Into the peacefulness of Bettesworth's last working summer a
disquieting circumstance had been slowly intruding; and now, with
August, it developed into a subject of grave fears. I do not know when
I first noticed a small sore on the old man's lower lip, but I think
it must have been in May or early June. On being asked, he said it had
been there since his illness in the spring, and "didn't seem to get no
worse." Certainly he was not troubling about it.
Weeks passed, perhaps six weeks, in which, though the ugly, angry look
of the thing sometimes took my attention, I forbore to speak of it
again, being unwilling to arouse alarm. Then it occurred to me that if
I was too fanciful, Bettesworth was not fanciful enough. In his robust
out-door life he had never learnt to be nervous and anticipate
horrors; and he might not be sufficiently alive to the dreadful
possibilities which were presenting themselves to my own imagination.
I urged him accordingly to see his club doctor.
He did so, not immediately, though after how long an interval I am
unable to say, since none of this affair got into my note-book. The
doctor no sooner saw the sore than he said it must be cut out. "Do
you smoke?" was one of his first questions; and "Where is your pipe?"
was the next. Bettesworth produced his pipe--an old blackened
briar--and was comforted to learn that it was considered harmless. But
he must have the sore removed, and his two or three remaining teeth
near it would have to come out. When could he have it done? the doctor
asked. Bettesworth said that he must consult me on that point, and
came away promising to do so.
Considering how sure he must have been that I should put no obstacle
in his way, I incline to think that by now he must himself have begun
to feel alarm. He waited, however, about a week, and then one morning
off he went again to see the doctor, half expecting, I believe, to
have the operation done then and there, before he came home.
An hour afterwards I met him returning, looking worried. The doctor
was just setting off for his holiday, and could not now undertake the
operation, but advised him to go to Guildford Hospital. Perhaps
Bettesworth would have liked me to pooh-pooh the suggestion--he little
relished the idea of leaving his wife and his work, and taking a
railway journey to so dismal an end; but even as he talked, I was
watching on his lip that which might mean death. So I sent him off
straightway to the Vicarage, where he could obtain a necessary letter
of introduction to the hospital.
Of what immediately followed my memory is quite blank. I only recall
that the old chap started at last all alone on his journey to
Guildford, not knowing how long he would be away, or what was likely
to happen to him. A niece of his had provided him with a stamped
addressed envelope and a clean sheet of note-paper, in case he should
need to get anyone at the hospital to send a message home.
_August 6, 1904._--So he disappeared for a time. Three or four days,
we supposed, would be the extent of his absence; but the days went by
and no word came from him. For all we knew he might never have reached
the hospital; and it began to be a serious question what would become
of his wife, and whether she would not have to be sent to the
workhouse for want of a protector. At last, I wrote for information to
the matron of the hospital. Her answer, which lies before me now, and
is the only piece of evidence I have preserved of the whole business,
is dated August 6th. On that day, it stated, Bettesworth was to be
operated upon, and, if all went well, he would most likely be able to
leave the hospital in ten days or a fortnight.
Unless I mistake, the ten days or a fortnight dragged out to nearly
three weeks, in which I had the old wife on my mind. A visit to her
one Sunday morning reassured me. Poor old Lucy Bettesworth! I did not
anticipate, then, that I should never again see her alive. Dirty and
dishevelled as ever, alone in the squalid cottage, she received me
with a meek simplicity that in my eyes made amends for many faults.
She was more sane than I had dared to hope I should find her, eager
for "Fred" to come home, but contented, it seemed, to wait, if it was
doing him good. She did not want for anything; she ate no meat, and it
cost her nothing to live. Would I like a vegetable marrow? There was a
nice one in the garden that "wanted cuttin'."
Perceiving that she desired me to have the vegetable marrow, I allowed
her to take me out into the garden to get it. "Could I cut it?" Of
course I could, and did. Then a qualm struck her: perhaps I shouldn't
like carrying it! But she might be able to wrap it up in a piece of
newspaper....
