The Citadel

by A. J. Cronin

  He broke off, observing their blank faces.

  ‘Wouldn’t work,’ Urquhart snapped. ‘Dammit to hell! I’d sooner stay up every night of the month than trust old Foxborrow with one of my cases. Hee, hee! When he borrows he doesn’t pay back.’

  Andrew interposed feverishly.

  ‘We’ll leave that then – anyway, till another meeting – seeing that we’re not agreed on it. But there’s one thing we are agreed on. And that’s why we’re here. This percentage we pay to Doctor Llewellyn.’ He paused. They were all looking at him now, touched in their pockets, interested. ‘We’ve all agreed it’s unjust. I’ve spoken to Owen about it. He says it has nothing to do with the Committee but is a matter for adjustment between the doctors.’

  ‘That’s right,’ threw out Urquhart. ‘ I remember when it was fixed. A matter of nine years ago. We had two rank Jonahs of assistants then. One at the East Surgery and one at my end. They gave Llewellyn a lot of trouble over their cases. So one fine day he called us all together and said it wasn’t goin’ to be worth his while unless we could make some arrangement with him. That’s the way it started. And that’s the way it’s gone on.’

  ‘But his salary from the Committee already covers all his work in the Society. And he simply rakes in the shekels from his other appointments. He’s rolling in it!’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Urquhart testily. ‘But, mind you, Manson, he’s damn useful to us, is the same Llewellyn. And he knows it. If he chose to cut up rough we’d be in a pretty poor way.’

  ‘Why should we pay him?’ Andrew kept on inexorably.

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ interjected Con, refilling his glass.

  Oxborrow cast one glance at the dentist.

  ‘If I may be allowed to get a word in. I agree with Doctor Manson in that it is unjust for us to have our salaries deducted. But the fact is, Doctor Llewellyn is a man of high standing, excellently qualified, who gives great distinction to the Society. And besides he goes out of his way to take our bad cases off our hands.

  Andrew stared at the other.

  ‘Do you want your bad cases off your hands?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Oxborrow pettishly. ‘ Who doesn’t?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Andrew shouted. ‘I want to keep them, see them through!’

  ‘Oxborrow’s right,’ Medley muttered unexpectedly. ‘ It’s the first rule of medical practice, Manson. You’ll realise it when you’re older. Ger rid of the bad stuff, get rid of it, rid of it.’

  ‘But damn it all!’ Andrew protested hotly.

  The discussion continued, in circles, for three quarters of an hour. At the end of that time, Andrew, very heated, chanced to exclaim:

  ‘We’ve got to put this through. D’you hear me, we’ve simply got to. Lleweilyn knows we’re after him. I told him this afternoon.’

  ‘What!’ The exclamation came from Oxborrow, Urquhart, even from Medley.

  ‘Do you mean to say, doctor, you told Doctor Llewellyn –’ Half rising, Oxborrow bent his startled gaze on Andrew.

  ‘Of course I did! He’s got to know some time. Don’t you see, we’ve only got to stand together, show a united front and we’re bound to win!’

  ‘Dammit to hell!’ Urquhart was livid. ‘You’ve got a nerve! You don’t know what influence Llewellyn has. He’s got a finger in everything! We’ll be lucky if we’re not all sacked. Think of me trying to find another pitch at my time of life.’ He bullocked his way towards the door. ‘You’re a good fellow, Manson. But you’re too young. Good night.’

  Medley had already risen hurriedly to his feet. The look in his eye said he was going straight to his telephone to tell Doctor Llewellyn apologetically that he, Llewellyn, was a superb doctor and he, Medley, could hear him perfectly. Oxborrow was on his heels. In two minutes the room was clear of all but Con, Andrew, and the remainder of the beer.

  They finished the beverage in silence. Then Andrew remembered that there were six more bottles in the larder. They finished these six bottles. Then they began to talk. They said things touching the origin, parentage and moral character of Oxborrow, Medley and Urquhart. They dwelt especially upon Oxborrow, and Oxborrow’s harmonium. They did not observe Christine come in and go upstairs. They talked together soulfully, as brothers shamefully betrayed.

