for a young man is perhaps the most difficult to manage--a practice
consisting almost entirely of prosperous and middle-class patients. I am
not using the term middle-class--it is one that I particularly hate--in
any derogatory sense, but _faute de mieux_ as describing the very large
stratum of society that pivots upon the shop-counter or the offices
behind it. It is a stratum, as you will be sure to find out pretty soon,
as kindly, honest, and really considerate as any other, and no less
lacking in heroism and endurance. But it is one that has not yet fully
acquired perhaps the habit of emotional suppression--the latest to be
developed in social evolution--and is consequently a little addicted to
superlatives, and still somewhat over-respectful, no doubt, to such mere
externals as eloquence and millinery in other people. On the other hand
it possesses an extremely accurate appreciation of the cash value of
services rendered, and its consideration for a gentleman is by no means
going to interfere with this when he comes before them as a salesman of
physic and incidentally of advice. Moreover--and it's no good being
hypersensitive about it--we mustn't forget that we too, as a profession,
have but lately differentiated ourselves from the ranks of retail
commerce--so lately, in fact, that the barber tradition is far from
being entirely defunct.
I can remember very well, for instance, in my first locum, a fortnight
after I had qualified, standing behind the counter of a little surgery
in Shadwell in response to a patient who had tapped upon it loudly with
the edge of his shilling, and summoned me with a call of "Shop." Would I
take out his tooth for sixpence? No, I wouldn't. A shilling was the
recognised fee for this operation. Well, what about ninepence? No, not
even for ninepence.
"Orl right, guv'nor, 'eave away then," and the shilling went into the
till, while the tooth, neatly wrapped in paper, was borne homewards for
domestic inspection. Nor are such incidents by any means uncommon even
to-day, and they add excellent lessons to those of Winchester and New.
Then, too, you mustn't overlook the fact that mere youth itself is under
a greater disadvantage in medicine than in almost any other profession.
The idea of a young advocate may fire the imagination. The idea of a
young doctor only suggests distrust. A young lawyer, having the keener
wit of youth, may be a safe adviser in our legal dilemmas. The young
officer is the marrow of our army and navy. We may even venture to
entrust our souls for spiritual guidance to some earnest young priest.
But when it comes to our bodies, to the actual tenements that contain
us, to such intimate events as percussion, palpation, the administration
of tonics, or the insertion of knife and forceps--why then, you know, we
must really insist upon maturity.
Your mere boys may administer our properties, or defend our countries,
or even dally gently with our souls. But when it comes to our actual
flesh and blood--well, we prefer the assistant or the locum to confine
his attentions to the servants, the children, or the very poor. There
are exceptions to the rule, no doubt. But I'm afraid that you will find
it a very general one. I know that I did. And about the only comfort to
be extracted from it is the fact that it may be regarded as an excellent
medium for the acquirement of humility. And that's why, if your brothers
in the Church or the Army become more lowly in spirit than yourself, it
must be taken to argue in them a greater endowment of natural grace.
For their teaching, in this respect, is not likely, I think, to be more
thorough than yours. At the same time, there are, as you have just been
finding out, some rather bitter moments for the newly fledged medico. I
remember once, when I was about twenty-four, I think, and doing a locum
in Portsmouth, being called up for the third night in succession to
attend a confinement. It was three o'clock in the morning, and the
night-bell stirred me out of the profoundest depths of slumber. Very
weary, and very bleary, I remember cursing myself by all my gods for
having set my hand to so laborious a plough as the pursuit of healing.
But later, walking grimly down the empty streets in a pallid drizzle of
rain, a certain sense of heroism came to my rescue. After all, it _was_
rather a noble thing to be doing; and no doubt my patient would be
proportionately grateful. As a matter of solemn fact, on setting eyes
upon me, she lifted up her voice, and wept incontinently.
It was a perfectly natural thing to do, of course, in the light of after
reflection. She had expected to see the genial, middle-aged physician
who had so often attended her; and behold, in his stead, a pale-faced
boy who might very nearly have been her son! It was no wonder that she
burst into tears. But it was rather a blow for the poor hero.
