I saw the three of us — four, counting Susan — in a lovely home, the girls with their horses, a couple of cars, perhaps; their friends coming in and out — boy friends, of course, as they grew older. I saw my Katie on her wedding day — all white, like a Snow Maiden; and I tried to see Jo — although it was hard to picture that harum-scarum getting married! I saw holidays for us all — the girls with their husbands — here, there, and everywhere; perhaps to America — I’d always had a hankering to see New York and Chicago. I hoped one of my sons-in-law would be a bit of a sport and take the old girl around places. Shall I make a confession? I always wanted to see a gangster’s funeral! All those flowers, and the mortuary parlors, and the girls dressed up as angels in white satin, with real ostrich-feather wings stuck on, singing the deceased’s favorite hymn! That just got my sense of humor; I had a fancy Jo would appreciate it too.
And I thought of making my will, and how I would leave something to Stan and Albert and Ozzy that would surprise them — although of course the girls would get the bulk of it; and a nice legacy for dear old George, and a remembrance for Hetty. Ever since old Mrs. Glaize died I had been cracking myself to get those two to marry, but it was plain they never would. George had a one-track mind; it was no use trying to do anything about it.
To hell with it all! I thought at last, and I got out of bed and found my purse and took out a penny. Heads Ed go to Orleans, tails Ed stay at home. Up it went, and of course it came down on the floor, and I had to go crawling all over the room on my hands and knees to find where it had rolled to.
I know now Ed have cheated. If it hadn’t come down heads Ed have gone on spinning until it did; for my mind was made up. But there was the King, showing me his profile, and I hope it wasn’t lese majesty when I spat on him for luck and put the penny away for a mascot. One gets these fits of superstition, and I never think it pays to disregard them.
The following day I wrote my letter to Dr. Lavigne, and nearly a fortnight passed before I had the answer: typed, and so formal you would never have believed how well we had got on at St.-Jean-de-Luz. I showed it to Remmy and, although he kept a hold on himself, I don’t think I have ever seen a man so excited. “You’re made, Bell; you’re made.” He kept saying it over and over again. I felt as if I had had a knock on the head; now I had crossed my Rubicon, as it were, the whole thing seemed like some sort of a foolish dream from which I would wake up at any minute.
Before I departed I thought I would drop over to George’s and try out on him the tale I had prepared for other people. He was very glad to see me, as usual, when the taxi dropped me at Kozy Kot just as he was finishing his supper. The window was open, and the smell of fox terrier and old Mrs. Glaize was gone; it was a great improvement.
George was in mourning — black arm band, black tie, white shirt with a thin black stripe — but the fact of his having on one of his ordinary gray cheviot suits prevented the general effect from being too lugubrious. He had, as it were, worked through the immediate postfunerary stage, and a sober cheerfulness seemed to be in order. While he was showing me the enlargement he had had done of his mother’s last photograph, and telling me he meant to have it hung in the parlor where he could look at it while he was having his meals, he told me about the trouble he was having with his married sister, who, as we had expected, was determined George should come and live with her.
“I don’t want to hurt Annie’s feelings,” he said in his kind way, “but it’s not as if she was by herself, and I’ve got into the way of living here. It’s very good of her of course —”
“Good my foot,” I told him. “What that bitch wants is to see you don’t get married and to make sure of your money. Come on, George, pull yourself together and stand out for your independence.” I still had the habit of shocking him; nobody else ever dared, and it was good for him. I was encouraged when he gave me what almost amounted to a wink, put the photograph of Mrs. Glaize away, and we went into the garden, where we sat while I told him the version I had thought up of my next trip abroad.
“So you’re off again.” His little hazel eyes looked at me quite wistfully. “You’ll be forgetting all about England one of these days.”
“Not I,” I answered, “but foreign travel broadens the mind. A bit of gay Paree would do you good, George! Why don’t you slip across for a long week end when you get your summer holiday?”
