Chapter VIII: Lower Sparkdale

I

NEXT day, in a fever of restlessness, Edwin essayed and passed his fourth professional examination. He had expected to get a first-class in it, but when he found himself near the bottom of the list in the neighbourhood of W.G., he was not seriously disturbed. The subjects of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology were unimportant, and now that his life had taken this sudden change of direction, it did not much matter what sort of a degree he took. His one concern was to get qualified and licensed to earn his living on the bodies of his fellow-men as quickly as possible.

Since his interview with his father, the determination to leave Halesby had not faltered, although he had not then calculated the difficulties that now faced him. To begin with, he had no money beyond a few pounds that his mother had placed to his credit in the Post Office Savings Bank in his childhood. Luckily his college and hospital fees had been paid in advance, and he was only concerned with the actual cost of living and the fees for the final examination. In some way or other he would have to live for twelve months, and he smiled to himself to think that he was in very much the same position as his father had occupied thirty years before.

On the whole, he thought, his father must have had less cause for anxiety, with Dr. Marshall’s two hundred pounds behind him and the humble standards of a village boy in place of Edwin’s more elaborate traditions of life. He felt that he needed the advice of a sound man with some knowledge of the world. In an emergency of this kind Matthew Boyce could offer him very little but sympathy, and so he turned naturally to the counsels of that battered warrior, W.G., feeling, at the same time, rather shabby in making use of a friend whom he had practically neglected in the last two years.

W.G. providentially didn’t look at it in that light. He had always regarded Edwin from a fatherly standpoint, and the mere fact that this was a case of rebellion against domestic authority of the kind in which he had been engaged since his childhood made him sympathetic, though he didn’t, as Edwin saw to his despair, appreciate the delicacies of the situation.

“I can quite see why you want to cut adrift,” he said. “It’s a feeling that any one’s who’s dependent gets, if he has any guts in him; but I’m damned if I see any cause or just impediment why these two persons shouldn’t enter into holy matrimony.”

“I suppose it’s just rotten sentimentality. Still . . . I can’t help it. There it is. It’s the idea of seeing another woman in my mother’s place. I simply couldn’t stick it, W.G.”

“Well, old chap, I’m quite prepared to believe you know best. The thing is, what are you going to do? You can’t live on nothing in this hard world. You can share my bed for a week or two if you like. I’m sorry it won’t be for longer; but marriage appears to be in the air. To tell you the truth, I’m going to get married myself.”

“You married? . . . Good Lord! What on earth are you doing that for?”

“I don’t know. Force of circumstance, I suppose. It’s one of the things that happens when you least expect it.”

“Do I know her, W.G.?”

“Oh, yes . . . you know her. It’s Sister Merrion in Number Twelve.”

There came to Edwin a vision of a tall, dark girl, with wavy brown hair and Irish eyes, whom he couldn’t help remembering at the infirmary.

“I didn’t even know that you were friendly.”

“We weren’t until about three weeks ago. I happened to notice that she was looking rather down in the mouth, and took her out to tea; and then the poor girl broke down at the Dousita and told me all about her home affairs. It’s the devil and all to see a pretty girl like that crying. She’d been having a thin time of it at home with her father: a pretty rotten sort of fellow, I gathered, and that seemed the only way out of it. So we’re going to be married next month. A sort of fellow-feeling, you know.”

“But . . . Good Lord . . . are you in love with her?”

“Of course I am, you old ass. I shouldn’t marry her if I wasn’t. It’ll be a bit of a pinch till I’m qualified, though.”

“I say, I hope you’ll be happy.”

A sudden pang of something like envy overwhelmed Edwin. The picture of settled peace, romantic love in a cottage, that W.G. was about to share with the undeniably beautiful Sister Merrion struck him as an ideal state.

“You’re a lucky devil, W.G.,” he said.

It seemed unreasonable that W.G. should devote himself to the smaller problem of Edwin’s ways and means on the eve of such a momentous adventure. It hardly seemed fair to bother him.

