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[Illustration: Book Cover]
THE CORNER OF HARLEY STREET
THE CORNER
OF HARLEY STREET
BEING SOME FAMILIAR
CORRESPONDENCE OF
PETER HARDING. M.D.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1913
CONTENTS
I
To Robert Lynn, M.R.C.S.,
Applebrook, Devon March 4th 9
II
To Horace Harding,
Trinity College, Cambridge March 11th 20
III
To Miss Josephine Summers,
The Cottage, Potham, Beds. March 14th 32
IV
To Colonel R. F. Morris, C.B.,
7th Division, Meerut, India March 15th 34
V
To Hugh Pontrex,
Villa Rosa, Mentone March 23rd 45
VI
To Miss Sarah Harding,
The Orphanage, Little Blessington,
Dorset March 31st 55
VII
To Harry Carthew,
Trenant Hotel, Leeds April 8th 66
VIII
To John Summers, M.B.,
At Actonhurst, Granville Road,
Bristol April 12th 71
IX
To Harry Carthew,
Trenant Hotel, Leeds April 15th 78
X
To the Rev. Bruce Harding,
S. Peter's College, Morecambe Bay April 20th 79
XI
To Miss Josephine Summers,
The Cottage, Potham, Beds. April 22nd 87
XII
To Tom Harding,
c/o the Rev. Arthur Jakes, Rugby April 24th 88
XIII
To Hugh Pontrex,
Villa Rosa, Mentone May 3rd 95
XIV
To Miss Molly Harding,
91B, Harley Street, W. May 6th 109
XV
To Miss Josephine Summers,
The Cottage, Potham, Beds. May 16th 116
XVI
To Lady Wroxton,
The Manor House, Stoke Magna,
Oxon May 23rd 118
XVII
To Miss Sarah Harding,
The Orphanage, Little Blessington,
Dorset June 7th 127
XVIII
To Robert Lynn, M.R.C.S.,
Applebrook, Devon June 25th 151
XIX
To Hugh Pontrex,
Hotel Montana, Biarritz July 16th 157
XX
To Horace Harding,
c/o Major Alec Cameron, Glen
Bruisk, Sutherland, N.B. Aug. 17th 166
XXI
To Miss Josephine Summers,
The Cottage, Potham, Beds. Aug. 25th 177
XXII
To Reginald Pole,
S.Y. Nautilus, Harwich Aug. 30th 179
XXIII
To Miss Sarah Harding,
The Orphanage, Little Blessington,
Dorset Sept. 6th 195
XXIV
To the Rev. Bruce Harding,
S. Peter's College, Morecambe Bay Sept. 14th 202
XXV
To Hugh Pontrex,
Villa Rosa, Mentone Oct. 3rd 219
XXVI
To John Summers, M.B.,
c/o the Rev. W. B. La Touche,
High Barn, Winchester Oct. 18th 231
XXVII
To Miss Sarah Harding,
The Orphanage, Little Blessington,
Dorset Nov. 7th 242
XXVIII
To Miss Josephine Summers,
The Cottage, Potham, Beds. Nov. 26th 249
XXXIX
To the Rev. Bruce Harding,
S. Peter's College, Morecambe Bay Dec. 2nd 251
XXX
To Hugh Pontrex,
Villa Rosa, Mentone Dec. 25th 255
I
_To Robert Lynn, M.R.C.S., Applebrook, Devon._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_March_ 4, 1910.
MY DEAR BOB,
Your letter of this morning, like the cream that it was, rose naturally
to the surface of the little pile of correspondence that awaited me on
the breakfast-table; and if I didn't read it then, and am only answering
it now, in front of my dressing-room fire, there are more reasons than
one for this. You might even detect a little pathos, perhaps, in the
chief of these. For I can't help feeling that a younger man--myself, for
example, twenty years ago--would have been into it before you could say
scalpel, snatching his joy as one of your own parr will take a Wickham
on a clear pool before the half-pounder beside him has even decided to
inspect it. And if I have not done this, if I have learned the better
way, the art of lingering, the value of the "bouquet," well, there's a
rather forlorn piece of scalp in the opposite looking-glass to tell me
the reason why.
So you see that I didn't rush headlong at your letter, tearing it open
with a feverish, if mature, forefinger. I even ignored the twinkle in my
wife's eye, and the more impertinent expression that Miss Molly was
permitting to rest upon her usually calm features.
"Another lump, my pet," was all I said, and stirred my coffee with that
inscrutable calm so justly associated with Destiny, Wisdom, and the
Consulting Physician.
"He's pretending not to be excited," explained Miss Molly to a college
friend across the table; and Claire, all chestnut mop and
black-stockinged legs (and convalescent, by the way, from the mumps),
gurgled suddenly over her Henty when she ought by rights to have been
completely breathless.
Through the open window a pleasant breeze stirred lazily across the
table, decked with its stolen sweets from our own and our neighbours'
hyacinths. And in a welcome sunshine the windows of Sir Jeremy's
consulting-room beamed as merrily as their owner's eyes.
"And not even one spark of enthusiasm," proceeded Molly. "Oh, who would
have a mere physician for a parent?"
