Читать книгу This Little World - Francis Brett Young - Страница 9

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It is doubtful if anyone in Chaddesbourne was happier during the spring than “that nice Dr. Selby”; it is certain that nobody was busier. That year the fourth wave of the direst pestilence since the Black Death, the influenza of nineteen-eighteen, swept Europe. This wave, though less devastating than its predecessors, had still enough foaming spite left in it to upset and suck back in its deadly recoil a few victims made feeble by age or undermined by the stresses of war. The old man called Sheppy, for instance, who had hobbled so painfully in the funeral procession, was swept off his tottering legs; he made a second, a far easier journey in the same direction (this time they carried him), and did not return to the cottage in which he had been born; but John Sheppy was so gnarled and mossed and shaky in any case, that his passing created no more surprise or concern than the fall of a dry elm bough that crashes in the night.

For the most part Dr. Selby’s practice was not clinically exciting. It consisted of the maladies of a typical village community, picturesquely and badly housed, somewhat meagrely (and often injudiciously) fed, incredibly ignorant of the first elements of hygiene, but, on the whole, healthy. Older folk of both sexes, of course, showed signs of wear—“bad legs,” the legacy of haphazard child-bearing, that refused to heal without rest which could not be given them; old ruptures, the penalty of forgotten strain, crippling rheumatisms and chronic bronchitis, the result of patient exposure to wind and weather. In addition to these he was met by the common casualties of a labourer’s existence: falls from ricks or from ladders; feet crushed by a horse’s stamping or pierced by a fork; fingers “poisoned” because some neglected puncture or tear had gone septic.

Every morning, at nine to the tick, his housekeeper, Mrs. Hussingtree—an ex-cook (in “good service”), who, together with her husband, an ex-under-gardener, looked after the doctor, his house, his car and his garden, for two pounds a week—unlocked the door of his surgery, a converted stable, providentially placed (for Jane Trost guessed quite enough as it was) on the side of the house remote from Miss Loach’s observation. And there, by the time that the doctor stepped briskly across the yard and took his seat at his desk in the shabby consulting-room, whose air was drenched with an odour of sharp antiseptics and vinous tinctures, the débris of Chaddesbourne’s leisurely activities drifted up: hobbling pensioners, stalwart young men with their arms in splints or bandages, housewives dragging children with swollen faces tied up in handkerchiefs, muffled convalescents taking their first outing after a fortnight in bed. As each entered the surgery, which, in winter, a quick fire made comfortable, the bell on the door of the waiting-room rang. They sat down on the varnished deal benches, patient as cattle, exchanging not only the tales of their private ailments, but the gossip of their neighbours—so that this bare room, scrubbed clean and smelling of lysol, became a kind of club where news and opinions were exchanged far more freely and comfortably than in the public-bar of the “Ombersley Arms” (since sickness frees tongues as quickly as liquor), and “going to the doctor’s” became a social occasion, for which one put on one’s best clothes and manners, like “going to church.” They sat there and talked, discussing themselves and their neighbours, till another bell on the doctor’s desk pinged; till one patient came out to tell them the results of his consultation, and another entered the confessional. For that, in a sense, Dr. Selby’s consulting-room was. Though he had only arrived in Chaddesbourne after the war, he was less of a “foreigner” in the village’s eye than the admirable Hussingtrees (who came from the next village, Wychbury), or Mr. Winter, or (more reasonably) Morgan Jones.

For Dr. Selby’s regrettable alienism was excused and discounted by his function, more intimate, if possibly less sacred, than that of the vicar. Like a man who, succeeding to the headship of a mystical cult, assumes the hieratic name of his predecessors, he was known to all as “the doctor,” and rarely as anything else. Even his house—though a faded inscription on the garden gate declared its correct designation to be “Ivy Cottage”—had been known, for longer than even Miss Loach could remember, as “the Surgery.” He possessed, in fact, in the shabby black bag which he carried and which contained, in addition to dressings and hypodermics, the awful instruments of minor surgery and obstetrics, the social equivalent of a red diplomatic passport, admitting him, without let or question, within the most jealously-guarded domestic frontiers. Wherever he entered people said: “Oh, it’s only the doctor.” Harassed minds grew calmer; tense faces softened with relief. Even women in labour momentarily forgot their pangs and smiled at him with pale, anguished eyes, anticipating release.

