But though they are saved and cured they cannot ever forget. Their eyes
have a characteristic look of alert, suspicious watchfulness. For
wheresoever they move about the world, in the drawing-rooms of what is
called Society, in the business circles of the City, in the barracks or
the mining-camp, on the ship's heaving deck or the floor of the Pullman
carriage; amidst the sands of the Desert or the golden-rod of the
prairie, or the red sand and dry karroo scrub of the lone veld, they
will hear, when they least expect it, the thin, shrill hiss of the Asp
that once bit them to the bone. Or supposing that they have forgotten
in reality--so cleverly has the world pretended to!--with what a pang of
mortal anguish Memory awakens. When you recognise the devil that once
entered and possessed you, looking out of the eyes of your child.
When Saxham lifted up his ashen face and looked at the portrait in the
third leaf of the triptych frame and met the clear, candid gaze of his
son's blue eyes, you know what he was seeking, and praying not to find.
To have given Lynette a drunkard for her son would be the most terrible
penalty that could be exacted by merciless Nature for those five sodden,
wasted years.
Ah! to have had a clean, unspotted life to share with Bawne's fair
mother. That his priceless pearl of womanhood should gleam upon a
drunkard's hand--his spotless Convent lily have opened to fullest bloom
in a drunkard's holding, had been from the outset of their married life,
verjuice in Saxham's cup by day, and a thorn in his pillow by night.
But never before had it occurred to the man of science, the great
surgeon, the learned biologist, that relentless Nature might be saving
up for him, Saxham, a special rod in saltest brine.
Bawne.... He sat in silence with set teeth, asking himself the bitter
question:
"How could I have forgotten--Bawne?"
*CHAPTER XIX*
*BAWNE*
As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded his well-known
thump upon the door-panel. When had the Dop Doctor ever cried, "Come
in!" with such a leaden sinking of the heart?
The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong for his twelve
years. You saw him attired in the dress with which we are all
familiar--the loose shirt of khaki-brown, with its knotted silk
neckerchief of dark blue, the lanyards ending in clasp-knife and
whistle, the roomy shorts upheld by a brown leather pouch-belt
supporting a serviceable axe, the dark blue stockings turned over at the
knee, fitting close to the slim muscular legs, the light strong shoes,
the brown smasher hat with the chin-strap, completed the picture of a
Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed. He carried his light staff at
the trail, and entering, brought it to an upright position, and saluted
smartly. The salute formally acknowledged, he came straight to the
table and stood at his father's elbow, waiting, as Saxham feigned to
blot a written line. Outwardly composed, the drumming of the man's
heart deafened him, and a mist before his eyes blurred the page they
were bent upon. Fatherhood gripped him by the throat as in the first
moment of his son's separate existence. A thing we prize is never so
poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of its ruin
or loss.
"Father, you aren't generally pleased when I come bothering you in
consulting hours, but this time it is really serious business, no kid,
and Honour bright!"
Saxham answered with equal gravity:
"If you have a reasonable excuse for coming, I have said that you may
come."
The boy was like him. You saw it as he stood waiting. The vivid
gentian-blue eyes were Saxham's, as were the thick throat and prominent
under-jaw and the square facial outline. But the plume of hair that
swept over the broad forehead was red-brown like Lynette's. The
delicate, irregular profile and a sensitive sweetness about the lips
were gifts from his mother. The directness of his look, and the tinge
of brusqueness in his speech were unconsciously modelled on the
father's, as he said, sacrificing sufficient of manly independence to
come within the curve of the Doctor's strong arm:
"First, I wanted to show you my new badge."
Saxham's left hand squeezed the arm most distant from him, where a
familiar device was displayed upon the sleeve, midway, between the
shoulder and elbow, below the six-inch length of colours distinctive of
this Scout's Patrol.
"Turn round and show it, then!"
"Father, you're larking. That's my General Scout Badge. I've had it
ever since I passed my Second Class tests. Before then, you know, when
I was a Tenderfoot, I'd only the top-part--the _fleur-de-lis_ without
the motto, and you wear that in your left pocket button-hole. But this
is something special, don't you see?"
