popular dramatist, with a thumping bank balance and a permanent
predilection for bachelor existence. All the female villains in his
plays are blondes. The stage directions, underlined in red, run thus:
“_Enter So-and-So, a fair and slightly formed woman of barely thirty,
with icy and repellent blue eyes and hair of a pale and sunless straw
color. She conveys the impression of cold insincerity and self-centered
absorption, and her hard and mocking laugh falls gratingly upon the
ear._” Which goes to prove that Human Nature is and never will be
anything but Human Nature until the Curtain drops.
THE HAND THAT FAILED
Four men were seated about a round table, with dessert and wine
upon it, in the dining-room of a luxuriously furnished house in a
fashionable street in the West End of London--a street which is the
Eldorado of the struggling professional man, the Tom Tiddler’s ground
of successful members of the faculties of surgery and medicine. The
aroma of Turkish coffee and choice Havanas was warm and fragrant
upon the air, and the Bishop consented to a second Benedictine. His
left-hand neighbor was a dry-faced, courteous gentleman, a King’s
Counsel, famous by reason of several _causes célèbres_. The third man
at table was merely a hard-working, small-earning practitioner of
medicine and surgery, settled in a populous suburb of the high-lying
North. Coming to the host, with whom the Highgate Doctor had walked the
hospitals in his student days, one may describe him as a world-famous
Consulting Specialist and operator; one of the kings of the scalpel,
the bistoury, and the curette; a man of medals, orders, and scientific
titles innumerable. Forty-three years of age, shortly about to be
married (to a widowed niece of the Bishop), and in excellent spirits--a
thought too excellent, perhaps....
“Wants rest, decidedly. Pupils of the eyes unnaturally dilated,
circulation not what it ought to be. Overdone.... Changed color when
the servant dropped a fork just now.... He had better take care!” said
the Highgate Doctor to himself. He had to deal with many cases of
nervous breakdown up Highgate way, where there are so many compositors
and clerks and journalists. But the Bishop and the King’s Counsel had
never seen the Distinguished Surgeon look more fit, and so they told
him.
“What makes it more remarkable, in my poor opinion”--the Bishop,
employing his favorite phrase, emptied his liqueur-glass and folded
his plump, white hands--“being that our distinguished friend here”--he
waved the fattest and whitest of his thumbs toward his host--“seldom,
if ever, takes a holiday.”
“When,” said the Distinguished Surgeon, playing with a gold fruit-knife
belonging to a set which had formed part of the First Napoleon
camp-equipment at Leipsic, “when a professional man’s brain is
absolutely clear, his nerves infallibly steady; when his digestion,
sleep, appetite are unimpaired by any amount of physical and mental
labor; when his hand is the ready, unerring, unflinching servant of his
will at all times and all seasons, what need has that man of rest and
relaxation?” The strong, supple, finely-modeled hand went on playing
with the historical fruit-knife, as its owner added: “Work is my play!
For change of air, give me change of experience; for change of scene,
new cases, or fresh developments of familiar ones. The excitement of
the gaming table, or any other form of excitement, would be a poor
exchange for the sensations of the operator, the skilled, experienced,
unerring operator, who calculates to the fraction of an inch the depth
of the incision his scalpel makes in the body of the anæsthetized
patient extended on the glass-table before him. Life or Death are his
to give, and the trembling of the balance one way or the other is to
be guided and controlled by his unerring eye, his unerring brain, and
his skilled, infallible hand. He holds the balances of Fate--he guides
and controls Destiny, and knows his power and glories in it. He is a
supreme artist--not in clay or marble, gold or silver, pigments or
enamels--but in living flesh and blood!”
The Bishop shifted in his chair uneasily, and turned a little pale
about the gills. The removal of the episcopal appendix some months
previously had preserved to the Church of England one of its principal
corner-stones; and the neat, red seam underneath the Bishop’s apron
on the right side, on the spot that would have been covered by the
vest-pocket of an ordinary layman, twitched and tingled. And the King’s
Counsel, who had once undergone a minor operation for throat-trouble,
hurriedly gulped down a mouthful of port. The Highgate Doctor alone
answered, fixing his steel-rimmed pince-nez securely on his nose, and
tilting his chin so as to get the host’s face well into focus: “He is a
supreme artist, as you say, and he delights in his work. But supposing
him to delight too much? Supposing him to have arrived at such a pass
that he cannot live without the excitement of it!--that he indulges
in the exercise of his beneficent profession as a cocaine-drinker or
hashish-eater, or morphinomaniac, indulges in the drug that destroys
him, morally and physically--how long will he retain in their
perfection the faculties which have made him what he is?”
