When I had made all those dispositions which I described with such
painful prolixity in my last letter, my dear Bertie, I sat down on my
study chair, and I laid out the whole of my worldly wealth upon the
table in front of me. I was startled when I looked at it,--three
half-crowns, a florin, and four sixpences, or eleven and sixpence in
all. I had expected to hear from Cullingworth before this; but at least
he was always there, a trusty friend, at my back. Immediately upon
engaging the house I had written him a very full letter, telling him
that I had committed myself to keeping it for one year, but assuring him
that I was quite convinced that with the help which he had promised me
I should be able to hold my own easily. I described the favourable
position of the house, and gave him every detail of the rent and
neighbourhood. That letter would, I was sure, bring a reply from him
which would contain my weekly remittance. One thing I had, above all,
determined upon. That was that, whatever hardships might lie before me,
I would fight through them without help from home. I knew, of course,
that my mother would have sold everything down to her gold eye-glasses
to help me, and that no thought of our recent disagreement would have
weighed with her for an instant; but still a man has his feelings, you
know, and I did not propose to act against her judgment and then run
howling for help.
I sat in my house all day, with that ever-present sense of privacy and
novelty which had thrilled me when I first shut the street door behind
me. At evening I sallied out and bought a loaf of bread, half a pound
of tea (“sweepings,” they call it, and it cost eightpence), a tin
kettle (fivepence), a pound of sugar, a tin of Swiss milk, and a tin
of American potted meat. I had often heard my mother groan over the
expenses of housekeeping, and now I began to understand what she meant.
Two and ninepence went like a flash, but at least I had enough to keep
myself going for some days.
There was a convenient gas bracket in the back room. I hammered a
splinter of wood into the wall above it, and so made an arm upon which
I could hang my little kettle and boil it over the flame. The attraction
of the idea was that there was no immediate expense, and many things
would have happened before I was called upon to pay the gas bill. The
back room was converted then into both kitchen and dining room. The sole
furniture consisted of my box, which served both as cupboard, as table,
and as chair. My eatables were all kept inside, and when I wished for a
meal I had only to pick them out and lay them on the lid, leaving room
for myself to sit beside them.
It was only when I went to my bedroom that I realised the oversights
which I had made in my furnishing. There was no mattress and no pillow
or bed-clothes. My mind had been so centred upon the essentials for the
practice, that I had never given a thought to my own private wants. I
slept that night upon the irons of my bed, and rose up like St. Lawrence
from the gridiron. My second suit of clothes with Bristowe’s “Principles
of Medicine” made an excellent pillow, while on a warm June night a
man can do well wrapped in his overcoat. I had no fancy for second-hand
bed-clothes, and determined until I could buy some new ones, to make
myself a straw pillow, and to put on both my suits of clothes on the
colder nights. Two days later, however, the problem was solved in more
luxurious style by the arrival of a big brown tin box from my mother,
which was as welcome to me, and as much of a windfall, as the Spanish
wreck to Robinson Crusoe. There were too pairs of thick blankets, two
sheets, a counterpane, a pillow, a camp-stool, two stuffed bears’ paws
(of all things in this world!), two terra-cotta vases, a tea-cosy, two
pictures in frames, several books, an ornamental ink-pot, and a number
of antimacassars and coloured tablecloths. It is not until you own a
table with a deal top and mahogany legs, that you understand what the
true inner meaning of an ornamental cloth is. Right on the top of this
treasure came a huge hamper from the Apothecaries’ Society with the
drugs which I had ordered. When they were laid out in line, the bottles
extended right down one side of the dining-room and half down the other.
As I walked through my house and viewed my varied possessions, I
felt less radical in my views, and begun to think that there might be
something in the rights of property after all.
And I added to my effects in a marvellous way. I made myself an
excellent mattress out of some sacking and the straw in which the
medicine bottles had been packed.
