by A. J. Cronin
‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered. ‘You managed that wonderfully. Just when I thought –’
He shook his head, his jaw still stubbornly set.
‘They didn’t want trouble, that crowd. I had their promise, their written promise –’ He swung round to her, his eyes burning. ‘ It wasn’t these idiotic fares, darling. You know that. It was the principle of the thing. People ought to keep their word. It put my back up too, the way they were waiting for us, you could see it a mile away – here’s a couple of greenhorns – easy money. Oh, and that cigar they dumped on me too, the whole thing reeked of swindle.’
‘We managed to get what we wanted, anyhow,’ she murmured tactfully.
He nodded. He was too strung up, too seething with indignation to see the humour of it then. But in their room at the Museum the comic side became apparent. As he lit a cigarette and stretched himself on the bed, watching her as she tidied her hair, he suddenly began to laugh. He laughed so much that he set her laughing, too.
‘That look on old Isaacs’s face –’ he wheezed, his ribs aching. ‘It was – it was screamingly funny.’
‘When you,’ she gasped weakly, ‘when you asked him for the fares.’
‘Business, he said, we can’t do business.’ He went off into another paroxysm. ‘“Am I a camel,” he said. Oh, lord! – a camel –’
‘Yes, darling.’ Comb in hand, tears running down her cheeks, she turned to him, scarcely able to articulate. ‘But the funniest thing – to me – was the way you kept saying “I’ve got it here in black and white” when I – when I – oh dear! – when I knew all the time you’d left the letter on the mantelpiece at home.’
He sat up, staring at her, then flung himself down with a yell of laughter. He rolled about, stuffing the pillow into his mouth, helpless, out of all control, while she clung to the dressing-table, shaking, sore with laughter, begging him, deliriously, to stop or she would expire.
Later, when they had managed to compose themselves, they went to the theatre. Since he gave her free choice she selected Saint Joan. All her life, she told him, she had wanted to see a play by Shaw.
Seated beside her in the crowded pit he was less engaged by the play – too historical, he told her afterwards, who does this fellow Shaw think he is, anyway? – than by the faint flush upon her eager entranced face. Their first visit to the theatre together. Well, it wouldn’t be the last by a long way. His eyes wandered round the full house. They would be back here again some day, not in the pit, in one of those boxes there. He would see to it; he would show them all a thing or two! Christine would wear a low-necked evening dress, people would look at him, nudge each other, that’s Manson, you know, that doctor who did that marvellous work on lungs. He pulled himself up sharply, rather sheepishly, and bought Christine an ice cream at the interval.
Afterwards he was reckless in the princely manner. Outside the theatre they found themselves completely lost, baffled by the lights, the buses, the teeming crowds. Peremptorily Andrew held up his hand. Safely ensconced, being driven to their hotel, they thought themselves, blissfully, pioneers in discovering the privacy afforded by a London taxi.
Chapter Four
After London the breeze of Aberalaw was crisp and cool. Walking down from Vale View on Thursday morning to commence his duties, Andrew felt it strike invigoratingly on his cheek. A tingling exhilaration filled him. He saw his work stretching out before him here, work well and cleanly done, work always guided by his principle, the scientific method.
The West Surgery, which lay not more than four hundred yards from his house, was a high vaulted building, white-tiled and with a vague air of sanitation. Its main and central portion was the waiting-room. At the bottom end, cut off from the waiting-room by a sliding hatch, was the dispensary. At the top were two consulting-rooms, one bearing the name of Doctor Urquhart and the other, freshly painted, the mysteriously arresting name, Doctor Manson.
It gave Andrew a thrill of pleasure to see himself identified, already, with his room, which though not large had a good desk and a sound leather couch for examinations. He was flattered too, by the number of people waiting for him – such a crowd, in fact, that he thought it better to begin work immediately without first making himself known, as he had intended, to Doctor Urquhart and the dispenser, Gadge.
Seating himself, he signed for his first case to come in. This was a man who asked simply for a certificate adding, as a kind of afterthought, beat knee. Andrew examined him, found him suffering from beat knee, gave him the certificate of incapacity for work.
