SEVENTY-THREE
The Doctor was exhausted: his eyes red with lack of sleep, his features wasted and drawn. His skill was in unending demand. The flood had gathered in its wake a hundred subsidiary disasters.
In a long attic room which became known as the hospital, the improvised beds were not only filled with cases of fracture and accident of every description, but with the victims of exhaustion, and of various sicknesses resulting from the dank and unhealthy conditions.
He was now upon his way to a typical accident. The news had been brought to him of yet another case of broken bones. A man had fallen apparently while trying to carry a heavy crate up a slippery stairway, its treads swimming in rain water. On reaching the place the Doctor found that it was a clean break of the femur. The man was lifted onto the professional raft at the spacious centre of which the Doctor could apply his splints or perform whatever temporary operation was necessary, while at the same time his orderly at the rear propelled them back in the direction of the hospital.
Dipping his long pole with excellent regularity the orderly would send the raft sliding steadily along the corridors. On this particular occasion as the raft, when about halfway to its goal, crept gingerly through a wooden arch somewhat narrow and difficult of manoeuvre, and came out into what must have once been a ballroom, for in one of its hexagonal corners the upper levels of an ornate platform emerged above the surface, suggesting that an orchestra once filled the place with music – as the raft edged itself out of the restricted passageway and floated forward into all this wealth of space, Doctor Prunesquallor sank back against the rolled up mattress he kept towards the stern of the raft. At his feet lay the man he had been attending, his trouser torn open from heel to hip; his thigh in a splint. The white bandages, bound with a beautiful and firm deliberation, were reflected in the ballroom water.
The Doctor shut his eyes. He hardly knew what was happening about him. His head swam; but when he heard his raft being hailed by some kind of dugout that was being paddled in his direction from the far end of the ballroom he raised an eyelid.
It was indeed a dugout that was drawing closer, a long, absurd affair, obviously made by the men who were now manning it, for the Carvers would never have allowed such an object to leave their workshops. At its stern, with his hand on the tiller was Perch-Prism, who was obviously in command. His black-gowned crew, using their mortar-boards as paddles, sat in varying degrees of dejection, one behind the other. They disliked not being able to face the way they were going, and resented Perch-Prism’s captaincy and consequent control over their watery progress. However, Bellgrove had appointed Perch-Prism to his post and given orders (which he had never dreamed would be carried out) that his staff should help patrol the waterways. Schooling, of course, had become impossible, and the pupils, now that the rain had stopped, spent most of their time leaping and diving from the battlements, the turrets, the flying buttresses, the tops of towers, from any and every vantage point, into the deep clear water where they swam like a plague of frogs in and out of windows and over the wide breast of the flood, their shrill screams sounding from near and far.
And so the staff were free of scholastic duties. They had little to do but yearn for the old days, and to chaff one another until the chaff became acrimonious and a morose and tacit silence had fallen upon them and none of them had anything original left to say about the flood.
Opus Fluke, the stern oar, brooded darkly over the armchair that the flood had swallowed – the armchair which he had inhabited for over forty years – the filthy, mouldering, hideous and most necessary support of his existence, the famous ‘Fluke’s cradle’ of the Common-Room – it had gone for ever.
Behind him in the dugout sat Flannelcat, a poor oarsman if ever there was one. For Flannelcat to be glum and speechless was nothing new. If Fluke brooded on the death of an armchair, Flannelcat brooded on the death of all things and had done so for as long as anyone could remember. He had always been ineffectual and a misery to himself and others, and so, having plumbed the depths for so long, this flood was a mere nothing to him.
