THE BEADLE AND THE THEATRE.
’Tis part of my proud fate
To lecture to as many thick-skulled youths
As please, each day, to throng the theatre.
—_Browning_ (“_Paracelsus_”).
O Youth and Joy, your airy tread
Too lightly springs by Sorrow’s bed;
Your keen eye-glances are too bright,
Too restless for a sick man’s sight.
—_Keble._
Old Jeremiah Horne was the beadle of the medical school at St.
Bernard’s. He had held the post now for nearly thirty years, and his
father held it before him. He and his family lived on the premises, and
the post was generally understood to be a lucrative one. His motto was,
“Nothing for nothing, and very little for a halfpenny.” He was a portly
man, very dignified in his manner towards the younger students, who
were kept at arm’s-length by him for purposes they well understood. He
was not hard on them for their mischief, their breach of rules, their
neglect of work, or any of their shortcomings, only they had to
understand, if they wanted his aid, they must tip him well and tip him
often. And this they did, and so Jerry Horne “waxed fat and kicked;”
and even the professors themselves somehow came to recognise that the
beadle was a not less important factor in the school than one of
themselves. He could restore order when they individually or
collectively repeatedly failed. A word from him would reduce the most
refractory to his senses, when the threats and the preaching of the
teachers fell on deaf ears. His business was to see that the theatres
and class-rooms were duly arranged for lectures. He had to provide a
proper supply of subjects for dissection, to prepare them and allot
them in due order. But his most important duty, and the one which gave
him the whip hand over all the men, was to register their attendance at
lectures, and so make or mar their prospects of being duly “signed up”
at the end of the session. By the rules of the examining bodies at “the
Hall” or the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, a student must attend
a certain proportion of all the lectures delivered in his school before
his papers can be received and himself duly entered as a candidate for
the necessary legal examinations which he must pass before he can get
his diploma or certificate to practice. Mr. Horne’s conscience was
elastic; and if a sufficient number of half-crowns and shillings were
flying about, he could always see and register the presence of a man in
the theatre at lecture who was probably at home in bed half a mile
away. As everybody voted lectures a great bore, especially those which
began at 8 or 9 o’clock on a winter’s morning, this was a great
convenience. The lecturers poured forth their wisdom to a scant
attendance at such times, and Mr. Horne’s half-crowns grew and
multiplied.
At all the lectures it was the duty of the beadle and his assistant to
occupy a convenient post, in view of the whole auditory, so that he
could mark the individual attendance and detect those engaged in
larking during the progress of the lecture. Under such circumstances it
was a task to the ingenuity of the boys to let off crackers without
detection, or shy potatoes and cabbages at the botany lecturer for
purposes of classification. The pundits themselves usually took the
interruptions in a good-humoured way, doubtless reflecting that medical
science has, from immemorial time, been imparted—in the British Isles,
at least—under similar difficult conditions; so these being recognised
_as_ conditions, they had to yield to the inevitable with the best
grace they might. But as they looked to the beadle to keep order by
means they knew him to possess, it was incumbent on Mr. Horne, now and
then, to “espy” somebody, usually one out of favour with him
temporarily, either from being deep in his debt or from having wounded
his dignity. When a scape-goat or two had been thus caught, they had to
pass an unpleasant quarter of an hour in the private room of the
warden, and give assurances of better behaviour under threats of
expulsion or suspension of schedules. The patience of the lecturers was
admirable; they bore most interruptions with exemplary meekness, but
they always resented pea-shooting as disturbing to the exact thinking
and speaking necessary in treating scientific subjects. The botany
lecturer, indeed, was a pattern of amiability. Not even a potato plump
against his snowy shirt front, or a cabbage flop on his manuscript,
disturbed him much or drove him into strong language. “Ah, thanks! yes,
my young friend, that tuber is the _Solanum tuberosum_; it is a good
specimen, but a little out of order. We have not yet reached the
_Solanaceæ_. Will the young gentleman who has thus rather roughly drawn
my attention to his specimen kindly tell me the characteristics of that
order, and name the principal medicinal plants belonging to it? You,
sir, I think it was, who forwarded me the example; Mr.——, Mr.——,
your name escapes me for the moment. I mean the gentleman with an
ecchymosis under his left eye.” The gentleman with the ecchymosis knew
as much about the order in question as his bull terrier knew of
astronomy; and amid the uproarious laughter of his class-mates, ever
ready for a diversion of interest, on being pressed by the lecturer to
exhibit his knowledge of the potato tribe, was fain to confess that he
knew little more about the species than he saw of them on the
dinner-table. He began to wish he had not thrown that tuber, and the
laugh was well turned against him as the lecturer scored several neat
points in dealing with him. This was one of the recognised and
old-established methods of defence adopted by the persecuted teachers,
and a good example of the survival of the fittest theory. The chair
could really only be held by development of such defence, and the
ingenuity of the students in organizing new systems of attack had to be
met by improvement in their repulse. It was armour-plating _versus_
guns, and the armour-plating generally saved the ship. Professor Letts
would have been a lost man one morning at the chemistry lecture had he
not caught the man who threw the lighted squib on the lecture table,
where it fizzed and bobbed amongst his neatly fixed-up apparatus for an
hour with the gases. “You, sir!” he cried, in his determined, assertive
manner that always commanded and secured respect; “you, sir, you
squib-thrower, come forward to the black-board! You are going up for
your preliminary science; give me the chemical formula for that
explosive. We are considering nitrogen this morning; you shall give the
audience the benefit of your, doubtless, complete knowledge of your
favourite gas. Nitrogen _is_ your favourite gas, is it not, Mr.
