the more so because I have an uncomfortable suspicion that I may have
wounded you a little when I wrote to you last. If only we could use
colours now, to express our deeper attitude on these occasions--as some
of your fellow-clergy wear stoles at certain seasons--with what pleasant
impunity could we write to one another in yellow, or purple, or red,
leaving black for the editor of "The Times," or the plumber whose bill
we're disputing. But, alas, even our lightest thoughts must needs go
forth clad like mutes at a funeral, and dependent upon those who meet
them to detect their forlorn humanity. And so if I have talked, as the
outsider that I am, too harshly of things that are dear to you, you
must forgive me even as Merridew has forgiven Rogers.
For you know--why should I tell you?--that it was no Word from on high
that my puny humanity was attempting to challenge, but only the chains
(as they seem to me) of Its ecclesiastical exposition; as though man had
been made for the Church, and not the Church for man. And yet even thus
one can only bow before its achievement. For to be able, as the miner of
whom we read the other day, to sing "Lead, kindly Light" through the
foul air of some blocked-up coal-pit is better than to have all
knowledge--and an abundant justification of any creed that makes it
possible.
"Thou wouldst not seek Me," says the Saviour in the "Mirror of Jesus,"
"if thou hadst not found Me."
Do you know the quotation? I came upon it by chance the other day as
repeated by Bourget in a book that I happened to be reading. And it
seems to me to contain very simply--if only we might give it something
more than an academic consent--just the one conception that is needed
for the true and permanent sweetening of all our religious
relationships. For they _are_ seeking, these pig-headed people who annoy
us so much--I think that, nowadays, we most of us can admit as much as
that. Methodist, Sacerdotalist, Hyde-Park Agnostic, Christian Socialist,
Roman Modernist, Traditional Romanist, High, Low, Broad, Middle, Open,
Closed (I wonder if God laughs sometimes at our resounding definitions),
or Free Lance--we cannot help pitying them, of course, according to our
several lights; but in so far as their sincerity is manifest, we do
behold in them the signs of a mistaken search.
And yet, by that very fact, have they not really found? Not our
particular little glimpse of the Almighty and the Eternal, but some
other little glimpse--something, at any rate, that is evidently making
them strive for more; and something that they, like we, are desperately
anxious to share. Or why these dusts of conflict?
And yet, perhaps, the dusts are inevitable, after all--the surest sign
that the Building grows beneath its million workers, and that the
mallets and chisels are being busy against that great day of Affirmation
when the Temple shall stand complete at the meeting-place of all our
roads.
And meanwhile Molly and Rupert, at any rate, are feeling very
happy--with a proud humility, carefully concealed. His years have
seldom weighed heavily on Molly's future husband, though as a matter of
bald fact he is Mr. Pickwick's senior. And lately he has been dropping
them by handfuls. Molly, however, must have picked some of them up, I
fancy, and is wearing them with an appropriate dignity.
Your affect. cousin,
PETER HARDING.
XXX
_To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_December_ 25, 1910,
10.30 p.m.
MY DEAR HUGH,
This seems an odd sort of time at which to begin a letter--even to you.
But this has been an odd sort of Christmas, a kind of aftermath, as far
as its festivities have been concerned, of those demanded by Molly's
marriage. The two water-colours that you sent them, by the way, were
both lovely, quite in your happiest vein; and I am sorry that at present
they have no permanent wall to hang them on. But Rupert's colonial tour,
upon which they had to start early last week, will scarcely be finished,
I suppose, for twelve months; and even then their place of habitation
seems likely to be very movable. So, upon the whole, we have been a
quiet little party, or as quiet, at any rate, as Claire and Tom will
allow; and we decided to spend the afternoon at the hospital, which is
_en fete_ for some twenty-four hours, at the price, possibly, of a few
subsequent temperatures, but to the immediate benediction of all
concerned.
