Adventures in Two Worlds

by A. J. Cronin

  ‘You are an only son?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ Harry stammered, and he flushed, as he did so easily. ‘I had two brothers, I believe, born abroad, like myself. But they both died when they were very young.’

  ‘Is your mother alive?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Your father?’

  Again that vivid colour mounted to his brow.

  ‘I do not know, Doctor.’ He paused, went on constrainedly, ‘My parents’ marriage was not a happy one. My father had business interests – a ranch – in South Africa. And for some years we lived with him there. But he was often away. He was of a gay disposition … He liked the life of cities … Paris … Rio. I am not blaming him, Doctor; he was a handsome, a most attractive man, but to speak frankly, even before my mother died, our home was broken up. We came to England, she and I … I have been here ever since.’

  Another pause. As I gazed fixedly at Charvet I seemed to see another, mature and dissipated face, the face of a man whose wife, and two of his children, had died prematurely, who had turned the joy of this bright June day into something sinister and terrible.

  ‘Really, Doctor, I don’t see what all this has to do with me.’

  ‘It has a great deal to do with you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  I still sat heavily at my desk, remembering his impending marriage, swept by an even greater wave of pitying compunction. I could not think what to say, or how to say it. For the first time in my career I felt the utter impossibility of telling the truth. Yet Charvet must be told. There was no other way. I set my teeth.

  ‘I’m afraid this trouble is rather more serious than you imagine. It isn’t just that you’re run-down, or a little out of sorts. Oh, I don’t want to worry you with long-sounding names or technicalities. But I do think we ought to have another … a specialist’s opinion.’

  ‘A specialist!’ Charvet exclaimed. ‘You can’t be serious. I haven’t time to see him. I’m too busy. I must go down to Devon to see about the cottage we’re renting for our honeymoon. Hang it all, Doctor, remember I’m being married next month!’

  There was silence in the sunlit room.

  ‘I think it might be as well,’ I said in a low voice, ‘if you made up your mind … to postpone your wedding … ’

  ‘Postpone my wedding! But it’s all arranged. Everything! Why do you look at me so strangely? What’s wrong with me?’

  I kept my eyes steadily upon the young man. It was not easy to say that single word, stil less so to explain that the scourge which had fallen upon him, which would ravage his nervous system, was a congenital condition, a legacy, insidious and terrible, inherited at his birth. But I had to do it.

  A long bar of silence throbbed within the room, while the meaning of my words dawned upon him. He remained absolutely still, pale to the lips, then a violent spasm of denia shook him.

  ‘No!’ he cried ‘ I can’t believe you It’s inconceivable. I’ll go and see someone else.’

  ‘That’s what I suggest,’ I agreed gently. ‘You must let me send you to Dr Barton. He’s the man who really will advise you…’

  ‘I don’t want advice,’ he answered, with heaving breast. ‘I only want to prove you’re wrong. Oh, it’s too cruel … too insane.’

  ‘So long as you go to him.’ I took up my pen. ‘Wait, I’ll give you a letter for him now.’

  Charvet said no more, but he waited, ashen with resentment, until I had finished writing; then, without a word, he took the letter from my hand.

  All that afternoon I felt troubled and oppressed. In the practice of my profession, I had often known the pity and terror of sudden calamity striking across the sweet brightness of life. But this, bursting out of a summer sky, turning happiness to misery and joyful prospects, in a flash, to certain pain, was the most terrible I had ever known.

  There were few patients at the evening surgery – all of London seemed to be in the country or at the seaside, enjoying a holiday week-end. But towards nine o’clock the doorbell rang. I went to the door myself and opened it.

  Harry Charvet stood there. Although his face was pale, he seemed calm, and his voice was quiet and controlled.

  ‘I’m sorry to be so late. One or two things have kept me. But perhaps I might see you for a moment.’

  He followed me into the sitting-room calmly – no anger, dismay, or nervous agitation.

  ‘I want to apologise.’ He fixed his dark eyes steadily upon me. ‘I behaved rather badly this morning. You see, it was a shock to me.’ A pause. ‘You were right, of course – absolutely right.’

