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The Third Generation
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Scudamore Lane, sloping down riverwards from just behind the Monument, lies at night in the shadow of two black and monstrous walls which loom high above the glimmer of the scattered gas lamps. The footpaths are narrow, and the causeway is paved with rounded cobblestones, so that the endless drays roar along it like breaking waves. A few old-fashioned houses lie scattered among the business premises, and in one of these, half-way down on the left-hand side, Dr. Horace Selby conducts his large practice. It is a singular street for so big a man; but a specialist who has an European reputation can afford to live where he likes. In his particular branch, too, patients do not always regard seclusion as a disadvantage.
It was only ten o’clock. The dull roar of the traffic which converged all day upon London Bridge had died away now to a mere confused murmur. It was raining heavily, and the gas shone dimly through the streaked and dripping glass, throwing little circles upon the glistening cobblestones. The air was full of the sounds of the rain, the thin swish of its fall, the heavier drip from the eaves, and the swirl and gurgle down the two steep gutters and through the sewer grating. There was only one figure in the whole length of Scudamore Lane. It was that of a man, and it stood outside the door of Dr. Horace Selby.
He had just rung and was waiting for an answer. The fanlight beat full upon the gleaming shoulders of his waterproof and upon his upturned features. It was a wan, sensitive, clear-cut face, with some subtle, nameless peculiarity in its expression, something of the startled horse in the white-rimmed eye, something too of the helpless child in the drawn cheek and the weakening of the lower lip. The man-servant knew the stranger as a patient at a bare glance at those frightened eyes. Such a look had been seen at that door many times before.
“Is the doctor in?”
The man hesitated.
“He has had a few friends to dinner, sir. He does not like to be disturbed outside his usual hours, sir.”
“Tell him that I MUST see him. Tell him that it is of the very first importance. Here is my card.” He fumbled with his trembling fingers in trying to draw one from his case. “Sir Francis Norton is the name. Tell him that Sir Francis Norton, of Deane Park, must see him without delay.”
“Yes, sir.” The butler closed his fingers upon the card and the half-sovereign which accompanied it. “Better hang your coat up here in the hall. It is very wet. Now if you will wait here in the consulting-room, I have no doubt that I shall be able to send the doctor in to you.”
It was a large and lofty room in which the young baronet found himself. The carpet was so soft and thick that his feet made no sound as he walked across it. The two gas jets were turned only half-way up, and the dim light with the faint aromatic smell which filled the air had a vaguely religious suggestion. He sat down in a shining leather armchair by the smouldering fire and looked gloomily about him. Two sides of the room were taken up with books, fat and sombre, with broad gold lettering upon their backs. Beside him was the high, old-fashioned mantelpiece of white marble—the top of it strewed with cotton wadding and bandages, graduated measures, and little bottles. There was one with a broad neck just above him containing bluestone, and another narrower one with what looked like the ruins of a broken pipestem and “Caustic” outside upon a red label. Thermometers, hypodermic syringes bistouries and spatulas were scattered about both on the mantelpiece and on the central table on either side of the sloping desk. On the same table, to the right, stood copies of the five books which Dr. Horace Selby had written upon the subject with which his name is peculiarly associated, while on the left, on the top of a red medical directory, lay a huge glass model of a human eye the size of a turnip, which opened down the centre to expose the lens and double chamber within.
Sir Francis Norton had never been remarkable for his powers of observation, and yet he found himself watching these trifles with the keenest attention. Even the corrosion of the cork of an acid bottle caught his eye, and he wondered that the doctor did not use glass stoppers. Tiny scratches where the light glinted off from the table, little stains upon the leather of the desk, chemical formulae scribbled upon the labels of the phials—nothing was too slight to arrest his attention. And his sense of hearing was equally alert. The heavy ticking of the solemn black clock above the mantelpiece struck quite painfully upon his ears. Yet in spite of it, and in spite also of the thick, old-fashioned wooden partition, he could hear voices of men talking in the next room, and could even catch scraps of their conversation. “Second hand was bound to take it.” “Why, you drew the last of them yourself!”
“How could I play the queen when I knew that the ace was against me?” The phrases came in little spurts falling back into the dull murmur of conversation. And then suddenly he heard the creaking of a door and a step in the hall, and knew with a tingling mixture of impatience and horror that the crisis of his life was at hand.
Dr. Horace Selby was a large, portly man with an imposing presence. His nose and chin were bold and pronounced, yet his features were puffy, a combination which would blend more freely with the wig and cravat of the early Georges than with the close-cropped hair and black frock-coat of the end of the nineteenth century. He was clean shaven, for his mouth was too good to cover—large, flexible, and sensitive, with a kindly human softening at either corner which with his brown sympathetic eyes had drawn out many a shame-struck sinner’s secret. Two masterful little bushy side-whiskers bristled out from under his ears spindling away upwards to merge in the thick curves of his brindled hair. To his patients there was something reassuring in the mere bulk and dignity of the man. A high and easy bearing in medicine as in war bears with it a hint of victories in the past, and a promise of others to come. Dr. Horace Selby’s face was a consolation, and so too were the large, white, soothing hands, one of which he held out to his visitor.
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting. It is a conflict of duties, you perceive—a host’s to his guests and an adviser’s to his patient. But now I am entirely at your disposal, Sir Francis. But dear me, you are very cold.”
“Yes, I am cold.”
“And you are trembling all over. Tut, tut, this will never do! This miserable night has chilled you. Perhaps some little stimulant——”
“No, thank you. I would really rather not. And it is not the night which has chilled me. I am frightened, doctor.”
The doctor half-turned in his chair, and he patted the arch of the young man’s knee, as he might the neck of a restless horse.
“What then?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at the pale face with the startled eyes.
Twice the young man parted his lips. Then he stooped with a sudden gesture, and turning up the right leg of his trousers he pulled down his sock and thrust forward his shin. The doctor made a clicking noise with his tongue as he glanced at it.
“Both legs?”
“No, only one.”
“Suddenly?”
“This morning.”
“Hum.”
The doctor pouted his lips, and drew his finger and thumb down the line of his chin. “Can you account for it?” he asked briskly.
“No.”
A trace of sternness came into the large brown eyes.
“I need not point out to you that unless the most absolute frankness——”
The patient sprang from his chair. “So help me God!” he cried, “I have nothing in my life with which to reproach myself. Do you think that I would be such a fool as to come here and tell you lies. Once for all, I have nothing to regret.” He was a pitiful, half-tragic and half-grotesque figure, as he stood with one trouser leg rolled to the knee, and that ever present horror still lurking in his eyes. A burst of merriment came from the card-players in the next room, and the two looked at each other in silence.
“Sit down,” said the doctor abruptly, “your assurance is quite sufficient.” He stooped and ran his finger down the line of the young man’s shin, raising it at one point. “Hum, serpiginous,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Any other symptoms?”
“My eyes have been a little weak.”
“Let me see your teeth.” He glanced at them, and again made the gentle, clicking sound of sympathy and disapprobation.
“Now your eye.” He lit a lamp at the patient’s elbow, and holding a small crystal lens to concentrate the light, he threw it obliquely upon the patient’s eye. As he did so a glow of pleasure came over his large expressive face, a flush of such enthusiasm as the botanist feels when he packs the rare plant into his tin knapsack, or the astronomer when the long-sought comet first swims into the field of his telescope.
“This is very typical—very typical indeed,” he murmured, turning to his desk and jotting down a few memoranda upon a sheet of paper. “Curiously enough, I am writing a monograph upon the subject. It is singular that you should have been able to furnish so well-marked a case.” He had so forgotten the patient in his symptom, that he had assumed an almost congratulatory air towards its possessor. He reverted to human sympathy again, as his patient asked for particulars.
“My dear sir, there is no occasion for us to go into strictly professional details together,” said he soothingly. “If, for example, I were to say that you have interstitial keratitis, how would you be the wiser? There are indications of a strumous diathesis. In broad terms, I may say that you have a constitutional and hereditary taint.”
The young baronet sank back in his chair, and his chin fell forwards upon his chest. The doctor sprang to a side-table and poured out half a glass of liqueur brandy which he held to his patient’s lips. A little fleck of colour came into his cheeks as he drank it down.
“Perhaps I spoke a little abruptly,” said the doctor, “but you must have known the nature of your complaint. Why, otherwise, should you have come to me?”
“God help me, I suspected it; but only today when my leg grew bad. My father had a leg like this.”
“It was from him, then——?”
“No, from my grandfather. You have heard of Sir Rupert Norton, the great Corinthian?”
