“WHAT’S BECOME OF WARING?”
Oh, never star
Was lost here but it rose afar!
Look east, where whole new thousands are!
In Vishnu-land what Avatar!
—_Browning._
Two years had passed away since Elsworth’s disappearance, and a little
party of house physicians and surgeons—all young men and recently
qualified—were sitting round the roaring fire in the snug quarters of
the senior house surgeon at our hospital, discussing the sad fate of
their old comrade. Young Harvey Bingley—a thoughtful and cultivated
man, who, besides passing his exams, with credit, found time and
inclination for literary pursuits, and especially loved to dig into
Robert Browning’s poetry and extract a nugget from time to
time—propounded the theory that perhaps Elsworth had gone off like
Waring in Browning’s poem. Nobody saw the allusion, because nobody
there knew anything of Browning; but Bingley was always worth listening
to when he got on his hobby, so he was required to explain.
“Well, you see, the poem opens with the question,—
‘What’s become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip,
Chose land-travel or seafaring,
Boots and chest, or staff and scrip,
Rather than pace up and down
Any longer London town?’
“He is described in the poem as walking with two or three friends one
snowy night in December, when suddenly he was missed from the little
company of students, who were returning home from a supper party, and
none of them saw him again, nor could anything be learned of his
whereabouts till years after, when one of his friends, sailing by
Trieste, caught a glimpse of the lost Waring’s face under a great grass
hat, in a fruit-boat, offering to trade with the English brig: caught
that glimpse, and nothing more, as the boat which bore him went off—
‘Into the rosy and golden half o’ the sky to overtake the sun.’”
“How romantic!” exclaimed several of the party.
“Yes,” said the junior house physician; “very like young Sapsford; he
disappeared just that way, after a supper party, and was not heard of
till several days after, and then he was found in a boat off Margate
jetty, with his landlady’s daughter!”
“Shut up!” cried Dr. Aubrey; “you’ve no poetry or sentiment in you—not
a bit. You are saturated with ‘Mark Twain,’ and it’s blasphemy to quote
Browning in your ribald hearing!”
“Do you think Elsworth has gone into the fruit business ‘in the rosy
half of the sky?’” meekly asked Maberley the dresser.
“I’ve no idea,” said Bingley; “but I have known things quite as strange
as that. By the way, you were all so anxious to laugh at my poetry that
you didn’t wait to hear the _dénouement_.”
“Oh, isn’t it over?” asked a groggy individual on the sofa, smoking a
churchwarden. “How could he get back out of the rosy sky?”
“That I can’t say; but he did, and is now living in a pretty villa on
Hampstead Heath, is very fat and jolly, and sketches in fine weather
‘bits’ which he exhibits at the Academy.”
“Then I say it’s a beastly shame,” cried Ryder, the “Resident Acc.,”
“to come to a public place like Hampstead and dissipate all that
beautiful poetry and rend asunder those rosy skies and appear as a fat
sketcher amongst donkey boys and nursemaids, to say nothing of girls’
schools. It’s indecent, and Robert Browning ought to go at him for
damages. I would! ‘Avatar’ indeed.”
“Now, joking apart,” said Dr. Aubrey, “don’t you think poor Elsworth
got a sudden sense of disgust with his rackety life, which was always,
I thought, rather assumed—never sat upon him quite naturally—and in a
moment resolved to cut it all? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear
that he had settled down in some quiet nook abroad, and was leading a
philosophical life. Do you remember Bartley Coleman? You do, don’t you,
Fourneaux?—he was of your year. You remember how promising he was? We
all made sure he would take the medical scholarship. One fine morning
he was missed, and nobody heard of him here till Dr. Sales went into a
little grocer’s shop in a Scotch village for some fish-hooks, and was
served by the missing Coleman. His father had become bankrupt while he
was a student, had a fit of apoplexy soon after, and died, leaving a
widow and five girls unprovided for. Poor Coleman heard the call of
duty, laid down the scalpel and took up the cheese-cutter, and so
supported his mother and his sisters. Noble wasn’t it?”
“Oh, I say, Aubrey,” said Maberley, “you don’t mean to imply that
Elsworth is keeping a chandler’s shop?”
“I imply nothing. I say we know very little of the under-currents of
half the men’s lives we are familiar with; we see the surface-water and
what floats on it; that is all. The wonder to me is how we keep between
the banks as well as we do. Some from inclination, others from duty,
more from defective control, get away from the old course, wander off
down the rapids, under the rocks, and disappear. Is it any marvel? For
my own part, there are times when I long to cast off the restrictions
of your so-called civilized existence, and go with a gun or a lasso to
the Pampas and the virgin forests.”
“Yes, all very fine, and make the welkin ring with cries for your
slippers and your grog when tired and heated with the chase. After a
very few months of that sort of work, the fit would cool down; and the
next thing that the world would see of you, you would be dining with
your father at the Fishmongers’ banquet, eating your turtle and
drinking your _très sec_ like the rest of the ‘domine diriges.’”
“I believe he has gone off with some girl,” said ugly little
beetle-browed Mills, the clinical clerk; “or somebody’s wife more
likely still.”
“Well, you may comfort yourself, Mills, that that indiscretion will
never happen to you. I could believe it of a cash-box, but there isn’t
a woman living who would elope with you—married or single. You will
never create that scandal.”
At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and a nurse put her head
into the room and, addressing one of the house surgeons, told him the
patient Green, in Isabella ward, had consented to undergo the operation
which he had suggested, and then added: “Sister says she thinks he is
dying fast, and are you going to operate?”
