VI
To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset.
91b Harley Street, W.,
March 31, 1910.
My dear Sally,
If the proprietors of a very excellent emulsion of cod liver oil did not send me (as they do) a little memorandum book at the beginning of each year, I should find letter-writing to my sister considerably more difficult. The book is not spacious enough to be called a diary, and the lines allotted to each day are merely sufficient to contain the baldest records of two or three dry facts. But while it is less than a diary, for the keeping of which, if it weren't for you, I'm afraid that I should never have had even the desire, it is entirely valuable as a means to an end. And may the aforesaid proprietors wax therefore as fat and well-liking as their advertised babies. For although you may never have thought of it, oh sister mine, it was by no means an easy condition that you imposed upon me in exchange for your consent to my wedding.
"One letter a month, Peter," I can see your stern uplifted finger even now, "one letter a month you must faithfully promise me, or Esther shall only capture you over my dead body."
And although in those glorious days it seemed but a little bargain to set one's hand to, yet I may now reveal to your horrified gaze—as regards the pre-emulsion period at any rate—visions of a haggard physician battering his cranium in a desperate effort to jog his memory for news. A little reflection will secure you from considering this to be an affront. For the very existence of such visions is the most eloquent testimony to the state of his brotherly affections; and to prevent your instantly taking the next train to town, I can assure you positively that the wing of a merciful providence (the liver wing) took him under its protection at the psychological moment. Thanks to the cod, its oil, and the emulsion thereof, his memory has been propped up just when he began to need it most. And this is why I can assure you most positively that, although ourselves and our daffodils are shrivelling to-day in the bitterest of easterly winds, but three short weeks ago we were picking primroses in the woods of Upper Basildon.
We were staying of course with Uncle Jacob, who was celebrating his seventy-sixth birthday and the fourth anniversary of his retirement from the judicial bench in contravening all the known rules of health—or, at any rate, the modern conception of them. Esther and Molly went down on the Friday night, and I joined them on Saturday, his birthday.
It was a lovely warm morning, with just enough briskness in the air to remind one that winter was still fighting a rearguard action, and just enough warmth in the sun to make one quite certain that it would end in a general defeat. Slipping into Portland Road Station in golfing kit, I caught an early train at Paddington, and was down at Goring soon after ten, where Esther and Molly met me in the pony-trap. We were to spend the day upon some private links upon the downs above Streatley, a beautiful, invigorating piece of country, and an offshoot, I think, of the Berkshire Ridgeway. From a strictly golfing point of view the course is, I suppose, an easy one. To players like myself, of the occasional order, too delighted at achieving anything that may decently be called a stroke to mind very much about a little pulling or slicing, the penalties, no doubt, are scarcely severe enough. But there are possibilities, at any rate, of some grand, exhilarating drives; the greens are capital; and there is seldom the nerve-racking ordeal of playing off before a multitude of cynical observers.
Instead, this particular course is filled for me with memories of elemental foursomes, innocent of caddies, unwitnessed by any living creature other than some simple sheep or an occasional pony, but filled to the brim with such dramatic fluctuations of chance and skill as are unknown to (or at any rate unremembered by) your poor plus 1 players at Richmond or St. Andrews. For golf, like her fairer sister cricket, reveals her wild and fickle heart in a truer lovableness at such places as this. Kneeling on immaculate turf, you may salute her queenly finger-tips at Hoylake or Sandwich or Rye—as her sister's at Lord's. But to know her as she is—to know them both as they really are—to snatch kisses from their sweet and rosy lips, to look deep into their honest, if baffling eyes, you must woo them, afar from fashion, by brae-side and village green.
And yet—and yet—well, perhaps that's just how we duffers always did talk. Like amateur mountaineers, we are fain to conceal our lack of craft in an admiration of extraneous circumstances—such as the view, for instance. And indeed the view from almost any of these particular eighteen holes is of the most comforting type that I know—a wide, pastoral expanse, silvered here and there with water, and apparently melting upon its horizons into a veiled and delicate endlessness. Upon such a view I would quite willingly close my eyes for the last time. And when the day comes for me to retire it will be to the arm of some such westward hill as this that I shall trust my agéd pilgrimage.
Grindelwald, Como, Cap Martin—they are good enough company for a mile or two of the road. To have known them has been a real privilege, and to meet them again would be an equal joy. But for the long, all-weathers' tramp, for the comfortable silences of true comradeship, and above all for those last hobbling footsteps of the journey, give me some little hill like this above English cornlands.
And, taking everything into consideration, I can really find very little in the way of an emotional demand that the view, for example, from the fourth hole of this particular course doesn't amply satisfy. For eyes necessarily accustomed to close studies and narrower outlooks there is space enough and to spare, and grandeur too, if they are content to accept it from above rather than below, and to feast upon those heavenly Himalayas and ethereal Pacifics that Nature and a south-west wind will always provide for the untravelled. As an echo, or perhaps fountain, of which sentiments let me extract for you three verses from a weekly paper upon my table. They are entitled—it is the Prayer Book heading of the traveller's psalm—"Levavi oculos."
Mahomed, when the mountains stood
Aloof from his so strong desire,
Mahomed, being great and good—
And likewise free—concealed his ire.
And since their will might not be bent,
Mahomed to the mountains went.
I too, a clerk in Bedford Row,
Long years the mountains yearned to see,
And since to them I could not go,
Besought that they might come to me.
"If Faith," I said, "can mountains move,
How surely should they come for Love."
And lo, to-day I watch them crowd,
Range upon range, above my head,
Cordilleras of golden cloud,
And snow-white Andes, captive-led,
Yea, Himalayas, crowned with snow,
Above my head in Bedford Row.
