The Corner of Harley Street Part 5

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _April_ 24, 1910.

MY DEAR TOM,

I have been expecting this letter of yours for a good many weeks. It would be almost true, I think, to say that I have been hoping for it.

And yet each week of delay has been making, I believe, for safety. So strongly have I been feeling this last, indeed, that now your letter has actually come, and actually contains to so large an extent the sort of material that I expected to find in it, I am more than glad that you have hesitated so long before writing it. One must always stand away a little from the burning bush to discuss its relations with an everyday world. Close beneath it, in the first apprehension of its significance, there is no room for anything but adoration. And I am afraid this letter of mine, had you received it then, would have seemed to you, if not even a little blasphemous, at any rate lacking in true reverence. For although you haven't told me so, I expect that I shouldn't be far wrong in hazarding a guess that for the first month or two after your experience at Scarborough you told yourself that your father, and perhaps even your mother, were a little wanting in a true understanding of the miracle that had befallen you. It was all so new, so overwhelming; it threw such a strange light not only upon your own individual life, past and to come, but upon the sum total of all other life as well, that you felt its wonder to be almost incompatible with the humdrum, commonplace existence that we and most of our friends appeared to be leading.

Had we known it, as it was then shining upon you, surely we should have been so different! You felt, I think, as if you had suddenly found us out. And though you didn't love us any the less for this--perhaps even loved us more, in another kind of way--you were quite sure that if you hadn't actually outstripped us by this single leap into the light, we had at any rate dropped down a little from the high plane on which, till then, you had never doubted that we lived.

How, for example, in a world that teemed with sin, could the governor be so keen on catching trout? How was it, with these dark, tremendous millions hemming him in, that you had never seen him hand away a tract, or preach the Word in season? How came it, alas, that he could even sometimes say "d.a.m.n" when he broke a bootlace, or waste some unreturnable hour over a rubber of bridge? Of course with the mater it was different. Maters _are_ different, and I'm glad you thought of that, Tom. But come now, didn't it run somehow in this way? Why naturally it did, and it meant that your discovery had already begotten another. It meant that you had suddenly realised the weak humanity of your parents.

But you must try to be kind to it.

And that's how it is with all great discoveries, Tom, in every branch of life. First one is struck with their extraordinary, their dazzling, simplicity. Belief--life; acceptance--salvation; and you had never somehow thought of it before! How simple, and by its very simplicity how G.o.d-like, how utterly convincing!

And then, in this new irrefragable conception, everything (even the governor) has to be reconsidered, appraised, condemned, readjusted, and inspired afresh. What is this going to mean to me personally? What does it mean to other people? And again, what responsibility towards them does its possession entail on myself? These are the inevitable questions that follow. The putting of them is the second stage in the general process. The very fact of their being put at all shows the discovery to be already at work. And the answers, if the discovery is worth anything at all, and we have postulated it to be a great one, can be of only one kind. I must pursue it to the end. I must follow out its leading as far as my humanity will let me. And I must communicate the results to my fellows according to the best of my abilities. That is the third stage, and it is coterminous with life, Tom. Because, you see, all great discoveries, like yours, contain within them the germ-cells of a thousand others. To discover one or two of these, to nourish them, and perhaps even, if one is very fortunate, to enable them in some degree to fructify, is more than a life-work for most of us.

So true is this, and so endless and apparently diverse appear to be their various possibilities, that we are apt very easily (especially in middle life) to forget the splendid, sweeping simplicity of the initial idea, just as we are equally apt to overrate, perhaps, the importance of those particular germs that we have, by temperament and circ.u.mstance, elected to serve, and to underrate the value of those to which our neighbours have been attracted. And it is because of the first of these things that I want to thank you for your letter, and tell you how very much I value it. You have reminded me again of something that I would never like to forget. You have re-created for me the right atmosphere.