"For the elderly," I told her, "excitement is to be deprecated. Now if I
were twenty-four, perhaps----"
"Twenty-three," put in Molly, adding, with very great distinctness,
"to-morrow."
"And that reminds me," murmured Claire from her sofa under the window.
So I opened the other envelopes first, those that contained the bills,
the appointments, the invitations, and the unpleasant letters, just as a
wise man should, who is at his best, and realizes it, tubbed and shaved
and over his breakfast bacon. And since Molly and her friend appeared to
have interrupted themselves in the midst of some earnest political
discussion, I begged them to resume this. For in making the
breakfast-table their judgment-bar they were setting an example, as I
reminded them, that the world would do well to follow. Breakfast-table
verdicts, breakfast-table sermons, breakfast-table laws, for true and
kindly sanity they might be safely backed, I observed, against any
product of the midnight oil that has emerged from the brain of
man--including even woman as produced by Newnham; or so, at any rate,
thought a middle-aged physician whose opinions were dear to me. Only,
of course, it would have to be a well-furnished table; and the
marmalade, if possible, should have been made at home.
"You had better just _glance_ at it though, hadn't you?" asked
Esther--dear, wise Esther--from her throne behind the urn; after which
there was quite obviously nothing else to be done. Applebrook--glorious
postmark--it had already begun to weave its magic for me as I slipped a
knife into the comfortable envelope, and ran a well-mastered eye over
its contents.
"Nothing of importance," I announced; "only fish."
"_Only_ fish," scoffed Molly, well into her third muffin.
And yet, though I have not actually read it till just now--my sacred ten
minutes before the dinner-gong summons me downstairs--your letter has
really followed me all day, even as Applebrook itself will follow a
returning angler down the evening moor, and ripple through his
after-supper dreams. It has blessed me, and made a dull day bright (for
the sun began to sulk again at noon), and the more so because my wisdom
kept it at a distance until just now. Applebrook--as I emerged from the
District Railway into that faint but inexorable smell of burnt coffee
and human unwashedness which broods over Whitechapel Road, the extra
bulge in my breast-pocket reminded me suddenly of wind-blown gorse and
all the hard-bitten, sunburnt heath that stands for Dartmoor. My step
quickened. I entered the hospital gates with a jauntier tread, and could
have sworn that a silver trout shot spectrally round the corner in front
of me. A poor presage for my lucidity in the afternoon march round the
wards, I can hear you murmur. But you are wrong there. For, on the
contrary, the points of my discourse made their bows to my memory with
unwonted briskness; and I contrived, I think, to keep the
notebook-pencils pretty busy.
Yet the afternoon did contain one of those disquieting surprises that
used at one time to seem so catastrophic, and now appear only too
wonderfully uncommon. For some weeks past I have had a poor fellow in
one of my beds, a cheerful soul, for all he knew himself to be treading
a downhill road. His condition, rather an obscure one, and in any event
incurable, might have represented one of two causes. Week by week, to a
respectful and intelligent body of students, I have demonstrated the
signs and symptoms of this patient, and proved to them how, on the
whole, they must be taken to indicate B--shall we say?--as the root of
the mischief. And now to-day, before an expectant gathering, the
uncompromising knife of the pathologist in the post-mortem room has
revealed the precisely opposite. It was A all the time, and there was
nothing for it but to accept defeat, and retire strategically in as good
an order as might be. There was, at any rate, the consolation that the
mistake could not have affected the unhappy issue of the malady. It was
merely a sort of academic pride that was to suffer; and I suppose it is
only an acquired familiarity with death that could have made so small a
personal disaster even imaginable--for I don't think it ever really
became actual--under its great shadow. So I made my retreat--in fair
order, I believe, with baggage intact and a minimum of casualties.
Nevertheless I caught young Martyn, the wing three, you know--what
wouldn't I have given for his swerve thirty years ago!--smiling
significantly across at your son, who was very tactfully endeavouring to
appear oblivious. And it was Applebrook that fortified my powers of
forgiveness--Applebrook rippling peacefully over its immemorial granite.
And so there's plenty of water, is there, and the colour has been just
right? And you have already been into a pounder, and landed him too.
That's good, for though we miss a lot of pounders in Applebrook--"a
pound, sir, if it weighed an ounce, and took half the cast away with
it"--we seldom land one. And am I game to come down on May 1st as usual?
A day-dream, or dusk-dream, has been interrupted here--I might have
prophesied it--by one of those earnest, cadaverous persons whose pride
it is that they have never taken--never felt the need of it, they
usually add--a holiday in their lives.
"Not for thirty-five years, sir," said this latest specimen to me just
now, rubbing his hands with counting-house pride.
"God help you," I replied, which took him aback a little, and was not, I
admit, a tactful welcome to a prospective two guineas. But then, you
see, he had fetched me back from a dusk-dream.
"Does that mean _you_ can't?" he inquired a little acidly. And really I
should not have been quite so abrupt with him, for his confession gave
me the right cue to his treatment. A holiday, in fact, was all that he
needed, though I doubted his ability to use one. So I assumed my
heaviest manner, as one must when it is to be unaccompanied by an
expensive prescription.
