The Corner of Harley Street Part 9

XX

_To Horace Harding, c/o Major Alec Cameron, Glen Bruisk, Sutherland, N.B._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _August_ 17, 1910.

MY DEAR HORACE,

So you have yielded at last. Your fine contempt for the gentlest art has begun to dissolve. And being on the very brink of one of the snuggest of sea-trout lochs you think that you must really have a cast or two upon its waters. There are people who will tell you, of course, that it's a blind man's game, or very nearly so, this loch trout fishing. But let the blue waters--crinkled, if fortune smiles, with the daintiest of ripples--be their immediate and sufficient refutation. And some day they may behold you casting one of Mrs. Richardson's artfullest duns over those senior wranglers among trout that lurk in the disillusioned depths of the Itchen.

At the same time I am not forwarding you an outfit for your birthday present, as you so delicately suggest, firstly because you tell me that Major Cameron can easily fix you up with all that is necessary; but princ.i.p.ally because I am not quite comfortable in my mind as to your real motive for caressing the surface of Loch Bruisk. I should like to be just a little surer that it is a genuine regard for _salmo trutta_ rather than a merely altruistic (though very praiseworthy) desire to be properly companionable to Miss Graham, who is, as you tell me, so awfully keen about it.

It is of course a very strong point in her favour, and I remember her brother quite well. He plays half for Richmond, I think, and you introduced us to one another at Queen's. And his sister--I don't remember that you have mentioned her to me before--may of course be the means to an end--an instrument chosen by a merciful Providence whereby a new channel of enjoyment is about to be revealed to you. But on the other hand, I can't help feeling that with your duty done, cheerfully and bravely, as I have no doubt will be the case--and Miss Graham away--the yearning to catch trout may conceivably leave you. So I am sending you instead my very best wishes for the happiest of birthdays, and a hope that you have many others yet in store for you.

I am glad that you have determined to go up for your second medical some time next year, and note that you have taken away volumes of anatomy and physiology in your trunk. If you will accept my paternal advice, however, you will leave them there until you have decided that your health is sufficiently recuperated to return either to Cambridge or Harley Street. I don't want you to curtail your holidays. I have far too much respect both for holidays in general and yourself in particular.

For it's one of the most pathetic features about the genuine old codger (and one of his surest signs too) that his periods of recreation tend to become progressively shorter--and not always by force of circ.u.mstances.

They may actually begin to bore him. He may even have to make an effort of will to prolong them for his ultimate good--to school himself into regarding them as cures. Thus, while at twenty-two a summer vacation of less than two months is too monstrous to be seriously considered, at forty-two one becomes grateful for a fortnight, could do with three weeks, but is apt to find a month just a trifle too long. Whereas at fifty-two---- So don't curtail them. And yet better is it to curtail them than to pollute. And unless you particularly need them for preserving specimens of the local flora or maintaining the creases upon your Sunday trousers, you should never, never, never pack technical books in a holiday trunk. It is to put poison--or at any rate water--into the wine that you are to pour out before the G.o.ds of mountain and moor and loch. And though they are generous they are proud.

And they will surely make you repent it--not merely because it is tactless, as though you should make Miss Dolly--I think that was her name?--the staple article of your conversations with Miss Graham; and not merely because it shows your ignorance, as though you should munch ginger-nuts with that fine old port which your uncle has dug up for your especial benefit; but because--far worse--it is an evidence of double-dealing. And no G.o.d, not even the presiding deity of the tiniest mountain ash, is going to stand that. If you read your Bible, as I hope you do, you will have been warned concerning this simultaneous worship of two contrary masters, and the doom that must certainly befall it. And that's why no really wise schoolmaster ever sets his pupils a holiday task, though there are still, I'm afraid, a few foolish ones left. I hardly like to think that mine can have been among them; and yet there's no doubt that "Marmion," the "Lady of the Lake," the "Cloister and the Hearth," and several other peaks upon the literary landscape remain clouded to me for ever.

