Bastian Cautley, M.D.
It was half-past five and Dr. Bastian Cautley had put on his house
jacket, loosened his waistcoat, settled down by his library fire with a
pipe and a book, and was thanking Heaven that for once he had an hour to
himself between his afternoon round and his time for consultation. He had
been working hard ever since nine o'clock in the morning; but now nobody
could have looked more superlatively lazy than Bastian Cautley as he
stretched himself on two armchairs in an attitude of reckless ease. His
very intellect (the most unrestful part of him) was at rest; all his
weary being merged in a confused voluptuous sensation, a beatific state
in which smoking became a higher kind of thinking, and thought betrayed
an increasing tendency to end in smoke. The room was double-walled with
book-shelves, and but for the far away underground humming of a happy
maidservant the house was soundless. He rejoiced to think that there was
not a soul in it above stairs to disturb his deep tranquility. At six
o'clock he would have to take his legs off that chair, and get into a
frock-coat; once in the frock-coat he would become another man, all
patience and politeness. After six there would be no pipe and no peace
for him, but the knocking and ringing at his front door would go on
incessantly till seven-thirty. There was flattery in every knock, for it
meant that Dr. Cautley was growing eminent, and that at the ridiculously
early age of nine-and-twenty.
There was a sharp ring now. He turned wearily in his chairs.
"There's another damned patient," said Dr. Cautley.
He was really so eminent that he could afford to think blasphemously of
patients; and he had no love for those who came to consult him before
their time. He sat up with his irritable nerves on edge. The servant was
certainly letting somebody in, and from the soft rustling sounds in the
hall he gathered that somebody was a woman; much patience and much
politeness would then be required of him, and he was feeling anything but
patient and polite.
"Miss Rhoda Vivian" was the name on the card that was brought to him. He
did not know Miss Rhoda Vivian.
The gas-jets were turned low in the consulting-room; when he raised them
he saw a beautiful woman standing by the fire in an attitude of
impatience. He had kept her waiting; and it seemed that this adorable
person knew the value of time. She was not going to waste words either.
As it was impossible to associate her with the ordinary business of the
place, he was prepared for her terse and lucid statement of somebody
else's case. He said he would look round early in the morning (Miss
Vivian looked dissatisfied); or perhaps that evening (Miss Vivian was
dubious); or possibly at once (Miss Vivian smiled in hurried approval).
She was eager to be gone. And when she had gone he stood deliberating.
Miss Quincey was a pathological abstraction, Miss Vivian was a radiant
reality; it was clear that Miss Quincey was not urgent, and that once
safe in her bed she could very well wait till to-morrow; but when he
thought of Miss Vivian he became impressed with the gravity and interest
of Miss Quincey's case.
While the doctor was making up his mind, little Miss Quincey, in her
shabby back bedroom, lay waiting for him, trembling, fretting her nerves
into a fever, starting at imaginary footsteps, and entertaining all kinds
of dismal possibilities. She was convinced that she was going to die, or
worse still, to break down, to be a perpetual invalid. She thought of
several likely illnesses, beginning with general paralysis and ending
with anemia of the brain. It _might_ be anemia of the brain, but she
rather thought it would be general paralysis, because this would be so
much the more disagreeable of the two. Anyhow Rhoda Vivian must have
thought she was pretty bad or she would not have called in a doctor. To
call in a doctor seemed to Miss Quincey next door to invoking Providence
itself; it was the final desperate resort, implying catastrophe and the
end of all things. Oh, dear! Miss Quincey wished he would come up if he
was coming, and get it over.
After all he did not keep her waiting long, and it was over in five
minutes. And yet it was amazing the amount of observation, and insight,
and solid concentrated thought the young man contrived to pack into those
five minutes.
Well--it seemed that it was not general paralysis this time, nor yet
anemia of the brain; but he could tell her more about it in the morning.
Meanwhile she had nothing to do but to do what he told her and stay where
she was till he saw her again. And he was gone before she realized that
he had been there.
Again? So he was coming again, was he? Miss Quincey did not know whether
to be glad or sorry. His presence had given her a rare and curiously
agreeable sense of protection, but she had to think of the expense. She
had to think too of what Mrs. Moon would say to it--of what she would say
to him.
Mrs. Moon had a good deal to say to it. She took Juliana's illness as a
personal affront, as a deliberate back-handed blow struck at the memory
of Tollington Moon. With all the base implications of her daily acts,
Juliana had never attempted anything like this.
"Capers and nonsense," she said, "Juliana has never had an illness in her
life."
She said it to Rhoda Vivian, the bold young person who had taken upon
herself to bring the doctor into the house. Mrs. Moon spoke of the doctor
as if he was a disease.
Fortunately Miss Vivian was by when he endured the first terrifying
encounter. Her manner suggested that she took him under her protection,
stood between him and some unfathomable hostility.
