by Francis Iles
There was little gladness in his hunting. The chase filled him more often with dread than with zest. But he simply could not help himself. Something far stronger than his own wishes seemed to be driving him on. It was an urge rooted so deeply in his primitive masculinity, swollen and strengthened so much by brute-nature in reaction from the timidity of his civilised mind, that he was totally unable to resist it. With every passably attractive woman with whom he was brought into contact he just had to try to flirt. Nearly always a kiss was all that he aimed for, more rarely some closer intimacy. Having achieved it, he was satisfied. His outraged male honour was appeased.
Victory was sometimes sweet to him, more often not. Frequently he did not even want it when it was in sight, but had to take it because it would be impolite at that stage to draw back; and very often because he was simply unable to believe that he could win it until he had actually done so. As a fact, victory usually did come to him (he always thought of it as a victory, never that perhaps the lady had wanted herself to be kissed), but that gave him no more confidence so far as the rest of the sex was concerned: each new affair seemed more impossible of success than the last.
It would be unfair to Dr. Bickleigh to let it be thought that he invariably embarked on these episodes in a spirit of weak revenge, or of sexual adventure either. That may be true of the less important incidents, but his major affairs always had a quite sincere basis. It was that he felt that at last he had met the one woman he really ought to have married. He was not looking for this one woman actively, because, even if he did find her, what would be the use? Julia would never give him the chance of divorcing her, and a country doctor with a practice to consider cannot afford to be divorced himself. It was simply that fate had brought them together. This happened about once in every eighteen months, and each time Dr. Bickleigh discovered with regret that fate had made another mistake.
Of course, it was his unfortunate complex which had brought him into marriage with Julia. Julia was an important person at that time. She was very nearly a Personage. Dr. Bickleigh knew as well as he knew anything that she would never tolerate him in her father’s house at all, except on professional terms: but she did. He knew she would never, never condescend to become his friend: but she did. It was inconceivable that she would ever tolerate a few terrified familiarities: but she did. He did not love her; she had no attraction in herself for him at all; he did not even like her much. But if he could actually aspire (he hardly dared even to formulate the thought in his own mind) to marry her, just aspire—why, then it would be impossible that he could be an insignificant person at all; on the contrary, he would be highly significant. Of course, it was too ludicrous; not for a moment would Julia even contemplate such a preposterous thing. But she did: and Dr. Bickleigh found himself even more insignificant than before.
From the beginning they had separate rooms. Julia was not disposed to be a dutiful wife, and Dr. Bickleigh did not particularly want her to be: Julia was the sort of person who would be dictatorial even in bed. So far as his wife was concerned, he had been sexually starved for the last ten years, and a lot may be forgiven a man in such conditions as those—though not, needless to say, by the wife in question.
Once again, then, even including his relations with women Dr. Bickleigh was very little removed from the perfectly average man. The normal man’s attitude towards women is far, far more complicated than those women ever suppose, or than theirs towards him—interlaced with totally conflicting likes and dislikes, self-contradictory, altogether much more illogical and irrational than anything of that kind which he has ever deplored in the women themselves.
2
DR. BICKLEIGH had a habit which he would have died rather than confess to another living soul. It was both as dear and as shameful to him as a monster-child to its mother. He used to soothe himself into sleep each night with what he thought of as his “visions.”
These were the most meticulous mental pictures of some situation of high importance of which Dr. Bickleigh himself was the core and centre. He would roll over on his right side in his single bed, hitch the pillow under his shoulder, curl up a little more compactly in sheer luxury of bodily rest, and then think to himself: “Well, now, what shall we do to-night? What about a little cricket?”