“We’re going into rooms in Alvaston at first,” he said. “It’ll be less expensive than furnishing, and we don’t intend to indulge in a family for the present. Meanwhile, if I were you, I should go and talk to the manager at Edmondson’s. He may be able to put you on to something. Yes . . . have a shot at him first, and mention my name, he’s a very decent sort.”

Edwin laughed to himself. It seemed to him that he was in the grip of a curiously ironical fate, for Edmondson’s was the identical firm of wholesale druggists with whom his father had been employed on his first arrival at North Bromwich. History was repeating itself in a way that was proper to romance.

In the afternoon he went down to Edmondson’s and asked for the manager, a vigorous person with shrewd eyes that he screwed up habitually whenever he made a point in his conversation. He called Edwin “Doctor”: a form of address that was flattering, until Edwin realised that it was no more than a habit with him. “Ingleby,” he said; “let me see, I know the name.”

“Probably you know my father. He’s in business at Halesby.”

“Ah, yes, of course . . . your father. Come along to my room, doctor, and have a cigar.”

In this varnished chamber, decorated with a collection of barbarous surgical instruments, survivals of the Middle Ages, Edwin unbosomed himself. The manager listened in silence, screwing up his eyes from time to time, to show that he was taking in Edwin’s story.

“Well,” he said at the end of it. “Do you want me to tell you what I think of it, doctor? Candidly, you know.”

Edwin was only too anxious for another opinion.

“Well, I think you don’t know when you’re well off. To tell you the truth, doctor, I think you’re a damned fool. That’s straight. See?”

“I’m not surprised,” said Edwin. “Still, I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to stay at home. I can’t do it, that’s all. I’m only wondering if you can put me in the way of a job of some kind.”

“Well, doctor, that’s easier said than done. When you’re qualified, it’ll be a different matter altogether. I think I can promise to keep you in ‘locums’ at four or five guineas a week, as long as you like to take them; but I can’t honestly say there’s anything for you at present. It’s not like the old days when doctors were allowed to keep unqualified assistants.”

“I’m through my fourth exam., you know. I could do dispensing.”

“Dispensing. . . . Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, doctor, I’ll see what I can do for you. You know what I think of it, don’t you? In the meantime you’d better leave your address. No good writing to Halesby, I suppose?”

Edwin gave him the address of W.G.’s diggings, and went off, hopelessly discouraged, to find his friend. W.G., however, was at present far too engrossed in the charms of Sister Merrion to be available. So Edwin went on to the Boyce’s house in Alvaston, only to find that Matthew had cycled down to Overton again with his father. It was impossible for him to settle to any work; so he took an afternoon train to Halesby, at a time when he knew his father would be busy at the shop, and collected the few belongings that he felt he must take with him.

The atmosphere of the house was inexpressibly poignant. Within its walls, he reflected, dwelt the ghost of all his childhood, and memories of his mother, that had lain submerged in his consciousness for many years, rose to meet him wherever he went. Well, he would never see the place again. This exile, it pleased him to think, was his final sacrifice to her memory. That was the best way in which he could express it. At the worst, another voice whispered, it was an excess of mawkish sentiment.

All through the afternoon, and particularly when he disinterred small pieces of the lumber that he had collected in his schooldays, this sense of a ghostly childhood haunted him. It followed him down the stairs into the hall, where the grandfather clock ticked steadily as it had ticked ever since he could remember, into the dead drawing-room, soon to be made alive by the tastes of another feminine personality; on the lawn, where the limes were shedding their sticky bloom; on the way to the station, when he lugged his bag through the gnarled shadows of Mrs. Barrow’s ancient garden, and caught a glimpse of the old lady’s kindly nodding bonnet as she smiled at him from her place in the window, where she sat hermetically sealed in an atmosphere of Victorian decay.