George looked startled, then a bit doggish, and finally embarrassed.
“I guess it’s not my line. Well, where are you stopping?”
“One of the hotels, I suppose. The lady I’m going to will make all the arrangements. And I’ll make a nice bit for myself out of the trip.”
“Money’s not everything,” said George.
“Of course it isn’t. But we’d all look pretty poor without it!” I tried to turn it into a joke.
“Well,” said George, and he fetched up a sigh from the soles of his boots, “perhaps you’ll have enough of it someday.”
“If all goes well, George, that day isn’t far off,” I could not resist saying to him. He gave me a look like an anxious old dog that doesn’t quite get its master’s meaning.
“I’m very glad; so long as you’re all right.”
“What d’you mean?” He had caught me on the raw.
“So long as you don’t get yourself into trouble,” said George stubbornly.
“Good God, what do you suppose I’m up to? Robbing the till?”
“No, Bell. I bet you’d never do anything dishonorable. I’d stake my last penny on that,” he said, so solemnly that he made my flesh creep.
“Of course I wouldn’t!” I spoke sharply because he had made me cross. But I remembered what a good old pal George had always been, and I think my voice softened as I went on. “There may have been one or two moments in the past ... it’s not easy for a woman to keep dead on the line when she’s fending for herself. But it’ll be all plain sailing from now on; you can take my word for that.”
He nodded once or twice, as if he wanted to believe me but did not find it as easy as he would have liked. And I suddenly realized that, fond as he was of me, and believing in me up to now, he had not swallowed my story of the trip to Paris. Well, if George didn’t, other people would not either; I went over it quickly in my mind, trying to find out the leak.
“I’ve never wanted money for myself!”
“You don’t have to tell me that. And you’ve made a fine job of the girls, Bell; I don’t know anybody but you could have done it ... I guess I’m an old fool: but just now and again it comes over me to worry about you, Bell.”
“Whatever for?”
He rubbed his nose and gave me a silly, shy sort of smile.
“Blessed if I know! I expect it’s what they call an — instinct.”
“Now, George, cut out instincts.” In another moment I would have had the jitters. “What you wants a drink! For goodness’ sake, cheer up; I’ll have to be going in a minute. You don’t happen to have such a thing as a bottle of Guinness in the house, do you? I could use it — my tongue’s like leather.”
When he had filled the pewter mugs — which I had given him for his last Christmas — and we sat drinking in the parlor (I would sooner have had it outside, but George said it didn’t do on account of the neighbors) he said I could drop him, if I liked, at the top of Brixton Hill.
“Hetty moved out there?” I gave him a wink. He didn’t take it.
“Hetty?”
“I thought you might be doing a bit of courting,” I said demurely. “Come now, how much longer are you going to keep the poor girl hanging around?”
“Now, Bell, you know there’s nothing of that sort between Hetty and me.” He sounded reproachful, as he always did when I brought the subject of Hetty on the tapis. “I want to go and see one of the lads.” (By which I understood him to mean one of the shop assistants.) “I fancy there’s a bit of trouble going on, and perhaps it’ll clear up if I have a talk with him. I don’t like fetching in the la
w, until it can’t be helped.”
I agreed that the law generally made more trouble than it was worth.
“Mind you, I don’t say, as a lot of people do, that the law’s an ass,” said George solemnly. “The law’s there to protect people who are too silly to protect themselves; and it sometimes looks as if they’re in the majority.”
“But, like a good many other institutions that have been invented for the benefit of fools,” I pointed out to him, “it doesn’t leave room enough for folks who are capable of thinking and acting for themselves.”
“Individualists, eh?” George sounded doubtful. “They’re all very well, Bell, but they’re a bit of a bother in a society like ours. It’s the community that matters, isn’t it? And one fellow walking out of steps spoils the look of the file.”
“Pooh! What’s the file matter? It might as well be a chain gang, if people like you had your way,” I retorted.