  Next morning Andrew marched on his rounds with a splitting headache and a scowl. In the Square he passed Llewellyn in his car. As Andrew lifted his head in shamed defiance Llewellyn beamed at him.

  Chapter Ten

  For a week Andrew went about chafing under his defeat, bitterly cast down. On Sunday morning, usually devoted to long and peaceful repose, he suddenly broke loose.

  ‘It isn’t the money, Chris! It’s the principle of the thing! When I think of it – it drives me crazy! Why can’t I let it slip? Why don’t I like Llewellyn? At least why do I like him one minute and hate him the next? Tell me honestly, Chris. Why don’t I sit at his feet? Am I jealous! What is it?’

  Her answer staggered him. ‘Yes, I think you are jealous!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Don’t break my eardrums, dear. You asked me to tell you honestly. You’re jealous, frightfully jealous. And why shouldn’t you be? I don’t want to be married to a saint. There’s enough cleaning in this house already without you setting up a halo.’

  ‘Go on,’ he growled. ‘Give me all my faults when you’re about it. Suspicious! Jealous! You’ve been at me before! Oh, and I’m too young, I suppose. Octogenarian Urquhart rammed that in my teeth the other day!’ A pause during which he waited for her to continue the argument. Then, irritably, ‘ Why should I be jealous of Llewellyn?’

  ‘Because he’s frightfully good at his work, knows so much, and well – chiefly because he has all these first-class qualifications.’

  ‘While I have a scrubby little MB from a Scots University! God Almighty! Now I know what you really think of me.’ Furious, he flung out of bed and began to walk about the room in his pyjamas. ‘What do qualifications matter anyway! Pure damn swank! It’s method, clinical ability that counts. I don’t believe all the tripe they serve up in text-books. I believe in what I hear through the ends of my stethoscope! and in case you don’t know it I hear plenty. I’m beginning to find out real things in my anthracite investigation. Perhaps I’ll surprise you one fine day, my lady! Damn it all! It’s a fine state of affairs when a man wakes up on Sunday morning and his wife tells him he knows nothing!’

  Sitting up in bed, she took her manicure set and began to do her nails, waiting till he had finished.

  ‘I didn’t say all that, Andrew.’ Her reasonableness aggravated him the more. ‘ It’s just – darling, you’re not going to be an assistant all your life. You want people to listen to you, pay attention to your work, your ideas – oh, you understand what I mean. If you had a really fine degree – an MD or – or the MRCP, it would stand you in good stead.’

  ‘The MRCP!’ he echoed blankly. Then: ‘So she’s been thinking it out all by her little self. The MRCP – huh! – take that from a mining practice!’ His satire should have overwhelmed her. ‘Don’t you understand they only give that to the crowned heads of Europe!’

  He banged the door and went into the bathroom to shave. Five minutes later he was back again, one half of his chin shaved, the other lathered. He was penitent, excited.

  ‘Do you think I could do it, Chris! You’re absolutely right. We need a few pips on the good old name plate so we can hold our end up! But the MRCP – it’s the most difficult medical exam, in the whole shoot. It’s – it’s murder! Still – I believe – wait and I’ll get the particulars –’

  Breaking off, he dashed downstairs for the Medical Directory. When he returned with it his face had fallen to acute dejection.

  ‘Sunk!’ he muttered dismally. ‘Right bang off! I told you it was an impossible exam. There’s a preliminary paper in languages. Four languages. Latin, French, Greek, German – and two of them are compulsory, before you can even sit the cursed thing. I don’t know language
s. All the Latin I know is dog lingo – mist, alba – mitte decem. As for French –’

  She did not answer. There was a silence while he stood at the window gloomily considering the empty view. At last he turned frowning, worrying, unable to leave the bone alone.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I – damn it all, Chris – why shouldn’t I learn these languages for the exam.?’