And then for ten minutes he would follow with his mind’s eyes a series of little pictures showing Dr. Bickleigh being selected to play for England in the last test-match to decide the rubber; the papers indignantly asking, “Who is Edmund Bickleigh?”; Australia going in first and making 637; England all out for 46; the follow-on, and nine wickets down for 32; Dr. Edmund Bickleigh last man in, followed by the hoots and jeers of the ignorant crowd; a terrific hit for six right over the pavilion at Lord’s; “My God, but this man can hit!”; another, and another, among the frantic cheering of that same crowd, the batting all that day and half the next, with a six every other ball, bagging the bowling all the time; the other man out at last; “Edmund Bickleigh, 645 not out”; “My God, he’s actually made more than the whole Australian eleven”; and then Australia’s second innings, and their crack batsmen clean bowled one after the other by Edmund Bickleigh’s unplayable off-breaks; till England, thanks entirely to Edmund Bickleigh, finally wins by the margin of three runs; “Dr. Bickleigh, you have saved England.” But by that time Dr. Bickleigh would be comfortably and happily asleep.
That was his favourite vision, though being summoned to Buckingham Palace ran it close (“Your Majesty, there is only one man in the world who can perform this terrible operation on you with any hope at all, but if it is not performed you will certainly die.” “And who is that, Sir Godfrey?” “A brilliant surgeon called Edmund Bickleigh, your Majesty. He elects to bury himself at Wyvern’s Cross, in Devonshire, disguising his genius under the guise of a general practitioner; but we who know him know that he is the greatest surgeon of this and all time.” “Send for him, Sir Godfrey.” . . . “Dr. Bickleigh, you realise? The King’s life is in your hands.” “I can but do my best, Sir Godfrey.” . . . “Marvellous! Stupendous! Not another man could have done it. Dr. Bickleigh, England owes you a debt of gratitude which . . .” “Rise, Lord Bickleigh of Wyvern. . . .”).
There were other stock favourites: Wimbledon, Bickleigh’s Symphony in C minor, the Bickleigh exhibition at Burlington House (“Bickleigh may owe something of his masterly technique to Rembrandt, but the brilliant manner in which he has transmuted it to his own purposes is all his own. We venture to assert that never before has the world been made to realise what effects are possible to genius armed with a mere palette and . . .”), the Collected Works of Edmund Bickleigh, the Open Golf Championship, the B.B.C. series of Bickleigh concerts, the war (“Field-Marshal Bickleigh, it is known now, enlisted on the day war broke out as a humble private; the first occasion on which he won the V.C. was . . .”), Bickleigh the Great Lover, and the rest of them. And there were the temporary visions, applied to situations of the moment.
On the night before the tennis-party, for instance, Dr. Bickleigh spent a happy fifteen minutes living in advance the scene in the tool-shed on the following afternoon: the masterful shutting of the door, the bold yet respectful and evidently sincere little speech, “Gwynyfryd, you must have seen that my feelings towards you are . . .”; Gwynyfryd’s shy delight, “Oh, Edmund— Teddy! Yes, my dear, of course I love you too. I—oh, Teddy, I adore you. . . .” Her yielding, the feel of her slim body in his arms, the scent of her hair, her lips. . . .
That was the last time this particular vision was enjoyed. Dr. Bickleigh never pursued an affair over an initial rebuff. The affair of Gwynyfryd Rattery ended with its beginning, in a violent revulsion. From imagining himself in love with the girl, Dr. Bickleigh now saw her as merely to be despised: not hated, she was not worth that. To the suggestion that Gwynyfryd might have despised him first, his eyes were firmly shut. Even to himself he refused to admit the possibility of lacerated pride (to do so would have been to rub salt into the already smarting wound), a
nd anointed his hurt with the ointment of contempt. The girl was a fool: just a fool. To have credited such a feminine clod with the finer perceptions was now merely amusing. Oh, it was very obvious that Gwynyfryd was certainly not the girl he should have married. Even Julia—well, Julia had sense, at any rate. “Come between husband and wife” for a kiss, indeed. The conceit of the girl! As if a kiss of Gwynyfryd’s was so . . .
But the sequel remained. Dr. Bickleigh definitely longed for his wife to be dead.
On the night of the tennis-party a new vision was inaugurated. He saw his life without Julia: the freedom, the expansion, the regained self-respect, the losing of that continual dread of what she might say in front of other people, the incredible peace. It kept him awake for over two hours.
The next night he did the same, and the next.