Again, out of three shutters which belonged to the room, I rigged up a
very effective side-table for my own den, which when covered with a
red cloth, and ornamented with the bears’ paws, might have cost twenty
guineas for all that the patient could say to the contrary. I had done
all this with a light heart and a good spirit before the paralysing blow
which I shall have to tell you about, came upon me.
Of course it was obvious from the first that a servant was out of the
question. I could not feed one, far less pay one, and I had no kitchen
furniture. I must open my door to my own patients--let them think what
they would of it. I must clean my own plate and brush down my own front;
and these duties must be thoroughly done, come what might, for I must
show a presentable outside to the public. Well, there was no great
hardship in that, for I could do it under the cover of night. But I had
had a suggestion from my mother which simplified matters immensely. She
had written to say that if I wished she would send my little brother
Paul to keep me company. I wrote back eagerly to agree. He was a hardy
cheery little fellow of nine, who would, I knew, gladly share hard times
with me; while, if they became unduly so, I could always have him taken
home again. Some weeks must pass before he could come, but it cheered me
to think of him. Apart from his company, there were a thousand ways in
which he might be useful.
Who should come in on the second day but old Captain Whitehall? I was
in the back room, trying how many slices I could make out of a pound of
potted beef, when he rang my bell, and I only just shut my mouth in time
to prevent my heart jumping out.
How that bell clanged through the empty house! I saw who it was,
however, when I went into the hall; for the middle panels of my door are
of glazed glass, so that I can always study a silhouette of my visitors
before coming to closer quarters.
I was not quite sure yet whether I loathed the man or liked him. He was
the most extraordinary mixture of charity and drunkenness, lechery and
self-sacrifice that I had ever come across. But he brought into the
house with him a whiff of cheeriness and hope for which I could not but
be grateful. He had a large brown paper parcel under his arm, which he
unwrapped upon my table, displaying a great brown jar. This he carried
over and deposited on the centre of my mantel-piece.
“You will permit me, Dr. Munro, sir, to place this trifle in your room.
It’s lava, sir; lava from Vesuvius, and made in Naples. By ----, you may
think its empty, Dr. Munro, sir, but it is full of my best wishes; and
when you’ve got the best practice in this town you may point to that
vase and tell how it came from a skipper of an armed transport, who
backed you from the start.”
I tell you, Bertie, the tears started to my eyes, and I could hardly
gulp out a word or two of thanks. What a crisscross of qualities in
one human soul! It was not the deed or the words; but it was the almost
womanly look in the eyes of this broken, drink-sodden old Bohemian--the
sympathy and the craving for sympathy which I read there. Only for an
instant though, for he hardened again into his usual reckless and half
defiant manner.
“There’s another thing, sir. I’ve been thinking for some time back of
having a medical opinion on myself. I’d be glad to put myself under your
hands, if you would take a survey of me.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Dr. Munro, sir,” said he, “I am a walking museum. You could fit what
ISN’T the matter with me on to the back of a ---- visiting card. If
there’s any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come
to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It’s not every one that can
say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living
on red pepper and brandy. If you can only set the ---- little germs
sneezing they’ll soon leave you alone. That’s my theory about cholera,
and you should make a note of it, Dr. Munro, sir, for I was shipmates
with fifty dead men when I was commanding the armed transport Hegira in
the Black Sea, and I know ---- well what I am talking about.”
I fill in Whitehall’s oaths with blanks because I feel how hopeless it
is to reproduce their energy and variety. I was amazed when he stripped,
for his whole body was covered with a perfect panorama of tattooings,
with a big blue Venus right over his heart.
“You may knock,” said he, when I began to percuss his chest, “but I am
---- sure there’s no one at home. They’ve all gone visiting one another.
Sir John Hutton had a try some years ago. ‘Why, dammy, man, where’s your
liver?’ said he. ‘Seems to me that some one has stirred you up with a
porridge stick,’ said he. ‘Nothing is in its right place.’ ‘Except
my heart, Sir John,’ said I. ‘Aye, by ----, that will never lose its
moorings while it has a flap left.’”