The doctor was a man of wide reading with a retentive, memory. The name brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister reputation of its owner—a notorious buck of the thirties—who had gambled and duelled and steeped himself in drink and debauchery, until even the vile set with whom he consorted had shrunk away from him in horror, and left him to a sinister old age with the barmaid wife whom he had married in some drunken frolic. As he looked at the young man still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy with his dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark satyric face. What was he now? An armful of bones in a mouldy box. But his deeds— they were living and rotting the blood in the veins of an innocent man.
“I see that you have heard of him,” said the young baronet. “He died horribly, I have been told; but not more horribly than he had lived. My father was his only son. He was a studious man, fond of books and canaries and the country; but his innocent life did not save him.”
“His symptoms were cutaneous, I understand.”
“He wore gloves in the house. That was the first thing I can remember. And then it was his throat. And then his legs. He used to ask me so often about my own health, and I thought him so fussy, for how could I tell what the meaning of it was. He was always watching me—always with a sidelong eye fixed upon me. Now, at last, I know what he was watching for.”
“Had you brothers or sisters?”
“None, thank God.”
“Well, well, it is a sad case, and very typical of many which come in my way. You are no lonely sufferer, Sir Francis. There are many thousands who bear the same cross as you do.”
“But where is the justice of it, doctor?” cried the young man, springing from his chair and pacing up and down the consulting-room. “If I were heir to my grandfather’s sins as well as to their results, I could understand it, but I am of my father’s type. I love all that is gentle and beautiful—music and poetry and art. The coarse and animal is abhorrent to me. Ask any of my friends and they would tell you that. And now that this vile, loathsome thing—ach, I am polluted to the marrow, soaked in abomination! And why? Haven’t I a right to ask why? Did I do it? Was it my fault? Could I help being born? And look at me now, blighted and blasted, just as life was at its sweetest. Talk about the sins of the father—how about the sins of the Creator?” He shook his two clinched hands in the air—the poor impotent atom with his pin-point of brain caught in the whirl of the infinite.
The doctor rose and placing his hands upon his shoulders he pressed him back into his chair once more. “There, there, my dear lad,” said he; “you must not excite yourself. You are trembling all over. Your nerves cannot stand it. We must take these great questions upon trust. What are we, after all? Half-evolved creatures in a transition stage, nearer perhaps to the Medusa on the one side than to perfected humanity on the other. With half a complete brain we can’t expect to understand the whole of a complete fact, can we, now? It is all very dim and dark, no doubt; but I think that Pope’s famous couplet sums up the whole matter, and from my heart, after fifty years of varied experience, I can say——”
But the young baronet gave a cry of impatience and disgust. “Words, words, words! You can sit comfortably there in your chair and say them—and think them too, no doubt. You’ve had your life, but I’ve never had mine. You’ve healthy blood in your veins; mine is putrid. And yet I am as innocent as you. What would words do for you if you were in this chair and I in that? Ah, it’s such a mockery and a make-believe! Don’t think me rude, though, doctor. I don’t mean to be that. I only say that it is impossible for you or any other man to realise it. But I’ve a question to ask you, doctor. It’s one on which my whole life must depend.” He writhed his fingers together in an agony of apprehension.
“Speak out, my dear sir. I have every sympathy with you.”
“Do you think—do you think the poison has spent itself on me? Do you think that if I had children they would suffer?”
“I can only give one answer to that. ‘The third and fourth generation,’ says the trite old text. You may in time eliminate it from your system, but many years must pass before you can think of marriage.”
“I am to be married on Tuesday,” whispered the patient.
It was the doctor’s turn to be thrilled with horror. There were not many situations which would yield such a sensation to his seasoned nerves. He sat in silence while the babble of the card-table broke in upon them again. “We had a double ruff if you had returned a heart.” “I was bound to clear the trumps.” They were hot and angry about it.
“How could you?” cried the doctor severely. “It was criminal.”
“You forget that I have only learned how I stand to-day.” He put his two hands to his temples and pressed them convulsively. “You are a man of the world, Dr. Selby. You have seen or heard of such things before. Give me some advice. I’m in your hands. It is all very sudden and horrible, and I don’t think I am strong enough to bear it.”
The doctor’s heavy brows thickened into two straight lines, and he bit his nails in perplexity.
“The marriage must not take place.”
“Then what am I to do?”
“At all costs it must not take place.”
“And I must give her up?”
“There can be no question about that.”
The young man took out a pocketbook and drew from it a small photograph, holding it out towards the doctor. The firm face softened as he looked at it.
“It is very hard on you, no doubt. I can appreciate it more now that I have seen that. But there is no alternative at all. You must give up all thought of it.”
“But this is madness, doctor—madness, I tell you. No, I won’t raise my voice. I forgot myself. But realise it, man. I am to be married on Tuesday. This coming Tuesday, you understand. And all the world knows it. How can I put such a public affront upon her. It would be monstrous.”
“None the less it must be done. My dear lad, there is no way out of it.”
“You would have me simply write brutally and break the engagement at the last moment without a reason. I tell you I couldn’t do it.”
“I had a patient once who found himself in a somewhat similar situation some years ago,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “His device was a singular one. He deliberately committed a penal offence, and so compelled the young lady’s people to withdraw their consent to the marriage.”
The young baronet shook his head. “My personal honour is as yet unstained,” said he. “I have little else left, but that, at least, I will preserve.”
“Well, well, it is a nice dilemma, and the choice lies with you.”
“Have you no other suggestion?”
“You don’t happen to have property in Australia?”
“None.”
“But you have capital?”
“Yes.”
“Then you could buy some. To-morrow morning would do. A thousand mining shares would be enough. Then you might write to say that urgent business affairs have compelled you to start at an hour’s notice to inspect your property. That would give you six months, at any rate.”
“Well, that would be possible. Yes, certainly, it would be possible. But think of her position. The house full of wedding presents—guests coming from a distance. It is awful. And you say that there is no alternative.”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, then, I might write it now, and start to-morrow—eh? Perhaps you would let me use your desk. Thank you. I am so sorry to keep you from your guests so long. But I won’t be a moment now.”
He wrote an abrupt note of a few lines. Then with a sudden impulse he tore it to shreds and flung it into the fireplace.
“No, I can’t sit down and tell her a lie, doctor,” he said rising. “We must find some other way out of this. I will think it over and let you know my decision. You must allow me to double your fee as I have taken such an unconscionable time. Now good-bye, and thank you a thousand times for your sympathy and advice.”
“Why, dear me, you haven’t even got your prescription yet. This is the mixture, and I should recommend one of these powders every morning, and the chemist will put all directions upon the ointment box. You are placed in a cruel situation, but I trust that these may be but passing clouds. When may I hope to hear from you again?”
“To-morrow morning.”
“Very good. How the rain is splashing in the street! You have your waterproof there. You will need it. Good-bye, then, until to-morrow.”
He opened the door. A gust of cold, damp air swept into the hall. And yet the doctor stood for a minute or more watching the lonely figure which passed slowly through the yellow splotches of the gas lamps, and into the broad bars of darkness between. It was but his own shadow which trailed up the wall as he passed the lights, and yet it looked to the doctor’s eye as though some huge and sombre figure walked by a manikin’s side and led him silently up the lonely street.
Dr. Horace Selby heard again of his patient next morning, and rather earlier than he had expected. A paragraph in the Daily News caused him to push away his breakfast untasted, and turned him sick and faint while he read it. “A Deplorable Accident,” it was headed, and it ran in this way:
“A fatal accident of a peculiarly painful character is reported from King William Street. About eleven o’clock last night a young man was observed while endeavouring to get out of the way of a hansom to slip and fall under the wheels of a heavy, two-horse dray. On being picked up his injuries were found to be of the most shocking character, and he expired while being conveyed to the hospital. An examination of his pocketbook and cardcase shows beyond any question that the deceased is none other than Sir Francis Norton, of Deane Park, who has only within the last year come into the baronetcy. The accident is made the more deplorable as the deceased, who was only just of age, was on the eve of being married to a young lady belonging to one of the oldest families in the South. With his wealth and his talents the ball of fortune was at his feet, and his many friends will be deeply grieved to know that his promising career has been cut short in so sudden and tragic a fashion.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)
Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life
The Third Generation. (#04)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
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A Straggler of ‘15
by Arthur Conan Doyle
It was a dull October morning, and heavy, rolling fog-wreaths lay low over the wet grey roofs of the Woolwich houses. Down in the long, brick-lined streets all was sodden and greasy and cheerless. From the high dark buildings of the arsenal came the whirr of many wheels, the thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil. Beyond, the dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and dwindling wall.