Wiser than Mahomed, like this little clerk, I begin to think that I can see myself enthroned, in my retirement, and letting my mountains be brought to my door. Moreover to old age, a little timid of loneliness, such a view as this would be completely reassuring. Cottages, manor-houses, Oxford with her dreaming spires, they are all contained within its broad and kindly grasp. Life, human life, trivial, cheery, part and parcel of the ages, has not here been sacrificed to any merely scenic splendour; while beneath it, if still flowing through it, lies the fierce and jovial memory of Briton and Saxon and Dane, their frames long since a part of this quiet crucible, and all but the heroic of their memories—a peaceable reflection—distilled into oblivion.
Yes, one might do a great deal worse, I think, than retire to Streatley. At any rate that is Uncle Jacob's opinion, and he has been there a year.
"View?" he remarked, when I pointed it out to him, "God bless my soul, it's the finest view in England. Let me see, where are they? Aha, just there. No, that's not them. There they are—the Wittenham Clumps. My honour, I think. Fore!"
When you have stayed here so long as an afternoon and evening, you will perceive that as St. Paul's to Ludgate Hill or the cross to Banbury, so are the Wittenham Clumps to Streatley. They are, at any rate, its soundest conversational investment.
We celebrated the evening with a feast to which Uncle Jacob had bidden several of his fellow-bachelors—Esther and Molly being the only ladies honoured with an invitation. Uncle Jacob, who has never, I should think, for the last thirty years consumed less than five glasses of port a night, accompanied, upon normal occasions, by two cigars, and followed, a little later, by a couple of large whiskies-and-sodas, was in great form, and very anecdotal. He did full justice to an excellent repast, and was knocking at our bedroom door at seven the next morning to summon us for early service.
"After that, sir, you may loaf, lounge, practise approach shots in the garden, play billiards, or pick primroses. But every able-bodied person must attend divine service at least once on Sundays while he is a guest under my roof." And so there he was, pink from his morning tub, and with an autocratic twinkle in an eye as clear as yours. I have often, I'm afraid, in a horrid, professional sort of way, contemplated Uncle Jacob, who is typical of a distinct class of prosperous old gentlemen, albeit not a large one. All my training and instincts tell me that he eats too much, and drinks too much. And I know that, until his retirement, his life, as a county-court judge, was almost wholly sedentary. And yet here he is at seventy-six, cheerful, vigorous, and very pleasantly self-satisfied—so apparently sound himself, in fact, as to be perhaps just a little bit intolerant of the frailties of others. Personally I am always tempted—a little unfairly, since he is really a trifle exceptional—to wield him as a bludgeon over the misguided pates of fanatical vegetarians. But, on the other hand, how just as reasonably might not some head-strong bon viveur wield him over mine, who am of course a preacher of the simple life. No, I think that Uncle Jacob has three things to thank for the blithe appearance that he cuts before the world: his forefathers' healthy and athletic simplicity; the fact that both by temperament and profession he has lived an objective, rather than a subjective, life; and finally the truth—Medicine's most comfortable axiom—that Nature, given half a chance, will always come up smiling. He is lusty malgré lui.
Apart from this little visit in the country I have been very busy; and some difficult and rather critical cases have tied me to town ever since. Horace, after some hesitation, has decided to take up medicine, and is working already for his first and second examinations at Cambridge, where he will now, I think, stay an extra year. Next month Esther and I are snatching a week with old Bob Lynn at Applebrook, when young Calverley will look after my patients, and I shall, I hope, land trout for a little while instead of fees. Molly is well and very stately, biding her time, politically speaking, with a stern eye on Mr. Asquith and a doubtful one on Mr. Balfour. Claire decided after all that she would like to postpone her confirmation until next year. She came up for a week-end, at her mistress's wish, to consult about it.
"You see, Daddy," she told me thoughtfully, "I'm not frightfully keen on it"; and then after contemplating her toes for a moment, "It's not that I want to be wicked exactly, only I like feeling sort of comfy."
When Mummy came in we had a little talk about it, and it emerged, I think, that being "comfy" meant retaining certain rights as to dormitory feasts and midnight expeditions that were believed to be incompatible with the confirmed conscience. Next year it would be different. Well, I suppose next year it will; and having preached her a little sermon, which she accepted very gracefully, we ended in a compromise. She was to be as good as she could, but need not take the irrevocable step till she felt quite ready for it—somewhere about next Easter.
Meanwhile she has discovered Mr. Stanley Weyman, and is doubtful if there is anything in all literature to compare with "Under the Red Robe," though one of the girls thinks "Count Hannibal" almost as good.
Tom's letters are terse, and, as I told you last month, we are still rather troubled about him.
My love to the orphans, with their proper little plaits and their shiny cheeks. And that they may continue to rejoice their matron's heart is the prayer of
Her affectionate brother
Peter.
VII
To Harry Carthew, Trenant Hotel, Leeds.
91b Harley Street, W.,
April 8, 1910.
My dear Carthew,
I believe every word you tell me about yourself—that you are feeling, that is to say, pumped-out, uncertain, doubtful each morning if you can get through the day without breaking down, and as a result of it all, very wretched and depressed. At the same time I can only assure you, and I think you must accept my word as a trained man, that you are physically sound, and indeed at this very moment a "first-class life."
I know how difficult it is to believe all this when one is suffering as you are now. But believe me, it is the gospel truth, and one that you must reiterate daily, and if need be hourly, to yourself. Remember that all this is just a phase of experience. Twelve months from now you will be laughing at the memory of it. Twelve years hence it will have ceased even to be a memory. And if you could only observe your troubles from without, as I do, you would see at once how very understandable they are.
For here are you, a busy enough barrister at all times, plunging headlong into the sea of electioneering, from which, after a very stormy month or two, you emerge to find heavy arrears of work awaiting you at chambers, to say nothing of two unexpectedly prolonged and arduous cases in the courts. In addition to these things you have been, as you tell me, caught up a little in the present whirlwind of rubber speculation, and have had rather disquieting reports of Eric's health in Switzerland.