  ‘I wish to God I had been wrong.’

  ‘The specialist was extremely kind,’ Charvet went on in that same matter-of-fact tone. ‘Just as kind as you were, Doctor. He confirmed your opinion. There’s no doubt at all. I made him tell me everything.’

  The impersonal voice broke suddenly, revealing a depth of tortured bitterness.

  ‘So I know what to look forward to. These giddy attacks will get more frequent. Soon I’ll begin to stagger all over the place like a drunken man. In a year or two I won’t be able to walk at all. Then my eyesight will suffer and my speech may go. Oh, yes, I know all about it. I made him give me the whole story. So there I’ll lie, paralysed and in curable … helpless until I die. A pretty picture of a bridegroom, Doctor.’

  A ware of the utter inadequacy of any comfort I could give, nevertheless made the effort to console him.

  ‘I’ve been trying to think things out for you, Charvet. It’s hard, I know, but wouldn’t it be better if you went away from London for a bit, just cut off to a sanatorium in the country?’

  He looked across at me with a twisted face.

  ‘Dr Barton said something like that, too. He wanted me to go to a nerve home up in the Mendip hills.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And wait there, I suppose,’ went on Harry with a note of dreadful satire in his voice, ‘until they carry me out on a stretcher. Wait until I lose my reason. There’s no treatment, no cure for this thing, and you know it.’

  ‘You mustn’t talk that way. You’ve got to face it.’

  There was a silence. Harry sighed. His calmness returned. He was not looking at me now, but into the distance; he spoke like a man talking to himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to face it. No use making a fuss. You’ve been very patient and kind. I’m afraid I’ve not appeared too grateful.’

  ‘You’ll take my advice?’ I said quickly.

  He nodded slowly. ‘I’ll get out of London. It’s best for all concerned.’

  ‘Come in here tomorrow and we can make all the arrangements,’ I insisted. ‘I’ll do everything I can.’ I paused. ‘But you … you must tell Lucy.’

  ‘I shan’t tell her just yet.’ He spoke without any visible trace of emotion. ‘I have one or two things. I must do first. Arrangements to make and unmake. For instance, I must go and settle about the cottage.’ He smiled at me with a new courage. ‘You knew we’d arranged to spend a month there, at Teignmouth. Lucy’s fond of the sea. And she loves Devon. That’s why we planned our honeymoon there. But now I’ll have to cancel it. I’ll go at the end of the week. And then Lucy must be told.’

  At this he rose abruptly, held out his hand to me, thanked me once again, and in a moment he had left the house and set off, swaying a little on his feet, down the street.

  I moved slowly upstairs. Charvet’s behaviour under this crushing blow served only to increase my sympathy for him. The miserable injustice of it all, the impossibility of escape, pressed down upon me. I could not banish from my mind the picture of Harry and Lucy standing together, laughing, brightening the waiting-room by their presence.

  A week passed and next Saturday came. At four o’clock I entered the house and went to the living-room for tea. My wife was there, but she offered no greeting, did not give me her usual smile. An early edition of the evening paper was in her hand.

  ‘Have you seen the new
s?’ These were her first words. ‘ It’s dreadful. Poor fellow … poor young man.’

  Silently, she handed me the sheet, marking a front-page paragraph with her finger.

  ‘Tragedy in Devon: Boat Capsizes in Rough Sea: Holidaymaker Drowned.’

  ‘This morning, off the coast of Teignmouth, a tragic fatality occurred. A visitor named Henry Charvet, aged twenty-six, having hired a rowboat from the jetty, set off on a fishing expedition to Pollock Deep some two miles off shore. The sea was choppy but not rough. It appears, however, that, while sculling. Mr Charvet unfortunately lost an oar and in reaching for it capsized his skiff. When the overturned craft was observed a launch from the boat pier went at once to his assistance but without avail. The body was not recovered. The accident is rendered more painful by the fact, we understand, that Mr Charvet was about to be married.’

  A heavy silence in the room. I could not speak. Now I understood Harry’s ready acquiescence – the best, the only remedy – a quick and certain way out, indeed.

