Adventures of a Black Bag

by A. J. Cronin

  There fell a deathly silence when the song concluded.

  Jackson stared like a man who has seen a ghost, and in young Weir’s eyes was something cowed and bitterly ashamed. But she had forgotten them. Breathing quickly, bent a little forward, she sat at the piano with that dreamy distant look upon her face.

  Then, as for herself alone, she sang again – the Love Song from ‘Isolde’.

  When she had finished, they still sat petrified. But at last Doggy stirred.

  “My God!” he whispered humbly. “That was marvellous.”

  She turned to them, and with that half-smile upon her lips, said:

  “Let me sing ‘Allan Water’.”

  Finlay, watching her face, the panting of her breath, jumped up from the table.

  “No, no!” he cried. “For God’s sake, don’t – don’t sing any more.”

  But she had begun. The moving words of the old Scots song flowed out with a pathos unbelievable:

  “On the banks of Allan water,

  When the sweet spring time had fled.”

  There were tears in Finlay’s eyes; Doggy bowed his head upon his hands. But as they listened, spellbound, her voice, rising at the second verse to one last supreme note, broke suddenly and failed.

  She swayed upon the seat; a tiny foam of scarlet came upon her lips. She looked at them rather stupidly; then, helplessly, she toppled sideways.

  Finlay caught her before she fell. As the others rose clattering from the table, Jackson gasped:

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Haemorrhage,” snapped Finlay. “Bring some cold water, quick!”

  He carried her to the sofa in the far corner of the room. Doggy stood blubbering: “It’s all my fault! It’s all my fault! Oh, God! What can I do for her?”

  “Get a cab, you fool,” said Finlay. “We must get her to the hospital.”

  When they got her to the Cottage Hospital, she had recovered consciousness. Indeed, she rallied a little for the next few days, then slowly she began to sink. She lived altogether for three weeks more.

  She was completely tranquil. She had no pain; she had everything she desired. Doggy saw to that. He paid for everything. He took her flowers every day – great masses of flowers which brought to her sunken features that faint, elusive smile.

  He was with her when she died, and when he left the hospital that cold January afternoon, there was written on his face a strange new firmness.

  Letty Grey lies buried in Levenford Cemetery.

  Every week Doggy walks up there with his big stick and his pipe. He has lost his gush, his empty laugh, and something of his taste for brandy-splashes. But there is something more about him of the man.

  3. The Sisters Scobie

  That sharp September morning, while Finlay stood warming his boots at the fire before stepping into them, Janet entered the room with a slip of paper in her hand.

  “There’s a call,” she remarked, “for Anabel Scobie.” And she held out the paper with a singular expression on her face.

  He took the paper, a curious, narrow strip which somehow impressed him as having been cut carefully to pattern, and let his eye fall upon the angular, old-fashioned script –

  Miss Beth Scobie requests the doctor kindly to call upon her sister Anabel, who is unwell.

  “All right, Janet,” he nodded. “I’ll make a note of it.”

  She stood for a moment, watching him make the entry in his book, burning, simply, to tell him something of the Scobies. The conflict between her imposed dignity and a frightful inclination to gossip made the corners of her down-drawn lips twitch – like a cat within sight of forbidden cream. Glancing up suddenly, he caught that thirsting look fixed on him. He laughed outright.

  “Don’t worry, Janet,” he said amiably. “I’ve heard about the Scobies.”

  She bridled.

  “It’s just as well. For not one thing would ye have heard about them from me.”

  With her head in the air she turned on her heel, and in high indignation swept from the room.

  The fact is that most folks in Levenford knew about the Scobies. They were sisters. Two maiden ladies, well past fifty, who occupied the little grey stone house at the end of Levenford Crescent.

  It was an old-fashioned house situated beyond the Green, right on the edge of the Estuary, a wind-blown little house, with a wonderful view of ships and open water and a taste of salt, so to speak, washed into its very mortar.

  It looked the house of a sea-faring man, and so, indeed, it was.