Saxham eyed the row of little enamelled circles on the sleeve next him
with respectful gravity. The boy went on, trying to control the gleeful
tremor in his voice:
"I've got the Ambulance Badge!--look at the Geneva Cross!--and the
Signaller's Badge--this is it--with the crossed flags--and the
Interpreter's Badge--the one with the two hands holding. But this is
the very latest. Our Scoutmaster gave it to me after parade to-day.
It's the Airman's Badge--" He caught his breath, the secret was coming
in a moment.... He went on: "To get it you must have made a model
aeroplane. Not a flying-stick, any kid of nine can make one--but a
model that will really fly. That's my special reason for coming.
Mother was out--and--and next to her I wanted to tell you!"
"And next after me?"
The boy considered a moment before he looked up to answer:
"Cousin Pat, because she can keep a secret so tightly."
Saxham patted the sturdy square shoulders.
"You are fond of Cousin Patrine, aren't you?"
"Rather!"
"Just tell me why?"
"Because"--the young brows were puckered--"because she's so big and
so--beautiful. And she'd just die for you and Mother.... She comes in
my prayers next after you two."
"And--the Chief Scout?"
"Father, wouldn't it be--a bit cheeky to go and pray for a man like
that?"
A spark of laughter wakened in Saxham's sombre eyes.
"Not quite respectful, you think? Is that it? Why so, when you're
taught to pray for the Holy Father, Mother Church, and the King and
Queen?"
The boy's puckered brows smoothed. The question was settled.
"Of course. I forgot. Then the Chief Scout must come in after Cousin
Patrine. Because a gentleman must always give place to a lady. That's
what Mother says."
"Suppose Cousin Patrine never came to see you any more, what would you
do then?"
Bawne straightened the sturdy body and proclaimed:
"I would go and find her and bring her back!"
"Suppose she did not want to come?"
Bawne said instantly:
"I would tell her Mother was wanting her. For Mother would be, you
know. And Cousin Pat wouldn't keep her waiting. Not much, sir, she
wouldn't!"
"She cares so?"
"Doesn't she! Why, have you forgotten when I was a little shaver and
Mother was so ill?"
Saxham, with a certain tightening of the muscles of the throat, recalled
the wan, red-eyed spectre that had haunted the landing outside the
guarded bedroom where Lynette lay, white and strengthless, while her
husband fought for her with Death.
"Well, well. Go on loving Patrine and praying for her! Now tell me of
your model."
The boy said, controlling his exultation:
"It has to be left at our District Headquarters until to-morrow. You
see--it's rather a special affair. It's not a flying stick, like the
things I used to make when I was a shaver, nor a glider--you see men in
spectacles flying those every day to please the kids on Hampstead Heath
and in Kensington Gardens, but a model of a Bristol monoplane with a
span of thirty inches, and a main-plane-area of a hundred and fifty"--he
caught his breath and with difficulty kept his eager words from tumbling
over one another as he reached the thrilling climax--"and I built up her
fuselage with cardboard and sticking-plaster out of the First Aid case
you gave me to carry in my belt-pouch, and cut the propeller out of a
tin toy engine I've had ever since I was a kid--and made the planes of
big sheets of stiff foolscap strengthened with thin strips of glued
wood, and her spars, sir!--the upright ones are quills, and her stays
and struts I made of copper wire and she's weighted with lead ribbon
like what you wrap about the gut when you're bottom-fishing for tench or
barbel--and her motor-power is eighteen inches of square elastic
twisted--and father"--he broke into a war-dance of ecstasy
unrestrained--"when Roddy Wrynche and me went on a secret expedition to
Primrose Hill to test her--she flew, sir! First go-off--by George!"
"Really flew? ... You are certain?"
"Upon my life, sir, and that's my Honour. Scout's Honour and life are
the same thing. That's what the Oath rubs into us." He squared his
shoulders and lowered his voice as a boy speaking of high matters that
must be dealt with reverently. "I think it's--ripping. I can say it.
Would you like me to?"