He found the Old Lady disentangling herself with immense dignity from her
maze of furniture. Mrs. Moon was a small woman shrunk with her eighty
years, shrunk almost to extinction in her black woollen gown and black
woollen mittens. Her very face seemed to be vanishing under the immense
shadow of her black net cap. Spirals of thin grey hair stuck flat to her
forehead; she wore other and similar spirals enclosed behind glass in an
enormous brooch; it was the hair of her ancestors, that is to say of the
Quinceys. As the Old Lady looked at Cautley her little black eyes burned
like pinpoints pierced in a paste-board mask.
"I think you've been brought here on a wild goose chase, doctor," said
she, "there is nothing the matter with my niece."
He replied (battling sternly with his desire to laugh) that he would be
delighted if it were so; adding that a wild goose chase was the sport he
preferred to any other.
Here he looked at Miss Vivian to the imminent peril of his self-control.
Mrs. Moon's gaze had embraced them in a common condemnation, and the
subtle sympathy of their youth linked them closer and made them one in
their intimate appreciation of her.
"Then you must be a very singular young man. I thought you doctors were
never happy until you'd found some mare's nest in people's constitutions?
You'd much better let well alone."
"Miss Quincey is very far from well," said Cautley with recovered
gravity, "and I rather fancy she has been let alone too long."
Cautley thought that he had said quite enough to alarm any old lady. And
indeed Mrs. Moon was slowly taking in the idea of disaster, and it sent
her poor wits wandering in the past. Her voice sank suddenly from
grating; antagonism to pensive garrulity.
"I've no faith in medicine," she quavered, "nor in medical men either.
Though to be sure my husband had a brother-in-law once on his wife's
side, Dr. Quincey, Dr. Arnold Quincey, Juliana's father and Louisa's. He
was a medical man. He wrote a book, I daresay you've heard of it;
_Quincey on Diseases of the Heart_ it was. But he's dead now, of one of
'em, poor man. We haven't seen a doctor for five-and-twenty years."
"Then isn't it almost time that you should see one now?" said he,
cheerfully taking his leave. "I shall look round again in the morning."
He looked round again in the morning and sat half an hour with Miss
Quincey; so she had time to take a good look at him.
He was very nice to look at, this young man. He was so clean-cut and tall
and muscular; he had such an intellectual forehead; his mouth was so
firm, you could trust it to tell no secrets; and his eyes (they were dark
and deep set) looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey. Indeed, at
the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did see nothing
but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather worn and
wizened child than a middle-aged woman. He was very gentle and
sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her. As
it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who
in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so young but so
formidably fastidious and refined. She had not expected him to look like
that. All the clever young men she had met had displayed a noble contempt
for appearances. To be sure, Miss Quincey knew but little of the world of
men; for at St. Sidwell's the types were limited to three little
eccentric professors, and the plaster gods in the art studio. But for the
gods she might just as well have lived in a nunnery, for whenever Miss
Quincey thought of a man she thought of something like Louisa's husband,
Andrew Mackinnon, who spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and wore flannel
shirts with celluloid collars, and coats that hung about him all anyhow.
But Dr. Cautley was not in the least like Andrew Mackinnon. He had a
distinguished voice; his clothes fitted him to perfection; and his linen,
irreproachable itself, reproved her silently.
Her eyes left him suddenly and wandered about the room. She was full of
little tremors and agitations; she wished that the towels wouldn't look
so much like dish-cloths; she credited him with powers of microscopic
observation, and wondered if he had noticed the stain on the carpet and
the dust on the book-shelves, and if he would be likely to mistake the
quinine tabloids for vulgar liver pills, or her bottle of hair-wash for
hair-dye. Once released from its unnatural labours, her mind returned
instinctively to the trivial as to its home. She glanced at her hat,
perched conspicuously on the knob of the looking-glass, and a dim sense
of its imperfections came over her and vanished as it came. Then she
tried to compose herself for the verdict.
It did not come all at once. First of all he asked her a great many
questions about herself and her family, whereupon she gave him a complete
pathological story of the Moons and Quinceys. And all the time he looked
so hard at her that it was quite embarrassing. His eyes seemed to be
taking her in (no other eyes had ever performed that act of hospitality
for Miss Quincey). He pulled out a little book from his pocket and made
notes of everything she said; Miss Quincey's biography was written in
that little book (you may be sure nobody else had ever thought of writing
it). And when he had finished the biography he talked to her about her
work (nobody else had ever been the least interested in Miss Quincey's
work). Then Miss Quincey sat up in bed and became lyrical as she
described the delirious joy of decimals--recurring decimals--and the
rapture of cube-root. She herself had never got farther than cube-root;
but it was enough. Beyond that, she hinted, lay the infinite. And Dr.
Cautley laughed at her defence of the noble science. Oh yes, he could
understand its fascination, its irresistible appeal to the emotions; he
only wished to remind her that it was the most debilitating study in the
world. He refused to commit himself to any opinion as to the original
strength and magnitude of Miss Quincey's brain; he could only assure her
that the most powerful intellect in the world would break down if you
kept it perpetually doing sums in arithmetic. It was the monotony of the
thing, you see; year after year Miss Quincey had been ploughing up the
same little patch of brain. No, certainly _not_--she mustn't think of
going back to St. Sidwell's for another three months.
