by A. J. Cronin
I racked my brains.
‘I have my own opinion,’ I said at last. ‘It’s the lung!’
‘The lung!’ muttered Mrs Niven, casting up her eyes. ‘ The lung, quoth he! As if I hadn’t known it was the lung the minute I stepped in this door. And what are we to do then, since you’ve come to the conclusion it’s the lung? Am I to stand here and watch the dearie whistle herself into her beloved grave, or am I to poultice her with linseed back and front, like I wanted to do a solemn hour since if I’d had my way?’
‘Don’t poultice her till I tell you to poultice her,’ I said savagely.
‘Then what …?’
‘Do nothing!’
I cut her off and took Mrs Duncan by the arm.
‘I must have a second opinion. This is a difficult case. Keep calm. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in half an hour with Dr Cameron.’
‘That’s the wisest thing that’s been said since he put foot in this room,’ Mrs Niven remarked confidentially to the ceiling.
The perspiration stood in beads upon my forehead as I went through the door. Heavens, I thought fervently, I’m glad to be out of there! But the faint whistling of the baby’s breath followed me downstairs.
Crouched over the handlebars, I scorched through the gathering dusk with no thought of dignity, or the figure I presented to the village at large. I was back at Arden House in half the time it had taken me to come.
Cameron was at tea, munching hot oatcake before a cheerful fire in the dining-room with the air of one untroubled by the world.
‘Come away, man, come away,’ he cried hospitably. ‘You’re just in time to catch the bannocks while they’re warm.’
I forced a smile; it was a poor attempt.
‘No, thanks. I’m not minding about tea. I’ve a case – a bad case. Mrs Duncan’s baby at Lomond View.’
‘Yes?’ Cameron shot me a quick, quizzical glance, then away again. ‘A fine stirring bairn. I brought her into the world eighteen months past. Ye know, this is a grand piece of cheese Janet’s put before us. Come winter, I’m terrible fond of hot bannock and cheese to my tea. Try them, man, they go famously together.’
I moved restlessly.
‘I tell you I’m worried about this case.’
‘Tut, tut! That’s not like you at all, at all. You’re not the man to let a case get the better of ye! Deed! In all my born days I’ve never seen a man like ye to get the better of a case. Bless my soul! Ye’re not serious about the Duncan bairn. Sit in and have a slice of cheese.’
Under the delicate satire I coloured.
‘Hang your cheese,’ I blurted out. ‘Can’t you see I’m wanting you to come to Duncan’s now?’
Cameron’s lips twitched. Slyly he cut himself a further tiny sliver and nibbled it off the knife blade.
‘Well! Well!’ he said. ‘What’s like the matter with the bairn?’
‘A whistling lung.’
Cameron raised his eyebrows.
‘Never heard of that before.’
‘Then you’ll hear it now,’ I retorted angrily. ‘It’s got me beat. It’s a pneumothorax maybe – you can hear the air whistling into the pleural cavity.’
‘Pneumothorax,’ repeated Cameron, as though the sound pleased him. ‘It’s a braw name!’ He brushed the crumbs from his vest and got up. ‘Umph! We’d better see!’
The gig took us to Lomond View. To my overstrung nerves it seemed as if I had spent the day tearing to and from the cottage. I followed the senior up the steps.
‘Well, well!’ Cameron remarked genially on the threshold of the sick room. ‘What’s all to do here?’ His very presence soothed the air.
‘I’ve poulticed the bairn, Doctor,’ whispered Mrs Niven with a sharp look at me.
Cameron ignored her. He took a long look at the child, with his ear cocked to hear breathing.
He spoke coaxingly. Then with a sure and gentle touch he lifted her out of the cot and, disdaining any stethoscope, laid his ear against her chest.
His head moved up, down, up again. He seemed almost to smile; or was it merely the play of light and the shadow on his weathered face? He put the baby back to bed.
Then, for a moment he stood caressing his lantern jaw with his long, bony finger before he turned to Mrs Duncan.
‘My dear,’ he remarked blandly, ‘have ye such a think as a hair-pin in the house?’
‘A hairpin?’ she faltered, wondering if he had gone out of his mind or she, from panic, out of hers.
