The Corner of Harley Street Part 6

So we argued, and knew all the time that there was a far more important consideration than any of these tucked away in the upstairs part of our minds. Was it safe to leave her at only ten months old? Would she know us again when we came back? Could any one in the world take a great enough care of her?

Perhaps you have never guessed what an important little person she was; and perhaps, even now, you decline, in that very calm and unimpa.s.sioned habit of yours, to believe it. But that must be because you have never properly studied the evidence. I wonder if you have ever seen, for instance, the clothes that she wore--such little clothes, but just look at them, every st.i.tch as delicate as a tendril, and every dimple and pucker as soft as a wild bird's nest. There's never more than one person in the world who can make clothes like that; and n.o.body, not even her husband, knows where she learned the secret. And if this were only the husk, what then about the plump little kernel inside?

I can remember the long discussions, and how at last two cold-blooded physicians, the one in Devonshire and the other in town, had their own way, and forced a mother from her babelet for two long, if health-giving, weeks. I can remember the arrival of a Miss Sarah Harding--admirablest of lay-mothers (G.o.d bless them all)--to take up her awful charge; and the hour or so during which she received instructions enough to cause a less iron brain to melt upon its pan. But she was a wonderful woman even then, and _somebody_ had to take care of the child.

And now, with a trifling difference or two, here's history repeating itself in the oddest manner possible, father and mother flown down again to Devonshire, and somebody offering, in their absence, to take care of Miss Molly--but for rather longer than a paltry two weeks; and please what do we think of it?

By the same post, too, comes a brief, apologetic sort of letter from the candidate himself. He had meant to wait for another year or so before suggesting himself as even a possible caretaker, only as it happened last night at Lady Pearson's she was looking, etc. etc.--and you know how these things will get the better of a chap, etc. etc.--and, well, there it was, don't you know; and now it is all upon the knees of the G.o.ds. Or of one little G.o.ddess, did he mean to say? Because that of course is where it really is, as you both know very well indeed, in spite of your pretty letters to us, which have made your mother and me feel at once very elderly and happy and anxious (in a not too unpleasant sense) and also--do you mind?--vicariously honoured.

I doubt if I am looking at the matter quite eye to eye with the W.S.P.U.

when I say this; but you'll have to forgive me, I think, especially as it's your Daddy's opinion that you ask for, and not theirs. So I'll tell you just what I felt when I read your letter, and comprehended its tidings.

1. Dear me, is she really as old as that?

2. Then what am I?

3. _O tempus edax rerum!_

4. But it's really rather gratifying.

5. Because after all there are so many nice girls in the world.

6. And yet it's _my_ girl that he would like to marry.

7. _Our_ girl, please. (This from Esther.)

You see how primitive we become in these little crises of life.

And I think, if you really want to have my very particular message to you about this, it is--don't mind being a little primitive yourself.

On the whole, perhaps, I am not able to prescribe this as often as I should like; and chiefly because, I suppose, the young couples that come to me for an opinion on matrimony are not as a rule normal young couples. They have usually been sent, that is to say, by some wise or anxious guardian who has foreseen for them some probable disaster. And often enough I have had to beseech them for their own good and for the unborn others to let their reason lay aside their pa.s.sion--not without tears.

Now, I believe I know you well enough to be right in saying that the--shall I call it the strictly eugenic?--side of the question is not likely to suffer from your neglect. Newnham and the W.S.P.U. will have taken care of that. Nor is there anything, in the present case, to trouble you from this point of view. For Arthur Lynn is a sound, healthy, athletic young man, four years your senior, of good stock and sufficiently satisfactory means and prospects. Both physically and in every other way he would be a desirable husband for you. And all this, as I gather from your letter, you have been very carefully, and very rightly, considering. Moreover you can be quite sure--you probably _are_ quite sure--that there is no one whom your mother and I would sooner have for a son-in-law, as I am writing to tell him this evening.

No, my dear, I don't think that your danger lies in a too slender application of reason to the problem before you. It lurks, if anywhere, in a too great disregard of what is often supposed to be its ant.i.thesis. And I should like you to have written to me, not only that you were 'naturally pleased, of course, if a little perplexed,' but that you were _thrilled_. To which, no doubt, you will reply that in the first place you're not the sort of young woman that indulges in thrills, and in the second that, had you done so, you would certainly never have committed the fact to paper. But I should have read it between the lines. Ah, Molly, don't ever be _too_ afraid of thrills. For at the worst (the most _bourgeois_) they are at any rate evidences of life, not only within but without--some all-pervading force, short-circuited for a moment through your own awakened consciousness to that old, old world on which you stand; while at the best--well, who shall say from what unseen Vessel the current has its birth?

Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, I would speak my heart out; heaven is my need.