“No, no,” said George, and I could see I had hurt his feelings. “I’m all for the liberty of the subject, but you know liberty can be abused. The law keeps things comfortable for decent people; and that’s only fair, to my way of thinking.”
“It depends what you call decent people.” As usual, George’s smugness made me argumentative. “I know lots of people I call decent that you turn up your nose at. The truth is, George, you’re damned self-righteous! And do you know why? Because you’ve never gone outside your own little narrow circle; you’ve never troubled to find out how people live or the problems they get up against. You think there’s a cut-and-dried answer to everything. Well, there isn’t; and perhaps one day you’ll find that out. I’m afraid it will be a shock to you; but it will do you good.”
George said something that I could not have believed if I hadn’t heard it from his own lips.
“Why, Bell! We — we’ve got the commandments —”
“And the collects, and the Lord’s Prayer, and the creed — eh? ‘Lead us not into temptation’ — I wonder how many times that prayer gets answered? I believe’ — listen, George: I believe the intelligent human being has the right to be the final judge of his own actions, and so long as these bring no harm to anyone else nobody’s got a right to criticize.”
“Ah!” said George as if he had caught me out. “But who’s to say if they bring harm or not? Pontius Pilate said, ‘What is truth?’ — meaning that nobody ever knows the whole truth about anything.
“You may think you’re doing no harm —”
“If you start Pontius Pilateing, that takes me out,” I said, getting up. “Thanks for the Guinness, George — and we’ll be seeing each other when I get back. Kathleen would like it if you popped over one evening; what about tea on Sunday?”
“I dare say I’ll manage that.” He had got up too, and he laid his hand on my shoulder: an unusual thing for George, who generally kept his hands to himself. “Just bear one thing in mind, Bell: you’ve never got to worry about Katie or Jo while I’m around.”
I thanked him again, and I dropped him at Brixton Hill, and that was the end of it: except that for once I had not enjoyed my visit to George. He irritated me with his preaching, and I felt people ought not to presume like that on an old friendship? My word, wasn’t it a mercy I hadn’t married him? A couple of years and I would have been as batty as poor Lady Cynthia. I felt I would like to see Mr. Somervell and tell him I was sorry and make up the friendship again; but I remembered the talk with Lady Emily and decided it would be better to leave it alone for a while.
I spent a month at Orleans, and when I came back I was worn out. It wasn’t the work, which was most interesting, and I knew from the beginning that I was up against the greatest thing I had ever met in my life: a thing that was going to benefit humanity and bring comfort and peace of mind to many. If I had not believed in the goodness of the work, after I began studying with Dr. Lavigne, I would have turned it down; and that is God’s truth. But I had not been with him more than a few days before the last of my qualms had vanished; I recognized the purity of his motives, and that he was really working for the benefit of the human race; and I was prepared to take any trouble or risk to profit by the knowledge he put — in every sense of the word — in my hands. I should add that it was he who made me serious about what I was doing; all the flippancy with which, I must admit, I had approached my work up to now faded out.
But I must also allow that by the end of a week I discovered that he sapped every bit of my energy. He had only one subject: the work. And he went on about that as if it was a religion. It struck me the Apostles must have been pretty tiring as companions, always harp, harp, harping on the one old string. I had always been used to working like a horse, but when I came off the job I liked to relax myself, if it was only in reading the paper, or having a drink and some silly talk, joking and larking with somebody, being frivolous for an hour. But Dr. Lavigne had never heard of relaxation, and when I tried cracking a few jokes and found they didn’t register I gave up. I regretted very much that I had accepted his invitation to stay in his own house instead of at one of the hotels — an offer he had made because the house itself stood some little way outside the town, and he said it was inconvenient, getting in and out.
