The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  ‘So they made a chaplain of you, did they?’ said Dr Jakes. They were walking together down the dingy, moonlit street. ‘That was after you were wounded, of course. Anything rather than let you go. I know ‘em, the brutes. And how did you fancy that?’

  ‘I didn’t fancy it. I funked it. I tried to get out of it.’

  ‘And couldn’t you, with that limp?’

  ‘I got that afterwards,’ said Felix, ‘in a field dressing-station. Shell splinter.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  The doctor nodded. The answer seemed to give him professional satisfaction. ‘I rather thought it did. They bungled the job, I suppose?’

  ‘Not at all. They saved my leg for me,’ said Felix, smiling.

  ‘Devilish good of them,’ said Dr Jakes.

  Felix laughed. ‘What a chap you are, doctor, for jumping to false conclusions! We were retreating, don’t you see? And our casualties … had to lie about a bit and wait their turn.’

  ‘I know. Gangrene. Are we walking too fast for you? I don’t want a Christian martyr on my hands.’

  ‘No, I’m all right. Where do they live?’

  ‘Plenty Street. Number 163. Waggish fellow who gave it that name. P’raps it was the damned scoundrel who put the houses up. Plenty Street! Plenty of rent, God blast his dirty soul! You don’t mind my language, I hope?’

  ‘It’s a shade too prayerful for me,’ said Felix. ‘Otherwise all right. But I think your theology’s pretty shaky.’

  Dr Jakes took him by the arm. ‘We cross here. That’s the road, by that lamp-post. Do you know, Elderbrook,’ he said giving the arm a friendly squeeze, ‘you’re the rummiest man of God I’ve ever struck.’

  ‘If it comes to that,’ said Felix, ‘you’re the rummiest man of medicine I’ve ever struck.’

  Having crossed the road, they turned into Plenty Street; and Jakes, with one eye on the look-out for number 163, went on with the conversation. Talking was his favourite pursuit; he could never have too much of it; and since he was able to do several other things at the same time it did not in the least hinder his being an excellent doctor. Moreover there was this to be said for him, that in the course of his day’s and night’s work he had a good deal of listening to do.

  ‘You’ve got your work cut out here, man of God. I fancy that’s the one. They’re all alike, and all hideous, but that’s the one. As like as one louse to another. Ought to call ‘em hice, not houses. Not very funny. Is it religion they want? Maybe. But what they want first is better food, better housing, better sanitation. They want more money. They want champagne and oysters and three months in the south of France. Can you give them that? Not you. Nor can I. I can give them bottles of medicine and let them tell me their troubles. Some like it nasty, think it does ’em more good; others prefer it sweetish; but nasty or nice it must have a good rich colour. The only colour they get in their lives is the colour of my medicine, poor devils. And you, what do you give them?’

  ‘I?’ said Felix. ‘Nothing. I merely try to show them … well, other colours. I can’t, by myself, alter their world, any more than you can. I can only help them, a little, to endure it, by pointing to the sky.’

  ‘The sky? You can’t see it here for chimney pots. And what’s that mean anyhow? Bliss hereafter? The gospel of jam tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ said Felix, with a sudden urgent sincereity. ‘Not that at all. It means, for me, a light from beyond the world. The light of eternity breaking into time. Since you ask me,’ he added apologetically.

  With his hand on the knocker of number 163 Jakes looked at him for a moment without answering.

  The door opened gingerly. A face peered out. ‘It’s quite a good story,’ said the doctor over his shoulder. ‘You stick to it. … I’m Dr Jakes,’ he announced. ‘Are you Mrs Smith? I can’t see you in the dark.’