Afterwards, I think, having both made the best of a bad job, and
observed an all-wise Nature introduce to us an entirely normal baby, we
became quite friendly. And you will generally find, if you know your
work, and refrain from dogma, that a little patience will heal most of
these differences, while the cause of them, alas, will depart readily
enough. It is good, no doubt, to be considered a wise old codger. But
the pearl that pays for it is of great price. So don't be in too much of
a hurry to part with it.
Your affect. uncle,
PETER HARDING.
IX
_To Harry Carthew, Trenant Hotel, Leeds._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_April_ 15, 1910.
MY DEAR CARTHEW,
I am very glad. But let me put it to you, sir--that _is_ the phrase,
isn't it?--that you really cured yourself.
Yrs. very sincerely,
PETER HARDING.
X
_To the Rev. Bruce Harding, S. Peter's College, Morecambe Bay._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_April_ 20, 1910.
MY DEAR BRUCE,
The whole subject is so difficult, and one's opinions upon it, in cold
ink as it were, are so liable to be misread, that I wish we could have
had a quiet talk about it instead. But of course, since you cannot leave
the school until the May holiday begins, and will have, if you decide to
take so radical a step, to write to the boys' parents in India and
Egypt, this is quite impossible. From your letter I seem to gather that
this was your intention at the time of writing, and it is a decision in
which I can sympathise with you very deeply.
For the whole ten years during which the school has been in your charge
it has, to your almost certain knowledge, and according also to the
testimony of many of your old pupils, been absolutely free from this
"moral canker," as you describe it, that you have just discovered in it
now. And even for a preparatory school, like yours, this is a record for
which you are right to be profoundly thankful. It is one also that
naturally throws up into a blacker relief the present condition of
affairs. Moreover, having discovered its sphere to be at present fairly
circumscribed--confined apparently to a single coterie of some half a
dozen boys--the obvious course, as you say, would seem to be a prompt
and thorough excision, _pro bono publico_.
And yet I believe that there's a better way--so much better that I am
sure, before receiving this, you will have already found it, and
abandoned your first decision. You won't expel the youngsters. You'll
create instead a public feeling that will cure them. And you'll
distribute them in such a way that each will be surrounded by it to his
best advantage. I feel so certain that you'll have already made up your
mind to do this that I won't put in any special pleading on behalf of
these particular nippers or their parents abroad, although I sincerely
believe that in taking so drastic a step as you suggest in your letter
you would not only be magnifying their offence out of all proportion,
but that the result all round would be more than harmful.
Instead, the point that I would most urgently put before you--in spite
of many an old drawn battle upon the subject--is that the present little
crisis would be an excellent excuse for reconsidering your position as
regards giving to your scholars some definite physiological instruction.
Because I am quite convinced that at least three-quarters of your moral
canker would more properly be defined as physiological curiosity and
that the whole problem is only secondarily one of actual perversity. Now
your custom up to the present has had, I'll admit, a great deal to
recommend it. For your boys come to you very young, usually at the age
of nine or ten, shy and imaginative enough perhaps, but for the most
part mentally sexless, and with an almost entirely objective outlook
upon life. In other words, their inquisitiveness is eccentric rather
than concentric. It's a happy condition, and one, as you say, that must
be dealt with exceedingly carefully. When they leave you, somewhere
about fourteen or fifteen years old, you usually take the opportunity of
the good-bye interview to give them some warnings as to confronting
moral dangers. But purposely, for fear of prematurely dissipating a
desirable innocence, or awakening what you call an illegitimate
curiosity, you keep your advice to generalities in all but the rarest
instances. The possible stimulus to dangerous self-exploration in some
unsuspecting youngster has always outweighed for you the advantages of a
too direct explanation.
And this is where, in spite of your ten years' immunity, I feel sure
that your methods have fallen short of the best. Self-exploration is
only dangerous when it's blind, and if self-curiosity is ever
illegitimate--and I don't see why it should be--we both know that some
day or another it is going to become inevitable. We know more, because
we are fully aware that some day or another it is going to be satisfied.