Belief _is_ life, Tom, in a great many more senses than one. Hang on to that like a limpet, and the peace of heart that means strength of hand will never leave you. But it's because of the second of these things that I want you to hesitate just a little longer before you commit yourself to the proposition in your letter.

To be a lay evangelist, something like the gentleman whose services you attended, may be as high and n.o.ble a life as any that the world has to offer you. As I conceive it, lived to its greatest advantage, it must be an exceedingly difficult one, which should only of course make it the more worth living. But to say that it is the _best_ worth living, while it may be true for yourself, is certainly not true as a general principle. There is no one sort of life that is the best worth living.

And in considering the question, as you certainly must, I think you ought to be very careful to keep this before your mind. Ways in life are not to be selected like articles from a shop-window. You cannot ask for the best, and go away with it in your pocket. The best worth living life is already inside you. And your new discovery is not going to determine its nature--heredity and a thousand other things have already done that--but rather its quality. You may be cut out for a lay, or any other kind of evangelist. I hadn't somehow suspected it in you. But I may easily have been wrong. Yet I think you mustn't take any definite vows upon your shoulders--at any rate, for some time--and probably, I suspect, for several years.

Promises of this sort, you see, are so very much better left unmade. For in the first place, the remembrance of them is more than likely to blur the gladness, and consequent usefulness, with which you will obey your temperament and tendencies in later years, should these determine for you some different course. And in the second, they may even, standing upon some mistaken scruple of conscience, succeed in forcing you, against your real calling, into an altogether unsuitable career.

Meanwhile you need have no fears, I think, in leading your normal, probationary life. You have the opportunity of University education before you. And that, at any rate, can do you no harm, and will probably be of extreme use to you, whatever your ultimate decision. You want to find out the truth, to impart the truth, and to help your fellow-men to lead better lives. Very well then, if there's a G.o.d, Tom, as you and I believe, you must be just the material that He would most greatly care to use. So why not leave it at that for a little while? Want to do the right thing, and so do the next one; and you'll find, I think, that the precise nature of your own particular right thing, evangelist or engineer, will pretty certainly settle itself.

Your aff. father, P. H.

XIII

_To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._

c/o DR. ROBERT LYNN, APPLEBROOK, DEVON, _May_ 3, 1910.

MY DEAR HUGH,

I have just come back to read your letter from one of those super-days of which even the happiest life can contain, I imagine, no more than a handful. Of merely good days I can remember many enough--a sufficient number, at any rate, to absorb very happily the memory of their less favoured brethren. And several of them remain distinct by virtue of some outstanding incident or emotion that they contained or inspired. But most, I think, have become blended into a general peaceable impression of past contentment. To use a popular Americanism, they were good times, and usually real good times at that.

But of these super-days, these Olympians among mundane experiences, no man can expect very many, and I have been, I suspect, as fortunate as most--in any case so fortunate as to be more than grateful, notwithstanding the tiny, struggling sense in me (a legacy of superst.i.tion, I suppose, from some far-back ancestors) that so exquisite an enjoyment must surely prelude some equivalent disaster. They are not, as a rule, I think, critical days, at any rate in the ordinarily accepted sense of the term, though I can remember perhaps a couple that in a small fashion might answer this description.