The second case came in. He also demanded his certificate, nystagmus. The third case: certificate, bronchitis. The fourth case: certificate, beat elbow.
Andrew got up, anxious to know where he stood. These certificate examinations took a great deal of time. He went to his door and asked:
‘How many more men for certificates? Will they stand up, please.’
There were perhaps forty men waiting outside. They all stood up. Andrew reflected quickly. It would take him the best part of the day to examine them all properly – an impossible situation. Reluctantly, he made up his mind to defer the more exacting examinations until another time.
Even so, it was half past ten when he got through his last case. Then as he glanced up, there stamped into his room a medium sized, oldish man with a brick-red face and a small pugnacious grey imperial. He stooped slightly so that his head had a forward belligerent thrust. He wore cord breeches, gaiters, and a tweed jacket, the side pockets stuffed to bursting point with pipe, handkerchief, an apple, a gum elastic catheter. About him hung the odour of drugs, carbolic and strong tobacco. Andrew knew before he spoke that it was Doctor Urquhart.
‘Dammit to hell, man,’ said Urquhart without a handshake or a word of introduction, ‘where were ye these last two days? I’ve had to lump your work for ye. Never mind, never mind! We’ll say no more about it. Thank God ye look sound in mind an’ limb now ye have arrived. Do ye smoke a pipe?’
‘I do.’
‘Thank God for that also! Can ye play the fiddle?’
‘No.’
‘Neither can I – but I can make them bonny. I collect china too. They’ve had my name in a book. I’ll show ye some day when ye come ben my house. It’s just at the side of the surgery ye’ll have observed. And now, come away and meet Gadge. He’s a miserable devil. But he knows his incompatibles.’
Andrew followed Urquhart through the waiting-room into the dispensary where Gadge greeted him with a gloomy nod. He was a long, lean cadaverous man with a bald head streaked with jet-black hair and drooping whiskers of the same colour. He wore a short alpaca jacket, green with age and the stains of drugs, which showed his bony wrists and death’s door shoulder blades. His air was sad, caustic, tired; his attitude that of the most disillusioned man in the whole universe. As Andrew entered he was serving his last client, flinging a box of pills through the hatch as though it was rat poison. ‘Take it or leave it,’ he seemed to say. ‘You’ve got to die in any case!’
‘Well,’ said Urquhart spryly, when he had effected the introduction. ‘Ye’ve met Gadge and ye know the worst. I warn ye he believes in nothing except maybe castor oil and Charles Bradlaugh. Now – is there anything I can tell ye?’
‘I’m worried about the number of certificates I had to sign. Some of these chaps this morning looked to me quite capable of work.’
‘Ay, ay. Leslie let them pile up on him anyhow. His idea of examining a patient was to take his pulse for exactly five seconds by the clock. He didn’t mind a docken.’
Andrew answered quickly. ‘What can anyone think of a doctor who hands out certificates like cigarette coupons?’
Urquhart darted a glance at him. He said bluntly:
‘Be careful how you go. They’re liable not to like it if you sign them off.’
For the first and last time that morning Gadge made gloomy interjection.
‘That’s because there’s nothing wrong wi’ half o’ them, ruddy scri
mshankers!’
All that day as he went on his visits Andrew worried about these certificates. His round was not easy for he did not know the neighbourhood, the streets were unfamiliar and more than once he had to go back and cover the same ground twice. His district, moreover, or the greater part of it, lay on the side of that Mardy Hill to which Tom Kettles had referred and this meant stiff climbing between one row of houses and the next.
Before afternoon his cogitation had forced him to an unpleasant decision. He could not, on any account, give a slack certificate. He went down to his evening surgery with an anxious yet determined line fixed between his brows.
The crowd, if anything, was larger than at the morning surgery. And the first patient to enter was a great lump of a man, rolling in fat, who smelled strongly of beer and looked as if he had never done a full day’s work in his life. He was about fifty and had small pig eyes which blinked down at Andrew.
‘Certificate,’ he said, without minding his manners.
