Nothing could have been less like Rochett than Number 27 Palace Court.
It was one of thirty large, red, solid houses overlooking one another.
It was sufficiently far from a main thoroughfare not to be noisy, and
sufficiently near never to taste, except in the small hours of the
morning, undiluted silence. It was a broad cul-de-sac of a street,
neither green nor untidy, upon which the sun struck without the
tenderness of shadows. In the summer it was full of hard, clear light,
and in the winter it seemed particularly open to gloom.
The house looked as if every thought it had was born in London and had
never gone outside it except for the week-end. All the other houses were
the same; they employed the usual number of well-trained servants, and
enjoyed the same number of good meals and carefully kept habits. The
only difference between Number 27 and the others was that it had been
taken over by the Government as a receptacle for human pain and
helplessness. It was an officers’ hospital for cases which needed
recurrent surgical skill.
Behind its solid face spun the slow, cruel hours of the fight between
life and death, the sometimes stagnant, but ever progressing, fight
between the courage of the mind, reinforced by skill, and the
helplessness of the broken body.
It was a grim, persistent fight, shrouded in mystery. Sometimes skill
got the better of the mystery, and men who came there expecting never to
walk again went away cured and rejoicing; and more often mystery got the
better of skill, and hopes and efforts were alike baffled.
The hospital was only one of Hilton Laurence’s many activities. He was
an eminent surgeon, with his hands full, and glad to leave the
unremunerative and more stationary work to Anthony.
Anthony didn’t want money; he wanted work. He had no tastes; two ugly
rooms in a quiet street, with an occasional ill-cooked meal when he and
his landlady remembered it simultaneously, were all he asked for. He had
no expensive pursuits and no desire for expensive objects. He had a
nervous horror of society, and refused every invitation he received.
Books contented him, and the only form of exercise he took was to walk
out of London down the North Road with Max at his heels after his work
on summer evenings. He walked straight out, sat in a hedge to smoke a
pipe, and returned. When the weather became too cold, he went into a
cottage for a cup of tea instead; but he never sought any companionship
beyond Max’s, and he disliked all attempts at conversation.
Anthony did not realize that he was trying as far as possible to
reproduce his prison conditions; but it was, nevertheless, what his mind
fumbled toward. He wanted to feel about him the safety of inflexible
habit, set work, and an increasing inhibition. He wanted to close all
the avenues to his senses down which might come the haunting images
which racked his heart. He wanted not to remember, not to feel, not to
see. He felt that if he could only completely cut himself off from his
old conditions, he might be as marooned in London as on a desert island.
It was easy to get rid of his family by the hedge of his work and the
reassurance of an occasional letter. He seldom saw Henry, who had been
severely discomposed by his own lack of judgment. He was, of course,
glad Anthony had not gone out of his mind, but at the same time he
disliked to think that he had been provided with all the materials for
thinking so without the event taking place.
Hilton Laurence persisted from time to time in trying to draw Anthony
out of his packed solitude; but Anthony disliked his excellent,
well-chosen dinners, where men aired their theories of reconstruction,
and carefully avoided the subject upon which their lives were spent. All
talk which did not deal with the immediate became for Anthony a mere
cheating of the intelligence, a bite on empty air. He wanted to see
speech used only for the purpose of action.
Thought was different. You must, he knew, accumulate thought in order to
provide the safe material for activity, but no after-dinner conversation
went very deeply into thought. London traveled more easily upon the
oiled surface of its hourly topics; and Anthony, who had got into the
habit of thinking a thing out till he hit against his last idea, was
often disconcertingly aware that people thought he ought to stop, and
that politeness forced you to leave your social foxes at some distance
from their holes.
“You ought to be a Trappist,” Hilton Laurence said to him once; “you
have made a religion of silence.”
The only exception Anthony made was that he talked to his patients; for
them he waived all his rules and inhibitions, he encouraged them to
speak off the point, because they did not know what the point was, and,
if confined to its preconceived direction, might miss it altogether.
Anthony was peculiarly gentle and patient with his cases. He would
listen intently to the irrelevant, and no complaint ever escaped him.
“It is just as important for a mind that manufactures complaints to get
rid of them by airing them,” he explained to Hilton Laurence, who
suggested shorter methods, “as for a real complaint to be looked into
and tackled; only the remedy in the first case is chiefly in the airing
of it. It is always worth while to listen to what people say if they
have anything wrong with them at all. Of course if their only ground is
to present themselves picturesquely, one might try a different method.
All introspection is selfish beyond a certain point, and all selfishness
increases the difficulty of breaking a habit. It is a curious point that
unselfishness is invariably bad for other people, and selfishness bad
for the person himself. One would like to know the moral, if any, a
bishop would draw from it.”
“You may be sure he wouldn’t accept it if he couldn’t draw a moral from
it,” said Hilton Laurence. “But what method would you try with a case of
sheer nerves?”