Was it like that with you, Molly? Because that is how I would have it for you, my dear. And I think it is worth waiting for, not for a week only, as you have suggested to Arthur, but for far longer than that. You will tell me, very likely, and with perfect truth, to remember that wherever marriages may be said to have their hypothetical origin, in actual practice they must needs evolve upon earth. And that's a side of the question, no doubt, that a good many people are inclined to forget.

But you're not one of them. And I should like you to give Heaven a chance, not only for your own sake, but for your future husband's, whoever he may ultimately be. Husbands need a little halo, you see, at any rate to begin with. And that's why I should like you to wait awhile--say six months or so--even at the risk of causing young Lynn a little gentle (but quite harmless) unhappiness. And when--and if--he comes to you then (for you mustn't allow him to promise) let your heart have no doubt in its yes.

Your affect. father, P. H.

XV

_To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _May_ 16, 1910.

MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,

It is certainly very wrong of Claire not to have written to thank you for the mittens. As you say, colds in the head are quite common in the months of May and June, and I have no doubt that if she wears them, as you suggest, whenever she goes out to play, they will keep her hands very warm indeed. I hope that you will hear from her in a day or two.

With regard to the vicar's boy, I think, from what I remember of him, that you can quite safely leave him in the hands of the vicar's very wise housekeeper and your own excellent doctor. I doubt too if he would ever really constantly wear the flannel cholera-belt that you have been making for him; and in any case, I think a temporary abstinence from b.u.t.ter-scotch would be an even more effective measure. Your doctor is quite right about the tomatoes. There is no evidence to show that they cause cancer. But of course one must always be careful not to eat too many of them. No, the gravel from which, I am sorry to hear, the new lay-reader suffers has nothing to do with that which is found in gardens. And it is quite sufficient, as you say, to account for a little occasional hastiness in his temper. We are all glad to hear that you have been so busy and comparatively well, and both Esther and Molly join me in sending you their best love.

Your affect. nephew, PETER HARDING.

XVI

_To Lady Wroxton, The Manor House, Stoke Magna, Oxon._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _May_ 23, 1910.

MY DEAR LADY WROXTON,

I was very glad, as were we all, to hear from you again after so long a silence, and gladder still to learn that the pleasant peacefulness of Stoke is doing its good work on your behalf so surely, if still a little slowly. For both from your own letter and that of Dr. Rochester I can see that the spirit of you is climbing back again towards the light, less lonely than you would have thought possible six months ago, and into an air as clear even as that which you and your husband breathed together before he was taken from you. I think that I know how hard must be the ascent, although in my own perhaps too peaceful life I have had little enough experience of these swift and terrible bereavements, that will come to me also, I must suppose, in their due time. And it is only from the share, sometimes completely professional, sometimes rather more intimate than this, that I have been called upon to take in such experiences of others that I seem to have learned a very little about the tides of grief.

Looking down upon the dead face, touching the cold hand, lifting up the leaden arm, one cannot help feeling how utterly dead a dead man looks, an impression enormously deepened, as a rule, by the circ.u.mstances of the last days. For in these his external, his spiritual activities have been, of necessity almost, set aside, and perhaps temporarily forgotten in the paramount appeals of his body itself. Now this organ, now that, must be attended to, supported, cleansed, stimulated, implored, as it were, to fulfil its duty towards the struggling economy of the whole.

And as an almost inevitable result their slender responses, their final refusals, have obsessed both patient and friends to the exclusion of everything else. The bodily case, so long taken for granted, and now so fast giving way, has become no longer a subordinate, but the predominant factor in its owner's ent.i.ty. So that when the body, _Imperator et Dux_ of these later hours, at length lays down its sceptre, it's a small wonder if all else has appeared to die with it. Nor for a time can the formulae of the churches seem anything but unreal, however humbly a schooled faith may try to accept their verity. The dead thing beneath the sheet seems to weigh down the balance with a fact too stark for disputation. Of the earth earthy, it is committed to the earth, resolving presently into its elements--and who shall tell its number any more?

Between mere friends, the friend taken and the friend left, this bodily dissolution has perhaps a less grim significance, or makes, at any rate, a smaller demand on faith. We loved our friend for his ways, his wit, his kindliness, his character, and not very particularly for his cast of feature or mould of physique. But where friendship has allied itself with pa.s.sion, where the actual flesh has meant much, where souls have spoken, not only in sight and speech, but in touch and fast embrace, the death of the flesh must necessarily seem to involve so infinitely more--enough almost to justify mediaeval thought in demanding, for its consolation, a belief in the resurrection of the body. And as a result the well-meant advice of physicians and friends must appear at these times to be entirely inadequate--I was almost going to say impertinent--because it must necessarily be only half informed.