‘What for?’ Andrew asked.
‘’Stagmus.’ He held out his hand. ‘The name’s Chenkin. Ben Chenkin.’
The tone alone caused Andrew to look at Chenkin with quick resentment. Even from a cursory inspection he felt convinced that Chenkin had no nystagmus. He was well aware, apart from Gadge’s hint, that some of these old pitmen ‘swung the lead on ‘stagmus’, drawing compensation money to which they were not entitled for years on end. However, he had brought his ophthalmoscope with him this evening. He would soon make sure. He rose from his seat.
‘Take your things off.’
This time it was Chenkin who asked: ‘What for?’
‘I’m going to examine you.’
Ben Chenkin’s jaw dropped. He had not been examined, so far as he could remember, in the whole of Doctor Leslie’s seven years of office. Unwillingly, sulkily, he pulled off his jacket, his muffler, his red and blue striped shirt, revealing a hairy torso swathed in adiposity.
Andrew made a long and thorough examination, particularly of the eyes, searching both retinae carefully with his tiny electric bulb. Then, sharply, he said:
‘Dress up, Chenkin.’ He sat down and, taking his pen, he began to write out a certificate.
‘Ha!’ sneered old Ben. ‘I thought you’d let us ’ave it.’
‘Next please,’ Andrew called out.
Chenkin almost snatched the pink slip from Andrew’s hand. Then he strode triumphantly from the surgery.
Five minutes later he was back, his face livid, bellowing like a bull, thrusting his way between the men seated waiting on the benches.
‘Look what he’s done on us! Let us in, will ye! Hey! What’s the meanin’ of this?’ He flourished the certificate in Andrew’s face.
Andrew affected to read the slip. It said, in his own handwriting: This is to certify that Ben Chenkin is suffering from the effects of over indulgence in malt liquors but is perfectly fit to work. Signed A. Manson, MB.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘’Stagmus,’ shouted Chenkin. ‘Certificate for ’stagmus. You can’t play the bloody fool on us. Fifteen year us got ’stagmus!’
‘You haven’t got it now,’ Andrew said. A crowd had gathered round the open door. He was conscious of Urquhart’s head popping out curiously from the other room, of Gadge inspecting the tumult with relish through his hatch.
‘For the last time – are ye going to give us ’stagmus certificate?’ Chenkin bawled.
Andrew lost his temper.
‘No, I’m not,’ he shouted back. ‘And get out of here before I put you out.’
Ben’s stomach heaved. He looked as if he might wipe the floor with Andrew. Then his eyes dropped, he turned and, muttering profane threats, he walked out of the surgery.
The minute he was gone Gadge came out of the dispensary and shuffled across to Andrew. He rubbed his hands with melancholy delight.
‘You know who that was you just knocked off? Ben Chenkin. His son’s a big man on the Committee.’
Chapter Five
The sensation of the Chenkin case was enormous, it hummed round Manson’s district in a flash. Some people said it was ‘a good job’ – a few went so far as ‘a damned good job’ – that Ben had been pulled up in his swindling and signed fit for work. But the majority were on Ben’s side. All the ‘compo cases’ – those drawing compensation money for disabilities – were especially bitter against the new doctor. As he went on his rounds Andrew was conscious of black looks directed towards him. And at night, in the surgery, he had to face an even worse manifestation of unpopularity.
Although nominally every assistant was allotted a district, the workmen in that district had still the right of free choice of doctor. Each man had a card and by demanding that card and handing it to another doctor he could effect a change. It was this ignominy which now began for Andrew. Every night that week men whom he had never seen dropped into his surgery – some who were disinclined for the personal encounter even sent their wives – to say, without looking at him: ‘If you don’t mind, doctor, I’ll ’ ave my card.’
The wretchedness, the humiliation of rising to extract these cards from the box on his desk, was intolerable. And every card he gave away meant ten shillings subtracted from his salary.
On Saturday night Urquhart invited him into his house. The old man, who had gone about all week with an air of self-justification on his choleric features, began by exhibiting the treasures of his forty years of practice. He had perhaps a score of yellow violins, all made by himself, hung up on his walls, but these were as nothing compared with the choice perfection of his collection of old English china.
