But if Savage compelled you to act in his life drama, he also rewarded you handsomely for your services. He was the slave of his friends. He was always planning little pleasures and surprises for your benefit; he seldom came to see you without bringing some present—a gramophone record, a pretty tie, a book. Even when, a couple of years later, we were living only a few streets away from each other in Berlin, and met several times a day, Savage would often arrive with a large specially chosen orange or a little bunch of flowers. His kindness was so touching and disarming that it sometimes made me quite irritable. I was cross with myself because I couldn’t hope to compete with it; because it somehow made me feel myself an inferior, unworthy mortal, a traitor to his friendship. All Savage’s friends betrayed him, in some minor degree, sooner or later. He asked too much of them; he trusted them absolutely—so that the blow, when it fell, was doubled in force. The pin-prick hurt him like a thrust from a two-edged sword. He stumbled off, by himself, utterly bewildered; and his nose began to bleed. Savage’s nose-bleeding (now long since cured) was famous, at this period: Weston called him ‘the fountain.’ Without the least warning, at all times of the day, the blood would suddenly squirt from his nostrils, as if impelled by the appalling mental pressure within that scarlet, accusing face; and no keys, no cold water compress could stop it until the neural wound had, as it seemed, bled itself dry.
In thinking about Stephen as he was in those days, I like specially to remember one incident. During the spring of 1930, the authorities had temporarily erected in Hyde Park a carillon of bells, destined, eventually, for a war memorial in New Zealand. Every day there were concerts. One afternoon, I happened to be crossing the park and stopped for a minute at the edge of the crowd which surrounded the little wooden bell-tower. The absurdly sweet, sugary chimes had just finished tinkling out ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’; and the crowd stood awe-struck, with slightly open mouths, like sea-lions awaiting their next meal. Suddenly, in the reverent silence, a wild silly laugh rang out: somebody, with more courage than myself, was sharing my amusement at the scene. All heads turned in his direction, some curious, some indignant, some really shocked. And there stood Savage, a head taller than any of them, hatless and wilder-looking than ever: completely isolated in his riotous, unrestrained mirth. I felt very strongly drawn towards him at that moment.
At the beginning of October, 1928, I began my career as a medical student—not without the darkest misgivings. It was like starting school all over again, not as the prize scholar, the scholarship candidate, but as the backward, overgrown boy who finds himself left behind in the infants’ class. Nearly all my fellow students had just passed out of their public schools; I was five or six years older than any of them—amidst those pink unfinished faces I felt like a man of forty. Nor was it any good my trying to imagine myself their superior on account of my advanced years; in the one essential subject I knew far less than they did. At school, I had done little or no science, my mathematics were disgraceful, chemistry I had never even touched. The hospital authorities had assured us that no preliminary knowledge was necessary; the courses would all start from the letter A. But the fact remained that my fellow students were merely covering familiar ground, while I was setting out, alone, into an unknown country.
The courses at the medical school were, no doubt, admirably suited to their object, which was to get you, by hook or by crook, through the preliminary science examination, and on to the corpse-dissection and the beginnings of practical medical knowledge. They were never intended to provide an ignorant, imaginative, woolly-minded person like myself with a bird’s-eye view, a general conception, of the nature and origins of matter. Yet without this general view I was lost. Brought up on the methods of Mr Holmes, I expected all kinds of instruction to be condensed into epigrams, aphorisms, brilliant simplifications. Instead of which, wandering about in a fog, I stumbled upon signposts marked cryptically ‘Aluminium Hydroxide,’ or ‘H2SO4,’ and was none the wiser. Chemistry, to my bewildered ignorance, was merely cookery: a mad sort of cookery in which you mixed things or heated them, without knowing what they were, or where they came from, or how they came. Theoretically, of course, a cook could make a delicious omelette in the firm belief that butter was a mineral, that eggs grew on trees and that salt was laid by hens: but such misconceptions are likely, in the long run, to lead to trouble—possibly, even, an explosion. It is profoundly disconcerting to find yourself landed in a world where the labels have come seemingly unstuck. ‘Aluminium,’ to my lay ear, was inextricably associated with saucepans; ‘mercury’ meant a thermometer; ‘magnesium’ was something only used for lighting the insides of caves. Yet here they all were, on a shelf in the lab., leading isolated existences of their own: the whole physical universe was taken to bits and displayed in a row of bottles and little glass pots. The lecturer instructed us to pass sulphuretted hydrogen through a solution of copper sulphate. Copper sulphide, we were told, would be precipitated. ‘Copper sulphide,’ I repeated to myself, staring dully at the small brownish-black mess in the test-tube. I wasn’t in the least surprised. This was purest alchemy, anyhow. I shouldn’t have raised an eyelid if I had accidentally succeeded in manufacturing gold. But here was, apparently, copper sulphide. I had made it with my own hands, and now I hadn’t the remotest idea what I should do with it. Neither, it seemed, had anybody else. We all poured our little messes down the sink.