This last department of his practice was one which, except in desperate emergencies (which were rare), he would gladly have forgone. Quite apart from the fact that it frequently dragged him from bed in the middle of the night and condemned him to fruitless vigils in unpleasant surroundings, he considered it was not a man’s job. Furthermore, from the standpoint of present economic conditions, he considered that there were already quite enough children in Chaddesbourne—rather more, in fact, than the village wage-list could support. But now, since a score of demobilized married men had come home from abroad, the birth-rate was rising rapidly.

This phenomenon, which Dr. Selby, who knew that more mouths must be fed, found disquieting, was a source of high satisfaction to Mr. Winter, who boasted to him that the number of christenings in the parish church was the highest recorded since the beginning of the war.

“So there’ll be plenty to fight in the next one,” Selby told him. “That’s fortunate, isn’t it?”

Mr. Winter went red in the neck, but refrained from explaining what he meant, which, of course, wasn’t that. This was one of those little sardonic jokes which made his friendship with Selby (and friendship it was) exasperating. They felt much the same about many important things, such as the superiority of Rugby football to Soccer, of pipes to cigarettes, of claret to Burgundy and of either of these to champagne; they shared, to a large degree, the same views on politics—were in theory free-traders, but leaned towards tariff reform, thought the House of Lords individually superb and collectively a danger, and agreed that the Unemployment Donation, lately christened “the dole,” was a humiliating catastrophe and entirely necessary; yet in matters of religious dogma and even religious principle, of which, patently, the abominable thing called birth-control was one, Mr. Winter knew that he and the doctor would never see eye to eye.

He regretted this: he not only liked Selby personally, but also admired him for his candour, his kindness, his humour (within limits) and his courage. There wasn’t a man in Chaddesbourne with whom he would rather find himself in a tight hole, nor one whose life, in practice, more nearly reflected the spirit of his Master. He was encouraged, when he first came to Chaddesbourne, to see Selby in church—for doctors, he knew, were not uncommonly infidels—and hurt more than shocked when he found that Selby was not a communicant. One day, choosing his moment tactfully, he had broached the sore subject.

“Well, you see, I’m afraid those things mean nothing to me; they’re left out of my composition,” Selby had said.

“Yet you come to church sometimes?”

“Ah, that’s quite a different matter. I come to church, first of all, because the building is beautiful—by far the most beautiful work of man in Chaddesbourne—and because I find your noble Anglican liturgy sublime. I come there again because I believe in tradition and—what shall I call it?—continuity of experience, religious or otherwise; because the people of this place have been worshipping on that spot for more than a thousand years and have left something behind them—an atmosphere that’s worth sharing. Then, I come to church because it’s a good example—no, I’m not being priggish—and think the beauty and quietude and all the other things I find there are good for their souls. Incidentally I like to feel I am sharing good things with the people around me. And lastly I come, quite frankly, because I enjoy it. I like to hear people singing hymns and forgetting themselves. And you happen to be one of the very few padres I know who don’t talk nonsense. But as for your sacraments—the mystical part of your religion....”

“The most profoundly important part of it....”

“Ah, there you have me. I suppose, if you want the truth, I’m not really religious. We’ll leave it at that.”

Mr. Winter supposed they must, although he hated doing so. What puzzled him most of all, and indeed made him envious, was the clear fact that Selby was actually more closely in touch with his parish than himself. It seemed odd, it seemed almost unjust that in spite of his prayers, his fasting, his consuming desire for their welfare, his brotherly love for them (and this was no empty phrase), the people to whom he was ready and willing to devote his life denied him that entrance to theirs which they accorded to this mere layman, whose mission was not reinforced by the divine sanctions that he possessed.

Dr. Selby, in fact, was that rare type of human creature (even among doctors), a man with an enquiring mind, absorbed and fascinated by every aspect of his calling—concerned not only with the bodies that, for reasons grave or trivial, ran the gauntlet of Jane Trost’s scrutiny and entered his surgery, but also with the far more mysterious minds which compelled those bodies to enter; with the factors of heredity and environment which made those minds, no less than the bodies they controlled (or failed to control), what they were (or imagined they were); concerned with the very dreams, immediate or atavistic, which haunted those minds and, unconsciously, influenced them; with the souls—he was sufficiently modern to believe in souls—which, apart from bodies and minds, yet not immune from their association, revealed, in defiance of matter, such astonishing energies and apathies, such odd manifestations of essential goodness or evil.