And yet I am not sure that we, standing at a distance (and perhaps even because of this), have not, after all, the real comfort in our hands. To you, from whose close touch the alabaster box has slipped, its breaking has seemed to mean the end of all things. You were so near to it. And how irreparable was its fracture no eyes but yours could tell. So what can we others say to you that can be of any value in your sorrow?

Well, we can at least say this--that its perfume is still upon the air, its real gift to us and our great and permanent possession. It may be easier for us--his mere friends--to declare thus that we haven't really lost him. But given a little time it will become possible even to you, who were heart of his heart. And if there's no older--and perhaps colder--truism than this, yet it has a very sound and, I believe, an actually physical basis. For if we grant, as we needs must, that the material body is ever changing, cell replacing cell by a continuous process of wasting and repair, so that the substance containing us to-day is by no means identical with that which contained us, as it were, yesterday, why then the cells that called out for the physical sight and touch of those other cells that surrounded him we loved must necessarily pa.s.s also upon their journey, and with them, to a very great extent, their anguish of unsatisfied desire. This is why, I think, nothing becomes more absolutely obliterated than a dead pa.s.sion that has been merely bodily; and why also, in most other cases where pa.s.sion has been a factor, the diminution of grief must be regarded as a completely natural process and one that implies no shadow of disloyalty. It merely means that the sense of loss has been transferred to another and more spiritual plane, where, lo! it even appears at times to have been scarcely a loss at all; but instead a withdrawal, so obviously transient as to be itself an evidence of some certain, if incomprehensible reunion. With his memories so thronging, with the visible and abiding evidences of his activities so implicit in the growth of his successors, how little, after all, has become the value of the vessel that contained him! Am I right? Isn't it going with you somehow in this fashion?

But, dear me, if your power of sleep were not returning to you so rapidly, you would be imagining this some subtle form of prescription by epistle.

And that was one of the best bits of news in your letter, besides being the chief reason why you mustn't, I think, come back to town just yet, even at the risk of disappointing Hilary and Norah. For Sleep's a fickle G.o.ddess when she once goes wandering, and the way to woo her home is not to woo her at all. Seek her not, and she will come stealing back to you round the corner to know the reason why. And there's no place like the country and some quiet garden therein in which to declare your war of independence.

For, as I told you before, sleeplessness _per se_ has never killed anybody yet; and where nothing but the rising and setting of stars, and the opening and closing of flowers need call for your attention, you can very comfortably afford to snap your fingers at it in defiance. But in town it would be different. Your days would become, in spite of yourself, so automatically exacting that you would of necessity demand respite from your nights--the very demand that, just at present, you mustn't be obliged to make. At Stoke, on the other hand, it doesn't matter (and the more you insist on this the better), it doesn't matter a bit where, when, or how much, you sleep. The very air of the place is a far too bewitching, and incidentally a quite adequate, subst.i.tute; while for dreams you have the whole cycle of field and garden husbandry spread out before your eyes, as little changing as the downs themselves, and like them pretty nearly "half as old as time." So watch it for a year, day in and day out, and leave the turmoils and telephones of London to such unfortunate and envious friends as P. H., of medicinal memory.

As regards the girl you sent up to me from the village last Friday, I have taken her into one of my wards at the Hospital, where I fancy a little careful dieting will soon set her right again. At the same time I may take the opportunity of examining the defaulting organ by means of a very ingenious instrument just devised by two of my junior colleagues.

It's a toy--it's going to be much more than that--that would have delighted your husband's heart, and by its means, down a bent tube, inserted through her mouth, fitted with a tiny electric lamp and reflectors at the angles, I shall be able not only to peep into her stomach, but to survey it as thoroughly and particularly as I am now able to inspect her tongue. Even so do the youngsters show us the way!

Yes, you are quite right. Anaemia, dyspepsia, gastric ulcer seem to be the special afflictions of the under-housemaid. And it's the d.a.m.nable habit of providing her with "kitchen" tea, and "kitchen" b.u.t.ter, and "kitchen" food of all sorts that is largely responsible for this, not only directly, but indirectly, in that it tempts her to indulge in various kinds of unhealthy in-between meals. Surely the servants who work for us, and feed us, and keep us clean, should be at least as well and as carefully fed as ourselves, even if they wouldn't be quite happy, perhaps, to sit at our own tables. And the careless (and I'm afraid doubtful) ladies who think otherwise should be made to undergo a spell of domestic dieting in their own establishments.

Esther and Molly, who are at home, join me in sending you their very best love and hopes for a near-at-hand complete recovery; and, if you can really put up with them, nothing will make Tom and Claire happier than to spend a week or two of their summer holidays at Stoke.

Your sincere friend, PETER HARDING.

P.S.--You must try to forgive me for this rambling and rather inconsequent letter, but I have been both inflicting and enduring, for the last ten days, a superfluity of full-dress lectures. So I have been writing to you, as a result, in my mental shirtsleeves.