Fifty years ago, when I was a young medical student, I was in the habit
of spending as many week-ends as possible at home with my father, to
whose practice I was one day to succeed.
On a certain Saturday the only other occupants of the railway compartment
were an artist and his wife. I knew him to be an artist from certain
scraps of his conversation that I overheard, but I should have guessed it
also on the evidence of his hands and dress. I don’t mean that he wore a
black velvet tam-o’-shanter and trousers tight at the ankles, as in
plays; but his hands were eloquent, and there was a general careless ease
about his tweeds that suggested the antipodes of any commercial or
anxious calling.
After a while he turned to me and asked if I knew the town of Lowcester.
I said that I had lived in the neighbourhood—at Bullingham, five miles
away—all my life.
“We are going to spend a few days at the Crown at Lowcester,” he said,
“looking about to try and find a house.”
“There’s a very good house at Bullingham,” I said: “just empty. Jolly
garden too. As a matter of fact it adjoins ours. My father’s the
doctor.”
“Next door to the doctor,” said the lady, speaking now for the first
time. “That would be a great convenience.”
One result of this chance meeting was that they took the house and we
became friends; another was the general shaping of my life; and a third
is this narrative, the fruit of an old man’s egoism and leisure.
* * * * *
I don’t put my own case as an example to the medical profession, but you
can’t deny there is a kind of fitness in it: it is surely more proper
than not that the doctor who presides at the birth of a child should
continue to take an interest in that child throughout its life. Being
born is, after all, something of an event, and he who assists in that
adventure and helps to introduce a new soul (not to mention a new body)
to this already overcrowded and over-complicated planet of ours, ought to
be counted as something a little more important than a jobbing gardener,
say, or any other useful ally that the householder calls in. For no
matter how mechanical his services, he is also an instrument of destiny.
None the less, if accoucheurs were expected to follow the fortunes of
every new arrival from the cradle to the grave one of two things would
happen: either the medical profession would disappear for want of
recruits, or home life (with the addition of the semi-parental doctor
intervening between father and mother) would become more difficult than
it already is. Perhaps then it is as well that the
man-with-the-black-bag remains the piano-tuner that he more or less
appears to be. But I shall continue to believe that so tremendous an
affair as a birth should carry more fatefulness with it; although for the
well-being of patients I can see that it is better that doctors should be
machines rather than sympathetic temperaments. Good Heavens! if we were
not so mechanical into what sentimental morasses should we land
ourselves!
All this, however, is more or less irrelevant and too much concerned with
myself. But you will find that preoccupation, I fear, throughout this
story, such as it is. I commenced author, you see, at a time of life
when it is not easy to keep to the point or exclude garrulity. When one
does not take to writing until one is over seventy—I shall be seventy-one
this year, 1920—readers must expect a certain want of business-like
adroitness. Had you known me in the days when I was in practice, before
I was established on the shelf, you would have found me, I hope, direct
and forcible and relevant enough. The stethoscope was mightier than the
pen.
Still, there is more relevance than perhaps you would think, for I am
coming to a case where the doctor and the newly-born established an
intimacy that was destined to grow and to endure through life. For, as
it chanced, my father died very soon after I was qualified, and when our
new neighbours, the Allinsons, became parents, it was I who was called in
to assist. I was then twenty-seven. Circumstances of personal
friendship and contiguity alone might have promoted a closer association
than is customary between the babe and the intermediary; but the
controlling factors were the death of the mother, after which many of the
decisions which a mother would have to make devolved on me; and Rose’s
delicate little body, which caused her during her early years to need
fairly constant watching. The result was that until a certain unexpected
event happened she moved about almost exclusively between her father’s
house and mine, and was equally at home in both. But even with such a
beginning it never crossed my mind that the strands of our fate were to
be so interwoven.
* * * * *
Rose’s father was a landscape painter of rather more than independent
means: sufficient at any rate to make it possible for him to seek
loveliness in no matter how distant a land. He had sketches which he had
made all over Europe, in Morocco, in Egypt, in Japan. But France was his
favourite hunting ground, partly, I think, because he liked the comments
of the French peasants who stood behind his easel better than those of
any other critic.