Now I know you to be a healthy disbeliever in drugs, the possessor of a scepticism, in this respect, that I largely share. And I'm not going to wind up this letter with a prescription. But you tell me that your cases are now well in hand, and that you have four clear days before the Leeds Sessions begin; and therefore, if you will let me, I am going to assume the sceptre of the autocrat, and commandeer them for your good. First, then, select a bedroom with a south aspect, and have your bed pulled up beneath the window in such a manner that, being propped up with pillows, you can survey some little portion of the outside world. Having done this, prepare to stop in it for thirty-six hours. The preparation will be simple. Procure a round table and a selection of suitable books. What these should be I daren't prescribe. Let me suggest widely that most of them should deal rather with abstracts than concretes, that some of them should therefore be books of poetry, but that a volume of Jacobs' stories should by all means be included. Select one newspaper only, and that of an unsensational character. Let me recommend, without prejudice to political convictions, the "Morning Post." As regards Eric, consign him mentally, as you have done actually, to the wisdom of his headmaster and the school doctor. And for the rest, commend your affairs to the discretion of your broker. Now as to diet—for twenty-four hours you must live on milk, and milk alone, no matter how hungry you may become. The hunger will by no means be hurtful, and you can console yourself by remembering that your bodily tissue-waste, while in bed, will be comparatively small. So much for the first day. For breakfast, upon the second, have a bowl of bread and milk. Lunch in bed on some sole or plaice, followed by a rice pudding and some stewed fruit. Rise at three, spend an hour in the garden if the day is warm enough, and have tea at half-past four. Being in the provinces, this meal may be accompanied by two boiled eggs without creating undue attention. Have a warm bath, followed by a cold sponge-down, at seven o'clock, when you must retire to bed, supping on bread and milk at half-past eight, and taking thereafter some effective, but not too violent aperient, such as five grains of calomel, let us say, an hour later.
On the third day, having breakfasted in bed upon a cup of tea, two rounds of buttered toast and a boiled egg, you may rise at eleven, and take an hour's walk. For lunch you should have some boiled fish, potatoes, stewed fruit and custard. In the afternoon you should take another hour's walk, and have a cup of tea and some toast at half-past four. Dine in your room at half-past seven upon some clear soup, sole, a nicely grilled chop with some mashed potatoes, and any sort of sweet that you may fancy. Having dined, drink a cup of coffee, and smoke your first cigar among your fellow-men downstairs. Upon the fourth day, arise, and have a cold tub. Don some old and comfortable tweeds, eat the biggest breakfast of which you are capable, seize a stout stick, take an early train, and spend the day in the country, eating when and what you like, and drinking, if you can get it, some good home-brewed ale. Go to bed early, and I will promise you that, upon the morning of the fifth, you will arrive in court at any rate relatively cheerful. A fortnight's holiday, when the sessions are over, will complete the good work.
Yrs. very sincerely,
Peter Harding.
VIII
To John Summers, M.B., at Actonhurst, Granville Road, Bristol.
91b Harley Street, W.,
April 12, 1910.
My dear Jack,
I expect that, by this time, a good long night and twenty-four hours' reflection will have restored your equanimity. For I can't imagine that much more would be necessary, although I can sympathise, with a very sincere fellow-feeling. Bless you, my boy, it's happened to all of us—and goes on happening too, if that's any comfort to you.
Why even young Calverley, who was in here just now, and who looks, as you know, almost supernaturally solemn for his five-and-thirty years, was the victim of a similar experience only last week, under circumstances far less considerate than yours. For the old lady—the scene was somewhere near Cadogan Square, and it was his second visit—received him in person, sitting very bolt upright.
"You're very young," she told him. "I don't like you. And you don't understand my case."
So you see your experience has not been by any means unique; and I really don't think that you have any ethical ground for complaint. The lady considered you, quite erroneously of course, to be too inexperienced, and having told you so in a letter that is by no means ungraceful, has called in another practitioner. He may be, as you say, an ignorant old rotter. But that is irrelevant. And the fact that you are a locum tenens doesn't, I think, alter the situation.
After all, we are merely the servants of the public, in spite of our M.D.'s and our hospital appointments. And we must face the fact with as much philosophy as we can gather about us. If they don't want us, well, they won't have us, and there's the bitter end of it. Coming fresh from the hospital, where one has been, perhaps, a house-surgeon or house-physician, into the entirely different atmosphere of private practice, it is sometimes a bit hard to realise this, and the process is always a painful one. For between the house-surgeon, clad in white, backed up by the accumulated authority and tradition of his hospital, surrounded by satellite nurses, and perhaps (dare I breathe it?) a wee bit lordly, and the very young man, in a new frock-coat, who will be ushered next week by a curious parlour-maid into a private drawing-room, there is all the difference in the world.
Moreover you seem to have got yourself into the sort of practice that for a young man is perhaps the most difficult to manage—a practice consisting almost entirely of prosperous and middle-class patients. I am not using the term middle-class—it is one that I particularly hate—in any derogatory sense, but faute de mieux as describing the very large stratum of society that pivots upon the shop-counter or the offices behind it. It is a stratum, as you will be sure to find out pretty soon, as kindly, honest, and really considerate as any other, and no less lacking in heroism and endurance. But it is one that has not yet fully acquired perhaps the habit of emotional suppression—the latest to be developed in social evolution—and is consequently a little addicted to superlatives, and still somewhat over-respectful, no doubt, to such mere externals as eloquence and millinery in other people. On the other hand it possesses an extremely accurate appreciation of the cash value of services rendered, and its consideration for a gentleman is by no means going to interfere with this when he comes before them as a salesman of physic and incidentally of advice. Moreover—and it's no good being hypersensitive about it—we mustn't forget that we too, as a profession, have but lately differentiated ourselves from the ranks of retail commerce—so lately, in fact, that the barber tradition is far from being entirely defunct.