The first of them was in my fifteenth year, and was the last day (at the end of six weeks' strict training) of the House Races at school. Our four had started bottom of the river, and day by day had crept up until, in the evening of this particular one, we were to row the favourites, School House, for the cup. When I call them the favourites, they were this merely in a sporting sense. Because, I think, the succession of good fights put up by our own insignificant little house, added to a certain reputation for conceit that most School Houses would seem to possess, had won pretty nearly the whole of the rest of the school to our support. As a very junior and inferior oarsman (and I was more than conscious of this at the time, I remember) I can claim no particular share, other than an accidental one, in this series of victories. I had been one of two candidates for the post of bow, and being a few pounds heavier than my opponent, had managed to secure the thwart. But my mere undeservedness did not lessen--in fact, I think, it enhanced--the almost miraculous sweetness of those wonderful twelve hours. To be gazed at surrept.i.tiously by yet smaller boys in a patently envious admiration; to be patted on the back by older ones who had never hitherto noticed my existence; to be let out of school half an hour earlier by the form-master, with a jocose phrase about privileged heroes--all these things wove a magic round my way that no anxiety about the coming race was strong enough to mar, and that has survived a good many years. Of the race itself I can remember, curiously, nothing but the peculiar hollow echo of our oars as we came through the Town Bridge, and the bare fact that we succeeded in winning, to the supposed vast humiliation of our superior enemies. But what I do remember most distinctly is being invited to tea with the captain, a big man and a monitor. It was a splendid, G.o.d-like meal, in which the six weeks' abstention (mistaken, no doubt, but none the less heroic) from sweets and pastries was utterly forgotten. And there stands out to me the doughnut that dismissed them to oblivion, a doughnut of so succulent a clamminess that it is unlikely, I think, ever to have had its peer--a very Lycidas among doughnuts.

The second day that occurs to me is that in which, playing through, for the first time in many years, to the Finals, the Hospital XV was defeated after a gruelling ninety minutes by the team that represented Guy's. This must have been some eight or nine years later, and its essence is contained in my memory by five perfect minutes, gloriously relaxed, tired but hard, in a hot bath at Richmond.

Now looking back, I know these to have been super-days, and they were, as I have explained, in a very minor sense critical perhaps. But they were exceptions, I think, to the general rule. For though the critical day, the long-looked-forward-to, the apparently, and indeed, chronologically speaking, the really important day may be a good one, and contain great things, yet in later life, at any rate, there is an inseparable anxiety about it of which the super-day knows nothing. The day one qualified, for example, and became by one scratch of the pen licensed to sign death-certificates, exempt from serving on fire brigades, and worth (on paper) from three to five guineas a week as a loc.u.m tenens, was, no doubt, a notable one. The day one proposed oneself in a kind of stammering paralysis as a possible husband to the only possible girl--and was unbelievably accepted; the marriage day; the day when one was appointed to the hospital staff; the day when, in a cool and blinded room, one stooped to kiss the tired but joyful eyes of the first baby's mother--these are the dates over which, most probably, the outside historian would choose to pour the vials of his fancy. But I doubt if in any life these are ever the super-days. They are days to remember; but at the same time they are days that one is glad to have seen closed. They have beheld Destiny too visibly hanging on so desperately fine a balance.

No, they come, these gift-days from the G.o.ds, even as they list; and they refuse to be cla.s.sified. The most constant feature about them, I think, is that they rather generally appear during a holiday. And this, I believe, is because they depend so much on a certain purely bodily fitness. I hesitate a little to be very dogmatic about this, because the older one grows the more spiritual, and consequently deeper, becomes their joy. And yet, for the majority of us, at any rate, I am certain that the temple must be at least in pa.s.sable order if the spirit within is to look abroad with an unworried heart, and thoroughly spring-cleaned before its householder, free from domestic cares, can roam joyously at will to find those rarer flowers that he's so seldom free enough to seek. And there lies my stock argument for all misguided religious workers who won't take holidays, and incidentally the real d.a.m.nation of all systems of monastic self-mortification. A sound body not only means a sound mind, but an untrammelled spirit. For a spirit that has constantly to be down on its knees stopping up some leak in the bas.e.m.e.nt cannot possibly find much time for walking in the garden with G.o.d. And if it's a self-made or self-permitted leak, it hasn't even the excuse of being engaged in some equally necessary occupation.