There were the reedy pools and Shenstone’s hanging woods, ghostly waters and woodlands, never to be seen again. And there was the platform of Halesby station, reeking of hot coal dust and ashes, and, from the incoming train, a flux of shabby people, including the bank-clerk in tennis flannels and the mysterious commercial traveller with the brown leather bag, reading the _Pink ’Un_ as he walked. From this, through the black-country’s familiar desert, the train carried him into the bitter reality of North Bromwich. With something approaching the feelings of an intruder he installed himself in W.G.’s diggings, and made a supper, undeniably pleasant, of bread and cheese with a large bottle of W.G.’s beer. The latter, which happened to be Astill’s XXXX, induced a mood of tolerant sleepiness, and luckily prepared him to receive, at midnight or thereabouts, the confidences of his friend on the subject of Sister Merrion’s intellectual charms.

“You know, old chap, she’s different from me—reads poetry by the hour when she’s in the bunk on night duty. Longfellow’s her favourite. A long way above my head and all that; but it’s a wonderful thing, when you come to think of it, to be married to an intellectual woman. . . .” So the words poured into Edwin’s drowsy ears. He was far too sleepy to smile, and, Longfellow apart, it did seem to him a comfortable and even enviable thing to be the adored centre of the universe in the Irish eyes of a tender creature with wavy brown hair and a painful domestic tragedy. W.G. was still moralising on his past wickedness and the prospect of a blameless future when Edwin fell asleep.

II

Next morning he was awakened by his friend, boisterous and ruddy from a bath, performing a strange ritual of prostrations and contortions in front of an open window discreetly veiled with fluttering butter-muslin. Edwin lazily watched the sinuous play of muscles under the shaggy limbs of W.G. through half-closed lids.

“You’d make a topping subject for dissection, W.G.,” he said.

“Hallo!” W.G. answered from between his legs. “You awake, you old slacker? There’s a letter for you that came up with the tea. Tea’s cold, by the way.”

“Thanks,” said Edwin, as W.G. skimmed the letter over to him. “Good Lord, it’s from Edmondson’s.”

It was a note hastily scribbled advising Edwin to go at once and see Dr. Altrincham-Harris at 563 Lower Sparkdale, North Bromwich, between nine and ten a.m., or six and nine p.m., and signed by the manager who screwed his eyes up.

“Five hundred and sixty-three, Lower Sparkdale,” Edwin groaned. “I say, that sounds pretty bad. Altrincham-Harris is rather hot stuff for Lower Sparkdale, isn’t it? Queer place for a double-barreler.”

“General practitioner,” said W.G., rubbing himself down with a pair of flesh-gloves. “They all go in for hyphens. It impresses the lower-middle classes. When I go into practice, my son, I shall be known as Dr. William George-Brown, if I can afford the extra letters on a plate.”

“Lower Sparkdale’s a pretty awful slum, isn’t it?”

“Never been there. It’s time you cleared off to the bathroom. You’ll feel better when you’re awake.”

Edwin spent the morning in writing, and four times rewriting, a letter to his father. It was a difficult job, for he felt that the reasons for his departure could not be explained in words, and he was particularly anxious to make it clear that it was purely a matter of temperament and that he didn’t wish it to imply any criticism of Mr. Ingleby’s plans. When he had finished it he found that it was far too late to visit the surgery of Dr. Altrincham-Harris. He therefore waited till the evening, and then took a steam-tram through a succession of sordid streets, past the public abattoirs and the newly-opened Rowton House, to the level of 563 Lower Sparkdale.

The extreme end of that street was not as bad as he had imagined it might be, for at this point the slum ended, resolving itself into the edge of a growing suburb of red-brick. Number 563 was a corner house secretively curtained with dirty muslin on flat brass rods. A shining plate revealed the qualifications, such as they were, of C. Altrincham-Harris, Physician and Surgeon, and as the front door seemed to have sunk into a state of disuse, Edwin entered at another, marked “Surgery,” round which a number of poorly-clad women, some of them carrying babies, were clustered.