I can remember very well, for instance, in my first locum, a fortnight after I had qualified, standing behind the counter of a little surgery in Shadwell in response to a patient who had tapped upon it loudly with the edge of his shilling, and summoned me with a call of "Shop." Would I take out his tooth for sixpence? No, I wouldn't. A shilling was the recognised fee for this operation. Well, what about ninepence? No, not even for ninepence.
"Orl right, guv'nor, 'eave away then," and the shilling went into the till, while the tooth, neatly wrapped in paper, was borne homewards for domestic inspection. Nor are such incidents by any means uncommon even to-day, and they add excellent lessons to those of Winchester and New.
Then, too, you mustn't overlook the fact that mere youth itself is under a greater disadvantage in medicine than in almost any other profession. The idea of a young advocate may fire the imagination. The idea of a young doctor only suggests distrust. A young lawyer, having the keener wit of youth, may be a safe adviser in our legal dilemmas. The young officer is the marrow of our army and navy. We may even venture to entrust our souls for spiritual guidance to some earnest young priest. But when it comes to our bodies, to the actual tenements that contain us, to such intimate events as percussion, palpation, the administration of tonics, or the insertion of knife and forceps—why then, you know, we must really insist upon maturity.
Your mere boys may administer our properties, or defend our countries, or even dally gently with our souls. But when it comes to our actual flesh and blood—well, we prefer the assistant or the locum to confine his attentions to the servants, the children, or the very poor. There are exceptions to the rule, no doubt. But I'm afraid that you will find it a very general one. I know that I did. And about the only comfort to be extracted from it is the fact that it may be regarded as an excellent medium for the acquirement of humility. And that's why, if your brothers in the Church or the Army become more lowly in spirit than yourself, it must be taken to argue in them a greater endowment of natural grace. For their teaching, in this respect, is not likely, I think, to be more thorough than yours. At the same time, there are, as you have just been finding out, some rather bitter moments for the newly fledged medico. I remember once, when I was about twenty-four, I think, and doing a locum in Portsmouth, being called up for the third night in succession to attend a confinement. It was three o'clock in the morning, and the night-bell stirred me out of the profoundest depths of slumber. Very weary, and very bleary, I remember cursing myself by all my gods for having set my hand to so laborious a plough as the pursuit of healing. But later, walking grimly down the empty streets in a pallid drizzle of rain, a certain sense of heroism came to my rescue. After all, it was rather a noble thing to be doing; and no doubt my patient would be proportionately grateful. As a matter of solemn fact, on setting eyes upon me, she lifted up her voice, and wept incontinently.
It was a perfectly natural thing to do, of course, in the light of after reflection. She had expected to see the genial, middle-aged physician who had so often attended her; and behold, in his stead, a pale-faced boy who might very nearly have been her son! It was no wonder that she burst into tears. But it was rather a blow for the poor hero. Afterwards, I think, having both made the best of a bad job, and observed an all-wise Nature introduce to us an entirely normal baby, we became quite friendly. And you will generally find, if you know your work, and refrain from dogma, that a little patience will heal most of these differences, while the cause of them, alas, will depart readily enough. It is good, no doubt, to be considered a wise old codger. But the pearl that pays for it is of great price. So don't be in too much of a hurry to part with it.
Your affect. uncle,
Peter Harding.
IX
To Harry Carthew, Trenant Hotel, Leeds.
91b Harley Street, W.,
April 15, 1910.
My dear Carthew,
I am very glad. But let me put it to you, sir—that is the phrase, isn't it?—that you really cured yourself.
Yrs. very sincerely,
Peter Harding.
X
To the Rev. Bruce Harding, S. Peter's College, Morecambe Bay.
91b Harley Street, W.,
April 20, 1910.
My dear Bruce,
The whole subject is so difficult, and one's opinions upon it, in cold ink as it were, are so liable to be misread, that I wish we could have had a quiet talk about it instead. But of course, since you cannot leave the school until the May holiday begins, and will have, if you decide to take so radical a step, to write to the boys' parents in India and Egypt, this is quite impossible. From your letter I seem to gather that this was your intention at the time of writing, and it is a decision in which I can sympathise with you very deeply.
For the whole ten years during which the school has been in your charge it has, to your almost certain knowledge, and according also to the testimony of many of your old pupils, been absolutely free from this "moral canker," as you describe it, that you have just discovered in it now. And even for a preparatory school, like yours, this is a record for which you are right to be profoundly thankful. It is one also that naturally throws up into a blacker relief the present condition of affairs. Moreover, having discovered its sphere to be at present fairly circumscribed—confined apparently to a single coterie of some half a dozen boys—the obvious course, as you say, would seem to be a prompt and thorough excision, pro bono publico.
And yet I believe that there's a better way—so much better that I am sure, before receiving this, you will have already found it, and abandoned your first decision. You won't expel the youngsters. You'll create instead a public feeling that will cure them. And you'll distribute them in such a way that each will be surrounded by it to his best advantage. I feel so certain that you'll have already made up your mind to do this that I won't put in any special pleading on behalf of these particular nippers or their parents abroad, although I sincerely believe that in taking so drastic a step as you suggest in your letter you would not only be magnifying their offence out of all proportion, but that the result all round would be more than harmful.
Instead, the point that I would most urgently put before you—in spite of many an old drawn battle upon the subject—is that the present little crisis would be an excellent excuse for reconsidering your position as regards giving to your scholars some definite physiological instruction. Because I am quite convinced that at least three-quarters of your moral canker would more properly be defined as physiological curiosity and that the whole problem is only secondarily one of actual perversity. Now your custom up to the present has had, I'll admit, a great deal to recommend it. For your boys come to you very young, usually at the age of nine or ten, shy and imaginative enough perhaps, but for the most part mentally sexless, and with an almost entirely objective outlook upon life. In other words, their inquisitiveness is eccentric rather than concentric. It's a happy condition, and one, as you say, that must be dealt with exceedingly carefully. When they leave you, somewhere about fourteen or fifteen years old, you usually take the opportunity of the good-bye interview to give them some warnings as to confronting moral dangers. But purposely, for fear of prematurely dissipating a desirable innocence, or awakening what you call an illegitimate curiosity, you keep your advice to generalities in all but the rarest instances. The possible stimulus to dangerous self-exploration in some unsuspecting youngster has always outweighed for you the advantages of a too direct explanation.