Artists, even when they are poor, are enviable men. They live by
enjoyment—their work is fun—for even if the unequal struggle to persuade
pigments to reproduce nature fills them with despair, they are still
occupied with beauty, still seeing only what they want to see, and remote
from squalor and sordidness and the ills of life.
Theodore Allinson took the fullest advantage of his artistic temperament
and his private fortune. The one enabled him to ignore whatever was
unpleasing, and the other to fulfil every wandering caprice. It was all
in keeping with such a man’s destiny that he should have as a next-door
neighbour an ordinary trustworthy fellow like myself, who could be
depended upon to keep an eye on his motherless infant when he was absent.
Or, for that matter, when he was present too. He would have taken it as
a very cruel injustice on the part of the gods if I had moved to any
other part of the kingdom—as probably any decently ambitious young man in
my position would have done. How he would have raised his clenched fists
to Heaven and railed against fate! But, luckily for him, I could eat the
lotus too.
My lotus-eating, however, would have been only half as delightful if
Allinson were not my neighbour and his small daughter my protegée. For
he was easy and amusing and full of whimsical fancies, with a very solid
foundation of culture beneath all, and his little girl was a continual
joy.
She had taken to me at once, or at any rate had taken to my watch—watches
having always been useful links between infantile patients and their
medical men. Mine was a gold repeater, very satisfying to immature gums
and surprising and amusing to the ear. I still have it, and
sophisticated though the world has grown, and mechanically melodious with
gramophone and piano-player, it still chimes for the young with all its
old allurement.
As Rose developed, the function of the repeater as a mediator decreased
in importance, and she and I took to more ordinary means of communicating
our sympathy; but the watch laid the foundations and laid them truly.
* * * * *
It is extraordinary what a small child’s tongue can do with an honest
English name. Every one has had experience of this fantastic adaptive
gift, but none could be more curious than my own. My name is
Greville—Julius Greville, M.D., if you please—and if there is a sound
less like Greville than “Dombeen” I should like to be told of it; but
Dombeen was Rose’s translation of what she so often heard her father call
me, and Dombeen I have remained to her. Of all the music in the world
none was more sweet to me than her cool clear voice calling “Dombeen!
Dombeen!”
* * * * *
Our gardens were separated only by an old fruit wall with a gate in it,
both sides of the gate being equally Rose’s domain; and I used to rejoice
when on returning from my rounds I saw her dainty proud little head among
the fruit bushes.
Briggs, my gardener and my father’s gardener before me, was the happier
for her society too, as she circled about him like a robin and never
ceased her inquisitorial functions.
“Lord, but she do flummox me sometimes,” he would say. “The things that
child wants to know! It isn’t only book-learning that’s needed, it’s
flower-learning too. It makes me feel that ignorant.”
“What sort of things?”
“Well, why one flower’s blue and another pink. Man and boy I’ve worked
in gardens, and with good head-men over me too when I was
learning—Scotchmen and all—but I never heard about that. Never even
wondered about it. ‘So as to look prettier in nosegays’ was all I could
say; but it must go deeper than that. I told her to ask you, you being a
gentleman of learning, but she says, ‘No, no, Briggs, it’s what a
gardener ought to know,’ and she’s right.
“Here’s some more nuts of hers to crack—‘Why do some flowers have scent
and others don’t?’ ‘Who discovered that potatoes are good to eat?’ ‘Who
began to put horse-radish with beef?’ ‘Why are butterflies called
butterflies?’ Really, sir, you ought to take her on, she makes me seem
that ignorant. She won’t ask me the things I do know. The funny part of
it is,” Briggs went on, “she doesn’t want to have a garden of her own.
Some children are mad about that, but she doesn’t care. All she wants is
to walk about among the flowers, or stand by me, and watch and watch.”
And off he went.
He came back a moment later. “It would be very good of you,” he said,
“to try and find out why butterflies are called butterflies. My missis
wants to know too.”
I remember another of Briggs’ stories of Rose. “The other day,” he
said—this was when Rose was about six—“she brought a tooth—the one that
you gave her a shilling for if she didn’t cry when she went to have it
pulled—and what do you think? She wanted me to plant it for her. Plant
it! And what for? So as it would grow into a soldier, as it did in some
book they’d been reading to her.
“‘A soldier!’ I said, wishing to tease her a little, ‘why a soldier, I
should like to know? Why not a gardener?’
