Philip’s ideas of the life of medical students, like those of the
public at large, were founded on the pictures which Charles Dickens
drew in the middle of the nineteenth century. He soon discovered that
Bob Sawyer, if he ever existed, was no longer at all like the medical
student of the present.
It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical profession, and
naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless. They think it is an
easy life, idle away a couple of years; and then, because their funds
come to an end or because angry parents refuse any longer to support
them, drift away from the hospital. Others find the examinations too
hard for them; one failure after another robs them of their nerve; and,
panic-stricken, they forget as soon as they come into the forbidding
buildings of the Conjoint Board the knowledge which before they had so
pat. They remain year after year, objects of good-humoured scorn to
younger men: some of them crawl through the examination of the
Apothecaries Hall; others become non-qualified assistants, a precarious
position in which they are at the mercy of their employer; their lot is
poverty, drunkenness, and Heaven only knows their end. But for the most
part medical students are industrious young men of the middle-class
with a sufficient allowance to live in the respectable fashion they
have been used to; many are the sons of doctors who have already
something of the professional manner; their career is mapped out: as
soon as they are qualified they propose to apply for a hospital
appointment, after holding which (and perhaps a trip to the Far East as
a ship’s doctor), they will join their father and spend the rest of
their days in a country practice. One or two are marked out as
exceptionally brilliant: they will take the various prizes and
scholarships which are open each year to the deserving, get one
appointment after another at the hospital, go on the staff, take a
consulting-room in Harley Street, and, specialising in one subject or
another, become prosperous, eminent, and titled.
The medical profession is the only one which a man may enter at any age
with some chance of making a living. Among the men of Philip’s year
were three or four who were past their first youth: one had been in the
Navy, from which according to report he had been dismissed for
drunkenness; he was a man of thirty, with a red face, a brusque manner,
and a loud voice. Another was a married man with two children, who had
lost money through a defaulting solicitor; he had a bowed look as if
the world were too much for him; he went about his work silently, and
it was plain that he found it difficult at his age to commit facts to
memory. His mind worked slowly. His effort at application was painful
to see.
Philip made himself at home in his tiny rooms. He arranged his books
and hung on the walls such pictures and sketches as he possessed. Above
him, on the drawing-room floor, lived a fifth-year man called
Griffiths; but Philip saw little of him, partly because he was occupied
chiefly in the wards and partly because he had been to Oxford. Such of
the students as had been to a university kept a good deal together:
they used a variety of means natural to the young in order to impress
upon the less fortunate a proper sense of their inferiority; the rest
of the students found their Olympian serenity rather hard to bear.
Griffiths was a tall fellow, with a quantity of curly red hair and blue
eyes, a white skin and a very red mouth; he was one of those fortunate
people whom everybody liked, for he had high spirits and a constant
gaiety. He strummed a little on the piano and sang comic songs with
gusto; and evening after evening, while Philip was reading in his
solitary room, he heard the shouts and the uproarious laughter of
Griffiths’ friends above him. He thought of those delightful evenings
in Paris when they would sit in the studio, Lawson and he, Flanagan and
Clutton, and talk of art and morals, the love-affairs of the present,
and the fame of the future. He felt sick at heart. He found that it was
easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results. The
worst of it was that the work seemed to him very tedious. He had got
out of the habit of being asked questions by demonstrators. His
attention wandered at lectures. Anatomy was a dreary science, a mere
matter of learning by heart an enormous number of facts; dissection
bored him; he did not see the use of dissecting out laboriously nerves
and arteries when with much less trouble you could see in the diagrams
of a book or in the specimens of the pathological museum exactly where
they were.
He made friends by chance, but not intimate friends, for he seemed to
have nothing in particular to say to his companions. When he tried to
interest himself in their concerns, he felt that they found him
patronising. He was not of those who can talk of what moves them
without caring whether it bores or not the people they talk to. One
man, hearing that he had studied art in Paris, and fancying himself on
his taste, tried to discuss art with him; but Philip was impatient of
views which did not agree with his own; and, finding quickly that the
other’s ideas were conventional, grew monosyllabic. Philip desired
popularity but could bring himself to make no advances to others. A
fear of rebuff prevented him from affability, and he concealed his
shyness, which was still intense, under a frigid taciturnity. He was
going through the same experience as he had done at school, but here
the freedom of the medical students’ life made it possible for him to
live a good deal by himself.
It was through no effort of his that he became friendly with Dunsford,
the fresh-complexioned, heavy lad whose acquaintance he had made at the
beginning of the session. Dunsford attached himself to Philip merely
because he was the first person he had known at St. Luke’s. He had no
friends in London, and on Saturday nights he and Philip got into the
habit of going together to the pit of a music-hall or the gallery of a
theatre. He was stupid, but he was good-humoured and never took
offence; he always said the obvious thing, but when Philip laughed at
him merely smiled. He had a very sweet smile. Though Philip made him
his butt, he liked him; he was amused by his candour and delighted with
his agreeable nature: Dunsford had the charm which himself was acutely
conscious of not possessing.
