91b Harley Street, W.,
October 3, 1910.
My dear Hugh,
When you write and ask me to tell you what books I read during my illness I can see an ancient accusation of yours peering at me behind the question—as though you had visibly added that, except when indisposed, I never read books at all. And if it weren't that I too find other people's reading so interesting, though less informing perhaps than their pictures, I might possibly stand upon my dignity, and decline to supply you with an answer. And in any case, now that I come to reflect a little, this will be rather a difficult thing to do. For having got me at a disadvantage, you see, I could no longer pick and choose, as is my wont when the health within me is rude and exacting. I could no longer demand haughtily of a book that it must make me read it, or remain within its covers for ever unread. My defences were down, and I had perforce to roll over, hands up, for anything in the shape of book with which Accident and Mudie had happened to endow my house. And as a result I read half a dozen novels that, as the Americans say, left me cold, although I must needs give them the credit of having whiled away the time. Moreover, before dismissing them thus unkindly, I must remember that they were each the work of somebody's hand and brain, and the hard work too—at any rate so far as the hand was concerned—as anyone who has tried to put eighty thousand words of even unimaginative English upon paper would surely bear witness. Some of it too, one could see, was the rather tired work of minds that should really have been (perhaps only too willingly) lying fallow of production. And I think that I noticed this particularly in an altogether unimportant little volume called "Daisy's Aunt" by Mr. E. F. Benson, that may well stand for a sorrowful example. It's true that it was merely a two-shilling story; but even so, it was surely an unworthy one. And yet, I suppose, there is a public that likes to devour these descriptions of very ordinary London drawing-rooms and very usual Thames-side bungalows—that would fain listen to even the weariest repetitions of the somewhat annoying slang of the "oh you heavenly person" type that for the moment is being affected by Mr. Benson's "quite nice people." And having thus found, or created, such a public, and designed the precise bait that it requires, I suppose that one is justified in hooking, as often as may be, one's share of their two-shilling pieces. But alas for the artist in Mr. Benson, in whose books there have been passages good enough of their kind to have made, perhaps, three or four pieces of real literature that few, I suppose, would have bought, but that some, at any rate, would have liked to keep upon their shelves. And yet again, who is to say that Mr. Benson (as representing not a few) has not after all chosen his better way? For if his popularity has been costly, it is at any rate of a clean and healthy sort, and one that may well, perhaps, be substituting itself for vogues unworthier and less wholesome.
They form an interesting study, these three brothers, not merely in heredity of talent, but because, as it seems to me, they stand very high in that small but growing band of really able writers, who possess also the knack of a popular appeal. The sons of a religious, scholarly, and discreet father, who himself had the power of attracting both attention and success, these qualities, with no suspicion of a more wayward genius, have descended upon them in very generous measure. The social sense, the faculty of choosing the right friends, and a gift for getting them on paper; the high purpose, clerically moulded; the gentle inward warring of trained intellect and instinctive orthodoxy; to each has fallen a share of his father's mantle, wherewith to make himself a garment. And the mental pabulum that they provide is just what is wanted by a large number of active, intelligent men and women to whom genius is at all times unsympathetic; and by the yet greater company—including most of us, I suppose—to whom its strongest appeal is a matter of mood and place. Every generation seems to provide itself with such writers, and as a rule rewards them well; and while, no doubt, it is genius alone that survives, with a light that can never remain hidden, the others, by their more instant and transient appeal, do yeoman work, and are gathered honourably to their fathers. For we may not always be tuned to the tang of Stevenson or the burr of Dr. John Brown. But we are seldom incapable of sitting with enjoyment at some College Window, or allowing the lesser voices to prepare us for those that are mightier than they.
And never, perhaps, has a generation possessed so many of these. Never certainly has their level of eloquence been so high. Hichens and Locke and Anthony Hope, Phillpotts, Marriott, Munro, and Wells, with Hewlett and de Morgan a little nearer, perhaps, to the stars, and a score of others close upon their heels—how sound and various is their artistry, and how consistent, as a whole, is the quality of their output. For this, one thinks, must be the besetting danger of all these skilled professionals—to avoid, on the one hand, the Scylla of over-repetition (to which most of the monthly magazines were long ago safely anchored) and on the other, the more dangerous Charybdis of a too venturesome novelty. Upon the first (and still confining oneself to the more considerable writers) Mr. Benson, the essayist, for example, would seem, more nearly than many, to be in danger of foundering. While upon the second I can think of Conan Doyle as having bumped as badly as most writers of an equal eminence. For while there is no man who can spin a better yarn for a dull journey (even if he has never given us a Brushwood Boy), his particular talent is about as at home among the delicate domesticities of his "Duet with an Occasional Chorus" as would be some genial pugilist with the "Pot-pourri of a Surrey Garden." And yet, while one could pile up examples of sad wreckage upon both these rocks, the wonder, after all, is that there is really so little of it.
Mr. Benson, no doubt, will put up his helm in time; and Sir Arthur has been wise enough, as far as I know, to avoid any further emulation of Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Mitford. But it is, perhaps, to Mrs. Humphry Ward that one naturally seems to turn for a demonstration of the completely median course—so rigidly median indeed, in its lofty mediocrity, that I am sometimes at a loss to account for her very great popularity even among (as the critics have called it) the circulating-library public. For though she has a gift, and a very considerable one, for bringing together the materials—a little machine-made, perhaps—of dramatic incident, one may search her books in vain for a single thrill that they have produced; while of humour they contain not a semblance. Indeed they form, as it seems to me, a long series of admirably well-laid fires, for which only the matches are wanting. As Dr. Brown would have said, she is the Maker, not the Mother, of her books. And I think hers must be the twentieth-century triumph of the college-bred lady inspector.