Have you ever been to the hospital? I think not. And I daren't attempt
to describe it to you, chiefly, I suppose, on account of the natural
reticence, the _mauvaise bonte_, or the golden silence--I leave you to
select--with which most men avoid such subjects as their wives, their
souls, and their _alma mater_; but secondarily because, by the time my
letter reached you, the description would most probably have ceased to
be true. It would have added a storey, or sprouted a wing. Let me
content myself therefore with pointing out to you those two boys
standing rather awkwardly in one corner of the entrance-hall--the
left-hand corner between the cloak-room and the porter's desk. Both of
them have only just left school. The shiny-haired one, with the crimson
tie, and the gold buttons on his waistcoat, and the creases on his
rather striking trousers, was at one of our older foundations. The
other, with yesterday's collar round his neck, and a stain or two of
nitric acid upon his sleeves, has just won an entrance scholarship from
a private school at Camberwell. The second is the shyer of the two
perhaps, in spite of his ardent Fabianism and his bitter independence
of revealed religion. But both are a little nervous in that they are
only in their first year, and still, academically speaking, confined to
the study of the dog-fish in a remoter corner of the college. They are
feeling rather young, in fact, though the hospital's name is on their
visiting cards--something like new boys again, at the bottom of the
first form.
Three Christmases from now, however, and they will be sauntering here
very much at their ease, waiting about with their house-physicians for
the two o'clock arrival of their chiefs from Harley Street. The gold
buttons will have disappeared, I think, by then, and the trousers will
be modester in hue; while on the other hand that collar will be above
suspicion, and you might search in vain for a trace of red corrosive.
Both, too, will be dangling stethoscopes, and would like, if they were
quite certain of the chairman, to be smoking a Virginian cigarette. In
other words, they have deserted the college for the "house." They have
become critics of the nursing staff, and their talk--not on Christmas
Day, of course--is of _rales_ and _rhonchi_ and the merits of their
respective H.P.'s. There are some of them standing about in the hall as
our party dismounts from the carriage. But the majority are already in
their favourite wards, whose walls they have been helping to decorate.
Far removed are they from the Sawyers of yesterday, though at times they
grow merry with wine. For the demands of examiners have become annually
more stringent; their hospital duties are arduous; and hard work, as
everybody knows, is the next-door neighbour to virtue.
Give them but three Christmases more, and they will be even as this
white-coated and dignified young man whom Horace and I are watching as
he deals with the patients in the receiving-room. For these will drift
in from the streets and tenements, whether or no the day be a Festival,
and partly, perhaps, with an eye to possible good cheer. We wait a
little, as he stands there by the pillar, a curious contrast, with his
fresh face and athletic figure, to the slouching fleshiness of these big
navvies and the stunted urbanity of the rest.
Behind him stand a couple of dressers, fresh from the college, willing,
but still perhaps a little bewildered, and to whom this all-knowing and
self-possessed young surgeon is something of a god. His treatment is
rapid--it has to be--for he is here primarily to sort out the cases
that come crowding in their daily hundreds. But he must never make a
mistake--a grave one, that is. And the remembrance of this has taught
him--no easy matter--to know real illness when he sees it with a pretty
high degree of certainty. So the bad cases he sets on one side. For if
possible they must be admitted; and at any rate they must be seen by the
house-surgeon or house-physician on duty. While as for the rest, they
may be given at once the necessary pill, or a desirable draught from
that decorated urn in the corner--there's a certain irony in that
particular wreath of holly--or despatched, with out-patient cards, to
appropriate special departments.