Physics, by contrast, were dry and odourless and drearily clean. We measured bits of metal with the micrometer screw-guage, weighed them on scales or suspended them from springs. We proved Boyle’s Law and learnt to construct the Polygon of Forces. The only things I had to cook here were my results: I seemed incapable of making any kind of measurement accurately. If you had questioned me as to the significance of what I was doing, I should have replied vaguely that I supposed all this technique might conceivably be useful to an engineer. As I wasn’t going to be an engineer my enthusiasm for physics was faint.
Botany exposed my clumsiness most mercilessly. I could never cut a section which didn’t look like a thick slice of bread and butter. Under the microscope, my specimens were usually quite opaque. And the names! How should I ever manage to stuff them all into my poor head? How should I ever remember the difference between epidermis and endodermis, metaxylum and protoxylum, collenchyma and parenchyma? The truth was that I was frightened by the mere sound of them: my brain shut its doors against them from the very start.
Zoology, on the whole, I disliked least. Here, at any rate, we were on the threshold of the animal kingdom: Man, our proper study, was already in sight. Even the earth-worm has intestines, blood-vessels and nerves. As for the dogfish, it seemed almost as good as human: and if its insides contained a whole new classical dictionary of anatomical names, you could comfort yourself with the reflection that quite a number of them would recur later on.
Later on … Yes, at all costs, I must keep my objective steadily in view. At the moment it wasn’t easy. The ‘peculiar-looking green-shaded lamp in the surgery’ which Chalmers had described—how brightly and cosily it had shone six months ago! How faintly it glimmered now, far in the remotest distance, behind an immense and formidable foreground of lecture rooms, labs., alphabetically chalked blackboards, and all the sad armoury of microscopes, magnets, mirrors, Bunsen-burners and test-tubes which encircled my daily studies! ‘I shall never reach it,’ I thought, in moods of sudden panic: ‘I shall never learn to distinguish between the Pharyngo-, the Epi-, the Cerato- and the Hypo-branchials; I shall never make a decent dissection, or prepare a good slide! Was I really the stupidest, clumsiest member of the entire class? It seemed that I was. All these nineteen-year-old boys—not to mention the women students, the Indians and the three Chinese—were working placidly away, jotting down calculations, raising intelligent faces to answer the demonstrator’s questions: their calm, their industry, their bright self-assurance fairly terrified me. I was slipping behind, hour by hour, day by day. This was Cambridge again, but worse
. Worse, because this time, I was honestly trying, seriously doing my best. I couldn’t flatter myself with conceited lies about my Art: my Art was a flop, a declared failure in the open market. And I couldn’t hide myself in Mortmere: Mortmere had failed us, dissolved into thin air. The brutal truth was: I should never make a doctor. The whole thing had been a day-dream from the start. It was madness ever to have joined the medical school at all. But suppose I left it now—what was to become of me? Was I to go back to tutoring until I got too old to impress the parents? Was I to try for another amateur-secretary job, and spend the rest of my life messing about on the outskirts of Bohemia? Was I, indeed, a total misfit, a hundred per cent incompetent? I couldn’t, I daren’t face such thoughts. I took refuge from them in my note-book; concentrating all my faculties upon a very beautiful drawing of helianthus (transverse section) which I didn’t even begin to understand.
