The Corner of Harley Street Part 8

MY DEAR BOB,

I have had a talk with Arthur, as you suggested, about his new appointment, and I think, on the whole, that he would be well advised to take it. As he said to me, poor boy, he has had just lately to readjust his future a bit, and the practice that he had thought of buying has ceased to have much attraction for him. And I needn't tell you again how very sorry I am that Molly, and perhaps to a lesser degree both Esther and myself, have been responsible for this. For you know quite well that there is n.o.body whom we would more gladly have welcomed as an extra son; and until quite lately we both fully believed--although we had never of course actually ascertained this--that Molly returned his feelings.

Alas, however, for the best-laid plans--for since we discussed the matter at Applebrook, I have become almost certain that although her answer would be "yes" on every other ground but this, on this particular one she will never, I'm afraid, be able to meet him with open arms. The event may contradict me, but I think not. The divine spark has not yet touched her heart. And I know you are with me in believing that she would be wrong, with all her youth in front of her, not to wait for it a little longer. And so Arthur, being robbed (but only for a time, I hope) of what he tells me sorrowfully was his _raison d'etre_, has decided to postpone his debut as a general pract.i.tioner--yet not without, unless I am very greatly mistaken, a certain secret atom of relief. For his real inclinations, I am sure, still centre in the laboratory and the microscope; and it was chiefly for financial reasons that he had abandoned any ideas of further dallying with them. He wanted to "do Molly," as he confided to me, "as well as he could"; and that would have been impossible, he was afraid, as a bacteriologist or pathologist. And there, from a strictly monetary standpoint, he was perhaps in the right. For though, as a profession (and through us, the great public), we must needs lean each year more heavily upon these skilled workers at our right hand, yet at present we are all very reluctant to give them their full dues either in professional _eclat_ or pounds, shillings, and pence. All the same, their day is coming, if perhaps a little slowly; so that maybe, after all, Miss Molly's unintentional cruelty may prove to be an angel in mufti. And now that he is in no immediate need of earning more money than can comfortably support himself, I think that this new appointment, as a.s.sistant in the inoculation department, is just the job for him. It will mean of course two years of life; but he has already been a house-surgeon and a house-physician, and in any case a two years' training in the exactest of all scientific technique will not be a waste of time whatever his ultimate occupation is destined to be.

Moreover (though it is seldom wise to prophesy) I am becoming pretty thoroughly convinced that the future of medicine lies more wholly in the hands of the vaccino-therapists than any of us are as yet quite able to realise. For when one comes to think of it, although surgery, during the last fifty years, has been advancing by leaps and bounds, medicine has been standing very still indeed. Where it has moved at all it has been chiefly on the lines of improving its methods of diagnosis, while as regards treatment it has remained very nearly as empirical as it was a century ago. Perhaps this is rather a hard saying, but in the main I am quite sure that it is a true one. And I think its restoration to lively and effective growth will be more dependent upon the methods, so sound in their conception and so brilliant in their performance, of Sir Almroth Wright and his fellow-workers, at home and abroad, than upon any other factor now making for medical progress. As a school they are no doubt destined to confront a good many reverses. And they will presently be forced, I suspect, to re-state a certain number of their present beliefs. But their guiding principle is so essentially sane, so really scientific, in the true sense of an abused adjective, that I cannot think your boy will go far wrong in perfecting himself in their methods, and even perhaps deciding later to specialise altogether in this particular branch of medicine.

To determine by culture the precise organism that is causing a patient's malady (and how few are the diseases left to us that may be definitely cla.s.sed as non-microbic); to learn by an examination of his blood-cells the exact condition of his resisting powers; and to increase these by carefully graduated doses of his own or similar bacteria until his newly stimulated anti-bodies have been so increased and fortified as to be able to win their own battle--it is a general method of treatment that seems to me to hold more palpably the key to future victory than any other. There's an infinity yet to be learned about it, of course. The mysteries of the anti-body have been scarcely fringed. And the technique is still so difficult that none but a highly trained man can be trusted with it. But if anybody is to win an ultimate triumph over incidental disease it is that trained man who is going to do it. And the sooner we consulting physicians learn rather to count him as a brother than a mere laboratory a.s.sistant, the better will it be for the march of light and healing. Amen. This little peroration was put into my head by a pa.s.sage in an address that I heard delivered the other day at an evening lecture to post-graduates.