Inside the door was a narrow waiting-room that concentrated into an incredibly small number of cubic feet the characteristic odour of an out-patient department. Every seat was occupied, and Edwin, deciding to wait for his turn, stood listening to a varied recitation of medical history that every patient seemed compelled by the surroundings to relate to her neighbour. At the moment when he entered a very stout woman, who had been drinking, had the ear of the company, talking loudly over the shoulder of a pasty child whose neck was covered with the pin-points that fleas make on an insensitive skin, and occasionally, in accessions of tenderness, hugging it to her bosom.

“So I says to the inspector . . . yes, inspector, ’e ’ad the nerve to call ’isself . . . says I, you can take your summonses to ’ell, I says. I _love_ my children, I says. There’s more love for the little ’armless things in my finger than there’ll ever be in your bloody body, I says. And I caught ’er up and carried ’er straight along ’ere to the doctor. Doctor ’Arris knows me, I says, and what’s more ’e shall ’ave a look at Margaret’s ’ead with ’is own eyes. Shan’t ’e, my pretty?” The child wriggled as she was clasped in another beery embrace.

A bell tingled inside. “Now we shall see,” said the lady determinedly rising. “And ’ave a stifficate if it costs me two shillin’s.”

The room murmured low applause and sympathy, and she entered the surgery, emerging, two minutes later, with the testimonial in her mouth.

“What did I tell yo’?” she said. “The doctor says there ain’t one. Not _one_. It’s time these inspectors was done away with. I only ’ope ’e will summons me. Good-night, all.”

She went out, hugging the child in both arms, and a pale woman, respectably dressed, who had sat through her tirades in silence, took her place in the doctor’s consulting room. Dr. Altrincham-Harris didn’t keep her long. She came out, like the rest of them, after an interview that lasted perhaps two minutes, carrying a bottle of medicine wrapped up in one of the papers that are called comic. Again the bell rang.

“Good God,” Edwin thought, “and this is general practice!” It was evident that he had entered a world in which the academic methods of diagnosis and prescription with which he had been educated were not followed. On the surface it was quite clear that the physician could not have given an eighth part of the usual time or care to the consideration of any single case. He remembered instances of hospital patients who had affected to despise the perfunctoriness of the methods of the Prince’s out-patient department, and had boasted that they would receive better attention from the hands of a “private doctor.” He hoped to goodness that none of these unfortunate people would drift into the hands of Dr. Altrincham-Harris.

His own turn came, and relieved to be rid of the stink of the waiting-room, he entered the surgery. Dr. Harris was sitting in an attitude of impatience behind a desk littered with papers. He was a little man, with grey, untidy hair and a drooping moustache. He held a pencil in his hand, as if he were itching to dash off another prescription, and an open drawer in the desk at his right hand was full of small silver. When he saw that Edwin was better dressed than the majority of his patients, his manner changed at once. “Please sit down,” he said. “Now, what can I do for you?”

Edwin hesitated, for he found it difficult to begin. Dr. Harris encouraged him with a wink, and a grip of his left arm.

“Now, my boy, you needn’t be frightened of me. You’ll find the doctor’s your best friend. Had a bit of bad luck, eh? Well, you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”

The wink was the most disgusting part of this performance, but Edwin, quickly recovering his sense of humour, pulled out Edmondson’s letter and handed it to the doctor.

“Well, now, why didn’t you say so at first,” said Dr. Harris, scratching a bristly grey chin. “Yes . . . I did mention to their manager that I was in want of some one to do a bit of rough dispensing and keep this place tidy. You see I don’t live here. It’s what we call a lock-up, and the work’s so pressing that I’ve really no time to do my own dispensing. I suppose you hold the Apothecaries’ Hall Diploma—passed your exams and that?”

“No . . . I’m a medical student. I took pharmacology in my last exam. I’m in my final year.”

“Hm . . . I shouldn’t have thought it. You look very young. Final year . . .” Then his eyes brightened. “Have you done your midwifery yet?”

“No, I shall do that later in the year.”