Saxham nodded without speaking, because of that choking something
sticking in his throat. That something Lear called "the mother." And,
dammed away behind his eyes, were scalding tears that only men may shed.
As the young voice said:
"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to be loyal to God and
the King.
"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to Help other people at
all times.
"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to obey the Scout Law....
You see"--the boyish arm was on Saxham's shoulder now, the ruddy-fair
cheek pressed against the pale, close-shaven face--"you see, Father,
when a Scout says 'On my Honour' it's just as if he swore on the
Crucifix!"
Saxham said, crushing down the fierce emotion that had almost mastered
him:
"It is--just the same! For the man who breaks a promise will never keep
an oath.... I have a friend of whom I have told you.... I think he
would like to hear about your model aeroplane.... May I tell him, or
would you prefer to tell him yourself?"
Bawne's fair face glowed. He gasped in ecstasy:
"_Father_.... You mean Mr. Sherbrand--your Flying Man who's in the
Hospital?"
"My Flying Man--but he is well again and back at work at Hendon. There
was not much the matter with him; a slight obstruction in one of the
nasal passages that prevented him from breathing with his mouth shut as
he should. Now he has asked me--this afternoon if I am at leisure--to
bring my little son to the aerodrome and see him make a flight."
"And go up in his aeroplane with him? Father, say Yes! Do, please do!"
As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in joyous excitement,
Saxham answered, not without an inward tug:
"If your mother says 'Yes' I shall not say No! Now off with you, my
son!"
The boy saluted and went. Even his bright obedience wrung his father's
heart. The man looked haggard and old. He hid his careworn face in his
hands for a minute. His lips were still moving when he looked up and
made the Sign so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast.
Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often
prescribed by Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and sedative in
moments of bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.
He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable night at
Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing fiend.... Lynette
had taught him the habit of prayer. And even as she, a friendless,
neglected waif, had learned to look up and see the shining Faces of our
Divine Redeemer and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and
tender woman; so her husband, looking in the eyes of Lynette, had found
the gift of Faith lost years before.
"Oh! ... Prayer!" you say--"Faith!" ... and I see you shrug and sneer a
little, you who are intellectual and highly educated, and have ceased to
believe in what you term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend--since
you learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of Genesis,
and sneer at the discrepancies between the statements of the Gospel
narrators--though you will hear such testimonies sworn to in good faith,
wherever witnesses are examined in a Court of Law.
But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic. You credit the existence
of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson's affair. Well, because a man
wears a straight black coat, will you abandon to him so inestimable a
privilege? Is it not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up
our earth-made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny
planet to spin out its aeons of cycles amidst the innumerable millions
of systems wheeling through His Universe should stoop to hear the words
we utter? Feeble cries, drowned by the orchestras of the winds, and the
chorus of the Spheres revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances
imperceptible to any Ear save His alone.
*CHAPTER XX*
*THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES*
Patients rapidly succeeded one another in the chair that faced the
window. There were confirmed invalids who were really healthy men and
women, and certain others who came in smilingly to talk about the
weather and the newest Russian Opera, who bore upon their faces the
unmistakable stamp of mortal disease. The wife or the husband, the
father or the mother had worried for nothing.... Would the Doctor
prescribe a little tonic to buck them, or the surgeon alleviate a little
trouble of the local kind? Really nothing--but--Death's knock at the
door. And there were cases--open or unacknowledged--of the liquor-habit
and the drug-mania. To these, instead of dropping out bromide of
potassium and throwing in the chloral hydrates with strychnine and the
chloride of the metal that is crushed and assayed out of the quartz reef
near Johannesburg, or pick-axed out of the frozen ground of the
Klondyke, Saxham dealt out that savage tonic Truth, in ladlesful.
The secret dipsomaniac or druggard could not deceive this man's keen
scrutiny, or escape his unerring diagnosis. When, beaten, they admitted
the fact, Saxham said to them as to the others:
"You say you cannot conquer the craving. I myself once thought so.
Your moral power can be restored, even as was mine. In your case the
habit is barely as ingrained as in the case I quote to you. I drank
alcohol to excess for a period of five years."
