Love in chief

LOVE IN CHIEF

I

WRITE ME AS ONE WHO LOVES HIS FELLOW-MEN

The waiting-room of Dr. Maude’s surgery at Monkswell was sparely furnished with guests, mainly because the December weather was of that mild and unseasonable type commonly called unhealthy. The darkness outside was pierced by a fine, invisible rain, borne on a south wind, and the waiting-room, though heat as well as light was spread only by a single gas-burner, was not cold. One patient was with the doctor; the details of his complaint could have been overheard by the others if they had cared to listen, but they did not; sufficient unto them were their own diseases. Five centres of self-complacent misery were sitting on a cane-seated bench; the sixth person was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. The only other representative of the male sex was eight years old, and had come to have a tooth out; too stolid to feel nervous, he sat sucking peppermints. His mother, in a decent black mantilla and a square-fronted bonnet trimmed with red chrysanthemums, was talking to a girl with a baby about wrongs invisible to the unjaundiced eye. The young mother’s dark eyes and delicate features had the remains of real beauty, though two years of matrimony had made her middle-aged; her pretty young sister, sitting beside her, showed what she must have been. The baby was not handsome; its pinkish-purple face was framed in a yellow woollen hood, and the colour which should have tinged its cheeks had settled upon its ugly little button of a nose and on its chin. It wheezed; the mother coughed loosely; the girl stared before her; the young man also coughed, but inobtrusively. He did not give to phthisis its due dignity.

The surgery presently discharged its patient and received the small martyr to toothache. The young man took the seat left vacant; and the gaslight, falling on his face, showed thin, brown features, eyebrows strongly arched and strongly marked, and bright, vagrant eyes which took an interest in everything. He edged a little closer to the young mother and looked inquiring. Finding that did not answer, he plunged into conversation with a speech which was admirable in sentiment but not discreet in wording.

“Jolly baby, that.”

“Yes, he was a fine boy,” said the girl, her tired eyes quickening as she looked down at her child, “but he’s after his teeth now, and it’s pulled him daouwn awful. We didn’t have a wink of sleep with him last night.”

“You must be pretty tired, then,” quoth the stranger. “Wonder if the little chap would come to me?”

“He don’t like strangers,” said the mother, doubtfully. She was unused to hear her boy called either a jolly baby or a little chap; and she distrusted the abilities of a young man, plainly unmarried, moreover, who used such terms.

“I’ll hold him like a patent rocking-chair,” the stranger asserted. “Come on, sonny. You won’t howl at me, will you? Great land, what a weight you are! I never turned ayah before—yes, put my eye out, will you? What’s wrong besides the teeth?”

“He’s got a touch of bromtitus; I caught it washing-day, and he took it from me. Oh, it’s crool work washing in the winter; our houses hasn’t any coppers, and we has to do it all out at the back.”

“Do you mean you wash the clothes in the open air?”

“Every mite of ’em. My husband he’s been to the landlord times and again, but he won’t do nothing for us; and they’re the cheapest houses round, so we just have to put up with it.”

“What a beastly shame! Who’s your landlord?”

“Old Fane, up at Fanes. Ah, he is a hard man. Last time as Mr. Searle went to see him, ‘You can take or leave it,’ he says; ‘I can get plenty more as won’t complain. I will not be pestered with discontented gutter-birds,’ he says. So my husband he come away; there wasn’t nothing to be done.”

“Fane, I think you said,” said the brown-eyed stranger, upon whose face the tale had painted a gleeful anticipation, as he took down the name in a pocket-book. “I’m thinking I’d like a little friendly conversation with Mr. Fane. Whereabouts is your place?”

“Burnt House, they call it; right out in the fields it is. If he’d put in one copper for the six houses, you wouldn’t think he’d ever miss the money. But he don’t care about us poor folks. I wish we was in Farquhar’s houses, that I do.”

Conversation was here broken by Dr. Maude, who summoned Mrs. Searle and her sister and the baby. Her short interview left her in tears. The doctor had ordered milk, which seemed to her as far beyond her means as caviare or turtle-soup. It would be got, but meanwhile Mrs. Searle would starve, Mr. Searle would swear, and the debt at the shop would grow. The stranger gave her a shilling, and fled into the surgery to escape her thanks.

The place smelt strong of drugs; shelves laden with bottles climbed up one wall, and the others were decorated with framed photographs and cases of medical books. Everything was strictly professional and methodically neat; and the doctor, slight and dark in appearance, cool and composed in manner, was the essence of his room embodied.

“What’s your trouble?” he asked of the stranger, who stood before him interested and insouciant, his hands still in his pockets.

“Hæmorrhage from the lungs. Oh, I’ve had the charming complaint before, and I know the ways of it; I’ve been despaired of three times already. But I’d like you just to tinker up my old constitution, if that’s possible.”

“When did the hæmorrhage occur?”

“I had a smart attack Sunday, and it’s been off and on ever since.”

