The Corner of Harley Street Part 12

This afternoon, my junior being salmon-fishing in Norway, I thought that I would take the out-patients for the first time in twelve years; and the clinical a.s.sistant proving not unwilling to go and play tennis, I amused myself with seeing the lot of them. For there's no other commentary upon men and manners quite like a collection of out-patients at a large hospital. Listen therefore to a stalwart gentleman who earns twenty shillings a week, and doesn't stint himself in beer.

"Debility, doctor," he said, "that's what's the metter with me." He dropped his voice huskily. "Domestic trouble," he added.

"Dear me," I sympathised, feeling his pulse. "Serious?"

"Twins," he said gloomily; "second lot I've 'ed in eighteen months; an'

I think it's run me down."

Your aff. brother, PETER.

XXIV

_To the Rev. Bruce Harding, S. Peter's College, Morecambe Bay._

c/o HARRY CARTHEW, CROME LODGE, NEAR CAVERSHAM, BERKS, _September_ 14, 1910.

MY DEAR BRUCE,

I am very glad to hear that you have had such an excellent holiday in Switzerland, and brought home four or five more mountain scalps to your c.u.mberland wigwam. But it's rather sad that the little storm that was brewing at S. Peter's before you left should have burst in thunder and lightning during your absence. Knowing both Merridew and Rogers, I quite agree with you that it was probably inevitable, and may ultimately tend to a clearer atmosphere. Meanwhile however the little community makes war from opposite camps, and there is a great deal of unnecessary bitterness in their tactics that seems likely to increase when Rogers comes back from London. And, as you say, it's all rather sad and sordid, and only humorous because the parish is so small and the whole storm contained, as it were, in one of its afternoon teacups. But then most parishes are comparatively small, and we all have to live in one or other of them, and storms in teacups are apt to be just as devastating as any other kind of storm--even more so perhaps, because it's so much easier on these occasions to insist upon recommending one's own particular infusion of tannin, than to insert instead an un.o.btrusive drop or two of the calming milk of human kindness. Whereas cyclones have a habit of setting us shoulder to shoulder, by virtue of the unanimous discovery that they rather suddenly engender of the extraordinary unimportance of our differences.

So on the whole I'm with you in preferring cyclones, although at first I was rather inclined to disagree with your a.s.sertion that this little flare-up between Rogers and your new vicar was merely a somewhat exaggerated instance of the general underlying hostility that seems to exist between Medicine and the Church.

I was for pointing out to you, with some vigour, the fact that we both have friends, not a few, in the consulting-room and cloth respectively, to whom we can talk with a complete frankness, and in the a.s.surance of a reciprocated understanding. And yet, on second thoughts, I am reluctantly sure that you are right, and that, speaking in very general terms, there does exist some such feeling as you have named--less hostility, perhaps, than a decently veiled distrust. It's a little hard to see why this should be the case. For there would appear superficially to be at least a hundred reasons why the precisely opposite should be true. Perhaps the foundation of it is historical. Centuries enough have not yet rolled away since medicine came out of the side of priestcraft; so that on the one hand there is still an occasional smarting of the old wound, and on the other a little over-insistence, perhaps, upon a complete and rather superior liberty--tradition still looming somewhat largely in the education of the young clergyman, and reverence being not, perhaps, a particularly prominent feature in the training of his medical brother. In any case, there it is; and though I think that Rogers has been wrong, or at any rate tactless, in his opposition to the extra services that Merridew wishes to hold in the cottage hospital, it seems to me that your two protagonists are very typical of all that is best (and possibly least reconcilable) on either side. For on the one hand you have Merridew, ardent, sincere, sacerdotal, and very nearly young enough to account for, though not of course to justify, Rogers's rudeness in referring to him as "the boy from Cuddesdon." And on the other, you have Rogers, equally genuine, generous, uncompromising, and almost fiercely insistent in his demand for intellectual honesty. Indeed I think his rather truculent materialism is far more an expression of this desire than an exact creed of his personal belief. And both men, it seems to me, are so obviously the logical products of their respective upbringings.