"If you don't take one," I proceeded to tell him, "though you will
probably survive with the aid of iron, arsenic, and an occasional
Seidlitz powder, you will become eventually like those sorrowful civil
servants that may be met at almost any time in Somerset House or the
General Post Office. They have been pensioned for months, but there they
are, unable to inter themselves decently among the mashies and geraniums
of Wimbledon and Weybridge, haunting their former desks, poor forlorn
creatures, whose one bond of life has been severed--a torture to
themselves and their successors."
While I was taking breath after this rather impressive harangue, he
stared at me gloomily.
"It has always," he said, "been my one great desire to die in harness."
After congratulating him on the possession of so modest, if somewhat
cheerless, an ambition, I asked him why he had come to see me. A
physician, to a man with such a goal, seemed, on the face of it,
something of a superfluity. But I learned that there was a wife at home,
poor soul. And it was her doctor, he said, who had recommended this
visit.
"And I may tell you," he added, "that your opinion coincides with
theirs." He handed me his two guineas. "Where shall I go?" he asked.
By now of course I could see that my advice was going to be useless; but
there was no better alternative.
"Have you any hobbies?" I inquired. But he shook his head. No; he had
never had time for hobbies. And by to-morrow afternoon he will be
reading his _Financial News_ on Brighton Pier, and wondering when he can
decently return.
* * * * *
But the dressing-gong has sounded already, and the embers in my fire are
reddening into darkness. Outside, the wheels of a myriad motor-cars and
carriages pass ceaselessly, and repass; and from beyond and beneath
them, through the open window, comes the roar of London. I believe you
sigh for it sometimes, don't you, down there among your moorland
silences? Give me three weeks of it a year, and, as far as I am
concerned, you might monopolise the orchestra for the other forty-nine.
I don't particularly want my dinner, and I am still less inclined to
talk amiably with the two dull, but worthy, guests--may the gods of
hospitality forgive me--who are to sit at our board to-night. With the
tired girl-poet, I am praying instead;
God, for the little streams that tumble as they run.
For there are times when I think that the best thing about Harley Street
is that there are exactly twelve ways out of it, and this, I think, is
one of them.
If to-morrow now were only the 1st of May, and that doorstep of mine
opened into Paddington, cheeriest of railway stations. By the way,
somebody ought to write an essay on the Personality of Railway Stations.
Liverpool Street, for example, smokes cheap cigarettes, and lives at
Walthamstow--does its baggage up with string, and takes dribbly children
to Clacton-on-Sea. And Paddington is a sun-tanned country squire, riding
a good thirteen stone, and with an eye for an apple. His luggage is of a
well-ripened leather, and he is a bit lavish with his tips.
* * * * *
But, alas, my door merely opens to admit the timid nose of a new maid
who announces the arrival of the visitors. Dressing-gowns must be shed,
and tails donned. I am grasping your hairy brown hand. Can you feel it?
"Lucky dog," I am saying to you, "the wind's up-stream, and the trout
are hungry, and for all your scattered practice you can still nip down
for one perfect hour to Marleigh Pool--still feel your rod-point bending
to some heaven-sent troutling of the true fighting stock." Will I come?
Won't I! And till then I can merely remain London-bound.
Your envious old friend,
P. H.
II
_To Horace Harding, Trinity College, Cambridge._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_March_ 11, 1910.
MY DEAR HORACE,
Casting a remorseful eye at the date upon your letter, I perceive that
it is already almost a week since I resolved to sit down, and answer it
immediately; and the postscript that follows "your aff. son H." gazes at
me with a rebuking stare, as if to remind me how very far I have been
from bucking up, as you so tactfully suggested, and flooring the problem
with which you have presented me. And yet you mustn't suppose that I
have been altogether too careless or too busy to deal with it as you
wished. On the other hand, I have been dodging it round the ring of
everyday happenings ever since I first beheld it eyeing me beneath the
Trinity crest. For the fact of the matter is, my dear Horace, that your
revered Daddy has all along been more than doubtful about his ability to
stretch the fellow on the carpet. And now, at the end of a week's
somewhat cowardly--footwork, shall we call it?--he has decided to crawl
under the ropes, and make room for a lustier substitute.
Shall you become a doctor? Well, I'm afraid, after all, that you must
tackle the question for yourself. As an American patient, with a
doubtful liver, observed to me this morning, the problem is right up
against you; and nobody else can defeat it in your stead. The thought of
this has cheered me so amazingly that from now onwards you may safely
imagine, I think, an almost contented physician, sitting plumply in a
front stall, smiling at the fight over contemplative finger-tips, and
merely tendering, between the rounds, some well-worn pieces of ring-side
advice.
And so the peaks are challenging you, eh? The wig, the gaiters, the gold
_pince-nez_, and the bedside manner, they have risen up to bid you
choose your future path. For twenty-two years, you tell me, you haven't
greatly disturbed yourself about these things. You have accepted
parental orders: you have taken, in consequence, a respectable, if not
distinguished, degree in classics; you have mastered enough science to
rob your "first medical" of most of its fears; and you have obtained, by
the way, a Rugger "blue," of which you are, no doubt, a great deal more
proud. And now that all this has been accomplished you turn to your
former guide, and say to him, "Whither away?" And like Gilbert's poor
wit, I feel inclined to retort very truthfully that I do indeed wither
away. Behold, I have vanished. The mountain range is before you. Choose
your summit.