  A murmur of thankfulness greeted him. The woman turned to show him the way. He followed her, with Felix at his heels. The rumour of Dr Jakes’s presence preceded them up the narrow, uncarpeted, evil-smelling stairway. One could almost hear the beating of expectant hearts. Dr Jakes had come. Our Dr Jakes from round the corner. Everybody’s friend. Dr Jakes who mucks in, same as us, when he might be riding in his kerridge with the dukes and duchesses. In the moment of crossing the threshold Felix had been hit in the face by another presence, a sour, stale, ammoniac stench, compounded of dankness and dirt and a variety of animal effluvia. But he was accustomed to that by now, and had not gone half-a-dozen paces up the stairs before he forgot it in his contemplation of this queer new friend of his, who already seemed an old friend. It was easy to get to know Dr Jakes, provided he liked you. And apparently he did like Felix, who from the first had been shrewd enough to see that being in with the doctor was his best passport to the confidence of his parishioners. Jakes had won his immense popularity, without plan or effort, by being himself, by making his home among the people he doctored instead of being, like his predecessor, an absentee doctor arriving two days a week from a supposedly luxurious house in the West End to put in a couple of hours’ profitable slumming at the Rattlebone Road surgery. Dr Jakes’s daily ‘surgery’ was a crowded occasion, conducted with brisk patience and tart good humour, and combining, as Felix had seen for himself, the functions of health-shop and confessional. At sixpence a consultation, ninepence with medicine, and a shilling for an outside visit, the doctor declared he made a good thing out of it, and having a hearty hatred of philanthropy, in his view a stinking substitute for social justice, he tacitly invited you to infer that to make a good thing out of it was his prime motive.

  The party now reached its destination, a narrow slip of a room lit by a naked jet of gaslight. The patient, a little fair-haired girl, lay in a bed in one corner. She whimpered faintly, turning large eyes towards her grandmother, who sat at the bedside with her lap full of knitting. To the prevailing stench a warm sweetness was here added. An effort at cosiness was apparent in the room: a handful of glowing coals in the grate, a tattered hearthrug on the bare boarded floor. Grandmother occupied the only chair, and there was hardly room for another.

  ‘We’ve put her in the parlour,’ explained Mrs Smith. ‘Nights are so bitter now.’

  Dr Jakes nodded. ‘Very nice. Now … perhaps you could bring me a candle, Mrs Smith?’

  He examined his patient in the light of a candle held by her grandmother, every now and again dropping a quick casual question. Having with a touch and a word or two won the ghost of a smile from the child, he lapsed into silence and stood looking down at her, at her and into her, probing for the secret. And Felix looked at him; for this was a Dr Jakes he had never seen before, silent, impersonal, a spirit poised, an energy concentrated, a mind focused on the problem confronting it. The stillness lasted only a moment, and then he was in motion again and the physical examination was resumed.

  ‘My pore sister was took just the same,’ said Mrs Smith, in a hoarsely whispered aside. She stood at Felix’s elbow, humble and grateful, and hospitably anxious to entertain him. ‘Gone in a week she was,’ she confided, mournfully savouring the drama of her story, ‘and suffered something terrible, doctor.’

  She imagined him to be Dr Jakes’s assistant, and he did not care to correct the fancy. He felt it was not the moment for advertising his own wares.

  Twenty minutes later he and Jakes were back in the street. They strode along without talking for a while, and at the lamppost where the roads joined their ways diverged.

  ‘She’s a nice little thing,’ said Jakes.

  ‘Has she any chance?’ Felix asked.

  ‘A chance? M’yes. A chance.’

  Felix waited, watching his face for a sign. An odd face, not unlike a gipsy’s, but a gipsy who might easily be taken for a Roman emperor. Dante, if he had had mischief and humour in him as well as genius, might have had such a face. A broken nose was the dominating feature. It had been broken by a drunken docker, indignant that his woman was in process of being delive
red of yet another mouth to feed. Jakes had thrown the reluctant father downstairs, but not before receiving an ox-felling punch between the eyes.

  ‘There’s always a chance,’ he said, with a grimace of indifference. ‘But don’t bet on it, son. You’ll lose your money…. Good night.’