It's strange how increasingly one misses, when it is absent, this underlying sense of humour; so much so indeed that one perceives it more and more to be a sine qua non of all towering and durable achievement. Given Meredith's humour, how Hardy, with his first-hand observation, his extraordinary detachment, and the beautiful lucidity of his English, would have loomed above the creator of Sir Willoughby. With humour for its lightning, how Tess would have stricken us to the heart. And how poor a substitute for it is irony, howsoever its subjects may deserve it. To withstand the years it must, no doubt, surround itself with the stronger qualities—depth and simplicity and desire—or Barrie, least of the Immortals, would be among their giants; and Jacobs would be knocking at their door. But that Olympus demands it let all testify who have tried to love Sordello, or watched Jude fade ever deeper into his obscurity, or read again, a generation later, the rhapsodies of Inglesant and Elsmere. There are a few exceptions of course, chiefly, I think, in the sphere of the short story, the mere conte, and among the poets, of whom perhaps Wordsworth is the one that springs most readily to the mind. By the way, I saw a discussion (a rather unkindly one) in one of the magazines, a year or two ago, as to the worst line in reputable poetry, and I am rather afraid that last Sunday I discovered it, and that Wordsworth must be regarded as its sponsor. Here it is, and one grain of humour would surely have made it impossible.
Spade! with which Wilkinson has tilled his land.
And yet he has written a sonnet or two, and at least one ode, that are as immortal, I suppose, as anything in letters.
But I don't seem to have told you very much about my bedside books. And the truth of it is that "Daisy's Aunt" is the only title that I can remember, though it may conveniently be stretched, perhaps, to embrace them all. For it concluded, if I remember rightly, with the matrimony of four persons; and the others also are now a blur to me of ultimate marriages—marriages between pathological pianists and high-born, introspective damsels; and marriages between athletic young gentlemen, good at puncture-mending, and the distressed maidens whose tyres had become deflated.
Of the books, on the other hand, that have made me read them—rare and beloved visitors—there have been fewer this year than usual, though it is I, and not the books, that must bear the chief blame for this. The two latest of these, separated by an interval of months, and both, I believe, already elderly as the lives of modern novels go, are "The Cliff End" and "Captain Margaret." The first of these delighted me from cover to cover, in spite of some exaggerations of character-drawing and dialogue; and I reverently bow my head to its author as having made himself at a bound the laureate, not only of the bath-tub, but of that peculiarly distressing variety of it that is very wide and shallow, with a dimple in it that cracks when you stand upon it, and a capacity for water that no housemaid has ever satisfied. It is perhaps too late for the nature of this vessel to change. But never more, with that rosy vision of sponging maidenhood before my eyes, shall I regard it as anything but blessed.
So it's a book for which I should like to prophesy life, though with less certainty, perhaps, than "Captain Margaret," upon the deck of his Broken Heart, carries the very germ of it in his delicate hands. For to his eldorado of dreams we have all of us, at one time or another, turned our eyes. And in his schooner might have sailed any Quixote of history, lucky indeed to find a Cammock for his navigator.
And yet who am I to be thus prophesying so boldly? For the third of my books has been a collection of Oscar Wilde's contributions to the "Pall Mall Gazette," full of such forecasts, and written, too, by a practised hand. Has one half of them been verified? I think not. And yet I suspect that few critics could more equably confront a reprinting of their twenty-year-old opinions. Looking through this book, I read, for example, whole pages devoted to the novel of Miss So-and-so whom one would have supposed, in the eighties, to have been an emerging George Eliot. And how desperately must the praise have fired her to further efforts. Yet what, in 1910, has become of poor Miss So-and-so; and where are those great works that were so certainly to be? There is the writer himself too, so young then, with his brilliant flippancies—his impeachment of the British Cook, for instance, with her passion for combining pepper and gravy and calling it soup, and her inveterate habit of sending up bread poultices with pheasant—and all his promises of grace.
So, upon the whole, it's a sad book; and here, for a brisker comment upon all that I have been writing, comes a volume of American essays that has just been lent to Esther, wherein I am positively assured that the volumes of Mrs. Humphry Ward are quite dangerously immoral! While there, upon a chair, lies a novel, "Mr. Meeson's Will," that Rupert Morris has just recommended to me as being his beau-ideal of a really outstanding story. So let me lie low. I have spoken out my literary heart to you, as any man, on occasion, should have the courage to do. But now let me lie low. For by what standards am I judging, after all, who have only spent an hour in Chicago, and never a moment east of Suez?
You will remember Morris, whom you met here during his last visit to England. And as you remember him so he is, with perhaps an added grey hair or two in his moustache, and a few more upon his temples. For the rest, he is just as lean and brown and boyish as he has always been, and with a touch of deference in his first greetings to Esther and me that has survived from the school-days, when he was a comparative nipper, and that he will carry, I suppose, since he is English of the English, until common earth shall level us all. He was looking, when he first came in, rather hesitating and ill at ease, with his title, as it were, tucked awkwardly under his arm. Much like this I have seen him at school, on some Old Boys' Day, coming back to the pavilion after making his century, with an uncomfortable shove at his cap, and something about the bowlers having been "dead off their luck."
Finding us alone however, and not disposed to worry him, he cheered up amazingly, and was soon chattering to us briskly about his various adventures. His personal part in these would seem as a rule to have been conspicuous by its dullness; but the adventures themselves were well worth hearing about. And it was only quite accidentally, as he was leaving for Stoke, that we discovered him to be seconded for some special duties in the colonies—"imperial defence, don't you know, and all that sort of thing; rather an interesting job."
And did I tell you, by the way, that the Poles have bequeathed us their baby during their visit to Italy? Esther has just brought her in, and she is staring at me now with the solemnest eyes in creation—little pools of Siloam, but with the angels just going to be busy. I must go to them, and be healed.
