Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/119

Rh There followed a period of commotion. A crowd gathered in the dingy lane with faces upturned to the window from the broken panes of which smoke was escaping. People pressed up the stair, now thick with the smell of paraffin and of burning flesh. The room, utterly wrecked, was in darkness, but by the light of an unsteady candle stuck in a bottle the body of the woman, moaning with pain, was dragged out. An improvised stretcher was obtained and on it the poor seamstress, wrapped up in a dirty quilt, was marched off to the hospital, followed by a mob. The police had appeared early on the scene and, acting on the evidence of the daughter, had arrested the now terrified drunkard.

When the woman reached the hospital she was still alive but in acute suffering. She was taken into the female accident ward and placed on a bed in a corner by the door. The hour was very late and the ward had been long closed down for the night. It was almost in darkness. The gas jets were lowered and the little light they shed fell upon the white figures of alarmed patients sitting up in bed to watch this sudden company with something dreadful on a stretcher.

A screen was drawn round the burnt woman's bed, and in this little enclosure, full of shadow, a