* * * * *
As if to point a moral, I have been here interrupted by a pitiful voice
over the telephone. Indeed for a week past, I have been its victim at
varying intervals. For Mrs. Cholmondeley, let us call her, cannot make
up her mind between the rival hygienic attractions of Cannes and
Torquay. As a matter of fact Camberwell or Camden Town would be equally,
probably more, effectual. Organically she is perfectly sound. For the
rest she is merely over-fed and under-occupied. She has deleted very
nearly every healthful activity from her list of physical employments.
And now those of her will are to be similarly abandoned; delegated to
paid assistants like myself.
Cannes or Torquay? Well, I have refused the responsibility of deciding.
In league with her long-suffering family physician, I am endeavouring
to force her faculties to make this little effort by themselves. For I
doubt if the sorrowful gates of illness behold anything more entirely
pitiable than the spectacle of a will on crutches.
Well then, having, as you see, completely foisted the ultimate issue
upon your own shoulders, it seems to me that there are three main
standpoints from which you must regard our profession before finally
deciding to embark upon it. To take the least important of these first,
you must bear in mind, I think, that while you should undoubtedly be
able to pay your way, and to make an honest living, yet the financial
rewards that medicine has to offer are scarcely worth considering. Given
an equal amount of capital, both in brain-power and pounds sterling,
your hours of work, your expenditure of energy, your capacity for
diagnosis and research, your readiness at the reading of human nature,
would bring you a far greater return of this world's goods in almost any
other occupation that you care to name--incomparably so in commerce. At
the same time I don't think that this point of view will detain you very
long; because, however little fathers may really know of their own sons
(and the sum of parental ignorance under this heading must be something
rather stupendous), I am quite sure that the financial laurel, _per se_,
has no overwhelming attraction for you.
Having deigned then to consider the problem from this lowest and most
sordid standpoint, you should shift your ground, I think, and reflect
upon it from the midmost of my three Pisgahs, the scientific one. If I
haven't led you to this first, it is because you have probably scrambled
up it already, and paid no attention at all to the one that I have just
recommended to you. And in a sense your instinct will perhaps have taken
you by a straighter route to the heart of this matter than that which
your more prudent parent has indicated. Because ultimately it is from
this point that you will have to make your final decision. You must ask
yourself, with all the earnestness of a novice at his altar-vigil, "Am I
prepared to _know_?"
For the long day of the charlatan and the quack is drawing at last to
its close, and their sun is even now setting in a blaze of
patent-medicine advertisements. Modern Europe has almost ceased to be
possible for the would-be Paracelsus; even America will not contain him,
I think, for very much longer. And through a dissolving mist of white
spats and atrocious Latin the eyes of humanity are turning slowly, but
very surely, towards the man who _knows_. Are you prepared to become
such a man?
I fancy that I can see your forehead wrinkling a little here; so let me
explain myself in a parable. There is an old story, familiar in the
hospitals, of a bygone practitioner whose simple habit it was to tie a
piece of string about the waist of his patient. He would then ask the
sufferer to locate the pain. If this were above the string he
administered an emetic, if below a purgative; while if the pain and the
string coincided, the unhappy victim would receive both. Now it is
melancholy to reflect that this gentleman has never been without
disciples. And yet how difficult at times may it become to avoid such a
fate. Are you prepared to avoid it?
Let me put the question in yet another shape. Some day a patient will
come to you--you may be quite certain that he will--at the end of a long
round or an exhausting afternoon at hospital; will complain to you of
his lamentable depression of spirits, his entire loss of appetite, his
slight but continual headache; and will show you, in confirmation of
these symptoms, nothing graver, let us say, than a dull eye and a
yellowish tongue. You will be tired; you will see at a glance that his
subjective troubles are altogether disproportionate to the objective
gravity of his complaint, and perhaps justifiably you will send him away
happy, or at any rate contented, in the belief that he is a bit
"liverish." But are you going to allow "liverish" to satisfy yourself?
"Of course not," you reply; and yet, believe me, my son, it will be a
very real temptation. Why bother, at a long day's end, to worry your
tired faculties into presenting to your mind as exact a mental picture
of the man's actual condition as they can draw? Nevertheless, unless you
do this, you will be treating him with less respect than your old
bicycle in the coach-house; as though, if it should creak or wheeze or
begin to run less smoothly, you would merely tell yourself that it was
"wheelish," and drop oil at random into its most convenient aperture. Do
you begin to see what I am driving at?
And then you will probably turn upon me and say, "But to cultivate this
habit of forming proper mental pictures, I shall have to be at least a
chemist, a physicist, a pathologist, a bacteriologist, to say nothing of
a philosopher; and how can a single human being, however industrious,
contain as many persons as these?" And of course he cannot. Upon no
more than one branch of the tree of Healing will it be given to you to
climb out a little farther than your fellows; but, at any rate, you can
keep your eye upon the others. It is in this way alone that you can
become a scientific physician in the best and broadest sense. And you
can take my word for it that it will never be worth your while to become
any other sort of a sawbones--an exacting prospect? I agree with you.
