CHAPTER VII: THE DOCTOR
James had often said that we must get to know of a good doctor whom we could call in if either of us was ill; but neither of us was ill, and we put off our inquiries until it was too late. Mrs. Beehive called one day, boasting that she had just recovered from influenza and really had no business to be out. Within forty-eight hours I wished she had never been born, and James brought a captive gentleman in spectacles to my bedside.
He held counsel with my inner works through the usual formulæ and then rang for hot water. While Clara was bringing it he adjusted his spectacles, put his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the mantelpiece.
“Fond of Alpine climbing?” he asked.
“No,” I gasped, coughing.
“Ah, it’s a grand sport!” he said. “Does your husband climb?”
I shook my head.
“What a wonderful woman his aunt, Miss Molyneux, is! I remember meeting her at a whist-drive ten years ago, and she must be now—let me see—what is her age?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, weary after his pommelling and longing for sleep.
“Pardon?”
I felt myself growing hot. “Ninety-eight,” I said hoarsely, at a venture. I did not know how old James’s aunt was, nor whether she climbed.
“Ah, is she so much?” he reflected, swaying on his toes. “That’s a nice little fellow” (pointing to a photograph on the mantelpiece). “Puts me in mind of Prince Olaf. It has a great look of him; don’t you think so? What?”
I nodded and shook my head at the same time, and kicked the bedclothes. My temperature was rising rapidly.
“Ah, thank you,” he said, as Clara came in with the hot water, and then he began washing his hands. I never knew a man useso much soap; it was my special kind at two-and-sixpence a tablet, and he left it in the water while he lathered and messed and went on with the Alpine business. He told me the names of all the mountains he had been up, and the routes by which he had unfortunately come down. He described how splendidly fit one felt tearing down the snow slopes on a toboggan (“I wish you would slide downstairs on what is left of my soap, and have done with it,” I thought). He said that he used to have a touch of bronchitis himself every winter, but it completely left him after a week at Mürren. After we had been all round Switzerland with the soap we came back to one of my favourite towels, which he reduced to something like a bread poultice during a ten minutes’ inquiry as to how many Wagner operas I had heard in my life, and whether my grandmother was the wife of a famous fisherman.
I lay panting and exhausted on the bed, feeling as one does after a long afternoon spent with a garrulous and deaf old lady.Finally the wretch came back to me, fiddled with the books at my side, criticised them all, gave me a list of those he had read during the past forty years, and then got as far as the door.
“Now keep quiet,” he remarked, looking down his nose at me with a judicial air, “don’t have people in here chattering.”
Ill as I was, I could not take this lying down. I sat up and croaked, “What about you?”
“Oh, I’ll come round to-morrow morning,” he replied, unscathed by my sarcasm.
When James came home I said I was a little better and would get up. “What did you think of Smithson?” he asked. “I am told he is a clever chap.”
“He’s a first-rate musician,” I said.
“What?”
“And Alpine climber.”
“How the deuce do you know?” asked James.
“He has been up the Markhorn, the Rotterham, the Bungleberg, the Sloshwald,all over Borenpest range; then in Wales, the Greater and smaller Bosh, the Gwaddear, the——”
James felt my pulse and passed his hand over my forehead.
“I wonder if I had better ask him to come round this evening?” he suggested.
“No,” I said, “don’t do that; in fact I was going to ask you to ring up and say I am so much better, that I think he had better not call to-morrow. He is fearfully busy, and if I am as well as this I want to go into town and get some soap—and a hatchet——”
James thought me extremely silly, and said the man was a deuced clever chap. I bided my time and had my reward later.
James got a bad chill, and I sent at once for Dr. Smithson. I provided him with a bag of the ordinary Castile soap, four thick towels, and my clinical thermometer, and left the room.
From the study downstairs I could hear the gentle monotonous flow of sound, and the hands of the clock moved peacefully on.Presently the stream of sound became fuller as it was joined by another and more familiar current. There was a prolonged duet. I thought of the Zonophone Opera Company in the last part of “Home to our Mountains”; the clock struck another hour, and I heard the door open. The first single stream of sound flowed down the stairs alone, and died away as the front door banged. I left James five minutes to get his breath, and then I went up.
“Well, dear,” I said, “I hope he is going to do you good. I suppose he does not want you to have many visitors, no talking——”
“The man’s a damn fool!” said James. “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
“Did he take your temperature?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied James. “I wanted to put the thing under my arm—it’s the proper way to take a temperature—but he stuck it in my mouth and left it there an hour while he talked.”
“Did he? Then how did you manageto tell him what the treatment ought to be?”
“I told him what he didn’t seem to know—that in cases of inflammation what you want to do is——”
“To set up counter-irritation. I know. And so you each talked one against——”
“I want some soup,” interrupted James.