Ever yrs.,
P. H.
91b Harley Street, W.,
October 18, 1910.
My dear Jack,
I have just received your letter, and also the accountant's statement as regards Dr. Singleton's books; and I have instructed the solicitors to sell out enough of your stock to buy the quarter-share of his practice upon which you and he have agreed. If you can manage to obtain with it an equal proportion of his skill, kindliness, and cheerful adequacy you may be quite sure that the advantage of the bargain will not be altogether upon his side. For though books are important of course, if the man who keeps them is sound you needn't trouble your head so very much about them. And Singleton is sound through and through—not exactly one of those brilliant men, perhaps, of whom, as operating surgeons, Sir Frederick Treves has declared himself to be so justly timid, but what is far better, one of those level-headed, big-hearted general practitioners, tender of hand and essentially careful, in whose professional history mistakes have been, and will continue to be, practically unknown.
Moreover he was never, even as a student, one of those people who have set out to purchase skill in their own profession by the sacrifice of very nearly every other human interest. Nihil humani a me alienum puto has been his own as well as his hospital's motto. And you must some day get him to tell you the story of how an odd little insight into esoteric Buddhism that he was once curious enough to obtain became the means of saving the life, to say nothing of the sanity, of one of the most valuable men of our time. That late cut of his, too, is still well worth seeing; and there are not many of my friends who can go straighter to the heart of a book or a picture—that is, if the book or the picture has a heart to be got to.
He may not be able to excise a Gasserian ganglion, or know very much about the researches of Calmette or von Pircquet. But he knows precisely when to call in the men who do. And he's just the sort of assistant with whom they feel safe in setting out to work. While, on the other hand, upon a hundred points—little everyday problems of medical practice, unclassified ailments that have never got into the text-books or been dignified with a Latin name, doubtful beginnings of more definite illnesses, their home-treatment, and the adequate settlement of the domestic problems that they involve—there isn't a man in Harley Street who could give a more valuable opinion. And he has performed a tracheotomy with his pocket-knife and a hair-pin, five miles from anywhere, in the heart of the Hampshire downs.
Such men are not only the pillars of our profession, but its topmost pinnacles, even if the wreaths and the knighthoods but seldom come their way. I am saying all this because I think that I can detect in your letter, and certainly in the newer generation of qualifying students, a kind of reluctance about going into general practice, as if this were in a way an admission of failure, a sort of dernier ressort. Whereas of course there is no point of view from which such a way of looking at it is at all justifiable. General practice is at least as difficult, if it is to be carried on well and successfully, as any special practice can be, and probably more so; for the G.P. has to live continually, as it were, with the results of his handiwork. He is always liable to meet his failures round the next corner; and his mistakes may quite easily rent the pew behind him in the parish church. The consultant, on the other hand, comes into the family life from afar, and returns again, an hour or two later, to the seclusion of his private fastness. He has brought down his little bit of extra technical skill or knowledge. He has used it for good or ill. And the results do not follow him, save indirectly, and at a very comfortable distance. But the G.P. who has taken upon himself the responsibility of calling him in must needs still bear upon his shoulders not only the anxiety that heralds ultimate success, but a large share of the possible obloquy that may follow failure.
Moreover, in all the hundred extraneous interests that are involved, his advice becomes of paramount importance. This would be the best room for the patient from the point of view of quietness and aspect. But that, on the other hand, is the room that he has been used to. His favourite books and pictures surround him there in the old accustomed order. Does the doctor think it better for him to be moved? His wife, his mother, or his sister are anxious to nurse him. Are they strong enough or skilful enough? What is the doctor's opinion on this point? Here is a telephone message from the office. A disturbing point has arisen in the conduct of a great business, and should be dealt with promptly. Are we to worry the patient with it now, or postpone the settlement, with the possibilities of greater anxieties later on? Let us wait, at any rate, until the doctor comes.
And from this household he has to drive home by a private school where lies some boy with a cheerful countenance and a suspicious red rash on his chest. It would never do to create a false alarm. But, on the other hand, it would be more than disastrous to let the origin of some sweeping epidemic go free for convenience' sake. And here is a servant-maid in the surgery with a throat that looks as diphtheritic as a throat can well be; and she comes from a dairy farm that supplies half the town with milk, under the eyes of a government inspector; while the rector's wife, nervous, and uncomfortably near forty, is expecting her first, long-looked-for baby some time this afternoon.
It may take a good man to remove successfully an adherent appendix or an obscure tumour of the brain, or to diagnose some out-of-the-way lesion of a heart valve. But such a man, after all, has spent the greater portion of his professional life in dealing with no other subjects but these. And it must surely require at least an equal equipment, after its own kind, to deal wisely and rapidly with such variously conflicting problems as I have just been describing.
You are probably becoming a little bored by these commonplace remarks of mine. But they are the sort of truism that will generally bear an occasional reconsideration. And if I have a very private opinion, to which you cannot subscribe, that the really able general practitioner is perhaps the very best man in our ranks bar none, I am quite willing to concede this extra superiority if you will grant him at least an equal eminence to that of Sir Grosvenor le Draughte, as Mr. Russell has called him in one of his recent books.
So go into your practice with a good heart. Your experience as a locum in Bristol and Shropshire will have prepared you for any little mortifications that may be in waiting during your first few months. You will be used to the disheartening fall of the countenance that greets the junior partner when his senior was expected. And you will accept with a grave countenance and an inward chuckle your knowledge of the extremely frank criticism that is likely to herald and succeed your first few visits. Even now there's a letter upon my desk from a disrespectful young lady who shall be nameless. A new curate has made his initial appearance in an Eastbourne drawing-room. "He shook hands just like a baby," she writes, "and he stopped to tea, and he sprawled all over the table, and he has quite nice eyes, but his mouth is just like cook's when she's having one of her windy spasums." And if sixteen can rise to heights like this, what about eighteen and twenty and twenty-two? Nor are curates, alas, the only legitimate prey. I wonder if there's a girls' school in your practice?