“That’s a pity . . . a pity. You could have been very useful to me in that way, keeping cases going, you know, so that I could be in at the finish. I could do twice the amount of midwifery that I do now if I had some one to keep an eye on them. Before the General Medical Council did away with unqualified assistants, I used to keep three of them: paid me well, too. Now I’ve got to do everything myself. It’s a dog’s life, but there’s money in it, I don’t mind telling you. Well, there’s no time to waste. What do you want?”

“I want a place to live in and my keep, and just enough money to keep me going till I’m qualified. That’s all. You’ll understand . . . I’m on my own, and I’ve just about ten pounds to carry me over a year. I hope you can give me a job.”

“I suppose you could take a hand with dressings and things like that?”

Edwin saw that the little man was out for bargaining, but as long as he could feel that something was being settled he didn’t really mind.

“Yes . . . I can do anything you like to use me for in your surgery hours. I can’t promise more. You see, I have to pass my final.”

“You can learn a lot of useful things about general practice here,” said Dr. Harris. “It should be extremely useful to you. You see, I’ve been at this game for thirty years. It’s a great chance for you.” He took up a handful of silver from the open drawer and started to jingle it. “Look here, you’re wasting time.”

Edwin agreed.

“Well, suppose I take you on, I might be able to give you three . . . better say two pounds a month. You can feed up at my place and sleep here. If you sleep here, you’ll be able to take night-messages and telephone them up to me. There’s a bedroom fitted up. One of my assistants used to sleep here. How will that suit you?”

With a feeling of intense relief Edwin accepted.

“Very well, then, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t begin at once, just to get into the way of things.” He paused, and added as an after-thought: “We’ll count that you start from to-morrow.”

He led Edwin behind the green baize curtain at the back of his desk, disclosing a set of shelves and a counter stained with the rings of bottles and measuring glasses. At the end of the counter was a sink into which a tap with a tapered nozzle dripped dismally. One drawer held labels, another corks, a third a selection of eight-ounce, four-ounce, and two-ounce bottles. At the back of the counter stood a row of Winchester Quarts, of indefinite contents, labelled with the Roman numerals from one to nine. Dr. Harris swabbed the swimming counter with a rag that was already saturated with medicines.

“You can learn all you want in five minutes,” he said. “There’s no time for refinements in this sort of practice. These big bottles are all stock mixtures, and whatever they teach you in your universities, I can tell you that these nine mixtures will carry you through life. There you are . . . Number One: White Mixture. Number Two: Soda and Rhubarb. Number Three: Bismuth. You have to go easy with Number Three: Bismuth’s expensive. Number Four: Febrifuge . . . Liquor Ammond Acet: and that. Number Five: Iron and Mag:Sulph. And so on. . . . Number Nine: Mercury and Pot:Iod . . . you know what that’s for,” with a laugh, “we use a lot of that here. Now you’ve one ounce of each stock mixture to an eight-ounce bottle, and a two-tablespoonful dose. I used to put them up in six-ounce bottles; but if you give them eight ounces they think they’re getting more for the money: they don’t realise they’re getting eight doses instead of twelve, and that’s their lookout, isn’t it? Same proportions for children and infants, only you use the four and two-ounce bottles instead, with dessert-spoon and teaspoonful doses. Simple, isn’t it? But you want to simplify if you’re going to make money in these days. Now, is that quite clear?”

“Quite clear.”

“Well, then, when a patient comes in I have a look at him—with my experience you can tell in a moment—and I give you a slip of paper behind the curtain. Like this. ‘Mrs. Jones. No. 5. T.D.S.’ Mrs. means an eight-ounce bottle. One ounce of Number Five stock mixture. One tablespoonful three times a day. Then, if I put ‘4tis horis’ instead of ‘T.D.S.,’ it means a tablespoonful every four hours; but I only do that when I see they can afford to get through the bottle more quickly. You’ll find powders in that drawer. Antifebrin—it’s cheaper than phenacetin and caffein. And calomel for children. Then, as I was saying, while I have a look at the patient and ask him one or two questions you make up the medicine.”

“Suppose, when you’ve had a talk to him, you change your mind about the treatment.”