“As long as he chooses!” said the Distinguished Surgeon, putting
down the gold fruit-knife, and rising with the easy air of the
well-bred host. “He is no longer a mere man, but a highly-geared and
ingeniously-planned machine, in all that concerns the peculiar physical
functions brought to bear upon the exercise of his profession. To lie
idle, for such a machine, means rust and ruin; to work unceasingly is
to increase facility and gain in power, and, provided it be carefully
looked after--and I assure you my nuts and bearings receive the
necessary amount of attention!--the machine of which I speak may go on
practically for ever!” And he ushered his guests through the folding
doors into his luxurious consulting-room.
“Unless there happened,” put in the King’s Counsel, “to be a screw
loose?”
“My dear fellow,” said the Distinguished Surgeon, with a smile, “my
screws are never neglected, I have assured you. The machine won’t come
to grief that way!”
“It might come to grief in another way,” said the Highgate Doctor in a
queer voice. “The Inventor might stop it Himself, just to prove to His
handiwork that it _was_ a machine--and something more!”
At this remark, plopped into the middle of the calm duck-pond of
sociality, the Bishop looked pained, as might an elderly spinster
of severe morals at an allusion savoring of impropriety. The King’s
Counsel, feeling for the Bishop, turned the conversation; but the
Distinguished Surgeon and the Highgate Doctor were at it again, hammer
and tongs, in a minute.
“I do not simply believe I shall not fail, my dear fellow! I _know_ I
shall not! As for----” (the Distinguished Surgeon, sitting smoking in
his Louis Quinze consulting-chair, mentioned a certain operation in
abdominal surgery, delicate, difficult, and dangerous in the extreme)
“I have performed it hundreds of times, successfully, within the last
twelvemonth, leaving minor operations--scores of them”--he waved the
scores aside with a movement of the supple hand--“entirely out of
the question! At the Hospital to-day” (mentioning the name of a great
public institution) “I operated in seven cases, bringing up the number
to one thousand and one. The last was the most interesting case I have
met with for some time, presenting complications rendering the use of
the knife both difficult and risky, but----”
The sharp whirring tingle of the telephone bell punctuated the
Distinguished Surgeon’s sentence: “But she’ll pull through; I guarantee
it! We’ll have the bandages off in three weeks. She’ll be walking about
before the month’s out like the others!”
“Under Providence let us hope so!” said the Bishop, encircled by
a halo of fragrant cigar smoke. “Thank you, yes, I will take a
whisky-and-soda. Without presumption, let us hope so, remembering,
trusting in--arah--the--arah--the Divine assurance.”
“You may take the assurance from me, my lord!” said the Distinguished
Surgeon. He got up and went to the fireplace (carved by Adam), and
leaned one elbow lightly on the mantelshelf--an easy attitude, but
instinct with pride and power. “As I have said, Case One Thousand and
One is a difficult case. I could name surgeons of repute who would have
hesitated to operate; but, given the requisite skill and the necessary
care, failure, I hold, is out of the question. I have never failed
yet--I do not intend to fail. It’s impossible!”
The second shrill, imperative summons of the telephone bell ended the
Distinguished Surgeon’s sentence.
“Tch! They’re ringing ye up on the telephone from somewhere,” said the
Highgate Doctor.
“Find out what they want, Donald, there’s a good fellow,” said the
Distinguished Surgeon, buttonholed by the Bishop, whose urbane
benevolence had creased into smiles tinctured with roguishness, as he
related a clerical after-dinner story.
And the Highgate Doctor rang back, and unhooked the receiver and cried:
“Halloa?” and listened to the thin ghost of a voice that droned and
tickled at his ear, and turned toward the Distinguished Surgeon a face
that had suddenly been bleached of all color.
“Well, who is it?” the Distinguished Surgeon asked.
“It’s the House Surgeon at the Hospital. Perhaps ye would speak to him
yourself?” the Highgate Doctor said thickly; and the Distinguished
Surgeon, released by the chuckling Bishop, strolled over and took the
Highgate Doctor’s place at the receiver.