There were few folk in the streets, for the toilers had all been absorbed since break of day by the huge smoke-spouting monster, which sucked in the manhood of the town, to belch it forth weary and work-stained every night. Little groups of children straggled to school, or loitered to peep through the single, front windows at the big, gilt-edged Bibles, balanced upon small, three-legged tables, which were their usual adornment. Stout women, with thick, red arms and dirty aprons, stood upon the whitened doorsteps, leaning upon their brooms, and shrieking their morning greetings across the road. One stouter, redder, and dirtier than the rest, had gathered a small knot of cronies around her and was talking energetically, with little shrill titters from her audience to punctuate her remarks.
“Old enough to know better!” she cried, in answer to an exclamation from one of the listeners. “If he hain’t no sense now, I ‘specs he won’t learn much on this side o’ Jordan. Why, ‘ow old is he at all? Blessed if I could ever make out.”
“Well, it ain’t so hard to reckon,” said a sharp-featured pale-faced woman with watery blue eyes. “He’s been at the battle o’ Waterloo, and has the pension and medal to prove it.”
“That were a ter’ble long time agone,” remarked a third. “It were afore I were born.”
“It were fifteen year after the beginnin’ of the century,” cried a younger woman, who had stood leaning against the wall, with a smile of superior knowledge upon her face. “My Bill was a-saying so last Sabbath, when I spoke to him o’ old Daddy Brewster, here.”
“And suppose he spoke truth, Missus Simpson, ‘ow long agone do that make it?”
“It’s eighty-one now,” said the original speaker, checking off the years upon her coarse red fingers, “and that were fifteen. Ten and ten, and ten, and ten, and ten—why, it’s only sixty-and-six year, so he ain’t so old after all.”
“But he weren’t a newborn babe at the battle, silly!” cried the young woman with a chuckle. “S’pose he were only twenty, then he couldn’t be less than six-and-eighty now, at the lowest.”
“Aye, he’s that—every day of it,” cried several.
“I’ve had ‘bout enough of it,” remarked the large woman gloomily. “Unless his young niece, or grandniece, or whatever she is, come to-day, I’m off, and he can find some one else to do his work. Your own ‘ome first, says I.”
“Ain’t he quiet, then, Missus Simpson?” asked the youngest of the group.
“Listen to him now,” she answered, with her hand half raised and her head turned slantwise towards the open door. From the upper floor there came a shuffling, sliding sound with a sharp tapping of a stick. “There he go back and forrards, doing what he call his sentry go. ‘Arf the night through he’s at that game, the silly old juggins. At six o’clock this very mornin there he was beatin’ with a stick at my door. ‘Turn out, guard!’ he cried, and a lot more jargon that I could make nothing of. Then what with his coughin’ and ‘awkin’ and spittin’, there ain’t no gettin’ a wink o’ sleep. Hark to him now!”
“Missus Simpson, Missus Simpson!” cried a cracked and querulous voice from above.
“That’s him!” she cried, nodding her head with an air of triumph. “He do go on somethin’ scandalous. Yes, Mr. Brewster, sir.”
“I want my morning ration, Missus Simpson.”
“It’s just ready, Mr. Brewster, sir.”
“Blessed if he ain’t like a baby cryin’ for its pap,” said the young woman.
“I feel as if I could shake his old bones up sometimes!” cried Mrs. Simpson viciously. “But who’s for a ‘arf of fourpenny?”
The whole company were about to shuffle off to the public house, when a young girl stepped across the road and touched the housekeeper timidly upon the arm. “I think that is No. 56 Arsenal View,” she said. “Can you tell me if Mr. Brewster lives here?”
The housekeeper looked critically at the newcomer. She was a girl of about twenty, broad-faced and comely, with a turned-up nose and large, honest grey eyes. Her print dress, her straw hat, with its bunch of glaring poppies, and the bundle she carried, had all a smack of the country.
“You’re Norah Brewster, I s’pose,” said Mrs. Simpson, eyeing her up and down with no friendly gaze.
“Yes, I’ve come to look after my Granduncle Gregory.”
“And a good job too,” cried the housekeeper, with a toss of her head. “It’s about time that some of his own folk took a turn at it, for I’ve had enough of it. There you are, young woman! In you go and make yourself at home. There’s tea in the caddy and bacon on the dresser, and the old man will be about you if you don’t fetch him his breakfast. I’ll send for my things in the evenin’.” With a nod she strolled off with her attendant gossips in the direction of the public house.
Thus left to her own devices, the country girl walked into the front room and took off her hat and jacket. It was a low-roofed apartment with a sputtering fire upon which a small brass kettle was singing cheerily. A stained cloth lay over half the table, with an empty brown teapot, a loaf of bread, and some coarse crockery. Norah Brewster looked rapidly about her, and in an instant took over her new duties. Ere five minutes had passed the tea was made, two slices of bacon were frizzling on the pan, the table was rearranged, the antimacassars straightened over the sombre brown furniture, and the whole room had taken a new air of comfort and neatness. This done she looked round curiously at the prints upon the walls. Over the fireplace, in a small, square case, a brown medal caught her eye, hanging from a strip of purple ribbon. Beneath was a slip of newspaper cutting. She stood on her tiptoes, with her fingers on the edge of the mantelpiece, and craned her neck up to see it, glancing down from time to time at the bacon which simmered and hissed beneath her. The cutting was yellow with age, and ran in this way:
“On Tuesday an interesting ceremony was performed at the barracks of the Third Regiment of Guards, when, in the presence of the Prince Regent, Lord Hill, Lord Saltoun, and an assemblage which comprised beauty as well as valour, a special medal was presented to Corporal Gregory Brewster, of Captain Haldane’s flank company, in recognition of his gallantry in the recent great battle in the Lowlands. It appears that on the ever-memorable 18th of June four companies of the Third Guards and of the Coldstreams, under the command of Colonels Maitland and Byng, held the important farmhouse of Hougoumont at the right of the British position. At a critical point of the action these troops found themselves short of powder. Seeing that Generals Foy and Jerome Buonaparte were again massing their infantry for an attack on the position, Colonel Byng dispatched Corporal Brewster to the rear to hasten up the reserve ammunition. Brewster came upon two powder tumbrils of the Nassau division, and succeeded, after menacing the drivers with his musket, in inducing them to convey their powder to Hougoumont. In his absence, however, the hedges surrounding the position had been set on fire by a howitzer battery of the French, and the passage of the carts full of powder became a most hazardous matter. The first tumbril exploded, blowing the driver to fragments. Daunted by the fate of his comrade, the second driver turned his horses, but Corporal Brewster, springing upon his seat, hurled the man down, and urging the powder cart through the flames, succeeded in forcing his way to his companions. To this gallant deed may be directly attributed the success of the British arms, for without powder it would have been impossible to have held Hougoumont, and the Duke of Wellington had repeatedly declared that had Hougoumont fallen, as well as La Haye Sainte, he would have found it impossible to have held his ground. Long may the heroic Brewster live to treasure the medal which he has so bravely won, and to look back with pride to the day when, in the presence of his comrades, he received this tribute to his valour from the august hands of the first gentleman of the realm.”
The reading of this old cutting increased in the girl’s mind the veneration which she had always had for her warrior kinsman. From her infancy he had been her hero, and she remembered how her father used to speak of his courage and his strength, how he could strike down a bullock with a blow of his fist and carry a fat sheep under either arm. True, she had never seen him, but a rude painting at home which depicted a square-faced, clean shaven, stalwart man with a great bearskin cap, rose ever before her memory when she thought of him.
She was still gazing at the brown medal and wondering what the “Dulce et decorum est” might mean, which was inscribed upon the edge, when there came a sudden tapping and shuffling upon the stair, and there at the door was standing the very man who had been so often in her thoughts.
But could this indeed be he? Where was the martial air, the flashing eye, the warrior face which she had pictured? There, framed in the doorway, was a huge twisted old man, gaunt and puckered, with twitching hands and shuffling, purposeless feet. A cloud of fluffy white hair, a red-veined nose, two thick tufts of eyebrow and a pair of dimly questioning, watery blue eyes—these were what met her gaze. He leaned forward upon a stick, while his shoulders rose and fell with his crackling, rasping breathing.
“I want my morning rations,” he crooned, as he stumped forward to his chair. “The cold nips me without ’em. See to my fingers!” He held out his distorted hands, all blue at the tips, wrinkled and gnarled, with huge, projecting knuckles.
“It’s nigh ready,” answered the girl, gazing at him with wonder in her eyes. “Don’t you know who I am, granduncle? I am Norah Brewster from Witham.”
“Rum is warm,” mumbled the old man, rocking to and fro in his chair, “and schnapps is warm, and there’s ‘eat in soup, but it’s a dish o’ tea for me. What did you say your name was?”
“Norah Brewster.”
“You can speak out, lass. Seems to me folk’s voices isn’t as loud as they used.”
“I’m Norah Brewster, uncle. I’m your grandniece come down from Essex way to live with you.”