The house, which stood in its own small grounds, behind a row of lime trees, was a holy terror: all polished floors and furniture, and not a comfortable chair in the place. It was run by an old woman who was some sort of relative of the doctor’s and who never spoke a word to me all the time I was there, except “Bon jour” and “Bonne nuit, madame.” Except for the bonne a tout faire there seemed to be no servants; goodness knows how the place was kept as it was. No windows except those of the surgery were ever opened, and the whole house reeked of cooking. I used to get up an enormous appetite, to begin with, at those savory smells, which never lined up with the food that was served on the table. The old woman did the cooking, and I don’t know who started the fable that all Frenchwomen are good cooks, for we had practically the same thing every day: a potage, followed by some steamed or boiled fish, and a dish of radishes on the side. There was almost no conversation at meals, for Dr. Lavigne was too tired, and the old woman, who sat down with us, just got her snout in her trough and paid no attention to anything else. It was lively — I don’t think.
Two days a week Dr. Lavigne went to Paris, and I was left to my own devices; but there was not even a little pub or cafe within a mile’s walk, and when you got there it was a sort of place for workmen who did not know a word of English. It wasn’t gay, cither, as you expect French taverns to be; the men sat and played dominoes and the women sat — and stared at me. It was not worth the walk, and after I had been at Dr. Lavigne’s a fortnight I began to feel as if I was in a nunnery.
After dinner he would get out X-ray photographs and diagrams and explain them to me until my head went round in circles. I was never any use at that sort of thing; but once let me get my hands on the human body, and I promise I knew as much as most of the specialists in internal or bone diseases who had ever come my way. Not as much as Dr. Lavigne; in him I had the sense to know I had met my master. So I strangled my yawns and tried to take it all in. Sometimes, when he gave me case histories, he was very interesting.
I discovered he was working against time. Sometimes he said to me, “No one but you will know this ...” and I felt he was referring to his own death. His right hand was almost useless (he never spoke of it, but I had a shrewd suspicion it was poisoned) and he was in constant pain; I used to see the beads of sweat breaking out on his brow when he was doing his manipulations. At the end of three weeks I thought I had learned my job, but he would not hear of my leaving until the end of the month. “You will never have this opportunity again,” he kept impressing on me, and as I realized the more experience I got the better I did not argue. But I never had such a strenuous month in my life: not physically, but mentally. It was like being forced to live on a plane to which one did not belong. It took it out of me, but, as I have said, it sobered me up and made me
realize once and for all the tremendous responsibility of this work, which nobody but Dr. Lavigne, and myself, could do.
Dr. Lavigne had a great number of patients while I was there, many of them foreigners — I mean, not even French. They came to him from all over Europe. When the patients were English I was kept out of the way; actually the only ones I was allowed to help him with were of the working classes, whom I believe he treated free of charge — or for so little that it did not matter, even to them. I also discovered that he refused almost as many patients as he took. “Infame!” I got to know as one of his favorite expressions of disgust, which he would use when he came out of the consulting room, where he had left someone with a title and a name that sounded to me like patent medicine. I got to know that his principles were as high as his interest in his work and that money would not buy his services; that set the seal on my respect for Dr. Lavigne.
After I got back nothing happened for a long while. I took up my work at the nursing home again and picked up a good many but by no means all of my private patients. It was rather harassing, but I remembered my dividends and decided to pin my faith to the future. And at last I got my opportunity.
Chapter IV
IT WAS a filthy February night, I remember, and I had just got in and started to change my wet clothes when the telephone rang. It was Remmy, telling me to come straight to Harley Street.
“But I’ve only just got in!”
“Never mind that. Come along and don’t argue. And look — take a car and tell him to wait here for you; it isn’t a moment for cheeseparing!”
This sounded like business, so I rang up a local garage, told Kathleen and Susan I had to go out again, and when we got to Harley Street I was shown, not into the consulting room, which I knew, but into a study, very cozy with its blazing fire and shaded lights. I had just had time to reflect that Remmy did himself well when he came in quickly, closing the door behind him. He wasted no time on preliminaries.
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