Well, I examined him, and I found his own account not very far from the
truth. I went over him carefully from head to foot, and there was not
much left as Nature made it. He had mitral regurgitation, cirrhosis of
the liver, Bright’s disease, an enlarged spleen, and incipient dropsy.
I gave him a lecture about the necessity of temperance, if not of total
abstinence; but I fear that my words made no impression. He chuckled,
and made a kind of clucking noise in his throat all the time that I was
speaking, but whether in assent or remonstrance I cannot say.
He pulled out his purse when I had finished, but I begged him to look on
my small service as a mere little act of friendship. This would not do
at all, however, and he seemed so determined about it that I was forced
to give way.
“My fee is five shillings, then, since you insist upon making it a
business matter.”
“Dr. Munro, sir,” he broke out, “I have been examined by men whom I
wouldn’t throw a bucket of water over if they were burning, and I never
paid them less than a guinea. Now that I have come to a gentleman and a
friend, stiffen me purple if I pay one farthing less.”
So, after much argument, it ended in the kind fellow going off and
leaving a sovereign and a shilling on the edge of my table. The money
burned my fingers, for I knew that his pension was not a very large one;
and yet, since I could not avoid taking it, there was no denying that it
was exceedingly useful. Out I sallied and spent sixteen shillings of it
upon a new palliasse which should go under the straw mattress upon my
bed. Already, you see, I was getting to a state of enervating luxury
in my household arrangements, and I could only lull my conscience by
reminding myself that little Paul would have to sleep with me when he
came.
However, I had not quite got to the end of Whitehall’s visit yet. When
I went back I took down the beautiful lava jug, and inside I found his
card. On the back was written, “You have gone into action, sir. It may
be your fate to sink or to swim, but it can never be your degradation
to strike. Die on the last plank and be damned to you, or come into port
with your ensign flying mast-high.”
Was it not fine? It stirred my blood, and the words rang like a bugle
call in my head. It braced me, and the time was coming when all the
bracing I could get would not be too much. I copied it out, and pinned
it on one side of my mantel-piece. On the other I stuck up a chip from
Carlyle, which I daresay is as familiar to you as to me. “One way or
another all the light, energy, and available virtue which we have does
come out of us, and goes very infallibly into God’s treasury, living and
working through eternities there. We are not lost--not a single atom
of us--of one of us.” Now, there is a religious sentence which is
intellectually satisfying, and therefore morally sound.
This last quotation leads to my second visitor. Such a row we had! I
make a mistake in telling you about it, for I know your sympathies will
be against me; but at least it will have the good effect of making you
boil over into a letter of remonstrance and argument than which nothing
could please me better.
Well, the second person whom I admitted through my door was the High
Church curate of the parish--at least, I deduced High Church from his
collar and the cross which dangled from his watch chain. He seemed to be
a fine upstanding manly fellow--in fact, I am bound in honesty to admit
that I have never met the washy tea-party curate outside the pages of
Punch. As a body, I think they would compare very well in manliness (I
do not say in brains) with as many young lawyers or doctors. Still, I
have no love for the cloth. Just as cotton, which is in itself the most
harmless substance in the world, becomes dangerous on being dipped into
nitric acid, so the mildest of mortals is to be feared if he is once
soaked in sectarian religion. If he has any rancour or hardness in him
it will bring it out. I was therefore by no means overjoyed to see my
visitor, though I trust that I received him with fitting courtesy. The
quick little glance of surprise which he shot round him as he entered my
consulting-room, told me that it was not quite what he had expected.
“You see, the Vicar has been away for two years,” he explained, “and
we have to look after things in his absence. His chest is weak, and he
can’t stand Birchespool. I live just opposite, and, seeing your plate go
up, I thought I would call and welcome you into our parish.”
I told him that I was very much obliged for the attention. If he
had stopped there all would have been well, and we should have had a
pleasant little chat. But I suppose it was his sense of duty which would
not permit it.
“I trust,” said he, “that we shall see you at St. Joseph’s.”