“I never change my mind. There’s no time for that,” said Dr. Harris. “And if I did we could change the medicine next time. But you needn’t worry about the treatment: that’s my part of the business. Why”—and the little man expanded—“I shouldn’t wonder if we got through as many as a hundred patients in a couple of hours, the two of us together. Now, are you ready?”

He left Edwin behind the curtain and rang his bell. A patient entered, and as soon as the doctor had said good-evening to her the prescription was passed behind the curtain and Edwin proceeded to fill a bottle from one of the Winchester Quarts. This business went on monotonously for another hour. Edwin dispensed mechanically in a kind of dream. He never saw a single patient; but little scraps of conversation showed him that most of them were suffering from the evils of poor housing and a sedentary life. It consoled him to think that most of the mixtures that he dispensed were relatively harmless. Sometimes, by an access of solicitude and deference in the doctor’s voice, he could gather that the patient was of a higher social degree, and he smiled to find, in these cases, that the mixture was invariably prescribed in four-hourly doses.

All the men, it appeared, were judged to be in need of White Mixture or Rhubarb: all the women demanded Iron and Mag:Sulph: all the children were treated with a treacly cough mixture or calomel powders. In the space of an hour he must have dispensed at least forty bottles of medicine, and towards the end of the evening he noticed that Dr. Harris became even more perfunctory in his examinations—if such a word were ever justified—and that signs of irritation began to show themselves in his voice. At last the waiting-room bell rang twice, and no patient appeared.

“That’s the lot,” said Dr. Harris, appearing from behind the curtain. “I think I’ll have a wash.” It was the first time that he had washed his hands in the whole of the evening. “Well, you see what it’s like,” he said, “I think I’ll have a nip of whisky.” He produced a vitriolic bottle from a cupboard and mixed some whisky with water in a medicine-measure.

“A good average day,” he said. “Three pounds ten.” He shovelled the silver from the drawer into a leather bag that weighed down his coat pocket. “That takes a lot of making at a shilling a time. Well, how do you like it?”

“I think I shall be able to manage,” said Edwin, who was not anxious to commit himself.

“You’d better come and see your room.”

It was a bare bedroom on the first floor with iron bedstead and a dejected washhand-stand, but it seemed to Edwin that, at least, it would be quiet and free from distractions. “I shall be able to read here,” he thought, “and after all, it’s only for twelve months.”

“Not much to look at,” said Dr. Harris apologetically. “I’ll send you down some bedding to-night. I’ll expect you for breakfast at eight o’clock sharp. You’d better come along and have some supper now.”

“I think I’d better go and collect some of my things. I’ve been staying with a friend in his diggings.”

“All right. As you like,” said Dr. Harris. “Nine o’clock sharp to-morrow morning then? You have to be punctual if you’re to make money in this business.”

Edwin said good-night, keeping the key of the surgery. When the doctor had gone he went back into the curtained dispensary and tried to introduce a little order into the waste. A strange life, he thought . . . a strange and degrading life. If this were general practice, he wondered why he had ever despised his father’s trade, for surely there was more dignity in selling tooth-brushes than in dealing so casually with the diseases of human beings. “I must talk it over with old W.G.,” he thought. “He’s a sound man.” But he knew at the bottom of his heart that he couldn’t afford to speculate on the ethics of the case. All that mattered to him, for the present, was the necessity of finding a roof—any roof to shelter him and food to keep him alive. He was a beggar, and could not choose, and had every reason to be thankful for this or any solution of his difficulties.

“It sounds bad,” said W.G., when Edwin had expanded on the refinements of Dr. Harris’s medicine, “but, in a way, you’re lucky to have fallen on your feet so quickly. As a matter of fact, you don’t deserve it. You’re an old fool to have left home, you know. Now, there’s some chance of your appreciating how comfortable you were.”

Boyce was more sympathetic, entering with great pains and seriousness into the cause of Edwin’s spiritual nausea. The results of it pleased him in so far as they meant that in future Edwin would be living in North Bromwich, and promised a perpetuation of the delightful comradeship that they had enjoyed in the summer. “I expect we shall see a lot of you, old boy,” he said, “ambrosial evenings, you know.”