  Her manicure things spread themselves upon the floor as she jumped out of bed and hugged him.

  ‘Oh, I did want you to say that, my dear. That’s the real you. I could – I could help you perhaps. Don’t forget your old woman’s a retired schoolmarm!’

  They made plans excitedly all day. They bundled Trollope, Tchekov and Dostoevsky into the spare bedroom. They cleared the sitting-room for action. All that evening he went to school with her. The next evening, and the next –

  Sometimes Andrew felt the sublime bathos of it, heard from afar off the mocking laughter of the gods. Sitting over the hard table with his wife, in this remote Welsh mining town, muttering after her caput – capitis, or Madame, est-il possible que?, wading through declensions, irregular verbs, reading aloud from Tacitus, and a patriotic reader they had picked up, Pro Patria – he would jerk back suddenly in his chair, morbidly conscious –

  ‘If Llewellyn could see us here – wouldn’t he grin! And to think this is only the beginning, that I’ve got all the medical stuff after!’

  Towards the end of the following month parcels of books began to arrive periodically at Vale View from the London branch of the International Medical Library. Andrew began to read where, at college, he had left off. He discovered, quickly, how early he had left off. He discovered and was swamped by the therapeutic advance of biochemistry. He discovered renal thresholds, blood ureas, basal metabolism, and the fallibility of the albumen test. As this keystone of his student’s days fell from him he groaned aloud.

  ‘Chris! I know nothing. And this stuff is killing me!’

  He had to contend with the work of his practice, he had only the long nights in which to study. Sustained by black coffee and a wet towel round his head he battled on, reading into the early hours of the morning. When he fell into bed, exhausted, often he could not sleep. And sometimes when he slept he would awake, sweating from a nightmare, his head ablaze with terms, formulae, and some drivelling imbecility of his halting French.

  He smoked to excess, lost weight, became thinner in the face. But Chris was there, constantly, silently, there, permitting him to talk, to draw diagrams, to explain, in tongue-twisting nomenclature, the extraordinary, the astounding, the fascinating selective action of the kidney tubules. She also permitted him to shout, gesticulate, and, as his nerves grew more ragged, to hurl abuse at her. At eleven o’clock as she brought him fresh coffee he became liable to snarl:

  ‘Why can’t you leave me alone? What’s this slush for anyway? Caffeine – it’s only a rotten drug. You know I’m killing myself, don’t you. And it’s all for you. You’re hard! You’re damnably hard. You’re like a female turnkey, marching in and out with skilly! I’ll never get this blasted thing. There are hundreds of fellows trying to get it from the West End of London, from the big hospitals, and me! – from Aberalaw – ha, ha!’ His laughter was hysterical. ‘From the dear old Medical Aid Society! Oh, God! I’m so tired and I know they’ll have me out tonight for that confinement in Cefan Row and –’

  She was a better soldier than he. She had a quality of balance which steadied them through every crisis. She also had a temper but she controlled it. She made sacrifices, refused all invitations from the Vaughans, stopped going to the orchestral concerts in the Temperance Hall. No matter how badly she had slept she was always up early, neatly dressed, ready with his breakfast when he came dragging down, unshaven, the first cigarette of the day already between his lips.

  Suddenly, when he had been working six months, her aunt in Bridlington took ill with phlebitis and wrote asking her to come North. Handing him the letter she declared immediately that it was impossible for her to leave him. But he, bunched sulkily over his bacon and egg, growled out:

  ‘I wish you’d go, Chris! Studying this way, I’d get on better without you. We’ve been getting on each other’s nerves lately. Sorry – but – it seems the best thing to do.’

  She went, unwillingly, at the end of the week. Before she had been gone twenty-four hours he found out his mistake. It was agony without her. Jenny, though working to carefully prepared instructions, was a perpetual aggravation. But it was not Jenny’s cooking, or the lukewarm coffee, or the badly made bed. It was Christine’s absence: knowing she was not in the house, being unable to call out to her, missing her. He found himself gazing dully at his books, losing hours, while he thought of her.