And for the life of me I cannot see why mere physiological ignorance
shouldn't be dispelled in the same routine that is employed for
dispelling any other sort of ignorance, mathematical, historical, or
what you will. It can be done, I am quite certain, without rubbing a
particle off the sweet bloom of childhood, and it will go a very long
way in preserving from a much ruder handling that of adolescence and
early manhood. For it seems to me that the very fact of refraining from
any definite instruction upon what, after all, from the purely physical
point of view, is the bed-rock of our _raison d'etre_, lends the
subject in advance precisely that air of unnecessary and even shameful
mystery which is responsible for about nine-tenths of our prudery on the
one hand, and our obscenity on the other.
There's so little original in these reflections, they represent the
attitude of so large a number of ordinarily thoughtful persons, that
they may probably bore you. But, on the other hand, although there's a
good deal of educational spade-work still before us, the day will
certainly come, I think, when we shall treat and teach sexual phenomena
in the same sane and self-consciousless way as we treat and teach the
principles of personal cleanliness and physical hygiene. It will be a
great day--may it come soon--and with its dawning will disappear not
only the entire stock-in-trade of a not uncommon type of smoking-room
raconteur, but a very considerable portion of actual and imaginative
immorality. For if you cover up anything long enough, and refer to it
slyly enough, you can be certain in the end of making its exposure
indecent. If gloves became _de rigueur_ for a couple of centuries we
should raise prurient titters at the mention of a knuckle. No; it's air
and sunlight and the salt of a bracing sanity in these matters that is
our crying need.
"The sea," says Mr. Stacpoole in his clever romance "The Blue Lagoon,"
"is a great purifier," and proceeds, in a little piece of delicate and
absolutely true psychology, to describe how Dick, the derelict boy on
the coral island, instinctively ran naked with his sister in the
presence of winds and waves, although some impulse, born probably of
memory, bade him cover himself inland. But his decency was the same in
either place.
And it's the sea air of a healthy knowledge and acceptance of these
matters that we ought to be pumping through our schoolrooms, our
dormitories, and our heart-to-heart talks with our children. Approach
them frankly enough, and with no semblance of shamefacedness, and we
needn't be afraid, I think, of any evil consequences. The guilty smile,
the illicit joke, become disarmed in advance when their subject is
treated in the same matter-of-fact and unmysterious fashion as those of
geography or astronomy. And that is why, on the whole, I am opposed to
the average "purity" volumes that are published for purposes of sexual
instruction. For though they acknowledge this to be the solution of a
large portion of the problem, they are so written, circulated, and
advertised as to suggest rather an initiation into the unspeakable than
a straightforward piece of natural history. And I suspect, as a
consequence, that their sales are considerably larger among the prurient
than the pious. An older generation was brought up on "Reading without
tears." The next should have a companion volume "Biology without shame."
Forgive this sermon, but I have been confronted just lately with such a
lot of human mental wreckage, the direct result, in my opinion, of the
half-religious, half-fearful shrouds with which we always swaddle up
these questions, that I rejoice in an opportunity for their wholesale
condemnation. It was Mrs. Craigie, I think, who said that every girl of
eighteen should read "Tom Jones." And one can see why, for it is a clean
and wholesome history, if a little unspiritual. But her education, like
her brother's, should not be left haphazard to the chance reading of a
novel, or to the unnecessary blushes with which she ponders certain
passages of Scripture.
Well, good-bye, old man, and God bless you. Chat it all over with the
young sinners, and then work out a little course of lectures upon the
reproduction of species. If you have never talked collectively to a
roomful of boys upon the subject before, you will be surprised at the
rapt interest and genuine solemnity with which they will attend to what
you have to tell them. And the purity of your school won't suffer, I
think, by its change of foundations.
Your affect. cousin,
PETER HARDING.
XI
_To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_April_ 22, 1910.
MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,
I am glad to hear that the ring has been so completely successful in
driving away the pains from your joints. I haven't actually heard of the
wearing of a ring round the waist for pains elsewhere. But, as you say,
it sounds a distinctly hopeful idea. With regard to the pills, so much
depends, of course, on what you mean by being worth a guinea. If you are
to measure these benefits in actual cash, I believe this amounts to
about three farthings. But perhaps that is an unfair standard. No, I
don't think that there is the least risk in taking four. I am sorry to
hear of your gardener's troubles. But I should hardly have thought that
it would be necessary to send him to Torquay. Has it ever occurred to
you to suggest that he should sign the pledge?
Your affect. nephew,
PETER HARDING.
XII
_To Tom Harding, c/o the Rev. Arthur Jake Rugby._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_April_ 24, 1910.
MY DEAR TOM,
I have been expecting this letter of yours for a good many weeks. It
would be almost true, I think, to say that I have been hoping for it.
And yet each week of delay has been making, I believe, for safety. So
strongly have I been feeling this last, indeed, that now your letter has
actually come, and actually contains to so large an extent the sort of
material that I expected to find in it, I am more than glad that you
have hesitated so long before writing it. One must always stand away a
little from the burning bush to discuss its relations with an everyday
world. Close beneath it, in the first apprehension of its significance,
there is no room for anything but adoration. And I am afraid this letter
of mine, had you received it then, would have seemed to you, if not even
a little blasphemous, at any rate lacking in true reverence. For
although you haven't told me so, I expect that I shouldn't be far wrong
in hazarding a guess that for the first month or two after your
experience at Scarborough you told yourself that your father, and
perhaps even your mother, were a little wanting in a true understanding
of the miracle that had befallen you. It was all so new, so
overwhelming; it threw such a strange light not only upon your own
individual life, past and to come, but upon the sum total of all other
life as well, that you felt its wonder to be almost incompatible with
the humdrum, commonplace existence that we and most of our friends
appeared to be leading.
Had we known it, as it was then shining upon you, surely we should have
been so different! You felt, I think, as if you had suddenly found us
out. And though you didn't love us any the less for this--perhaps even
loved us more, in another kind of way--you were quite sure that if you
hadn't actually outstripped us by this single leap into the light, we
had at any rate dropped down a little from the high plane on which, till
then, you had never doubted that we lived.
How, for example, in a world that teemed with sin, could the governor be
so keen on catching trout? How was it, with these dark, tremendous
millions hemming him in, that you had never seen him hand away a tract,
or preach the Word in season? How came it, alas, that he could even
sometimes say "damn" when he broke a bootlace, or waste some
unreturnable hour over a rubber of bridge? Of course with the mater it
was different. Maters _are_ different, and I'm glad you thought of that,
Tom. But come now, didn't it run somehow in this way? Why naturally it
did, and it meant that your discovery had already begotten another. It
meant that you had suddenly realised the weak humanity of your parents.
But you must try to be kind to it.
And that's how it is with all great discoveries, Tom, in every branch of
life. First one is struck with their extraordinary, their dazzling,
simplicity. Belief--life; acceptance--salvation; and you had never
somehow thought of it before! How simple, and by its very simplicity how
god-like, how utterly convincing!
And then, in this new irrefragable conception, everything (even the
governor) has to be reconsidered, appraised, condemned, readjusted, and
inspired afresh. What is this going to mean to me personally? What does
it mean to other people? And again, what responsibility towards them
does its possession entail on myself? These are the inevitable questions
that follow. The putting of them is the second stage in the general
process. The very fact of their being put at all shows the discovery to
be already at work. And the answers, if the discovery is worth anything
at all, and we have postulated it to be a great one, can be of only one
kind. I must pursue it to the end. I must follow out its leading as far
as my humanity will let me. And I must communicate the results to my
fellows according to the best of my abilities. That is the third stage,
and it is coterminous with life, Tom. Because, you see, all great
discoveries, like yours, contain within them the germ-cells of a
thousand others. To discover one or two of these, to nourish them, and
perhaps even, if one is very fortunate, to enable them in some degree to
fructify, is more than a life-work for most of us.