You would have thought this a sufficiently clear lesson, perhaps, upon the point that I am pressing into you. But it wasn't. And I remember consecrating a golden September in Fife to the mastery of my materia medica. There's a moor, for instance, somewhere between Dunfermline and Rumbling Bridge that will eternally be a.s.sociated in my mind with the preparations of opium. I can recall in all its hideous detail some such afternoon's tramp as this:--

"By George, that's a fine piece of colouring, the sunlight on that dying heather over there, Tinct: Camph: Co: strength of opium one in two hundred and forty. There are the Ochils again, pil: plumbi c.u.m opio, strength of opium one in eight---- d.a.m.n, I forgot to look for that big trout when I crossed the burn just now. Extractum opii, strength of opium two in one" (it sounds improbable--even theological--but if you look it up you will discover it to be correct, and I have never found the knowledge in the least important). And, as a result, that particular moor will always whisper to me unhealthily of morphia, while the preparations of opium had to be learned all over again in something less than six weeks' time.

And you will generally find it to be the case, I think, that the work which has desecrated the holiday can seldom stand either the test of an examination or the more valuable one of practical appliance. For it's the term's work, the good, solid, everyday's grind in the dissecting-room or the physiological theatre, and later in the wards and the out-patient department, that is the bone and marrow of your pre-graduate education. Without it no amount of feverish cramming will ever make you efficient, though it may occasionally perhaps save you from being deservedly ploughed. And with it no cramming should be necessary--or at most a very little. For there are still a few subjects, alas, demanded by examining boards that can be learned, I suppose, in no other way--such as the preparations of opium before mentioned, with their respective strengths and all that appertains unto them, and the ingredients of various obscure powders that you will never hear about again. In after life you will always refer to your pharmacopeia if you want information upon these subjects, and no normal mind has either the capacity or the desire to retain their details for so long as twenty-four hours after they have been required in the examination-room.

But as a general rule, and one that is happily gaining ground every year, you will find that your examiners will far prefer to discover in you the evidences of a functionally active, if somewhat lightly stored, mind than a kind of _pate de foie gras_, fattened up for the occasion, but too inert, as a result, to leave him quite happy about its future.

And that's why it's always a good thing to take life easily during the last week before your papers have to be written. Go abroad, mix with normal men and women, to whom examinations are just episodes in the lives of other people, fearsome but remote. And remind yourself in their unruffled company that, after all, they _are_ merely episodes. You won't forget anything really important in that time. If you do, you can never properly have known it. While as for the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, you will be more than compensated for the shedding of a few of these by the sanity and freshness with which your brain will come to its ordeal--as an example of the reverse of which there occurs to me the vision of a pallid young man who addressed me about six weeks ago in the hospital lobby. He was very much frightened. I didn't know who he was. Indeed I don't think that I had ever seen him before. And the remnants of a natural modesty were evidently struggling to hold him back. But Circ.u.mstance, and the awful fact that in less than an hour's time he was due for a _viva_ upon the Thames Embankment, forced him trembling towards me. He wiped his forehead--I was the only likely subject within range at the moment, and his train was to leave in exactly seven and a half minutes.

"I can remember the hooklets," he gasped, "but _would_ you mind telling me, sir, which of the tapeworms it is that has four suckers?"

Poor boy--I could see that his whole future was pivoting miserably upon those forgotten suckers; and, by an excessively fortunate accident, I happened to have some notes for a lecture upon the subject in one of my pockets.

"If you'll wait a moment," I told him honestly, "I think that I can let you know. But I really couldn't tell you offhand."

He looked at me anxiously, and I could see my reputation tottering in his eyes as I searched about for my pocket-book.

"Nor could your examiners, you know," I a.s.sured him, "unless they had just primed themselves beforehand, or carried notes upon their cuffs--which they probably do."

His brow cleared amazingly at this, and I could see that the relative importance of knowing, without reference, the precise number of a tapeworm's suckers was beginning to define itself a little more clearly to his distressed understanding. So I read out my notes to him, and he dashed upon his way, relieved if not rejoicing. But you mustn't ever become like that, you know, although it's not so difficult to do so as you may think.