And all this time there is flowing from him to the dressers a little
stream of wounds to be stitched, torn scalps to be cleaned, and sprains
and strains to be temporarily bandaged. Odder things too may be
demanding their youthful attention. Here, for instance, is a genial but,
alas, beery Irishwoman of vast _embonpoint_, whose wedding-ring has been
jammed into her finger, and must at all costs be removed. Alcoholic
invocations are breathed into the dresser's ear as he files patiently at
this brass emblem of married unity. Sure, darlin', she tells him, if
she could only be rid of her ould man as aisy, she'd be another woman
to-morrer, she would. While here, sitting next her, is a dark-eyed
twelve-year-old, holding out a pathetic little toe that has been stamped
upon by a passing dray-horse. It is attached to a very grimy foot that
was not, one fears, the only inhabitant of the stocking that contained
it. And the dresser is not sure if the bone is broken. She has the
countenance of a tear-stained Madonna; but her language, when he twists
her toe, becomes positively lurid. The other women titter or are
shocked, the Sister rebukes her, and young white-coat is called up for
reference. He likes the little girl, and gives her some chocolate,
whereupon she stifles half her sobs and most of her profanity. Yes, it's
a fracture all right. Does the dresser know how to put on a poroplastic
splint? The dresser looks a little uncertain. So white-coat gives him a
swiftly helping hand, and within five minutes is removing a decayed
Semitic molar that has been giving its owner _schmerz_ indescribable.
Accompanying this gentleman are his two sisters, a married brother with
his wife and family, and an elderly uncle, all of whom wail
incontinently to the general discomfort. Glancing over his shoulder,
young white-coat sends briefly for a porter, who courteously removes
them; and is only just in time, having extracted the tooth successfully,
to avoid the happy sufferer's embraces. He has never hurried; and yet by
the time that we have made our round of the dressing-rooms the benches
are empty, and he has disappeared to his pipe and his arm-chair. Can you
believe that but four years ago he was throwing chalk about the
dissecting-room, and stamping uproariously during lectures?
This wonder has my hospital performed. And what am I to tell you of the
Sister who has witnessed it--whose shrewd eyes have beheld so many
dressers emerging rawly from the college or from Cambridge, becoming in
due time even as our white-clad friend, and passing hence, as he will
pass, into the staid gravity of the family doctor?
There's a time--fortunately brief--in the career of the just-qualified
student when he is a little inclined to assert his professional
supremacy. How tenderly she watches him through it; and how, telling him
all things, she apparently tells him nothing! I wouldn't like to say how
many years she has stood there, or what sights, humorous, tragic,
unpaintably indecent, she has witnessed in all that time. And you could
certainly never guess them for yourself. Let me only say then that her
wisdom is more than the wisdom of many physicians, and that no gentler
fingers have touched the seamy side of life.
And yet, I suppose, she was once a little girl, shinning up the orchard
trees for the apples at the top. And she can still, I believe, drop a
sentimental tear or two upon the last page of a novel. So can this be
yet another miracle that my hospital has wrought? Dear me--and we have
got no further than the receiving-room, and scarcely even thought about
the patients.
Sometimes I wonder if the people whose pennies are invited to keep us
for a second ever realise the full significance of the instant that they
make their own. Not always, I think, for even I, who am in the hospital
three times a week, only get an occasional vision of it--chiefly on such
days as these, when one may travel its wards at large, unforbidden by
professional etiquette. Do they know, for example, that under the roof
of the out-patients' department there are two small boys--open-mouthed
little snorers of yesterday, sprawling about on the pavement inviting
trouble--whose tonsils during that moment have been successfully removed
from them? And can they perceive, in the same measure of time, a dozen
blocked-up ears and noses being skilfully examined by electrical
illumination? Do they realise that, simultaneously with all this, eight
short-sighted persons are being tested for spectacles, and two more
being operated upon for squint; that three men with diseased skins are
being prescribed for in another part of the building, and that four
women who were being consumed with lupus are now being cured with light;
that a poor servant-girl is under gas while her yet poorer teeth are
being removed, and that three others are being fitted with nerveless new
ones; that a little damsel with a dislocated hip is having it put in
plaster; that an elderly and rheumatic cab-driver is being helped with
radiant heat; and that some four hundred men and women of all
descriptions are waiting their turn for treatment? My numbers are
conservative; but, even so, does the gentleman on the underground
railway platform realise (to be merely sordid) that during his second
some five hundred pounds' worth of free operations are in progress? Does
he visualise the resultant satisfaction in all those squalid little
homes, the domestic relief, the returning efficiency, the rolled-away
anxiety, the dawning happiness? And does he remember that he has as yet
peeped into but one department of the great hospital that he is
supporting?