Because of the mystical conception of life which a study of its material aspects had forced on him—a mysticism more profound than that which Mr. Winter professed as a matter of faith—Dr. Selby regarded the little pathetic world of which, when he adopted it, he had made himself part, with a benevolence which was more tender than the vicar’s because of its detachment, more effective because it was less vague and also less critical. For this reason, though he had no intimates, all the village was his friend; his life was a solitary life, yet never lonely; his vision of Chaddesbourne, though realistic, was unclouded by pessimism.

Indeed he was aware that he had much to be thankful for. First of all, he was young—and apart from a fragment of shrapnel in the lung, quite reasonably healthy; he was alive—and, but for a freak of chance, or Providence, or the law of averages, might have been dead; he was independent, in a modest degree, financially; he had interests, only a shade less absorbing, outside his work—in the natural world (here seen at its loveliest), in books, in music.

This last passion, indeed, would have afforded him a rare escape—had escape been needed—from the more grim obsessions of his medical life. In the sunny room at the back of Ivy Cottage, which he consecrated to his leisure, stood a small Blüthner grand piano, which he had bought, years ago, with his first professional earnings. During the war the poor thing had languished in a North Bromwich repository, so sadly neglected that when first he installed it at Chaddesbourne the very keys seemed to have forgotten the touch of his fingers and become insensitive. Now, coaxed back to life, the piano had recovered its soul. It stood there, a stark shape of lustrous ebony, against the cream wall from the midst of which, like some blank-eyed oracle, brooded the death-mask of Beethoven which, in days of younger enthusiasm, its owner had brought back with him in triumph from Leipzig.

Mrs. Hussingtree regarded the instrument with pride and awe; its unusual shape gave the house distinction, though its lid, unlike that of any other piano she had met, was dedicated to an austere and unnatural nakedness. “Not so much as a vase or a mat of embroidery or a photograph!” she complained. After a number of earnest but unsuccessful attempts to supply appropriate decorations, which no sooner appeared than they were ruthlessly swept away, Mrs. Hussingtree gave in. “I’m bothered if I know what he does want,” she said—though she might have guessed.

Dr. Selby was not a good pianist; his fingers were clumsy, for this passion had come to him at a time of life when they had lost youth’s flexibility. Yet, to balance this lack of skill, he was fortunate in possessing a faculty (more æsthetic than mathematical) for extracting, almost at a glance, the essence of the music he tried to play. His tastes were not easily classified. In the days of his early enthusiasm they had been frankly romantic; he had been sweetly ravished by the songs of Schumann, ensnared in the silken threads, like dew-drenched gossamer, out of which Debussy delicately wove his tissue of crepuscular sound, carried clean off his feet, exhilarated (though half protesting), by the full flood of Wagner—impetuous, irresistible as the surge of the Rhine-music sweeping through Siegfried’s Journey in Götterdämmerung. Since the war his liking for sentimental heroics had waned. He suspected that sentiment and cruelty might be the poles of the same emotion; he had seen the bright Nordic panoply of Siegfried, the pomps of Valhalla, uncomfortably translated into terms of cold steel or high explosives; and his mind, which now craved for an expression less chaotic, less volatile, had discovered it in the pellucid profundities of Bach, the ripe wisdom of Brahms, in the vast serenity of his first love, Beethoven, in Hugo Wolf’s poignancy, in the peculiarly intimate quality—as native to his soul as Piers Plowman or Wordsworth’s Prelude—which he found in the later work of the English Elgar.

It was a solitary passion. So far as the doctor knew, there was not, in the whole of Chaddesbourne, a single soul who could share it. Mr. Winter’s eyes, it is true, had shown a faint glimmer of interest when they discovered on Selby’s piano copies of Bach’s Mass in B Minor and The Dream of Gerontius. But that interest, as the doctor divined, was not artistic but ethical: the result of a hope that the presence of these works denoted a secret change of heart in the direction of orthodox religion, which, of course, they didn’t. That the vicar was devoid of any vestige of a musical “ear” was evident from his uncanny skill in avoiding, when he intoned, the note which Miss Burton, at the organ, gave him. For him—and indeed for the rest of the village—Miss Burton was the arch-priestess of musical mysteries: she had actually contrived to teach the school-children four-part glees (which were anything but gleeful) and carols; to produce in church (on appropriate occasions) recognisable versions of Lohengrin’s Wedding-March and the Dead March in “Saul,” and to perform, with more confidence (and therefore with much less noise) Handel’s Largo and a selection of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. On occasions, intoxicated by these successes, she had been known to improvise....