Three months! Impossible! It was a whole term.
Dr. Cautley scowled horribly and said that if she was ever to be fit for
cube-root and decimals again, she positively and absolutely _must_.
Whereupon Miss Quincey gave way to emotion.
To leave St. Sidwell's, abandon her post for three months, she who had
never been absent for a day! If she did that it would be all up with Miss
Quincey; a hundred eager applicants were ready to fill her empty place.
It was as if she heard the hungry, leaping pack behind her, the strong
young animals trained for the chase; they came tearing on the scent,
hunting her, treading her down.
When Rhoda Vivian looked in after morning school, she found a flushed and
embarrassed young man trying to soothe Miss Quincey, who paid not the
least attention to him; she seemed to have shrunk into her bed, and lay
there staring with dilated eyes like a hare crouched flat and trembling
in her form. From the other side of the bed Dr. Cautley's helpless and
desperate smile claimed Rhoda as his ally. It seemed to say, "For God's
sake take my part against this unreasonable woman."
Now no one (not even Miss Quincey) could realize the insecurity of Miss
Quincey's position better than Rhoda, who was fathoms deep in the
confidence of the Head. She happened to know that Miss Cursiter was only
waiting for an opportunity like this to rid herself for ever of the
little obstructive. She knew too that once they had ceased to fill their
particular notch in it, the world had no further use for people like Miss
Quincey; that she, Rhoda Vivian, belonged to the new race whose eternal
destiny was to precipitate their doom. It was the first time that Rhoda
had thought of it in that light; the first time indeed that she had
greatly concerned herself with any career beside her own. She sat for a
few minutes talking to Miss Quincey and thinking as she talked. Perhaps
she was wondering how she would like to be forty-five and incompetent; to
be overtaken on the terrible middle-way; to feel the hurrying generations
after her, their breath on her shoulders, their feet on her heels; to
have no hope; to see Mrs. Moon sitting before her, immovable and
symbolic, the image of what she must become. They were two very absurd
and diminutive figures, but they stood for a good deal.
To Cautley, Rhoda herself as she revolved these things looked significant
enough. Leaning forward, one elbow bent on her knee, her chin propped on
her hand, her lips pouting, her forehead knit, she might have been a
young and passionate Pallas, brooding tempestuously on the world.
"Miss Vivian is on my side, I see. I'll leave her to do the fighting."
And he left her.
Rhoda's first movement was to capture Miss Quincey's hand as it wildly
reconnoitred for a pocket handkerchief among the pillows.
"Don't worry about it," she said, "I'll speak to Miss Cursiter."
Dr. Cautley, enduring a perfunctory five minutes with Mrs. Moon, could
hear Miss Vivian running downstairs and the front door opening and
closing upon her. With a little haste and discretion he managed to
overtake her before she had gone very far. He stopped to give his verdict
on her friend.
She had expected him.
"Well," she asked, "it _is_ overwork, isn't it?"
"Very much overwork; and no wonder. I knew she was a St. Sidwell's woman
as soon as I saw her."
"That was clever of you. And do you always know a St. Sidwell's woman
when you see one?"
"I do; they all go like this, more or less. It seems to me that St.
Sidwell's sacrifices its women to its girls, and its girls to itself. I
don't imagine you've much to do with the place, so you won't mind my
saying so."
Rhoda smiled a little maliciously.
"You seem to take a great deal for granted. As it happens I am Classical
Mistress there."
Dr. Cautley looked at her and bit his lip. He was annoyed with himself
for his blunder and with her for being anything but Rhoda Vivian--pure
and simple.
Rhoda laughed frankly at his confusion.
"Never mind. Appearances are deceitful. I'm glad I don't look like it."
"You certainly do not. Still, Miss Quincey is a warning to anybody."
"She? She was never fit for the life."
"No. Your race is to the swift and your battle to the strong."
He was still looking at her as he spoke. She was looking straight before
her, her nostrils slightly distended, her grey eyes wide, as if she
sniffed the battle, saw the goal.
"We must make her strong," said he.
She had quickened her pace as if under a renewed impulse of energy and
will. Suddenly at the door of the College she stopped and held out her
hand.
"You will look after her well, will you not?" Her voice was resonant on
the note of appeal.
Now you could withstand Rhoda in her domineering mood if you were strong
enough and cool enough; but when she looked straight through your eyes in
that way she was irresistible. Cautley did not attempt to resist her.
He went on his way thinking how intolerable the question might have been
in some one else's mouth; how suggestive of impertinent coquetry, the
beautiful woman's assumption that he would do for her what he would not
do for insignificant Miss Quincey. She had taken it for granted that his
interest in Miss Quincey was supreme.