Yet apart from this, there isn't a doubt, I think, that these super-days stand out in memory, and gain their constructive force less by reason of their muscular exaltation than by virtue of their spiritual vision. For even in the days of the doughnut and the hot bath this last wasn't altogether absent. The doughnut marked the closing of an epoch and the dawn of its successor. It meant the pa.s.sage--and to a certain extent the conscious pa.s.sage, too--of an irresponsible childhood into a region of honourable reputation. It was a doughnut that had been bestowed by the hands of a captain. While the hot bath, careless of defeat, merely whispered how great had been the game. And in their successors of later years this spiritual factor has tended to emphasise itself in an ever-growing proportion. Wordsworth might almost have selected the theme, I think, for an Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Middle Age. I can remember one such day on Butser Hill, during a s.n.a.t.c.hed week-end in Hampshire, and another that is summed up for me in a bend of heather-bordered road, turning, at a hot day's end, towards Stronachlacher and a green lawn above Loch Katrine.

And now, with an equal unexpectedness, there has come the latest of them all.

You know how it goes on a holiday--the holiday, that is, of a man to whom holidays are rare and very blessed. For the first day your mind has not yet freed itself from town and toil and the hundred other interests for which they stand. Nor has your body quite overcome the la.s.situde inspired by pavements, and encouraged by taxi-cabs and broughams. Your host, too, wants to learn the latest tidings from the great metropolis; what So-and-so thinks of the political situation; the prevailing opinion on stocks and shares; the last p.r.o.nouncements on art and music; the newest good thing in plays. And perhaps even, if you chance to be of the same profession, you fall to talking shop. Not even the magic of plunging streams and deep, rock-shaded pools is quite sufficient, for the moment, to dispel the urban atmosphere that still clings about you.

Your unused muscles remind you of the reason for their flabbiness. Your eye, too long engaged upon other sights, is not yet quick enough to mark the swift rise among those ripples at the tail of the pool. And you return from your first day's fishing a little annoyed with yourself, aching as regards the wrist and thigh, and more often than not with a light or empty bag. Yet even so, mark the change in your after-dinner talk! Smoking there round the hall fire, surrounded by rods and guns and cases of fish and game, you no longer deliver yourself of opinions on the rubber market or the precise value of the latest vaccine. You discuss instead the reason why you missed that pounder under Applebrook Bridge. And you sit for long minutes staring through a blue tobacco haze into the wood-fire's heart, presumably thinking, but in reality doing nothing of the kind. For though the gates of your brain are open, it is to speed rather than receive impressions. And by to-morrow the overcrowded hostel of your mind will be standing with doors ajar for its l.u.s.tier moorland visitors.

So it has been with me, Hugh, and to-day, the third of my holiday, has been one of those great ones of which I have been writing. Talking sleepily in bed last night to Esther I had announced an intention, received by her with a discreet appearance of belief, of sallying out early to try a couple of those big pools at the junction of the Applebrook and Dart. But the servant with the shaving water found us both comfortably asleep at half-past eight, with two silvery morning hours unfished except in dreams. Dear me, but what a glorious air, and how divine a whisper, too frail to be called a scent, of delicately browning trout!

For old Bob had been up betimes, and, in spite of a powder of frost on the riverside gorse and alders, had succeeded in beguiling half a dozen plump little troutlings into providing the _hors-d'oeuvre_ to a substantial three-decker breakfast. The family had already made their meal, by the time we got downstairs, and old Bob, ruddy and contented, surveyed us approvingly from the hearthrug.

"If the sun didn't find you yesterday," he chuckled, "I fancy the breeze did," and Mrs. Bob murmured something to Esther about hazeline ointment.

A long round would prevent Bob from doing any more fishing for the rest of the day, but a touch of south in the wind had decided him that Esther and I must settle upon the East Dart for our third day's sport.

"The wind should help you," he said; "and you ought to have a pretty good time," and became forthwith a prophet, though not concerning trout.

I'm not going to bother you with details of our angling. It was very arduous, for the wind changed almost as soon as we had started, and blew down the steep valley at a good many miles an hour. But it was at least exciting, and we lunched in a hail-storm on sandwiches and fruit pies, conveyed to us across the moor by Nancy on her pony.