"Gentlemen," said the lecturer--a well-known provincial consultant, "I should like the day to dawn when I could be met at the door of my hospital by a trained chemist, a trained bacteriologist, a trained pathologist, so that when I came to some complicated case I could say, 'Chemist, a part of this problem is yours, take it and work it out.

Bacteriologist, perform your share in elucidating this difficulty.

Pathologist, advance, and do likewise.'"

There was a little applause; and after all, he had got, I suppose, some glimmering of what the new medicine is to be. Only he, the lecturer, was still, do you see, to be the _deus ex machina_. He was a genial old gentleman and quite without conceit, and was merely taking, as we all do, I'm afraid, the predominant position of the consulting physician as fixed for eternity. Whereas instead it is quite healthily rocking, I fancy, on waters that are ceasing to be stagnant.

Yours ever, P. H.

XIX

_To Hugh Pontrex, Hotel Montana, Biarritz._

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

MY DEAR HUGH,

So the pendulum of our frailty swings. The warm airs of July have surrounded you with well-being in your Atlantic quarters, and a confounded carbuncle under my left shoulder has been painting my world quite black for at least four days, and grey for the inside of a week.

It's the penalty, I suppose, of being rarely laid aside by sickness, that when some trivial misfortune does make its appearance, one exaggerates its proportion in the general scheme of things to a quite unmerited degree--and especially, I think, if one happens to be a doctor. "Physician, heal thyself," the mockers say. But he should never attempt to. He knows too much about the various possibilities, the remoter significances of each one of his little troubles, to be a sufficiently clear-minded judge. And he is far better advised when he resigns his body _in toto_ to the care of some outside mind, and confines his own mental powers to the fortification of his private philosophy.

Pain, sleeplessness, and that peculiar sense of being disowned by one's own body that a high temperature always seems to induce--I suppose if all the comfortable words that have been uttered in their explanation were to be gathered up into a book the whole world would not be great enough to contain it. We were told not so desperately long ago that they represented the direct tenancy of the evil one or some of his dependents. Then a more enlightened but still stern theology informed us that they represented the well-deserved judgments of G.o.d; until a later and more generous interpretation has inclined rather to believe in them as evidences, a little puzzlingly disguised, of a chastening yet still indubitable Love.

But, alas, it is so easy, even in the full comfort of bodily health, to perceive the bottomless gaps in these and all other arguments about the great problem of pain, that in the actual enduring of it there seems, after all, very little to be done but to lie low, and bear it humbly--as many a better fellow and weaker woman have borne worse things before us since the foreconsciousness of death became the price of the first man's soul. And yet I believe quite orthodoxly that these unattractive episodes in one's life--even carbuncles--do really contain some sort of a message to one's intelligence, apart from the patent one that somewhere or other one has blundered against a natural law, and paid the necessary penalty.

For there comes a period in most illnesses, I think, sometimes during a temporary respite, more often perhaps at the first dawn of convalescence, when one becomes extraordinarily conscious, yet without discomfort, of the almost trivial delicacy of one's surrounding tissue.

It is generally, I suppose, a moment of exhaustion, both mental and physical, either upon the bugle of a victory or a truce. But it is a moment when one's spiritual aesthesis, as it were, is peculiarly at liberty. Very soon, in a minute or two even, Nature will begin her work of restoration--none more willing than she, given a very little patience and half a straw to make her bricks with. But now she is standing by for a moment, trowel in hand, and the outer wind is breathing through the gap. And it's then, I think, if you'll only listen carefully enough, that you can sometimes hear it whispering.

"Presently," you can hear it say, "this little house of yours will be mended, and the more easily maybe, because its walls are so thin. But don't--don't forget too quickly that it is but a house after all."

Yet I suppose we do forget it, most of us, and probably quite healthily, when once the dwelling-place is bricked up again, and the new paint is on, and it stands foursquare to the winds that may not enter now. And yet again, if the message has once been heard, or twice, or thrice, as circ.u.mstances have it, I don't believe that it is ever entirely lost.

And there, perhaps, may even lie the key to all the mystery; so that when the last storm blows, and Nature must shake her head, and let the frail house fall, its tenant may not go out altogether unprepared.

I felt all this very strongly some ten days ago, having made or reviewed my will about twenty-seven times, resigned myself to the administration of gas and the skilful weapons of old Sir Jeremy across the way, and awakened next morning to a normal temperature and a comparatively comfortable back. But a week's high feeding, and three days with Esther at Eastbourne, in the occasional brisk and simple company of Claire and her pals, have been steadily blunting my higher susceptibilities. So that's why I've been setting them on record with so much circ.u.mstantial detail--a great deal less for your satisfaction than my own.