Gradually life without Julia edged its way into the stock visions. Within a few weeks the details were complete—Julia taken ill, Julia sinking under some malignant disease, Julia on her death-bed, Julia apologising with her last breaths for the hard, cruel woman she had been, Julia dead, Julia’s funeral, the house without Julia, the garden without Julia, life without Julia. . . .
For nights and nights he did not play cricket once.
3
DR. BICKLEIGH had a great respect for Mr. Torr. Mr. Torr had not married for position, he had that himself and plenty of it; he had married for money—or, at any rate, he had, as it were, absent-mindedly married where money was. Mrs. Torr was the daughter of a neighbouring brewer, and the living of Wyvern’s Cross had been in the brewer’s gift; it was a fat living, and there was very little work to do for it. Dr. Bickleigh considered that Mr. Torr had made a success of life.
Mr. Torr, too, was a person of some importance. At Oxford his career had been noteworthy. A member of a very small and choice circle, he had been considered on an intellectual level with the most brilliant. Most of the University prizes had fallen to this circle, and Mr. Torr had had his share of them. A remarkable future had been prophesied for him, as for the others. The others had fulfilled these predictions, with the consequence that Mr. Torr could now count as his friends some of the foremost names in literature, art, and the Cabinet. That Mr. Torr alone had dropped into obscurity was never accounted to him in Wyvern’s Cross as failure; it was simply that, with the perversity of genius, he had preferred this course.
About a week after the tennis-party Dr. Bickleigh met him in the village street, outside the post-office.
Mr. Torr was evidently pleased about something, for his manner was swelling and vast. Mr. Torr was not unlike his own church organ; fruity in presence always, when in genial mood he would swell to a booming diapason, giving the impression of occupying far more space in matter than his actual physical self could fill.
The post-office in Wyvern’s Cross was the grocer’s too, and the haberdasher’s as well as that, and the ironmonger’s besides. One counter served for everything, but you indicated which department you wanted by where you stood at it. Mr. Torr was in the post-office and Dr. Bickleigh was in the ironmongery department, buying a rat-trap for his greenhouse. There was thus the whole of the grocery counter and the gents’ and ladies’ outfitting department between them, yet Mr. Torr somehow overflowed these two and extended right into the ironmongery, squeezing Dr. Bickleigh into the extreme corner, though remaining all the time in the post-office.
“Good morning, Bickleigh. Good morning.” Mr. Torr conveyed the impression that he had now, by special arrangement with the Almighty, ensured that Dr. Bickleigh should have a good morning.
“Good morning,” beamed Dr. Bickleigh. It seemed almost a sacrilege to descend to such mundane matters as rat-traps, but he mentioned his requirement to old Mrs. Stinvell behind the counter who kept this multiple store, and she went off, nodding sympathetically, to search mysterious recesses “out to the back.” Mrs. Stinvell never seemed to keep what one wanted in the shop itself, and it invariably took her three times as long to overhaul her hiding-places “out to the back” as one would have thought possible. Two persons encountering one another in her shop, therefore, had plenty of time to discuss the weather and their neighbours.
“And how,” said Mr. Torr with majestic grace, “is old Mrs. Brent to-day?” He remembered vaguely having heard recently that old Mrs. Brent really was bad this time, and the village clergyman should always keep himself informed about his charges, however humble. Besides, Bickleigh would like to talk about one of his patients; professional men always talk shop.
But Dr. Bickleigh was looking embarrassed. “To-day?” he repeated awkwardly. “Well—she’s still dead, you know. I mean, you buried her last week, you remember.”
“Chrrrm-hrrrm!” observed Mr. Torr with severity. One gathered that it was tactless of Mrs. Brent to have died in any case, but it was far, far more tactless of Dr. Bickleigh that Mr. Torr should have forgotten all about it.
“Are you—are you troubled with rats?” stammered the little doctor hastily, seeking to retrieve his error.
Mr. Torr moved his eyebrows a fraction of an inch up his wide forehead. “I am glad to say that I am not troubled with rats, no.” My person, added Mr. Torr’s tone, always has been free of rats, whatever other people’s may be.