Edwin laughed. “The evenings won’t be exactly ambrosial. I shall be earning my two pounds a month filling eight-ounce bottles with rubbish at a shilling each. I shall feel like compounding in a felony. It’s the devil . . .”

III

And it was pretty bad. No more concerts or operas; no week-ends at Overton; no dinners at Joey’s; no possible diversion of any kind that impinged upon the hours between six and nine. And yet Edwin was happy. For the first time in his life, and at a price, he was realising what independence meant. Even the break at Halesby had passed off without any severe emotional disturbance. He had written to his father again, telling him his new address and what he was doing, and his father had replied in his formal business hand, not, indeed, with any offer of help, but with an implied approval of what he had done, enclosing a number of bills (opened) and a couple of second-hand book catalogues.

There was nothing unfriendly in the letter, no heroics of outraged paternity. Reading between the lines, Edwin felt that by consulting no interests but his own he had made an awkward situation easy for his father. In that case, he reflected, Mr. Ingleby might very well have made him an allowance. It gave him a sense of grim satisfaction to remember that he was still a minor and that even if he were too proud to use it, he still held the weapon of his father’s legal responsibility in reserve, but the next moment he was ashamed of this reflection: when it came to a point the element of pathos in his father’s history and person always disarmed him.

It was enough that he should be happy, principally for the reason that his days were so full and any moments of relaxation came to him with a more poignant pleasure than any he had known before. He had very little time for reading outside the subjects of his final exam., that now overwhelmed him with an increasing weight. For pleasure he read little but lyrical poetry, finding his chief enjoyment in the last hour before he fell asleep in Dr. Harris’s empty lock-up, with a copy of Mackail’s selections from the Greek Anthology that he had salved from one of the second-hand bookstalls in Cobden Street.

In spite of himself, he was beginning to like Charles Altrincham-Harris. He didn’t for one moment alter his opinion of the degradation to which the man had subjected the nobilities of his calling, his meanness and his avarice. In his dealings with the unfortunate people who came to the shilling doctor for treatment, he still abhorred him; he knew him to be a person whose mind was a sink of pseudo-professional prurience, and whose body and habits were unkempt and unclean; but for all this, he could not deny the fact that in his relations with his dispenser he displayed a curious vein of natural kindness, and that his ideals, apart from his loathsome business, were of a touching simplicity.

Every morning they met at breakfast. The doctor believed in good food as a basis for work, and his housekeeper, a small, shrewish woman of fifty, was an excellent cook. At the breakfast table he would impart to Edwin the more salacious paragraphs of the morning paper, which he always opened at the page that contained the records of the divorce-court. He took no notice of politics. “They can do what they like as long as they don’t legislate about _us_.” And though Edwin felt sincerely that the sooner his kind were legislated for, the better, he was thankful that his employer was not a political bore or bigot.

After breakfast Dr. Harris always smoked a clay pipe in his carpet slippers, a present from a patient who, for some unimaginable reason, had been grateful. Then they would walk down to 563 Lower Sparkdale together in the fresh morning air, and the combination of gentle exercise with deeper breathing would impel the little man to make Edwin the confidant of his ambitions.

“Twelve thousand pounds,” he would say, “that’s all I want. Twelve thousand pounds. Five hundred a year. Then I shall find a quiet little place in the country and have a rest. Keep bees and poultry: that’s what I shall do, and smoke a pipe in the garden in the evening when the poor devil that buys my practice is going down to the surgery to rake in the shillings.”

In these moments he would reflect on the beginning of his career. “I took a good degree, you know. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, would you? No . . . I had bad luck, and a bad wife, which is the worst sort of luck. She lost me my practice, and so I grew sick of medicine. I couldn’t be bothered with the social side of it. Money was what I wanted: money and quiet. And so I took a dose of medicine: fifteen years at a shilling a bottle, with advice thrown in, and then a quiet life. That was all I wanted. And I’ve very nearly got it. Another year or two will make me secure. Security . . . that’s what I wanted. Well, here we are. . . .”

