment.Philip watched the progress of the war with all his heart, and greedily flipped through the newspaper morning and night, but she was not interested in everything in front of her.She had met a few people on the street, and one of them had asked her if she wanted the curate to come and see her.Mildred put on a wedding ring and called herself Mrs. Carey.On the walls of the apartment hung two or three paintings by Philip in Paris, two of which were nudes of women, and one of Miguel Ajuria, on which Miguel Ajuria Clenching his fists, he stood upright with his legs apart.Philip hung these pictures on the wall, because they were his best pictures, and when they looked at them he thought of the good days he had spent in Paris.Mildred had long since disliked these nude paintings.

"Philip, I want you to take those pictures down," she said one day when she couldn't hold back at last. "After Mrs. Foreman, who lives in No. 13, came yesterday afternoon, I didn't know what to do with my eyes. I found her staring at the pictures." "What happened to those pictures?" "Those pictures are very indecent. As I say, the room is full of nudes. It's a nuisance. Besides, it's not good for my child. She's starting to understand." "Why are you so vulgar?" "Vulgar? I call it tasteful and elegant. I haven't said anything about these paintings. Do you think I like to look at those naked people in the paintings all day long?"

"Mildred, why don't you have a sense of humor?" Philip asked coldly. "I don't know what this has to do with a sense of humor. I really want to reach out and pick them off. If you want to hear what I think of these pictures, I'll tell you the truth, I think they're disgusting." "I don't want to know what you think, and I don't allow you to touch these paintings." Whenever Mildred got angry with Philip, she punished Philip by taking it out on her children.The little girl liked Philip as much as Philip liked her.It was a great pleasure for her to crawl into Philip's bedroom every morning (she was almost two years old and could already walk) and be carried into his bed immediately.Whenever Mildred refused to let her climb, she would cry out with grief.As soon as Philip persuaded, Mildred immediately contradicted:

"I don't want her to get into that habit." Now, if Philip had said anything more, she would have said: "How I discipline my child has nothing to do with you. Let others hear it and think you are her father. I am her mother. I should know what is good for her. Shouldn't I ?" Philip was very annoyed that Mildred should be so ignorant.Philip, however, was so indifferent to her now that he was seldom angry with her.Philip was getting used to her walking around him.Soon Christmas came, and Philip had a few days off.He brought home some holly trees and decorated the room.On Christmas Day, he also presented several small presents to Mildred and her daughter respectively.There were only two of them in all, so they couldn't have turkey.But Mildred roasted a chicken, and cooked a Christmas pudding, which she bought from the street grocer.They also drank a bottle of wine.After supper Philip sat in an easy-chair by the fire, smoking his pipe.He was not used to drinking wine, a few drops of wine made him forget for a while what he had been worrying about money recently.He felt refreshed.Presently Mildred came in and told him that the girl wanted him to kiss her.Philip went into Mildred's bedroom with a smile on his face.Then, he coaxed the child to close his eyes and go to sleep, and dimmed the gas lamp casually.When he came out of the bedroom, he was afraid that the child would cry, so he left the door open.He went back to the living room.

"Where are you sitting?" he asked Mildred. "You're still sitting in the easy chair. I'm sitting on the floor." He settled into the easy chair, and Mildred sat on the floor in front of the fire, with her back leaning on Philip's knees.At this moment, he couldn't help thinking back to the scene in the room on Vauxhall Bridge Road.At that time, the two of them sat like this, the difference was that their seats were reversed.He, Philip, was sitting on the floor with his head on Mildred's lap.How passionately he had loved her then!Right now, there is a kind of warmth in his heart that he hasn't felt for a long time.He seemed to feel the girl's soft arms still around his neck.

"Are you comfortable?" he asked Mildred. Mildred looked up at Philip with a smile on her face, and then nodded.They both looked at the flames in the fireplace in a trance, and neither of them spoke.At last Mildred turned and gazed at Philip with a curious twinkle in her eye. "You haven't kissed me once since I've come here. Do you know that?" she said suddenly. "Do you want me to kiss?" Philip asked with a smile. "I guess you'll never show you like me that way again?" "I like you a lot." "You prefer my daughter."

Philip did not answer, and now Mildred pressed her cheek against his hand. "You're not mad at me anymore?" she asked again, looking at the floor. "Why should I be mad at you?" "I never liked you as much as I do now. I learned to love you only through hard work and suffering." Hearing her say such words, Philip's heart suddenly turned cold.The words she used were all picked up from the cheap novels she had read.He couldn't help wondering if she really meant that when she said this.Perhaps she didn't know how to express her real feelings except by using the hyperbole she had learned from the Home Economics Herald. "It seems so surreal for the two of us to live together like this." Philip did not answer for a long time, and silence fell upon them both again.But at last Philip spoke, and there seemed to be no end to it. "Don't be angry with me. There's really no way for this kind of thing to happen. I know I used to think you were mean and cruel because of the things you did, but I was too stupid. You didn't love me in the past, why Blaming you for this is absurd. I used to think I could find a way to make you love me, but I see now that it's impossible. I don't know what it is that makes someone fall in love with you, but whatever it is Therefore, there is only one condition at work, if you do not have this condition, no matter how good your heart is, no matter how generous you are, you will never be able to create this condition." "I should have thought that if you loved me with all your heart, you should still love me." "I should have thought so, too. I remember it vividly. I used to think that this love would last forever. At that time, I felt that I would rather die than live without you. I often longed to have Then one day, when you fade away and no one likes you, I will be with you forever." Mildenand was silent.Then she stood up and said she was going to bed and rested.She smiled timidly at Philip. "It's Christmas, Philip, will you kiss me good-bye?" Philip laughed, his cheeks flushed slightly.He kissed Mildred.Mildred went into the bedroom, and he buried himself in his book.