“‘Pooh, gardeners!’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, teeth
don’t grow into gardeners anyway, they grow into soldiers’; and she comes
out every morning and evening to water it.”
* * * * *
Rose’s want of interest in work of any kind extended to games. Her
boredom when her father and I were at croquet or billiards was abysmal,
and I could never induce her to persevere with a mallet. Her playground
was the world, and her play was to be in it, and see it, and, I doubt
not, speculate as to its peculiarities. She liked to have stories read
to her, but she liked better to invent them for herself and relate them
to herself as she walked about, outdoors or in. But when she could get
one’s whole attention, which is the too-often-frustrated desire of most
children, she was happiest. A walk with me in the garden when I was
“ab-so-loot-ly” idle, without scissors or spud or preoccupation, was one
of her special treats; the tendency of grown up people to let their eyes
wander towards weeds or suckers or green fly being among her heavy
crosses.
But her crosses were few. She must have been one of the first children
for whom those in authority made the world primarily a happy place. It
is more or less the rule now, but it was exceptional then.
Like most little girls, she was interested in young creatures: more than
interested, enchanted by them. The finest horse in the world—Iroquois,
say, who had just won the Derby—the finest cow, the finest sheep, left
her calm; but she trembled with rapture on catching sight of a foal or a
calf or a lamb. If the lamb had a black face she screamed with joy. As
for puppies and kittens, she lost her head completely over them. Again
and again I have had to stop, when she has been on my rounds with me,
while she got down in order to embrace one of these impostors, and the
uglier the kitten was the more she loved it. I could never break her of
the habit—an extremely insanitary one, I am convinced—of hugging stray
kittens.
It was odd that an ugly one should appeal to her more than a perfect one;
but odder that any injured creature had such an immediate claim on her
sympathy. Many children are afraid of animals that are maimed and in
pain: or at any rate they avoid them. But Rose collected them. Birds
with broken wings, mangy puppies, kittens that had been scalded or
lamed—her infirmary always contained one or more specimens of these, and
we all had to help in nursing them back to vigour.
Such was Rose in those early days when we were still neighbours. And
then came one of the crises in the life of both of us.
* * * * *
I had been on a long day’s round and returned tired out, after eight in
the evening, with the doctor’s dread in my mind that another call would
be waiting. There was indeed a telegram, but it was not of the kind that
I had feared, but a worse. It was from the British Consul at Marseilles
stating that Theodore Allinson had died of typhoid fever two days before,
and that his effects were being forwarded home.
Allinson’s household consisted at that time of Rose’s nurse and several
servants under a cook, and I went over after dinner to break the news.
It was, however, broken. We had so few telegrams in those days that
their contents always became public, and I found the staff in tears.
Rose, however, I was glad to find, had not been told.
The next thing was to inform the relatives, chief of whom was Mrs.
Stratton, Theodore’s sister, older by a few years, whose husband was
something in the city; and a telegram, despatched to her the next
morning, brought herself and Mr. Stratton quickly on the scene.
Mrs. Stratton was as different from her brother as two members of the
same family can be—and often are. Where he was gay and insouciant, she
was grave and anxious. He was full of fun and banter; but to her life
was real, life was earnest. Where he let things slide she was all for
management and control. She was a big woman too, with a suggestion
always of having her square-sails set and bearing down on you before the
wind.
As for George Stratton, he was the nice quiet somewhat invertebrate
husband that such women capture.
No sooner was Mrs. Stratton in the house than she got to work and
explored every room systematically, sniffing a good deal as she inspected
the canvases in the studio. Drawings were turned out, documents read,
and Rose was sent off to Lowcester to be properly fitted out with black.
I offered to take the child into my house until the memorial service was
over, but Mrs. Stratton declined; and on this rebuff I disappeared from
the scene and was not again in evidence until the ceremony in the church,
which most of the neighbours and various relations, near and distant,
attended.
I was however called out to a case a few miles away, and was therefore
not present at the luncheon that followed; but I returned in time to take
my place, at the lawyer’s invitation, in the studio to hear the reading
of the will, in which, the lawyer informed me, to my great surprise, I
was mentioned.