And many an hour will come to you with the easy question, "Why lavish
all this time and trouble in gathering up some very trifling grain of
extra knowledge--knowledge that, in all probability, will never become
of the least importance in your hands?"
And then, perhaps, a moment will flash into your life when this very
grain shall shape a million destinies. Are you prepared to live for that
moment?
I am almost tempted to finish my letter at this question mark; and the
more so because the great public, or such of it as has been led away by
a certain school of literary sentimentalists, has plastered my final
mound of observation--shall we call it the human one?--with such a
viscid layer of adulation that it has become a little hard for a
self-respecting physician to take his stand there even for two and a
half moments. Has ever, I wonder, a doctor figured in fiction or drama
who, being neither a clown nor a fool, was not described as noble? Have
we not tracked him on his rounds through unconscionable horrors, and
wept big tears at his preposterous death-bed? No wonder such a fellow
finds it hard to get his bills paid. To offer him mere money would seem
little less than sacrilege.
And yet, I think, you will agree with me that here is an aspect of
medicine worth consideration. To the seeing eye and the tender hand
there is no easier door into the warm heart of humanity. There is no
other profession that will lead you quite so close to reality. And by
this I don't mean realism in the modern sense, wherein, as it seems to
me, the altogether ugly looms so disproportionately large. For after
thirty years of tolerably wide opportunity I have still failed to find
the altogether ugly. And though of course you will meet ugliness in
plenty--a cancer that will find you shocked and, alas, largely
impotent--yet, if you look long enough, and carefully enough, how often
will you discover it to be but the shadow of some clearly shining
spiritual beauty. No, you need not fear, I think, to tread behind the
veil.
And now let me round off my epistle with a brief reminiscence. In my
early twenties, just after I had qualified, I travelled down to a small
fishing-village in Cornwall to act there as locum tenens for a
practitioner who had finally broken down in health. The practice, mostly
among a poor population, was a scattered one, and I was kept fairly
busy; so busy, in fact, that beyond a hazy impression of buffeting
across estuaries in big-bottomed ferryboats, and driving, upon a wild
night or two, along as rough a coast-line as one could desire to see, I
remember very little of that month's experiences.
One remains with me. And you must imagine a rather tumble-down,
twopenny-halfpenny cottage, half-way down a cobbled street, with its
front door opening directly into a tiny living-room. A youthful-looking
Hippocrates is backing out of it rather more awkwardly than usual. And
in front of him, still holding one of his hands, is a willowy, comely
Cornish lass, mother of three, with the most disturbingly moist-looking
eyes. In the background there would be, I think, a very old and rugged
woman, crooning over her youngest grandchild, just recovered, happily,
and rather miraculously, from a very tough attack of pneumonia. The
young man had been telling them, this simple family, that he was going
away now, back to London and the big hospital. And hence--dare I write
it?--hence these tears.
"Ah, doctor," says the lassie, "'tis wisht you've made us. An'
whatever'll us do now if the little uns take bad?"
"Oh, rot," says the blushing physician, jolted for the moment out of a
rather elaborate bedside manner--"nonsense, I mean. You'll get along all
right. There's another man coming. And I didn't do anything, you know,
really."
"Didn't do nothen? D'you hear that, mother?" And the old woman looks up,
with her wrinkled cheeks and cavernous, sea-blue eyes. "D'you think us
don't know very well as you've saved the poor lamb's life?"
And so, as Pepys would say, into the wet, bright street, and up the hill
to the surgery. She was under a misapprehension, of course. Presently,
if you take up medicine, you will learn that a doctor's part in the
treatment of pneumonia consists chiefly of a masterly inactivity. But a
boy of twenty-four can't hear words like that spoken to him, and remain
quite the same person; even if next week he is busy bashing hats in at a
Hospital Cup-tie. By the way, I got mine rather badly damaged last
Wednesday when Guy's won the cup again. And, I think, now you have read
this letter, that I can almost hear you murmuring, "No wonder."
Your affect. father,
P. H.
III
_To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_March_ 14, 1910.
MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,
I am very glad to learn that your health on the whole has not been much
worse since your visit to us last month. And I have no doubt that this
last week's sunshine will have already improved it. Claire is now quite
fit again after a mild attack of mumps, and goes back to Eastbourne in
two days' time.
With regard to your rheumatism, there are, as you say, several kinds of
this complaint, or at any rate a good many affections that go popularly
under the same name. And I think that it is quite likely that the
wearing of a ring upon your third finger might very probably benefit
your own particular variety, though I am much more doubtful about its
efficacy in the case of your coachman's wife. Yes, there are two I's in
bacilli, as you point out, but I'm afraid that the article you read in
the paper is quite correct in stating that our insides contain a very
large number of these active little animals. Nor is the female sex
exempt, I'm sorry to say. But it is an idea that one soon gets used to,
and I doubt if the measures that you suggest will make a very great
difference either to their health or your own. But there was once a wise
old doctor who used to say that between milk and good sound blood there
was no difference but the colour. Personally I prefer it sweet. But the
sour kind is no doubt better than none at all.