  § 5

  THE day of Ann’s homecoming arrived at last. Matthew was to fetch her, and he could think of nothing else. He got up at his usual early hour and did all the various jobs about the farm which he always did before breakfast and always had done since he first became a farmer. He still did a large share of the milking, taking a far more than mercenary pleasure in any unlooked-for increase in the quality and quantity of the milk, and ready to be perplexed and disgruntled by any unaccountable falling-off in either. Dark though mornings were at this season, the cows at early milking-time were always ready and waiting for him. They would be crowded together in the orchard, where they had no proper business but which they must pass through to get from meadow to farmyard. They would stand mildly mooing or dumbly expectant on the further side of the five-bar gate, and in the morning dimness loom upon the vision like a group of fabulous sculptures. The iron of a man’s boots would strike sharp and clear on the cobbles, a curiously lonely noise that made palpable the prevailing stillness, and, the gate flung back, the cows would lurch in and cross the yard to their long shed, where before very long they would be spending their nights as well as their milking sessions.

  Matthew this morning did everything as usual, but with a mind preoccupied. When he thought of the sundry small things that had to be done or endured before he could take the road his impatience mounted to fever height. Milking, breakfasting, harnessing the pony, driving to where Ann was, finding her, greeting her, bringing her back where she belonged, and re-establishing for all time the old dull satisfying order of things, this seemed in prospect a task so immense, an end so much to be desired, that to be held back from it by slow-ticking time, by petty pieces of routine, was a sort of agony. It was moreover a sort of agony to which he was a comparative stranger, and of which his neighbours, accustomed to his slow-going placid manners, would have supposed him hardly capable. With a persistence that made these lesser things a tiresome irrelevance, Ann filled his mind. She did not fill it with a thought, with a romantic sentiment. She filled it.

  He stamped into the stone-flagged kitchen and sat down to his breakfast, but noticing that his hands were dirty got up again at once and went out to the scullery pump. On his return Hilda slapped down a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him. With no more than a grunt of acknowledgment he began eating.

  ‘I’ve done you a bit of bubble-and-squeak,’ said Hilda.

  She spooned a well-browned slab of that confection on to his plate. If he had had attention to spare for her he would have seen that she was in a state of not unhappy tension. His condition made him wonderfully blind to any special meaning the day might hold for her. But the sight of this unusual addition to his breakfast gave him a moment’s surprise.

  ‘What’s the idea?’

  ‘Must make a good meal, Mr Elderbrook.’

  ‘Um.’ He was not interested, yet vaguely wondered what she meant. ‘Why?’

  She shrugged her shoulders and answered, as to a child; ‘Never mind why.’ And then, absurdly: ‘You’re going a journey, that’s why.’

  The lameness of the remark made him look at her, made him aware of her as something more than the terminus of an arm that had handed him his breakfast. His mind was in a fret of nervous anxiety. Was Ann fit to travel? Perhaps she had had a relapse since Wednesday, when he had last heard news of her. The pony would go lame. The weather might suddenly change: the long prayed-for rain might suddenly arrive. She would be cold, wretched, arrive home chilled to the bone and take to her bed and be ill again. He knew she was longing to be home, and now, after being patient and comparatively easy for a long time, he could not rest till her wish were fulfilled. As he glanced half-absently at Hilda, as a man might glance up from an absorbing book, it was suddenly present to his mind, without shock because almost without meaning, that this warmhearted abundant girl now stood in a special and secret relation to him. Without shock, because what he remembered seemed unreal, or real only as something in a well-told story is real. It was at any rate something that did not concern him now, nor her either, and he gave it no thought beyond perceiving, in a flash of mutual understanding, that Hilda as usual was at one with him in the tacit denial of significance to anything that might otherwise have made for awkwardness on this morning.

  ‘Hope to goodness,’ said Matthew, suddenly blurting out his fear, ‘hope to goodness she’s really better, and no nonsense.’

  ‘Why of course she is!’ said Hilda warmly. ‘They said so, didn’t they? Wouldn’t be no sense in telling you a pack of lies.’

  ‘I know,’ said Matthew. ‘But she might have had a setback since then. It’s a trying little journey for a person that’s poorly. I hope she won’t come to any harm from it.’

  Hilda said: ‘Of course she won’t! Whatever next? My word, she won’t half be glad, coming home.’ Standing over the teapot she added, for his comfort: ‘And once she’s back we’ll keep good care of her, don’t you worry!’

  ‘I know you will, Hilda,’ he said humbly. He saw that her ‘we’ had meant ‘I’, and was conscious of receiving more kindness than he deserved.