“As,” he announced, “Mr. Allinson died abroad too far away for any of his
relatives or friends to attend the funeral, it has been thought well that
now, when they are convened together in his house, they may like to hear
what his wishes were with regard to the disposition of his estate and the
settlement of his affairs. It was fortunate that he was able to put
these wishes in order before his illness had made that impossible; the
document is properly signed and attested and bears every indication of
cool judgment. With your permission I will now read it.”
I had never been present before at the reading of a will, and I am glad
not to have had the experience since. It is too dramatic. Why more
plays do not contain a will scene, I cannot understand. But the dramatic
quality is not all. My objection to such a ceremony is the
disappointment that one has to witness, and perhaps even more the
triumph. Poor human nature’s expressions of joy on coming into a few
hundred pounds can be an almost tragic spectacle.
Theodore Allinson had remembered most of his relations and all of his
dependents. Such benefactions came first. “‘The remainder of the
estate,’ the lawyer read on, ‘I leave in trust to my daughter Rose, to be
administered as they think best by her trustees George Stratton and
Julius Greville, until her twentieth birthday, when it will be hers to do
as she wishes with.’”
The lawyer paused again and Mrs. Stratton indicated her approval of at
any rate one of the trustees by a guarded smile.
“‘Finally,’” the lawyer went on, “‘I ask my friend and neighbour Julius
Greville to become my daughter’s guardian and foster-father.’”
At these words a rustle of astonishment ran round the room, and no one
could have been more astonished than myself. Mrs. Stratton did more than
rustle: she bridled and shot me a furious glance. “Did you hear that,
George?” she asked her husband in a loud whisper.
“If you please,” said the lawyer, and continued: “‘guardian and
foster-father, reimbursing himself from her estate for every expense
which that duty imposes upon him, from the present time until she shall
become, on her twentieth birthday, her own mistress.’”
He paused again, and again the company sought each other’s faces. Mrs.
Stratton was scarlet with indignation.
“Why, that’s thirteen years!” she exclaimed.
“But supposing that Dr. Greville, not unnaturally, is unwilling to take
so great a responsibility?” Mr. Stratton asked, after a little whispered
coaching from his wife.
“We are coming to that,” said the lawyer. “The will continues: ‘I ask
Dr. Greville to do this great thing for me, because I have for him both
affection and respect, and because such neglect towards our Rose as my
own indolence and selfishness have betrayed me into has as far as lay in
his power been corrected by him; also because Rose loves him and has
profound confidence in him. I am conscious, however, that it is more
than I have the right to ask, and if he declines, which he can do with
perfect propriety and not the faintest suggestion of unfriendliness to
me, I wish that Rose may become the ward of my sister Millicent Stratton,
who I am sure will be delighted to have her, with the same conditions as
to finance.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Mrs. Stratton. “Then my brother had not entirely taken
leave of his senses.”
“My dear Milly!” said her husband soothingly.
“Well, and what do you say?” Mrs. Stratton asked me eagerly. “Of course
you will decline?”
“Before Dr. Greville comes to any decision,” the lawyer interposed,
“there is a letter from the testator which he ought to read. It was
included among the papers of the deceased, and would have been handed to
Dr. Greville earlier had he not been called away.”
“But there is no need for time or consideration to be given to such a
simple matter as this,” said Mrs. Stratton. “It is obvious on the face
of it that a busy country doctor, living alone, can have no fitness for
such a delicate task as the bringing up of a girl from seven to twenty.
It’s preposterous, and any real friend of my brother would agree.”
“In any case,” said the lawyer, “I don’t think that Dr. Greville should,
in fairness to himself and to every one concerned, be rushed into a
decision. Here, sir, is the letter”; and he handed me an envelope, which
I had the prudence to put in my pocket.
And so doing, I rose and left. It is one of the rare compensations in a
general practitioner’s life that he can go when he likes and without
ceremony. I don’t say that an engagement is always awaiting us; but it
is our privilege first to suggest it and secondly to be exempted from
cross-examination.
As soon as I was alone I read Theodore’s letter. I can give its exact
words, as it is one of the very few that I have kept.
“Dear Greville,” he wrote. “I’ve been eating oysters and they’ve got me.