With best love from Esther and the girls,
Your affect. nephew,
PETER HARDING.
IV
_To Colonel R. F. Morris, C.B., 7th Division, Meerut, India._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_March_ 15, 1910.
MY DEAR RUPERT,
It gave me real joy to see your hand-writing again this morning on the
breakfast-table. Only last week I had been thinking that one of your
rare letters was about due. So you have just had the time of your life,
have you, during your last shoot in Kashmir, and find Meerut, as a
result, pretty deadly--and oh to be in England now that April's nearly
there? A pestilent thing, isn't it, this divine discontent? Only last
week I had a letter from old Bob Lynn. You remember Bob. You were his
fag, I think, for half a term. London, London, London--that was the
burden of his desire; and he with a trout stream, by turns cavernous and
romantic and sheerly lyrical, splashing his very doorstep!
And now here are you, too, sighing for Pall Mall and the Park, whereas
I, who have them both, would hold six months at Meerut as a cheap price
indeed for those seven weeks of Kashmir forests. Is it racial, or
universal, or merely temperamental, I wonder, this passionate yearning
to be elsewhere--some uncrushable remnant of Romance? I give it up. I am
sure that it is a nuisance; and equally certain that it is in reality
the very salt of life.
Coming home sometimes in a tube railway-carriage--the latest invention
of the modern impersonal Devil--I glance down the long line of returning
City faces. There they are, sleek, absorbed, consciously prosperous. And
I wonder if they are to be read as indications of an absolute content;
or do they conceal, by some stern effort of will, a restless desire for
snow mountains, forests, moors, streams, sunshine, anything in fact that
is the antithesis of Oxford Circus? It is hard to believe it; and yet I
am not so sure that it is even unlikely. For as Matthews, the alienist,
said to me the other day, the only _really_ contented people are usually
to be found in lunatic asylums. So we must give them the benefit of the
doubt. But it's news that you want and not surmise.
And first of all let me reassure you, and with no shadow of professional
reserve, about your aunt--I was almost going to write your mother--Lady
Wroxton. For a month or two, it is true, I was really in anxiety about
her. Sir Hugh's death was a literal dividing in twain of every interest
of her life, and the very breadth and diversity of these was the
consequent measure of her suffering. But, as you know, that fine,
deep-founded will of hers could never really fail her. And even in the
darkest days of her first grief and almost complete insomnia it was
there for us inadequate physicians to work upon--our stay and hers.
Since then she has been resting down at Stoke, and has been progressing
slowly but steadily. I saw her last month for half an hour, and
Rochester, one of the best of G.P.'s, has written to me with increasing
confidence in each letter; so that I hope, when you return in the
autumn, you will find her again the strong, serene woman whom we both
love so well.
As regards ourselves--well, if the ratio between happiness and history
that is supposed to hold good for nations is equally true of families,
ours must be singularly blessed. For, upon my soul, I find it very hard
to think of any at all. We are all a little older, of course, and both
Esther and I have made modest additions to our equipment--of grey hairs.
For me there is, at any rate, in this the compensation of that
increasing maturity of appearance which lends weight to my opinions in
the eyes of a good many of my patients. For Esther, I suppose, there is
none. But (I speak of course as a husband. And who should know better?)
they are not altogether unbecoming.
And it is chiefly in the children that the march of time is being most
visibly displayed for us. Every month, or so it seems to us, they are
altering before our eyes. And the adventures, as a consequence, have
been chiefly theirs. Horace, for example, has filled out and solidified
to an alarming extent during the last year or so, tips the scale at
thirteen stone, ventures an occasional opinion on wine and the other
members of its trinity, and has succeeded in attaining his Rugger
"blue." It is his last year at Cambridge though and I'm afraid that the
memory of his one and only Varsity match at Queen's is likely to be a
little chequered. For, as you probably know, it was a record defeat; and
though both teams were fairly matched as regarded the forwards, Oxford
was vastly superior in all other departments of the game, as the
sporting papers say. But it was a great spectacle for the onlookers. The
Oxford threes, magnificently set in motion by their stand-off half,
were quite an ideal picture of clever and unselfish attack. Time and
again they swept down the field, alert, speedy, and opportunist, in the
cleanest sense of the word. The weakness of the opposition flattered
them, no doubt. But it was a splendid and invigorating exhibition for
all that, and one that must have sent the blood tingling enviously down
a good many middle-aged arteries. For there's always something superbly
tonic about this particular match, emanating even more from the
surrounding crowd than from the actual struggle of healthy young
athletes that it has come to witness. There is no other large crowd
quite like it, so unanimously well-coloured, clean, and cheerful, so
lusty of shoulder and clear of eye. The winter air has set a colour in
the girls' cheeks, to be heightened presently by the instructed ardour
with which they follow the doings of their cousins and brothers, or
cousins' and brothers' friends. And even the old duffers among us seem
to don an infectious vitality as we greet our grey-haired friends by
rope and doorway. The strained eyes and late-night cheeks that are not
uncommon at such comparable gatherings as those at Lord's and Henley are
to be sought in vain at this mid-winter festival. And I can think of no
sounder answer to the modern cries of race-degeneracy than a stroll
round Queen's at half-time. "Ah, but that shows you merely the cream,"
you may tell me. But then races, like milks, must be judged, I think, by
the cream that they produce. And this particular spectacle at Queen's is
sufficiently reassuring both as to quality and amount.