“Halloa! Yes, it’s Sir Arthur Blank!” he called, and the ghostly voice
came back.... “One of the abdominal sections in the Mrs. Solomon Davis
Ward ... Number Seven ... Mrs. Reed ... Hæmorrhage.... Imminent danger
... collapse.... Come at once!”
The Distinguished Surgeon glanced round, with eyes that were sunk
in pits quite newly dug. The Bishop, still in his anecdotage, was
buttonholing the King’s Counsel. Plainly they had not overheard. And
as the Distinguished Surgeon took out his handkerchief and wiped the
cold damps from a face that had gone gray and shiny, he knew relief.
He avoided looking point-blank at the Highgate Doctor as he made his
courteous excuses to his guests. “An urgent case--suddenly called
away for an hour. My dear Lord, my dear Entwhistle, my dear Donald,
entertain yourselves for that space of time, and don’t deprive me of a
pleasant end to this delightful evening!”
But the Bishop, recently wedded for the third time, took leave,
accepting his host’s offer of dropping him at his hotel, and the pair
got into fur coats and a snug ante-brougham and drove away together.
Soon after, somebody from the Chancery Buildings came with an urgent
summons for the King’s Counsel, and he melted away with regrets, and
the Highgate Doctor sat in the luxurious consulting-room, and started
at every stoppage of swift wheels in the streets.
The silent servants came and looked to the fire, the Pompadour clock
upon the mantel chimed eleven! And then, looking up out of a brown
study, the Highgate Doctor saw his host returned, and started at his
worn and haggard aspect. As the demure servant relieved him of his
coat and hat, and vanished, the Distinguished Surgeon dropped into
an easy-chair and sat shading his face with the right hand, whose
steadiness he had so vaunted. And that infallible, unerring hand shook
as if with palsy.
The Highgate Doctor could bear no more....
“O man,” he said--in moments of excitement his accent savored of from
north of the Tweed--“dinna sit glowering and shaking there! I ken weel
what has happened! Your pride has got the killing thrust; she is in her
death-pangs at this minute I’m talking, and you stand face to face wi’
One you have denied! Am I richt or no?”
The Distinguished Surgeon moved the shaking hand and said, not in the
calm level tone the Highgate Doctor knew, but one jerky and uneven:
“You are right! You shall know the truth, though it places my
reputation at your mercy....”
“Forget your reputation a meenute,” said the Highgate Doctor. “As to
Case One Thousand and One ... is the woman dead?”
“No ...” said the other--“no, I reached the Hospital in time ... we
called up the chart-nurse and the Matron, had her taken up to the
theater and----”
“Found that ye had bungled--for once in your life!” said the Highgate
Doctor. “And weel for you, if not for your patient, that it is so. The
ligature had slipped, I take it, being insecurely tied?”
The Distinguished Surgeon looked him steadily between the eyes and
answered:
“The ligature was not tied at all! A grosser instance of neglect I
never met with.” He got up and leaned against the mantelshelf, folding
his arms. “I said so pretty plainly, and I have made a minute on the
Hospital register to that effect. I shall also draw the attention of
the Committee to the matter without delay!”
The Highgate Doctor blew his nose violently. His eyeglasses were misty.
“Ye have censured yourself? Ye will report yourself? O man! I kenned ye
were a great one, but ye have never been so great--in my eyes--as ye
are this night!”
“Thank you!” said the Distinguished Surgeon, as the two men gripped
hands. “And--Donald, old fellow--I am going to take a holiday!”
“Where is the whisky-and-soda?” said the Highgate Doctor gleefully.
HIS SILHOUETTE
“He walked down Upper Bond Street, after leaving his chambers, half-way
up on the left-hand side. The ground floor is occupied by the only
London purveyor of American chewing-gum, who does a tremendous business
in the imported article, and the shop is crowded all day by ladies,
young and old, whose jaws, even in moments of repose from conversation,
are in perpetual motion. Englishwomen do not yet chew gum. Let us hope
that our wives, sweethearts, sisters, and cousins will be slow to
acquire what, in my opinion, is an unpleasant habit, but too suggestive
of arboreal tendencies inherited from anthropoid ancestors.”