With my friends I was very bright and lively. I told them funny stories about the medical school, described my fellow-students, imitated the lecturers; casually letting drop, from time to time, one of my small stock of scientific words. The Cheurets, the Easts and Bill Scott were duly impressed. ‘How extraordinary Christopher is!’ I could imagine them saying. ‘The very last person you’d expect would take up this kind of thing—and he seems to be settling down to it wonderfully!’ Already, there were lots of jokes about my future career. Should I take up surgery, or psycho-analysis? Should I specialize? Perhaps I’d operate on the King and get a knighthood! Perhaps I’d discover the cure for cancer and become a lord! ‘I can just see Christopher in Harley Street!’ Such is the magic of a label that, when our cook poisoned her thumb on a rusty bit of tin, my family seriously asked me to come down to the kitchen and take a look at it.
But there was one friend who, for obvious reasons, I avoided; and that was Philip himself. It would be impossible to pretend to him that my life at the medical school was a success. He would see through my false gaiety in a moment, and the truth would be out. I could just picture the melancholy satisfaction of his sympathetic, delicately implied ‘I told you so!’ No, I would keep out of Philip’s way, until … Until things got better, somehow—or worse.
On arrival at the medical school I had looked round, as a matter of course, for a pal. Students pair off like birds. There are always experiments which have to be done in couples, pieces of apparatus which must be shared. And it is depressing to eat your midday teashop meal alone. I knew exactly the kind of pal I wanted. He must be efficient, energetic, patient with me, good at mathematics, and generally of a helpful nature. Also, and this was most important, he must be a typical medical student who liked his work and wanted to stick to it: I wasn’t keen to meet any more rebels, however interesting. I wanted to stop playing the rebel myself. I wanted to be absorbed in the crowd.
Platt had all, more than all, these qualities: he was in every way more than I deserved. From the moment I first caught sight of him, in the lobby, with his snub-nosed, sallow, good-natured face and stocky rugger player’s figure, I knew that here was the unlucky Sindbad whose broad back was doomed to carry me, like an Old Man of the Sea, through the trials and ardours of the next three or four years. Platt, who was only eighteen and, no doubt, feeling lonely, seemed pleased at being spoken to. We made friends hastily, for it was past the hour already, and went into our first lecture together.
He little guessed what he had let himself in for that morning: perhaps, even if he had guessed, he wouldn’t have minded. He was one of Nature’s boy scouts. He loved bossing me, in the most friendly manner imaginable: and I, alas, was only too ready to be bossed. Our partnership, unequal from the first, rapidly became so lop-sided that Platt would only trust me with the very simplest jobs. ‘You clean that test-tube, old horse,’ he would tell me, ‘and I’ll work out the results. You can have my book to copy, later.’ So I cribbed my way from one experiment to the next, completely in the dark; and Platt, who managed everything, went from strength to strength.
We always ate together, choosing each day a different restaurant. Platt’s favourite dish was sausage and mashed, mine was meat rissoles. Our conversation varied as little as our menu: the peculiarities of the lecturers, of our fellow students, of our respective schools, with occasional speculations as to the morals of the waitresses who served us, and, perhaps, a couple of dirty limericks with the dessert. Platt never asked me my age; and I was careful never to say anything which would start him thinking of me as a person older and more experienced than himself—though often, in his company, I felt like a man of eighty. The subject of writing and writers I avoided like the plague. With Platt, it was not very difficult to avoid.
Yet Platt, for all his stolidity, his unruffled patience with my incompetence, his well-arranged school-prefect’s conception of the universe, was by no means a dull companion. Sometimes he made me laugh a great deal. He could be startlingly catty about our neighbours and was capable of surprising flashes of wit. One afternoon, while we were doing qualitative analysis in the lab., Platt’s experiment, for the first and perhaps the last time in his life, went altogether wrong. Too little or too much of something or other had been added, and the result was a thick, poisonous-smelling black liquid. Platt poured it into the sink on our bench; but the drain was blocked and it wouldn’t disappear. We were both distastefully regarding it when the demonstrator came round.
‘What have you got there, Platt?’ he asked.
‘I don’t quite know sir,’ a grin suddenly split Platt’s sallow face from ear to ear: ‘I think it must be the Well of Loneliness.’