And this is where, in spite of your ten years' immunity, I feel sure that your methods have fallen short of the best. Self-exploration is only dangerous when it's blind, and if self-curiosity is ever illegitimate—and I don't see why it should be—we both know that some day or another it is going to become inevitable. We know more, because we are fully aware that some day or another it is going to be satisfied. And for the life of me I cannot see why mere physiological ignorance shouldn't be dispelled in the same routine that is employed for dispelling any other sort of ignorance, mathematical, historical, or what you will. It can be done, I am quite certain, without rubbing a particle off the sweet bloom of childhood, and it will go a very long way in preserving from a much ruder handling that of adolescence and early manhood. For it seems to me that the very fact of refraining from any definite instruction upon what, after all, from the purely physical point of view, is the bed-rock of our raison d'être, lends the subject in advance precisely that air of unnecessary and even shameful mystery which is responsible for about nine-tenths of our prudery on the one hand, and our obscenity on the other.
There's so little original in these reflections, they represent the attitude of so large a number of ordinarily thoughtful persons, that they may probably bore you. But, on the other hand, although there's a good deal of educational spade-work still before us, the day will certainly come, I think, when we shall treat and teach sexual phenomena in the same sane and self-consciousless way as we treat and teach the principles of personal cleanliness and physical hygiene. It will be a great day—may it come soon—and with its dawning will disappear not only the entire stock-in-trade of a not uncommon type of smoking-room raconteur, but a very considerable portion of actual and imaginative immorality. For if you cover up anything long enough, and refer to it slyly enough, you can be certain in the end of making its exposure indecent. If gloves became de rigueur for a couple of centuries we should raise prurient titters at the mention of a knuckle. No; it's air and sunlight and the salt of a bracing sanity in these matters that is our crying need.
"The sea," says Mr. Stacpoole in his clever romance "The Blue Lagoon," "is a great purifier," and proceeds, in a little piece of delicate and absolutely true psychology, to describe how Dick, the derelict boy on the coral island, instinctively ran naked with his sister in the presence of winds and waves, although some impulse, born probably of memory, bade him cover himself inland. But his decency was the same in either place.
And it's the sea air of a healthy knowledge and acceptance of these matters that we ought to be pumping through our schoolrooms, our dormitories, and our heart-to-heart talks with our children. Approach them frankly enough, and with no semblance of shamefacedness, and we needn't be afraid, I think, of any evil consequences. The guilty smile, the illicit joke, become disarmed in advance when their subject is treated in the same matter-of-fact and unmysterious fashion as those of geography or astronomy. And that is why, on the whole, I am opposed to the average "purity" volumes that are published for purposes of sexual instruction. For though they acknowledge this to be the solution of a large portion of the problem, they are so written, circulated, and advertised as to suggest rather an initiation into the unspeakable than a straightforward piece of natural history. And I suspect, as a consequence, that their sales are considerably larger among the prurient than the pious. An older generation was brought up on "Reading without tears." The next should have a companion volume "Biology without shame."
Forgive this sermon, but I have been confronted just lately with such a lot of human mental wreckage, the direct result, in my opinion, of the half-religious, half-fearful shrouds with which we always swaddle up these questions, that I rejoice in an opportunity for their wholesale condemnation. It was Mrs. Craigie, I think, who said that every girl of eighteen should read "Tom Jones." And one can see why, for it is a clean and wholesome history, if a little unspiritual. But her education, like her brother's, should not be left haphazard to the chance reading of a novel, or to the unnecessary blushes with which she ponders certain passages of Scripture.
Well, good-bye, old man, and God bless you. Chat it all over with the young sinners, and then work out a little course of lectures upon the reproduction of species. If you have never talked collectively to a roomful of boys upon the subject before, you will be surprised at the rapt interest and genuine solemnity with which they will attend to what you have to tell them. And the purity of your school won't suffer, I think, by its change of foundations.
Your affect. cousin,
Peter Harding.
XI
To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds.
91b Harley Street, W.,
April 22, 1910.
My dear Aunt Josephine,
I am glad to hear that the ring has been so completely successful in driving away the pains from your joints. I haven't actually heard of the wearing of a ring round the waist for pains elsewhere. But, as you say, it sounds a distinctly hopeful idea. With regard to the pills, so much depends, of course, on what you mean by being worth a guinea. If you are to measure these benefits in actual cash, I believe this amounts to about three farthings. But perhaps that is an unfair standard. No, I don't think that there is the least risk in taking four. I am sorry to hear of your gardener's troubles. But I should hardly have thought that it would be necessary to send him to Torquay. Has it ever occurred to you to suggest that he should sign the pledge?
Your affect. nephew,
Peter Harding.
XII
To Tom Harding, c/o the Rev. Arthur Jake Rugby.
91b Harley Street, W.,
April 24, 1910.
My dear Tom,
I have been expecting this letter of yours for a good many weeks. It would be almost true, I think, to say that I have been hoping for it. And yet each week of delay has been making, I believe, for safety. So strongly have I been feeling this last, indeed, that now your letter has actually come, and actually contains to so large an extent the sort of material that I expected to find in it, I am more than glad that you have hesitated so long before writing it. One must always stand away a little from the burning bush to discuss its relations with an everyday world. Close beneath it, in the first apprehension of its significance, there is no room for anything but adoration. And I am afraid this letter of mine, had you received it then, would have seemed to you, if not even a little blasphemous, at any rate lacking in true reverence. For although you haven't told me so, I expect that I shouldn't be far wrong in hazarding a guess that for the first month or two after your experience at Scarborough you told yourself that your father, and perhaps even your mother, were a little wanting in a true understanding of the miracle that had befallen you. It was all so new, so overwhelming; it threw such a strange light not only upon your own individual life, past and to come, but upon the sum total of all other life as well, that you felt its wonder to be almost incompatible with the humdrum, commonplace existence that we and most of our friends appeared to be leading.