Those lamentable modulations and progressions were the cause of Dr. Selby’s delight when he discovered in the unmusical wilderness the hint of an oasis. One spring afternoon, finding himself close to the Hall, he had taken the chance of catching Miles Ombersley at home and reporting on the condition of Roberts, the keeper, who had wrenched his ankle in a rabbit-hole. He approached the front door with diffidence—not because the Ombersleys were unfriendly—the colonel and he, on the contrary, understood one another perfectly—but because workmen still haunted the house and the family were not yet “settled in.”

Remembering his visits during old Mr. Ombersley’s last illness, he had always regarded the Hall as a gloomy, inhospitable house. It surprised him to find how the atmosphere of it had changed. The drive had been strewn with new gravel and rolled, the encroaching shrubberies cleared, the festoons of ivy stripped from pilasters and pediment; and the flagged entrance hall, in which his old friend the butler welcomed him, was no longer the dim, dank crypt which had made him shiver. The dull purplish tinge, which formerly absorbed and suppressed every glimmer of light that entered, had been banished from the walls and replaced by the colour of time-mellowed parchment, which not only reflected light but also seemed to retain it, revealing an unsuspected wealth of plaster-work in low relief, that, freed from successive incrustations of paint daubed on without stippling, now displayed the formal delicacy of a Georgian craftsman’s hand in swags and medallions, and defined, in the flicker of fire-light, fluent traceries whose shapes might well have been carved in old ivory.

“I’ll see if the Colonel is in, sir,” the butler said, “if you’ll wait here a moment.”

Dr. Selby, alone, continued to contemplate the astonishing changes in his surroundings. In the times he remembered, the place had not merely seemed gloomy and depressing; it had actually been boorish; it had seemed not only resentful of physical light, but also of the spiritual illuminations of grace or culture. It had seemed savage, unhomely, reflecting the material slovenliness of its owner, the typical blindness to beauty of a mid-Victorian squire. Even the painted eighteenth-century Ombersleys on the walls had appeared to withdraw themselves in frigid disdain of this decadence in manners which they loathed but could not resist. Now, revived and encouraged, they seemed to have taken heart, looking down with pride and complacence from canvases in which the rich hues of brocades and velvets and the whiteness of wig-powder resumed the glowing transparence of their original pigment. It was not so much, Dr. Selby thought, that the place had been brought to new life as that its old submerged life had been restored. It demanded, he thought, a habitation not stately, not even formal, but gracious and dignified: the kind of existence which was symbolized for him—he found it natural in matters of “atmosphere” to take his symbols from music—by Mozart, by Scarlatti, by Vivaldi, or by the “little” Bach.

“Yes, that,” Dr. Selby mused, “is what this house needs to lay the last ghost of its ugliness; the old music it remembers—or ought to remember—returning to the familiarly-proportioned spaces through which its faint echoes once wandered. If only these charming Ombersleys realised that! But I know what will happen. That nice-looking boy from Oxford will bring down a gramophone, and that gentleman in brocade on the wall over there, whose toe is already pointed to tread a minuet, will have his fine sensibilities affronted by jazz. And then....”

The amused, half-bitter flow of his thoughts was checked suddenly; he strained his ears. For, somewhere in the house, so distantly that the sound could not be traced, he heard a faint strain of music that might have been evoked by his meditation. It was his “little” Bach: the slow movement of the Italian Concerto. If he had racked his brains to find one, he could not have chosen a strain more appropriate to his mood than that sweet meandering melody with its slow falls and hesitations. These tenuous sounds—for he knew and loved every note of them—filled him with an odd excitement; not only because the invisible (and almost inaudible) player understood, as he understood, the value of the movement’s pale gaiety, its melting sadness, but also because (to make the effect more ghostlike, and therefore more real) it seemed, at this distance, to be played on some old sweet thin-toned instrument.