But really, on a Christmas Day one shouldn't be thinking about these
things; and you must put them down to an elderly garrulity, or as being,
if you will, in the nature of a half-sorrowful farewell. For by next
Christmas, alas, my wards will have ceased to know me. The twenty years'
span allotted to me will have come to its close; and even to-day, at a
corner of the corridor, I overheard a hazarded guess at my successor.
So after a long pilgrimage through gay and chattering wards--they were
all gay this afternoon, only you mustn't look, perhaps, at those quiet
corners--we at last found Esther and her party in the gayest of them
all. I will call it this, as being a very complete disguise if you
should ever quote me to the Sister of another. And here a troupe of
residents was delivering a little series of songs and dances, to the
complete delight of some forty patients and a background of visitors and
nurses. Its members were particularly hilarious. I fancy indeed that
they must have primed themselves with a little previous champagne--a
very little, and you must remember that at least two of them had been up
for most of the night. But nobody noticed this; and Claire, at any rate,
was very thoroughly taken by storm.
"Won't they come back presently?" she asked.
But the Sister shook her head. If Claire wanted to see them again she
must go off to some other ward. I saw her turn to Tom.
"Shall we?" she said, and they slipped away together. But before they
went I heard her calling his particular attention to one of the players,
"the second from the left," she whispered, "the awfully handsome one"--a
new note for Claire? Yes, just a little new.
And so we left it at last, driving out into the street through a small
crowd of eager, white-faced children, for some of whom, no doubt, its
walls were as the walls of Paradise. It was quite dark, with a blur of
rain upon the carriage windows; and for a minute or two the hospital,
with its long rows of lighted wards, towered dimly upon our left.
"Just like a great big liner," said Claire, who had been down to
Southampton when Molly and Rupert sailed. And so indeed one could
imagine it--lifting its strong sides above all these crowded roof-tops,
with unshaken bows, and Hope upon the bridge, and Comfort, at least, to
minister in its cabins.
"And yet there's something awful in it too," said Jeanie Graham.
"Chiefly," explained Horace philosophically, "because we're going home
ourselves to an excellent Christmas dinner."
"And happen to be feeling rather well," said Esther.
"And partly, I suppose," added Jeanie, "because just now we're looking
at it from the outside."
"And a little bit," I guessed, "because it stands, in a sense, for
Knowledge with a big K. And there are times when we're all rather afraid
of that--even when it wants to do us good."
"But we run to it in the end," smiled Jeanie.
Let me introduce you to her as she sits opposite to me in the
brougham--or to so much of her as is not obscured by Claire, who is
dividing her weight between Horace and his wife-apparent. Strictly
speaking, I suppose, she is scarcely to be described as pretty. Her
cheek-bones are the least shade too high, and her eyebrows just a trifle
too level. Here and there too her skin, still clinging to its Highland
brown, is powdered with tiny freckles; and though her nose is straight
enough, a purist might consider her mouth too big, and her chin perhaps
a little too firm--but very pleasantly so. Her hair is dark and wavy,
and in its natural setting--a grey tam-'o-shanter, I think, and the tail
of a Scotch mist--might well contain the deep, divine, dark dayshine of
the poet. And indeed I have been assured that it does. I have left her
eyes to the last, because at present she is standing away from them a
little. Regarded as mere windows to her mind they are well opened,
clear, and grey. But Horace, who has seen their owner leaning out of
them, could no doubt describe them better. And we think that he's a
fortunate young man.