  After the first intolerable shock, Lucy bore up bravely. She had sweet and happy memories to sustain her. No one dreamed of the real facts of the case. There was no scandal, no malicious gossip, only sympathy and regret. But for many days afterward I was haunted by a strange vision, not of poor Harry Charvet, but of an older man, that debonair and handsome man, who had liked, so much, the gaiety of cities.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Suicide is, of course, an indefensible act. But surely there are extenuating circumstances which merit, at least, the grace of Christian burial and not, as in olden times, that midnight interment at a lonely crossroads without benefit of bell, book, and candle, with a stake through the poor wretch’s heart. I shed no tears for the stockbroker who, having lost his fortune in a market gamble, throws himself out of the nearest tenth-storey window, or for the embezzler who, rather than face the clients he has defrauded, puts a bullet in his brain. But there are other instances which cannot be so easily dismissed as ‘the coward’s way out.’

  Many times, through my association with the district police station, I was called upon to view the bodies of those unfortunates, the lost souls of this great city, who had died by their own act, and now lay, rigid and pitiful, upon the cold marble of the mortuary slab. For those who seek an adventure in realism, a salutary lesson in the vanity of human wishes, nothing more suitable could be recommended than a periodic visit to the mortuary.

  An old woman fished out from the Serpentine, a sodden bundle of rags, bloated from long immersion, yet starved, destitute there was not a penny in her tattered purse – one of life’s lost people; I never even knew her name. I remember also that excorporal of World War I, badly shell-shocked, in and out of hospitals for fifteen years, martyred perpetually by his nerves we found him hanged, by his braces, in a Notting Hill doss-house. Nor shall I readily forget Mrs Stacey – that was not her real name for whom I had no sympathy whatsoever.

  She was a widow of forty, good-looking in a florid way, and very comfortably off, who, with another woman, her lifelong friend, and a man, a naturalised Swiss, Georges Lanier, owned and managed a small, extremely high-class hotel near the park. Georges and Mrs Stacey were acknowledged lovers. She had met him in Geneva, where he was a waiter in a lakeside cafe, some years before, had brought him to London and given him an opportunity in this excellent and profitable partnership which, since Lanier’s experience in the business was useful, seemed to work out admirably. But one day, unfortunately, she discovered that the three-way partnership existed in more than a commercial sense – in brief, she discovered Georges in bed with her best friend, in circumstances which precluded the explanation that they were merely changing the sheets. She made a frightful scene. Georges, however, was now financially independent. He shrugged the situation off coolly. He was sick of her, he told her, and infinitely preferred her friend. Hysterically, Mrs Stacey retired to her room with a bottle of fifty veronal tablets. When they called me next morning the bottle was empty. Without her make-up and her artificial teeth, she was a very ugly corpse.

  One of the most truly remarkable instances of suicide which I met with in my practice was the case of the Chattertons. Again, Mr and Mrs Chatterton kept a boarding-house – Bayswater teemed with these establishments. The Chatterton house was modest, took only a few guests, but was most admirably run by Ada Chatterton, a great, solid, muscular, plain-featured woman who was a magnificent housekeeper and a miraculous cook. Ada, in fact, did everything, from roasting and carving the joint to carrying up the coals, and did it the more readily since Alf, her husband, a tiny shrimp of a fellow with a sunken chest and a hollow cough, was not strong, capable only of light duties in the office. Ada was devoted to Alf, utterly so, and in her fondly aggressive maternal way she coddled him like a child, washed his woollens, bullied him out of smoking too many cigarettes, and above all, she fed him well, with steaks and chicken, nourishing soups and creamy puddings. No relationship could have been more admirable than that of this big, bossy woman and the meek, delicate little man …

  They were completely happy and had been so for nearly twenty years.

  One day a new boarder came to the Chatterton house, a middleaged man named Glover who was connected with a sporting arena newly established in nearby Hammersmith. Glover was a huge man, heavy and burly, bigger, almost, than Ada, and he had one of these thick black moustaches, waxed to a point, which one associates with pictures of old-time strong men. And, indeed, Glover had been a weight-lifter in his day, then had turned professional wrestler and travelled the country with a famous circus.