“You’ll be brother Jarge’s girl! Lor, to think o’ little Jarge having a girl!” He chuckled hoarsely to himself, and the long, stringy sinews of his throat jerked and quivered.
“I am the daughter of your brother George’s son,” said she, as she turned the bacon.
“Lor, but little Jarge was a rare un!” he continued. “Eh, by Jimini, there was no chousing Jarge. He’s got a bull pup o’ mine that I gave him when I took the bounty. You’ve heard him speak of it, likely?”
“Why, grandpa George has been dead this twenty year,” said she, pouring out the tea.
“Well, it was a bootiful pup—aye, a well-bred un, by Jimini! I’m cold for lack o’ my rations. Rum is good, and so is schnapps, but I’d as lief have tea as either.”
He breathed heavily while he devoured his food. “It’s a middlin’ goodish way you’ve come,” said he at last. “Likely the stage left yesternight.”
“The what, uncle?”
“The coach that brought you.”
“Nay, I came by the mornin’ train.”
“Lor, now, think o’ that! You ain’t afeard o’ those newfangled things! By Jimini, to think of you comin’ by railroad like that! What’s the world a-comin’ to!”
There was silence for some minutes while Norah sat stirring her tea and glancing sideways at the bluish lips and champing jaws of her companion.
“You must have seen a deal o’ life, uncle,” said she. “It must seem a long, long time to you!”
“Not so very long neither. I’m ninety, come Candlemas; but it don’t seem long since I took the bounty. And that battle, it might have been yesterday. Eh, but I get a power o’ good from my rations!” He did indeed look less worn and colourless than when she first saw him. His face was flushed and his back more erect.
“Have you read that?” he asked, jerking his head towards the cutting.
“Yes, uncle, and I’m sure you must be proud of it.”
“Ah, it was a great day for me! A great day! The Regent was there, and a fine body of a man too! ‘The ridgment is proud of you,’ says he. ‘And I’m proud of the ridgment,’ say I. ‘A damned good answer too!’ says he to Lord Hill, and they both bu’st out a-laughin’. But what be you a-peepin’ out o’ the window for?”
“Oh, uncle, here’s a regiment of soldiers coming down the street with the band playing in front of them.”
“A ridgment, eh? Where be my glasses? Lor, but I can hear the band, as plain as plain! Here’s the pioneers an’ the drum-major! What be their number, lass?” His eyes were shining and his bony yellow fingers, like the claws of some fierce old bird, dug into her shoulder.
“They don’t seem to have no number, uncle. They’ve something wrote on their shoulders. Oxfordshire, I think it be.”
“Ah, yes!” he growled. “I heard as they’d dropped the numbers and given them newfangled names. There they go, by Jimini! They’re young mostly, but they hain’t forgot how to march. They have the swing-aye, I’ll say that for them. They’ve got the swing.” He gazed after them until the last files had turned the corner and the measured tramp of their marching had died away in the distance.
He had just regained his chair when the door opened and a gentleman stepped in.
“Ah, Mr. Brewster! Better to-day?” he asked.
“Come in, doctor! Yes, I’m better. But there’s a deal o’ bubbling in my chest. It’s all them toobes. If I could but cut the phlegm, I’d be right. Can’t you give me something to cut the phlegm?”
The doctor, a grave-faced young man, put his fingers to the furrowed, blue-corded wrist.
“You must be careful,” he said. “You must take no liberties.” The thin tide of life seemed to thrill rather than to throb under his finger.
The old man chuckled.
“I’ve got brother Jarge’s girl to look after me now. She’ll see I don’t break barracks or do what I hadn’t ought to. Why, darn my skin, I knew something was amiss!
“With what?”
“Why, with them soldiers. You saw them pass, doctor—eh? They’d forgot their stocks. Not one on ’em had his stock on.” He croaked and chuckled for a long time over his discovery. “It wouldn’t ha’ done for the Dook!” he muttered. “No, by Jimini! the Dook would ha’ had a word there.”
The doctor smiled. “Well, you are doing very well,” said he. “I’ll look in once a week or so, and see how you are.” As Norah followed him to the door, he beckoned her outside.
“He is very weak,” he whispered. “If you find him failing you must send for me.”
“What ails him, doctor?”
“Ninety years ails him. His arteries are pipes of lime. His heart is shrunken and flabby. The man is worn out.”
Norah stood watching the brisk figure of the young doctor, and pondering over these new responsibilities which had come upon her. When she turned a tall, brown-faced artilleryman, with the three gold chevrons of sergeant upon his arm, was standing, carbine in hand, at her elbow.
“Good-morning, miss,” said he, raising one thick finger to his jaunty, yellow-banded cap. “I b’lieve there’s an old gentleman lives here of the name of Brewster, who was engaged in the battle o’ Waterloo?”
“It’s my granduncle, sir,” said Norah, casting down her eyes before the keen, critical gaze of the young soldier. “He is in the front parlour.”
“Could I have a word with him, miss? I’ll call again if it don’t chance to be convenient.”
“I am sure that he would be very glad to see you, sir. He’s in here, if you’ll step in. Uncle, here’s a gentleman who wants to speak with you.”
“Proud to see you, sir—proud and glad, sir,” cried the sergeant, taking three steps forward into the room, and grounding his carbine while he raised his hand, palm forwards, in a salute. Norah stood by the door, with her mouth and eyes open, wondering if her granduncle had ever, in his prime, looked like this magnificent creature, and whether he, in his turn, would ever come to resemble her granduncle.
The old man blinked up at his visitor, and shook his head slowly. “Sit ye down, sergeant,” said he, pointing with his stick to a chair. “You’re full young for the stripes. Lordy, it’s easier to get three now than one in my day. Gunners were old soldiers then and the grey hairs came quicker than the three stripes.”
“I am eight years’ service, sir,” cried the sergeant. “Macdonald is my name—Sergeant Macdonald, of H Battery, Southern Artillery Division. I have called as the spokesman of my mates at the gunner’s barracks to say that we are proud to have you in the town, sir.”
Old Brewster chuckled and rubbed his bony hands. “That were what the Regent said,” he cried. “‘The ridgment is proud of ye,’ says he. ‘And I am proud of the ridgment,’ says I. ‘And a damned good answer too,’ says he, and he and Lord Hill bu’st out a-laughin’.”
“The non-commissioned mess would be proud and honoured to see you, sir,” said Sergeant Macdonald; “and if you could step as far you’ll always find a pipe o’ baccy and a glass o’ grog a-waitin’ you.”
The old man laughed until he coughed. “Like to see me, would they? The dogs!” said he. “Well, well, when the warm weather comes again I’ll maybe drop in. Too grand for a canteen, eh? Got your mess just the same as the orficers. What’s the world a-comin’ to at all!”
“You was in the line, sir, was you not?” asked the sergeant respectfully.
“The line?” cried the old man, with shrill scorn. “Never wore a shako in my life. I am a guardsman, I am. Served in the Third Guards—the same they call now the Scots Guards. Lordy, but they have all marched away—every man of them—from old Colonel Byng down to the drummer boys, and here am I a straggler—that’s what I am, sergeant, a straggler! I’m here when I ought to be there. But it ain’t my fault neither, for I’m ready to fall in when the word comes.”
“We’ve all got to muster there,” answered the sergeant. “Won’t you try my baccy, sir?” handing over a sealskin pouch.
Old Brewster drew a blackened clay pipe from his pocket, and began to stuff the tobacco into the bowl. In an instant it slipped through his fingers, and was broken to pieces on the floor. His lip quivered, his nose puckered up, and he began crying with the long, helpless sobs of a child. “I’ve broke my pipe,” he cried.
“Don’t, uncle; oh, don’t!” cried Norah, bending over him, and patting his white head as one soothes a baby. “It don’t matter. We can easy get another.”
“Don’t you fret yourself, sir,” said the sergeant. “‘Ere’s a wooden pipe with an amber mouth, if you’ll do me the honour to accept it from me. I’d be real glad if you will take it.”
“Jimini!” cried he, his smiles breaking in an instant through his tears. “It’s a fine pipe. See to my new pipe, Norah. I lay that Jarge never had a pipe like that. You’ve got your firelock there, sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. I was on my way back from the butts when I looked in.”
“Let me have the feel of it. Lordy, but it seems like old times to have one’s hand on a musket. What’s the manual, sergeant, eh? Cock your firelock—look to your priming—present your firelock—eh, sergeant? Oh, Jimini, I’ve broke your musket in halves!”
“That’s all right, sir,” cried the gunner laughing. “You pressed on the lever and opened the breech-piece. That’s where we load ’em, you know.”
“Load ’em at the wrong end! Well, well, to think o’ that! And no ramrod neither! I’ve heard tell of it, but I never believed it afore. Ah! it won’t come up to brown Bess. When there’s work to be done, you mark my word and see if they don’t come back to brown Bess.”