Had we known it, as it was then shining upon you, surely we should have been so different! You felt, I think, as if you had suddenly found us out. And though you didn't love us any the less for this—perhaps even loved us more, in another kind of way—you were quite sure that if you hadn't actually outstripped us by this single leap into the light, we had at any rate dropped down a little from the high plane on which, till then, you had never doubted that we lived.
How, for example, in a world that teemed with sin, could the governor be so keen on catching trout? How was it, with these dark, tremendous millions hemming him in, that you had never seen him hand away a tract, or preach the Word in season? How came it, alas, that he could even sometimes say "damn" when he broke a bootlace, or waste some unreturnable hour over a rubber of bridge? Of course with the mater it was different. Maters are different, and I'm glad you thought of that, Tom. But come now, didn't it run somehow in this way? Why naturally it did, and it meant that your discovery had already begotten another. It meant that you had suddenly realised the weak humanity of your parents. But you must try to be kind to it.
And that's how it is with all great discoveries, Tom, in every branch of life. First one is struck with their extraordinary, their dazzling, simplicity. Belief—life; acceptance—salvation; and you had never somehow thought of it before! How simple, and by its very simplicity how god-like, how utterly convincing!
And then, in this new irrefragable conception, everything (even the governor) has to be reconsidered, appraised, condemned, readjusted, and inspired afresh. What is this going to mean to me personally? What does it mean to other people? And again, what responsibility towards them does its possession entail on myself? These are the inevitable questions that follow. The putting of them is the second stage in the general process. The very fact of their being put at all shows the discovery to be already at work. And the answers, if the discovery is worth anything at all, and we have postulated it to be a great one, can be of only one kind. I must pursue it to the end. I must follow out its leading as far as my humanity will let me. And I must communicate the results to my fellows according to the best of my abilities. That is the third stage, and it is coterminous with life, Tom. Because, you see, all great discoveries, like yours, contain within them the germ-cells of a thousand others. To discover one or two of these, to nourish them, and perhaps even, if one is very fortunate, to enable them in some degree to fructify, is more than a life-work for most of us.
So true is this, and so endless and apparently diverse appear to be their various possibilities, that we are apt very easily (especially in middle life) to forget the splendid, sweeping simplicity of the initial idea, just as we are equally apt to overrate, perhaps, the importance of those particular germs that we have, by temperament and circumstance, elected to serve, and to underrate the value of those to which our neighbours have been attracted. And it is because of the first of these things that I want to thank you for your letter, and tell you how very much I value it. You have reminded me again of something that I would never like to forget. You have re-created for me the right atmosphere. Belief is life, Tom, in a great many more senses than one. Hang on to that like a limpet, and the peace of heart that means strength of hand will never leave you. But it's because of the second of these things that I want you to hesitate just a little longer before you commit yourself to the proposition in your letter.
To be a lay evangelist, something like the gentleman whose services you attended, may be as high and noble a life as any that the world has to offer you. As I conceive it, lived to its greatest advantage, it must be an exceedingly difficult one, which should only of course make it the more worth living. But to say that it is the best worth living, while it may be true for yourself, is certainly not true as a general principle. There is no one sort of life that is the best worth living. And in considering the question, as you certainly must, I think you ought to be very careful to keep this before your mind. Ways in life are not to be selected like articles from a shop-window. You cannot ask for the best, and go away with it in your pocket. The best worth living life is already inside you. And your new discovery is not going to determine its nature—heredity and a thousand other things have already done that—but rather its quality. You may be cut out for a lay, or any other kind of evangelist. I hadn't somehow suspected it in you. But I may easily have been wrong. Yet I think you mustn't take any definite vows upon your shoulders—at any rate, for some time—and probably, I suspect, for several years.
Promises of this sort, you see, are so very much better left unmade. For in the first place, the remembrance of them is more than likely to blur the gladness, and consequent usefulness, with which you will obey your temperament and tendencies in later years, should these determine for you some different course. And in the second, they may even, standing upon some mistaken scruple of conscience, succeed in forcing you, against your real calling, into an altogether unsuitable career.
Meanwhile you need have no fears, I think, in leading your normal, probationary life. You have the opportunity of University education before you. And that, at any rate, can do you no harm, and will probably be of extreme use to you, whatever your ultimate decision. You want to find out the truth, to impart the truth, and to help your fellow-men to lead better lives. Very well then, if there's a God, Tom, as you and I believe, you must be just the material that He would most greatly care to use. So why not leave it at that for a little while? Want to do the right thing, and so do the next one; and you'll find, I think, that the precise nature of your own particular right thing, evangelist or engineer, will pretty certainly settle itself.
Your aff. father,
P. H.
XIII
To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone.
c/o Dr. Robert Lynn,
Applebrook, Devon,
May 3, 1910.
My dear Hugh,
I have just come back to read your letter from one of those super-days of which even the happiest life can contain, I imagine, no more than a handful. Of merely good days I can remember many enough—a sufficient number, at any rate, to absorb very happily the memory of their less favoured brethren. And several of them remain distinct by virtue of some outstanding incident or emotion that they contained or inspired. But most, I think, have become blended into a general peaceable impression of past contentment. To use a popular Americanism, they were good times, and usually real good times at that.
But of these super-days, these Olympians among mundane experiences, no man can expect very many, and I have been, I suspect, as fortunate as most—in any case so fortunate as to be more than grateful, notwithstanding the tiny, struggling sense in me (a legacy of superstition, I suppose, from some far-back ancestors) that so exquisite an enjoyment must surely prelude some equivalent disaster. They are not, as a rule, I think, critical days, at any rate in the ordinarily accepted sense of the term, though I can remember perhaps a couple that in a small fashion might answer this description.