Some of the sufferers--elderly women and mild-mannered old
gentlemen--were horrified. Others thought such candour brutal--but
attractively so. Yet others responded to the sympathy masked by the
stern, impassive face, and the blunt, brusque manner.
"At any rate the man's no humbug!" such and such an one would stutter.
"And seems to have any amount of Will. Think I shall put myself in his
hands for a bit." Adding with a rueful twinkle: "He knows how the dog
bites, if anyone does!"
He did, and those hands of his were strong, prompt and unfaltering.
Since the grip of human sympathy had fastened on the Dop Doctor of
Gueldersdorp, and drawn him up out of the depths into sunlight and free
air, and set his feet once more on the firm ground, how many of his
fellow-sufferers had Saxham not hauled reeking and squelching out of the
abysmal sludge, whose secrets shall only be revealed upon the Last Day.
Yet Saxham realised that the grand majority of these twentieth-century
men and women really wanted little more of the physician and surgeon
than the thirteenth-century patient desired of the apothecary or the
leech. A patient hearing given to their category of evils--a little
hocus-pocus, and a nostrum or so.
We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men of the Dark
Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt and toe of frog, the
salted earthworms, and the _Pulvis Bezoardicus Magistralis_ or _Pulvis
Sanctus_, dissolved in the liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious
conjunction of their ruling planets with the Moon--have but given place
to extract of the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries of the
guinea-pig, the spinal cord and brain of rabbits and mice and other
small mammalia, with--instead of broth of vipers, liquor distilled from
the parotid secretion of the tropical toad; identical with the reptile
administered in boluses to Pagan patients by the Greek Hippocrates.
With other remedies hideously akin to the hell-brews that whipped the
sated desires of Tiberius and Nero.... Such as the pastelloids
frequently prescribed by bland-mannered, frock-coated, twentieth-century
physicians--professing Christians who pay West-End pew-rents, and
deplore the abnormal drop in the birth-rate--for the spurring of the
sense of debilitated Hedonists.
Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We have
harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia's silver chariot. In Surgery the Short
Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get
on, at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to
existence. Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human
machine, alive and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the
shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be
detected and photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The
electro-magnet automatically carried out the removal of such fragments,
provided only that they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in
this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has
even weighed the Soul.
Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate--consider.... This
quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham's breast and in yours and
mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator--this Ego for whose
eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at
precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man,
weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately
afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.
The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and
sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders,
when the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable
air; when the last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in
ponderability shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling
matter. Will the result proportionate with the moribund's sixteenth of
an ounce?
It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social upheaval upon a
vaster scale than historian ever recorded or visionary ever dreamed; a
cataclysmic cleansing, a purging as by fire; the regeneration of the
human race, the reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the
Divine Ideal, could never be brought about. Unconsciously he sought for
the decadent world some such ordeal as he himself had passed through.
You looked at him and saw the scars of suffering. The soil of his
nature had been rent by volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst
of fierce abysmal fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the
frowning steeps, the jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle clouds; the
pure springs gathered and ran; the valleys became fruitful and the
plains carpeted themselves with flowers.
A miracle had been wrought for Saxham the Man, and he saw the need of
one for the World, and said in his heart that, though holy men might
pray, it would not, could not, ever be vouchsafed. And all the while
the miracle was ripening, the Day was coming, the Great Awakening was at
hand.
*CHAPTER XXI*
*MARGOT LOOKS IN*
It drew on to the luncheon hour. The last patient a very young, very
little, very pretty married woman, was summoned by the neat maid from
the waiting-room, in a remote corner of which a husband of military type
and ordinarily cheerful countenance, remained, maintaining with obvious
effort a fictitious interest in the pages of a remote issue of _Punch_.
The dainty little lady bore a name well known to Saxham. The fact that a
title was attached to it did not interest him, nor had it shortened her
term of waiting by a second of the clock. But her youth smote him with
a sense of pity as she took the chair upon his left hand facing the
window, and without overmuch embarrassment made clear her case.