“A well-tempered clavier,” he thought; “but, of course, that’s impossible. People don’t play clavichords nowadays, nor even harpsichords. It’s just possibly a spinet. Upon my soul, I believe it’s a piano: an ancient piano of the kind that one might expect to find marooned in a house of this kind—unless the whole thing’s an illusion, which isn’t like me. But the player.... Who can that be... ?”

The butler returned. The rhythm of his steps on the stone pavement broke in on the music and drowned it.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I can’t find the colonel anywhere. I thought he was in the garden, but I’m afraid he’s ridden over to Uffley. If you could leave a message....”

A message! No, no, that could wait. He said: “Who is that playing, Langley?”

“Playing what, sir?” The man looked puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”

“Can’t you hear? Someone’s playing the piano.”

“Oh, that, sir! Why, that’ll be Miss Catherine practising. Yes, that’s what it’ll be. At first I didn’t catch your meaning. She goes on by the hour like that, sir.” He spoke as though her persistence required an apology. “But we don’t hear it much, sir. These old walls are very thick.”

So this wasn’t an illusion after all. It was Catherine Ombersley. Catherine Ombersley.... A beautiful-sounding name; a pale, luminous name (like reliefs in old ivory); a gentle, sweet-smelling name, with something in it of the Worcestershire fields and orchards in this green-growing season of young grass and plum blossom. As he turned away from the steps—for now that the clue had been broken he was no longer tempted to explore her labyrinth of faint sound—Dr. Selby’s mind went back to the day of old Ombersley’s funeral and to the thoughts which had passed through his mind as he watched the procession. He had decided then, he remembered, that this Ombersley child might, perhaps, be called beautiful. Only perhaps.... Only if beauty denoted in chief a certain fineness of texture. With a girl of her breeding one might almost take that for granted, together with composure, quietness, restraint, good taste: all quite admirable qualities no doubt, yet all of them (if not actually negative) rather neutral, rather cold—rather discouraging, in fact, to a man like himself whose upbringing and daily life were concerned with different social strata; to a bachelor whose contacts with women, thanks to the war, had been mainly professional, and therefore unsentimental; to a shy man, in short, who generally preferred, out of habit perhaps, the society of men.

Till that moment he had not felt an inclination nor taken the trouble to speculate on what qualities or deficiencies lay hidden beneath that placid (but wasn’t there beauty in placidity?), that fine-textured exterior; yet now, at a single glimpse of its mysterious content, his imagination, his curiosity were fired. In that moment Catherine Ombersley slipped into her place as a half-human figure, delicate and tender as the little Bach tune she had played (and what was more, understood, as he himself understood it) in a setting formal and gracious, designed by Adam, and irradiated by ivorine light—rather distant still, but indubitably, mysteriously alive.

That mystery provoked him. He was curious about Catherine Ombersley. She suggested a virginal realm which challenged his exploration, but lay just out of reach. Perhaps the one sample which had come to him of the treasures it held—that little Bach tune—was fortuitous and misleading; perhaps disappointment (and that wouldn’t be the first of its kind!) awaited him. None the less, he felt eager now to review his first impression; to see what effect this newly-discovered tinge of colour would give to the static, inanimate figure. Mr. Winter was encouraged by seeing Dr. Selby more frequently in church. He was flattered to notice that the doctor had changed his seat for one nearer the pulpit, which happened also (though this did not strike him) to be on a level with the chapel in which, amid their dead ancestors’ monuments, the living Ombersleys, still feudally distinguished from their neighbours, performed their weekly devotions. Mr. Winter hoped, though without much confidence, that the bread he had cast on the waters in those lamp-lit winter colloquies was returning to him. Perhaps Dr. Selby had suffered a change of heart?

Well, perhaps he had. It was possible (to use an appropriate clinical metaphor) that Dr. Selby’s mind had already become unconsciously infected with the vagrant virus of love which no filter of reason can exclude—or that, at this moment (May’s mildness favouring) his resistance happened to be lowered and that the germs of infection—against which previous attacks unfortunately confer no immunity—were ready to fulminate in their favourite culture-medium of a lonely heart. There was a lot of measles—and love—“about” in Chaddesbourne that spring.