“Did you say soup or soap?” I asked.
“Soup, and as hot as possible.”
“Did he say you were to have hot things?”
“No; but it is obviously the thing to do.”
I turned, just as I was leaving the room, to say: “By the way, that’s a nice little water-colour sketch; do you——”
A leather slipper whizzed past my head and struck the door.
We have been in many parts of the world since then, and I have come across a great number of doctors. Many of them are amongst the dearest creatures on earth, but, like all our other loved ones, they have theirlittle ways. Clara was ill once, and Dr. Smithson’s partner came. He explained everything to me with the greatest care.
“What I should get, Mrs. Molyneux, if I were you,” he said with great emphasis, “is a piece of bread. Get your cook to give you some nice bread, not new you know, stale—stale bread a couple of days old—and steep it in a little milk. Heat the milk (you have a saucepan I expect? that’s capital!)—get a nice saucepan, then, and I should wash it first—get it washed for you—your maid can do that—get it well washed with soap and hot water, that’s right, wash it, and then pour the milk in. You have the milk, say, in a jug—a china jug—quite so—no doubt it stands in the larder, precisely—well, you get your cook to give you that jug of milk, and pour a little into the saucepan and heat it; I shouldn’t boil it—no, I shouldn’t indeed. I should heat it and pour it very gently on the bread. Cut the bread, you know—get a knife and cut it; don’t crumb it—that would be too small—cutit into nice pieces and pour the milk over it—you’ll find the girl will do capitally on it.”
We all hear from doctors about the tendency of women to be faddy about their health. The truth of the matter is that every one likes to feel that something about them is of importance to some one, and not only to some one in their own family, but to the outside world. I used to feel that James was an interesting personality to many people; he expounded his views to them, his remarks were received with sympathy, and he got a great deal of patting on the back. I didn’t. Clara and Ruth thought me an eccentric, amiable creature of another breed from themselves, a sort of finish to the house in a way, an ultimate cat on whom to lay responsibility for failure and domestic sin; but they were not interested in me. My women friends were more interested in my habits than in my personal psychology; James was mainly interested in my interest in him. It was sometimes a sore temptation to have adisease, something that would make at least three men shake their heads and wonder what I was doing. They would find out then what an exceptional character I had—what courage, what wit under trying circumstances, what intelligence in household management (the vacant chair, the cold bacon, that would bring it all home to them). James would hurry home in the evening and read letters to me from people who were all interested; he would chat—not quite so long as I wanted, so that I could have the pleasant qualm of missing him—then he would be dispatched downstairs to horrid discomfort where his darling was not, and I should not have to change into a cold evening dress. At last I should fall asleep, comfortable, warm, and washed, knowing that I need not get up next morning and slave and worry in unrecognised monotony. Can anyone wonder that we do it?
But anyone will do as well as a doctor; a clergyman or a lover if they will take an interest in one’s soul. I believe thata chiropodist who was really concerned for one’s toes would fill a long-felt want. It is a curious fact that no one goes to a lawyer for sympathy, and yet why we suppose that abnormalities in our liver will make us interesting in the eyes of a doctor to whom livers are no treat, while we neglect our lawyers who will investigate disorders in our conduct for the moderate sum of six-and-eightpence, must remain a mystery.
Suppose that one of us went to a solicitor’s office and said: “Do you know, such a queer thing has happened to me! I went and burgled a poor old gentleman the other day—stole his watch and a lot of valuable plate—and outside I met a policeman, whom I drugged with chloroform on a handkerchief.” One imagines the solicitor gravely investigating the matter, finding no old gentleman, no watch, no stolen plate, and no policeman. He charges the usual fee, puts a pair of handcuffs on the lady, and tells her to come back in a fortnight and have them altered.
A doctor whom I love very much once made this startling remark to me: “You lead a very nice life for a lady.”
The words brought to my mind such pictures as I have never forgotten. Such vistas of flat, dull landscape stretched before me; such dead seas of sensible conversation; such mountains made of interminable molehills; such continents of golf links and tennis lawns. All the shores were strewn with correctly balanced account books and thedébrisof tea parties; the trees were hung with carefully selected and well-boiled legs of mutton; first-rate parlourmaids with slight moustaches who understood the telephone peeped from behind every bush, and family butchers mated on St. Valentine’s Day in the place of nightingales. The sky was made of chill-proof Jaeger, and the stars were all turned so that their light fell from behind and on the left side of the book. My thoughts took the form of a parody on Lear’s poem about the Jumblies:
Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve.
Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve.
Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve.
Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;
Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve.
The last line will not bear analysis, but I think that the word “ladies” as he used it gave me an impression of something that lets the juice of life escape and retains only a few husks and skins. A very nice life for a lady seemed to me little more than a very nice tissue of habits, but then, no words mean quite the same thing to any two people.