Of Merridew's I can only speak of course as an outsider. His father, whom I knew very slightly, was himself a clergyman of the old High Church type, moderately wealthy, refined to the uttermost, acutely sensitive, artistic, yet as rigid in his standards as any Cromwellian Ironside. He was happily married, and his home--and young Merridew's--was, almost necessarily, like himself. Merridew was the only child, and when his father died, while he was still at Lancing, it was only natural that he should resolve to enter the Church, and that his mother should henceforth devote herself almost entirely to his welfare and to the furtherance of these boyish resolutions. Leaving Lancing, he went up to his father's old college at Cambridge, commended to his tutors, and known to his fellow-undergraduates, from the outset, as a candidate for Holy Orders. And here--again as a perfectly accepted consequence--he took his degree in cla.s.sics, and dabbled a little in history. He was not unpopular. His ardour, never awkward, procured him many friends and indeed followers among like-minded youths with a similar future in front of them; and, being adequately athletic, he was on friendly, if not intimate, terms with a good many others. At twenty-two or so he left Cambridge for Cuddesdon, and at twenty-four he obtained a curacy in Hoxton, where he overworked himself for four years.

He was then, I think, an a.s.sistant priest at a fashionable church in Kensington, until he was presented by one of his uncles with the living of S. Peter's. Those are the external facts, and, as a guesser from the opposite camp, I may very likely go wrong in estimating their inner significances. But it seems to me--and in talking with Merridew I am always conscious of this--that as the inevitable result of this training he has been surrounded by a kind of protective aura, now almost impenetrable, that has interposed itself, as it were, between himself, as an anointed priest, and the great tides of actual life that go surging about him. Little by little it was created for him by his parents. The vicissitudes of school life made him cling to it only the more firmly. Cambridge, and the conspiracy of silence that, to a lesser extent, surrounds the embryo and younger clergy as certainly as it does their sisters at home, merely strengthened it fourfold; so that when he left Cuddesdon there it was complete--his lifebelt for the conflicting seas of reality--and not only about his waist, but also to a large extent encircling his intellect. For if you examine his education you will find, I think, that never in all that time was he encouraged, for himself and by himself, to discover, to cla.s.sify, to co-relate, one single naked fact of real existence. Science was then, and has always been, in its inward sense, a thing unknown to him. Of the living stuff of humanity he was given not the smallest primary notion. And his observation of it since has been that of a man who has never been equipped with the first unprejudiced principles of observation at all.

Of heredity and psychology he knows not a line. And of their results in actual character and conduct he can perceive, as a rule, only as much as the normal man will reveal to the present type of normal parson--while even of that he has never been given the wherewithal to judge.

Rogers, on the other hand, was the son of a small Northampton milliner.

At the age of fourteen he ran away to sea, where he served for four years in all sorts of ships, in all sorts of capacities. It was on one of these that some rough and ready, but skilful, surgery, by which a young ship's doctor removed some broken bone from the brain of a comrade who had fallen from the rigging, first fired him with the desire to be a surgeon. He returned home to find his father dead and his mother in straitened circ.u.mstances. He got work in a boot factory, and studied at night schools for his preliminary examination. Having pa.s.sed this, he went back to sea for a year, and then, coming up to London, he managed to attend at hospital by day, while he kept himself as dispenser, bottle-washer, and general handy man to a dispensing pract.i.tioner in his spare hours.

By this means, and with the aid of a scholarship or two, he obtained his diplomas, and started a cash surgery near Waterloo. Five years later he was a Fellow of the College of Surgeons, and in another three had become a member of his hospital staff. For a year or so he found it pretty hard to make both ends meet behind his modest plate (one of five) upon a front door in Harley Street. But then the tide began to turn. A brilliant paper or two marked him out as a coming man. A new and admirable method of performing a certain cerebral operation became a.s.sociated with his name. And in ten years' time he had become perhaps the foremost brain surgeon in London. Twelve years after this he lost a hand, in consequence of a post-mortem infection, but retired a wealthy man, though at first a rather disconsolate one. For a time his love of the sea rea.s.serted itself, and he travelled. Then, as you know, he found a retreat that suited him on the sh.o.r.es of c.u.mberland, where he has built, endowed, and kept lavishly up-to-date the little cottage hospital about which your teacup storm is raging.