Well, it was a great game, and I wish you could have been there to see
it. Molly, with the halo of Newnham still upon her, was as enthusiastic
as her tradition will allow, while Claire, on a special holiday from her
school at Eastbourne, was quite openly broken-hearted for poor Horace's
sake. However, he got enough hero-worshipping next day to soothe the
most wounded of defeated warriors. The more prosaic problem of how to
tackle his future is troubling him now; and I more than half suspect him
of designs on Medicine.
Molly, on the other hand, is disturbed by no such uncertainty. She is
already on the committee of the W.S.P.U., which being interpreted means
the Women's Social and Political Union; and concerns herself vigorously
with the vexed questions of adult suffrage and the feminine vote.
Besides this she is assistant manager of a girls' club in Hoxton, and
combines an intense faith in the political future of her sex with an
ardent admiration for Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw. Religiously, she is, for
the moment (to the acute distress of some of our nearer relatives),
inclining to an up-to-date form of polytheism; but hedges with an
occasional (rather unobtrusive) attendance at a more orthodox early
service. Fortunately she is inveterately addicted to the coldest of cold
baths, the roughest of towels, and a plentiful breakfast. Moreover
another phase of experience is presenting itself modestly, but with a
quite unmistakable sturdiness, to her consideration. He is a nice,
open-air sort of boy (_entre nous_, Bob Lynn junior. What fogies we are
getting, to be sure), untroubled about the constitution of his _ego_,
and frankly bored by politics, but with a passion for his microscope
that must be running, I think, a very neck-and-neck sort of race with
his admiration for Miss Molly.
Tom, as you know, is still at Rugby; and about him we are all, that is
Esther and I and Jakes, his house-master, a little anxious. For it seems
that during the latter part of his Christmas holidays, which he spent
with a friend at Scarborough, he fell very deeply under the influence of
one of those ardent, but dangerous, people possessed of what they
describe as a passion for souls. This particular one, a sort of
nondescript with private means, was what he called, and what he has
tried to make Tom and his friend, an "out and outer."
Obviously shyly, Tom sent us a programme of this man's meetings--he was
holding a mission to schoolboys--from which we gathered that his
particular spiritual preserves are confined to our larger public
schools. He was a little careful to emphasise this. Boys from elsewhere
were only permitted to hear him by special introduction. He has not
apparently been to a public school himself; but owns, or was once owned
by, one of the more recent colleges at Cambridge. I hope that I am not
writing this too bitterly, for I am trying to be kind to his motives.
But the results of his efforts upon Tom have been, up to the present,
rather devastating. The boy is quite clearly in earnest, has been indeed
very profoundly stirred. With one or two others he has started a meeting
for prayer in his house, has given up singing his comic songs, and has
been systematically tackling his fellows about their souls' health.
Knowing a little bit about the boy, I should scarcely have been able to
believe all this, if Jakes hadn't written to me so very fully about the
matter. He is acting quite wisely, I think--has given full permission
and facilities for their little meetings, with a gentle word or two
about the inadvisability of too much publicity. Nevertheless a certain
amount of natural, and, as I can't help feeling, healthy hostility has
sprung up against the movement--a hostility that we both fear is being
interpreted by the boys, and their spiritual adviser, as persecution for
their Lord's sake.
I doubt if you'll understand much of this. Your temperament has always
been too downright, too untroubled with spiritual questionings, too
simply aware of the "things we don't talk about." "Isn't this all rather
like cant?" I can imagine you wondering. But it isn't by any means all
cant. And that is what makes the whole question so difficult to deal
with. For into the warm nest of the boy's soul this holy blunderer has
thrust his easy, ignorant fingers, pulling out, as it were, the
fledgling spiritual secrets. They were not ready for the air and the
light and the winds. They were tucked away, as a wise Nature meant them
to be, under the protecting feathers of the natural boy's carelessness.
And now, since they have been plucked out into the open for all the
world to see, they must needs flap their premature wings in a sort of
pitiful, earnest foolishness. While we, who know so well what has really
happened, can only stand by, at whatever cost, to see that the
half-sprouted pinions may not beat themselves into some permanent
distortion or futility--may become, after all, those strong, supporting
structures that they were designed for at their birth.
And all the while there will be the ever-present danger of the natural
boy himself discovering suddenly, in a dumb sort of way, that his
fledgling has been making (as he will most certainly put it) a little
fool of itself. And then how desperately likely will he be to disown it
altogether, to his lifelong incompleteness. Self-constituted missioners
to schoolboys should be required to possess a licence. And it should be
pretty difficult to obtain.
Claire you will still find, I think, when you come home next autumn,
very much of the pure child, for all her fifteen and a half years.
Hockey and Henty bound her physical and mental horizons, and she writes
periodical letters to Tom urging the army as the only possible
profession for him. And now I must put a stop to what will seem in your
bachelor eyes the prosy outpourings of the typical family man. But then
your Kashmir precipices are not for all of us, you know; and I have only
just been giving you what you asked for.