To that, however, I demurred. There was no harm in being seen with a
vegetable marrow on Sunday morning; and I took it, undraped by paper,
aware that the despised old woman had done me the greatest courtesy in
her power. And that was, as it proved, the last time I ever saw her.
Bettesworth, meanwhile, in the hospital, was not quite forgotten. His
niece has been mentioned who gave him the stamped envelope which he
had not used. We shall hear a good deal of her, later on--a helpful
but delicate woman, who was Bettesworth's niece only by marriage with
a nephew of his, of whom also we shall hear. These two on that Sunday
morning--it being a quiet, half-hazy, half-sunny August day--walked
over to Guildford, and brought back news that the old man was doing as
well as could be hoped. They proposed to repeat the visit the
following week. It made a pleasant Sunday outing.
But before that week was ended Bettesworth was suddenly home again,
unannounced. An odd look about him puzzled me, until I realized that
he had grown a beard--a white, scrubby, short-trimmed beard, which
gave him a foxy expression that I did not like. His lip was in
strapping, a little blood-stained, but he reported that all was going
on well. The surgeons had carved down into his jaw, and believed the
operation to have been quite successful. Satisfied as to this, I could
endure his changed appearance.
Something about his manner was less satisfactory. Looking back, I
think I know what was the matter; but at the time a sort of levity in
him struck a false note. Besides, he seemed not to realize that his
wife might have suffered by his absence, or that others had put
themselves about on his behalf. He struck me as selfish and
self-satisfied. I forgot what a lonely expedition his had been, and
how he had had to start off and face this miserable experience without
a friend at hand to care whether he came through it alive or not.
Left to himself (it is obvious enough now) and determined to go
through the business in manly fashion, he had rather overdone it--had
over-played his part. In refusing to admit fear, he had erred a
little on the other side, and he still erred so in telling his
experiences, perhaps because he was still not quite free of fear. By
his account, his stay in the hospital had been an interesting holiday.
Everything about it was a little too good to be believed. He had
jested with the doctors and the nurses. They called him "Dad," and "a
joking old man," and he felt flattered: they had had a "fire-drill,"
and from his bed, or his seat under the veranda among the
convalescents, he had entered into the spirit of the thing. Grimmer
details, too, did not escape him: the arrival of new patients in the
night--"accident cases" brought in for immediate treatment; the
sufferings he witnessed; the hopeless condition of a railway porter,
and so forth. All this was told in his own manner, with swift
realistic touch, convincingly true; with a genuine sense of the humour
of the thing, he mentioned the operating-room by the patients' name
for it--"the slaughter-house"; but none the less his narrative had an
offensive emptiness, an unreality, a flippancy, unworthy, I thought,
of Bettesworth.
A little more sense would have shown me the clue to it, in his
behaviour just before the operation. He was dressed in "a sort of a
white night-gown," waiting for his turn; and, he said, "I made 'em
laugh. I got up and danced about on the floor. 'Now I be Father
Peter,' I says." Then the nurse came to conduct him to "the
slaughter-house." "'Old Freddy's goin' to 'ave something now,' they"
(the nearer patients) "says. I took hold o' the nurse's arm. 'Now I be
goin' out for a walk with my young lady,' I says. 'We be goin' out
courtin'.'" And in such fashion, over-excited, he maintained his
fortitude, with a travesty of the courage he was all but losing. He
never confessed to having felt fear. The nearest approach to it was
when he was actually lying on the operating-table. Left quite alone
there (for half an hour, he alleged and believed), "I looked all
round," he said, "and up at the skylight, and I says to myself, 'So
this is where it is, is it?'"
With these tales he came home, repeating them until I was weary. By
and by, however, he settled down to work, although one or two visits
had to be paid to the hospital, for dressing the lip; and as he
settled down, his normal manner returned. For some weeks--nay, for
longer--his friends were not free of anxiety about him. There were
pains in his jaw, and in his lip too, enough to draw dire forebodings
from those of pessimistic humour. But Bettesworth owned to no fears.
So it went on for a month or so, when that occurred which effectually
banished from his mind all remembrance of this trouble.