So true is this, and so endless and apparently diverse appear to be
their various possibilities, that we are apt very easily (especially in
middle life) to forget the splendid, sweeping simplicity of the initial
idea, just as we are equally apt to overrate, perhaps, the importance of
those particular germs that we have, by temperament and circumstance,
elected to serve, and to underrate the value of those to which our
neighbours have been attracted. And it is because of the first of these
things that I want to thank you for your letter, and tell you how very
much I value it. You have reminded me again of something that I would
never like to forget. You have re-created for me the right atmosphere.
Belief _is_ life, Tom, in a great many more senses than one. Hang on to
that like a limpet, and the peace of heart that means strength of hand
will never leave you. But it's because of the second of these things
that I want you to hesitate just a little longer before you commit
yourself to the proposition in your letter.
To be a lay evangelist, something like the gentleman whose services you
attended, may be as high and noble a life as any that the world has to
offer you. As I conceive it, lived to its greatest advantage, it must be
an exceedingly difficult one, which should only of course make it the
more worth living. But to say that it is the _best_ worth living, while
it may be true for yourself, is certainly not true as a general
principle. There is no one sort of life that is the best worth living.
And in considering the question, as you certainly must, I think you
ought to be very careful to keep this before your mind. Ways in life
are not to be selected like articles from a shop-window. You cannot ask
for the best, and go away with it in your pocket. The best worth living
life is already inside you. And your new discovery is not going to
determine its nature--heredity and a thousand other things have already
done that--but rather its quality. You may be cut out for a lay, or any
other kind of evangelist. I hadn't somehow suspected it in you. But I
may easily have been wrong. Yet I think you mustn't take any definite
vows upon your shoulders--at any rate, for some time--and probably, I
suspect, for several years.
Promises of this sort, you see, are so very much better left unmade. For
in the first place, the remembrance of them is more than likely to blur
the gladness, and consequent usefulness, with which you will obey your
temperament and tendencies in later years, should these determine for
you some different course. And in the second, they may even, standing
upon some mistaken scruple of conscience, succeed in forcing you,
against your real calling, into an altogether unsuitable career.
Meanwhile you need have no fears, I think, in leading your normal,
probationary life. You have the opportunity of University education
before you. And that, at any rate, can do you no harm, and will probably
be of extreme use to you, whatever your ultimate decision. You want to
find out the truth, to impart the truth, and to help your fellow-men to
lead better lives. Very well then, if there's a God, Tom, as you and I
believe, you must be just the material that He would most greatly care
to use. So why not leave it at that for a little while? Want to do the
right thing, and so do the next one; and you'll find, I think, that the
precise nature of your own particular right thing, evangelist or
engineer, will pretty certainly settle itself.
Your aff. father,
P. H.
XIII
_To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._
c/o DR. ROBERT LYNN,
APPLEBROOK, DEVON,
_May_ 3, 1910.
MY DEAR HUGH,
I have just come back to read your letter from one of those super-days
of which even the happiest life can contain, I imagine, no more than a
handful. Of merely good days I can remember many enough--a sufficient
number, at any rate, to absorb very happily the memory of their less
favoured brethren. And several of them remain distinct by virtue of some
outstanding incident or emotion that they contained or inspired. But
most, I think, have become blended into a general peaceable impression
of past contentment. To use a popular Americanism, they were good times,
and usually real good times at that.
But of these super-days, these Olympians among mundane experiences, no
man can expect very many, and I have been, I suspect, as fortunate as
most--in any case so fortunate as to be more than grateful,
notwithstanding the tiny, struggling sense in me (a legacy of
superstition, I suppose, from some far-back ancestors) that so exquisite
an enjoyment must surely prelude some equivalent disaster. They are not,
as a rule, I think, critical days, at any rate in the ordinarily
accepted sense of the term, though I can remember perhaps a couple that
in a small fashion might answer this description.