You may tell me, perhaps, that both Rogers and Merridew are extreme instances. But if they are, it is in degree only and not in kind. For behind Rogers I can see a large and quickly growing army of thinking men and women, risen like him from what are called the ma.s.ses, vigorous of mind and hard of muscle, men accustomed to deal with life at first hand, trained to observe, quick to deduct, unhampered, if perhaps a little too unmoved by tradition, state-makers, explorers, and men withal not impervious to, but on the contrary almost pa.s.sionately eager for the truth.

And behind Merridew I can see many, if not most, of his brethren, men of fine instincts and real devotedness--narrow-minded in none but the most literal sense, and in that merely because of the school that has moulded them--men who would cheerfully give all that they possess to be able to influence in any substantial degree the great world's dreamers and doers. And behind them again I can see their Church.

Curiously enough, we have just been discussing something of all this upon Carthew's Thames-side lawn. We had crossed the river in the morning, and walked up, about a couple of miles, to a neighbouring village church. And now, as I write to you in the boat under the willows, they seem to me--the temple and its service--to have been almost tragically symbolic. The village itself, on the outskirts of Reading, consists of a rustic core, about which time and circ.u.mstance have wrapped several red-brick layers, the innermost containing workers from the various shops and factories of the neighbouring town, together with a sprinkling of day-labourers in the country round; and the outer accommodating some superior clerks and their families, a few of the more substantial Reading tradesmen, and the inevitable retired colonel.

Most of these, as we pa.s.sed upon our way, were smoking over the Sunday papers in their front gardens, or preparing for a morning to be spent upon the river; and the church was far from their midst, a mile in fact beyond their extremest outskirts. Moreover the day was hot, and the road to it dusty.

The building itself was neither old nor new, and we were shown into a pew beneath a large stained-gla.s.s window that almost immediately began, in spite of myself, to monopolise my attention. The congregation consisted, of course, mainly of women. ("It will be the same in the Hereafter," my Aunt Josephine once a.s.sured me when commenting upon the same phenomenon.) But there were about thirty men present, for the most part gnarled and sunburnt sons of the field, in uncomfortable, ready-made suits--men, as I guessed, in whose veins there still ran something of the older homage once shared by parson and squire. What was this particular parson going to give them, I wondered, as mental and moral food for the week's sustenance? His delivery of the prayers and lessons was not very promising. It was not that he had any physical impediment in his speech. It was merely that he had never been taught to produce his sounds effectively, and that Oxford and his clubs had successfully schooled him into eliminating any tincture of emotion from their quality. But he might still, of course, have a message in waiting for us from the pulpit.

He preached upon the value of communicating before breakfast; and, as far as I could see, his remarks upon the subject were received, especially by the male portion of his congregation, with the same kind of curious, impa.s.sive gusto that had been noticeable in their delivery of the responses and the hymns. I remember a verse of one of these, and am quoting it exactly:

Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee Repaid a thousandfold will be; _Then_ gladly will we give to Thee, Who givest all.

Could they have known what they were singing? Had their vicar read these lines before he gave them out? Let us hope not.

But, as I said, it was the stained-gla.s.s window that dominated me, and seemed to contain in itself an epitome--yet not quite that, perhaps--of sermon and service and hymn, and the system that had made their survival possible in twentieth-century England. And yet, let me first put down that through it came light, real if distorted, and distilled, but how faintly, from the true arch of the outside heaven. And let me not forget this as I go on to remember its eight divisions, containing each a worshipping and apparently musical young woman, arrayed as no being has ever been arrayed, and regarding with upturned eyes--well, fortunately the artist had stopped short there, though merely, one fears, from want of s.p.a.ce. I have called these maidens musical for the rather inadequate reason that in the hands of each were instruments by and through which sounds might conceivably be produced. But at the nature of these one could, alas, guess only too readily. Even in the grasp of experts one would have been justly dubious about the capabilities of those two-stringed violins, that one-keyed portable organ, those twin-trumpets with a common mouthpiece. And imagination reeled before their combined contemplation in the hands of these anaemic and self-evident amateurs.

Nor could one turn from the subject, and find consolation in its colour or history. The window was not forty years old, and the colour was but a ghost of what colour might be.