Albery?” Now poor Albery had to maintain a reputation for chemistry on
a very slender basis, and withal was a nervous man; and being all the
while unmercifully twitted by Mr. Letts, his symbols got mixed, and he
returned to his seat feeling that the squib itself was not more
completely “bust up” than he. One of the best retorts was made by the
professor of anatomy, who, entering the theatre for lecture one
afternoon, found that the skeleton, which always hung on a stand near
the lecturer’s table, had been removed from its frame and placed on one
of the benches in the auditorium, and was seated in a free and easy
manner, with a long clay pipe in its ghastly jaws, and a pewter pot in
its left hand. Dr. Hawkes took in the situation at a glance, and said,
“Gentlemen, I miss our old friend the skeleton from its accustomed
place, and perceive it in a new character seated amongst you. We shall,
this afternoon, go on with our remarks on the vertebral column, and I
have no doubt my address will be as useful to its empty cranium as it
will be to those by which it is surrounded.”
It was many a long day before that trick was played again.
The worst attacks were always made on poor young Dr. Harburne, who held
the chair of Materia Medica. He was not equal to dealing with them, and
took the matter to heart so much that he soon retired. He was a most
able physician, and the more studious of the men did their utmost to
repress the disturbances, which were so frequent as to make it
impossible for anybody to learn anything or to gain the least benefit
from the very valuable course of lectures on this important subject. He
often left the theatre, finding it impossible with his meek and gentle
manner, and his lack of any power of retort or ability to make
reprisals, to continue his address. “Come back, papa,” they would cry;
“we are good now!” He knew the ringleaders, but he was too amiable and
patient to expose them. “Ah, gentlemen,” he said one day in the lull of
a storm of interruption, “the day will come when you will be standing
helpless by the bedside of some loved one whom you would give your own
lives perhaps to save, and will be powerless by reason of opportunities
you are wasting now! I do not envy your reflections then. I pardon you
now; your punishment will come later!” Poor fellow! he died in harness,
a victim to his long years of hard work in toxicology. In a fit of
depression he swallowed prussic acid, just after leaving the profession
an exhaustive treatise on its uses!
Such were the lectures at St. Bernard’s, and so passed the time which
should have been spent in acquiring information for which the
prescribed four years’ course was all too short to gather. No wonder
that so many men hold hospital lectures to be almost useless, and
attend them no more frequently than they are obliged, when they are
generally only occasions of childish amusement. It was not the idle and
dissipated who neglected these opportunities—too often these mustered
in force for the sake of the fun. It was the best men, who felt that
their own rooms and their books could better assist their progress.
Jerry Horne was an accomplished photographer, and used to do many
strange and interesting things with his camera. He would get a
collection of skeletons from the museum, and arrange them in novel and
curious attitudes. One scene was a ball-room, all the dancers being
skeletons; another was an inquest, with coroner, witnesses, and
jurymen, all skeletons; another an operating theatre, with a skeleton
surgeon and assistants, a skeleton patient and spectators. But the
favourite subject with the students was the skeleton lecturer, with a
skeleton audience larking and otherwise neglecting the business for
which they had assembled. The boys bought all these drolleries, and
horrified and even appalled their mammas and sisters when they went
home, by exhibiting them in a gay and easy manner, thus manifesting
their indifference to and contempt of death and the ultimate destiny of
man.
Elsworth often thought of the lines Louis XIV. was fond of quoting from
Racine:—
“Mon Dieu, quelle guerre cruelle!
Je trouve deux hommes en moi.”
One of these two men within him was doomed to perish, which should it
be? The wild follies of his companions had a strange fascination for
him, and daily he seemed getting spiritually harder and more engrossed
with unworthy pursuits. He was full of fun, and there seemed such
drollery to be got out of upsetting policemen, leaping closed
toll-gates without paying, and such-like pranks, that the lofty
purposes with which he entered seemed like the blossoms in spring,
which yield to the first frosty night after their appearance. Of course
he could have held on his way had he been firmer, but the majority of
the better-hearted men were so given to these sprees that he seemed to
be merely finding his natural level in joining with them.
Dr. Day often invited Elsworth to spend an evening with him at his
lodgings. The great anatomist was not a man of one book, but of
world-wide reading and information. Nothing was too small for him to
notice, no subject too deep for him to study: he lived to know. There
was a charm about the old man, and the calm philosophic way he bore his
reverses commanded the respect of all who knew his story. There was one
subject on which he was impervious to argument: he would never admit
that it concerned him in the least how the subjects for dissection had
come into his hands. “If people like to use dynamite and the knife to
advance their political projects, what has that to do with the leaders
of the party who profit by their actions? Is it not an infamous calumny
to accuse them of being the associates of murderers? My work was to
teach anatomy. I did not kill people, I did not employ those who did.
If the greed of money prompted men to do improper things, how could I
be held responsible for them simply because I paid liberally and asked
no questions?”
He cared nothing for the healing art; his speciality was the dead
subject. The only true use in living, he seemed to think, was to
provide the anatomist with good subjects for his table. The man had not
lived in vain who had served Robert Day with his frame. He was an
atheist, a dogmatic atheist, interested not merely in denying the God
of the Bible, but in proving the impossibility of the existence of any
Supreme Being at all. Hence the melancholy of the man. His daughter
shared his views, for she worshipped her father, and he had taken care
she should learn nothing of religion from her infancy. They took pains
to imbue Elsworth with their opinions; not that they vulgarly scoffed
at his faith, but as propagandists of “the religion of Man” they
declared it their duty to wage war against that of God. The learning of
the old man and his daughter tempted our student to many a discussion
with them; he thought if his faith would not stand a little argument it
was not worth much. An orange tree grows and bears fruit in the open
air in the South, but soon sickens and dies in an English garden. It
was rash of Elsworth to subject his faith to such a test. He was doing
what has proved fatal to many a youthful mind.