  Captain Scobie had built the house when – a widower with two grown daughters – he retired at long last from fighting the Atlantic gales. And he had built it snug and proper within sight and sound and smell of the sea he loved so well.

  He was a short, trim, genial man, Abernethy Scobie, who had served his time in sail, stood his watch on the old paddle-pushers that made their clanking passage to Calcutta in the eighties, and come finally to command the Magnetic, the finest twin screw ship that ever left the Latta Yards for the southern trans-Atlantic route. That, in a sense, is ancient history, for Captain Scobie was dead these eighteen years past. But his daughters, Beth and Anabel, still lived on in the solid, spray-stung house which their father had built upon the Estuary shore.

  Beth was the elder, a small, dark, dried-up woman with black, forbidding eyebrows and hair drawn tight as wire.

  Anabel was two years younger, very like her sister, except that she was taller and more angular. She, had, however, a shade of colour in her cheeks, and sometimes, alas, when the wind blew sharp, in her nose as well.

  They dressed alike – two regular old maids – the same style in shoes, gloves, hats, stockings of the same ply wool, and gowns always of black, with a thin white edging at the neck and cuff.

  And they had the same expression – that bleak and vaguely hostile look which seems somehow to become ingrained in the faces of elderly spinsters compelled by usage to live too much together. For they were always together.

  In fifteen years they had not once been apart. But for fifteen years they had not spoken a single word to one another.

  This stupendous fact seemed incredible. But it was true. And like most incredibly stupendous facts it had arisen in the simplest, the silliest manner possible. It had arisen over Rufus.

  Rufus was a cat, a large ginger cat belonging equally to the sisters, and equally esteemed by them. Every evening they took in turn the duty of calling Rufus from the back garden, where, like a sensible cat, he habitually promenaded before stretching himself luxuriously upon the kitchen hearth to sleep.

  “Rufus! Rufus! Here, here!” Anabel would call one night. And on the next Beth, not to be thought copying her sister, would exclaim –

  “Pussy, pussy! Here, Rufie, here!”

  It went like clockwork until that fatal night of fifteen years ago. Then Beth, glancing up from her knitting, or it might have been her crochet, towards the clock inquired –

  “Why haven’t you called Rufus, Anabel?”

  To which Anabel replied, without rancour –

  “Because it isn’t my turn. I called him last night.”

  “But no!” Beth countered. “ I called him last night.”

  “You did not, Beth Scobie.”

  “I did!”

  “You did not!”

  “Allow me, but I did! I remember because he would keep hiding in the currant bushes.”

  “That was the night before! I remember fine you telling me when you came in. It wasn’t last night.”

  “I beg your pardon, but it was last night.”

  Then they both lost their tempers and went at it hammer and tongs. Finally Beth determinedly demanded:

  “For the last time, Anabel, I ask you. Will you go and call the cat?”

  And Anabel, with equal determination, hissed:

  “It is not my turn to call the cat.”

  Where upon they both rose and went to bed. Neither of them called the cat.

  All might have
been well, but for the fact that Rufus, finding himself so unexpectedly at large, took it into his stupid feline head to wander.

  Next morning Rufus was lost – not only lost, but lost beyond recall. And when it was known that Rufus was irreparably gone, Beth turned to her sister like a viper that has been trampled on.

  “I will never,” she declared with concentrated venom, “speak to you again as long as I live until you go down upon your bended knees and beg my pardon for what you have done.”

  “And I,” Anabel retorted passionately, “ will never speak to you again as long as I have breath in my body, until you go down on your bended knees and beg pardon of me.”

  Such vows have been taken before in the course of family squabbles! But the strange thing about this vow was that the Scobie sisters kept it; and even stranger perhaps the manner in which they kept it.

  It fell out, then, at half-past eleven on this particular day when he got word to call on Miss Anabel, that Finlay walked up the white pebbled path of the Scobie house and knocked discreetly at the Scobie door, Beth Scobie opened the door herself.