“Then you ought to be in bed.”

“Quite so, Æsculapius, but I haven’t one.”

“There is the workhouse infirmary at Alresworth.”

“To which I’m on the way; but I didn’t think I could git.”

Then there was silence, while Maude applied his stethoscope. After testing the lungs he tried the heart, and after the heart other organs, and soon discovered that his patient was a collection of inceptive diseases. His questions elicited a tale of ill-health lightly borne in which he did not believe, for stoicism is rare in surgery patients.

“I don’t know your face—where do you come from?” Maude asked him.

“I was at Alresworth with a travelling company as a kind of a sort of a shadowy understudy of a sub-super, but I knocked up Sunday and was left behind. Nobody missed me. I can’t act any more than a dead egg,” said the patient, candidly—“ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine; is that enough? But that don’t matter in the profession. Hullo, were you in the cricket-team at Queens? Nice game, cricket. I always shone in it myself.”

He disengaged himself, and walked across to study the photographed groups on the wall.

“Come back, please; I have not done with you,” said the doctor. “What’s your name?”

“Oh, I don’t know—John Smith, I guess. Last time I played cricket was near the English cemetery at Iquique. Jolly ground it was, too. There’s never a drop of rain from year’s end to year’s end, so the turf isn’t too good; but we had thousand-foot precipices on three sides of the ground, and what could you ask more? We played till Saunders made a boundary hit, and then we hadn’t a rope long enough to fetch up the ball. Next time Saunders went up there was after Yellow Jack had done with him. My hat! it was hot enough for kingdom come. The very abomination of desolation; red hills, and never a blade of grass, except the thread of green where the water comes down from the snows.”

“Well, John Smith,” said the doctor, “I can’t do much for you; your constitution’s rotten. You had better stop talking, take this medicine, and go to the infirmary, if it’s true that you have no home. A motor ’bus passes here at seven, and goes to Alresworth.”

The patient made a grimace. “More land of counterpane for me, I suppose. Passes here at seven, does it? I shall certainly be ’bus-sick; but, after all, tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Take my tip, Æsculapius, and don’t you drop your cricket. Good-night.”

It was only half-past six. Maude felt an impulse to recall the picturesque stoic and bid him wait in the surgery until the omnibus passed; but honesty is a rare quality, and the stranger, by pleasing him, inspired him with mistrust. An observant man, he noticed that John Smith spoke French like a Frenchman: a Parisian could have detected the difference, for his accent was that of Guernsey: but Maude had learned modern languages at a public school. In brief, the rain was inaudible in the surgery; the stranger was a questionable character; and Maude did not ask him in.

John Smith went out whistling; his frame was lean and gaunt and loose-jointed, but he walked with a fine swing. The surgery was the last house of the village. Some hundred yards further on the railway embankment spanned the road, and a lane turning up just beyond it led to the station. John Smith, sauntering along in the increasing rain, found shelter beneath the arch and stayed there. The wind blew up from the south straight through the tunnel, and the scene circumscribed by the arc of masonry was wild and beautiful. Across the black sky raced a froth of fleecy clouds, through which a half-moon shone, girt by a pallid zone of blue and bronze. The wild streamers were so unearthly pale, the heaven so solemnly dark, that only by the moon’s presence could sky be told from cloud. Gray hills, crowned with dark soft masses of woodland, folded down to a valley deep in mist, where a cluster of golden lights burned like a constellation magnified by rain; while up to his very feet the streaming road was turned to a sheet of glory by a common street-lamp.

John Smith immediately brought out a penny pencil and a penny exercise-book and began to write. Valiantly disregarding the inequalities of the brick-work, he rested the paper against the wall. He had thought of some elegant words and phrases for describing the evening sky, and wanted to fix them fast on paper before they escaped from his volatile memory. Actor he had been by chance, artist he was by nature; an artist in words, he professed himself gravely; a lover of apt phrase and finely balanced sentence; one of that happy confraternity whose goal in a strange room is always the bookcase. He had as many interests as ideas, but this reigned paramount.

The wind blew, and the rain came with it. It may have been the cold, or it may have been the weight of Mrs. Searle’s baby, or it may have been the inevitable sequence of his disease, which suddenly arrested the writer’s hand, and made him, choking, press a handkerchief to his lips to quell the flow. He knew how to meet the attack, and, lacking any other couch, lay down in the road; he could not well be wetter, and a mud-bath, at least, is warm. His handkerchief was drenched, but the stream did not stop. Presently the moon dimmed before his eyes, and his own troubled breathing seemed a far-off sound. It crossed his blurred mind that he was about to solve the great riddle, and go out with the wind; and he reflected with satisfaction that Dr. Maude, who had unmercifully turned him out into the rain, would be visited by pangs of conscience. He felt neither fear nor elation, but a certain regret in leaving a world which he had persistently enjoyed in spite of all; after which consciousness went out like a spark, and John Smith lay still in the road.