The man who was telling the story stretched out his hand across the
coffee-cups to select a toothpick. The man who opposed him at the table
promptly annexed the glass-and-silver receptacle containing the article
required.
“The original ape,” he said, “probably employed a twig. I cannot
encourage you in a practice you so strongly denounce. Waiter, take
these things away! Bonson, my good fellow, let us hear your story--if
it is worth hearing. If not, keep it to yourself. The man began by
walking down Bond Street. There is nothing original in that. I myself
do it every day without being the hero of a story.”
“This man was the hero of a tragedy,” said the man who was telling the
story. “Other people might smile at it for a farce--it was a tragedy to
him.”
“Where did the horror of it come in?” asked the other man.
“Under Shelmadine’s waistcoat,” said the man who had been addressed
as Bonson. “Shelmadine was losing his figure, which had been his
joy and pride and the delight of the female eye ever since he left
Oxford, without his degree, and, thanks to the influence of his uncle,
Colonel Sir Barberry Bigglesmith, K.C.B., Assistant Under-Secretary to
the Ordnance Office Council, took up a Second Division Higher-grade
Clerkship at £280 per annum, which sufficiently supplemented his
younger son’s allowance of £500 to make it feasible to get along with
some show of decency--don’t you follow me?”
“If I had followed this beggar down Upper Bond Street,” hinted the
other man, knocking an ash off a long, slim High Dutch cigar, “where
would he have led me?”
“Into his tailor’s,” said the man who had been addressed as Bonson
promptly. “He walked in there regularly every day on his way to the
War Office. Clothes were his passion--in fact, he simply couldn’t live
without clothes!”
“Could we?” answered the other man simply.
“I have heard that Europeans shipwrecked on the palm-fringed shores of
a Pacific Island,” said Bonson, “have managed to do very well without
them. Under those circumstances, let me tell you, Shelmadine would
still have managed to be well dressed. He would have evolved style out
of cocoa-fiber and elegance out of banana-leaves, or he would have died
in the attempt. I am trying to convey to you that he had a genius for
clothes. He evolved ideas which sartorial artists were only too happy
to carry out. He gave bootmakers hints which made their reputations.
He would run over to Paris every month or so to look at Le Bargy’s hat
and cravats. He never told anyone where he got his walking sticks, but
they were wonderful. I tell you----”
“Every man likes to be well dressed,” said the man who was listening to
the story, “but this beggar seems to have had coats and trousers on the
brain.”
“Rather,” said the narrator. “He thought of clothes, dreamed of
clothes--lived for clothes alone. Garments were his fad, his folly, his
passion, his mania, his dearest object in life. Men consulted him--men
who wanted to be particularly well got-up couldn’t do better than put
themselves in Shelmadine’s hands. He permitted no servile copying of
the modes and styles he exhibited on his person. ‘Forge my name,’
he said to a fellow once, ‘but never copy the knot of my necktie!’
Chap took the advice, and did forge his name--to the tune of £60.
Shelmadine would not prosecute. He was planning an overcoat--a kind of
Chesterfield, cut skirty--with which he made a sensation at Doncaster
this year, and when a certain Distinguished Personage condescended to
order one like it, Shelmadine made the three he had got, quite new,
and wickedly expensive, into a parcel, poured on petrol, and applied a
match. Shut himself up for three days, and appeared on the fourth with
a perfectly new silhouette.”
“A perfectly new what?” said the listener, with circular eyes.
“Shelmadine’s creed was that for a man to look thoroughly well dressed
he must have a perfect silhouette. Every line about him must be
perfect. The sweep of the shoulders, the spring of the hips, the arch
over the instep, and so forth, must display the cut of scissors wielded
by an artist--not a mere workman. Now, on this particular morning,
not so very long ago, it had been brought home to him, as he looked in
his full-length, quadruple-leaved, swing-balance, double lever-action
cheval glass, that the reflection it gave back to him was not quite
satisfactory. His silhouette did not satisfy him. Then all at once came
with a rush the overwhelming discovery that he was----”
“Getting potty,” said the listener. “Those Government clerkships play
the devil with a man’s waist. Nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep,
walk, or drive to the Office and sit in a chair gumming up envelopes or
drawing heads on the blotting paper when you’re there, until you fall
asleep. Once you’re asleep, you don’t wake till it’s time to go home.
Consequently you develop adipose tissue.” He yawned.