  At the end of a fortnight she wired that she was returning. He dropped everything and prepared to receive her. Nothing was too good, too spectacular for the celebration of their reunion. Her wire had not given him much time but he thought rapidly, then sped to the town on a mission of extravagance. He bought first a bunch of roses. In Kendrick’s the fishmonger’s he was lucky to find a lobster, fresh in that morning. He seized it quickly, lest Mrs Vaughan – for whom Kendrick primarily intended all such delicacies – should ring up and forestall him. Then he bought ice in quantity, called at the greengrocer’s for salad and finally, with trepidation, ordered one bottle of moselle which Lampert, the grocer in the Square, assured him was ‘ sound’.

  After tea he told Jenny she might go, for already he could feel her youthful eye fastened inquisitively upon him. He then set to work and lovingly composed a lobster salad. The zinc bucket from the scullery, filled with ice, made an excellent wine pail. The flowers presented an unexpected difficulty, for Jenny had locked up the cupboard under the stairs where all the vases were kept and, to all intents, hidden the key. But he surmounted even this obstruction, placing half the roses in the water jug and the remainder in the tooth-brush holder from the toilet set upstairs. It struck quite a note of variety.

  At last his preparations were complete – the flowers, the food, the wine upon the ice, his eye surveyed the scene with shining intensity. After surgery, at half past nine, he raced to meet her train at the Upper Station.

  It was like falling in love all over again, fresh, wonderful. Tenderly, he escorted her to the love feast. The evening was hot and still. The moon shone in upon him. He forgot about the intricacies of basal metabolism. He told her they might be in Provence, or some place like that, in a great castle by a lake. He told her she was a sweet, exquisite child. He told her he had been a brute to her but that for the rest of his life he would be a carpet – not red, since she interjected her objection to that colour – on which she might tread. He told her much more than that. By the end of the week he was telling her to fetch his slippers.

  August arrived, dusty and scorching. With the finish of his reading in sight he was confronted with the necessity of brushing up his practical work, particularly histology – an apparently insuperable difficulty in his present situation. It was Christine who thought of Professor Challis and his position at Cardiff University. When Andrew wrote to him, Challis immediately replied stating, with verbosity, that he would rejoice to use his influence with the Department of Pathology. Manson, he said, would find Doctor Glyn-Jones a first rate fellow. He concluded with a carolling inquiry for Christine.

  ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Chris! It does mean something to have friends. And I very nearly stuck away from meeting Challis that night at Vaughans’. Decent old bouncer! But all the same, I hate asking favours. And what’s this about sending tender regards to you!’

  In the middle of that month a second-hand Red Indian motor cycle – a low, wickedly unprofessional machine, advertised as ‘ too fast’ for its previous owner – made its appearance at Vale View. There were, in the slackness of summer, three afternoon hours which Andrew might reasonably regard as his own. Every day, immediately after lunch, a red streak went roaring down the valley in the direction of Ca
rdiff, thirty miles away. And every day towards five o’clock a slightly dustier red streak, moving in the opposite direction, made a target of Vale View.

  These sixty miles in the broiling heat with an hour’s work at Glyn-Jones’s specimens and slides, sandwiched midway, often using the microscope with hands which still shook from the handlebars’ vibration, made heavy going of the next few weeks. For Christine it was the most anxious part of the whole lunatic adventure, to see him depart with a swift crackling exhaust, to wait anxiously for the first faint beat of his return, fearing all the time that something must happen to him bent to the metal of that satanic machine.

  Though he was so rushed he found a moment occasionally to bring her strawberries from Cardiff. They saved these till after his surgery. At tea he was always parched from the dust and red-eyed, wondering gloomily if his duodenum had not dropped off at that last pothole in Trecoed, asking himself if he could possibly manage before the surgery these two calls which had come in during his absence.