“By the Lord, sir!” cried the sergeant hotly, “they need some change out in South Africa now. I see by this mornin’s paper that the Government has knuckled under to these Boers. They’re hot about it at the non-com. mess, I can tell you, sir.”
“Eh—eh,” croaked old Brewster. “By Jimini! it wouldn’t ha’ done for the Dook; the Dook would ha’ had a word to say over that.”
“Ah, that he would, sir!” cried the sergeant; “and God send us another like him. But I’ve wearied you enough for one sitting. I’ll look in again, and I’ll bring a comrade or two with me, if I may, for there isn’t one but would be proud to have speech with you.”
So, with another salute to the veteran and a gleam of white teeth at Norah, the big gunner withdrew, leaving a memory of blue cloth and of gold braid behind him. Many days had not passed, however, before he was back again, and during all the long winter he was a frequent visitor at Arsenal View. There came a time, at last, when it might be doubted to which of the two occupants his visits were directed, nor was it hard to say by which he was most anxiously awaited. He brought others with him; and soon, through all the lines, a pilgrimage to Daddy Brewster’s came to be looked upon as the proper thing to do. Gunners and sappers, linesmen and dragoons, came bowing and bobbing into the little parlour, with clatter of side arms and clink of spurs, stretching their long legs across the patchwork rug, and hunting in the front of their tunics for the screw of tobacco or paper of snuff which they had brought as a sign of their esteem.
It was a deadly cold winter, with six weeks on end of snow on the ground, and Norah had a hard task to keep the life in that time-worn body. There were times when his mind would leave him, and when, save an animal outcry when the hour of his meals came round, no word would fall from him. He was a white-haired child, with all a child’s troubles and emotions. As the warm weather came once more, however, and the green buds peeped forth again upon the trees, the blood thawed in his veins, and he would even drag himself as far as the door to bask in the life-giving sunshine.
“It do hearten me up so,” he said one morning, as he glowed in the hot May sun. “It’s a job to keep back the flies, though. They get owdacious in this weather, and they do plague me cruel.”
“I’ll keep them off you, uncle,” said Norah.
“Eh, but it’s fine! This sunshine makes me think o’ the glory to come. You might read me a bit o’ the Bible, lass. I find it wonderful soothing.”
“What part would you like, uncle?”
“Oh, them wars.”
“The wars?”
“Aye, keep to the wars! Give me the Old Testament for choice. There’s more taste to it, to my mind. When parson comes he wants to get off to something else; but it’s Joshua or nothing with me. Them Israelites was good soldiers—good growed soldiers, all of ’em.”
“But, uncle,” pleaded Norah, “it’s all peace in the next world.”
“No, it ain’t, gal.”
“Oh, yes, uncle, surely!”
The old corporal knocked his stick irritably upon the ground. “I tell ye it ain’t, gal. I asked parson.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said there was to be a last fight. He even gave it a name, he did. The battle of Arm—Arm——”
“Armageddon.”
“Aye, that’s the name parson said. I ‘specs the Third Guards’ll be there. And the Dook—the Dook’ll have a word to say.”
An elderly, grey-whiskered gentleman had been walking down the street, glancing up at the numbers of the houses. Now as his eyes fell upon the old man, he came straight for him.
“Hullo!” said he; “perhaps you are Gregory Brewster?”
“My name, sir,” answered the veteran.
“You are the same Brewster, as I understand, who is on the roll of the Scots Guards as having been present at the battle of Waterloo?”
“I am that man, sir, though we called it the Third Guards in those days. It was a fine ridgment, and they only need me to make up a full muster.”
“Tut, tut! they’ll have to wait years for that,” said the gentleman heartily. “But I am the colonel of the Scots Guards, and I thought I would like to have a word with you.”
Old Gregory Brewster was up in an instant, with his hand to his rabbit-skin cap. “God bless me!” he cried, “to think of it! to think of it!”
“Hadn’t the gentleman better come in?” suggested the practical Norah from behind the door.
“Surely, sir, surely; walk in, sir, if I may be so bold.” In his excitement he had forgotten his stick, and as he led the way into the parlour his knees tottered, and he threw out his hands. In an instant the colonel had caught him on one side and Norah on the other.
“Easy and steady,” said the colonel, as he led him to his armchair.
“Thank ye, sir; I was near gone that time. But, Lordy I why, I can scarce believe it. To think of me the corporal of the flank company and you the colonel of the battalion! How things come round, to be sure!”
“Why, we are very proud of you in London,” said the colonel. “And so you are actually one of the men who held Hougoumont.” He looked at the bony, trembling hands, with their huge, knotted knuckles, the stringy throat, and the heaving, rounded shoulders. Could this, indeed, be the last of that band of heroes? Then he glanced at the half-filled phials, the blue liniment bottles, the long-spouted kettle, and the sordid details of the sick room. “Better, surely, had he died under the blazing rafters of the Belgian farmhouse,” thought the colonel.
“I hope that you are pretty comfortable and happy,” he remarked after a pause.
“Thank ye, sir. I have a good deal o’ trouble with my toobes—a deal o’ trouble. You wouldn’t think the job it is to cut the phlegm. And I need my rations. I gets cold without ’em. And the flies! I ain’t strong enough to fight against them.”
“How’s the memory?” asked the colonel.
“Oh, there ain’t nothing amiss there. Why, sir, I could give you the name of every man in Captain Haldane’s flank company.”
“And the battle—you remember it?”
“Why, I sees it all afore me every time I shuts my eyes. Lordy, sir, you wouldn’t hardly believe how clear it is to me. There’s our line from the paregoric bottle right along to the snuff box. D’ye see? Well, then, the pill box is for Hougoumont on the right—where we was—and Norah’s thimble for La Haye Sainte. There it is, all right, sir; and here were our guns, and here behind the reserves and the Belgians. Ach, them Belgians!” He spat furiously into the fire. “Then here’s the French, where my pipe lies; and over here, where I put my baccy pouch, was the Proosians a-comin’ up on our left flank. Jimini, but it was a glad sight to see the smoke of their guns!”
“And what was it that struck you most now in connection with the whole affair?” asked the colonel.
“I lost three half-crowns over it, I did,” crooned old Brewster. “I shouldn’t wonder if I was never to get that money now. I lent ’em to Jabez Smith, my rear rank man, in Brussels. ‘Only till pay-day, Grig,’ says he. By Gosh! he was stuck by a lancer at Quatre Bras, and me with not so much as a slip o’ paper to prove the debt! Them three half-crowns is as good as lost to me.”
The colonel rose from his chair laughing. “The officers of the Guards want you to buy yourself some little trifle which may add to your comfort,” he said. “It is not from me, so you need not thank me.” He took up the old man’s tobacco pouch and slipped a crisp banknote inside it.
“Thank ye kindly, sir. But there’s one favour that I would like to ask you, colonel.”
“Yes, my man.”
“If I’m called, colonel, you won’t grudge me a flag and a firing party? I’m not a civilian; I’m a guardsman—I’m the last of the old Third Guards.”
“All right, my man, I’ll see to it,” said the colonel. “Good-bye; I hope to have nothing but good news from you.”
“A kind gentleman, Norah,” croaked old Brewster, as they saw him walk past the window; “but, Lordy, he ain’t fit to hold the stirrup o’ my Colonel Byng!”
It was on the very next day that the old corporal took a sudden change for the worse. Even the golden sunlight streaming through the window seemed unable to warm that withered frame. The doctor came and shook his head in silence. All day the man lay with only his puffing blue lips and the twitching of his scraggy neck to show that he still held the breath of life. Norah and Sergeant Macdonald had sat by him in the afternoon, but he had shown no consciousness of their presence. He lay peacefully, his eyes half closed, his hands under his cheek, as one who is very weary.
They had left him for an instant and were sitting in the front room, where Norah was preparing tea, when of a sudden they heard a shout that rang through the house. Loud and clear and swelling, it pealed in their ears—a voice full of strength and energy and fiery passion. “The Guards need powder!” it cried; and yet again, “The Guards need powder!”
The sergeant sprang from his chair and rushed in, followed by the trembling Norah. There was the old man standing up, his blue eyes sparkling, his white hair bristling, his whole figure towering and expanding, with eagle head and glance of fire. “The Guards need powder!” he thundered once again, “and, by God, they shall have it!” He threw up his long arms, and sank back with a groan into his chair. The sergeant stooped over him, and his face darkened.
“Oh, Archie, Archie,” sobbed the frightened girl, “what do you think of him?”