You may lament too, for a little while perhaps, the slow dawning of confidence in your new patients. But before very long you may even be rather overwhelmed (quite privately of course) by the freedom and completeness with which it is accorded you. And above all things, be just your natural self in dealing with them, forgetting, if you can, that you have ever even heard of such an attribute as a good bedside manner.
This reminds me that only last week, in a railway carriage, I overheard two young ladies discussing a very sympathetic physician well known to us both. One of them was wondering why he had always been so successful. "Oh, that," said the other cheerfully, "is because he's so frightfully good at comforting the relatives—afterwards, you know."
If your news must be bad, tell it soberly and promptly. It's seldom—very seldom—wise to conceal it for some dubious temporary benefit. And if you are in doubt about any of their maladies let them know it quite frankly, explaining to them in language suited to their degree of education and intelligence exactly why this should be the case.
There's been a good deal written lately about the personal factor in treatment, the Psychology of the Physician, and the mental therapeutics at his command. And I even saw a letter in the "Lancet," a few weeks ago, urging that the practical application of Personality in the sick-room should form one of the recognised subjects of the medical curriculum. But in the first place, I'm exceedingly doubtful if the modesty of our profession is so excessively marked as to demand for its correction a course of instruction in the conscious prescribing of its own personality. And in the second, I fail to see how this latter could ever be done without, by the very act, considerably altering that uncertain quantity, at any rate so far as its victim was concerned. And what would one's ego be like, I wonder, after ten years' conscientious labour? So I shouldn't worry too much about your personality if I were you. It will be a good thing, no doubt, to get all you can into it by encouraging such tentacles as it may put forth to the sun and the breeze. But what other people are to get out of it is a matter with which you may quite properly, I think, be too busy to concern yourself.
While I'm still in the pulpit, let me recommend you to husband your energies. Don't play tennis all the afternoon (even with Amaryllis) if you have been up all night. Go to sleep in the hammock, instead, over a book or a paper or a letter from Uncle Peter. And don't forget sometimes to say your prayers. For whatever may be one's private notions as to their ultimate Destination; whether one affects a belief in some beneficent Overlord, once incarnate; or regards God as the ever-growing sum of all higher human volitions; or, remembering this infinitesimal particle of earth in the greatness of the universe, considers such a conception to be inadequate; or admits only some possible Starting-point, a kind of Divine Convenience upon which to found theories; or has never thought about the matter at all—it's always a gracious and comforting act to remove one's moral hat, as it were (even if reverence goes no further) to Something at any rate bigger than most of us. While even on the very chilliest of auto-suggestion grounds there is still a word to be said for it as a vehicle wherein to despatch one's extra troubles to some handy mental cemetery. For prayer, whether we look upon it as sacred or superstitious, must still, as the hymn says, be the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed. And occasional expression is about as valuable a prelude to the acquiring of knowledge as any that are going.
So I may as well tell you at once that I know nothing whatever about motor-cars, and therefore find the last half of your letter entirely unintelligible. But I gather that the one you mean to purchase combines speed, silence, and freedom from odour in a quite unusual degree. Some day, no doubt, I shall be sponging upon you for a lesson in driving it—or him—or do you call the thing her?
Yr. affect. uncle,
Peter Harding.
91b Harley Street, W.,
November 7, 1910.
My dear Sally,
This is going to be a short letter because the news that it contains is probably speeding to you already—from Esther, to whom its greatness is not unmixed with tears; and from Molly, to whom its joy is of the eternal gold. Ten days ago she came back to us from Stoke, where, as she told us, she had been having a good time, but seemed now to have fulfilled her little contract. For the house-party had broken up: Horace had long ago made a late return to Cambridge; Carthew was in the Temple, and Pole in Fleet Street; Hilary and Norah were off to Spain; and the one or two extra guns, just leisurely shooting men, had betaken themselves, at any rate superficially regretful, to other people's houses. Lady Wroxton was better—very nearly her old self, and for the moment wrapped up, heart and soul, in her nephew Rupert. It had been a pleasant visit. She kissed us very tenderly. And now it was high time that she was back again among her girls at Hoxton.
Two days later came a wire from Rupert asking if he might spend a night with us on his way to Yorkshire. And in the evening he duly arrived. Nobody else was dining with us that night, and our little party at the table was perhaps quieter than usual. After dinner we were going to smoke our pipes in the library with Esther and Molly, when Rupert drew me aside and asked me to take him into the consulting-room.
"I want you just to run over me," he said, with his eyes on a dangling stethoscope, "to run over me rather thoroughly."
I glanced at him anxiously. But in his evening clothes he seemed even lither and more bronzed than ever.
"Feeling bad anywhere?" I inquired. But he shook his head.
"Rather fit," he admitted, as he took off his coat and waistcoat. And as I suspected, I could find nothing wrong with him. On the contrary, he appeared to be in the very pink of condition, for all his tropical sojournings.
"Good," he said; "and, as a matter of fact, I saw Manson this morning, and West this afternoon, and they both told me the same thing."
I began to laugh at him, though he was speaking very seriously. "You're surely not becoming a hypochondriac?" I asked.
"No," he said gravely; "I don't think so. But I'm forty-seven, you see. And I want to get married."
I was, perhaps, rather taken aback at this, though I scarcely knew why. And he himself appeared to consider the idea as savouring somewhat of presumption. For he blushed a little as he slowly collected his clothes. Somehow we had neither of us thought of him as being a marrying man. Then, as he began to dress himself again, I congratulated him, and asked him if the lady was known to me. He hesitated for a moment, and then smiled.