It was a superb collection – Spode, Wedgwood, Crown Derby, and, best of all, old Swansea – they were all there. His plates and mugs, his bowls, cups and jugs, they filled every room in the house and overflowed into the bathroom where it was possible for Urquhart, when making his toilet, to survey with pride an original willow pattern tea service.
China was, in fact, the passion of Urquhart’s life, and he was an old and cunning master in the gentle art of acquiring it. Whenever he saw a ‘nice bit’ – his own phrase – in a patient’s house he would call with unwearying attention, meanwhile fixing his eye, with a kind of wistful persistence upon the coveted piece, until at last in desperation the good woman of the house would exclaim:
‘Doctor, you seem awful struck on that bit. I can’t see but what I’m goin’ to let you ’ave it!’
Thereupon Urquhart would make a virtuous protest, then bearing his trophy, wrapped up in newspaper, he would dance home in triumph and place it tenderly on to his shelves.
The old man passed, in the town, as a character. He gave his age as sixty but was probably over seventy and possibly near to eighty. Tough as whalebone, his sole vehicle shoe leather, he covered incredible distances, swore murderously at his patients, and could yet be tender as a woman, lived by himself – since the death of his wife eleven years before – and existed almost entirely upon tinned soup.
This evening, having proudly displayed his collection, he suddenly remarked to Andrew with an injured air:
‘Dammit, man! I don’t want any of your patients. I’ve got enough of my own. But what can I do if they come pestering me. They can’t all go to the East Surgery, it’s too far away.’
Andrew reddened. There was nothing he could say.
‘You want to be more careful, man.’ Urquhart went on in an altered tone. ‘ Oh, I know, I know. You want to tear down the wall of Babylon – I was young myself once. But all the same, go slow, go easy, look before you leap! Good night. My compliments to your wife!’
With Urquhart’s words sounding in his ear, Andrew made every effort to steer a cautious course. But, even so, a greater disaster immediately overtook him.
On the Monday following he went to the house of Thomas Evans in Cefan Row. Evans, a hewer at the Aberalaw colliery, had upset a bottle of boiling water over his left arm. It was a serious scald, covering a large area and particularly b
ad in the region of the elbow. When Andrew arrived he found that the district nurse, who had been in the Row at the time of the accident, had dressed the scald with carron oil and had then continued on her round.
Andrew examined the arm, carefully suppressing his horror of the filthy dressing. Out of the corner of his eye he observed the carron oil bottle, corked with a plug of newspaper, holding a dirty whitish liquid, in which he could almost see bacteria seething in shoals.
‘Nurse Lloyd done it pretty good, eh, doctor?’ said Evans nervously. He was a dark-eyed, highly strung youngster, and his wife, who stood near, closely observing Andrew, was nervous too and not unlike him in appearance.
‘A beautiful dressing,’ Andrew said with a great show of enthusiasm. ‘I’ve rarely seen a neater one. Only a first dressing of course. Now I think we’ll try some picric.’
He knew that if he did not quickly use the antiseptic the arm would almost certainly become infected. And then, he thought, heaven help that elbow joint!
They watched him dubiously while, with scrupulous gentleness, he cleansed the arm and slipped on a moist picric dressing.
‘There now,’ he exclaimed. ‘Doesn’t that feel easier?’
‘I don’t know as how it does,’ Evans said. ‘Are you sure it’s goin’ to be all right, doctor?’
‘Positive!’ Andrew smiled reassuringly. ‘You must leave this to nurse and me.’
Before he left the house he wrote a short note to the district nurse, taking extra pains to be tactful, considerate of her feelings, wise. He thanked her for her splendid emergency treatment and asked her, as a measure against possible sepsis, if she would mind continuing with the picric dressings. He sealed the envelope carefully.
Next morning when he arrived at the house, his picric dressings had been thrown in the fire and the arm was redressed with carron oil. Waiting upon him, prepared for battle, was the district nurse.