‘Exactly,’ he reassured her. And when she fumblingly produced the hairpin he thanked her. ‘And now, lassie,’ he continued, patting her shoulder, ‘maybe ye’d leave us for a minute; we’ve something to discuss, my colleague and myself.’
Half in fear, and half in wonder, little Mrs Duncan let herself be propelled gently from the room.
‘As for you, Mrs Niven,’ said Cameron, in a different tone, ‘ out you go, too!’
‘I’m as well here,’ she answered defiantly, ‘ to lend ye a hand. Here I am and here I’ll stay.’
Cameron drew down his brows in a sudden scowl, black as a hanging judge.
‘Out with ye!’ he hissed. ‘Out, ye auld bitch. And if ye don’t – as God’s my Maker – I’ll take my boot to your big beam end.’
It was too much even for the bold Niven. She quailed, and in a moment she, too, was outside.
Cameron smiled at me.
‘Isn’t it amazin’ what can be done by kindness and what old. Professor Syme called conspicuous unobtrusiveness?’ Then very confidentially he inquired, ‘By the way, lad, do ye know what a squeaker is?’
‘A squeaker?’ I echoed, confusedly.
‘That was what I said – a squeaker.’
Nonplussed, I stared at him.
‘Well!’ – Cameron reflected genially – ‘as you don’t know, I’ll tell you. A squeaker is a wee thing like a button that squeaks and whistles when ye blow it. A child’s plaything, ye understand; ye’ll find them in crackers and suchlike party trash. And since we’re speaking of children, have ye ever noticed how mischievous they can be about the age of eighteen months? They’ll stuff things in their mouths and in their ears – ay, even up their noses.’
As he spoke he was bending over the cot with the hairpin in his hand. Swiftly and delicately the round end of the hairpin slipped up the baby’s left nostril, then out again. And at the instant the whistling ceased.
‘Good God!’ I gasped.
‘There’s your pneumothorax,’ Cameron remarked mildly, holding the squeaker in his palm.
The baby smiled amiably at Cameron, curled itself into a ball, and began to suck its thumb.
I turned a dull red, mumbled shamefully a protestation of my own idiocy. And, stretching out my hand, I made to take the squeaker. But Cameron with a gesture slipped it in his own waist-coat pocket.
‘No, no, lad,’ he declared kindly. ‘I’ll take charge of this. And if ever I see ye getting a bit above yourself – then, sure as fate, out comes this squeaker!’
Chapter Ten
When the autumn run of salmon came into the loch, these were days to make a fisherman’s pulse beat faster. Dr Cameron well knew my ruling passion’ and in this season gave me many an afternoon off – from kindness of heart, no doubt, yet perhaps also because he was very partial to a slice of ‘ brandered’ grilse.
It was on one of these excursions that I made acquaintance with the strange character known on the loch side as Houseboat Tam, and thereafter I seldom went fishing without calling upon him. If I failed to do so, then Tam like as not would call on me, swimming up silently behind my dinghy and bursting triumphantly into view with a loud laugh or a friendly halloo. He would stay for a moment treading water, smiling naively, exchanging a word or two of news, then down would go his wet, black head, and he would glide away, striking through the water like a seal to where his old houseboat lay moored in Sandy Bay. It was here that Tam Douglas lived his solitary life, though to call Tam’s home a houseboat was flattery of the
first degree.
In her early days the boat had been a coal scow, plying between Levenford and Overton on the Forth and Clyde Canal. With the finish of the barge trade she had lain for years mouldering in the mud of the Leven Estuary. In course of time a ramshackle superstructure had been added to her hull, and, with a lick of paint on her sodden timbers, she was tugged up to the loch in the hope that she might be sold for a fishing bothy.
But no one wanted the old tub. Sun-blistered, wind-scoured, rain-battered, she lay deserted, forgotten, and alone in the cove named Sandy Bay. Weather had toned her first hard ugliness into something not unbeautiful. She harmonised with her background, had the look of a strange, unwanted creature that has found safe anchorage at last.
It was then that she was taken by Tom Douglas – that was Tam’s proper name! Some said Tom had got her for a pound, others for a wager he would swim across the loch – for even then Tom was marvellous as a swimmer – yet it was equally probable that Tom had simply boarded the old hulk and made her, quite calmly, his own. Nobody cared very much, and it was all so long ago no one had a note of it. The fact is that Tom was not an institution in those days. He was just a young fellow come to the loch to recover from a serious and, indeed, a most mysterious illness.