"Yes, I think she is," he said; "though I doubt if you'd consider me much of a husband for her."
He filled his pipe thoughtfully.
"For though in some ways she seems to me to be rather old for her years—old-fashioned, you know, and womanly, and all that—she's really rather young."
He seemed to consider this a difficulty. Then he looked at me with a kind of deprecating straightness.
"You'd be giving her," he said, "to a fellow who's old enough to be her father."
I suppose that I looked a little surprised.
"Yes, I do," he said humbly; "I mean Molly."
We sucked our pipes in silence for a minute or two, looking at one another through the tobacco smoke. Then I asked him if he had ever pointed out to Molly her striking lack of modernity. He shook his head.
"Hadn't the pluck," he confessed; "but it's so obvious, isn't it?"
He glanced at me anxiously.
"But you mustn't think I'm against it," he said. "It's so rare nowadays. And I think it's beautiful; and anyway, it's just what I've been wanting all my life."
"You'll let me talk to Esther?" I asked presently.
"I should like to talk to her myself," he answered, "only I'm such a fool at these things."
He lit another match.
"Look here," he went on, "I don't want you to tell me what you both think for a week—till I come back from Yorkshire. I'm too old for her, I know. But I seem to be pretty sound, and I—well, dash it all, Peter, you know her better than I do, although you—d'you know, by the way, that you rather put me off her in that last letter of yours?"
"Did I?" I asked. "Perhaps that was because I don't really know her so well."
"Well, first," he said, "there was that Lynn affair, of course. But that's dead, isn't it?"
"Quite," I told him; "and they've both gone out of mourning."
"And then," he went on, "you made me think of a rather up-to-date young woman, quite nice, of course," he looked at me apologetically, "but perhaps just a little bit self-complacent. Whereas I found in her, instead, everything that I've always worshipped most, you know—from rather a long way off."
That was a week ago. And since he left, as you will imagine, both Esther and I have done a good deal of thinking. For on the one side we couldn't help feeling the absurdity of regarding Rupert as a son-in-law. And on the other we should be giving our daughter—or rather watching her go—into the hands of one of our oldest friends. Given love too, how well should they be mated; both so strong, but he so abidingly simple, so unchallenged by surrounding mysteries, and she so eager, so delicately tuned to each passing subtlety of thought.
Characteristically enough, he had neither told us, before he went, how clearly he had shown Molly his feelings, nor asked us to discuss with her, or to withhold, his announcement to ourselves. And so we said nothing to her about it. But just now, as we were expecting his arrival, I discovered, I think, that our desire for her had been fulfilled. For with a shyness bringing back to me a little girl that I had forgotten, she had perched herself on the arm of my chair; so that when his voice was in the hall there wasn't very far to bend.
"You told me to wait for Heaven, you know," she reminded me. And her eyes confessed that it was standing at the door.
Your affect. brother,
Peter.
P.S.—I can see you pursing those wise lips of yours, and muttering that Heaven has been a little sudden. But I believe that there are precedents for this.
91b Harley Street, W.,
November 26, 1910.
My dear Aunt Josephine,
We shall be very disappointed if you don't come to Molly's wedding, although it is to be rather a quiet one, or at any rate as quiet as we can manage to keep it—not because we are anything but desirous that as many people as are kind enough to do so may rejoice with us over the occasion; but because, from Molly downwards, we have a temperamental shrinking from crowded churches, pavement druggets, hired exotics, and paid choir-boys. And you mustn't worry because your favourite porter has been transferred to Leeds, and therefore won't be able to look after your luggage at St. Pancras. Because one of us will be sure to meet you with the carriage, and escort both you and it quite safely to Harley Street.
I have received your cheque, and will buy the little medicine-chest for Rupert to-morrow. As you say, it's most important that the breadwinner should try to keep himself in as good a state of health as possible, even if he is so liable, as Rupert is, to be suddenly shot. And we all think the old bracelet that you have sent to Molly very beautiful. Both of them will so much want to thank you personally for your gifts that you must really make up your mind, I think, to take the risks of the journey (the most recent statistics show these to be quite small) and stay with us here for a couple of nights from December 6th.
Yr. affect. nephew,
Peter Harding.
91b Harley Street, W.,
December 2, 1910.
My dear Bruce,
It was very good of you to enclose a note in your letter to Molly, and the more so because I have an uncomfortable suspicion that I may have wounded you a little when I wrote to you last. If only we could use colours now, to express our deeper attitude on these occasions—as some of your fellow-clergy wear stoles at certain seasons—with what pleasant impunity could we write to one another in yellow, or purple, or red, leaving black for the editor of "The Times," or the plumber whose bill we're disputing. But, alas, even our lightest thoughts must needs go forth clad like mutes at a funeral, and dependent upon those who meet them to detect their forlorn humanity. And so if I have talked, as the outsider that I am, too harshly of things that are dear to you, you must forgive me even as Merridew has forgiven Rogers.
For you know—why should I tell you?—that it was no Word from on high that my puny humanity was attempting to challenge, but only the chains (as they seem to me) of Its ecclesiastical exposition; as though man had been made for the Church, and not the Church for man. And yet even thus one can only bow before its achievement. For to be able, as the miner of whom we read the other day, to sing "Lead, kindly Light" through the foul air of some blocked-up coal-pit is better than to have all knowledge—and an abundant justification of any creed that makes it possible.
"Thou wouldst not seek Me," says the Saviour in the "Mirror of Jesus," "if thou hadst not found Me."