“Do you suppose,” asked the teller of the tale, with large
contempt, “that Shelmadine lived the life of one of those human
marmots--Shelmadine, a man so sensitively, keenly alive to the beauty
of Shape, Form, Line, and Proportion? Do you dream that he lightly
risked the inevitable result of indulgence in the pleasures of the
table or the delights of drowsiness? If so, you are wrong. He rose at
5 a.m., winter and summer, in town or country, and after a hot bath,
followed by a cold douche, pursued a course of physical exercises
until seven, when he breakfasted on milkless tea, dry toast, or gluten
biscuits”--the other man shuddered--“with, perhaps, a little plain
boiled fish, its lack of flavor undisguised by Worcester sauce or any
other condiment.”
“Horrible!” said the other man. “I once tried....”
“After breakfast, in all weathers, he walked five miles, within the
Radius, returning to dress for the day. Anon he would saunter down Bond
Street, look in at the shops, where he was adored, and criticize the
new models submitted to him, as only Shelmadine could, show himself
at his Club, stroll in the Park, and get to the Ordnance Office about
eleven. The floors at Whitehall are solidly built, consequently his
habit of jumping backward and forward over the office-table when
he felt his muscles dangerously relaxed, met with little, if any,
opposition in the Department. Dumb-bells, of course, were always ready
to hand. At his Club the invariable luncheon supplied to him was the
eye of a grilled cutlet, a glass of claret and water, eight stewed
prunes, and, of course, more gluten biscuits. He shunned fat-forming
foods more than he would the devil!”
“And made his life a hell!” said the other man, with conviction.
“My dear fellow,” said the relater, “you can’t understand what a man’s
life is or is not until you have seen both sides of it. A Second
Division Higher-Grade War Office clerkship allows of a good deal of
liberty. Picture Shelmadine as the _enfant gâté_ of Society, followed,
stared at, caressed and courted, by the smartest feminine leaders of
fashion, as well as by the swellest men, as the acknowledged Oracle
in Clothes. There’s a position for a young man single-handed to
have achieved. To be the vogue--the rage--the _coq de village_--the
_village_ being London--and at twenty-seven.”
“Exhausting,” said the other man, “to keep up, but sufficiently
agreeable. Quite sufficiently agreeable! And I realize that at the
psychological moment, when the fellow discovered that his figure had
begun to run to seed, he sustained a shock--kind of cold moral and
mental _douche_ a professional beauty gets when her toilet glass shows
her the first crow’s-foot. Did your friend have hysterics and ask his
valet for sal-volatile? I should expect it of him!”
“Shelmadine did not employ a man,” said the teller of the tale, fixing
his eyeglass firmly in its place, “to do anything but brush his
clothes. For all other purposes connected with the toilet he preferred
a Swiss lady’s-maid. Do not misunderstand, my friend,” he added
sternly, as the listener exploded in a guffaw of laughter. “_Honi soit_
... the rest of the quotation is familiar to you. And Mariette Duchâtel
had been strongly recommended to him by his aunt, Lady Bigglesmith, as
a most desirable person for the post of housekeeper. She was at least
fifty--retained the archæological remains of good looks, and owned a
moustache a buddin’ Guardsman might be jealous of, by Jingo! But her
heart had remained youthful, or we may so conjecture.”
“I begin to tumble to the situation of the swelling subject of your
story,” said the other man, pouring out a Benedictine. “When your
elderly housekeeper happens to be in love with you, it is bad enough.
Things become complicated when the victim of your charms happens to be
your maid. Continue!”
“A visit to his tailor’s on the day on which my story begins,” said
Bonson, “convinced Shelmadine that--in fact, his outlines were becoming
indefinite. ‘This will not do, sir,’ said his tailor, a grave and
himself a portly personage, ‘with your reputation for silhouette to
keep up--and at your years. We will let out the garment one inch--a
thing I decline to do even for Royal Personages, as destructive of
the design--and as this is now the Autumn Season I recommend you to
obtain leave. Klümpenstein in the Tyrol has a reputation for reducing
weight; its waters have done wonders for several of my customers, and
the Rittenberg affords several thousand feet of climbing opportunity to
tourists who wish to be quickly rid of superfluous girth. But, first of
all, I should consult Dr. Quox, of Harley Street. Good-morning.’