It was Platt who insisted that he and I should go and watch some operations. ‘We’ve got to get used to them some time, you know, old horse,’ he argued, ‘and if you’re going to throw a faint, you’d much better to do it now and get it over.’ This seemed unanswerable, and I agreed. Besides, I’d always half wanted to see an operation myself. Any medical student, even in his first year, was allowed to visit the theatres of the big hospitals, provided he didn’t make a nuisance of himself and the surgeon didn’t object. Several of the other students had been already. I rang up Philip and we fixed our adventure for an afternoon when Philip himself would be acting as one of the dressers.
The operating-theatre was like an unnaturally clean kitchen. And the nurses and dressers were like cooks, in their white caps, goloshes and sexless overalls, chatting in groups, or scrubbing their hands at the sink, or busy at the gleaming silver oven doors of the sterilizers. The air was steamy. The atmosphere was expectant, yet somehow horribly domestic. Platt and I sat down on a little flight of marble steps, which formed a grand-stand before the operating-table, at one end of the room. In our dirty flannel trousers and highly septic tweed jackets we were as much out of place as if we had intruded upon a levée at Buckingham Palace. I began to feel rather queer, and Platt’s face had already a greenish tinge.
One of the neuter cook-dressers approached us. It was Philip—a Philip I had never seen before and should scarcely have recognized. The only human thing about him was a tiny new-grown moustache, which looked dirty and reassuring against the stern whiteness of his overalls. We conversed across the silver railing which separated the septic and the antiseptic worlds. ‘Do you like it?’ he asked. ‘I’ve only had it ten days. People call it the cricket match—eleven a side.’ ‘You’re in luck today,’ he added, ‘We’ve got a sarcoma of the femur. MacDonald is going to amputate.’
We were interrupted by the entry of the patient, wheeled in under blankets, attended by the anaesthetist and the surgeon himself. The groups broke up, the oven doors were opened, the cooks took up their positions around the table. But now they were no longer cooks; they were acolytes and minor priests. This was a religious ceremony. A sister, in her triply disinfected, sacrificial robes, brought out the consecrated instruments and proffered them on a towel. The hot-water bottles were removed; the victim’s leg was bared to the hip. The surgeon had assumed his black rubber gloves of office. Bending over the table he pronoun
ced the opening words: ‘Now, gentlemen, I want you particularly to notice where the incision is made …’
The scalpel approached the thigh. This was the moment I had most feared to see—the terrible, outrageous contact between metal and flesh. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I didn’t. I had to watch. A wave of nausea dimmed, for an instant, the powerful electric lights. And, in an instant, it was over. A thin ring, drawn quick as lightning by the knife, in scarlet ink, encircled the leg: tiny blood-drops were flecked along the edges of the wound. The wound was like a tight-shut mouth which grinned suddenly, and gaped wide. The leg was no longer a leg, but something quite inhuman, not even disgusting—a joint of raw meat in a butcher’s shop. They were tying up the arteries. The surgeon made a sign to the sister for the saw. ‘I never liked this thing,’ he told the students, ‘old Douglas of Edinburgh invented it, fifteen years ago.’ What followed didn’t upset me in the least. I had seen it so often before, out shopping, as a little boy. The leg was dropped into a pail, and carried off. The bleeding jam-roll stump, before they stitched over the flap of flesh, was entirely without relation to the face at the other end of the motionless form under the blankets: an eleven-year-old girl, lying calm and remote, with a wonderful bluish moonlit beauty, in the depths of the ether, the tube between her lips. Her eyes were half open and gazing quietly at the ceiling, as though she were wide awake.
We had tea afterwards with Philip in the hospital canteen. He was grumbling because the surgeon had given him the leg to dissect in his spare time. ‘And Heaven knows what use they think the operation is, anyway … It’s pretty well dead certain to develop later, somewhere else …’ I regarded Philip with a new-found respect. He had long since surmounted all my obstacles. What if he had failed an exam, now and then? He had persevered; and this was his moment of triumph, his reward—to sit, blasé and weary with all the weariness of knowledge, opposite two gaping greenhorns who hung on his every word. Philip, I now felt, had really found his vocation. He would make an ideal doctor; so comfortably mondain, so soothingly bored. And if he had chucked up the medical school earlier on it would have been largely my fault. This was a sobering but not uninspiring thought. Perhaps I, too, should persevere: perhaps, if I made one more mighty effort, the dogfish and the helianthus and the acidic radicals would yield up their secrets. At any rate I’d try.
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