Our only other guest was Wensley, dragged reluctantly from Chelsea. His
year has had some of its usual disappointments. His big work wasn't
finished in time for the Academy, and is still in his studio. But though
the Chantrey trustees passed over the very beautiful bronze that he did
send, he has sold this to the National Gallery at Copenhagen for six
hundred pounds, and has spent, in consequence, a fortnight at
Whitby--his first holiday, I believe, in three years, since his invalid
aunt and sister absorb most of his usual earnings. He always looks odd
and uncomfortable in evening dress. But our very informal table
generally sets him at his ease. And he is an extreme favourite with both
Tom and Claire. To-night he remembered one of Tom's songs, and persuaded
him, after dinner, to deliver it--with a little hesitation at first (for
the poor boy has still got some scruples, I think), but ultimately to
his saving grace. He left us at ten o'clock, for the invalids' sake, by
which time Tom and Claire announced themselves to be feeling rather
sleepy, without, as I observed, any notable protest from Jeanie and
Horace. So they have both gone upstairs to bed; or at least I had
thought so. But a tentative whisper at my door-handle has aroused my
suspicions. I am busy writing to Mr. Pontrex, so that I shall be sure
not to hear anything; and slowly the crack widens between the door-edge
and the architrave. Across the blackness disclosed, flashes the gleam of
a white-frocked arm, like a turning trout in a pool; and presently a
brown hand, desperately silent, begins feeling for my key. I look at it
apprehensively (for I have become a little nervous on this point lately)
and am happily relieved to find it ringless. I must be very quick.
* * * * *
And yet, as you will have noticed, even Claire is growing up, still
faithful to a more boisterous March, but now and then holding out her
finger-tips to May. She reposes, as you may remember, in the little room
next to ours. And yesterday morning Esther called me from my
shaving-glass. For she had opened the door between, to discover that
Claire had flown. Whither we could guess very easily, as she was even
then hammering Tom with her pillow. But there, balanced face downwards
on the edge of the bolster, lay a momentarily forgotten photograph.
Esther touched it with a smile.
"D'you think we ought to?" she asked. And then she drew back. But at
that moment a rather more vehement bump than its predecessors shook the
wall and floor so thoroughly that the photo slid down upon the sheets,
poised itself for a second upon its edge, and then dropped over, to
reveal the very debonair figure of Mr. George Alexander as the gallant
Rudolf Rassendyll. We looked at one another, and laughed--but only a
little. And then Esther restored the picture to its resting-place.
Some day we shall meet him in the Park, and Claire will behold a very
genial, middle-aged gentleman, a little inclined to be plump. But he
won't be Rudolf Rassendyll. And what will happen to his likeness?
* * * * *
"She'll put it in her bottom drawer," smiles Esther, leaning over me as
I write, "and it'll become part of somebody else."
She drops a kiss upon my occiput.
"And now you must come to bed," she adds, "or perhaps to-morrow morning
you'll be tired."
And by this, of course, she means "cross," though possibly, by some
blessed dispensation, she imagines that she doesn't. For long (as I am
minded to tell you, Hugh Pontrex), long before she's married, a woman
has made a garment for the man who is to wed her--a beautiful and rather
princely garment, and fortunately a bigger one than is usually required.
Because then, you see, she has only to take a tuck in it--and forget
about it--and there's her man clad in his coat, just as she had always
dreamed that he would come to her. Most women, I'm afraid, have to
deepen this tuck until there's no more stuff that they can turn. And by
that time, perhaps, we have begun to suspect that there has been some
tampering with our property.
"D'you mean to say," we inquire bitterly, "that we've grown out of it
already?"
And then it is that they must needs explain to us, with dewy eyes and
hands upon our shoulders, how it's only the same dear garment
still--_three times as thick_.
"What nonsense," says Esther above my shoulder.
"The garment?" I ask.
"No, the--the tuck."
But she looks a little conscious.
Ever yours,
P. H.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Corner of Harley Street, by Henry Bashford