  Though the sisters were comfortably off, with an income derived from a joint annuity, they prided themselves in keeping no maid.

  “Please to step this way, doctor,” Beth observed, showing him into the front parlour, a freezingly clean apartment with horsehair furniture, marine paintings on the walls, some excellent Satsuma china in a case, and a heavy marble presentation clock ticking solemnly upon the mantelpiece.

  In the same colourless voice she added: “I’ll see if my sister is ready for you yet.”

  Then she left the room.

  When she had gone Finlay turned instinctively to warm himself at the fireplace. It was blank, however, of any cheerful blaze – the grate hidden behind an incised lacquer screen. But on the mantelpiece beside the clock his eye was arrested by a neat pile of paper slips, each exactly like the slip upon which had been written the message asking him to call. Beside the little pile of papers lay a pencil. Finlay stared at the papers and the pencil, while a dim

  understanding worked to the surface of his mind.

  Suddenly he observed two crumpled slips lying in the grate behind

  the screen, and, impelled by an odd curiosity, he stooped and picked

  them up.

  On the first, written in pencil, were the words –

  I don’t feel well, please send for the doctor, and on the second:

  A pack of nonsense fancying you’re ill.

  Finlay dropped the papers in amazement. So that, he thought,

  that’s the way they’ve worked it all the time.

  Just then a noise made him swing round. Beth stood before him

  at the door.

  “My sister will see you,” she declared evenly. And he could have

  sworn she was crushing a slip of paper in her palm.

  He went upstairs, at her direction, for she did not follow, and

  entered one of the two front bedrooms.

  Anabel lay in the big brass bed covered by a beautifully worked

  bedspread. The linen of the sheets and pillows was very fine. And

  Anabel herself was far from being fine.

  It took Finlay just five minutes to discover that she had influenza

  – the early symptoms – and that she was going to have it pretty

  bad.

  Her skin was dry, her temperature on the rise, her pulse bounding;

  and already there was a suspicious roughness creeping round the

  bases of her lungs.

  She submitted grimly to his examination. She had none of that

  skittish modesty which so often besets the elderly unmarried female.

  And at the end she went straight to the point.

  “I’m going to be ill, then, by the look of ye?”

  “You’ve got influenza,” he admitted. “There’s a regular epidemic

  of it about. It’s sharp while it lasts, but not serious.”

  At his evasion she laughed shortly, which brought on her cough.

  “I mean,” he amended, colouring, “you’ll be over it in a week

  or ten days.”

  “Of course I will!”

  “In the meantime, I’d better get you a nurse.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, doctor.”

  The dour look settled back in her deep-set eyes.

  “My sister will look after me. She’ll make a handless nurse, no doubt, poor creature, but I maun just put up with that.” Pause. “She’s stubborn, ye know, doctor. Stubborn to a fault and quarrelsome, forbye. But I’ve tholed it in health. And I can thole it in sickness.”

  There was nothing more to be said to Anabel. He folded his stethoscope, snapped his bag shut, and went downstairs.

  In the parlour, amongst the horse-hair furniture, the marine paintings, the Satsuma china, and the little pile of papers by the monumental clock, he addressed himself to Beth.

  “Your sister has influenza.”

  “Influenza! Is that all? Well, well! Anabel was aye one to be sorry for herself.”

  “Don’t you understand?” he exclaimed curtly. “Your sister is definitely ill. She’ll be worse before she’s better. Much worse. This influenza is no joke. It’s the real pulmonary type she’s got. She’ll want a lot of looking after.”

  Beth made a slight ironic gesture.

  “I can look after her. And look after her well. Though I’ve little doubt she’ll make a poor, poor, patient. She’s stubborn, ye know, doctor. Stubborn to a fault and quarrelsome, forbye. What I’ve had to endure ye wouldn’t credit. But sin I’ve endured it from her when she was well, faith, I can endure it now she’s ill.”

