As soon as there was a bit of mist you couldn’t see the big hospital, yet it was a building that had bulk and breadth… It melted into the surroundings, you had to go near it, almost touch it. It was painted like fog with some yellow and raspberry added. It’s a slimy depressing mess from October on, gets into everything, mixes up everything, your head, things, makes you gently dizzy so you don’t know what time it is and that time is passing and night falling. It rises up from the river, sweeps in from the end of the neighborhood, takes in all the landings, docks, people and trams.. makes everything hazy and stumpy..
Days when it really streams in you can’t see the hospital from La Vaillance, the pub opposite.. when it comes steaming out, in enormous torrents.. You just catch little gleams… it blinks a little in the windows.. and the big yellow lantern at the door.. It’s almost blotted out already.. It’s not a bad thing for your worries.. they drift away… it leaves you quiet. I can’t help saying that when I die I’d like to be left on the sidewalk as is, just like that, all alone in front of the London… let everyone go away.. you wouldn’t see any thing happening. I think I’d be carried off gently. That’s my notion.. faith in the gloom… It hasn’t any basis, of course. Ah! good thing I’m aware of it. I’m joking, it’s just an impression. brief futility.. an idle thought. Boy!
^^nce her ass was sewn up, Joconde was impossible! there was no holding her!. All the way to the end of the common ward you could hear her roaring out awful curses against Angele, that snake in the grass, whom she wanted to finish off right away, to go home and pound her to a jelly once and for all. Good thing she couldn’t do anything! she lay stiff in bed, wrapped up from her neck to her heels… in bandages, cotton. wasn’t allowed to move..
She stank of iodoform, she sickened the whole ward more with her stink than her screaming! Never a second’s silence. The nurses, who weren’t prudish, snapped right back at her, hung on till they got the last word.. That caused some awful sessions. Always thinking about Angele, that ghastly hag, she boiled in the sheets. /'That fart! that fart!” that’s what she called her, brooding away. "Murdering an arteezt!.. The jealousy of that bitch!. Zlut!. Oh! woe eez me!”
The suffering patients protested right and left. that they were fed up with the noise..
There were all kinds of patients around.. but mostly women of the neighborhood, housewives and maids, some waitresses from the bars, and some Chinese, too.. and also two or three Negresses, women under treatment.. most of them for the belly.. breasts, and also for the skin.. running sores, ulcers, chronic cases. Joconde wasn’t in for long, but all the same at least twenty-five days like that on her back, that was Clodovitz’ opinion, absolutely motionless. He came by at least three or four times a day to examine and check. He came to look at her drain, whether it was running… He was as attentive as could be.. Recommended by Cascade, that wasn’t to be sneezed at!.. Clodovitz wasn’t old, yet he already looked rheumatic, sickly, shriveled up, and his joints full of arthritis… He even made the patients laugh at his aches, he made dry, ropy, creaky noises at will..
"Ah! if you had my knees,” he’d answer when they complained. "You’d see something! And my shoulders! And my back! Boy! What would you say then?.. And I’ve got to go running around! I don’t lie in bed!”
Rushing through the wards, up and down the five flights, three times a day, he’d ask on the run how things were going. And that nose of his! unbelievable! out of Punch and Judy! it dragged him along! He’d lean forward everywhere, over everything, nearsighted as a dozen moles, his big popping eyes rolling under his glasses. As soon as he’d start spouting, it would all shake rhythmically in time with the words, nervous by nature, his ears would wiggle too, sticking out, wide-open, wings keeping his head up, but gray, like a bat’s. He was really pretty homely. He scared certain patients. but a kindly smile, ah! no denying it! a kind of girl’s smile, never brusque, never impatient, always ready to be pleasant, to make himself agreeable, to put in the right word, in the teeth of destiny and fatigue!.. a word of comfort, a compliment, to the worst wallowing pissy flattened-out bellyacher, all delicacy with the worst down-and-outers! with the most snarling tiresome sluts.. rotting and peevish, the dregs of the "chronic” wards, where the others, the "staff” doctors, practically never set foot. there were some pretty queer customers, hard to imagine such perfect wrecks, who nevertheless were pests for months and months. some for years it seems.. who fell away piecemeal, bit by bit, one day an eye, the nose, a ball, then some spleen, a pinky, it was a kind of battle with the big bite, the horror inside gnawing away, without a gun or saber or cannon, that rips a guy’s whole works apart, that drills away at him piece by piece, that comes from nowhere, from no sky, and one fine day he no longer exists, skinned alive, cut up nibbled with ulcers, just like that, with little squeals, red hiccups, groanings and prayers and awful pleading. Ave Maria! Sweet Jesu! Jesus! as the tenderhearted English sob, the elite of sensibility.
And what an assortment, a choice, a whole world, a calamity bazaar, departments for everything, for the stomach, heart, kidneys, bowels, the eight and fifty common wards of the London Freeborn Hospital! Especially during the winter months when there was coughing!. terrific coughing! at least ninety-three wards! with catarrhs all over, besides the street accidents which came up in series. often ten or fifteen at a time. mornings when the fog was too thick..
In the wards themselves it was dark from late September on, except for two or three hours in the morning, and then very close to the window, the high guillotines, it came from the river in big dense waves, it penetrated the whole building, it choked the gaslights, the lamps in the corridors, it brought in a smell of coal tar, the coal smoke from the port, and then the echo of the ships, the movements on the docks, the cries..
Clovis fortified himself for the checkup with an enormous oil lantern, a "mail coach,” when someone called him as he passed, he could hardly see, but heard well, he’d come very close to the bed, he’d light up their faces, it made a white circle all around, the face of the suffering chap stood out in the darkness, he’d lean over against him, he’d speak to him in a hushed voice. "Sh! Sh!” he’d say. “Sh! old boy! Don’t wake anyone.. I’ll be right back! I’ll give you your little injection!.. Soon be over!.. Soon be over!”
The same words to each sufferer.. and from one ward to another. on all floors. "Soon be over!”. It was a kind of quirk of his.
He did lots of injections in the course of a night, lots and lots!.. among the women and the men… He was so nearsighted that I’d hold his lantern for him up against it.. right against the buttock… so he’d dig the needle straight in.. not sideways or crossways..