“I’ll tell you when I’ve found one,” replied Anthony. “At present I
don’t believe in sheer anything. I used to before I went to prison, and
when I was first there—the first six months—I believed then in sheer
misery; but other factors came in. There were curious, unexpected
let-ups.”
“You must have had some odd experiences,” Hilton Laurence ventured
tentatively. Anthony had never talked to him of his imprisonment.
“The most ordinary ones in the world,” Anthony answered dryly. “I learnt
how to bear what I couldn’t, and I got this out of it—that now I know I
can. The limit of human endurance is the limit of consciousness. When
you get to a certain point you turn or break; or, what is perhaps more
common, part of you breaks, and part of you turns. Life means you to
have this process gradually. That’s why, in general, old people are
weaker and wiser than the young; they don’t get their experiences all at
once. But in this war some of us got it quick, and we have to pay for it
slow.”
Number 27 Palace Court absorbed Anthony. He had cases outside it,
private cases which came to him from his old practice or from the wide
circle of the Arden family, and others came from his singular successes;
but his life was the life of Number 27 Palace Court. He felt it move in
him like the double consciousness of domesticity. He never took any
obvious notice of the nurses, but nothing about them escaped him. If one
of them needed a holiday, Anthony saw that she got it; and if another
scamped her work, Anthony found out why, and if he couldn’t remove the
cause—and he often could remove the cause—he removed the nurse. He
rather disliked the capable and unattractive matron, who seemed to rely
more than the unattractive should upon the exhibition of her capacities;
but he saw that her rule was in the main just, good for the patients,
and bringing out, with occasional flares, the best qualities of the
nurses, and he knew that justice, even a rough-tongued justice, is too
valuable a quality to pass over. When Hilton Laurence said: “I can’t
stand that matron; let’s get rid of her. Women were meant to please, and
she wouldn’t please an iron door-scraper,” Anthony bluntly refused.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t see that women were any more meant
to please than men. When they do, they often do it to get out of other
things. Matron knows her job; we’ve never had a scandal here, or lost a
case through carelessness. You don’t want a woman you can fall in love
with for a matron; you want a woman you can’t.”
Hilton Laurence looked rueful, but he agreed.
“I’m not at all sure _you_ can’t fall in love with her,” he said rather
crossly. “You’re both made of cast-iron. The sisters are quite pretty,
and I don’t believe you’ve looked at them!”
But Anthony had looked at them. He knew every detail of their work, and
he had watched their absorbed complete self-consciousness, to which
their daily life was a mere subsidiary fact. They were women long before
they were nurses.
Anthony studied the Irish Roman Catholic sister, whose gay and joking
exterior hid a determined unselfishness; he knew she would appear
careless of details and be safe to leave patients with; he couldn’t
trust her memory, but he felt certain of her punctual heart. She was one
of the race of mother-women to whom all objects of care are more
precious than their lives.
On the other hand, he deeply disliked a smart and neat-handed young
woman whose interest centered in her own attractions, and who would
sacrifice a patient’s comfort for a moment’s self-indulgence.
A flirtatious night sister once made an emergency call an opportunity
for a determined attempt upon Anthony’s affections, but she did not do
it again. He stared at her out of strange, gray eyes with ironic
curiosity.
“I wonder why you are doing this kind of thing,” he said on the landing
in his low, clear voice; “you do it very badly. I should strongly advise
you to return to your duties.”
It was the first time that Anthony had realized that the nurses were of
the same species as Kitty. It came over him as he looked at the confused
and irate night sister how differently Kitty would have taken his
question, and how in the end she would have triumphed over him. He could
never have said that Kitty played the game of sex badly; she played it
so well that half the time Anthony had never been aware that she played
it at all.
Now he was aware. Every sense he had ached for her and demanded her
perpetual stimulus. He was like a man athirst in a desert of sand; he
could drug his brain with work, but at night his body and his heart beat
out their revenge upon him; and this silly woman, with her unready
eagerness for his attention, forced back his torture straight upon him.
He wondered, as he left her, if he had blamed her too sharply. Perhaps
her desire to win his admiration had been aroused by the obstinate
longing for another woman in himself. The invisible traffic between mind
and mind is full of misleading messages. The night nurse hated him from
that moment, but all the nurses preferred Hilton Laurence; he was less
polite, much less considerate, and far more approachable.
It was the patients who wanted Anthony. There was something in his
spare, tall figure, a little bent, in his grizzled hair and young gray
eyes, which filled them with confidence and hope. He was young enough to
inspire them, and old enough to reassure them by his steadiness, and
they knew he cared.
They felt he was there for them, not for success or experience or money,
not merely as a doctor, but as a personality. He would never let
anything interfere between their cure and his efforts, nor would he give
up helping them when help seemed useless.