And lastly, if there should be a Miss Graham--I speak in the abstract, of course, and very, very tentatively--she must be allowed to share none of the homage that every respectable examination insists upon monopolising. She may still be the G.o.ddess in your car. For on the whole I think that G.o.ddesses (of the right sort) make for careful driving. But at present your eyes must be chiefly upon the reins. You must forgive me for touching upon a topic that you will probably find extremely irrelevant, but there are certain things in a Highland country house that are curiously apt to wander a little from their true perspective. I ought to have mentioned, by the way, that Churchills are sending you a gun, which I hope may arrive safely with this letter. For though I am quite open to conviction about the fishing, I feel rather more certain about the shooting. It was pre-Grahamite, you see--you haven't told me her Christian name--pre-Dollyite, pre-Berylite--and even, if I remember rightly, pre-Looite; so that I think it may safely be accepted as being integral and not merely advent.i.tious. Anyway, there's the gun, and I hope that you'll kill many grouse with it in spite of your sister Molly and her humanitarian comrades. For grouse, like men, must die on a day, and better the quick shot in mid-flight than to crawl away, and to perish slowly in the corner as most of us, alas, will probably have to do when our sunset days come round.

I expect you will already have had letters from mother and Molly, if not from Tom and Claire, who are staying with Lady Wroxton at Stoke, and defying the Thames Conservancy in the matter of mixed bathing during most of the forbidden hours. You heard, no doubt, or saw in the papers, that Rupert Morris has had a K added to his C.B.; which means, I suppose, that his little sc.r.a.p on the frontier was more important than he led us to suppose. In any case, n.o.body, I should think, has deserved his t.i.tle more, and quite certainly no one will value it less. He is expected home, I believe, about the end of September, and you will probably meet him at Stoke, where Molly (having squared her conscience) is presently to a.s.sist in the extra housekeeping demanded by the partridges and pheasants. With much love,

Yr. affect. father, P. H.

XXI

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

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _August_ 25, 1910.

MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,

I have, of course, frequently seen many of the pictures that you mention, and have also read some of the stories of which, as you say, each ill.u.s.tration professes to tell one. I don't think however that I have seen the particular one of the signalman which you enclose; and it certainly seems a coincidence that he should be pressing his left hand so vehemently upon the precise spot at which your cook also is so apt to suffer pain. And it is odd too that, like her, he would appear to be so thoroughly respectable that their common affliction becomes a little difficult to understand. It is not, as you say, as if either of them gave one the least impression of being in any degree _loose_ or _rackety_. At the same time, from a close examination of the signalman's anatomy, I don't think that the organs so frequently mentioned in his very eloquent account of himself are those most likely to be affected.

And perhaps your cook may also be happily under a similar misapprehension. And that is why, before taking the pills that have been so markedly blessed to the signalman, I would suggest the outward application of a little friction with the open palm of someone else's hand in which have been previously placed a few drops of turpentine. It will be so far less expensive, you see; and, even if not finally successful, will at any rate do no harm. But I have great hopes.

Your affect. nephew, PETER HARDING.

XXII

_To Reginald Pole, S.Y. Nautilus, Harwich._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _August_ 30, 1910.

MY DEAR REGGIE,

When one of your youngest journalists from Franciscan House called upon me last night, I guessed at once that you were either away from home or that you had given the lad _carte blanche_ to collect material for a "silly season" discussion, without adding an Olympian hint or two as to where he had best go hunting. As a matter of fact both surmises turned out to be correct; and I even seemed to detect in him a certain air of relief as he admitted the first, while he was still young enough to feel rather important with regard to the second. Unhappy youth--how should he know that he had run into the very jaws of your arch-enemy?

It was a college friendship with Horace, he informed me, that was his excuse for calling upon me, although of course he knew quite well that I was an eminent authority on the subject in hand. This was so obvious an afterthought that I couldn't help asking him what the subject might be.

He told his lie so nicely, you see, and was so humbly aware of its small worth. He coloured a little.

"Are we nervous?" he said.

I pushed over the tobacco-jar, and asked him to fill his pipe.

"I hope not," I replied, and he coloured a little more.

"You don't understand," he explained. "That is to be the headline of the discussion. At least, that was what I'd thought myself. But some of the other fellows have suggested, 'Are we _more_ nervous?' or 'Where are our National Nerves?' or 'National Neurosis; are we suffering from it?'"

I nodded.

"Yours is the shortest," I said.

"Just so," he replied, "and, I think, the most arresting."

"And who's going to write the first letter?" I asked.

"Well," he stammered, "I rather expect it will be me."