The whole window indeed was but a ghost--a ghost, manufactured at the thirtieth hand, of the mediaeval work of some laborious but crude designer. And what, one wondered, could be even its pretended message to the full-blooded, restless, and instructed generation of to-day? Could these sallow-cheeked saints, these obviously unhealthy, ill-nourished, incapable young women, tell anything worth the hearing upon any single plane of thought or conduct to the men and women of 1910? Could they indeed preach any other possible sermon than to cry out to all would-be healthy people to flee away from them into the outer sunshine? Were they even justified as reflections, infinitely remote, of the pale Galilean of Gautier and Swinburne? And was there in fact ever a pale Galilean, the least of Whose doctrines they could ever imaginably have embodied?

Was that st.u.r.dy, sun-browned Youth, with His carpenter's wrists and His physical endurance, with His undreamed spiritual forces and His splendid sanity in their control, with the glory of His emanc.i.p.ating conceptions and His divine simplicity in their exposition--was He ever such as to be thus pallidly worshipped save in the twilight imageries of earlier centuries and the resentful poetry of rebellious thinkers? And I couldn't help wondering if my stained-gla.s.s window had perhaps cast its spell not only upon the aisles, but the authority of the Church that had set it up.

Only a year or two ago, for instance, I remember being a.s.sured by a youthful priest from Cambridge, who had scarcely ever stirred beyond his East End settlement, that, while he would refrain from setting a limit to G.o.d's mercy, no man could really be considered safe who had not made verbal confession of his sins to himself or one of his brothers. And only last week, upon the beach at Swanage, I heard another young clergyman, of a rather more so-called evangelical way of thinking, most positively a.s.suring a ring of little children that the Devil was even then whispering in their ears what a good time he would like to give them. No wonder that the Carthews and the Rogers' stand aside, and wait impatiently for the coming of the New Word or of the Old one as it was.

And no wonder that men and women, more really religious now, perhaps, than ever in history, look on at it all rather dubiously in a healthy hesitation, or turn frankly away to the tennis-lawn and river.

I have been watching them all the afternoon plying their oars here upon the Thames--strong and ruddy, keen-faced artisans from Reading, actresses from town, barristers, doctors, men of leisure, and men of affairs. And now, as I write, they are plying still, while across the fields comes the ineffectual call of the various ecclesiastical bells.

By some they are not even heard, I suppose. They are singing choruses from "Our Miss Gibbs." To others they are just decorative in the region of river sounds, as the loose-strife and charlock in that of its colours. To a few they must even be merely sad. They might mean--they once have meant--so much to their country's seething life. And now they would seem to contain almost less significance than the gramophone in the steam-launch round the corner.

A few moments ago the Bishop, Carthew's newly-acquired brother-in-law, was leaning forward in his chair.

"If you knew," he said, "the real agony with which the Church has to face these problems."

Carthew nodded.

"Yes," he said slowly, "parturition's always painful--especially to the elderly--but the price for shirking it----"

"Is sterility," said the Bishop. "I know. But we don't want your pity.

We want your help."

Carthew knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"Then first," he said, "you must get rid of those lifebelts, where the race goes past them, and teach your clergy to swim. And then you must keep 'em swimming. And you must see that they swim first. Don't stultify their efforts by askin' 'em to square impossible traditions with new truths, or mediaeval ethics with essential Christianity. Don't call 'em unsound because they have inklings inside 'em that Revelation didn't cease with St. John or interpretation with the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Let 'em have Visions of their own. Tell 'em to go out, and make discoveries. Let 'em dare to be simple--really simple, that is. And trust G.o.d and human kindness to do the rest."

I don't think that he was speaking lightly, but the Bishop looked at him for a moment rather closely.

"You're a believer?" he said. "You don't mind my asking?"

"Not a bit," said Carthew. "I'm a believer. And what's more, I'm a believer in an organised, visible Church, not because it's vital, but because it's expedient. Only its stained-gla.s.s windows, if they _must_ be stained, should contain blacksmiths and boxers and wireless telegraphists, with some bank clerks and a bus driver, and of course some children." Mrs. Carthew had just brought out the twins, "for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Your affect. cousin, PETER HARDING.

P.S.--Rogers is coming to dinner with us, as you suggested, before he goes back to c.u.mberland.

XXV