The Corner of Harley Street Part 15

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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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.

x.x.x

_To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._

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 fete_ 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 b.u.t.tons 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 b.u.t.tons 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 _rales_ 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 G.o.d. 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 st.i.tched, 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 bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 t.i.tter 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 pa.s.sing hence, as he will pa.s.s, 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 a.s.sert 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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-gla.s.s. 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 b.u.mp 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 Ra.s.sendyll. 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 Ra.s.sendyll. And what will happen to his likeness?