Do you remember Nancy Lynn, a blush-rose little baby-girl a dozen years ago? But I'm sure you do, and I wish you could have seen her to-day as she rode down to us along the steep path to the river, straddle-legged on her Dartmoor pony, bareheaded, and the colour of a ripe chestnut--l.u.s.tiest of little animals, but with eyes, as she cuddled her pony's nose, that have already learned to spell mother, and sometimes wonder what it means.

After lunch, Esther went home with her to meet some friends of Mrs. Lynn at tea, and I was to fish a mile or two further up stream, returning later in the evening. But smoking my pipe under the stone wall that had sheltered our meal, it was a long time before I again took up my rod.

And instead I sat there under the clearing sky--a great gulf now of tear-washed blue, deepening into an immeasurable calm behind these trivial clouds--and watched the two of them making their leisurely way along the hill. And seen thus, at a little distance, they might very easily have been sisters. There was the same spring in their boyish tread, and, could I have seen it, I have no doubt that there was the same kind of look in their clear, contented eyes. For what Nancy now was, Esther so obviously once had been. And what Esther had become, Nancy in her kind would also grow to be--and subtly, to some small extent, because of Esther. Indeed it might almost have been Esther as she was, walking pleasantly with Esther as she is, the child's instinct of living only each moment's life, clinging happily to the woman's deeper philosophy of doing precisely the same. I wonder if you see what I'm driving at. It all looks so commonplace on paper. They were really of course two ordinary people, a young girl and a woman, disappearing down a path. But to an elderly physician (a thousand feet up, and on a super-day, mind you) they seemed suddenly to be something rather more.

For swinging hands as they walked, half-way between the changing water and the changeless Tor, it was as though now they held visibly between them some mystical arm's-length of the secret core of life--something that was at once common to their age and youth, and was yet apart from both; something, independent of circ.u.mstance, that was swinging for a benediction over the years that lay between them. And I'll tell you what it was, Hugh, or at any rate what I knew it to be this afternoon. It was just the Ultimate Truth about things. And behold it was very good!

So that's why I've written you this letter in answer to your sad one of this evening.

For though there is said to be a kind of comfort, I believe, in realising that others are suffering like ourselves, I doubt if this is ever a comfort worth having. And, on the other hand, there is a certain amount of real satisfaction in knowing, at the end of a blank day, that your neighbour, at any rate, has had a bit of luck. And so because you write to me _de profundis_, your bronchial mucous membrane being more than usually congested, I'm deliberately crowing to you from my little hill-top. But there's another reason, Hugh. Do you remember, twelve years ago, facing me on Believer Bridge, and holding out to me a lean brown hand to grasp? I was there this afternoon, and that nice sunburnt girl has now got a family of six.

"Peter," you said to me, "this has been a great day. It has been worth living for. I wouldn't have missed it for whatever's got to come. And if you're a real pal you won't let me forget that."

And so I have reminded you. That was one of _your_ super-days, and you chose to make it your throne of judgment upon life. And you were right, Hugh, because you judged by the best, and life, like genius, must always be greater than even its highest gifts to us. Some day, when I too am glowering upon it from the windward side of a bronchitis-kettle, I hope there'll be an equally tactful fellow to remind me of this. Perhaps you'll be the fellow.

Ever yours, P. H.

XIV

_To Miss Molly Harding, 91B Harley Street, London, W._

c/o DR. ROBT. LYNN, APPLEBROOK, DEVON, _May_ 6, 1910.

MY DEAR HOUSEKEEPER,

Twenty years ago your mother and I came down here for a fortnight's fishing to stay, just as we are staying now, and in the same month, too, with Bob Lynn and his wife. I remember that we wondered for quite six weeks if we could properly afford to do this. The house, you see--not 91B, but the tiny one at the end of Devonshire Street--had been so very costly in its demand for furniture, for rent, for wear and tear. The practice was so uncertain, seemed so desperately slow in growing. Was it safe to leave it? Would it be still there when we returned? And if not----?