The first of them was in my fifteenth year, and was the last day (at the end of six weeks' strict training) of the House Races at school. Our four had started bottom of the river, and day by day had crept up until, in the evening of this particular one, we were to row the favourites, School House, for the cup. When I call them the favourites, they were this merely in a sporting sense. Because, I think, the succession of good fights put up by our own insignificant little house, added to a certain reputation for conceit that most School Houses would seem to possess, had won pretty nearly the whole of the rest of the school to our support. As a very junior and inferior oarsman (and I was more than conscious of this at the time, I remember) I can claim no particular share, other than an accidental one, in this series of victories. I had been one of two candidates for the post of bow, and being a few pounds heavier than my opponent, had managed to secure the thwart. But my mere undeservedness did not lessen—in fact, I think, it enhanced—the almost miraculous sweetness of those wonderful twelve hours. To be gazed at surreptitiously by yet smaller boys in a patently envious admiration; to be patted on the back by older ones who had never hitherto noticed my existence; to be let out of school half an hour earlier by the form-master, with a jocose phrase about privileged heroes—all these things wove a magic round my way that no anxiety about the coming race was strong enough to mar, and that has survived a good many years. Of the race itself I can remember, curiously, nothing but the peculiar hollow echo of our oars as we came through the Town Bridge, and the bare fact that we succeeded in winning, to the supposed vast humiliation of our superior enemies. But what I do remember most distinctly is being invited to tea with the captain, a big man and a monitor. It was a splendid, god-like meal, in which the six weeks' abstention (mistaken, no doubt, but none the less heroic) from sweets and pastries was utterly forgotten. And there stands out to me the doughnut that dismissed them to oblivion, a doughnut of so succulent a clamminess that it is unlikely, I think, ever to have had its peer—a very Lycidas among doughnuts.
The second day that occurs to me is that in which, playing through, for the first time in many years, to the Finals, the Hospital XV was defeated after a gruelling ninety minutes by the team that represented Guy's. This must have been some eight or nine years later, and its essence is contained in my memory by five perfect minutes, gloriously relaxed, tired but hard, in a hot bath at Richmond.
Now looking back, I know these to have been super-days, and they were, as I have explained, in a very minor sense critical perhaps. But they were exceptions, I think, to the general rule. For though the critical day, the long-looked-forward-to, the apparently, and indeed, chronologically speaking, the really important day may be a good one, and contain great things, yet in later life, at any rate, there is an inseparable anxiety about it of which the super-day knows nothing. The day one qualified, for example, and became by one scratch of the pen licensed to sign death-certificates, exempt from serving on fire brigades, and worth (on paper) from three to five guineas a week as a locum tenens, was, no doubt, a notable one. The day one proposed oneself in a kind of stammering paralysis as a possible husband to the only possible girl—and was unbelievably accepted; the marriage day; the day when one was appointed to the hospital staff; the day when, in a cool and blinded room, one stooped to kiss the tired but joyful eyes of the first baby's mother—these are the dates over which, most probably, the outside historian would choose to pour the vials of his fancy. But I doubt if in any life these are ever the super-days. They are days to remember; but at the same time they are days that one is glad to have seen closed. They have beheld Destiny too visibly hanging on so desperately fine a balance.
No, they come, these gift-days from the gods, even as they list; and they refuse to be classified. The most constant feature about them, I think, is that they rather generally appear during a holiday. And this, I believe, is because they depend so much on a certain purely bodily fitness. I hesitate a little to be very dogmatic about this, because the older one grows the more spiritual, and consequently deeper, becomes their joy. And yet, for the majority of us, at any rate, I am certain that the temple must be at least in passable order if the spirit within is to look abroad with an unworried heart, and thoroughly spring-cleaned before its householder, free from domestic cares, can roam joyously at will to find those rarer flowers that he's so seldom free enough to seek. And there lies my stock argument for all misguided religious workers who won't take holidays, and incidentally the real damnation of all systems of monastic self-mortification. A sound body not only means a sound mind, but an untrammelled spirit. For a spirit that has constantly to be down on its knees stopping up some leak in the basement cannot possibly find much time for walking in the garden with God. And if it's a self-made or self-permitted leak, it hasn't even the excuse of being engaged in some equally necessary occupation.
Yet apart from this, there isn't a doubt, I think, that these super-days stand out in memory, and gain their constructive force less by reason of their muscular exaltation than by virtue of their spiritual vision. For even in the days of the doughnut and the hot bath this last wasn't altogether absent. The doughnut marked the closing of an epoch and the dawn of its successor. It meant the passage—and to a certain extent the conscious passage, too—of an irresponsible childhood into a region of honourable reputation. It was a doughnut that had been bestowed by the hands of a captain. While the hot bath, careless of defeat, merely whispered how great had been the game. And in their successors of later years this spiritual factor has tended to emphasise itself in an ever-growing proportion. Wordsworth might almost have selected the theme, I think, for an Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Middle Age. I can remember one such day on Butser Hill, during a snatched week-end in Hampshire, and another that is summed up for me in a bend of heather-bordered road, turning, at a hot day's end, towards Stronachlacher and a green lawn above Loch Katrine.
And now, with an equal unexpectedness, there has come the latest of them all.
