Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/54

42 are nearly always some people waiting in it. It may be a sniffing woman who has called for her dead husband's clothes. It may be a still breathless messenger with a "midwifery card" in her hand, or a girl waiting for a dose of emergency medicine. There may be some minor accident cases also, such as a torn finger, a black eye like a bursting plum, a child who has swallowed a halfpenny, and a woman who has been "knocked about cruel," but has little to show for it except a noisy desire to have her husband "locked up." In certain days of stress, as on Saturday nights, when the air is heavy with alcohol, or on the occasion of a "big" dock accident, the waiting-room is crowded with excited folk, with patients waiting their turn to be dressed, with policemen, busybodies, reporters and friends of the injured.

On each side of the waiting-hall is a dressing-room—one for women, one for men. Into these rooms the accident cases are taken one after the other. Here the house surgeon and his dressers are engaged, and here the many-sided drama of the Receiving Room reaches its culminating point. It is an uninviting room, very plain, and, like the outer hall, bears an aspect of callous unconcern. By the window is a suspiciously large sink, and on the ledge above it a number of pewter porringers.