A student, was he? No one knew. And what had been the matter with him? Brain fever, some declared, contracted through overstudy for a bursary examination. But the knowing ones implied that Tom must have been ‘that way’ from his birth. For, to speak plainly, Tom was inclined to be a little queer; simple, you understand. He was quiet and friendly, not a soul had one word against him. He was just fey or, as they say in those parts; plain wuddy. You might come on him, for instance, standing all by himself under a rowan tree, not gathering the rowans for jelly, like an ordinary body, but talking to the tree. Talking to the tree, no less! Or again, about the gloaming, you might find him on the loch shore listening to the lapping of the waves upon the shingle and smiling to himself as though he found it oddly beautiful. As if a man had never heard the sound of waves before!
He came from a place in Fife, near Kirkcaldy. But he had no folks that anyone heard tell of.
‘I’m just by myself,’ Tom would answer, smiling, when pressed upon the subject.
He brought little money with him to Tannochbrae. And the little he had was soon gone; Tom never was any good with money. Yet he stayed on. He had come to love the place. The sweet stretch of water and wood and mountain had entered into his being, enslaved his simple mind. The loch had him for its own.
That was why he took the deserted houseboat. And in that boat he became, gradually, not Tom Douglas, but Wuddy Houseboat Tam. He lived like a hermit, cooked his own food, washed his own dishes, darned his own socks. His hair grew long, his beard unkempt. He became in course of time a character. Pleasure launches, bearing their load of tourists up the loch in summer, came to make a detour to ‘take in’ the sight of Houseboat Tam. And Tam was proud, proud for the English tourists to take a look at him.
He would be on the deck of his boat, cutting up a cabbage for his dinner. And, as the steamer went past, like as not Tam would take care to knock a leaf of cabbage overboard, offhandedly, as though he hadn’t meant it. Then, swish! Tam would take a straight header into the loch, clothes and all, and come up cool as you like with the cabbage in his mouth. The tourists loved it, especially the lady tourists, and many a good half-crown came to Tam that way.
For the rest, Tam lived like a wild thing on the bounty of the loch. He was a marvellous fisher and a natural cook. A cut of freshcaught salmon grilled on wood embers in his little galley, with a flavouring of wild thyme and parsley, was the most exquisite dish you could imagine. I had it often, and it was the finest fish I had ever eaten. In the autumn there were nuts and brambles, blae berries and wild rasps. Tam knew all the places; he knew the roots, too, that were edible, the herbs and simples.
The winter, of course, was Tam’s worst time. With ice on the water and sleet blinding down the loch in bitter squalls, Tam stayed shivering below hatches with little enough to eat for days on end. He must have suffered severely – having insufficient clothing and still less food – but no one ever heard Tam complain. He was the gentlest, kindest, humblest creature, whose little odd streaks of vanity merely made him the more lovable. He was accepted even by the pharisees of the village as part of the Creator’s scheme of things. Nobody worried about him, and he worried nobody.
When I came to Tannochbrae, Tam was close on fifty years of age, yet he looked little more than thirty. The spartan rigour of his life, the constant exercise, in and out of the clean loch water, had given him the body of an athlete. Tall as a beech, muscular, upright, his skin weathered to a fine bronze, he might have stood for the statue of Poseidon. He had a striking head, with long, dark hair, a noble brow, and gentle, hazel eyes. But his tattered clothing, unkempt beard, his old canvas shoes tied on with string made him frowsy and ridiculous. To see Tam naked was to see a god. Dressed in his clothes he looked a tinker.
That first summer following my arrival was both glorious and warm. But the succeeding winter came cruelly hard, not perhaps so iron-hard as that famous winter when the loch froze over and they drove a horse and cart upon the ice at Darroch, but raw and bitter. For a whole fortnight the country lay under deep snow, and we had many patients, from the sheer severity of the weather.
Stiff work it was, getting about, with deep drifts on the roads. And there was need to get about; I made the weary drive up to Marklea, at the head of the loch, every day, and every other night, in that freezing fortnight.