They often went to have tea at a shop in Parliament Street, because
Dunsford admired one of the young women who waited. Philip did not find
anything attractive in her. She was tall and thin, with narrow hips and
the chest of a boy.
“No one would look at her in Paris,” said Philip scornfully.
“She’s got a ripping face,” said Dunsford.
“What DOES the face matter?”
She had the small regular features, the blue eyes, and the broad low
brow, which the Victorian painters, Lord Leighton, Alma Tadema, and a
hundred others, induced the world they lived in to accept as a type of
Greek beauty. She seemed to have a great deal of hair: it was arranged
with peculiar elaboration and done over the forehead in what she called
an Alexandra fringe. She was very anaemic. Her thin lips were pale, and
her skin was delicate, of a faint green colour, without a touch of red
even in the cheeks. She had very good teeth. She took great pains to
prevent her work from spoiling her hands, and they were small, thin,
and white. She went about her duties with a bored look.
Dunsford, very shy with women, had never succeeded in getting into
conversation with her; and he urged Philip to help him.
“All I want is a lead,” he said, “and then I can manage for myself.”
Philip, to please him, made one or two remarks, but she answered with
monosyllables. She had taken their measure. They were boys, and she
surmised they were students. She had no use for them. Dunsford noticed
that a man with sandy hair and a bristly moustache, who looked like a
German, was favoured with her attention whenever he came into the shop;
and then it was only by calling her two or three times that they could
induce her to take their order. She used the clients whom she did not
know with frigid insolence, and when she was talking to a friend was
perfectly indifferent to the calls of the hurried. She had the art of
treating women who desired refreshment with just that degree of
impertinence which irritated them without affording them an opportunity
of complaining to the management. One day Dunsford told him her name
was Mildred. He had heard one of the other girls in the shop address
her.
“What an odious name,” said Philip.
“Why?” asked Dunsford.
“I like it.”
“It’s so pretentious.”
It chanced that on this day the German was not there, and, when she
brought the tea, Philip, smiling, remarked:
“Your friend’s not here today.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said coldly.
“I was referring to the nobleman with the sandy moustache. Has he left
you for another?”
“Some people would do better to mind their own business,” she retorted.
She left them, and, since for a minute or two there was no one to
attend to, sat down and looked at the evening paper which a customer
had left behind him.
“You are a fool to put her back up,” said Dunsford.
“I’m really quite indifferent to the attitude of her vertebrae,”
replied Philip.
But he was piqued. It irritated him that when he tried to be agreeable
with a woman she should take offence. When he asked for the bill, he
hazarded a remark which he meant to lead further.
“Are we no longer on speaking terms?” he smiled.
“I’m here to take orders and to wait on customers. I’ve got nothing to
say to them, and I don’t want them to say anything to me.”
She put down the slip of paper on which she had marked the sum they had
to pay, and walked back to the table at which she had been sitting.
Philip flushed with anger.
“That’s one in the eye for you, Carey,” said Dunsford, when they got
outside.
“Ill-mannered slut,” said Philip. “I shan’t go there again.”
His influence with Dunsford was strong enough to get him to take their
tea elsewhere, and Dunsford soon found another young woman to flirt
with. But the snub which the waitress had inflicted on him rankled. If
she had treated him with civility he would have been perfectly
indifferent to her; but it was obvious that she disliked him rather
than otherwise, and his pride was wounded. He could not suppress a
desire to be even with her. He was impatient with himself because he
had so petty a feeling, but three or four days’ firmness, during which
he would not go to the shop, did not help him to surmount it; and he
came to the conclusion that it would be least trouble to see her.
Having done so he would certainly cease to think of her. Pretexting an
appointment one afternoon, for he was not a little ashamed of his
weakness, he left Dunsford and went straight to the shop which he had
vowed never again to enter. He saw the waitress the moment he came in
and sat down at one of her tables. He expected her to make some
reference to the fact that he had not been there for a week, but when
she came up for his order she said nothing. He had heard her say to
other customers:
“You’re quite a stranger.”
She gave no sign that she had ever seen him before. In order to see
whether she had really forgotten him, when she brought his tea, he
asked:
“Have you seen my friend tonight?”
“No, he’s not been in here for some days.”
He wanted to use this as the beginning of a conversation, but he was
strangely nervous and could think of nothing to say. She gave him no
opportunity, but at once went away. He had no chance of saying anything
till he asked for his bill.
“Filthy weather, isn’t it?” he said.
It was mortifying that he had been forced to prepare such a phrase as
that. He could not make out why she filled him with such embarrassment.
“It don’t make much difference to me what the weather is, having to be
in here all day.”
There was an insolence in her tone that peculiarly irritated him. A
sarcasm rose to his lips, but he forced himself to be silent.
“I wish to God she’d say something really cheeky,” he raged to himself,
“so that I could report her and get her sacked. It would serve her
damned well right.”