The sergeant turned away. “I think,” said he, “that the Third Guards have a full muster now.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)
Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life
A Straggler of ‘15 (#03)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Doyle, Arthur Conan, Doyle, Arthur Conan, DRUGS & MEDICINE & LITERATURE, Round the Red Lamp
His First Operation
by Arthur Conan Doyle
It was the first day of the winter session, and the third year’s man was walking with the first year’s man. Twelve o’clock was just booming out from the Tron Church.
“Let me see,” said the third year’s man. “You have never seen an operation?”
“Never.”
“Then this way, please. This is Rutherford’s historic bar. A glass of sherry, please, for this gentleman. You are rather sensitive, are you not?”
“My nerves are not very strong, I am afraid.”
“Hum! Another glass of sherry for this gentleman. We are going to an operation now, you know.”
The novice squared his shoulders and made a gallant attempt to look unconcerned.
“Nothing very bad—eh?”
“Well, yes—pretty bad.”
“An—an amputation?”
“No; it’s a bigger affair than that.”
“I think—I think they must be expecting me at home.”
“There’s no sense in funking. If you don’t go to-day, you must to-morrow. Better get it over at once. Feel pretty fit?”
“Oh, yes; all right!” The smile was not a success.
“One more glass of sherry, then. Now come on or we shall be late. I want you to be well in front.”
“Surely that is not necessary.”
“Oh, it is far better! What a drove of students! There are plenty of new men among them. You can tell them easily enough, can’t you? If they were going down to be operated upon themselves, they could not look whiter.”
“I don’t think I should look as white.”
“Well, I was just the same myself. But the feeling soon wears off. You see a fellow with a face like plaster, and before the week is out he is eating his lunch in the dissecting rooms. I’ll tell you all about the case when we get to the theatre.”
The students were pouring down the sloping street which led to the infirmary—each with his little sheaf of note-books in his hand. There were pale, frightened lads, fresh from the high schools, and callous old chronics, whose generation had passed on and left them. They swept in an unbroken, tumultuous stream from the university gate to the hospital. The figures and gait of the men were young, but there was little youth in most of their faces. Some looked as if they ate too little—a few as if they drank too much. Tall and short, tweed-coated and black, round-shouldered, bespectacled, and slim, they crowded with clatter of feet and rattle of sticks through the hospital gate. Now and again they thickened into two lines, as the carriage of a surgeon of the staff rolled over the cobblestones between.
“There’s going to be a crowd at Archer’s,” whispered the senior man with suppressed excitement. “It is grand to see him at work. I’ve seen him jab all round the aorta until it made me jumpy to watch him. This way, and mind the whitewash.”
They passed under an archway and down a long, stone-flagged corridor, with drab-coloured doors on either side, each marked with a number. Some of them were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with tingling nerves. He was reassured to catch a glimpse of cheery fires, lines of white-counterpaned beds, and a profusion of coloured texts upon the wall. The corridor opened upon a small hall, with a fringe of poorly clad people seated all round upon benches. A young man, with a pair of scissors stuck like a flower in his buttonhole and a note-book in his hand, was passing from one to the other, whispering and writing.
“Anything good?” asked the third year’s man.
“You should have been here yesterday,” said the out-patient clerk, glancing up. “We had a regular field day. A popliteal aneurism, a Colles’ fracture, a spina bifida, a tropical abscess, and an elephantiasis. How’s that for a single haul?”
“I’m sorry I missed it. But they’ll come again, I suppose. What’s up with the old gentleman?”
A broken workman was sitting in the shadow, rocking himself slowly to and fro, and groaning. A woman beside him was trying to console him, patting his shoulder with a hand which was spotted over with curious little white blisters.
“It’s a fine carbuncle,” said the clerk, with the air of a connoisseur who describes his orchids to one who can appreciate them. “It’s on his back and the passage is draughty, so we must not look at it, must we, daddy? Pemphigus,” he added carelessly, pointing to the woman’s disfigured hands. “Would you care to stop and take out a metacarpal?”
“No, thank you. We are due at Archer’s. Come on!” and they rejoined the throng which was hurrying to the theatre of the famous surgeon.
The tiers of horseshoe benches rising from the floor to the ceiling were already packed, and the novice as he entered saw vague curving lines of faces in front of him, and heard the deep buzz of a hundred voices, and sounds of laughter from somewhere up above him. His companion spied an opening on the second bench, and they both squeezed into it.
“This is grand!” the senior man whispered. “You’ll have a rare view of it all.”
Only a single row of heads intervened between them and the operating table. It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong, and scrupulously clean. A sheet of brown water-proofing covered half of it, and beneath stood a large tin tray full of sawdust. On the further side, in front of the window, there was a board which was strewed with glittering instruments—forceps, tenacula, saws, canulas, and trocars. A line of knives, with long, thin, delicate blades, lay at one side. Two young men lounged in front of this, one threading needles, the other doing something to a brass coffee-pot-like thing which hissed out puffs of steam.
“That’s Peterson,” whispered the senior, “the big, bald man in the front row. He’s the skin-grafting man, you know. And that’s Anthony Browne, who took a larynx out successfully last winter. And there’s Murphy, the pathologist, and Stoddart, the eye-man. You’ll come to know them all soon.”
“Who are the two men at the table?”
“Nobody—dressers. One has charge of the instruments and the other of the puffing Billy. It’s Lister’s antiseptic spray, you know, and Archer’s one of the carbolic-acid men. Hayes is the leader of the cleanliness-and-cold-water school, and they all hate each other like poison.”
A flutter of interest passed through the closely packed benches as a woman in petticoat and bodice was led in by two nurses. A red woolen shawl was draped over her head and round her neck. The face which looked out from it was that of a woman in the prime of her years, but drawn with suffering, and of a peculiar beeswax tint. Her head drooped as she walked, and one of the nurses, with her arm round her waist, was whispering consolation in her ear. She gave a quick side-glance at the instrument table as she passed, but the nurses turned her away from it.
“What ails her?” asked the novice.
“Cancer of the parotid. It’s the devil of a case; extends right away back behind the carotids. There’s hardly a man but Archer would dare to follow it. Ah, here he is himself!”
As he spoke, a small, brisk, iron-grey man came striding into the room, rubbing his hands together as he walked. He had a clean-shaven face, of the naval officer type, with large, bright eyes, and a firm, straight mouth. Behind him came his big house-surgeon, with his gleaming pince-nez, and a trail of dressers, who grouped themselves into the corners of the room.
“Gentlemen,” cried the surgeon in a voice as hard and brisk as his manner, “we have here an interesting case of tumour of the parotid, originally cartilaginous but now assuming malignant characteristics, and therefore requiring excision. On to the table, nurse! Thank you! Chloroform, clerk! Thank you! You can take the shawl off, nurse.”
The woman lay back upon the water-proofed pillow, and her murderous tumour lay revealed. In itself it was a pretty thing—ivory white, with a mesh of blue veins, and curving gently from jaw to chest. But the lean, yellow face and the stringy throat were in horrible contrast with the plumpness and sleekness of this monstrous growth. The surgeon placed a hand on each side of it and pressed it slowly backwards and forwards.
“Adherent at one place, gentlemen,” he cried. “The growth involves the carotids and jugulars, and passes behind the ramus of the jaw, whither we must be prepared to follow it. It is impossible to say how deep our dissection may carry us. Carbolic tray. Thank you! Dressings of carbolic gauze, if you please! Push the chloroform, Mr. Johnson. Have the small saw ready in case it is necessary to remove the jaw.”
The patient was moaning gently under the towel which had been placed over her face. She tried to raise her arms and to draw up her knees, but two dressers restrained her. The heavy air was full of the penetrating smells of carbolic acid and of chloroform. A muffled cry came from under the towel, and then a snatch of a song, sung in a high, quavering, monotonous voice:
“He says, says he,
If you fly with me
You’ll be mistress of the ice-cream van.
You’ll be mistress of the——”
It mumbled off into a drone and stopped. The surgeon came across, still rubbing his hands, and spoke to an elderly man in front of the novice.
“Narrow squeak for the Government,” he said.
“Oh, ten is enough.”
“They won’t have ten long. They’d do better to resign before they are driven to it.”
“Oh, I should fight it out.”
“What’s the use. They can’t get past the committee even if they got a vote in the House. I was talking to——”
“Patient’s ready, sir,” said the dresser.
“Talking to McDonald—but I’ll tell you about it presently.” He walked back to the patient, who was breathing in long, heavy gasps. “I propose,” said he, passing his hand over the tumour in an almost caressing fashion, “to make a free incision over the posterior border, and to take another forward at right angles to the lower end of it. Might I trouble you for a medium knife, Mr. Johnson?”