Do you know the quotation? I came upon it by chance the other day as repeated by Bourget in a book that I happened to be reading. And it seems to me to contain very simply—if only we might give it something more than an academic consent—just the one conception that is needed for the true and permanent sweetening of all our religious relationships. For they are seeking, these pig-headed people who annoy us so much—I think that, nowadays, we most of us can admit as much as that. Methodist, Sacerdotalist, Hyde-Park Agnostic, Christian Socialist, Roman Modernist, Traditional Romanist, High, Low, Broad, Middle, Open, Closed (I wonder if God laughs sometimes at our resounding definitions), or Free Lance—we cannot help pitying them, of course, according to our several lights; but in so far as their sincerity is manifest, we do behold in them the signs of a mistaken search.
And yet, by that very fact, have they not really found? Not our particular little glimpse of the Almighty and the Eternal, but some other little glimpse—something, at any rate, that is evidently making them strive for more; and something that they, like we, are desperately anxious to share. Or why these dusts of conflict?
And yet, perhaps, the dusts are inevitable, after all—the surest sign that the Building grows beneath its million workers, and that the mallets and chisels are being busy against that great day of Affirmation when the Temple shall stand complete at the meeting-place of all our roads.
And meanwhile Molly and Rupert, at any rate, are feeling very happy—with a proud humility, carefully concealed. His years have seldom weighed heavily on Molly's future husband, though as a matter of bald fact he is Mr. Pickwick's senior. And lately he has been dropping them by handfuls. Molly, however, must have picked some of them up, I fancy, and is wearing them with an appropriate dignity.
Your affect. cousin,
Peter Harding.
91b Harley Street, W.,
December 25, 1910,
10.30 p.m.
My dear Hugh,
This seems an odd sort of time at which to begin a letter—even to you. But this has been an odd sort of Christmas, a kind of aftermath, as far as its festivities have been concerned, of those demanded by Molly's marriage. The two water-colours that you sent them, by the way, were both lovely, quite in your happiest vein; and I am sorry that at present they have no permanent wall to hang them on. But Rupert's colonial tour, upon which they had to start early last week, will scarcely be finished, I suppose, for twelve months; and even then their place of habitation seems likely to be very movable. So, upon the whole, we have been a quiet little party, or as quiet, at any rate, as Claire and Tom will allow; and we decided to spend the afternoon at the hospital, which is en fête for some twenty-four hours, at the price, possibly, of a few subsequent temperatures, but to the immediate benediction of all concerned.
Have you ever been to the hospital? I think not. And I daren't attempt to describe it to you, chiefly, I suppose, on account of the natural reticence, the mauvaise bonte, or the golden silence—I leave you to select—with which most men avoid such subjects as their wives, their souls, and their alma mater; but secondarily because, by the time my letter reached you, the description would most probably have ceased to be true. It would have added a storey, or sprouted a wing. Let me content myself therefore with pointing out to you those two boys standing rather awkwardly in one corner of the entrance-hall—the left-hand corner between the cloak-room and the porter's desk. Both of them have only just left school. The shiny-haired one, with the crimson tie, and the gold buttons on his waistcoat, and the creases on his rather striking trousers, was at one of our older foundations. The other, with yesterday's collar round his neck, and a stain or two of nitric acid upon his sleeves, has just won an entrance scholarship from a private school at Camberwell. The second is the shyer of the two perhaps, in spite of his ardent Fabianism and his bitter independence of revealed religion. But both are a little nervous in that they are only in their first year, and still, academically speaking, confined to the study of the dog-fish in a remoter corner of the college. They are feeling rather young, in fact, though the hospital's name is on their visiting cards—something like new boys again, at the bottom of the first form.
Three Christmases from now, however, and they will be sauntering here very much at their ease, waiting about with their house-physicians for the two o'clock arrival of their chiefs from Harley Street. The gold buttons will have disappeared, I think, by then, and the trousers will be modester in hue; while on the other hand that collar will be above suspicion, and you might search in vain for a trace of red corrosive. Both, too, will be dangling stethoscopes, and would like, if they were quite certain of the chairman, to be smoking a Virginian cigarette. In other words, they have deserted the college for the "house." They have become critics of the nursing staff, and their talk—not on Christmas Day, of course—is of râles and rhonchi and the merits of their respective H.P.'s. There are some of them standing about in the hall as our party dismounts from the carriage. But the majority are already in their favourite wards, whose walls they have been helping to decorate. Far removed are they from the Sawyers of yesterday, though at times they grow merry with wine. For the demands of examiners have become annually more stringent; their hospital duties are arduous; and hard work, as everybody knows, is the next-door neighbour to virtue.
Give them but three Christmases more, and they will be even as this white-coated and dignified young man whom Horace and I are watching as he deals with the patients in the receiving-room. For these will drift in from the streets and tenements, whether or no the day be a Festival, and partly, perhaps, with an eye to possible good cheer. We wait a little, as he stands there by the pillar, a curious contrast, with his fresh face and athletic figure, to the slouching fleshiness of these big navvies and the stunted urbanity of the rest.
Behind him stand a couple of dressers, fresh from the college, willing, but still perhaps a little bewildered, and to whom this all-knowing and self-possessed young surgeon is something of a god. His treatment is rapid—it has to be—for he is here primarily to sort out the cases that come crowding in their daily hundreds. But he must never make a mistake—a grave one, that is. And the remembrance of this has taught him—no easy matter—to know real illness when he sees it with a pretty high degree of certainty. So the bad cases he sets on one side. For if possible they must be admitted; and at any rate they must be seen by the house-surgeon or house-physician on duty. While as for the rest, they may be given at once the necessary pill, or a desirable draught from that decorated urn in the corner—there's a certain irony in that particular wreath of holly—or despatched, with out-patient cards, to appropriate special departments.