“Going to operate! Rather think I was. Don’t you know, Nurse, this is
my first capital operation? Do you think I am going to lose the chance?”
“Then, sir, Sister told me to ask you if I had better let the chaplain
know?”
“Chaplain be hanged!” he cried. “Certainly not! It would only depress
the poor devil. No! no! Plenty of brandy! Keep him up! Cheer him all
you can; tell him it is only a trifling, every-day sort of affair, and
he will be well in a jiffy. You may send for his wife.”
“Oh, sir, she has been waiting about the hospital all day.”
“All right, then! Now, gentlemen, to business. You shall see me do
something pretty. Bishop says I may do it all myself as soon as the
ether is given. Is Bishop in the wards?”
“No, I saw him in the pathologist’s room with Crowe an hour ago, and he
said he should be here but part of the day. I’ll tell him, shall I?”
asked a dresser.
“Do!”
The bell rang for the operation, to assemble the students, some of whom
said “It was a beastly shame to torture a poor wretch who hadn’t a
chance of getting over it.”
“Ah, you won’t talk like that when you are house surgeon (H.S. they
always termed it) yourself. You will be glad to operate on your own
father if you can’t get anybody else. Besides, what are hospitals for,
if not to qualify us for our work? If people don’t want us to learn all
we can from them, why don’t they stay at home and die? The parish
doctor won’t disturb their latter moments with operations.”
And so, while the case was being discussed by the novelty-hunting lads,
and the grim tools of the surgeons were being selected and placed on a
pretty little table by the side of the couch in the theatre, and
covered with a white napkin;—while the nurses were assembling who had
to assist, and the surgeon refreshing his memory by a last peep at the
text-book directing the steps of the operation;—while the poor
patient, who, after much worrying, had at last consented to undergo
what he was told was a trifling affair that would be certain to cure
him—an agonised young woman, with a baby at her breast, was pacing up
and down the courtyard of the “cathedral of surgery,” as the Sunday
papers called it, feeling that her poor husband was fast leaving her
and his little home, and much doubting if she should have given that
young doctor her consent to cut and hack the sinking frame of the
father of her babe. But what was she to do? Had not five well speaking,
kind-looking gentlemen told her that very morning it was the only
chance of saving him? Did not the pretty nurse and the ladylike sister
urge her to do just whatever the doctor in charge of the case advised?
There was only her own heart, her sad misgivings, standing between her
and the operation that they said was to give her Jimmy back to health.
She had yielded; it was to be done. She had seen him, and kissed him;
but her heart told her she would see him and hear his voice no more in
life.
A kind porter in the place let her sit down in his room and await the
result. Before nightfall, she was a widow. The announcement was made to
her by one of the dressers, who coupled his bad news with a request
from the authorities for leave to make a _post-mortem_ examination. For
James Green had yet something to contribute to science and St.
Bernard’s; he had given his life; had presented a rising young surgeon
with his first opportunity for a great and interesting operation. He
had still something more to bestow—his dead body. It was considered a
grievous oversight, and a wrong to the institution, if a patient
who had died there failed to make his or her appearance on the
_post-mortem_ table at four o’clock the next day, not only that it
might be seen and demonstrated by skilled pathologists just where and
how the operation had gone wrong, but for the sake of all the beautiful
and instructive things that might be shown in brain, or heart, or
lungs. For statistical purposes, for treatises being written, for
papers for learned societies on all and every of the ailments of
humanity, it was ill fortune to let a _sectio cadaveris_ slip, as one
never knew what one might be losing. They had an euphemistic way of
asking the relatives’ permission for what they termed a “P.M.”
“You don’t object to a slight examination, do you, just to find out the
real cause of death, so as to make the death certificate all right?”
Who could object? Few understood what it all meant, fewer thought they
had any power to object; so the cases were rare where the ruse failed.
There is a widespread feeling amongst the people against _post-mortem_
examinations. There is a vague apprehension that portions of their
deceased friend’s anatomy may appear “in spirits in a vial,” in some
museum or other. When the remains of the relative come back from the
hospital, it is unpleasant to feel doubts as to their integrity.
Visions of important portions of their internal economy lying _perdu_
in back gardens of students’ lodgings, the prey of the too inquisitive
cat or investigating terrier, are not altogether baseless. Hundreds of
back gardens in London doubtless do contain such material, as we have
frequent proof. Many thousands of museum shelves are loaded with
preparations of such departed friends. It is doubtless, in the
abstract, absurd to object to these common practices; but when it comes
home to a mother to ask how she would like her dead child’s remains
disposed of, it is perfectly natural, and not at all absurd, to suppose
that with her whole heart, she would earnestly demand that they should
be reverently interred in Christian ground, and be as little mutilated
as possible.
The Jews are very reluctant to allow _post-mortem_ examinations on
their relatives; and, when such a thing is unavoidable, as by coroner’s
order, an official from the synagogue is present to see that nothing is
abstracted. It has often happened that the friends have discovered that
portions of the corpse have been withheld or lost; and, as such
detention of human remains is forbidden by law, the authorities have
had to compensate the relatives by handsome sums towards the funeral
expenses. Nevertheless, one shilling will still purchase a healthy,
adult human brain to dissect quietly at home; and the emptiness of the
dead person’s head is not always a cause of surprise. A judicious
porter in the P.M. room has often found the cranial cavity a good
receptacle for the liver, thus balancing matters comfortably.