  Some weeks later when I heard gossip that Ada and Glover had, as my informant phrased it, ‘gone off the deep end,’ I could not believe it. Yet it was so. After years of soft maternal fondness, Ada discovered, at a dangerous age, a different variety of love, and Glover, apparently, was carried away by an equal passion. They were always together, out every evening in Glover’s car, committing the wildest of indiscretions, in which was, admittedly, a saturnalia of sexual indulgence.

  As usual, the husband was the last to guess the truth. Poor little chap, how I pitied him – how could this delicate atom hope to survive against these two huge, brutal creatures linked by an overpowering sordid passion? I waited with compassion, for the inevitable denouement.

  What actually happened defies description. I cannot explain it. I only know what I found one chilly January morning when summoned, at dawn, to the back-yard of the Chatterton house. Ada and Glover had locked themselves in Glover’s car inside the lean-to garage. They had written out a mutual suicide pact, put their arms around each other, then started the engine. Within fifteen minutes both were asphyxiated.

  Was it remorse? The triumph of weakness over strength, or right over wrong? Who knows? Perhaps Alf does. He sold the business, bought a Bath chair, and went to enjoy the placid existence of a semi-invalid on the promenade at Brighton.

  This dissertation upon suicide would not be complete without the mention of one final episode which is, perhaps, the most singular of all.

  On a wet November night, towards one o’clock, I was awakened by a loud knocking at the door. It was my friend Blair, sergeant of police, in dripping helmet and cape, mistily outlined on the doorstep. A suicide case, he told me abruptly, in the lodgings round the comer – I had better come at once.

  Outside it was raw and damp, the traffic stilled, the street deserted. We walked the short distance in silence, even our footsteps muffled by the fog, turned into the narrow entrance of an old building. Then, as we mounted the steps of a creaking staircase, my nostrils were stung by the sick-sweet odour of coal-gas.

  At the open door of a small flat on the upper storey an elderly woman, the landlady, received us and, in great agitation, showed us to a bare little attic where, stretched on a narrow bed, lay the body of a young man.

  It took only a glance to recognise the unmistakable symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. But although the youth was apparently lifeless, there remained t
he barest chance that he was not quite beyond recall. At least any gleam of hope, faint though it might be, could not be ignored, and, with the sergeant’s help, I began the work of resuscitation. For an entire hour we laboured without success. A further fifteen minutes and, despite our most strenuous exertions, it appeared useless. Then, as we were about to give up, completely exhausted, there broke from the patient a shallow, convulsive gasp, followed by another, and still another. It was like a resurrection from the grave, a miracle, this stirring of life under our hands. Half an hour of redoubled efforts and we had the youth sitting up, gazing at us dazedly and, alas, slowly realising the horror of his situation.

  He was a round-cheeked lad, with a simple, countrified air, and the story that came brokenly from his swollen lips was painfully simple too. His parents were dead, an uncle in the provinces – anxious, no doubt, to be rid of an unwanted responsibility – had found him a position as clerk in a London solicitor’s office. He had been in the city only six months. Utterly friendless, he had fallen victim to the loose society of the streets, had made bad companions, and, like a young fool, eager to taste pleasures far beyond his means, had, under their influence, begun to bet on horses. Soon he had lost all his small savings, had pledged his belongings, owed the bookmakers a disastrous amount. Then, pressed, threatened on all sides, he had, in an effort to recoup,’ taken a sum of money from the office safe for a final gamble which, he was assured, was certain to win. But this last resort had failed and, terrified of his employer, of the prosecution which must follow, muddled, sick at heart, sunk in despair, he had chosen the easy way out, had shut himself in his room and turned on the gas.

  A long bar of silence throbbed in the little attic, chilled by the night air, when he concluded this halting confession. Then, gruffly, the sergeant asked how much he had stolen. Pitifully, almost, the answer came: seven pounds ten shillings. Yes, incredible though it seemed, for this paltry sum, this poor misguided lad had almost thrown away his life.