On the Thursday of the second week I was snatching a cup of hot coffee in the kitchen of the Marklea Arms when the landlady casually remarked:
‘You didn’t see Wuddy Tam stirring about his boat, Doctor, when you drove past the cove today?’
Holding the steaming cup in both my hands – they were perished by the cold – I reflected for a minute, then shook my head. She went on:
‘In the ordinary way when the weather’s like this he’ll win round to the back door for a drop broth or suchlike. Not charity, you understand. Tam would never take that. It’s payment in kind, so to speak. For come the spring he’ll leave a salmon or a dozen trout at the house and never take a penny piece for’t.’ She paused. ‘But he hasna’ been near us for ten days now.’
‘Are you worrying about him, then?’
She frowned doubtfully.
‘I’m just hereaway thereaway. Maybe my notion’s all wrong. But what with this awfu’ frost and all, I’d an idea he might be ill. A crying shame it would be if the poor creature was stricken down with not a soul to tend to him.’
I finished my coffee, pulled on my driving gloves.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll keep my eye skinned as I go past.’
An hour later, having finished my calls, I started back on the road to Tannochbrae. I was driving myself, in a hired trap with a cob from the stables, for Cameron had taken Jamie and the gig on the Overton round. And, as I came opposite Sandy Bay, I drew up and stared across fifty yards or so of water towards Tam’s house boat.
No smoke from the tiny tin chimney. Not a sign of life. I hailed the boat. A loud, long yell, which seemed to vibrate across the desolation of snow and blue-grey, icy water.
No answer. Nothing but stillness. And silence.
I swore impatiently. My impulse was to go on, to get back to Tannochbrae, a warm fire, and my dinner. But instinct and a sense of compunction restrained me. I leaped out of the trap, crossed the snowy shingle, and went down to the waterside. Several boats lay drawn up, boats used by the Marklea Anglers’Club and beached on this safe shore against the winter. I threw off the covering tarpaulin, chose the stoutest skiff, launched it with an effort, and poled a passage through the pack ice to the houseboat. Clambering aboard, I ducked my head and went below.
Tam lay on his narrow bunk in the tiny cabin, the atmosphere of which was frigid as an igloo. Dressed in his tinker’s clothes, covered by
an old rug, Tam lay on his back shivering.
‘Man, man,’ I cried, ‘ what’s the matter that you didn’t answer me?’
Tam looked up dazedly.
‘I didn’t hear ye. I didn’t hear anything.’
‘A week – or thereabouts,’ Tam muttered, his teeth chattering with ague.
‘A week!’ I echoed.
I stood cudgelling my brains. Tam was ill, his wretched cabin unfit even for a dog, his locker – lying open – empty of food or stimulant. His condition, moreover, made it impossible to drive him back these two snow-bogged miles to the Marklea Arms. What could one do about it? Suddenly I reached a decision.
I climbed on deck, sculled ashore, and got into the trap. Whipping up the cob, I turned, into a narrow side road opposite the cove and drove up the hill to Saughend farm. In five minutes I was there, pealing on the front-door bell, asking to see the mistress of the house immediately.
For all my urgency, Elizabeth Robb was in no hurry to appear. Saughend, unlike the neighbouring crofts and steadings, was a large farm with a fine residence and ample barns. Ever since her husband Robin Robb had died, three years before, Elizabeth had managed the farm herself and, for that matter, managed it admirably. The sense of her possessions, of her own competency, added to a natural brusqueness, gave to the widow a proud and high-handed air. Yet she was a fine woman, with a full bosom, a good, honest figure, sloe-black eyes, and neat feet. On these neat feet Elizabeth was always on the move, full of life and energy; at least, since her windowhood, her energy had been relentless. In Tannochbrae they said she was turning sour; and the knowing ones – in a Scottish village there are always knowing ones – slyly adduced a reason, which was nonsense, of course, for many suitors had come after the widow Robb, or after her fortune, and had been firmly turned away.
At this moment, indeed, it looked as though I might also be shown to the door, for when in a few hasty phrases I had described the situation and put forward my plea, Elizabeth made a wry face.
‘I’m not so sure about all this,’ she said. ‘We’re overbusy for an upset of that kind. And we’re not overfond of fusty auld tykes at Saughend.’