It was evident that if he were to see her again he must make friends with

Edward Willis. He was sorry that he had not done so before. For once in

a way the recommendations of Aunt Laura had been prophetically right.

His self-consciousness made it difficult for him to do so, for he felt

certain that this cold, calculating young man would see through him. For

two days he debated with himself on the various ways in which Mawne might

be approached without coming to any satisfactory conclusion. On the

third he was so lucky as to meet his victim on the Halesby train. Willis

did not seem in the least anxious to renew their acquaintance; and it was

at the expense of some awkwardness that Edwin managed to drag him into

conversation.

They talked a little about the war, which Willis seemed to view from a

remote and pessimistic angle. From that, by way of Mr. Willis’s

Ladysmith rumour, they passed on to a discussion of the dance. Edwin was

enthusiastic.

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” said Willis. “I hate dancing.”

“I rather admired that Miss Powys,” said Edwin.

“Dorothy Powys? Yes, she’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”

“Who is she?”

“Oh, she’s a niece of Lord Alfred Powys, one of our directors. Lives

with him, I believe. I don’t really know her.”

“Isn’t she staying with you?”

“Oh, no. . . . She only stayed at Mawne for the night of the dance. Her

uncle happened to be coming over for a directors’ meeting, and the

governor asked him to bring her along with him as there was a dance on.”

This was all very discouraging.

“Where do they live?” Edwin asked.

“Somewhere over in the Teme valley, I think. Lord Alfred’s a great

fisherman. He’s a nice chap.”

“And she lives with him?”

“Yes. . . . I think he’s sort of adopted her. But I understand she’s

going to India sometime next month.”

“India? What on earth is she going to India for?”

“Going to be married to some fellow in the Indian army. A major, I think

he is.”

“To be married—” said Edwin.

And the train pulled up at Mawne Hall.

IV

He took it very hardly. On the face of it, it seemed that her kiss had

been no more than a piece of mad, cynical trifling; but his respect for

himself—which was considerable, as became his years—would not allow him

to believe this. He decided, instead, that Dorothy Powys’s kiss had been

the symbol of a great and noble passion, fated, in the melancholy manner

of nearly every legendary lore, to frustration. He was convinced that

the unknown major in the Indian army would never be loved; that the

memory of that intense moment on Mr. Willis’s back stairs would haunt his

wife for ever, and temper with romance the vistas of an unhappy marriage.

The main result of the incident in Edwin’s case was a spate of passionate

but imitative verses, a new devotion to such music as repressed his

particular portion of _weltschmerz_, and an anxiety to confide the story,

with elaborations, to some sympathetic friend. He turned it on to W.G.

“Well, W.G., what do you think of it?” he asked, when he had finished.

W.G. sucked at his pipe and smiled good-humouredly.

“Better luck next time, old chap,” he said.

CHAPTER VI

THE DRESSER

I

IN the following June the second professional examination was held. On a

stifling morning, when the blue brick pavements of North Bromwich

reflected a torrid heat, and a warm wind, blowing like a sirocco from the

black desert outside, swept the streets with clouds of dust, Edwin,

Maskew, and W.G. waited in the cloakroom outside the Dean’s office to see

the results of the examination posted. Maskew was the only one of the

three who showed no signs of nervousness; for W.G. could never overcome

the difficulty of expressing his thoughts on paper, and Edwin had passed

ten minutes of purgatory with an outside examiner in the anatomy _viva_.

He knew, on the other hand, that his Physiology had been extraordinarily

good, and put his faith in the general impression of intelligence that he

hoped he had created.

The porter came out with the lists, and W.G., striding to meet his fate

like some Homeric hero, snatched the paper from his hands. He went very

white as he read it.

“Good God—” he said. “Well, I’m damned—”

“Rotten luck if you’re down, W.G.,” said Maskew sympathetically.

“Down? . . . I’m not down. I’m through.”

He still looked bewildered. Edwin took the paper from his trembling

hands. As he had expected Maskew was first, but he saw that he himself

was second on the list. Martin had ambled through respectively somewhere

about the middle. W.G. and Harrop were last and last but one. He pinned

the list on the notice-board. It was an exhilarating moment in which he

was conscious of the herculean, sweaty handgrip of W.G. who was

muttering: “Well, I’m damned if we don’t all deserve it.”

Talking and laughing together, they went out to lunch at Joey’s and

caught the next train down to Evesham, where the coolness of the glassy

Avon made the June heat more tolerable, and in the evening, blistered

with rowing and sunshine, they came back to North Bromwich, dined

together, and afterwards went to a music-hall. It was wonderful to Edwin

to see the physical elation of W.G. The big man wanted to dance like a

child, and it was with difficulty that Maskew restrained him from

smashing a plate-glass window in Sackville Row. “You’re a cold-blooded

swine, Maskew,” he said indignantly. “God, man, don’t you feel you want

to do something? You must let off steam in some way, and it’s just as

well to do it decently.”

Next morning the Dean sent a message to Edwin and Maskew, asking them to

call at his office during the morning. They went together, and were

received with his usual urbane politeness.

“Good-morning, Mr. Maskew . . . Mr. Ingleby. . . . You had better sit

down. I am very pleased to see your names at the top of the list. Yes . . .

very pleased. I’ve consulted Dr. Moon, and he approves your

appointment as prosectors. It is an office that you will be very wise to

undertake if you have any surgical ambitions, and I am very pleased to

offer it to you. Perhaps you will let me know to-morrow? Thank you,

gentlemen. . . . Good-morning.”

“Shall you take it?” said Edwin, as soon as they were outside.

“Of course I shall. I’m rather keen on Anatomy. It only means putting

one back a year, and it’s worth it a hundred times over, if one gets the

primary Fellowship. You’ll be a fool if you don’t do it. We should have

a topping time together. No lectures . . . just a year of research

work.”

“I shall have to think about it,” said Edwin.

It was the financial side of the question that had to be considered. To

add another year to a course that was already expensive in pursuit of an

elusive Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons: was it worth while?

To begin with, he might easily fail. The primary examination was

notoriously fluky, the results depending on the individual caprices and

preferences of examiners. Edwin knew very well that better men than

himself had failed in it. If, after draining his father’s pockets for

another year, he should be ploughed, the situation would be altogether

too pathetic.

Anything that affected his father’s purse seemed to Edwin, in those days,

a matter for delicacy and shame. He hated to receive money from him. It

was an acute embarrassment to see him write a cheque. He wrote slowly,

with a regular, formal hand, and all the time Edwin, watching him, would

think how many small, degrading sales of tooth paste and castor oil and

pennyworths of camphor had gone to the making of that tenuous

bank-account, and how easily and carelessly the painful accumulations

would be spent. He hated asking his father for money, and for this

reason had compelled himself to refrain from asking for the perfectly

reasonable and necessary allowance that he had been wanting to settle for

the last year.

And so he did not dare to tell his father that he had been offered the

prosectorship and the opportunity of taking the Fellowship. If he had

done so he was almost certain that Mr. Ingleby would have consented, and

his father’s sacrifice would have thrown such a weight of obligation on

him that life would not have been worth living. Indeed, if, in the end,

he should have failed, his shame would have been intolerable. These

reflections on the humility and penury of his father always plunged Edwin

into a debauch of sentiment in which he would return with the zeal of a

prodigal to the resolutions that he had made at the time of his mother’s

death. They filled him with a kind of protective fervour that might

easily have been mistaken for love, but was, in reality, an excuse for

its absence. Still, even if the sentiment harrowed, it consoled, and

Edwin was heroically elated by the performance of a sacrifice that he had

not been brave enough to refuse.

It pleased him also to find that W.G. was thankful for his decision.

“You see, it would have been rotten for me,” he said, “if you and Maskew

had both been left behind. When you’ve got into the habit of working

with a fellow in your first two years, it’s a bit of a break to have to

go on by yourself. Of course, I should never have the least earthly

chance of getting the Fellowship, and even if I had, I couldn’t afford to

waste a year over it. I’m damned glad you’re coming on with me,

Ingleby.”

The tribute was flattering. Edwin, always rather pathetically anxious

for friendship, was particularly pleased to have it offered so frankly by

a creature as unlike him in every way as W.G. There was something stable

and reliable about the big man’s simplicity. He felt that he would be as

loath to give offence to W.G. as to his father; and though he still felt

some indefinite hankerings after the atmosphere of culture that he would

have enjoyed in the society of Boyce, he couldn’t deny the fact that W.G.

was a sound and splendid fellow, and a good man to have by his side in an

emergency. Together they plunged into the new world of hospital life.

II

Two general hospitals supplied the clinical needs of the North Bromwich

Medical School. The older, from which the school had originated, was a

small institution, the Prince’s, with which Edwin had become acquainted

on the occasion of his first panto-night. It stood in the upper and

healthier part of the city, in the middle of the slums that lie upon the

fringe of the fashionable suburb of Alvaston: a solid building of early

Victorian red brick, with a stone portico facing upon a thoroughfare of

rather older houses that had once been reputable but had now degenerated

into theatrical lodging-houses.

The hospital itself was small enough to be homely, and W.G. and Edwin

soon became accustomed to its narrow entrance hall, and the lodge in

which porters, who already knew all that was to be known about the

reception of casualties, were housed.

Edwin would arrive at the hospital early in the morning, when no sign of

life was to be seen in the “professional” lodgings sleeping with drawn

blinds upon the other side of the road. At this time of the day the

hospital porch smelt clean and antiseptic, for the stream of stinking

humanity had not yet begun to trickle through. He would hang his coat in

the narrow passage that served for cloakroom and lounge with a cigarette

in his mouth before the glass-fronted notice-boards on which the lists of

operations for the day were exhibited, and exchange greetings with the

night porter departing in a state of drowsy ill-temper, or the day-porter

coming on duty with a military swagger and his grey hair plastered down

with vaseline, from the casualty department, and cold water.

Here, too, the members of the consulting staff would arrive in their

frock-coats and top-hats: great men, such as Lloyd Moore, the outstanding

surgical genius of the Midlands; old Beaton, the professor of surgery,

with his long, grey beard, and Hartley, the ophthalmologist, whose

reputation was European. These giants would pass on through the swinging

doors to their wards or consulting rooms, and on the very stroke of nine,

W.G., who was a bad riser, and always cut things fine, would plunge in,

carrying with him the strenuous atmosphere of a cold sponge and breezy

enthusiasm. Then the clock would strike nine, and they would pass on

together arm in arm, into the huge, airy waiting-hall with innumerable

benches set crosswise like the pews in a church; and, at the same moment,

the military porter, who had been marshalling the queue of out-patients,

would release them, and a bewildering crowd of poorly-clad human wreckage

would drift in behind them, settling patiently into the benches opposite

the door of the department from which they were seeking relief.

The work of Edwin and W.G. lay in the Casualty Department, a small room

full of pleasant morning light. On one side of it ran a long counter

with shelves for bottles, and drawers in which plasters, dressings, and

ointments were kept. On the other, half a dozen chairs were ranged for

the reception of patients. The medical staff consisted of four persons

only: two professionals, a young and enthusiastic surgeon named Mather

who held the post of Assistant Surgeon to Out-patients, and an elderly

sister who had been on the job for years, and two amateurs in the shape

of Edwin and W.G.

All of them were clothed in white overalls; for the work of the casualty

department was of a dirty nature, and these long garments also served as

some protection from the swarming parasites that lived upon the bodies of

their patients. Edwin, who suffered agonies of irritation from their

attacks, also armed himself with a glass-stoppered bottle of ether with

which he would drench the seat of irritation in the hopes of inflicting

death or at least unconsciousness upon his tormentors.

Then, one by one, the patients would file in, and plant themselves upon

the wooden chairs: old men whose skins were foul with the ravages of

eczema and dirt combined; women, exhausted in middle age by

child-bearing, and the accepted slavery of housework; sturdy mechanics

who had been the victims of some unavoidable accident; pale young women,

made anxious for their livelihood by illness that its conditions had

caused, and, more terrible than all, the steady stream of wan,

transparent children, the idols of maternal care, the victims of maternal

ignorance.

In the human wreckage of the casualty department there was no great

variety; but all of it was new to Edwin and W.G., and they threw

themselves into the labour with enthusiasm, working so hard from nine

o’clock till one, that their backs ached and they lost all sense of the

passage of time. Mather himself seemed to them a prodigy of skilfulness,

so swift in his decisions, so certain and adroit in the work of his

hands. Even the sister, whom Edwin had originally regarded as a mere

woman, aroused their admiration by the ease with which she worked and her

invincible good humour. Edwin found that she could teach him more than

his male superiority would ever have dreamed.

Little by little the astounding confusion of their work began to seem

more simple. Bandages, that had seemed condemned to unsightly ruckles,

or liable to fall unrolled upon the dirty floor, began to fold themselves

in symmetrical designs. Edwin and W.G. vied with one another in the

neatness of their dressings. The smell of the place, that had seemed at

first to fester beneath an unconvincing veil of carbolic and iodoform,

now seemed natural to their nostrils, even pleasant in its familiarity.

Edwin began to have time to look about him, to form individual

attachments to the patients who came there every day, to take a

particular interest in cases that he regarded as his own. Gradually,

from the mass of evil-smelling humanity, personalities began to emerge

and even intimacies that were flattering because they implied a trust in

his own imperfect skill.

He did not know the names of his patients any more than they knew his.

To him they were grouped under conventional generics: Daddy, Granny,

Tommy, Polly, and the like. To them he was always “Doctor”; but the

thing that made them human and lovable to him was the sense of their

dependence on him; and the preference for his attentions that was

sometimes timidly expressed, gave him a flush of gratification deeper

than any he had ever known. It pleased him to think that it was true

when his patients told him that he dressed them more gently than the

other workers in the casualty department. Such confidences almost

convinced him that he had found a vocation.

After lunch Edwin and W.G. would talk over their cases together in the

lounge of the Dousita. Maskew, who still met them every day at this

resort, found their conversation boring, and fell back more and more upon

the charms of Miss Wheeler, who did not seem to have varied by a single

hairpin since the day of their first acquaintance. And from the

discussion of their individual cases, W.G. would sometimes pass on to the

more general questions that their work aroused.

“This life’s worth living,” he would say. “When you first take up

medicine and spend a couple of years over learning the atomic weights of

heavy metals or dissecting the stomach of an earthworm, you begin to

wonder what the devil you’re getting at; by Gad, this hospital work opens

your eyes. You’re doing something practical. What’s more, you’re doing

a job that no professor of classics or stinks could touch, and you see

the actual results of your treatment on your patients.”

“Thank God, I’m not one of them, W.G.,” said Maskew morosely. “As a

matter of fact, it’s no more than when an electrical engineer finds a

short circuit and makes a new connection, or when a carpenter makes a job

of a rickety staircase.”

“That’s all you know about it, my friend,” said W.G. “In our job you’re

dealing with human life; you’re relieving physical pain—and sometimes you

get thanked for it, which is damned pleasant. And you’ve a

responsibility too. If you make a slip the poor devil you’re

experimenting on is going to suffer. You may even kill him. And the

extraordinary thing is that he trusts you . . .”

To Edwin also that was the most extraordinary thing, and, indeed, the

most pathetic. It showed him that the practice of medicine imposed an

actual moral discipline on those who followed it: an obligation of the

most meticulous honour and devotion. But if the discipline of practice

demanded much, it repaid a thousandfold. He had his reward not only in

the thanks of the scabrous old men whose varicose ulcers, or “bad legs,”

as they called them, he dressed, but in the rarer consciousness of actual

achievement which came to him more frequently as the scope of his work

extended.

One case in particular he always remembered, principally because it was

the first of the kind. She was a little Jewish tailoress who laboured at

piecework in some sweater’s den in the rookeries on the southern side of

the hospital. She was not beautiful. Her face had the peculiar ivory

pallor, and her whole body the unhealthy brittleness, of plants that have

sprouted in a cellar. But her voice was soft, and her hands, the

fingertips of which were made callous by the plucking of threads and

rough with innumerable needle pricks, were beautifully shaped. A week or

so before she had stabbed her left forefinger with an infected needle,

and lit a focus of suppuration in the tendon sheath. She had to live,

poor thing! and so, for a week she had worked in a state of agony, while

the tissues grew tense and shiny with compression, and the pain would not

let her sleep. At last, when she could work no longer, she had come to

the casualty department, nursing her poisoned hand in a bandana

handkerchief. She had not slept for four nights, and was very near to

tears.

Edwin, who saw that surgery was needed, showed the case to Mather. The

surgeon stripped the sleeve from her thin, transparent arm and showed him

the red lines by which the poison was tracking up the lymphatics towards

the glands of the axilla that stood like blockhouses in the way of

bacterial invasion.

“Why didn’t you come before?” he said, with a roughness that was not

unkind. How many times was Edwin to hear those very words!

“I couldn’t, doctor. There was my work—”

“There’d be no more work for you, my dear, if you went on much longer,”

said Mather: and then, to Edwin, “Yes . . . you’d better incise it at

once, I’m busy putting up a fracture. Straight down in the middle line.

Don’t be afraid of it.”

“Oh, you’re not going to cut me, doctor?” she said. “Not till to-morrow.

. . . Oh, please . . . when I’ve had a night’s sleep.”

He was very nervous. He assured her that he would give her no pain; but

while he left her to fetch the scalpel and the dressings he heard a queer

drumming noise and turned to see that it was made by the heels of his

patient trembling on the floor. He was nearly as tremulous himself.

“I promise you I won’t hurt you,” he said, and she returned him a painful

smile. It was a look he knew. “Just like the eyes of a dog,” W.G. had

said.

He sprayed the finger with ethyl chloride, that froze into a crust like

hoarfrost on the fingertip and blanched the skin that was already pale

with the pressure inside it. All the time the girl was making little

nervous movements, and sometimes her heels began to drum again until she

tucked them under the bar of her chair.

“I’m sorry, doctor, I can’t help it,” she said.

Then, with his scalpel, he made a clean longitudinal cut through the

tense skin down to the bone of the phalanx. She gave a start and

clutched his hand so that he nearly gave it up. “I’ve got to do it,” he

thought. “I must do it.” It was the first time that he had ever cut

with a knife into living flesh. A strange sensation. . . . But the bead

of matter that escaped showed him that he had got to the root of the

trouble, and the sight of it filled him with a new and curious

exultation.

It was a long business, for the neglected pressure had impaired the

vitality of the bone and the wound would not heal until the dead spicules

had been separated from the living tissue. Edwin dressed the finger

every morning. The patient would have been a poor subject at the best of

times, and he knew that the fact that she was now out of work probably

meant that she was starving. It would have been easy for him to tell her

that she must have plenty of nourishing food; but he knew well enough

that the words would have been no more than a mockery. In the hospital

wards, he reflected, she might have been well fed; but the wards at the

Prince’s were full of more serious cases who could not walk to the

hospital to receive their treatment. On occasions of this kind he wished

that he were a millionaire: an extravagant idea—for doctors are never

millionaires. He could only ram iron into her and dress her and try to

get her well so that she might travel back around the vicious circle to

the conditions that had been responsible for her illness. It seemed to

him that people who were not doctors could never really know anything

about life.

In a little while there were others, many of them, in whose cases he knew

that he had been privileged to effect some positive good: notably an old

woman, always dressed in black and loaded with crepe as though she were

attending her own funeral, who had fractured her wrist by slipping on an

icy pavement one evening when she was fetching her husband’s supper beer,

an office that she appeared far too ladylike ever to have performed. She

had put out her hand to save herself, and a Colles fracture of the ulna

and radius had been the result.

She called Edwin “My dear,” and the first thing that he noticed about her

was the amazing cleanliness of her withered skin. He remembered the

fortitude that she had shown when first he reduced the fracture; how her

bony fingers, on one of which was a wedding ring worn very thin, had

clasped his. For some curious reason he felt very tenderly towards her,

and when the bones were set and he had passed her on to the massage

department, he felt quite lost without her early “Good-morning!” That

was another strange thing about medical practice: the way in which people

with whom he was thrown into an intimate sympathy for a few days passed

completely and irrevocably out of his life.

W.G. and Edwin found their experience so intriguing that they took turns

to visit the casualty department in the afternoons when the work was

light, and the absence of Mather gave them a free hand in the performance

of minor surgery. At this time of the day the work of the department was

more suggestive of its name; for the people who came there were nearly

all the victims of sudden illness or accident that needed diagnosis and

immediate treatment. It pleased Edwin to deal with these off his own

bat, and he spent the long afternoons that were free from lectures in

suturing wounds, removing brass filings or specks of cinders from eyes,

extracting teeth, gaining confidence every day and suffering the mingled

emotions of pain, pity, and violent indignation. Not infrequently the

last . . . for he saw so much suffering that might easily have been

prevented but for the ignorance or callousness of humanity. These things

aroused his anger; but he soon realised that anger was the one emotion

that a doctor is most wise to suppress.

Sometimes a woman from one of the neighbouring slums would enter in a

state of hollow-eyed terror, carrying in her shawl a child that was

obviously dying from broncho-pneumonia.

“Why, in the name of Heaven, didn’t you come up before?” he would ask

indignantly.

“The neighbours said it was only the teething, doctor,” she would reply.

Edwin would try to suppress an inclination to damn the neighbours upside

down. “Surely you could see the child was ill?” he would say.

“Yes, doctor, but how could I get away? There’s seven of them, bless

their hearts, and me going with another, and the house looking like a

pigsty, and the master’s dinner to cook. I haven’t got no time to spare

for hospitals.”

And he knew that she spoke the truth, contenting himself, as he filled in

the form for admission to the children’s ward, with telling her that the

diet of bread-crusts soaked in beer, which she had been giving it, was

not ideal for a baby eight months old.

“Take the baby along to ward fourteen,” he would say, “they’ll do what

they can for it,” and be met, as likely as not, with a volume of tigerish

abuse from a wild-eyed woman who swore that if her baby was going to die

it wasn’t going to do so in any bloody hospital, was it, my pretty?—the

last words sinking to a maternal coo and being accompanied by a paroxysm

of kisses on the baby’s lips that were already blue for want of breath.

And then Edwin would control his indignation and resort to wheedling and

coaxing, feeling that if the baby were left to the mercies of maternal

instinct, he himself would be little better than a murderer.

Indeed, the responsibilities of his calling and its immense obligations

impressed themselves on him more deeply every day. He saw that this

profession of medicine was not to be taken lightly; that his work in it

would be useless, almost impious, if it were not religiously performed.

Even from the earliest ages this had been so. One day, idly reading a

back number of the _Lancet_, he came upon a historical article that

contained a translation of the Hippocratic oath, which had been

administered to all those who were initiated in the mysteries of medicine

two thousand years ago. It seemed to him that it might have been written

on the day that he read it. Thus it ran:—

“I swear by Apollo the Healer, and Æsculapius, and Hygieia, and

Panacea; and I call all Gods and Goddesses to witness, that I will,

according to my power and judgment, make good this oath and covenant

that I sign. I will use all ways of medical treatment that shall be

for the advantage of the sufferers, according to my power and

judgment, and will protect them from injury and injustice. Nor will

I give to any man, though I be asked to give it, any deadly drug, nor

will I consent that it should be given. But purely and holily I will

keep guard over my life and my art.

“And into whatever houses I enter, I will enter into them for the

benefit of the sufferers, departing from all wilful injustice and

destructiveness, and all lustful works, on bodies, male and female,

free and slaves. And whatever in practice I see or hear, or even

outside practice, which it is not right should be told abroad, I will

be silent, counting as unsaid what was said.

“Therefore to me, accomplishing this oath and not confounding it, may

there be enjoyment of life and art, being in good repute among all

men for ever and ever: but to me, transgressing and perjured, the

contrary.”

Fine reading, Edwin thought. . . . The only deity of whom he was not

quite certain was Panacea. Obviously the classical representative of

Mother Siegel. It seemed to him a pity that the modern student was not

bound by the formulæ of the Physician of Cos.

His three months in the casualty department passed away quickly, and in

the spring of the year he found himself attached as dresser to that

startling surgeon, Lloyd Moore. The appointment, as he soon realised,

was a privilege; for Lloyd Moore was the one man of unquestionable genius

in the North Bromwich Medical School. At first the experience was rather

alarming, for the vagaries of his chief, and, not least, his genial

vulgarity, seemed at first as though they were going to destroy the

pretty edifice of ideals that Edwin had constructed on the basis of the

Hippocratic oath and his experience in the casualty department. Lloyd

Moore, to begin with, was no respecter of persons, ancient or modern; his

wit was ruthless and occasionally bitter, as Edwin had reason to know;

his language, particularly in moments of stress, was unvarnished and

foul, even in the presence of women.

On the surface, indeed, he seemed a person whom Hippocrates would have

regarded as undignified and improper. Sometimes in the out-patient

department Edwin would blush for his chief’s violence and cruelty, but,

in the end, all these things were forgotten in the realisation that the

little man was a great surgical genius, to whom diagnosis was a matter of

inspired, unerring instinct, and practice a gift of the gods. Nor were

his virtues merely professional. L.M. (as he was always called) was a

man of the people, one who had fought his way inch by inch into the

honourable position that he held as the greatest of surgeons and the

wealthiest practitioner in the Midlands. The unpaid work of the hospital

absorbed him even to the neglect of private practice, and every doctor in

the district knew that he could count on the very best of the great man’s

skill for a nominal fee in any case of emergency. Far more than any

consultant in the Midlands, he was regarded as the general practitioner’s

friend, and, as a result of this confidence, all the most interesting

surgical material of the district found its way into his clinic.

In a little time Edwin became wholly subject to the spell of this amazing

personality, until it seemed strange to him that he could ever have

doubted the propriety of anything that L.M. said or did. He wondered

more and more at the man’s titanic energy, for Lloyd Moore was a little

fellow, so pale that he always looked as if he were fainting with

exhaustion. His patients also adored him, and more than once Edwin was

told in the wards by elderly female admirers that Mr. Lloyd Moore was the

very image of Jesus Christ.

In the days of the casualty department Edwin’s main concern had been with

the alleviation of immediate pain. The problem of the wards was graver,

being no less than the balance of life and death. In the achievements of

L.M.’s scalpel, he saw the highest attainment of which surgery was

capable. In a hundred cases offhand he could say to himself that but for

Lloyd Moore’s skill the patient would have died, and when he saw the

fragile figure of the surgeon with his pale face and burning eyes enter

the theatre, Edwin would think of him as a man worn thin by wrestling

with death . . . death in its most cruel and invincible moods.

But in the theatre, at the time of one of L.M.’s emergency operations,

there was no time for dreaming or for romantic speculation. An

atmosphere of materialism, of pure, sublimated action, filled the room as

surely as the sweet fumes of chloroform and ether. Everything about the

place was clean and bright and hard, from the frosted-glass of the roof

and the porcelain walls to the shining instruments that lay newly

sterilised in trays on the glass-topped tables. Even the theatre sister

in her white overall gave an impression of clean, bright hardness.

Indeed, in this white temple of sterility, everything was clean except

those parts of the patient’s body that the nurses in the wards had not

scrubbed with nail-brushes and shaved and painted with iodine, and the

language of L.M., whose physical lustrations had no effect whatever on

his vocabulary.

Even L.M.’s language was at times a relief, for it seemed to be the only

human thing that ever gained admission to the theatre, and the sister was

so inhuman as never to take the least notice of it. Not a smile, nor

even the least compression of the lips marked her appreciation or

disapproval of the surgeon’s sallies. Physically she was an extremely

attractive woman, with very beautiful eyes that were not without their

effect upon Edwin; but the influence of the place robbed her of any

sexual attributes; so that she became no more than a monosyllabic

automaton, intent, devoted, faultlessly prepared for any of the desperate

emergencies of surgery. From the first Edwin had noticed that the more

embarrassing physical details of the patients had no disturbing effect

upon her modesty. He soon saw that if she had permitted herself for one

moment to be a woman she could not have remained the wholly admirable

theatre-sister that she was. “But I can’t imagine,” he thought, “how any

man could marry a nurse—”

From such reflections he would be roused by the anæsthetist’s laconic

“Ready.” On one side of the operating table he would stand, and on the

other L.M. with the theatre-sister ready at his elbow. The surgeon would

pick up a scalpel carelessly, as a man picks up a pencil to write, and

then, apparently with as little thought, he would make a long, clean

incision through the skin and superficial fatty tissues of the abdomen,

putting his head on one side to look at it like an artist whose pencil

has described a beautiful curve. Then, sharply: “Swabs . . . Ingleby,

what the hell do you think you’re doing?” And Edwin would press a swab

of gauze to the incision to absorb the blood that escaped from the

subcutaneous veins.

“Right.”

Layer by layer the various planes of fascia, muscle, and peritoneum would

be opened and neatly laid aside, every one of them slipped in its own

pair of artery forceps. Then, from the gaping wound, that L.M. probed

with his thin finger, a sickening odour would rise . . . one that Edwin

never remembered apart from the other sickening smell of ether.

“Pus. . . I thought so,” L.M. would say. “The brute’s perforated, damn

him.” And Edwin knew that yet another creature had been snatched out of

the jaws of death.

In the hands of L.M. surgery seemed so simple. His scalpel—for he used

fewer instruments than any surgeon Edwin ever knew—was a part of him in

the same way as a perfect rider is part of his horse. There was never

any hesitation in his surgery, never any room for doubt; everything was

straightforward and self-evident from the first incision to the last

suture; and he was at his best when he threw into it a touch of bravura,

rejoicing in the amazing virtuosity of his own technique and playing, a

little, to the gallery.

“There you are,” he would say, “you see there’s nothing in it. Nothing

at all but a working knowledge of anatomy and a dollop of common-sense.

That’s all surgery. Why on earth should they pay me a hundred guineas

for doing a simple thing like that? There’s nothing in it, is there?”

Edwin knew that there was a great deal in it: genius, and more than

genius: a life of devotion to one end only; infinite physical strains;

cruel disappointments; harrowing mistakes. For even L.M. had made

mistakes in his time; and a doctor pays for his mistakes more heavily

than any other man.

Apart from the performance of emergency operations, that might take place

at any hour of the day or night, the surgeon only occupied his theatre on

three mornings in the week; and the greater part of Edwin’s time was

devoted to the work of the wards. Here he performed his proper function

as dresser, being, under the house-surgeon, responsible for the

after-treatment of the patients on whom L.M. had operated This business

kept his hands full. Nearly all the acute surgical cases needed dressing

daily, and some more than once a day. It was usual for the dresser to

leave the second dressing to be done by the house-surgeon on his evening

round, or by the sister of the ward, who would doubtless have performed

it, as well as either of them; but nothing could induce Edwin, in his

newest enthusiasm, to drop a case into which his teeth were fixed.

The morning visits were ceremonial. The great floors of the wards shone

like the faces of such patients as were fit to be scrubbed, with a soapy

flannel; the rows of beds were set with a mathematical correctness, the

sheets turned down at exactly the same level; the water in the jugs stood

hot, awaiting the dresser’s hands, his towel lay folded in the jug’s

mouth; a probationer, pink-faced and red-armed, stood waiting to do his

professional pleasure; morning sunlight flickered over the leaves of

aspidistras that flourished in pots on the central tables, and on the

trays of dressing instruments that were ready for his hand.

At ten o’clock precisely, Edwin, an older and more experienced Edwin

whose shaves were no longer a luxury, whose clothes no longer looked as

if he were in the act of growing out of them, and whose collars were

adorned by the very latest thing in ties, would enter the ward, roll up

his shirtsleeves, and be helped on with a white overall by the obedient

probationer—whose main function in life this office seemed to be—or

sometimes by the sister herself. The new Edwin, product of six months in

hospital, was no longer afraid of these attentions because they happened

to be performed by women. In a mild way he was even an amateur of the

physical points exhibited by the _genus_ probationer, and had arrived at

a touching intimacy with the sisters, who found in him a clean and

pleasant mannered youth, and on occasion hauled him out of the

difficulties into which his inexperience landed him. Thus attired, he

would begin his progress of the ward, followed, wherever he went, by the

females who had robed him, the junior pushing before her the wheeled

glass table on which the dressings and instruments were kept. For the

time being he was, or imagined himself to be, the most important person

in the ward, until, perhaps, the house-surgeon entered, and his

attendants forsook their allegiance and hastened to put themselves at the

service of this superior person.

In the duties of the wards Edwin became far more familiar with his cases

than in the casualty department. The work was less hurried, and the

patients themselves were less fully armed with the conventional social

gestures by which men and women protect and hide themselves. They lay in

bed helpless, dependent on the hospital staff for every necessity and

amusement; and the stress of physical pain, or the catastrophe of a major

operation had generally shaken from them the little superficialities that

they had gathered to themselves in the course of everyday life. Edwin

noticed that, even at their worst, the women were hardly ever too ill to

be a little concerned for their personal appearance, and, as they grew

better, the patients of both sexes would make an heroic attempt to appear

as they wished themselves to seem rather than as they were; but he

realised, none the less, that the doctor gets nearer to the bed-rock of

human personality than any other man who ministers to humanity. With

him, the person into whose hands their suffering bodies were committed in

an almost pitiful confidence, they were concerned to hide themselves far

less than with any other; and in this triumphant discovery Edwin

flattered himself that he was becoming richly learned in human nature.

He did not realise how little he had learned.

One thing, however, that these days taught him, he never lost in after

life: an intense appreciation of the inherent patience and nobility of

human beings, the precious ore that the fire of suffering revealed. Even

the worst of his patients—in North Bromwich as elsewhere disease is an

impartial enemy, falling on the virtuous and abandoned alike—revealed

such amazing possibilities of good. In these hospital wards the

fundamental gregarious instinct of mankind, with the unselfishness and

sympathy that go along with it, asserted itself. The common life of the

ward was happy, extraordinarily happy. Removed from the ordinary

responsibilities of wage-earning and competition, fed and housed and

tended without question, the patients lived together as happily as a

community of African savages, supported by the female labour of the

nursing staff, obedient to the unquestioned authority of the sister in

charge.

And in Edwin’s eyes these, too, were wonderful people. At first he had

taken them more or less for granted; but gradually he realised the

tremendous sacrifices that their life implied: the long hours: the

unceasing strain of keeping their temper: the clean, efficient

materialism for which they must have sacrificed so much of the obvious

beauty of life, committing themselves—for most of them were

middle-aged—to an abnegation of the privileges of marriage and motherhood

in a cloistral seclusion as complete as that imposed on the useless

devotee of some mystical religion. He took it for granted that the life

of a nun was useless to any one except herself. . . . Well, this was a

religion worth some sacrifice: the religion of humanity. They themselves

would only have called it a profession. At first it had seemed to him

that their interests were narrow and their lives, of necessity, mean. He

had been astonished at the small things that gave them pleasure: a bunch

of primroses from a grateful patient; a ride on the top of a bus; a word

of commendation from one of the consulting staff; a house-surgeon’s or

even a student’s compliment; and, above all, the passionate attachments

and enmities that made up the life of the nunnery in which they lived:

but in the end he began to sympathise with them in the humility of their

pleasures, to feel that anything might be forgiven to creatures who had

made so great a sacrifice. In a mild way he idealised them; and for this

reason they decided that he was “quite a nice boy.”

III

In the winter of his third year Edwin’s newly formulated enthusiasm for

humanity in the bulk suffered something of a check. The hospital

absorbed him so completely that in those days he saw very little of the

city, going to and from his lectures and his work in the Pathological

Laboratory at the University without taking any real share in the life of

North Bromwich, or being aware of the passions and interests that swayed

the city’s heart. Coming down from the hospital, one evening in

December, he suddenly became conscious of a constriction in the traffic

which grew more acute as it reached the narrows that debouch upon the

open space in front of the town hall; and while he was wondering what

could be the cause of this, a huge rumour of voices, not unlike that

which proceeds from a Midland football crowd when it disapproves of a

referee, but deeper and more malignant, reached his ears.

He wondered what was the matter, and since it looked as if the traffic

were now completely blocked on the main road, he cut down the quiet

street that faces the university buildings and overlooks the paved court

in which the statue of Sir Joseph Astill inappropriately dispenses water

to a big stone basin. Almost immediately he found himself upon the

fringes of an immense crowd over which the waves of threatening sound

that he had heard at a distance were moving like catspaws on a sullen

sea. The windows of the town-hall itself blazed with light, making the

outlines of the Corinthian pillars that surrounded it almost beautiful.

He edged his way into the black crowd. It was composed for the most part

of workers in iron and brass, and exhaled an odour of stale oil. In a

moment of relative silence he asked the man who stood in front of him, a

little mechanic who had not troubled to change the oily dungarees in

which he worked, what was the matter.

“It’s Lloyd George . . . the b—,” he said, and spat fiercely. Edwin was

not sure where he had heard the name before. He seemed to remember it as

that of a Welsh member of Parliament who had come into notoriety during

the debates on the South African War. He inquired what Lloyd George was

doing.

“Come to speak agen’ Joe,” said the mechanic savagely; and, as a wave of

sound that had started somewhere in the middle of the crowd came sweeping

towards them, he suddenly began to squeal hoarsely like a carnivorous

beast in a cage: a ridiculous noise, that seemed, nevertheless, to

express the feelings of the multitude. From scraps of conversation that

he heard beneath the crowd’s rumour, Edwin began to understand that this

beggarly Welshman, who had spent the last few years in vilifying the

workmen of North Bromwich generally, and their political idol in

particular, had actually dared to bring his dirty accusations to the

political heart of the city: the town-hall in which their favourite had

delivered his most important speeches; that, at this very moment, the

meeting which popular feeling had proscribed, was beginning behind the

Corinthian pillars, and that the just indignation of North Bromwich had

determined that he should not escape with his life.

It struck Edwin that whatever else the Welshman might be, he was

certainly not lacking in courage; but, for all that, he found it

difficult to prevent his own feelings in the matter from being swamped

and absorbed and swept away by the crowd’s vast, angry consciousness.

Almost in spite of himself, his heart palpitated with vehement malice

against the intruder. He felt that he would have experienced a brutal

satisfaction in seeing him torn limb from limb.

A yell of extraordinary savagery, in which he found it difficult not to

join, rose from the square.

The meeting, it seemed, had begun. Edwin saw members of the crowd

scattering in all directions. A cry of “stones!” was raised, and he saw

that men, women, and children were streaming towards an area of slum that

was being dismantled to make room for some monument of municipal

grandeur, returning with caps and hands and aprons full of stones and

broken brick. Soon the air was full of flying missiles, and though the

crash of glass could not be heard, ragged holes were torn in the frosted

glass of the town-hall windows.

A body of police, tremendous strapping fellows, marched by, followed by

impotent jeers and hooting, and planted themselves in front of all the

doors with truncheons drawn. Their presence seemed to enrage the crowd,

inflaming that suppressed hate of the forces of order that slumbers in

most men’s hearts. The volleys of stones increased as the supplies of

ammunition grew more plentiful. A little dark man with a red tie

monotonously shouting the words: “Free speech!” was caught up, and, as it

seemed to Edwin, trampled to death. Somewhere in the middle of the

struggling masses people began to sing the revivalist hymn: “Shall we

gather at the river?” It reached Edwin in an immense and gathering

volume, with words adapted for the occasion:—

“Shall we gather at the fountain,

The beautiful, the beautiful, the fountain?

We’ll drown Lloyd George in the fountain.

And he won’t come here any more.”

The very volume of sound was impressive and inspiring.

Suddenly the crowd was parted by the arrival of a new body. It was a

phalanx of university students who had dragged an immense beam of oak

from the debris of the dismantled slum and were hurling it forward as a

battering ram against one of the principal doors. Edwin could see

amongst them the towering shoulders of W.G., and the mouth of the elder

Wade, the hero of the hansom cab, wide open and yelling. It seemed as

though the savagery of the crowd had reached its height: they tore a way

through it, trampling the fallen as they went. And then the police, who

had been held in reserve, charged at right angles to them, hitting out

right and left with their loaded batons. The less courageous part of the

crowd tried to scatter. The wave of a stampede spread outwards till it

reached the edge on which Edwin was standing. He was thrown violently

from his feet into the chest of a stranger, who shouted, “Hallo,

Ingleby—” It was Matthew Boyce. “I think we’d better get out of this,”

he said.

The words seemed to pull Edwin back into sanity. Together they forced

their way into a street that was empty but for a stream of people

hurrying to the square with stones. They stood panting in the quiet.

“God . . . what animals men are!” said Boyce. “I suppose it was

something like this a hundred years ago, when they burned Priestley’s

house.”

“Yes, it’s pretty rotten,” said Edwin, “but didn’t you feel you wanted to

join in it?”

“Yes, that’s the amazing part of it,” said Boyce. “What’s happening to

you in these days? We seem to have lost sight of one another.”

They walked down to the station together. “It’s an extraordinary thing,

isn’t it?” said Edwin, “that ordinary peaceable men should go mad like

that?”

“They aren’t men,” said Boyce. “They’re a crowd.”

CHAPTER VII

THE CLERK

I

WITH this chance encounter, the friendship of Edwin and Matthew Boyce

really began; and during the fourth year, that now opened before him, the

figure of W.G., who had dominated his stage by sheer physical magnitude,

gradually receded. It was inevitable; for the atmosphere of the Boyces’

house at Alvaston, with its air of culture and refinement, was far more

in keeping with Edwin’s inclinations than the obtuse, if honest,

companionship of W.G. Edwin felt some misgivings for his desertion; but

Maskew, who had now brilliantly taken his Primary Fellowship, began his

hospital career and rejoined his old partner. So, seeing that the needs

of W.G. were provided for and his responsibilities of friendship at an

end, Edwin drifted into a happy intimacy with the poet’s son.

They were both so young as to be convinced that they were very old. The

world was theirs; for they were full of health and contentment and, at

present, so free from complication that they could enjoy to the full the

treasures of the past and shape the future into splendid dreams. In the

beginning they had found a field of common interest in great works of

literature; but these enthusiasms did not carry them very far, for the

appreciation of literary masterpieces is at its best a solitary pleasure

that is not increased by the joy of sharing. It was in the enjoyment of

music that their friendship found the most intense of its pleasures.

Edwin’s musical development had been slow. The first seeds had been

planted in his babyhood when, without understanding, he had listened to

his mother’s playing. The chapel services at St. Luke’s, made

interesting by the exotic harmonies of Dr. Downton, had nursed his

interest in the beauty of organised sound. The closed piano in his

mother’s drawing-room had been the symbol of an instinct temporarily

thwarted, and from this he had escaped by way of Aunt Laura’s late

Victorian ballads which had seemed to him very beautiful in their kind.

Luckily his mother’s library of music had been good if old-fashioned, and

when he amused himself, more or less indiscriminately, by trying to learn

the piano at home, he had been forced to do so by way of the sonatas of

Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart, and the Wohltemperiertes Klavier of

Bach.

The emotional disturbance of his strange adventure with Dorothy Powys had

thrown him into an orgy of verse-making which produced such poor results

that he was forced to turn to the love-poetry of the Elizabethans and of

Shelley, which he embroidered with musical settings that gave him more

satisfaction. These attempts at song-writing pleased him for a time; but

it was not until he became friendly with Boyce that he began to realise

what music was. Not only were the Boyces the possessors of a grand-piano

on which his homely tinklings became magnificently amplified, but his

friend’s father, the poet, was intimately acquainted with the best of

modern music.

Boyce introduced Edwin to the great German song-writers from Schubert and

Schumann to Hugo Wolf, and laid the foundations of a feverish devotion to

Wagner, whom the friends approached perforce by way of Tannhäuser and

Lohengrin, the two operas that the Moody Manners company ventured to

present to provincial audiences. Edwin discovered that North Bromwich, a

city that takes its music as a boa-constrictor takes food, in the

triennial debauch of a festival and then goes to sleep again,

supported—or rather failed to support—a society for the performance of

orchestral music. The concerts were held fortnightly in the town-hall,

the windows of which had now been repaired, and to these concerts Edwin

and his friend went together, always sitting in the same two seats under

the gallery at the back of the hall. In this way they heard a great deal

of good music: the nine symphonies of Beethoven, with the Leeds Choir in

the last: the usual orchestral extracts from the Ring, the Meistersingers

Overture, and the Siegfried Idyll: the fourth, fifth, and sixth

symphonies of Tschaikovski: the tone-poems of Strauss, and a small

sprinkling of modern French music. These were ambrosial nights to which

they both looked forward, and Martin, who had developed an unexpected

inclination for music, sometimes went with them.

The concerts became the central incident in a kind of ritual. At seven

o’clock the two, or sometimes three, would meet in the grill room behind

the bar at Joey’s and consume a gross but splendid repast of tripe and

onions together with a pint or more of bitter Burton. All the best

music, they had decided, was German, and beer was the only drink on which

it could be fully appreciated, de Quincey’s preference for laudanum

notwithstanding. Pleasantly elated, they would cross the road to the

town-hall and take their familiar seats, pleased to recognise the people

who, like themselves, were regular attendants or subscribers to this

unfashionable function; and Boyce, who, by virtue of his distinguished

parentage, knew every one in North Bromwich who was interested in music,

would point out to them all the distinguished people who were present:

Oldham, the critic of the _Mail_, whom Arthur Boyce declared to be the

soundest living writer on musical subjects, and Marsden, who did the

musical criticism for the _Courier_. Matthew knew them both. Oldham, he

said, was a wonderful fellow, who wrote with a pen of vitriol that made

such short work of baser metals that the gold of beauty appeared brighter

for his writing. Oldham became Edwin’s prophet; but, on the whole, he

preferred the looks of Marsden.

“What is Marsden like?” he asked.

“Marsden? Oh, well, as a matter of fact, Marsden’s a bit of a gas bag.

The governor says that he always reminds him of an old hen. Didn’t you

notice him in Joey’s talking nineteen to the dozen to that queer fellow

with a face like a full moon who sits in front of us?”

The fellow with the face like a full-moon was only one of twenty or

thirty people with whom the friends experienced a sort of comradeship on

these nights. Perhaps the most wonderful time was the end of the concert

when they would walk out together into the spring night, parting at the

corner of the town-hall; and the memory of great musical moments would

accompany Edwin home through miles of darkling country, and even fill his

little room at Halesby with their remembered glory or wander through his

dreams.

His life at home was the least satisfactory part of these enchanted

years. There were moments, indeed, when it seemed as if the ideal

relationship with his father, that had been his early ambition, were

being realised. Sometimes, on a Sunday morning, they would walk round

the garden together in the sun, and Edwin would experience a return of

the passionate good-will and anxiety to please that had overwhelmed him

in the moment of their bereavement; but their two natures were radically

so different that such moments were rare, and, when they came, were

really more of an embarrassment than a pleasure.

He felt that, on his side at any rate, the relationship was artificial;

that, however unnatural it might seem, he really had to whip himself up

to a proper appreciation of his father’s virtues. A sense of veiled but

radical antagonism underlay all their dealings with each other; and at

times this hidden thing, that Edwin held in such dread, came so

perilously near to the surface as to threaten an open rupture.

The question of Edwin’s allowance created one of these dangerous

situations. Edwin knew that it was impossible for him to live the

ordinary life of a medical student in North Bromwich without one; but the

distaste for speaking of money matters, which arose from his delicate

appreciation of his father’s finances, had made it difficult to approach

the subject. At last he had screwed up his courage to the point of

making a very modest demand, and his father, instead of realising the

difficulty he had found in doing so, had hedged in a way that made Edwin

feel himself a hard and mercenary parasite.

“All right, father, we won’t say anything more about it,” he said,

comforting himself with the assurance that in a couple of years he would

be qualified and in a position to earn his own living and pay his way.

On the strength of this, and with his eyes wide open, he ran up a number

of small tailors’ bills in North Bromwich; and all would have been well

if Mr. Ingleby, in a fit of absent-mindedness, had not opened these

incriminating documents and leapt to the conclusion that his son was

going rapidly to the dogs. An unfortunate scene followed.

“I suppose you realise, Edwin,” he said, “that you are a minor, and that

while you are under age I am responsible for these bills?”

“I’ve not the least intention of letting you pay them,” said Edwin.

“I’m afraid I have no alternative. I want you to tell me truthfully if

there are any others.”

“Of course there are others. Please don’t bother about them. In a

little while I shall be able to pay them.”

“This is a great blow to me,” said Mr. Ingleby solemnly, overwhelming

Edwin with a picture of virtuous poverty staggering from a cowardly blow

in the dark; and the obvious distrust with which his father regarded him

made his position at home almost intolerable. It seemed to him that his

father now looked upon all his pleasures with suspicion; and, as a

natural result, he lived more than ever to himself, only returning to

Halesby late at night or at times when he knew that his father would be

busy in the shop. One circumstance came to bridge the gap between them,

a course of pharmacology that Edwin took early in his fourth year. He

was delighted to find a subject in which his father was more learned than

himself, and spent a number of hours that were almost happy in the shop

answering the questions that Mr. Ingleby put to him on pharmacopoeial

doses and searching the little nests of drawers for rare drugs to

identify in their raw state. But the pharmacology course was short, and

the subject that was so important in his father’s life was small and

unimportant in Edwin’s. In addition to which he could not help feeling a

sort of ethical prejudice against the complacency with which his father

discharged patent medicines that he knew to be worthless if not harmful.

Every circumstance tended to isolate him from the influences of Halesby.

His sudden attempt to be friendly with Edward Willis had withered under

the humiliating _dénouement_ of his adventure with Dorothy Powys; the new

fields of music that he explored with Matthew Boyce had made him

discontented with Aunt Laura’s ballads; the general air of elegance and

refinement with which he had become acquainted in one or two Alvaston

houses to which the Boyces had introduced him, made everything in

Halesby, even his own home, seem a little shabby and unsatisfactory.

North Bromwich, and his work there, claimed him more and more.

II

Even when his first enthusiasms and the inspiring generalisations that

arose from them were exhausted, he found that he could not escape from

the fascination of the studies which he now pursued, for the most part,

in the company of Matthew Boyce. His third year had not only introduced

him to the romance of surgery and the human interests of hospital life.

He had spent long hours in the pathological laboratory and had made

acquaintance with bacteriology, a science that was still in its infancy.

In this work he had shared a desk with Boyce, to whom it was particularly

attractive, and between them they had developed a bacteriological

technique rather above the average, taking an imaginative delight in the

isolation of the microscopic deadly forms of vegetable life that are

responsible for nearly all the physical sufferings of mankind. When they

looked together at the banded bacilli of tubercule, stained red with

carbolfuchsin, they saw more than a specimen under a coverglass: they saw

the chosen and bitter enemies of genius, the malignant, insensate spores

of lowest life that had banished Keats to fade in Rome, Shelley to drown

by Via Reggio, Stevenson to perish in Samoa: the blind instruments of

destruction that were even then draining the last strength from the

opium-sodden frame of the author of _The Hound of Heaven_. Here, in a

single test-tube, they could see enclosed enough of the organisms of

cholera to sweep all Asia with a wave of pestilence; here, stained with

Indian ink, the dreamy trypanosome that had wrapped the swarming shores

of the Nyanzas of dark Africa in the sleep of death.

Both of them were seized with a passionate fever for research, to rid

humanity of this insidious and appalling blight. Now, more than ever,

they felt the supreme responsibilities of their calling; and when, in

their fourth year, they passed on to their work in the medical wards, as

clerks to the senior physician at the Infirmary, and saw the effects of

bacterial havoc on the bodies of men and women, their enthusiasm rose to

a still higher pitch.

The canons of the new university decreed that students who had learnt

their surgery at one hospital should study medicine at the other. It was

something of a disappointment to Edwin to exchange the homely atmosphere

of Prince’s, where everything was familiar, for the colder and more

formal wards of the Infirmary. This hospital, which was nearly twice the

size of the other, was situated in the lower and less healthy part of the

city. At Prince’s there had been a way of escape westwards through the

pleasant suburban greens of Alvaston to the country and the hills. The

Infirmary, in its terra-cotta arrogance, had been set down in the heart

of unreclaimed slums, in such a way that its very magnificence and

efficiency were depressing by contrast. Edwin disliked the palatial

splendour of its shining wards which, for all their roominess, were full

of an air that suffocated; for the windows were never opened, and the

atmosphere that the patients breathed had been sucked into the place by

an immense system of forced ventilation, filtered until it seemed to have

lost all its nature, heated, and then propelled through innumerable

shafts into every corner of the building. In the basement of the

hospital the machine that was responsible for this circulation of heated

air made a melancholy groaning; and this sound made the whole structure

seem more like an artificial assembly of matter than a real hospital with

a personality and a soul.

It is possible that the teaching methods of the Infirmary were superior

to those of Prince’s; and the supporters of the institution prided

themselves on the fact that the nursing staff was drawn from a higher

social stratum; but for a long time Edwin felt considerably less at home

there than he had been at the older hospital. The ward work, however,

was even more fascinating, for the reason, no doubt, that his wonder was

now tempered with a higher degree of erudition.

He found his new chief an inspiring figure. In the first place, the fact

that he was a gentleman and a man of culture made him an effective

contrast to that dynamic but plebeian genius, L.M. He was a graduate of

one of the older universities, and though this counted for little in the

mind of Edwin, who now affected to despise the city of his broken dream,

it did lend an air of distinction to Sir Arthur Weldon’s discourses. He

had a quiet voice, an admirable manner with women patients or nurses, and

beautiful hands, on one of which he wore a signet ring embellished with

his crest and a motto which his presence merited: “In toto teres atque

rotundus.” The rotundity, it may be added, was so mild as to do no more

than accentuate the elegance of a gold and platinum watch-chain that he

wore. He was a great stickler for the traditions and dignity of his

profession, and no word that was not infallibly correct disturbed the

urbanity of his slow and polished periods. For this reason his tutorials

in the wards were models of academic dignity, and much frequented by

students who knew that he was far too anxious for the form of his

discourse to break its continuity by asking awkward questions. He

treated his clerks, and indeed every member of his classes, as if they

were gentlemen nurtured in the same fine atmosphere as himself. He

inspired confidence, and demanded nothing in return but correctness of

behaviour and speech.

All these things made it easy to work for him; and the fact that over and

above these social qualities he was a particularly sound physician, with

a reputation that was already more than provincial, made Edwin sensible

of the privilege of acting as his clerk.

His speciality was disease affecting the heart or lungs, and though his

wards at the infirmary were open to all sorts of general medical cases,

these two types of tragedy came most frequently under his care and

Edwin’s observation. Sir Arthur exacted from his clerks the preparation

of accurate and voluminous notes on all his cases, and Edwin spent many

hours in the wards extracting from his patients the details of family and

medical history and moulding them into a balanced and intelligible

report. The emotions that the study of the tubercle bacillus had aroused

in him in the laboratory were reinforced a hundred times in the wards

devoted to phthisical patients, too far advanced in dissolution for

sanatorium treatment, that were his chief’s especial care.

They were most of them creatures of intelligence and sensitiveness above

the average of the hospital patient; their eyes shone between their long

lashes with a light that may have been taken for that of inspiration in

those of dead poets; even in the later stages of the disease, when their

strength would hardly allow them to drag up their emaciated limbs in

their beds, and their bodies were wrung nightly with devastating sweats

or attacks of hæmorrhage that left them transparent and exhausted—even

then they were so ready to be cheerful and to let their imagination

blossom in vain hope, that Edwin found them the most pitiful of all his

patients. The _spes phthisica_ seemed to him the most pathetic as well

as the most merciful of illusions.

In this ward he became acquainted with one patient in particular, a boy,

the son of labouring parents whom heredity and circumstance alike had

marked down from the day of his birth to be a victim of the disease. His

mother and two sisters had died of it, and all his short life had been

spent in a labourer’s cottage made deadly by the family’s infection, at

the sunless bottom of a wet Welsh valley.

As a child he had been too delicate to enjoy the fresh air that he would

have breathed on the way to the village school. He had lived, as far as

Edwin could make out, in the single room in which his mother had lain

dying, and had learned to read and write at her side. Then she had died;

and as soon as he was old enough he had been sent out to work on the farm

where his father was employed, an occupation that might well have saved

him if the work and the exposure had not been too severe, or if he had

not returned at night to the infected hovel. As it was, in the rainy

autumn weather of the hills, he had caught a chill and sickened with

pleurisy, and thus the inevitable had happened.

He was only fifteen. Education had never come his way, and he had never

read any books but the Confessions of Maria Monk and the family Bible;

but whenever Edwin came to go over his chest and make the necessary

report of progress—fallacious word—upon his case sheets, he noticed that

the boy would hide a sheet of paper on which he had been writing. His

confidence was easily won, and without the least shame he showed Edwin

what he had been doing. He had spent his time in writing verses

composed, for the most part, in the jingling measures of Moody and

Sankey’s hymns. They were sprinkled with strange dialect words that

filled them with splashes of sombre colour; most of them were frankly

ungrammatical; but there were things in some of them that seemed to Edwin

to bear the same relation to poetry as the mountain tricklings of that

far hill country bore to the full stream of Severn. Their banalities,

faintly imitated from the banalities of the hymn book, were occasionally

relieved by phrases of pure beauty that caught the breath with surprise.

“Why do you do this?” Edwin asked, and when he had recovered from the

shyness and diffidence into which the question had cast him, the boy told

him that he wrote his verses because he couldn’t help it, because the

words became an obsession to him and would not let him sleep until they

were written down. The thin flame of creative aspiration showed itself

in other ways, in the patient’s vivid delight in colours and sounds, and

in the strange pictures, having no relation to nature, that he drew with

coloured chalks.

It seemed to Edwin that in this case the exhaustion of chronic disease

had revealed the existence, as it sometimes will, of a faint fire of

natural genius. “There, but for the spite of heaven,” he thought, “goes

John Keats,” and, with the feelings of an experimenter in explosives who

mixes strange reagents, he lent his patient a copy of the poet’s works.

The boy fell on them eagerly. He confessed that he did not understand

them; but he would read them all day, mispronouncing the words as the

classical student perhaps mispronounces those of the Greek poets, but

extracting from their sonorous beauty a curious and vivid sensual

satisfaction. A single line would sometimes throw him into a kind of

trance, and he would lean back in his bed with the book open on his chest

and his slender clubbed fingers clasped above it, repeating to himself

his own version of the words without any conception of their real

meaning. Sometimes a line would fill him with memories:—

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery moon, and eve’s one star . . .”

“That is like our home,” he would say.

The house-physician did not approve of these experiments. On principle

he would have disapproved of poetry, and in this case he considered the

reading of it unhealthy. As if there were any element of health in this

misfortune! . . . A few weeks later the patient had an attack of

hæmoptysis and died.

It was only in such cases of chronic illness that the question of the

patient’s intellectual state arose. Such speculations might mitigate the

fatigue of slow siege warfare that had only one end in view, but the

acute medical wards, and particularly those devoted to acute pneumonia,

were the scene of shorter and more desperate conflicts, grapplings with

death, in which the issue was doubtful and medicine could at least give

support, and sometimes turn the tide.

These were indeed terrible battles, in which devoted nursing counted for

much. To Edwin it was a sight more awe-inspiring than the quiet of

death, to watch a strong man stretched upon his back, breathing terribly

through the night-long struggles of pneumonia. In it he could see the

most tremendous expression of a man’s will to live, in the clenched

hands, in the neck, knotted and swollen with intolerable strain, in the

working of the muscles of the face and nose in their supreme thirst for

air. The sound of this breathing would fill the room that was otherwise

so silent that one could hear the soft hiss of the oxygen escaping from

its cylinder. The train of students that followed Sir Arthur round the

wards would stand waiting in the doorway, knowing that nothing was to be

seen, and the physician himself would step quietly to the square of red

screens and exchange a whisper with the sister who stood at the patient’s

bedside, her lips compressed as though their muscles were contracting in

sympathy with the other tortured muscles that she watched.

“Weill, how is he?” the physician would ask.

“I think he’s holding his own. No sleep.”

“That’ a pity. Well, persevere with the brandy and the warm oxygen.”

“Yes, sir.” Her tense lips scarcely moved.

And then Edwin’s chief, so quietly that the patient did not know what he

was doing, being indeed no more than a mass of labouring muscles bent on

life, would feel the temporal pulse in front of the ear with his firm

white finger.

“Not so bad, sister . . . not so bad.”

Then he would sweep away with the tails of his frock-coat swinging.

“Ingleby, did you notice anything about the patient’s hands?”

“His hands, sir?’

“Yes . . . his hands.”

“No, sir. Nothing, I’m afraid. I don’t think he was plucking the

bedclothes . . . carphology, do they call it?”

“You had better look the word up if you are not sure. No . . . it was a

finer movement. He was rolling his thumbs over the tips of his index

fingers, just like a man making pellets of bread at a dinner party.

There are men who do that. Remember it. It’s a bad sign in a case of

lobar pneumonia. Come along, gentlemen. The pneumococcus is a sporting

antagonist. Short and sweet. I’d as soon die of pneumonia as anything

and have a run for my money. That case has put up a good fight.”

That “case” . . . On the face of it the use of the word seemed to

justify the accusation of gross materialism that is so usually made

against the profession of medicine. The patient who lay there fighting

for his life was, in the physician’s eyes, a case, and not, as Edwin, who

had taken notes of his history in the earlier stages of the disease knew

him to be, a bricklayer’s labourer from Wolverbury with a wife and six

children, two of whom had died in infancy. He was a case: a human body,

the soulless body that Edwin had learned in detail through two years of

labour in the dissecting room, consisting of a heart hard-pressed, a

nervous system starved of oxygen and weakened by the virus of pneumonia,

and a pair of clogged lungs. This was the whole truth as far as it

concerned the physician. The calamity was a material calamity to be

fought with material weapons, and the state of his soul, or his relations

with his wife and the rest of the community in which he lived, only

mattered in so far as they affected his body and revealed him to have

been a clean-living and temperate man. For the rest he was a case; and

it were well for the physician to leave the _animula_, _vagula_,

_blandula_ to the poets. This was one of the hard lessons of medicine.

These were sombre things; but it must not be imagined that they reflected

the general tenor of hospital life. The Infirmary, indeed, was so vast

as to be microcosmic, and its loves, its jealousies, and its ambitions

combined to produce a broad effect of human comedy, not without tears,

but leavened by the rich, and often unprintable humour that flourished in

the out-patient department. Hospital politics, hospital scandals,

hospital romances, combined to make life a vivid and exciting experience.

In the toils of the last, spring found W.G. securely bound. Harrop, too,

had launched into a desperate affair with a probationer in the children’s

wards whom the matron promptly transferred to the infectious block and

perpetual quarantine. Edwin and Boyce escaped this epidemic of

tenderness that swept through the fourth year like measles. They were

far too absorbed in their own interests and discoveries to worry their

hearts about anything in a nurse’s cap and apron.

Spring passed in a swift vision of plum-blossom in the Boyce’s Alvaston

garden and two weeks of musical debauchery, one Wagnerian and the other

of Gilbert and Sullivan. Most of the time they were working at high

pressure; but a week before the beginning of the fourth examination,

Boyce proposed that they should cycle down together to the country house

that his father rented in Gloucestershire, and blow away the vapours of

forced ventilation with Cotswold air.

On the eve of an examination it seemed a daring but enthralling plan.

Edwin put the proposal before Mr. Ingleby, and was surprised to find that

he didn’t object. Indeed, it had seemed to Edwin for several months that

his father was curiously distrait and less interested than usual in his

work. This consent freed his conscience, and the two friends set off

together on a Saturday afternoon in the spirit of abandoned holiday that

is the highest privilege of youth. They had decided to take no medical

books with them. As far as they were concerned, the examination might go

hang; for a whole week they would live with no thought for the morrow,

taking long rides over the Cotswolds, lunching at village inns on bread

and cheese, returning at night to feasts of beans and bacon and libations

of Overton cider.

They started from the infirmary at half-past two, and had soon left the

dust and tram-lines of North Bromwich behind. The smooth, wide road that

they followed stretched in magnificent undulations over the heights of

the Midland plateau from which they could see the shapes of Uffdown and

Pen Beacon fading into the west under a pale, black-country sky. In

front of them southward the sky was blue.

“We’re in for ripping weather,” Boyce shouted as he rode ahead.

The weather didn’t really matter: they were in for a great adventure.

From the plateau they glided swiftly to the vale of Redditch, and when

they had left that sordid little town behind they climbed the backbone of

the Ridgway, where the road follows the thin crest of a line of small

hills and overlooks on either side two dreaming plains. In a blue haze

of summer these green dominions lay asleep, so richly scattered with dark

woodlands that no human habitation could be seen. They were as lonely as

the sky. Westward of Severn the Clees and Malverns towered over Wales;

but Boyce appeared to be more interested in certain lower wooded hills

upon the eastern side. He made Edwin the confidant of his latest

romance.

“She and I,” he said, “used to bicycle out from Alvaston in the cool of

the evening . . . about an hour and a half’s easy ride. It was early

last summer. Those woods are full of nightingales. We used to sit on a

gate and listen to them and ride home together in the dark. I can tell

you it was pretty wonderful.”

Of course it was wonderful. Everything must be wonderful in this

enchanted country. Riding along in the afternoon sunlight Edwin

constructed for himself just such another passionate adventure; and the

figure with which he shared these imaginary ecstasies was, for want of a

better, Dorothy Powys. While the dream nightingales were singing their

hardest and he was on the point of renewing that unforgettable kiss, they

came to a cottage half timbered and lost in clematis and honeysuckle

where a steep road fell on either side at right angles to the ridge.

“Right,” shouted Boyce, “we’ll take the road down through the Lenches.”

“What are the Lenches?” said Edwin, riding abreast.

“Villages. Five of them, I think. There’s Rous Lench and King’s Lench

and Abbot’s Lench, and two others. They’re a proper subject for a poem.”

“Right-o . . . let’s collaborate,” said Edwin. “How’s this for a

beginning?”

“As I was riding through the Lenches

I met three strapping country wenches.”

And laughing together, they constructed a series of frankly indecent

couplets, recording the voyager’s adventures with all three. It was a

matter of the most complete collaboration, for the friends supplied

alternate lines, outdoing one another in Rabelaisian extravagance.

Edwin, however, provided the final couplet, which, he declared, gave the

composition literary form:—

“Home to my vicarage I hasted

Feeling the day had not been wasted.”

“A parson of the type of Herrick,” said Boyce.

“Yes . . . but more serious.”

“That kind of affair is awfully serious . . . at the time.”

The gables of Evesham and its one tall tower swam in a golden dust. They

drank cider in the inn courtyard, purchased a couple of Bath chaps at a

grocer’s and crossed the Avon. Through an orchard country they rode in

that hour of evening when bird-song is most wistful. The sun went down

in a blaze of splendour behind Bredon Hill. The perfume of a beanfield

swept across the road.

“Good God, isn’t it good?” said Boyce. “We are nearly there.”

A village of Cotswold stone half hidden in blossoms of crimson rambler

received them. The gardens were full of sweet-williams, pale phloxes,

and tall hollyhocks. “Straight on,” Boyce called.

A sign-post pointed up the hill to Overton. They dismounted, and pushed

their bicycles up a steep lane in the twilight. Bats were flitting

everywhere, and a buff-coloured owl fluttered heavily between the

overarching elms. A faint tinkle of trickling water came to their ears.

“That is the sound of Overton,” said Boyce. “Slow water trickling in the

night.”

They slept together in the low-beamed room, so soundly that the sun was

high before they wakened next morning.

The week that now followed was the very crown of youth. The Boyce’s

summer house stood upon a patch of terraced ground, being the highest of

the three farms round which the hamlet of Overton clustered, and

overlooked the blossomy vale of Evesham bounded by the Cotswold

escarpment, blue and dappled with the shadows of cloud. “_Parva domus_:

_magna quies_,” read the motto that Matthew’s father, the poet, had

placed above the lintel of the door: “small house: great quietness”—and

indeed it seemed to Edwin that there could be no quieter place on earth.

He and Matthew would smoke their morning pipes together on a stone

terrace that bleached in the sun along the edge of a garden that the poet

had planted for perfume rather than for beauty of bloom. Here they would

sit, nursing books that were unread, until the spirit tempted them to set

out towards the blue escarpment, and, after a hard climb, lose themselves

in the trough of some deep billow of Cotswold and fall asleep on a bank

of waving grasses, or follow some runnel of the Leach or Windrush until

it joined the mother stream, where they would strip and float over the

shallows with the sun in their eyes, emerging covered with the tiny water

leeches that gave one of the rivers its name.

On the height of Cotswold they found an inn that was half farm,

possessing a barrel of cider that Edwin was almost ready to acknowledge

as the equal of that which he had drunk in Somerset; and, for further

attraction a huge yellow cat beneath the lazy stare of whose topaz eyes

Matthew sat worshipping. In the evening the air that moved over the

wolds grew cool and dry and more reviving than any juice of yellow

apples, and with their lungs full of it they would spin down the winding

hills into the plain, past many sweet-smelling villages and golden

manor-houses, reaching Overton about sunset, when the evening stocks,

that Mr. Boyce had planted along the approaches to his doorway, recovered

from their lank indolence and drenched the air with a scent that matched

the songs of nightingales.

There Mrs. Pratt, the wife of a neighbouring labourer, would have their

dinner ready: tender young beans and boiled bacon and crisp lettuce from

the garden that Matthew dressed according to the directions of his

epicurean father; and with their meal, and after, they would drink the

dry and bitter cider made at the middle farm from the apples of orchards

that now dreamed beneath them.

Then came music. The drawing-room piano stood by the open window, and a

soft movement of air disturbed the flames of the candles in silver

candlesticks that lighted the music stand. No other light was there; and

in the gloom beyond, Edwin, playing the tender songs of Grieg and

Schumann, and the prelude to Tristan, would see the long legs of Matthew

stretched dreaming on a sofa. The nights were so silent that it seemed a

pity to mar them with music; and for a long time Edwin would sit in

silence at the piano, while strong winged moths fluttered in out of the

darkness and circled round the candle’s flame. Last of all, before they

turned in, they would go for a slow walk over meadows cool in the

moonlight, listening to the silence—“Solemn midnight’s tingling

silentness,” Matthew quoted—or to the gentle creaking of the branches of

elms, now heavy with foliage, that embosomed their small house.

The last day of their holiday was wet; but that made no great difference

to them, for a succession of showers drew from the drenched garden a

perfume more intense. They spent the day in musical exploration, and

when the darkness came they sat together talking far into the night.

They talked of North Bromwich, for the ponderable influence of the morrow

had already invaded their quietude, and of their future work.

“In a year’s time,” said Edwin, “we shall be qualified.”

“What shall you do?”

“Oh, general practice, I suppose. That’s the easiest way to make a

living. It’s what most men do.”

“I don’t like the idea of it,” said Matthew. “It’s sordid,

unsatisfactory work. A hard living in which science stands no chance.

Selling bottles of medicine—quite harmless, of course, but unnecessary—to

people who don’t really need them. You have to do it to make a living.

If you don’t the other people cut you out.”

“I don’t think it’s as bad as that. There must be something

fundamentally good about medical practice. You are actually helping the

people who are genuinely ill.”

“That’s the ideal side of it. But there’s another. I don’t think I

shall risk it. If the governor can’t let me have enough money to wait

for consulting practice, I shall have a shot at one of the services. I

think the Indian Medical Service is the thing. Fairly good pay, a chance

of seeing the world, and a good sporting life.”

“India—?” Edwin had never thought of it. Sitting there in an English

dusk the idea appealed to him. Great rivers: burning plains under the

icy rampart of Himalaya: strange, dark religions. India. . . . Yes, it

sounded good. His imagination went a little farther ahead. A

hill-station according to Kipling, or perhaps a more solitary cantonment

in the plains where the commandant was a major in the Indian army and the

wife of the commandant, a girl whose name had once been Dorothy Powys.

And the major, of course, would succumb to some pernicious tropical

disease through which Edwin would nurse him devotedly; and when he was

dead and buried his beautiful wife would come to Edwin—the only other

Englishman in the station, and say: “I never really loved him. I never

really loved any one but you.” Altogether an extremely romantic

prospect. . . . Yes, the Indian Medical Service would do very well. . . .

The last night was more beautiful in its silence than any other. It had

been a wonderful week. There would never be another like it. The crown

of youth. And, as it came to pass, the end of youth as well.

III

It was late that night when Edwin reached home. After the huge openness

of the Cotswold expanses, the air of Halesby, lying deep in its valley,

seemed to him confined and oppressive, and to add to this impression

there was a sense of thunder in it. After supper his father went to his

writing desk and pulled out a sheaf of bluish, translucent papers which

he spread out on the table, and began to study intently. Edwin,

sprawling, tired and contented, in the corner, watched him lazily.

“Whatever have you got there, father?” he said.

“Plans . . . architect’s plans,” Mr. Ingleby replied nervously.

“Plans? What for? Surely you aren’t thinking of building a new house.”

“Well, not exactly. No . . . I am thinking of adding to this one.”

“But that would be an expensive job. Isn’t it big enough for us?”

“Yes. It’s big enough at present; but it may not be shortly.”

“What do you mean?”

Edwin laughed uneasily, for he could not understand this air of mystery.

Mr. Ingleby rose from his plans and cleared his throat. The little

lamp-lit room immediately became full of an atmosphere of suppressed

intensity, in which the tick of the clock could be heard as if it were

consciously calling attention to the importance of the moment.

“I mean. . . . As a matter of fact, I had intended telling you this

evening; but I found it difficult to do so, because . . . because I could

not be quite sure how you’d take it. It . . . it may come as a shock to

you. I am thinking of enlarging the house because I am proposing to be

married again.”

“Married? Good God!”

A feeling of inexplicable passion choked Edwin so that his voice did not

sound as if it were his own.

“Yes, I knew it would come as a surprise to you. Probably you’ll find it

difficult to understand my feelings. You mustn’t be hasty.’

“Good God!” Edwin’s amazement could find no other words.

“You are the first person I have told, Edwin. I’ve thought a good deal

about it . . . about you particularly, and I’ve quite satisfied myself

that I am not doing you any injustice. In another year I suppose you

will be going out into the world and leaving me. Don’t decide what you

think too hastily.”

He paused, but Edwin could not speak.

“If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you all about it. I think you will approve

of my choice. I’ll tell you—”

“For God’s sake, don’t. Not now—”

“Very well. As you wish.” Mr. Ingleby’s hands that held the architect’s

papers trembled. He smiled, kindly, but with a sort of bewilderment.

“As you wish,” he repeated.

And Edwin, feeling as if he would do something ridiculous and violent in

the stress of the curiously mingled emotions that possessed him, went

quickly to the door and ran upstairs to his room, where he flung himself

on his bed in the dark.

In a little while he found himself, ridiculously, sobbing. He could not

define the passionate mixture of resentment, jealousy, shame, and even

hatred, that overwhelmed him. He could not understand himself. A

psycho-analyst, no doubt would have found a name for his state of mind,

describing it as an “Œdipus complex”; but Edwin had never heard of

psycho-analysis, and only knew that his mind was ruthlessly torn by

passions beyond the control of reason. He made a valiant attempt to

think rationally. Primarily, he admitted, it wasn’t his business to

decide whether his father should marry again or remain a widower. His

father was a free agent with responsibilities towards Edwin that were

rapidly vanishing and would soon be ended. He couldn’t even suggest that

this new marriage would be the ruin of any vital comradeship between

them, for the hopes of this ideal state that he had once cherished, had

not been realised during the last few years. There was no reason why his

father’s marriage should affect him personally, or even financially, for

he had never reckoned on the least paternal support when once he should

be qualified. There was not even the least suggestion that his father

was physically unsuitable for the married state, for there was no reason

why he should not live for many years to come. There were actually valid

arguments, that Edwin could not dispute, in favour of the plan—such as

Mr. Ingleby’s loneliness, soon to be increased, and the discomfort that

he had suffered as an elderly widower at the hands of a series of

inefficient house-keepers. From every point of view the world would be

justified in concluding that he was doing the correct and obvious thing.

Why, then, should Edwin lie on his bed in the dark wetting his pillow

with tears, and sick with shame?

No reason could assuage his suffering. However calmly he tried to

consider the matter, the thought of his mother rose up in his mind; a

vision of her, beautiful and pathetic, and indefinitely wronged, came to

reinforce his indignation. He lit a candle and gazed for a long time at

her photograph, the one that he had always kept in his desk at St. Luke’s

and scarcely noticed for the last three years; and though he knew that

she was dead and presumably beyond the reach of any human passion, the

sight of her features filled him more than ever with this unconscionable

resentment so devastating in its intensity. The portrait took him back

to the tenderness that he remembered at the time of her death, and

particularly that strange moment when he and his father had knelt

together in the little room across the landing. The smell of Sanitas. . . .

And then he remembered another incident in the gloom of that brown room

at the Holloway on the windy crown of Mendip, whence he had seen all the

kingdoms of the earth. Thinking of this, he seemed to hear the voice of

a very old woman, who said, “The Inglebys are always very tender in

marriage. I’ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they

always marry again.” How could she have known? And then the thought of

a strange woman in the house, treading in the places where his mother’s

steps had once moved, swept him off his feet again.

“I could never stay here,” he thought. “I could never stay here. . . .

I should do something desperate and cruel and unreasonable. I couldn’t

help myself. I must go. It’s a pity . . . but I must go. I couldn’t

stay here. I simply couldn’t.”

With this determination in his mind, but without the least idea of the

way in which it might be realised, he arrived at a state of comparative

serenity, in which he could contemplate his mother’s photograph without

so much passionate resentment at the slur that was being laid on her

memory. Now he saw everything in terms of his new resolution. He saw,

pathetically, the little bed in which he had slept for so many years, the

shelves on which his favourite books were ranged, the piano and the

sheaves of his mother’s music that he had managed to install in his room:

all the small details that went together to create its atmosphere of

homeliness.

“How the devil shall I manage to leave them?” he thought. He went to the

window and saw, beyond the garden trees, the low line of those familiar

hills: the landscape that he had always delighted in as his own, and that

now was to be his no longer. He sighed, for to leave them seemed to him

impossible; they were so familiar, so much a definite part of his life.

A curious impulse seized him to creep downstairs and out of the house,

and visit the grave in the cemetery where his mother was laid; but he

restrained himself from this debauch of sentiment. “It will do no good,”

he thought. “It’s all over.” He even wondered if he might feel happier

if he went down to Aunt Laura’s house and confided in her: perhaps she

would understand. At least she was his mother’s sister and might be

conscious of the indignity; but when he had almost determined to do this,

he reflected that she and his uncle were probably in bed, and a ludicrous

picture of her putting her head out of the window to ask what was the

matter, with her hair in curling pins, restrained him. Besides, it would

be rather ridiculous to fall back upon the sympathies of a person whom he

had neglected for several years.

“No. . . . I must go on my own way,” he thought. “It’s a sort of break

in my life, just like the big break before. It’s got to be faced, and

it’s no good worrying about it.”

He suddenly remembered that in twelve hours’ time he would be sitting for

his fourth examination, and that it would be wise for him to get some

sleep; so he undressed and went to bed, wondering how many more times he

would undress in that little room and caring less than he would have

expected. He fell asleep soon, for he was thoroughly tired out, and

slept so soundly that he did not see his father enter the room a few

hours later. He came in softly, in his dressing-gown, carrying a candle,

and stooped above Edwin’s sleeping figure with troubled eyes.

CHAPTER VIII

LOWER SPARKDALE

I

NEXT day, in a fever of restlessness, Edwin essayed and passed his fourth

professional examination. He had expected to get a first-class in it,

but when he found himself near the bottom of the list in the

neighbourhood of W.G., he was not seriously disturbed. The subjects of

Forensic Medicine and Toxicology were unimportant, and now that his life

had taken this sudden change of direction, it did not much matter what

sort of a degree he took. His one concern was to get qualified and

licensed to earn his living on the bodies of his fellow-men as quickly as

possible.

Since his interview with his father, the determination to leave Halesby

had not faltered, although he had not then calculated the difficulties

that now faced him. To begin with, he had no money beyond a few pounds

that his mother had placed to his credit in the Post Office Savings Bank

in his childhood. Luckily his college and hospital fees had been paid in

advance, and he was only concerned with the actual cost of living and the

fees for the final examination. In some way or other he would have to

live for twelve months, and he smiled to himself to think that he was in

very much the same position as his father had occupied thirty years

before.

On the whole, he thought, his father must have had less cause for

anxiety, with Dr. Marshall’s two hundred pounds behind him and the humble

standards of a village boy in place of Edwin’s more elaborate traditions

of life. He felt that he needed the advice of a sound man with some

knowledge of the world. In an emergency of this kind Matthew Boyce could

offer him very little but sympathy, and so he turned naturally to the

counsels of that battered warrior, W.G., feeling, at the same time,

rather shabby in making use of a friend whom he had practically neglected

in the last two years.

W.G. providentially didn’t look at it in that light. He had always

regarded Edwin from a fatherly standpoint, and the mere fact that this

was a case of rebellion against domestic authority of the kind in which

he had been engaged since his childhood made him sympathetic, though he

didn’t, as Edwin saw to his despair, appreciate the delicacies of the

situation.

“I can quite see why you want to cut adrift,” he said. “It’s a feeling

that any one’s who’s dependent gets, if he has any guts in him; but I’m

damned if I see any cause or just impediment why these two persons

shouldn’t enter into holy matrimony.”

“I suppose it’s just rotten sentimentality. Still . . . I can’t help it.

There it is. It’s the idea of seeing another woman in my mother’s place.

I simply couldn’t stick it, W.G.”

“Well, old chap, I’m quite prepared to believe you know best. The thing

is, what are you going to do? You can’t live on nothing in this hard

world. You can share my bed for a week or two if you like. I’m sorry it

won’t be for longer; but marriage appears to be in the air. To tell you

the truth, I’m going to get married myself.”

“You married? . . . Good Lord! What on earth are you doing that for?”

“I don’t know. Force of circumstance, I suppose. It’s one of the things

that happens when you least expect it.”

“Do I know her, W.G.?”

“Oh, yes . . . you know her. It’s Sister Merrion in Number Twelve.”

There came to Edwin a vision of a tall, dark girl, with wavy brown hair

and Irish eyes, whom he couldn’t help remembering at the infirmary.

“I didn’t even know that you were friendly.”

“We weren’t until about three weeks ago. I happened to notice that she

was looking rather down in the mouth, and took her out to tea; and then

the poor girl broke down at the Dousita and told me all about her home

affairs. It’s the devil and all to see a pretty girl like that crying.

She’d been having a thin time of it at home with her father: a pretty

rotten sort of fellow, I gathered, and that seemed the only way out of

it. So we’re going to be married next month. A sort of fellow-feeling,

you know.”

“But . . . Good Lord . . . are you in love with her?”

“Of course I am, you old ass. I shouldn’t marry her if I wasn’t. It’ll

be a bit of a pinch till I’m qualified, though.”

“I say, I hope you’ll be happy.”

A sudden pang of something like envy overwhelmed Edwin. The picture of

settled peace, romantic love in a cottage, that W.G. was about to share

with the undeniably beautiful Sister Merrion struck him as an ideal

state.

“You’re a lucky devil, W.G.,” he said.

It seemed unreasonable that W.G. should devote himself to the smaller

problem of Edwin’s ways and means on the eve of such a momentous

adventure. It hardly seemed fair to bother him.

“We’re going into rooms in Alvaston at first,” he said. “It’ll be less

expensive than furnishing, and we don’t intend to indulge in a family for

the present. Meanwhile, if I were you, I should go and talk to the

manager at Edmondson’s. He may be able to put you on to something. Yes

. . . have a shot at him first, and mention my name, he’s a very decent

sort.”

Edwin laughed to himself. It seemed to him that he was in the grip of a

curiously ironical fate, for Edmondson’s was the identical firm of

wholesale druggists with whom his father had been employed on his first

arrival at North Bromwich. History was repeating itself in a way that

was proper to romance.

In the afternoon he went down to Edmondson’s and asked for the manager, a

vigorous person with shrewd eyes that he screwed up habitually whenever

he made a point in his conversation. He called Edwin “Doctor”: a form of

address that was flattering, until Edwin realised that it was no more

than a habit with him. “Ingleby,” he said; “let me see, I know the

name.”

“Probably you know my father. He’s in business at Halesby.”

“Ah, yes, of course . . . your father. Come along to my room, doctor,

and have a cigar.”

In this varnished chamber, decorated with a collection of barbarous

surgical instruments, survivals of the Middle Ages, Edwin unbosomed

himself. The manager listened in silence, screwing up his eyes from time

to time, to show that he was taking in Edwin’s story.

“Well,” he said at the end of it. “Do you want me to tell you what I

think of it, doctor? Candidly, you know.”

Edwin was only too anxious for another opinion.

“Well, I think you don’t know when you’re well off. To tell you the

truth, doctor, I think you’re a damned fool. That’s straight. See?”

“I’m not surprised,” said Edwin. “Still, I’ve made up my mind. I’m not

going to stay at home. I can’t do it, that’s all. I’m only wondering if

you can put me in the way of a job of some kind.”

“Well, doctor, that’s easier said than done. When you’re qualified,

it’ll be a different matter altogether. I think I can promise to keep

you in ‘locums’ at four or five guineas a week, as long as you like to

take them; but I can’t honestly say there’s anything for you at present.

It’s not like the old days when doctors were allowed to keep unqualified

assistants.”

“I’m through my fourth exam., you know. I could do dispensing.”

“Dispensing. . . . Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, doctor, I’ll

see what I can do for you. You know what I think of it, don’t you? In

the meantime you’d better leave your address. No good writing to

Halesby, I suppose?”

Edwin gave him the address of W.G.’s diggings, and went off, hopelessly

discouraged, to find his friend. W.G., however, was at present far too

engrossed in the charms of Sister Merrion to be available. So Edwin went

on to the Boyce’s house in Alvaston, only to find that Matthew had cycled

down to Overton again with his father. It was impossible for him to

settle to any work; so he took an afternoon train to Halesby, at a time

when he knew his father would be busy at the shop, and collected the few

belongings that he felt he must take with him.

The atmosphere of the house was inexpressibly poignant. Within its

walls, he reflected, dwelt the ghost of all his childhood, and memories

of his mother, that had lain submerged in his consciousness for many

years, rose to meet him wherever he went. Well, he would never see the

place again. This exile, it pleased him to think, was his final

sacrifice to her memory. That was the best way in which he could express

it. At the worst, another voice whispered, it was an excess of mawkish

sentiment.

All through the afternoon, and particularly when he disinterred small

pieces of the lumber that he had collected in his schooldays, this sense

of a ghostly childhood haunted him. It followed him down the stairs into

the hall, where the grandfather clock ticked steadily as it had ticked

ever since he could remember, into the dead drawing-room, soon to be made

alive by the tastes of another feminine personality; on the lawn, where

the limes were shedding their sticky bloom; on the way to the station,

when he lugged his bag through the gnarled shadows of Mrs. Barrow’s

ancient garden, and caught a glimpse of the old lady’s kindly nodding

bonnet as she smiled at him from her place in the window, where she sat

hermetically sealed in an atmosphere of Victorian decay.

There were the reedy pools and Shenstone’s hanging woods, ghostly waters

and woodlands, never to be seen again. And there was the platform of

Halesby station, reeking of hot coal dust and ashes, and, from the

incoming train, a flux of shabby people, including the bank-clerk in

tennis flannels and the mysterious commercial traveller with the brown

leather bag, reading the _Pink ’Un_ as he walked. From this, through the

black-country’s familiar desert, the train carried him into the bitter

reality of North Bromwich. With something approaching the feelings of an

intruder he installed himself in W.G.’s diggings, and made a supper,

undeniably pleasant, of bread and cheese with a large bottle of W.G.’s

beer. The latter, which happened to be Astill’s XXXX, induced a mood of

tolerant sleepiness, and luckily prepared him to receive, at midnight or

thereabouts, the confidences of his friend on the subject of Sister

Merrion’s intellectual charms.

“You know, old chap, she’s different from me—reads poetry by the hour

when she’s in the bunk on night duty. Longfellow’s her favourite. A

long way above my head and all that; but it’s a wonderful thing, when you

come to think of it, to be married to an intellectual woman. . . .” So

the words poured into Edwin’s drowsy ears. He was far too sleepy to

smile, and, Longfellow apart, it did seem to him a comfortable and even

enviable thing to be the adored centre of the universe in the Irish eyes

of a tender creature with wavy brown hair and a painful domestic tragedy.

W.G. was still moralising on his past wickedness and the prospect of a

blameless future when Edwin fell asleep.

II

Next morning he was awakened by his friend, boisterous and ruddy from a

bath, performing a strange ritual of prostrations and contortions in

front of an open window discreetly veiled with fluttering butter-muslin.

Edwin lazily watched the sinuous play of muscles under the shaggy limbs

of W.G. through half-closed lids.

“You’d make a topping subject for dissection, W.G.,” he said.

“Hallo!” W.G. answered from between his legs. “You awake, you old

slacker? There’s a letter for you that came up with the tea. Tea’s

cold, by the way.”

“Thanks,” said Edwin, as W.G. skimmed the letter over to him. “Good

Lord, it’s from Edmondson’s.”

It was a note hastily scribbled advising Edwin to go at once and see Dr.

Altrincham-Harris at 563 Lower Sparkdale, North Bromwich, between nine

and ten a.m., or six and nine p.m., and signed by the manager who screwed

his eyes up.

“Five hundred and sixty-three, Lower Sparkdale,” Edwin groaned. “I say,

that sounds pretty bad. Altrincham-Harris is rather hot stuff for Lower

Sparkdale, isn’t it? Queer place for a double-barreler.”

“General practitioner,” said W.G., rubbing himself down with a pair of

flesh-gloves. “They all go in for hyphens. It impresses the

lower-middle classes. When I go into practice, my son, I shall be known

as Dr. William George-Brown, if I can afford the extra letters on a

plate.”

“Lower Sparkdale’s a pretty awful slum, isn’t it?”

“Never been there. It’s time you cleared off to the bathroom. You’ll

feel better when you’re awake.”

Edwin spent the morning in writing, and four times rewriting, a letter to

his father. It was a difficult job, for he felt that the reasons for his

departure could not be explained in words, and he was particularly

anxious to make it clear that it was purely a matter of temperament and

that he didn’t wish it to imply any criticism of Mr. Ingleby’s plans.

When he had finished it he found that it was far too late to visit the

surgery of Dr. Altrincham-Harris. He therefore waited till the evening,

and then took a steam-tram through a succession of sordid streets, past

the public abattoirs and the newly-opened Rowton House, to the level of

563 Lower Sparkdale.

The extreme end of that street was not as bad as he had imagined it might

be, for at this point the slum ended, resolving itself into the edge of a

growing suburb of red-brick. Number 563 was a corner house secretively

curtained with dirty muslin on flat brass rods. A shining plate revealed

the qualifications, such as they were, of C. Altrincham-Harris, Physician

and Surgeon, and as the front door seemed to have sunk into a state of

disuse, Edwin entered at another, marked “Surgery,” round which a number

of poorly-clad women, some of them carrying babies, were clustered.

Inside the door was a narrow waiting-room that concentrated into an

incredibly small number of cubic feet the characteristic odour of an

out-patient department. Every seat was occupied, and Edwin, deciding to

wait for his turn, stood listening to a varied recitation of medical

history that every patient seemed compelled by the surroundings to relate

to her neighbour. At the moment when he entered a very stout woman, who

had been drinking, had the ear of the company, talking loudly over the

shoulder of a pasty child whose neck was covered with the pin-points that

fleas make on an insensitive skin, and occasionally, in accessions of

tenderness, hugging it to her bosom.

“So I says to the inspector . . . yes, inspector, ’e ’ad the nerve to

call ’isself . . . says I, you can take your summonses to ’ell, I says.

I _love_ my children, I says. There’s more love for the little ’armless

things in my finger than there’ll ever be in your bloody body, I says.

And I caught ’er up and carried ’er straight along ’ere to the doctor.

Doctor ’Arris knows me, I says, and what’s more ’e shall ’ave a look at

Margaret’s ’ead with ’is own eyes. Shan’t ’e, my pretty?” The child

wriggled as she was clasped in another beery embrace.

A bell tingled inside. “Now we shall see,” said the lady determinedly

rising. “And ’ave a stifficate if it costs me two shillin’s.”

The room murmured low applause and sympathy, and she entered the surgery,

emerging, two minutes later, with the testimonial in her mouth.

“What did I tell yo’?” she said. “The doctor says there ain’t one. Not

_one_. It’s time these inspectors was done away with. I only ’ope ’e

will summons me. Good-night, all.”

She went out, hugging the child in both arms, and a pale woman,

respectably dressed, who had sat through her tirades in silence, took her

place in the doctor’s consulting room. Dr. Altrincham-Harris didn’t keep

her long. She came out, like the rest of them, after an interview that

lasted perhaps two minutes, carrying a bottle of medicine wrapped up in

one of the papers that are called comic. Again the bell rang.

“Good God,” Edwin thought, “and this is general practice!” It was

evident that he had entered a world in which the academic methods of

diagnosis and prescription with which he had been educated were not

followed. On the surface it was quite clear that the physician could not

have given an eighth part of the usual time or care to the consideration

of any single case. He remembered instances of hospital patients who had

affected to despise the perfunctoriness of the methods of the Prince’s

out-patient department, and had boasted that they would receive better

attention from the hands of a “private doctor.” He hoped to goodness

that none of these unfortunate people would drift into the hands of Dr.

Altrincham-Harris.

His own turn came, and relieved to be rid of the stink of the

waiting-room, he entered the surgery. Dr. Harris was sitting in an

attitude of impatience behind a desk littered with papers. He was a

little man, with grey, untidy hair and a drooping moustache. He held a

pencil in his hand, as if he were itching to dash off another

prescription, and an open drawer in the desk at his right hand was full

of small silver. When he saw that Edwin was better dressed than the

majority of his patients, his manner changed at once. “Please sit down,”

he said. “Now, what can I do for you?”

Edwin hesitated, for he found it difficult to begin. Dr. Harris

encouraged him with a wink, and a grip of his left arm.

“Now, my boy, you needn’t be frightened of me. You’ll find the doctor’s

your best friend. Had a bit of bad luck, eh? Well, you’re not the

first, and you won’t be the last.”

The wink was the most disgusting part of this performance, but Edwin,

quickly recovering his sense of humour, pulled out Edmondson’s letter and

handed it to the doctor.

“Well, now, why didn’t you say so at first,” said Dr. Harris, scratching

a bristly grey chin. “Yes . . . I did mention to their manager that I

was in want of some one to do a bit of rough dispensing and keep this

place tidy. You see I don’t live here. It’s what we call a lock-up, and

the work’s so pressing that I’ve really no time to do my own dispensing.

I suppose you hold the Apothecaries’ Hall Diploma—passed your exams and

that?”

“No . . . I’m a medical student. I took pharmacology in my last exam.

I’m in my final year.”

“Hm . . . I shouldn’t have thought it. You look very young. Final year

. . .” Then his eyes brightened. “Have you done your midwifery yet?”

“No, I shall do that later in the year.”

“That’s a pity . . . a pity. You could have been very useful to me in

that way, keeping cases going, you know, so that I could be in at the

finish. I could do twice the amount of midwifery that I do now if I had

some one to keep an eye on them. Before the General Medical Council did

away with unqualified assistants, I used to keep three of them: paid me

well, too. Now I’ve got to do everything myself. It’s a dog’s life, but

there’s money in it, I don’t mind telling you. Well, there’s no time to

waste. What do you want?”

“I want a place to live in and my keep, and just enough money to keep me

going till I’m qualified. That’s all. You’ll understand . . . I’m on my

own, and I’ve just about ten pounds to carry me over a year. I hope you

can give me a job.”

“I suppose you could take a hand with dressings and things like that?”

Edwin saw that the little man was out for bargaining, but as long as he

could feel that something was being settled he didn’t really mind.

“Yes . . . I can do anything you like to use me for in your surgery

hours. I can’t promise more. You see, I have to pass my final.”