Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/305

 e swarthy and misshapen and laconic; he had a cleft palate, and his thick yet squeaky voice emitted occasional, bitter sarcasms. His sunken head bulged a big forehead over black and bushy eyebrows, and the eyes beneath them seemed enigmatic to the ordinary male.

For years this man had been the butt of the irresponsibly callow. All sorts of tales were told of him. It was said that as a student he had lived in a slum attic and had helped himself to exist by twanging a banjo and singing comic songs in various pubs. His very swarthiness had made him look unclean, and there had been an occasion when certain bright lads had set out to wash him, but had been surprised and discouraged by the creature's fierceness and its extraordinary simian strength. Persecuted, ridiculed, cold-shouldered, this misshapen little man had pushed on indomitably, showing to the sick and the broken a peculiar, abrupt tenderness, and to the rest of the world a sardonic disdain. The students feared and disliked him. He could bite and did so. To the incompetent and to the cheerfully casual he showed no mercy.

Christopher saw Mr. Orange's deep eyes fixed upon him. The little, thick, simian figure waited, its black coat wrinkled between the shoulders, its big head hanging forward. Its trousers bulged at the knees.

"Sorrell"

The squeaky gruffness of Mr. Orange brought the eyes of the younger man to attention. Kit waited.

"I have one of my headaches coming on."

Kit did not say that he was sorry. He wasn't sorry, nor did Orange expect him to feel so. Orange's headaches were well known, and they had earned him a queer and additional dislike. Everything about the grotesque little surgeon was transmitted into hostility. Even these attacks of migraine were an offence, for they served to bring out the man's venomous tenacity. He would go aside and vomit, and lie down for half an hour, and take powders of aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. He would get up looking ghastly, and go on with his work—if work there was. He clung with both hands, and with feet and teeth, causing the younger men who hungered to get their hands into the blood of precious practical experience to grumble savagely:

"Why doesn't the little beast let us in?"