And all this time there is flowing from him to the dressers a little stream of wounds to be stitched, torn scalps to be cleaned, and sprains and strains to be temporarily bandaged. Odder things too may be demanding their youthful attention. Here, for instance, is a genial but, alas, beery Irishwoman of vast embonpoint, whose wedding-ring has been jammed into her finger, and must at all costs be removed. Alcoholic invocations are breathed into the dresser's ear as he files patiently at this brass emblem of married unity. Sure, darlin', she tells him, if she could only be rid of her ould man as aisy, she'd be another woman to-morrer, she would. While here, sitting next her, is a dark-eyed twelve-year-old, holding out a pathetic little toe that has been stamped upon by a passing dray-horse. It is attached to a very grimy foot that was not, one fears, the only inhabitant of the stocking that contained it. And the dresser is not sure if the bone is broken. She has the countenance of a tear-stained Madonna; but her language, when he twists her toe, becomes positively lurid. The other women titter or are shocked, the Sister rebukes her, and young white-coat is called up for reference. He likes the little girl, and gives her some chocolate, whereupon she stifles half her sobs and most of her profanity. Yes, it's a fracture all right. Does the dresser know how to put on a poroplastic splint? The dresser looks a little uncertain. So white-coat gives him a swiftly helping hand, and within five minutes is removing a decayed Semitic molar that has been giving its owner schmerz indescribable. Accompanying this gentleman are his two sisters, a married brother with his wife and family, and an elderly uncle, all of whom wail incontinently to the general discomfort. Glancing over his shoulder, young white-coat sends briefly for a porter, who courteously removes them; and is only just in time, having extracted the tooth successfully, to avoid the happy sufferer's embraces. He has never hurried; and yet by the time that we have made our round of the dressing-rooms the benches are empty, and he has disappeared to his pipe and his arm-chair. Can you believe that but four years ago he was throwing chalk about the dissecting-room, and stamping uproariously during lectures?
This wonder has my hospital performed. And what am I to tell you of the Sister who has witnessed it—whose shrewd eyes have beheld so many dressers emerging rawly from the college or from Cambridge, becoming in due time even as our white-clad friend, and passing hence, as he will pass, into the staid gravity of the family doctor?
There's a time—fortunately brief—in the career of the just-qualified student when he is a little inclined to assert his professional supremacy. How tenderly she watches him through it; and how, telling him all things, she apparently tells him nothing! I wouldn't like to say how many years she has stood there, or what sights, humorous, tragic, unpaintably indecent, she has witnessed in all that time. And you could certainly never guess them for yourself. Let me only say then that her wisdom is more than the wisdom of many physicians, and that no gentler fingers have touched the seamy side of life.
And yet, I suppose, she was once a little girl, shinning up the orchard trees for the apples at the top. And she can still, I believe, drop a sentimental tear or two upon the last page of a novel. So can this be yet another miracle that my hospital has wrought? Dear me—and we have got no further than the receiving-room, and scarcely even thought about the patients.
Sometimes I wonder if the people whose pennies are invited to keep us for a second ever realise the full significance of the instant that they make their own. Not always, I think, for even I, who am in the hospital three times a week, only get an occasional vision of it—chiefly on such days as these, when one may travel its wards at large, unforbidden by professional etiquette. Do they know, for example, that under the roof of the out-patients' department there are two small boys—open-mouthed little snorers of yesterday, sprawling about on the pavement inviting trouble—whose tonsils during that moment have been successfully removed from them? And can they perceive, in the same measure of time, a dozen blocked-up ears and noses being skilfully examined by electrical illumination? Do they realise that, simultaneously with all this, eight short-sighted persons are being tested for spectacles, and two more being operated upon for squint; that three men with diseased skins are being prescribed for in another part of the building, and that four women who were being consumed with lupus are now being cured with light; that a poor servant-girl is under gas while her yet poorer teeth are being removed, and that three others are being fitted with nerveless new ones; that a little damsel with a dislocated hip is having it put in plaster; that an elderly and rheumatic cab-driver is being helped with radiant heat; and that some four hundred men and women of all descriptions are waiting their turn for treatment? My numbers are conservative; but, even so, does the gentleman on the underground railway platform realise (to be merely sordid) that during his second some five hundred pounds' worth of free operations are in progress? Does he visualise the resultant satisfaction in all those squalid little homes, the domestic relief, the returning efficiency, the rolled-away anxiety, the dawning happiness? And does he remember that he has as yet peeped into but one department of the great hospital that he is supporting?
But really, on a Christmas Day one shouldn't be thinking about these things; and you must put them down to an elderly garrulity, or as being, if you will, in the nature of a half-sorrowful farewell. For by next Christmas, alas, my wards will have ceased to know me. The twenty years' span allotted to me will have come to its close; and even to-day, at a corner of the corridor, I overheard a hazarded guess at my successor.
So after a long pilgrimage through gay and chattering wards—they were all gay this afternoon, only you mustn't look, perhaps, at those quiet corners—we at last found Esther and her party in the gayest of them all. I will call it this, as being a very complete disguise if you should ever quote me to the Sister of another. And here a troupe of residents was delivering a little series of songs and dances, to the complete delight of some forty patients and a background of visitors and nurses. Its members were particularly hilarious. I fancy indeed that they must have primed themselves with a little previous champagne—a very little, and you must remember that at least two of them had been up for most of the night. But nobody noticed this; and Claire, at any rate, was very thoroughly taken by storm.
"Won't they come back presently?" she asked.
But the Sister shook her head. If Claire wanted to see them again she must go off to some other ward. I saw her turn to Tom.
"Shall we?" she said, and they slipped away together. But before they went I heard her calling his particular attention to one of the players, "the second from the left," she whispered, "the awfully handsome one"—a new note for Claire? Yes, just a little new.