We had resolved to take Miss Claire by surprise, and, calling at the school, found, as a consequence, that she was out. She had probably gone Pevensey way, thought the maid, with some of the older young ladies and one of the governesses. And it was out Pevensey way that we presently recognised upon the beach, among a heterogeneous collection of empty shoes and stockings, some big-brimmed straw hats with the school ribbon upon them. Their owners were for the most part thigh-deep in the English Channel with their skirts tucked conveniently round their plump waists.

And they were being watched from the sh.o.r.e by a very pleasant young lady, who looked rather wistfully as if she would like to be out there too. Yes, she told us, Claire was in the water with the others, probably among the deeper ones who were getting their knickers wet. Surveying the melee with an expression of polite concern, she was rather afraid that it would be a little difficult to make Claire understand who we were.

But if we wouldn't mind waiting for a minute or two they would all be coming in to dry their legs before going back to prep.

Presently some floating atom of wreckage took them unanimously eastward, splashing through the shallows, until the governess, waving a white handkerchief, brought them gingerly ash.o.r.e across a little bank of rather slippery-looking rock. There was a general shaking out and rearranging of tousled manes, yellow and chestnut and black, and a modest dropping of skirts to the demurer level of shining wet knees.

The little party drifted slowly towards us, their brown feet lingering wholesomely across the sands.

"You'll know Claire," said the governess, "by the bandage round her instep. I oughtn't really to have let her paddle."

Esther's eyes became a little anxious.

"But what has been the matter?" she asked.

The governess smiled.

"Oh, nothing very serious," she said. "And I think you must ask Claire herself. Tales out of school, you know."

And then the least tidy, perhaps, of the damsels detached herself suddenly from her comrades, and came down upon us at top speed, regardless of pebbles.

"Have you got me off prep?" she asked earnestly, after she had kissed us and found her shoes and stockings. And having explained to her that we were going to take her out to tea for a pre-birthday treat--she was going to be sixteen next week--we inquired about the bandage. It was the result, we discovered, of an illegal (and unconfirmed) raid upon a neighbouring dormitory, during which, by a kind of Homeric retribution, a stray tin-tack had wounded her unprotected foot.

"But it's about well now, I should think," she said, undoing the bandage, and turning up a salmon-pink sole for our inspection. And we were obliged to confess that it was.

She rolled up the bandage into a little ball, and threw it down the beach.

"I wish we could _always_ go barefoot," she sighed. And for the moment I felt inclined to agree with her. For the happy foot, as T. E. Brown has said, swings rather from the heart than from the hip. And there are few prettier things in nature than the restless, romping legs of the average healthy little maiden. They are her life's joy made visible; so that it really seems a shame, if a necessary one, to imprison them in even the airiest of stockings and the most hygienic of leather shoes.

Blue gingham petticoats, White blown ap.r.o.ns, Five pairs of plump legs Twinkling down the hill, Black imprisoned plump legs, Fretful for the stream bed, Tired of shoes and stockings, Dancing like a rill, Dancing down the hillside, So come the children, Like a rill in sunshine, So dance they, Seek the solemn waters, Marching to the ocean, Set the solemn waters Laughing at their play.

So into my heart come, Silver it with laughter, Lest among the shadows Lost should be its way, So into my heart come Rosamund and Daphne, Marian and Rosemary, And little baby May.

Claire and her companions had been paddling in the big ocean itself; and being comparatively dignified did not of course wear ap.r.o.ns. Moreover, as I had the strongest reasons for believing, they were at this moment quite innocent of petticoats. But the little poem comes back to me as I write.

"And next week," she proceeded ruefully, "I shall have to go into blobs and half-masters."

We stared at her rather blankly.

"All the girls do, you know," she added, "when they turn sixteen."

"But blobs----" I began.

"And half-masters?" puzzled Esther.

"When your hair's neither up nor down," Claire explained, "with a big fat bow on it. And when you have to wear skirts a foot below your knees."

She rolled over, and struck her toes into the sand.

"It's to show," she finished pathetically, "that you're too grown up to be spanked and not old enough to have visiting cards."

Which seems to suggest that even sixteen may have its tragedies, though its capacity for ices remains happily unimpaired. Or would you call them growing pains? And are all pains growing pains?

Ever yrs., P. H.