Yours as ever,
PETER HARDING.
P.S.--There will of course be a spare bedroom and a well-stoked fire
here against your return next October.
V
_To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_March_ 23, 1910.
MY DEAR HUGH,
Our exchange of letters, since you finally left our fickle climate, has
become so regular that I would apologise for not having written to you
since the New Year, were it not that by so doing I should be distilling
the poison of formality into the pot-luck of our correspondence. So I
won't.
I am sorry to hear that the bronchitis has been bothering you again,
joining hands with _anno Domini_ to remind you of our human frailty. But
your fingers, I see, have lost none of their cunning, and I immensely
enjoyed your little exhibition of etchings at Obach's. Two of them I
have acquired, I am glad to say, and they are looking at me as I write.
And now I almost think that I shall have to take a third. It has drifted
into Obach's window, and for several days past its fascination has been
growing upon me. Three or four times in passing I have paused to
consider it; and on each occasion it has brightened far more than Bond
Street for me.
It is the drawing of the little flower-girl who has forgotten her wares
to feast her eyes upon the silk gown in the shop-window. And there was a
time, I think, when an older, or younger, Pontrex would rather have
scorned to descend upon so well-worn a theme--it would have seemed a
descent in those days. And at first I thought that even now you had
thrown it in among the others as a kind of sop to the easy sentiments of
the majority. But I have learned better, I think, and discovered that
you have treated what is, after all, the perennially beautiful with all
your own scrupulous severity.
I met such a little girl only to-day in Aldgate. She was not selling
flowers, and was singularly northern in type--coming home, I should
guess, from afternoon school. Moving mechanically through the maze of
hurrying passengers, she was obviously as deaf to the street-side
costers as to the more thunderous traffic of the dock-yard waggons. At
the corner of Houndsditch we almost collided, and she looked up for a
moment from her book. It was a healthy and piquant little face, if
typically town-bred, that she turned towards mine. But the look, if I
could have captured it on canvas, would have done more than immortalise
us both. For there was reflected in it--just for a moment--the very
dazzle itself of that authentic Wonder which some of us call Mysticism,
and some Romance; but which is only half named by them both. And I
should greatly have liked to ask her what book had wrought the miracle.
But the currents of crossing pedestrians separated us almost instantly,
though not so quickly as the look itself had bolted back into hiding,
leaving in its stead a very ordinary little schoolgirl extending the tip
of a small pink tongue.
"'Ullo, fice," she said.
So I blessed her, and went on my way rejoicing; and was quite ignorant,
for at least a quarter of an hour, of the very gorgeous pageant of smoke
and sunset that faced me towards Cheapside. For, like yourself, it is
always the humanity that these things frame that captures me first and
holds me longest. And I believe I would exchange any merely physical
panorama in the world for a new vista of the human soul. So greatly
indeed is this preference growing in me that, keenly as I love it, I
find my English landscape already rearranging itself in my memory. Where
it was once punctuated by trees or monuments or natural wonders, it is
now becoming mapped out for me by such trivial affairs as some passing
word of greeting or chance exchange of easy gossip. At this bend of the
road I met the decidedly tipsy old rascal who assured me that he had
made his debut with Henry Irving. By that hedge two little girls gave me
a spontaneous, and consequently very sweet, small handful of half-ripe
blackberries.
So your little flower-seller has gone to my heart; and if Esther will
let me--and I think that she will--I shall take her into my house as
well. Can I tell you more than this? My opinion on your technique is not
worth having, as you know very well. I only know that I am less
conscious of it in these latest etchings of yours than in any of the
others; and that too ought to count for praise, I think. And in any case
I mean it as such. For indeed it is rather refreshing just now to be
able, for once in a way, to ignore technique, or at any rate so
unconsciously to take it for granted that the message conveyed by it at
once, and alone, fills the mind. Because, _entre nous_, I seem lately to
have diagnosed in most of our galleries a small epidemic of--shall we
say?--hypertechnique. The origin of the malady cannot, I think, be very
deep-seated. But its outward and visible signs are rather striking
eruptions of a polymorphic type, for the most part somewhat grotesque,
and not infrequently even a little nauseous. And they are very modern.
Nothing quite like them has ever been seen before; unless--can it be
possible?--every age has known them, but time, in his mercy, has hidden
them in due season--a reflection that is not without a certain comfort,
since its corollary suggests the same process as being at work
to-day--unobtrusively, no doubt, but with equal certainty. As Wensley
said to me last week, if the authorities could only be induced to put
up, for example, Velasquez' Philip IV, or The Laughing Cavalier among
the annual exhibits of the New English Art Club, even the most
completely self-satisfied of Mr. John's young ladies would call out for
a catalogue to cover her nakedness. But, alas, Philip IV remains where
he is, and the neo-intellectuals of the art-world still perspire
admiration round their master's most recent visions, to drift hence, in
due season, that they may do homage to those "obscenities in lavender"
on the one hand, and the Bedlamite echoes of Van Gogh on the other, that
emerge annually from Paris to soil our walls in the name of progress.