There’s only a muddler of a doctor here and I have no hope anyway. One
knows when one’s number is up. The only thing that really worries me is
Rose. Be a good fellow and take charge of her and bring her up to beat
the band. I can’t bear the thought of Milly getting at her and making
her just like all the other women in the world. I’ve made my will, and
the Consul here has witnessed it, so you will find everything in order.
I wish I’d done more with my life, but I haven’t had a bad time and,
after all, after a certain age one day may as well be one’s last as
another. I hate not to see you again, and as for Rose. . .”
Here the letter broke off.
* * * * *
George Stratton and his wife were announced before I had finished dinner,
and I went to them not in the best of humour. I was tired, and the day’s
events had been disturbing, and I had been looking forward to a quiet
dispassionate review of the whole matter. It was an evening of unusual
charm too, and I am devoted to the garden in the dusk when there is only
enough wind to carry the scent of flowers and not enough to disperse it.
Such evenings are memorable and precious by their very infrequency and I
have always grieved when one has been wasted.
Doctors, however, being more naturally, and, I suppose, even wilfully, at
the mercy of other people than anyone else is, I laid aside my napkin
with a sigh of surrender and once again prepared for duty.
I thought that George looked a little awkward, and I hastened to put him
partly at his ease with a cigar. Mrs. George, who was clearly on the
warpath, was not to be pacified so simply. Women aren’t. Even with the
spread of the tobacco habit they cannot be bought, as a man and brother
can, by a Corona Corona; while a whisky-and-soda is powerless, at any
rate with the Milly Strattons of this earth.
She came to the point at once. “You must excuse such an informal and
probably inconvenient call,” she said, “but we have to leave by an early
train and I want to get everything settled. How soon will Rose be
ready?”
“Ready?” I said. “For what?”
“To come to us,” she replied. “You surely don’t, on consideration,
propose to fall in with my poor brother’s very curious idea of keeping
his child from her own kith and kin?”
“I don’t see that I have any way out of it,” I said. “The terms of the
will were that I was to be Rose’s guardian unless I had an insuperable
objection; in which case she was to go to you. But although I am aware
that her presence here will cause certain readjustments and that possibly
the child might be happier where there were more young companions, I have
no objection that for a moment could be called insuperable. Besides,
your brother was a friend of mine whom I knew pretty well—possibly,
through our contiguity, even better than you—and it was his wish.”
“His wish!” Mrs. Stratton echoed contemptuously. “And how capable was
he, do you consider, of making a sensible wish? At any time, but
particularly when he was so ill?”
“The will sounded sensible enough to me,” I said. “It has not been
contested. What do you think, Stratton?”
But Stratton was not there to talk. It was the grey mare’s evening out
and he was silenced almost before he had completed the preliminary stages
of lip-opening.
“Even if my brother had not been at the moment so ill as to be mentally
unhinged,” said Mrs. Stratton, “you must agree that the case is most
peculiar. Here am I, his own sister, with children of my own more or
less of Rose’s age, the properly equipped and natural person to bring up
this motherless and fatherless child, and instead she is left to the
tender mercies of a young man—and an unmarried man—whose only claim is
that he lived next door.”
“Not his only claim,” I suggested. “It is something to have known the
family for many years and to have brought the child into the world.”
“Mere accidents of adjacency and profession,” said Mrs. Stratton.
I granted that, but added that chance could rarely be separated from
destiny.
Mrs. Stratton hastened to assure me that she had no patience with
mystical balderdash. In any case it was absurd that a busy unmarried
doctor should be selected to train an orphan—and a female orphan at
that—when the orphan’s own aunt was not only ready to take over the duty
but had been in the dead man’s mind. She was convinced that ninety-nine
out of every hundred men in my position would have the grace—the
humanity—to stand aside and give close relationship precedence. She was
also convinced that no decently-honest judge, if there were such a
person, would hesitate to set the will aside and give her the custody of
her own flesh and blood.
I doubted if the phrase “own flesh and blood” could be applied properly
to nieces.
“It’s near enough,” said Mrs. Stratton. “There’s no need to quibble
about it. But to return to the question of a girl being entrusted to a
young unmarried man, I consider it unsuitable in every way. It’s not
nice,” she went on. “It’s not proper. It’s a kind of a scandal. The
idea of a bachelor bringing up a girl!”
I pointed out that I was a little different from most men in being a
doctor.