This subtle rebuke administered, Mr. Torr appeared to forgive Dr. Bickleigh and resumed most of his former expansiveness. “I called on Miss Cranmere yesterday.”
“Oh, yes?” Dr. Bickleigh was not particularly interested. Miss Cranmere had not attracted him, even remotely.
“A most refreshing young woman, I am glad to be able to say. Most refreshing.”
“Refreshing?” It was not the kind of epithet which Dr. Bickleigh himself would have applied.
“In comparison with the usual young woman of to-day.”
“Oh, I see; yes,” said Dr. Bickleigh, and could not help thinking of Quarnian. He had an uneasy feeling that Mr. Torr was doing the same.
But Mr. Torr was not. His voice took on a positively vox humana tone. “She promised me a hundred pounds for our restoration fund,” he said plummily.
“A hundred pounds?”
“A hundred pounds. Offered it, no less. Naturally one would not introduce the subject on a first call. She herself had admired our church, and noticed the scaffolding on the west front. A most observant young woman. I feel,” said Mr. Torr, after communing with his soul for a moment, “that she will be in every way a Credit to Us.”
Or in other words, gathered Dr. Bickleigh, who had heard all about his wife’s misgivings on the subject, that all objections to Miss Cranmere’s living alone at The Hall had now been withdrawn on the part of Mr. Torr.
To do Mr. Torr justice, Miss Cranmere must unwittingly have hit on the one means of effecting this. The church really was close to his heart, and to endow the one was to soften the other; it was of the early Norman period, with a genuine Saxon crypt, and, except for one Perpendicular window in the west end, all that showed above ground was homogeneous in style. His church was the only part of his responsibilities which the Rev. Hessary Torr took really seriously, and he contributed freely to its needs from his own wife’s purse.
Dr. Bickleigh went back to Fairlawn with his rat-trap. A hundred pounds to restore a bit of mouldering stonework, while he and Julia could not afford a new tennis-net!
Yes, undoubtedly the Rev. Torr had chosen the wiser policy.
Well, all one could hope was that the woman’s health was bad. It looked as if it might be, with that sallow complexion and those hollows under her eyes. She would be almost certain to make him her regular medical attendant; and she ought to be good for some very nice, fat little bills.
But—a hundred pounds!
Ten would have been ample.
4
IT SEEMED as if the woman’s health might be bad. Only the next day Dr. Bickleigh received a summons to The Hall. He wound up his ancient Jowett and trundled off with high hopes.
Dr. Bickleigh had never been inside The Hall before. Its l
ate owner, Colonel Swincombe, had never sent for him, in spite of the knowledge, featly inserted into that retired warrior’s mind on the only occasion when the two men had ever met, one year at the Merchester tennis-tournament, that Julia was a Crewstanton; he had his own doctor in Merchester. Now Dr. Bickleigh entered the old house with interest.
It made him catch his breath a little. His visions of Bickleigh the supreme artist were not without some excuse in fact: he did try to sketch a little, in such leisure as he could spare from his roses, and he had a genuine feeling for beauty; old and mellow beauty particularly. The Hall was old and mellow enough, and beautiful enough too: a perfect piece of late Tudor-work, peach-red, gabled, with twisted chimneys and lattice windows, not large but quite unspoiled by any heavy-handed Georgian restorers. Inside there were broad, cool rooms, with low, timbered ceilings, beams, wide open fireplaces, darkly gleaming panelled walls, and carved overmantels with both the Tudor boss and the Jacobean lozenge, which Dr. Bickleigh thought most interesting and unusual.
Madeleine Cranmere met him in the hall and showed him over the ground-floor herself. She appeared delighted to listen to his rapturous enthusiasm, and consulted him on a few points as if he were an expert in the period. He was not, but he knew enough about it to be able to advise her roughly, and was far too flattered by the earnest way in which she listened to gather that actually she knew a good deal more about the points in question than he did. The matter of her health only arose perfunctorily, and was dismissed in a couple of moments: she was inclined to suffer from nervous headaches; could he let her have something to take for them? He promised to make up a prescription for her.