The purpose of his being was to relieve pain, and in the depths of his
quiet eyes was the full knowledge of it. He had that understanding of
suffering, complete and without shrinking, which few doctors possess. He
did not want, as Hilton Laurence did, to rush in with his health, his
skill, and his brisk cheerfulness, and then get out again as soon as
possible, forgetting.
Laurence’s “cut and come again” attitude frightened the weak and gave no
encouragement to men who had been slowly undermined by recurrent pain.
They could not believe in quick or cheap escapes.
Anthony offered them none; he never deluded them or hurried from them.
If there was nothing he could do, he listened carefully to what they had
to bear; the most he ever said was, “I think this trouble will improve
in time,” or, “I hope this may help you a little,” and when he said
this, improvement and help always followed, and renewed the smoking flax
of hope.
He succeeded in persuading men to make efforts who had given up the
attempt in despair, because they saw that he had personal dealings with
despair.
“You see,” Anthony explained, “it is always worth while trying, because
no one knows the exact place where courage takes over from failure, and
it is a pity to stop at failure if one can help it. Miracles are merely
getting the hang of a thing suddenly that you’ve tried at deliberately
till you’re sick of it; you’ve got to help yourself just as far as you
can before anything else helps you, and few of us know how far we can
till we try.”
“It’s much easier,” he explained to another man suffering from general
debility after a severe wound, “to get over a bad time than to get over
having had one. That’s your trouble now. The bad time is finished, but
it took half of you to get through it; you’ve got to win that half back.
It will be quicker if you keep reminding yourself that you really _are_
on the right side of things, though of course it won’t be easy. You must
go on calling the other half of you back.”
But if his patience was endless with the weak, he was sharp with those
who did forbidden things from bravado. Anthony had always despised the
false courage which wants to be admired; it cloaked too clearly an
invisible cowardice.
“Don’t think you are showing courage,” he would assert to a man who had
disobeyed a restriction. “Courage is the patient handling of danger; it
is not the foolish manufacturing of it for purposes of showing off. No
one in a busy hospital is going to admire a fool. We should deeply
regret it if we threw away your case by our carelessness, but no one is
going to mind your throwing it away by your own.”
Anthony took endless trouble to divert his patients’ minds; he never
rested till he found some taste or hobby which he could encourage.
Nothing in the hospital was allowed to prevent a man’s carving out a
healthy interest.
Hilton Laurence was often surprised, and the matron frequently irate, at
Anthony’s waiving of the rules to suit the oddest occupations.
“In a short case,” he explained to Hilton Laurence, “you can concentrate
on the disease, and one needs only to know enough of a man’s mind to
keep his nerves quiet and his common sense uppermost; but in a long case
you _must_ know your man, and get him an object—virtually _any_ object
outside of himself—to hook on to. Any invalid’s attention gets
concentrated on discomfort and sensation, and the longer the case is,
the more water-logged and self-centered the mind gets. You’ve got to
fill it, if it’s only for half an hour a day, and never mind on
what—comic songs, theosophy, tall stories, well-cooked food, the study
of the Welsh language, or a music-hall star. Look at that jockey you
handed over to me a month ago. I couldn’t think what to do with him, he
seemed such a stuck case; all that septic business, going on so long,
had just rotted him to pieces. Actually, the mischief had stopped, but I
couldn’t start him up. He’d been ill too long. I wrote to my father to
unearth some old racing papers I knew my brother Tom had kept for years,
and the man lighted up immediately. Sister got him an album, and I found
him sitting up in bed, a thing he assured me he would never do again,
pasting in different records of horses as fast as he could go. Then we
started getting a sporting editor to visit him and keep him up in what
was going on now, and it’s astonishing to see the change in him. He’s
sleeping and eating and getting quite a healthy color back, and all
because he’s succeeded in finding something that interests him more than
his own inside.
“All these long cases need humoring; they are beyond drugs and knives.
We doctors have got to learn how to give them desires.”
“Desires,” murmured Hilton Laurence. “Well, I dare say you’re right.
I’ve often acted on that theory without analyzing it.” He hesitated for
a moment, then he risked, “Come to think of it, I did it in your own.
You know, my dear fellow, six months ago, when I blew in to Henry’s
flat, you were as near going bang off your head as any fellow I ever
saw. I wondered how I dared trust you in an operating theater with the
instruments.”
“I’d have been much more dangerous without them,” agreed Anthony.
“Things you are accustomed to handle give you sanity straighter than
ideas. I once knew a pianist who was so drunk before his performance he
couldn’t walk across the stage. The manager asked him how on earth he
was going to play? And he said, ‘Just get me to the piano somehow; it’ll
take care of me.’ They put him on the music-stool before the curtain
rose, and he played divinely. No one guessed why he didn’t get up to bow
afterward.”
“Do you think your piano has cured you?” asked Laurence, curiously.
Anthony looked at him steadily for a moment, then he turned away.
“The man was still drunk,” he observed, “after he’d finished playing.”