And so we left it at last, driving out into the street through a small crowd of eager, white-faced children, for some of whom, no doubt, its walls were as the walls of Paradise. It was quite dark, with a blur of rain upon the carriage windows; and for a minute or two the hospital, with its long rows of lighted wards, towered dimly upon our left.
"Just like a great big liner," said Claire, who had been down to Southampton when Molly and Rupert sailed. And so indeed one could imagine it—lifting its strong sides above all these crowded roof-tops, with unshaken bows, and Hope upon the bridge, and Comfort, at least, to minister in its cabins.
"And yet there's something awful in it too," said Jeanie Graham.
"Chiefly," explained Horace philosophically, "because we're going home ourselves to an excellent Christmas dinner."
"And happen to be feeling rather well," said Esther.
"And partly, I suppose," added Jeanie, "because just now we're looking at it from the outside."
"And a little bit," I guessed, "because it stands, in a sense, for Knowledge with a big K. And there are times when we're all rather afraid of that—even when it wants to do us good."
"But we run to it in the end," smiled Jeanie.
Let me introduce you to her as she sits opposite to me in the brougham—or to so much of her as is not obscured by Claire, who is dividing her weight between Horace and his wife-apparent. Strictly speaking, I suppose, she is scarcely to be described as pretty. Her cheek-bones are the least shade too high, and her eyebrows just a trifle too level. Here and there too her skin, still clinging to its Highland brown, is powdered with tiny freckles; and though her nose is straight enough, a purist might consider her mouth too big, and her chin perhaps a little too firm—but very pleasantly so. Her hair is dark and wavy, and in its natural setting—a grey tam-'o-shanter, I think, and the tail of a Scotch mist—might well contain the deep, divine, dark dayshine of the poet. And indeed I have been assured that it does. I have left her eyes to the last, because at present she is standing away from them a little. Regarded as mere windows to her mind they are well opened, clear, and grey. But Horace, who has seen their owner leaning out of them, could no doubt describe them better. And we think that he's a fortunate young man.
Our only other guest was Wensley, dragged reluctantly from Chelsea. His year has had some of its usual disappointments. His big work wasn't finished in time for the Academy, and is still in his studio. But though the Chantrey trustees passed over the very beautiful bronze that he did send, he has sold this to the National Gallery at Copenhagen for six hundred pounds, and has spent, in consequence, a fortnight at Whitby—his first holiday, I believe, in three years, since his invalid aunt and sister absorb most of his usual earnings. He always looks odd and uncomfortable in evening dress. But our very informal table generally sets him at his ease. And he is an extreme favourite with both Tom and Claire. To-night he remembered one of Tom's songs, and persuaded him, after dinner, to deliver it—with a little hesitation at first (for the poor boy has still got some scruples, I think), but ultimately to his saving grace. He left us at ten o'clock, for the invalids' sake, by which time Tom and Claire announced themselves to be feeling rather sleepy, without, as I observed, any notable protest from Jeanie and Horace. So they have both gone upstairs to bed; or at least I had thought so. But a tentative whisper at my door-handle has aroused my suspicions. I am busy writing to Mr. Pontrex, so that I shall be sure not to hear anything; and slowly the crack widens between the door-edge and the architrave. Across the blackness disclosed, flashes the gleam of a white-frocked arm, like a turning trout in a pool; and presently a brown hand, desperately silent, begins feeling for my key. I look at it apprehensively (for I have become a little nervous on this point lately) and am happily relieved to find it ringless. I must be very quick.
And yet, as you will have noticed, even Claire is growing up, still faithful to a more boisterous March, but now and then holding out her finger-tips to May. She reposes, as you may remember, in the little room next to ours. And yesterday morning Esther called me from my shaving-glass. For she had opened the door between, to discover that Claire had flown. Whither we could guess very easily, as she was even then hammering Tom with her pillow. But there, balanced face downwards on the edge of the bolster, lay a momentarily forgotten photograph. Esther touched it with a smile.
"D'you think we ought to?" she asked. And then she drew back. But at that moment a rather more vehement bump than its predecessors shook the wall and floor so thoroughly that the photo slid down upon the sheets, poised itself for a second upon its edge, and then dropped over, to reveal the very debonair figure of Mr. George Alexander as the gallant Rudolf Rassendyll. We looked at one another, and laughed—but only a little. And then Esther restored the picture to its resting-place.
Some day we shall meet him in the Park, and Claire will behold a very genial, middle-aged gentleman, a little inclined to be plump. But he won't be Rudolf Rassendyll. And what will happen to his likeness?
"She'll put it in her bottom drawer," smiles Esther, leaning over me as I write, "and it'll become part of somebody else."
She drops a kiss upon my occiput.
"And now you must come to bed," she adds, "or perhaps to-morrow morning you'll be tired."
And by this, of course, she means "cross," though possibly, by some blessed dispensation, she imagines that she doesn't. For long (as I am minded to tell you, Hugh Pontrex), long before she's married, a woman has made a garment for the man who is to wed her—a beautiful and rather princely garment, and fortunately a bigger one than is usually required. Because then, you see, she has only to take a tuck in it—and forget about it—and there's her man clad in his coat, just as she had always dreamed that he would come to her. Most women, I'm afraid, have to deepen this tuck until there's no more stuff that they can turn. And by that time, perhaps, we have begun to suspect that there has been some tampering with our property.
"D'you mean to say," we inquire bitterly, "that we've grown out of it already?"
And then it is that they must needs explain to us, with dewy eyes and hands upon our shoulders, how it's only the same dear garment still—three times as thick.
"What nonsense," says Esther above my shoulder.
"The garment?" I ask.
"No, the—the tuck."
But she looks a little conscious.
Ever yours,
P. H.