  He stared at her astounded. At length he said:

  “There’s just one difficulty.” He paused to clear his throat awkwardly. “ You and your sister don’t appear to be on speaking terms. You can’t possibly nurse her under these conditions.”

  She smiled her gaunt, humourless smile.

  “We’ll manage! We’ve managed well enough these fifteen years!”

  There was a silence. With a shrug of his shoulders Finlay accepted the situation.

  He began to explain at some length what had to be done. Having made his instructions clear he took his hat and left the house.

  So Beth began to nurse her sister in that same stubborn silence which had lasted fifteen years. At the beginning it was easy enough.

  As yet Anabel was not acutely ill, and notes flew between the sisters like swallows on the wing. Propped up on her pillows, the invalid would scrawl:

  “Give me beef-tea instead of gruel tonight.”

  And the nurse with a frigid face would countersign: “ Very well. But you must take your medicine first.”

  Ludicrous, of course! But ludicrous or no, the habits of fifteen years are hard to break.

  Late on the second afternoon, however, something went wrong with the well-tried system.

  Anabel was worse; much worse; for several hours she had been lying still, looking very queer. Now darkness was falling, and sunk back on the bed with flushed cheeks and unseeing eyes, she lapsed into a light delirium.

  Nonsense it was she talked, like scraps of words and phrases, but suddenly, in the midst of that rambling incoherence, she spoke – spoke to her sister. Out came the words –

  “I’m that thirsty, Beth. Please give me a drink.”

  Beth started as though a lance had pierced her.

  Anabel had spoken to her – after all these years – Anabel had spoken first. Her face, her whole body quivered. She pressed her hand against her side. Then she gave a cry.

  “Yes, Anabel, I’ll give you a drink. Look! Here it is –” And she rushed forward to the bed, supported her sister’s head with her arm, offered her the cup.

  The sound of Beth’s voice seemed to stir Anabel from her unconsciousness. She looked at her and smiled.

  At that Beth began to sob, harsh dry sobs that tore and racked her narrow bosom
.

  “I’m sorry, Anabel,” she wept. “I’m dreadfully sorry. It’s been all my fault. And all about nothing.”

  “Maybe it was my fault,” Anabel whispered. “Maybe it was my turn to call him.”

  “No, no,” Beth sobbed. “ I’m thinkin’ it was mine.”

  That night when Finlay called he found Beth waiting for him in the parlour. All her grimness had gone, and in its place there stood a real anxiety.

  “Doctor,” she asked straight away. “My sister’s worse. You don’t think – you don’t think she’s not going to get better?”

  He studied the marine painting on the opposite wall – the Magnetic passing the Tail o’ the Bank.

  “I think she’ll get over it,” he said eventually. “With a bit of luck, you know.”

  “She’s got to get over it,” Beth cried hysterically. “ Don’t you understand, doctor– we’ve made it up. This afternoon she spoke to me.”

  And without warning she burst into tears.

  In spite of himself Finlay was moved, moved by those tears – so foreign to this hard nature, they were like waters struck miraculously from barren rock.

  He saw as something strangely beautiful the reconciliation of the two sisters, two crabbed and arid beings who had turned a trifling quarrel into such savage animosity, and linked their lives by speechless hatred.

  With sudden poetic vision he reflected – if only he could save Miss Anabel, how marvellous to see the unfolding of these warped, malignant cords, the rebirth of affection, the progression of these twin natures into a rich and generous old age.

  And such was the intensity of the thought that he declared aloud:

  “We’ve got to save her!”

  But it was not easy.

  The days slipped in, and Anabel hovered between delirium and reason, her fever rising and falling, her pulse flickering feebly at the wrist, her strength gradually failing.

  The infection ravaged her. She seemed to verge upon a secondary pneumonia which could have ended everything. That at least, was Finlay’s fear.

  At times he almost despaired of her, her crisis was so long delayed. But she was tough, her fibre fashioned of a stern material. She lasted bravely. And she lacked for nothing.