The novice, with eyes which were dilating with horror, saw the surgeon pick up the long, gleaming knife, dip it into a tin basin, and balance it in his fingers as an artist might his brush. Then he saw him pinch up the skin above the tumour with his left hand. At the sight his nerves, which had already been tried once or twice that day, gave way utterly. His head swain round, and he felt that in another instant he might faint. He dared not look at the patient. He dug his thumbs into his ears lest some scream should come to haunt him, and he fixed his eyes rigidly upon the wooden ledge in front of him. One glance, one cry, would, he knew, break down the shred of self-possession which he still retained. He tried to think of cricket, of green fields and rippling water, of his sisters at home—of anything rather than of what was going on so near him.
And yet somehow, even with his ears stopped up, sounds seemed to penetrate to him and to carry their own tale. He heard, or thought that he heard, the long hissing of the carbolic engine. Then he was conscious of some movement among the dressers. Were there groans, too, breaking in upon him, and some other sound, some fluid sound, which was more dreadfully suggestive still? His mind would keep building up every step of the operation, and fancy made it more ghastly than fact could have been. His nerves tingled and quivered. Minute by minute the giddiness grew more marked, the numb, sickly feeling at his heart more distressing. And then suddenly, with a groan, his head pitching forward, and his brow cracking sharply upon the narrow wooden shelf in front of him, he lay in a dead faint.
When he came to himself, he was lying in the empty theatre, with his collar and shirt undone. The third year’s man was dabbing a wet sponge over his face, and a couple of grinning dressers were looking on.
“All right,” cried the novice, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry to have made an ass of myself.”
“Well, so I should think,” said his companion.
“What on earth did you faint about?”
“I couldn’t help it. It was that operation.”
“What operation?”
“Why, that cancer.”
There was a pause, and then the three students burst out laughing. “Why, you juggins!” cried the senior man, “there never was an operation at all! They found the patient didn’t stand the chloroform well, and so the whole thing was off. Archer has been giving us one of his racy lectures, and you fainted just in the middle of his favourite story.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)
Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life
His First Operation (#02)
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Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Table of Contents
The Preface
Behind the Times. (#01)
His First Operation. (#02)
A Straggler of ‘15. (#03)
The Third Generation. (#04)
A False Start. (#05)
The Curse of Eve. (#06)
Sweethearts. (#07)
A Physiologist’s Wife. (#08)
The Case of Lady Sannox. (#09)
A Question of Diplomacy. (#10)
A Medical Document. (#11)
Lot No. 249. (#12)
The Los Amigos Fiasco. (#13)
The Doctors of Hoyland. (#14)
The Surgeon Talks. (#15)
The Preface.
[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend in America.]
I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the surgeon or physician. He sees many beautiful things, it is true, fortitude and heroism, love and self-sacrifice; but they are all called forth (as our nobler qualities are always called forth) by bitter sorrow and trial. One cannot write of medical life and be merry over it.
Then why write of it, you may ask? If a subject is painful why treat it at all? I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat painful things as well as cheerful ones. The story which wiles away a weary hour fulfils an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold, than that which helps to emphasise the graver side of life. A tale which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result. There are a few stories in this little collection which might have such an effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved them from serial publication. In book-form the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid them.
Yours very truly,
A. CONAN DOYLE
P.S.—You ask about the Red Lamp. It is the usual sign of the general practitioner in England.
Behind the Times
by Arthur Conan Doyle
My first interview with Dr. James Winter was under dramatic circumstances. It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an old country house. I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat and knocked off his gold spectacles, while he with the aid of a female accomplice stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat and thrust me into a warm bath. I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with my lungs. I cannot recall how Dr. Winter looked at the time, for I had other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is far from flattering. A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very bandy legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards—those are the main items which he can remember.
From this time onwards the epochs of my life were the periodical assaults which Dr. Winter made upon me. He vaccinated me; he cut me for an abscess; he blistered me for mumps. It was a world of peace and he the one dark cloud that threatened. But at last there came a time of real illness—a time when I lay for months together inside my wickerwork-basket bed, and then it was that I learned that that hard face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a whisper when it spoke to a sick child.
And now the child is himself a medical man, and yet Dr. Winter is the same as ever. I can see no change since first I can remember him, save that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter, and the huge shoulders a little more bowed. He is a very tall man, though he loses a couple of inches from his stoop. That big back of his has curved itself over sick beds until it has set in that shape. His face is of a walnut brown, and tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads, with the wind and the rain in his teeth. It looks smooth at a little distance, but as you approach him you see that it is shot with innumerable fine wrinkles like a last year’s apple. They are hardly to be seen when he is in repose; but when he laughs his face breaks like a starred glass, and you realise then that though he looks old, he must be older than he looks.
How old that is I could never discover. I have often tried to find out, and have struck his stream as high up as George IV and even the Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric. He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and his abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death of that statesman brought the history of England to a definite close, and Dr. Winter refers to everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant anticlimax.
But it was only when I had myself become a medical man that I was able to appreciate how entirely he is a survival of a past generation. He had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views upon his own profession are even more reactionary than in politics. Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less. Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned. He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer to the stethoscope as “a new-fangled French toy.” He carries one in his hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients, but he is very hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he uses it or not.
He reads, as a duty, his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general idea as to the advance of modern science. He always persists in looking upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite joke in the sick room was to say, “Shut the door or the germs will be getting in.” As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the crowning joke of the century. “The children in the nursery and the ancestors in the stable,” he would cry, and laugh the tears out of his eyes.
He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in the front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for example, had been much in vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it than any one whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him when it was new to our generation. He had been trained also at a time when instruments were in a rudimentary state, and when men learned to trust more to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand, muscular in the palm, tapering in the fingers, “with an eye at the end of each.” I shall not easily forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell, the County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a horrible moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that Dr. Winter, whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it. “It’s always well to bring one in your waistcoat-pocket,” said he with a chuckle, “but I suppose you youngsters are above all that.”
We made him president of our branch of the British Medical Association, but he resigned after the first meeting. “The young men are too much for me,” he said. “I don’t understand what they are talking about.” Yet his patients do very well. He has the healing touch—that magnetic thing which defies explanation or analysis, but which is a very evident fact none the less. His mere presence leaves the patient with more hopefulness and vitality. The sight of disease affects him as dust does a careful housewife. It makes him angry and impatient. “Tut, tut, this will never do!” he cries, as he takes over a new case. He would shoo Death out of the room as though he were an intrusive hen. But when the intruder refuses to be dislodged, when the blood moves more slowly and the eyes grow dimmer, then it is that Dr. Winter is of more avail than all the drugs in his surgery. Dying folk cling to his hand as if the presence of his bulk and vigour gives them more courage to face the change; and that kindly, windbeaten face has been the last earthly impression which many a sufferer has carried into the unknown.
When Dr. Patterson and I—both of us young, energetic, and up-to-date—settled in the district, we were most cordially received by the old doctor, who would have been only too happy to be relieved of some of his patients. The patients themselves, however, followed their own inclinations—which is a reprehensible way that patients have—so that we remained neglected, with our modern instruments and our latest alkaloids, while he was serving out senna and calomel to all the countryside. We both of us loved the old fellow, but at the same time, in the privacy of our own intimate conversations, we could not help commenting upon this deplorable lack of judgment. “It’s all very well for the poorer people,” said Patterson. “But after all the educated classes have a right to expect that their medical man will know the difference between a mitral murmur and a bronchitic rale. It’s the judicial frame of mind, not the sympathetic, which is the essential one.”
I thoroughly agreed with Patterson in what he said. It happened, however, that very shortly afterwards the epidemic of influenza broke out, and we were all worked to death. One morning I met Patterson on my round, and found him looking rather pale and fagged out. He made the same remark about me. I was, in fact, feeling far from well, and I lay upon the sofa all the afternoon with a splitting headache and pains in every joint. As evening closed in, I could no longer disguise the fact that the scourge was upon me, and I felt that I should have medical advice without delay. It was of Patterson, naturally, that I thought, but somehow the idea of him had suddenly become repugnant to me. I thought of his cold, critical attitude, of his endless questions, of his tests and his tappings. I wanted something more soothing—something more genial.
“Mrs. Hudson,” said I to my housekeeper, “would you kindly run along to old Dr. Winter and tell him that I should be obliged to him if he would step round?”
She was back with an answer presently. “Dr. Winter will come round in an hour or so, sir; but he has just been called in to attend Dr. Patterson.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)
Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life
Behind the Times. (#01)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
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This year the Museum of London welcomes an exciting new exhibition, delving into the mind of the world’s most famous fictional detective; Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
Asking searching questions such as who is Sherlock Holmes, and why does he still conjure up such enduring fascination, this major exhibition – London’s first on the detective since 1951 – will explore how Sherlock Holmes has transcended literature onto stage and screen and continues to attract huge audiences to this day.