  ‘You’ll be taking some flowers with you, I expect?’ Hilda said.

  ‘Flowers?’ He was puzzled. ‘What for?’

  ‘What for?’ She echoed him derisively. ‘To feed the pony with, I expect, don’t you?’ Before he could answer this sally she said, with simple kindness: ‘She’ll like to have a few flowers, Mrs Elderbrook will.’

  ‘Seems a funny arrangement,’ said Matthew, ‘taking flowers all the way there and then bringing them all the way back home. You’d get the same result, come to think of it, by leaving them where they are.’

  ‘That’s what you think,’ answered Hilda. ‘I’ll make up a nice bunch anyhow. And if you don’t want to take them I’ll put them in the bedroom, against she gets back.’

  He remembered Hilda’s flowers an hour or two later, following at the heels of a prim trim young nurse into the ward where Ann was. He remembered that he had forgotten to bring those flowers. But the idea did not stay with him, for there she was, Ann, sitting alone, waiting. He caught a glimpse of her before she was aware of him, and his heart turned over. She sat pensive and patient, released at last from pain and ready to be taken home, her belongings packed away in a valise, her handbag on the made bed beside her, herself in outdoor clothes. Seeing her like that gave him a strange pang, deeper than any wish. In profile she was a child, forlorn among strangers, yet hopeful, trustful, looking for the happiness that was to come. All the youngness she had lost in her years remained written in that outline. Matthew suffered a pang of terror, seeing her threatened by something his fancy would not define. It came and went in a flash, like a voice heard in a dream and at once forgotten, like a half-seen face at your elbow that isn’t there when you look at it.

  At sound of the nurse’s approach Ann turned her head: not sadly, but with the meek patience of one well schooled in disappointment.

  The nurse said slyly: ‘A visitor for you, Mrs Elderbrook.’

  She looked and saw him. Her happiness burst into flower. It was not many days since his last visit, but today was different: today he was to take her home. These were her thoughts and his too, a shared knowledge brimming the moment with light.

  ‘Hullo, Ann. Ready, are you?’

  Supporting herself with one hand on the bed, she stood up and faced him, with a trembling smile. Though her face had lost something of its roundness, and all its bloom, the pleasure in her eyes made her seem young again, and somehow—for a reason beyond his fathoming—pathetic.

  ‘I’ve been ready over an hour,’ she said.

  It was not a complaint: merely the measure of her gladness at seeing him.


  ‘Really?’ He gave her a bantering half-grin. ‘I reckoned you’d be still asleep.’

  ‘An hour and thirteen minutes,’ said Ann happily.

  The nurse had already slipped away, in response to a call from another patient.

  Matthew picked up Ann’s valise and with his left hand cupping her elbow piloted her across the narrow room and into the corridor. There she said suddenly ‘I’ve forgotten something,’ and turned back. He put down his burden but did not follow her, thinking she could only be a few seconds gone. In her passage across the room he had been astonished by the limpness and slowness of her movements, though recognizing that to be astonished was unreasonable. He was apt to think in definite categories, ignoring the more-or-less, the gradations from one to the other. Well was well, and ill was ill. His fears of not finding her well enough to travel had been set at rest by seeing her out of bed and sitting in a chair fully clothed, even to hat and gloves. But she was evidently still very weak, and waiting for her to come back he became suddenly anxious again, thinking she had been gone a long while. In fact she had been gone about thirty seconds.

  He turned back and put his head in at the bedroom door. ‘Are you all right, Ann?’

  The answer was scarcely audible. He Went quickly in. Ann was drooping against the bed, one hand on the handbag she had gone back to fetch. She looked up and gave him a wan smile. The smile was meant to be reassuring, but it had the opposite effect.

  He went and put an arm round her shoulder.

  ‘Do you feel bad?’

  ‘No. Oh no. I was just tired for the moment, that’s all.’

  His old anxiety, that they might not let her come away, burst into flame; and Ann as if reading the thought and sharing it said quickly in a half-whisper: ‘Don’t tell anybody. They’ve been very kind.’

  ‘H’m.’ He was dubious.

  ‘I’m all right again now,’ she said brightly. ‘Shall we go, Matt?’