第2章 The Gate Log

The gate was Redvers Yarrell's, and he kept it the way other men keep accounts, in his head first and on the page second. There were two ways into the Marrowden Infirmary and both of them passed him. The front door on the slope was for the governors and the paying lodgers and the visitors who had been written down as expected, and it was kept clean and swept and had a mat. The yard gate at the back, off the lane, was for coals and provisions and laundry and the paupers who came in on the parish cart and the dead who went out in the night, and it had a stone threshold worn into a hollow by forty years of wheels. Yarrell had been a gatekeeper for the parish before he was a gatekeeper for the infirmary, and he knew the trick of the job, which was not to hurry. When someone came to the yard gate in the morning and said they were sick, he did not send them away and he did not let them in. He stood in the doorway of his lodge with the log open on the shelf and he asked them their name and their parish and the name of the person who had signed the paper, and if they had no paper he asked them where they lived, and he wrote it all down whether or not it led anywhere, because his uncle, who had kept a gate at the docks, had told him once that a gatekeeper who writes everything down is never accused of writing too little. The log went back to the opening. Every line was the same shape: hour, name, business, out. The business column was the one that filled up with the whole city. Coal, six hundredweight, in. Two coffins, plain, in. Mrs. Crendal, visitor, out at four. Parish cart, two inmates, in. Doctor Fenmore's trap, out at nine. The dead, out, two, and the hour, and the ward they came from, and the porter's own initials at the end of the line, R. Y., which he wrote in the same small hand every time, so that a stranger looking at the book would think one man had written the whole of it and been awake for sixty years. He had a key to every door that mattered and could not open most of them anyway, because the wards were the matron's and the stores were the steward's and the gate was the only room in the building that belonged to him entire. He kept a fire in it in winter and a chair and a shelf with a tin of tea and, under the shelf, a small box of things people had lost and never claimed: a boot, a wedding ring, a comb, a printed card with a name on it, one child's wooden horse. He never threw anything away. A gatekeeper's box of lost things was the only property he owned that anyone would miss if it went. The paying lodgers came to the front door, and Yarrell came to know them by the sound of their knock, because the front door had a brass knocker and the people who used it had grown up using knockers and did it twice, evenly, and then waited as though they had all afternoon, which they generally did. The paupers came to the yard and did not knock at all, or knocked once and quickly, like people who expected the door to be shut in their face and were braced for it. When Dr. Fenmore asked him one day to keep the two doors in his log as though they were one building, Yarrell said he would do it, and did, and saw the point of it, and hated it a little. A log that showed the front door and the yard gate in the same column made it look as though everyone who came to the Marrowden Infirmary came to the same place. It was not true. Yarrell had been in the building long enough to know that the sick were treated by their money before they were treated by their illness, and that the same fever in a paying room upstairs and in a yard-ward bed were two different fevers with two different ends. One night in March a man came to the yard gate who had no paper and no parish and no name worth writing down. He had been vomiting blood since the afternoon, and he stood at the lodge door with one hand against the wall and asked, without saying it, to be let in. The rule was plain. A patient without a parish paper and without payment could not be admitted except in an emergency, and an emergency was not a thing a porter was allowed to decide. Yarrell looked at the man and looked at the log and looked at the lamp over the door, and then he set the log down and walked up the lane to the front door and rang the bell, which he had already been told twice not to do at night. When the house surgeon came down he said only that a man was collapsing at the yard gate, and the surgeon came out in his coat and took one look and had the man carried in, and the man was dead by the morning. In the log Yarrell wrote him in as an emergency admission, with the hour and the surgeon's initials, and left the parish blank, and no one ever asked him about the blank, because the blank was the one part of the line that was true. He did what he could, which was small. When the parish cart brought in an old woman one February night with her feet wrapped in sacking and no paper, he let her sit in the lodge by the fire for half an hour and gave her tea while the clerk was roused, so that she would arrive in the ward warm and not be written down as a nuisance before she was written down as a patient. When a man came to the yard gate at three in the morning with his hand split open by a machine and no way to pay, Yarrell rang the bell at the front door, which he was not supposed to do, and said the words that opened the door of the theatre, which were that the man would lose the hand by daylight if nobody looked at it. No one ever asked him why the front-door bell had rung at three. There was no one awake to ask. The infirmary at night was a building of corridors and one lamp on each landing and a gatekeeper who could hear a cart from the top of the lane and know, from the sound of the wheels, whether it was coal or a corpse. ---