Going beyond film and fiction, visitors to the museum will be transported to the real Victorian London – the backdrop for many of Conan Doyle’s stories. Through early film, photography, paintings and original artefacts, the exhibition will recreate the atmosphere of Sherlock’s London, with visitors able to envisage the places that the detective visited and imagine they are standing on the pavement of the Strand watching the horse drawn traffic pass by.
Sherlock Holmes, the man who never lived and will never die, Museum of London
We look at the roots of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous fictional detective, explore depictions of Victorian London and delve into the enduringly popular characteristics of Sherlock Holmes.
Transcending literature onto stage and screen, Sherlock Holmes continues to fascinate audiences to this day. In this exhibition, London’s first on the detective since 1951, we use early film, photography and paintings plus original Victorian era artefacts to recreate the atmosphere of Sherlock’s London, and to re-imagine the places featured in Conan Doyle’s famous stories.
Objects and artworks include:
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1886 ‘A Study in Scarlet’ notebook, containing the first ever lines of a Sherlock Holmes story
• ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe
• Claude Monet’s painting ‘Pont de Londres’ (Charing Cross Bridge, London) 1902
• Belstaff coat used in the BBC’s Sherlock series, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch
Until 12 April 2015
# More on website museum of london
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Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
By the North Sea
Her cheek was wet with North Sea spray,
We walked where tide and shingle
meet;
The long waves rolled from far away
To purr in ripples at our feet.
And as we walked it seemed to me
That three old friends had met that
day,
The old, old sky, the old, old sea,
And love, which is as old as they.
Out seaward hung the brooding mist
We saw it rolling, fold on fold,
And marked the great Sun alchemist
Turn all its leaden edge to gold,
Look well, look well, oh lady mine,
The gray below, the gold above,
For so the grayest life may shine
All golden in the light of love.
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
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Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
The Message
(From Heine)
Up, dear laddie, saddle quick,
And spring upon the leather!
Away post haste o’er fell and waste
With whip and spur together!
And when you win to Duncan’s kin
Draw one of them aside
And shortly say, “Which daughter may
We welcome as the bride?”
And if he says, “It is the dark,”
Then quickly bring the mare,
But if he says, “It is the blonde,”
Then you have time to spare;
But buy from off the saddler man
The stoutest cord you see,
Ride at your ease and say no word,
But bring it back to me.
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
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Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
A Woman’s Love
I am not blind I understand;
I see him loyal, good, and wise,
I feel decision in his hand,
I read his honour in his eyes.
Manliest among men is he
With every gift and grace to clothe
him;
He never loved a girl but me —
And I I loathe him! loathe him!
The other! Ah! I value him
Precisely at his proper rate,
A creature of caprice and whim,
Unstable, weak, importunate.
His thoughts are set on paltry gain —
You only tell me what I see —
I know him selfish, cold and vain;
But, oh! he’s all the world to me!
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
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Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
Advice to a young author
First begin
Taking in.
Cargo stored,
All aboard,
Think about
Giving out.
Empty ship,
Useless trip!
Never strain
Weary brain,
Hardly fit,
Wait a bit!
After rest
Comes the best.
Sitting still,
Let it fill;
Never press;
Nerve stress
Always shows.
Nature knows.
Critics kind,
Never mind!
Critics flatter,
No matter!
Critics curse,
None the worse.
Critics blame,
All the same!
Do your best.
Hang the rest!
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
kempis.nl poetry magazine
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Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
Religio Medici
1
God’s own best will bide the test,
And God’s own worst will fall;
But, best or worst or last or first,
He ordereth it all.
2
For all is good, if understood,
(Ah, could we understand!)
And right and ill are tools of skill
Held in His either hand.
3
The harlot and the anchorite,
The martyr and the rake,
Deftly He fashions each aright,
Its vital part to take.
4
Wisdom He makes to form the fruit
Where the high blossoms be;
And Lust to kill the weaker shoot,
And Drink to trim the tree.
5
And Holiness that so the bole
Be solid at the core;
And Plague and Fever, that the whole
Be changing evermore.
6
He strews the microbes in the lung,
The blood-clot in the brain;
With test and test He picks the best,
Then tests them once again.
7
He tests the body and the mind,
He rings them o’er and o’er;
And if they crack, He throws them back,
And fashions them once more.
8
He chokes the infant throat with slime,
He sets the ferment free;
He builds the tiny tube of lime
That blocks the artery.
9
He lets the youthful dreamer store
Great projects in his brain,
Until He drops the fungus spore
That smears them out again.
10
He stores the milk that feeds the babe,
He dulls the tortured nerve;
He gives a hundred joys of sense
Where few or none might serve.
11
And still He trains the branch of good
Where the high blossoms be,
And wieldeth still the shears of ill
To prune and prime His tree.
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
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Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
Haig is moving
August 1918
Haig is moving!
Three plain words are all that matter,
Mid the gossip and the chatter,
Hopes in speeches, fears in papers,
Pessimistic froth and vapours–
Haig is moving!
Haig is moving!
We can turn from German scheming,
From humanitarian dreaming,
From assertions, contradictions,
Twisted facts and solemn fictions–
Haig is moving!
Haig is moving!
All the weary idle phrases,
Empty blamings, empty praises,
Here’s an end to their recital,
There is only one thing vital–
Haig is moving!
Haig is moving!
He is moving, he is gaining,
And the whole hushed world is straining,
Straining, yearning, for the vision
Of the doom and the decision–
Haig is moving!
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
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Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
The Bigot
The foolish Roan fondly thought
That gods must be the same to all,
Each alien idol might be brought
Within their broad Pantheon Hall.
The vision of a jealous Jove
Was far above their feeble ken;
They had no Lord who gave them love,
But scowled upon all other men.
But in our dispensation bright,
What noble progress have we made!
We know that we are in the light,
And outer races in the shade.
Our kindly creed ensures us this–
That Turk and infidel and Jew
Are safely banished from the bliss
That’s guaranteed to me and you.
The Roman mother understood
That, if the babe upon her breast
Untimely died, the gods were good,
And the child’s welfare manifest.
With tender guides the soul would go
And there, in some Elysian bower,
The tiny bud plucked here below
Would ripen to the perfect flower.
Poor simpleton! Our faith makes plain
That, if no blest baptismal word
Has cleared the babe, it bears the stain
Which faithless Adam had incurred.
How philosophical an aim!
How wise and well-conceived a plan
Which holds the new-born babe to blame
For all the sins of early man!
Nay, speak not of its tender grace,
But hearken to our dogma wise:
Guilt lies behind that dimpled face,
And sin looks out from gentle eyes.
Quick, quick, the water and the bowl!
Quick with the words that lift the load!
Oh, hasten, ere that tiny soul
Shall pay the debt old Adam owed!
The Roman thought the souls that erred
Would linger in some nether gloom,
But somewhere, sometime, would be spared
To find some peace beyond the tomb.
In those dark halls, enshadowed, vast,
They flitted ever, sad and thin,
Mourning the unforgotten past
Until they shed the taint of sin.
And Pluto brooded over all
Within that land of night and fear,
Enthroned in some dark Judgment Hall,
A god himself, reserved, austere.
How thin and colourless and tame!
Compare our nobler scheme with it,
The howling souls, the leaping flame,
And all the tortures of the pit!
Foolish half-hearted Roman hell!
To us is left the higher thought
Of that eternal torture cell
Whereto the sinner shall be brought.
Out with the thought that God could share
Our weak relenting pity sense,
Or ever condescend to spare
The wretch who gave Him just offence!
‘Tis just ten thousand years ago
Since the vile sinner left his clay,
And yet no pity can he know,
For as he lies in hell to-day
So when ten thousand years have run
Still shall he lie in endless night.
O God of Love! O Holy One!
Have we not read Thy ways aright?
The godly man in heaven shall dwell,
And live in joy before the throne,
Though somewhere down in nether hell
His wife or children writhe and groan.
From his bright Empyrean height
He sees the reek from that abyss–
What Pagan ever dreamed a sight
So holy and sublime as this!
Poor foolish folk! Had they begun
To weigh the myths that they professed,
One hour of reason and each one
Would surely stand a fraud confessed.
Pretending to believe each deed
Of Theseus or of Hercules,
With fairy tales of Ganymede,
And gods of rocks and gods of trees!
No, no, had they our purer light
They would have learned some saner tale
Of Balaam’s ass, or Samson’s might,
Or prophet Jonah and his whale,
Of talking serpents and their ways,
Through which our foolish parents strayed,
And how there passed three nights and days
Before the sun or moon was made!
· · · ·
O Bigotry, you crowning sin!
All evil that a man can do
Has earthly bounds, nor can begin
To match the mischief done by you–
You, who would force the source of love
To play your small sectarian part,
And mould the mercy from above
To fit your own contracted heart.
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
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