“A doctor!” she exclaimed, as though annihilating at one sniff not only
every pretension I might have cherished to know anything of the healing
art, but every vestige of discretion too, and all my predecessors from
Galen onwards.
“At any rate,” I said mildly, “I have been practising in this
neighbourhood for a good many years and I succeeded a highly-esteemed
father.”
“And not without your reward,” she returned. “It was worth having one of
your patients, at any rate, if you could induce him to leave you his
daughter and a nice little sum to play with.”
“My dear!” said George from the sofa. “My dear!”
“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Stratton. “I didn’t mean to say that. You must
excuse the feelings of a sister and—and an aunt. But,” she continued,
wasting no time in the nuances of regret, “at any rate you wouldn’t think
of accepting this trust if you didn’t marry? You must realize that my
poor brother had your marriage in mind when he made this preposterous
will.”
This was a new idea to me, and it assorted ill with Allinson’s expressed
views as to the matrimonial state.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“I know,” she replied.
“But,” I said, “I saw him more often and knew him more intimately in his
latter days than you could have done. He gave me no hint of wishing to
see me married. I could even give you a proof to the contrary, only I
should not wish to run the risk of offending you.”
Mrs. Stratton intimated that she should like to hear anything that her
poor brother had said.
“Very well then,” I replied. “He has often remarked what a relief it was
to be able to come over to me in the evening, to a house where there were
no women about to have to be polite to.”
“Disgraceful!” said Mrs. Stratton. “But his own dislike of refinement
and the convenances is one thing; the bringing up of his daughter is
another. I repeat that not even he would wish to leave his only child to
the mercies of a bachelor. I claim to know something of his character,”
she went on: “we were girl and boy together. He would have added the
clause to the will if he had been more himself. I am convinced of that.”
“But he didn’t,” I pointed out. “One can take wills only as they are
framed. Isn’t that so, Stratton?”
“Except in very exceptional cases, yes,” said George, with an heroic
effort.
Mrs. Stratton became tearful and turned on her husband. “You never
support me,” she complained. “You allow any one to override me. As if I
didn’t know my own brother better than strangers could! His wish—more,
his decision—would be that Dr. Greville should marry if he accepted the
care of Rose. Of course you must marry,” she added, to me. “How old are
you?—you look about thirty—every man of thirty should be married.
There’s always something wrong with bachelors. We can’t allow—can we,
George?—our niece to be brought up by a bachelor of thirty.”
“Many good men have been bachelors,” I said.
“Tell me one,” she replied, “and I shall be surprised.”
“Very well then,” I rejoined: “our Lord.”
“Don’t be blasphemous,” she said.
“I was merely being historical,” I explained meekly.
“You have no right to compare yourself with Him,” she said. “It all
helps to confirm my worst fears. I didn’t intend to pass on to other
matters connected with this deplorable affair; but that remark of yours
has forced me to. Not only are you young and unmarried, but you treat
sacred things with levity. I have not been prying, though you may think
so—I should scorn the action—I have not been prying or asking questions,
but I have learned that you are not a churchgoer. And not just because
you’re a doctor either,” she added.
“It was not an excuse that I was about to make,” I replied. “I should
not be a churchgoer whatever happened. It would involve suggestions of
belief that I could not make and should not like to be dishonest about.”
“An agnostic!” she said. “How terrible! O my poor Rose!” She began to
be tearful.
“There are more agnostics than you know of,” I said. “In this country,
where religious questions are rarely asked and more rarely answered, no
census of them could ever be taken. You probably not only know but
esteem and trust scores of them.”
To this she made no verbal reply, but settled down steadily to sob.
“My dear Mrs. Stratton,” I said. “You are taking the gloomiest view
without the faintest reason. You might just as well look on the case
brightly.”
“Yes, yes,” said George, who had gone to his wife’s side and was stroking
her with reassuring movements.
“You!” she said. “You’re always siding against me! Come away. It is no
use staying here or talking any more. Such selfishness I never saw in
all my life. But no good will come of it, I feel that. My poor little
Rose, my poor little Rose!”
She returned to look at me with an intense yearning in her exceedingly
damp features.
“I will not decide to-night,” I said.
“I shall pray that you may have the best guidance,” she assured me.