You know how it goes on a holiday—the holiday, that is, of a man to whom holidays are rare and very blessed. For the first day your mind has not yet freed itself from town and toil and the hundred other interests for which they stand. Nor has your body quite overcome the lassitude inspired by pavements, and encouraged by taxi-cabs and broughams. Your host, too, wants to learn the latest tidings from the great metropolis; what So-and-so thinks of the political situation; the prevailing opinion on stocks and shares; the last pronouncements on art and music; the newest good thing in plays. And perhaps even, if you chance to be of the same profession, you fall to talking shop. Not even the magic of plunging streams and deep, rock-shaded pools is quite sufficient, for the moment, to dispel the urban atmosphere that still clings about you. Your unused muscles remind you of the reason for their flabbiness. Your eye, too long engaged upon other sights, is not yet quick enough to mark the swift rise among those ripples at the tail of the pool. And you return from your first day's fishing a little annoyed with yourself, aching as regards the wrist and thigh, and more often than not with a light or empty bag. Yet even so, mark the change in your after-dinner talk! Smoking there round the hall fire, surrounded by rods and guns and cases of fish and game, you no longer deliver yourself of opinions on the rubber market or the precise value of the latest vaccine. You discuss instead the reason why you missed that pounder under Applebrook Bridge. And you sit for long minutes staring through a blue tobacco haze into the wood-fire's heart, presumably thinking, but in reality doing nothing of the kind. For though the gates of your brain are open, it is to speed rather than receive impressions. And by to-morrow the overcrowded hostel of your mind will be standing with doors ajar for its lustier moorland visitors.
So it has been with me, Hugh, and to-day, the third of my holiday, has been one of those great ones of which I have been writing. Talking sleepily in bed last night to Esther I had announced an intention, received by her with a discreet appearance of belief, of sallying out early to try a couple of those big pools at the junction of the Applebrook and Dart. But the servant with the shaving water found us both comfortably asleep at half-past eight, with two silvery morning hours unfished except in dreams. Dear me, but what a glorious air, and how divine a whisper, too frail to be called a scent, of delicately browning trout!
For old Bob had been up betimes, and, in spite of a powder of frost on the riverside gorse and alders, had succeeded in beguiling half a dozen plump little troutlings into providing the hors-d'œuvre to a substantial three-decker breakfast. The family had already made their meal, by the time we got downstairs, and old Bob, ruddy and contented, surveyed us approvingly from the hearthrug.
"If the sun didn't find you yesterday," he chuckled, "I fancy the breeze did," and Mrs. Bob murmured something to Esther about hazeline ointment. A long round would prevent Bob from doing any more fishing for the rest of the day, but a touch of south in the wind had decided him that Esther and I must settle upon the East Dart for our third day's sport.
"The wind should help you," he said; "and you ought to have a pretty good time," and became forthwith a prophet, though not concerning trout. I'm not going to bother you with details of our angling. It was very arduous, for the wind changed almost as soon as we had started, and blew down the steep valley at a good many miles an hour. But it was at least exciting, and we lunched in a hail-storm on sandwiches and fruit pies, conveyed to us across the moor by Nancy on her pony.
Do you remember Nancy Lynn, a blush-rose little baby-girl a dozen years ago? But I'm sure you do, and I wish you could have seen her to-day as she rode down to us along the steep path to the river, straddle-legged on her Dartmoor pony, bareheaded, and the colour of a ripe chestnut—lustiest of little animals, but with eyes, as she cuddled her pony's nose, that have already learned to spell mother, and sometimes wonder what it means.
After lunch, Esther went home with her to meet some friends of Mrs. Lynn at tea, and I was to fish a mile or two further up stream, returning later in the evening. But smoking my pipe under the stone wall that had sheltered our meal, it was a long time before I again took up my rod. And instead I sat there under the clearing sky—a great gulf now of tear-washed blue, deepening into an immeasurable calm behind these trivial clouds—and watched the two of them making their leisurely way along the hill. And seen thus, at a little distance, they might very easily have been sisters. There was the same spring in their boyish tread, and, could I have seen it, I have no doubt that there was the same kind of look in their clear, contented eyes. For what Nancy now was, Esther so obviously once had been. And what Esther had become, Nancy in her kind would also grow to be—and subtly, to some small extent, because of Esther. Indeed it might almost have been Esther as she was, walking pleasantly with Esther as she is, the child's instinct of living only each moment's life, clinging happily to the woman's deeper philosophy of doing precisely the same. I wonder if you see what I'm driving at. It all looks so commonplace on paper. They were really of course two ordinary people, a young girl and a woman, disappearing down a path. But to an elderly physician (a thousand feet up, and on a super-day, mind you) they seemed suddenly to be something rather more. For swinging hands as they walked, half-way between the changing water and the changeless Tor, it was as though now they held visibly between them some mystical arm's-length of the secret core of life—something that was at once common to their age and youth, and was yet apart from both; something, independent of circumstance, that was swinging for a benediction over the years that lay between them. And I'll tell you what it was, Hugh, or at any rate what I knew it to be this afternoon. It was just the Ultimate Truth about things. And behold it was very good!
So that's why I've written you this letter in answer to your sad one of this evening.
For though there is said to be a kind of comfort, I believe, in realising that others are suffering like ourselves, I doubt if this is ever a comfort worth having. And, on the other hand, there is a certain amount of real satisfaction in knowing, at the end of a blank day, that your neighbour, at any rate, has had a bit of luck. And so because you write to me de profundis, your bronchial mucous membrane being more than usually congested, I'm deliberately crowing to you from my little hill-top. But there's another reason, Hugh. Do you remember, twelve years ago, facing me on Believer Bridge, and holding out to me a lean brown hand to grasp? I was there this afternoon, and that nice sunburnt girl has now got a family of six.
"Peter," you said to me, "this has been a great day. It has been worth living for. I wouldn't have missed it for whatever's got to come. And if you're a real pal you won't let me forget that."
And so I have reminded you. That was one of your super-days, and you chose to make it your throne of judgment upon life. And you were right, Hugh, because you judged by the best, and life, like genius, must always be greater than even its highest gifts to us. Some day, when I too am glowering upon it from the windward side of a bronchitis-kettle, I hope there'll be an equally tactful fellow to remind me of this. Perhaps you'll be the fellow.
Ever yours,
P. H.