She was going to have a baby. Franky, her husband, earnestly desired
the kiddie for family reasons, yet its advent was unwelcome to him, in
that it must inevitably involve physical pain and mental anxiety for the
little lady, Franky's wife.
The little lady had been frightfully downed by the prospect. She rather
cottoned to kiddies, she explained, than otherwise. It was the bother
of having them that didn't appeal. It put everything in the cart as
regarded the Autumn Season. Besides--there were family reasons on her
side, why the prospect should not be too rosy. She stated the reasons,
and Saxham's listening face grew grave. He realised the danger of a
Preconceived Idea.
He said nothing. Margot went on talking. Her beautiful deer-eyes were
alternately wistful and coaxing. They entreated sympathy. They begged
for gentleness. They grew brilliant with enthusiasm as she explained
that after a lot of chinning, she and Franky had hit upon a perfectly
ripping plan.
A friend, recently encountered in Paris, had thrown a ray of hope upon
the doubtful prospect. No doubt Dr. Saxham was in sympathy with the
pioneers of the New Crusade against Unnecessary Pain.... Of course, Dr.
Saxham knew all about the wonderful experiments of German
gynaewhatdoyoucall'ems. The right term was frightfully crack-jaw.
Perhaps Dr. Saxham knew what was meant?
Saxham reassured the little lady.
"You refer of course to the experiments of Professors von Wolfenbuchel
of Vienna, and Krauss of the Berlin _Fraueenklinik_, resulting in the
method of treatment now known throughout the Continent as 'Purple
Dreams.' Wolfenbuchel and Krauss have published a pamphlet on the
subject. Perhaps you have read the pamphlet?"
"Yes--I've read it. A wonderful book that has been translated into
every language. A German officer, friend of a friend I met in Paris,
told her about it. His sister had tried the treatment, and found it A1.
So I bought a French translation of the book in Paris, and an English
one at a shop in the Haymarket. It's bound in rose-coloured vellum
stamped with a rising sun in gold. 'Weep No More, Mothers!' it's
called. Isn't that a charming title? And the subject is: 'Pangless
Childbirth, Produced through Purple Dreams.'"
In a sweet, coaxing voice that trembled a little, she began to tell the
Doctor about the wonderful results obtained by hypodermics of Krauss and
Wolfenbuechel's marvellous combination of drugs. And Saxham hearkened
with stern patience, while the table-clock ticked and the luncheon hour
drew near, and Franky chewed the cud of suspense in the Doctor's
waiting-room.
Thousands of peasant women, and others of the lower middle-class in
Germany had become mothers under the Purple Dreams treatment. Maternity
Hospitals in Paris, Brussels, and New York had adopted the method after
controversy and hesitation. It had triumphed over every doubt. An
American woman whose brother's wife had had a "Purple Dreams" baby at
the Berlin Institute had told the little narrator only yesterday how
quite too wonderful was the discovery of the enlightened Krauss and the
gifted Wolfenbuchel. Everything was made easy. When your ordeal drew
near you simply went to the place, and signed your name in a book, and
put yourself in the hands of skilled persons. You felt no pain--not a
twinge. Only the prick and throb of the hypodermic needle-syringe, and
most people were used to the _pique_ nowadays--administering the first
subcutaneous injections of the wonderful new drug.... Under its mild
sedative influence you dozed off to sleep presently. And when you woke
up--there was the baby--beautifully dressed, and lying on a lace pillow
in the arms of a smartly dressed, fresh-cheeked nurse.
This had been the experience of the sister of the German officer, as of
the wife of the brother of the American lady. The same thing happening
to thousands everywhere. The philanthropic Wolfenbuchel and the
benevolent Krauss had made of the stony Via Dolorosa by which Womanhood
attains maternity--a path of soft green turf bordered with fragrant
lilies and bestrewn with the perfumed petals of the rose.
She ended. Saxham had kept his keen blue eyes steadily upon her during
the eloquent recital. Not a hair of his black brows had twitched, not a
muscle of his pale face had moved--betraying his urgent inclination to
smile. His fine hand, lying upon the blotter near the small black
case-book, might have been carved out of ancient Spanish ivory, or
yellow-white lava. Now he said: