ON THE SICK LIST
More soda-water, and more dry toast?
Let me up, you damned saw-bones!
W. S. SIMCOX: _The Death-rattle_.
Miss Linthorpe died about three weeks later. I suppose even the most
selfish of us can look back at one or two really “good deeds” they have
put in during the course of their lives; and I must say I think the old
lady died the happier for my attendance at her bedside. I found, when I
reached her house in Sloane Gardens, that they had called in a young
doctor, passionately interested in mind-curing, whose method chiefly
consisted of sitting in her room for an hour or so at a time, not
talking to her much, but just, as he said, “keeping up her vitality.”
The first words she whispered to me as I bent down to kiss her were, “My
dear, do get rid of that death’s-head; he depresses me _beyond_ words.”
I managed somehow to dispose of him, and as he shut the door behind
him—not gently but with a loud bang, no doubt by way of keeping up her
vitality—my aunt actually fumbled at the side of her bed and brought out
her familiar lorgnettes; then, fixing his imaginary figure with that
devastating stare of hers, “Why do I have to pay to be attended by a man
who hasn’t even got the sense to see that I’m dying, when I can see it
for myself? I suppose he thinks death is some kind of sexual
abnormality. Now, my dear, I want you to be very kind, and call in Dr.
Matheson—Hodges will give you the address. He’s a rotten doctor, I
believe, but I’d sooner be killed off by one of my own generation. One
gets these fads, you know.”
So Miss Linthorpe had the services of her old, comfortable doctor: nor
was she less exacting in the case of her solicitor; nor, I need hardly
say, in the case of her clergyman. He had to come from a church several
parishes off: “It’s a dingy sort of hole, and the services there always
send me to sleep; but they’ve no stunts there, if you understand what I
mean; they don’t turn out in fresh clothes every week, or make up the
service as they go along.” I doubt if he did much for her, and indeed
she confided to me that she would look a pretty sort of fool in heaven
if all _he_ said was true. But she got her way, and she could bear
anything as long as she got her way. It was the same clergyman who
attended her coffin to the grave-side, and read the funeral service.
“When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal
shall have put on immortality” ... it was part of a dead world we laid
to rest at the West Drayton cemetery, but you felt that there, if indeed
she was anywhere, her old prejudices would be more respected, and her
odd ways less out of place.
It touched me profoundly, and at the same time took me seriously aback,
when I found that the old lady had left me her sole heir. She had also,
quite at the end of her life, entrusted to her solicitor a sealed packet
which was to be delivered to me personally, or failing that to be
destroyed unread. I do not know what strange freak induced my aunt to
plunge suddenly into authorship; but the envelope proved to contain
nothing more than her reflections on life, with a few general bits of
advice which she offered to me on the strength of it. I have it before
me as I type (Miss Linthorpe to her dying day would never use a
typewriter): a few extracts, which I do not hesitate to print, will show
the general character of it.
MY DEAR OPAL,
_When you grow old (as you probably will, for my family are
long-lived, and the Winterheads are a healthy stock, because they
think so little), you will have passed through an experience which
now lies a good long way back in my life, but which will perhaps
come to you later. I mean the moment when one drops out of the
movement that goes on in one’s generation: it is just like dropping
out of a competition, the same mixture of disappointment and relief.
You will find that you have suddenly stood still, when you had no
idea that you had been moving, like getting off one of these
murderous moving platforms when you’re not thinking. You will have
turned from a competitor in life into a spectator, and your first
thought will be that everything round you changes, and changes very
rapidly. But this, since it is not a very original thought, you will
probably keep to yourself._
_The next thing you will notice is that the change is of two kinds:
there is a change which is involuntary on mankind’s part, and a
change which is deliberate. All the progress of science, whether
practical or speculative, is involuntary. We shall not go back to
horses, nor to candles, nor to sewing-machines. And although all the
theories of all these silly scientists are not (thank God!) eternal,
but appear to go round in cycles, so that I am old enough to
remember the days when they thought consumption was not infectious
(or do I mean contagious?) and that there was no such person as
Homer, yet it’s only fair to say that they do learn from their
mistakes; they go up blind alleys, but they have the decency to
blaze the trail behind them, so that their posterity shan’t make
just the same kind of fools of themselves. And I suppose it’s true
that as our scientific apparatus gets better, we come to depend on
it more and grow physically inferior in consequence—I can say this
with some pride, since I am sixty-nine and haven’t a tooth in my
head that God didn’t put there.[2] But nobody is going to avoid all
that, and I never heard that anybody except Ruskin thought you
could._
_The lie you will find people telling all around you—and telling it
without realizing that it is a lie, which makes it so much worse, as
Plato says—is that the great movements of the human mind, whether in
the arts or in politics or in morals or in religion, are similarly
part of an irresistible progress; so that you could never go back on
our present attitude of mind about (say) marriage any more than you
could go back to sewing-machines. The truth is, of course, that the
great movements of the human mind are just fashions. The reason why
you don’t admire Whistler is just the same as the reason why you
don’t wear elastic-sided boots. And it’s so with bigger things than
that; generally it’s a catchword that starts the whole thing—look at
Evolution! Look at what a bogy it was to our fathers’—I mean, to my
father’s—generation: how all the clergymen went about thinking the
world was coming to an end and wondering where their next collection
was coming from: and all the dons tried to work evolution into their
subjects, and pretend that they had detected it there long before
they ever heard of Darwin, and the politicians—oh, Lord! And now
where is it? It outlived crinolines, which it never deserved to, but
it hasn’t outlived jumpers. You’ll see, it’ll be just the same with
this relativity nonsense every one is talking about. They’re
fashions, these things; it isn’t that any one person sits down and
says, “Now, let’s all think like this”: it’s a collective impetus,
as that bore Canon Dives would say. You’ll live through it._
_I wish I knew what it all meant. But I think this: I think it is
the result of man being born immortal, and thinking (like an ass)
that he has only this world to satisfy his immortal instinct with.
Despairing of immortality in this world, and forgetting it in the
next, he makes the human race the immortal unit, and so endows it
with life. And, because he has been told that life means growth, he
cannot be happy until he believes that the world in which he lives
is growing, from something to something else. That is human vanity’s
favourite dogma, and there is no atom of proof for it. Everything we
know about history and natural history shows that there is a kind of
progress in the world which is a progress from the less to the more
complicated, from the less to the more organized: nothing suggests,
except to our vanity, that there is a progress from the worse to the
better—and what other kind of progress would any sensible person
give a tinker’s curse for? That’s it, I believe. Sweating away on
the treadmill, humanity fancies that it is mountaineering, and that
the dawn is just going to show above the next slope. There’s an
epigram for you. Let me finish now, before I spoil it...._
The rest of Miss Linthorpe’s statement, though equally curious, was
entirely private. I am afraid I have got well past her age without ever
acquiring her truculent directness of thought and of expression. But I
sometimes hope she was right.
Meanwhile, it looked for a short time, for a few months after her death,
as if I was to defeat all her prophecies of my longevity. I got into the
doctor’s hands; and it must be remembered that in those days, when
doctors were not paid by results, but were allowed to charge what they
liked for various kinds of treatment which might prove wholly
unsuccessful, it was more easy to get into the doctors’ hands than to
get out of them. More particularly, since this was just the crisis of
the conflict between the physicist and the psychicist schools of
medicine, and a person of decent means (as I now found myself) was not
easily satisfied until she had tried all that either branch could do
towards a cure of the malady. It is clear to me now—I shall not enter
into the symptoms, for reasons which will readily be understood—that I
was suffering from a comparatively mild attack of Hilton’s disease, the
very nature of which was then only dimly suspected, while no steps had
been taken at all towards the discovery of a remedy for it. Nowadays the
doctors would have known what to do with me, and if my system had
responded properly to treatment I should have been well again in six
weeks. At the time, the very difficulty of diagnosis left me a prey to
every conceivable theory which the physician of the moment might be
trying to verify or to popularize.
It began in a sufficiently curious way. It was not common then for girls
of twenty-five or so to get engaged: we held that a girl ought to make a
living for herself and have something to settle down upon before she
looked about for a partner in life. But my mother, who was old-fashioned
in some ways, had set her heart on my marrying young. Although I was
aware of this, I did not connect it at all with the person of S—— (I
will not give his real name), a gentleman of about forty whom my father
picked up on the links one day and brought home to luncheon. He was
evidently in very comfortable circumstances, and he had good manners and
a good presence; in a word, I found it quite easy to get on with him.
Only gradually, as his visits became more frequent and more extended,
did I (as we used to say in those days) “tumble to the situation.” Some
indefinable instinct, a legacy, as my doctors told me afterwards, from
the days of marriage by capture, told me that he was beginning to take a
more than casual interest in me. From that moment, I am sorry to say, I
began to conceive the greatest possible distaste for him, and lost no
opportunity of being away when he called, or of treating him with
coldness when I was forced to be in the room with him. At last my mother
tackled me directly. I told her the exact truth, that I had nothing
whatever against him, and that he seemed to me well suited to make any
woman happy and to help her forward in her career; but that I did not
and could not feel any affection for him. My mother (I remember it all
as if it were yesterday) knocked the ash off her cigar and said
anxiously, “My dear, I don’t think you can be well. What’s wrong with
seeing a doctor?”
In those days, many families were still old-fashioned enough to have a
doctor who not only diagnosed the presence of disease but went on to
prescribe for it himself—very much as if you were to put a law case in
the hands of a solicitor and he were to take your case into court and
plead as counsel. We had already adopted the more modern method, and Dr.
Shanks, our dear old family physician, never dreamt of doing more than
telling you whether you “had a case” and recommending a suitable
specialist to take it to. I went round to his house, where he looked at
my tongue, X-rayed me, felt my pulse, took my reaction-times, and shook
his head importantly. “I am afraid you are in for some trouble, Miss
Winterhead,” he explained, “but I am not quite sure who is the best man
to take it to. My feeling is that the nervous disorder is primary, and
the organic only secondary, but on the whole it would be safest to start
by seeing if we cannot attack the organic trouble first. I will make an
appointment for you with Sir Alexander Rymer; and if there is any man
who can keep you out of the hands of the nerve-doctors, he will.” With a
few reassuring words he showed me out, and I awaited Sir Alexander’s
verdict.
Sir Alexander was, I think, the most broad-minded man I have ever met.
Well-known as a staunch antagonist of the mind-curing school, he
nevertheless gave you the impression that he was fully prepared to take
their theories into account, and to bow, if need were, to their
diagnosis; but on the other hand, his immediate duty was to prescribe
for this case here and now, and while in any other case he might have
hesitated, this was just the one case in a thousand which the
mind-doctors could not hope to tackle successfully. “Now, my dear young
thing” (he affected these old-world courtesies of speech), “if I were to
send you on to a woman like Dr. Bowles she would quite certainly give
you a lot of good advice, which would give you relief for the present,
and then in a year or two’s time you’d be back again here with the old
trouble as bad as ever, and possibly worse owing to neglect. Our
business just now is not to indulge in professional courtesies, we’ve
got to get you well. Now, what I want you to do is this. Go very
quietly: don’t dance late more than twice or three times a week; don’t
drive at more than thirty miles an hour; don’t inhale cigars; don’t play
‘bridge’ till after tea; and, if you can possibly manage it, try to give
up shopping altogether for the present. Give nature every chance to
right herself. Avoid milk in all forms, and fish, and dry toast. If you
aren’t on the mend in a month or so, you will have to go somewhere where
you can get good marsh air, the Thames Valley, of course, for
preference.” I went away greatly impressed with his manner, and honestly
did my best to carry out his prescriptions: I spent all the October of
1940 at Goring, which was then only a small country town, and had ideal
weather for my own requirements, since it hardly stopped raining the
whole time I was there. But my physical symptoms were still disturbing,
and, what alarmed my parents more, I could not meet S—— without a strong
desire to run out of the room.
In these circumstances it was thought best that I should change my
doctor. Dr. Bowles was abroad at the time, so I arranged for interviews
with Dr. Tryer, who was by common consent the second-best mind-healer in
London. She was a tall, rather sinister-looking woman, and I always felt
like a frightened rabbit in her presence. This had the unfortunate
effect of making me mix up my words, as I always do when I am nervous,
and she regarded this confusion on my part, as clear evidence of an
inhibition somewhere in my subconsciousness. For example, one of the
first things she did was to ask me about my interview with my own
doctor: I said, “He told me to put out my pulse, felt his head, and then
shook my tongue”—in a moment Dr. Tryer had rushed to her
typewriting-desk and was recording my idiotic remark for future
reference. You know how it is when you once start losing your head? I
could never say anything right after that. She held interminable
conversations with me, and it was quite a long time before she struck
platinum on that long-forgotten air-raid. Then it was all plain sailing:
I was simply docketed “cellar shell-shock”—the sort of phrase only Dr.
Tryer could have pronounced without tripping over it—and herded together
with a lot of other patients who had all to undergo the same treatment.
Once a week we used to collect in a cellar, the doors of which were
tightly locked, and Dr. Tryer, by some ingenious mechanical arrangement,
contrived to make the most fiendish noises overhead. I do not suppose
that even a modern air-raid could be quite so daunting; she called it
“reconstructing the conditions.” When it was time to let us out she
sounded the “All clear!” (this was the signal for the end of an air-raid
in the Five Years’ War, apparently), and encouraged us to whistle it to
ourselves as often as possible during the day. I still do it
inadvertently when I am not thinking. This treatment obsessed my mind
for nearly three months, and did everything except enable me to overcome
my distaste for the presence of S——. By that time, at any rate, it was
quite clear that what was chiefly wrong with me was nerves. Accordingly
I put myself under the direction of the Berthellot school, determined to
rid myself of nerves by the then popular expedient of auto-suggestion.
The Berthellot Institute then occupied the site of the old Hendon
Aerodrome, which has since been utilized as a library for the official
documents relating to the Great War. One did not lodge there, but spent
most of the day there in “classes” of self-suggestion: a class would
consist of fifty or sixty people all herded together in the same
lecture-room. The simplest exercise, which you ordinarily started on,
consisted of shouting “Health, health, health! Glorious health!” in
chorus. Juliet Savage, who came with me to watch one of these classes,
said it was all she could do to refrain from shouting “Beer, beer,
glorious beer” (an old chorus which she had picked up from an uncle when
young) to see if she were detected or not amidst the general din. But
there were more advanced exercises: I remember, for example, a sort of
skittle-alley where you threw a large ball at a set of nine-pins,
ejaculating “Better that time!” with every throw; it was said to be
highly restorative. And then there was the ball-room, where you danced
the Health-dance, and the gymnasium, where you did a sort of patent
Indian clubs, and much more that I have forgotten. Mr. Druce, the
Superintendent, was a brisk, rather oppressive sort of man who
positively oozed health: when I was shown into his room he greeted me
with the words, “Ha! Another of our malingerers! Isn’t it almost time
you gave up swinging the lead? Come now, you know there’s nothing to be
gained by it!” I replied that I was subject to headaches; that I had
come there that morning with a headache, which was, indeed, somewhat
worse after listening to the Health-chorus. He came up to me, put his
hands on both sides of my head, and said, “What, that thing! Aching!”
Then he rang a bell, and said to the attendant who appeared, “Oh, Miss
Sonnenschein, do come here! This young lady thinks her head is aching!”
To which Miss Sonnenschein, a rather gloomy lady to whom the whole thing
clearly came in the way of business, said in an unconvincing voice,
“That’s a good ’un!” I asked, somewhat timidly, what happened to you if
the treatment did not have a curative effect. Did the failures go out
feeling exactly as ill as they did when they came in, or was it
sometimes found that the treatment had been actually prejudicial?
“Failures?” said Mr. Druce, “my dear madam, there _are_ no failures.”
“Do you mean,” I said, “that you are quite certain I shall go out of
this place cured?” “Certain? Miss Sonnenschein, kindly explain to this
young lady the sort of certainty which I feel about her recovery.” To
which Miss Sonnenschein, who was chewing, replied “Sure thing!” I then
asked whether in the event of my proving a failure the Institute would
be prepared to refund my fees, but Mr. Druce simply repeated that there
were no failures.
I cannot feel that I was ever meant for the Berthellot Institute; it was
too breezy for me altogether. I discontinued my attendance at the
lectures before my proper time was up, and consequently was never
recorded as a failure. Meanwhile a friend, Mrs. Sholto,[3] had
recommended me to yet another variety of mind-doctors, the Mental
Homœopathists, who were the sworn rivals of the Berthellot system.
Theirs was a home treatment, and all you had to do was to murmur to
yourself at frequent intervals, “Every day in every way I grow worse and
worse and worse!” You were also recommended to study a little pamphlet
on the human body, entitled, “Our Disastrous Inheritance,” which showed
you pictures of various parts of the human body suffering under the
influence of virulent diseases, and gave you a long index of all
possible morbid conditions of the human frame—Juliet said it was exactly
like a manual she had called “Helicopter Troubles, and how to Trace
them.” I think I ought to have been an apt pupil for this system—the
idea of which was that the conscious mind is in continual revolt from
the impressions of the subconscious mind, and the more depressed your
subconsciousness was the better your chance of recovery—for Mr. Druce
had been an admirable preparation for it. But, though I stuck to it for
some time, and seemed to have been gaining strength, an unexpected
afternoon call from S—— immediately threw me back into a serious
relapse.
Finally, I was induced to go down to Winchcombe, in the Cotswolds, to
try the “colour-cure” which had recently been attracting a good deal of
attention. After a long examination, I was relegated to the “orange
suite,” where I was expected to pass a complete fortnight. There were
numerous other “orange” patients, but I was not allowed to speak to any
of them: a saturnine old woman sat in one corner of the room, with the
detached air of a bath attendant, to see that the rules were kept. I was
given an orange dress, which matched the wall-paper, the furniture, even
the flowerbeds outside the window. Reading was allowed, but not
encouraged; the great point, I was told, was to become saturated with
orange as early as possible. I certainly became fed up with orange long
before the fortnight was over, and by breaking a window (for which I
afterwards paid) contrived to get away into the grounds, and so, with
the help of an errand-boy, into the outside world. To this day I cannot
bear so much as an orange ribbon in my boudoir. I suppose Dr. Tryer
would have called that an inhibition.
I cannot describe what a comfort it was to get home, and to find that my
maid Antoinette had lit a fire in my bedroom, and got a mustard bath
ready (she always stuck to it that I had only a cold), and had put a
hot-water bottle in my bed and a Lourdes medal under the pillow. And so
I found peace after all my rest-cures.
It proved that S—— had meanwhile got engaged—for which I cannot blame
him—to somebody whose affections responded to his with less elaborate
treatment. My nerves soon recovered, I am glad to say; and although
symptoms of Hilton’s disease showed themselves about fifteen years
later, by that time both the disease itself and its cure had been
scientifically studied, and it only needed a few weeks to put me on my
feet again.