So the morning’s work began, and no morning, as far as Edwin could see, was different from any other. He was thankful when the clock struck ten, and Dr. Harris ruthlessly locked his surgery door. Then, fortunately, he was obliged to take the next tram to the hospital; for if he had lingered, as he was sometimes forced to do on Sundays, Dr. Harris would have lit his pipe and proceeded to regale him with anecdotes of medical experiences that always related to sex, on which he dwelt with a slow, deliberate satisfaction, like a dog that nuzzles a piece of garbage.

The aspects of medical science that related to sex were the only ones in which he was really interested. He possessed an expensive and eclectic library of books on these subjects, to which he was always adding others that he bought from the colporteurs of medical pornography who are continually pestering the members of his profession. These he would pore over at night, when Edwin was providentially engaged in reading for his final. “Medicine is an extremely interesting profession from that point of view,” he would say, and indeed the dispenser soon discovered that this aspect of the medical profession supplied Dr. Harris with a great number of his patients. In the squalid underways of the city he had established a reputation for skill and discretion in the treatment of contagious disease, and the unfortunate victims who came to Lower Sparkdale from more reputable suburbs were ready to pay through the nose for his advice.

One night, hearing behind his curtain the overtures of one of these cases that he knew so well, he suddenly became aware of a tone that was familiar in the patient’s voice. Listening more closely he could have sworn it was the voice of Griffin. Evidently it was a person of some consequence, for Dr. Harris devoted as much as five minutes to his examination.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like a prescription?”

“No, you’d better make it up for me,” said the voice that resembled that of Griffin.

“Certainly . . . delighted.”

Dr. Harris breathed heavily, as he always did when writing a prescription, and then passed the slip of paper behind the curtain to Edwin. Edwin, looking at once for the name at the head of the prescription, was disappointed. The patient had preferred to remain anonymous. He dispensed the medicine, and when Dr. Harris had said good-bye to the patient he could not resist the temptation of looking from behind the curtain to verify his suspicions. He could only see the back of the departing patient, but the suspicion filled him with a queer sensation of awe.

It showed him a new aspect of medicine that had never occurred to him in hospital life, but would, no doubt, be present often enough in private practice. Griffin was a person well known to Edwin and his friends, a person about whose adventures and their consequences he would easily and naturally have spoken. If he had retailed the incident to Maskew and W.G. in the Dousita, it would have been the occasion of a little pity and probably some irreverent mirth. But he saw at once that he could do nothing of the sort. He had become, for the first time in his life, the keeper of a professional secret. For the rest of the world, however interested, Griffin and Griffin’s disease must not exist.

Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, reflecting that in his future life he would in all probability become possessed of many such secrets and that there might be occasions on which his sense of duty would be divided between the traditional discretion of Hippocrates and the instincts of humanity. He invented a hypothetical case for his own confusion. Supposing he had a sister to whom Griffin was engaged: supposing that they were going to be married in a week after this uncomfortable knowledge had come into his possession, endangering the whole of her future happiness and perhaps her life: what, in that case, should be his attitude towards the question of professional secrecy? What would he do? Would he be justified in telling her what he knew? Hippocrates said “No”; but Hippocrates’ refusal narrowed the field of possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own shame and threatening him with . . . what? Not with exposure—for that Hippocrates forbade. Obviously with death. And that would be murder. . . .

Balancing the relative heinousness of murder and perjury, Edwin began to laugh at himself, and while he did this a curious reminiscence came into his mind: the picture of a small boy, who resembled him in very little but had been himself, lying in the hedge side of Murderer’s Cross Road, on the downs above St. Luke’s, reflecting on the same problem of the justification of homicide and saying to himself as he brooded on his wrongs: “I can quite easily understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.” And this picture tempting him further, he relapsed into a dream of those strange, remote days tinged with extremes of happiness and misery, and both of them unreal. . . .

He thought no more of Griffin.