Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 10

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They all liked Dr. Hillman, the senior physician. He was a big-shouldered fellow, an ex-Cambridge blue, six-foot-three in his stockinged feet. He had been dropped in the first flight at Arnhem, though the comedians said he had not been dropped, he had fallen through.

He had done good work till the enemy captured him; then he got away, and lived for some time in a hole under the floor of a beechwood, on potato-peel supplied by some cottagers close by. He had thrived on it, on the darkness day and night, the cramped quarters, the potato-peel. Then he got back to the line again, laughing his head off.

That was the sort of fellow Dr. Hillman was. They all liked him. He was a good doctor, too, though not clever about people. Schoolmasters are sometimes like that. They are not suspicious enough. A small handful of lewd boys will be quite enough to scatter the spore of obscenity over the whole school. Dr. Hillman did not have much idea what was going on at the “San” (as they all called it) apart from the way the bacilli were functioning in the test-tubes and the lungs and the knee-joints.

The women adored him. They blushed and giggled when he was around, the more determined made eyes at him. But he had a beautiful, even a culpable, naïveté. He was as much aware of them as a tree is aware of the circling dragonflies under its boughs.

His interest in the tubercle bacillus was abstract, so to speak; you almost felt it might have been chess, instead, excepting that he was sometimes quite jocular with the bacilli, in a way that chess-players never are with chess-men.

“So you’ve turned up again, have you?” he would be heard to chuckle in the laboratory to the bacilli disposed on a slide, execrable and passionless. “Looking very fine and hearty, I must say.” Or it might be a little tête-à-tête over an X-ray plate. “So you’ve turned up in the bronchus, have you? Or is it just a little game you’re playing, maybe? You wouldn’t be an incipient carcinoma, would you? Now, now, play the game.” And he would wag his finger as the captain of a Varsity boat might do at one of his oarsmen, on learning he had taken a girl out and got drunk a few nights before the boat race.

The fact is Dr. Hillman had never had a day’s illness in his life, excepting for a cold or two. He was married, with a wife in Guildford. They were both quite satisfied that he should come to see her for an occasional short week-end. He had no frustrations, for it did not seem necessary to him to lead a vigorous sexual life.

It was stated in the San., with some regret among certain of the female patients, and on no known scientific authority, that men of Dr. Hillman’s size use all their vitality in energizing their large frames. It was not known whether Mrs. Hillman was content to see little of her husband because she, too, was busy energizing a large frame, or because she had friends in Surrey who compensated her for her husband’s absences.

The fact remained, Dr. Hillman seemed to have no frustrations. It was difficult to believe he would ever have any illnesses. You could only accept on a priori grounds he must some day die.

It was different with the assistant physician, a little Siamese doctor from Bangkok, whose name was Packenham, as anglicized from the original Paknám. He had himself been a tuberculous case in another sanatorium, and though evidently he was cured, it was assumed that it was held advisable for him to take up employment under sanatorium conditions, tending a malady regarding which he had two sorts of knowledge.

Of his personal life and habits nothing definite was known, but it was generally assumed that he was a consummate master in every sort of debauchery. It was a regular occupation of the more salacious patients to speculate on the probable ingenuity and elaborateness of his lusts, compared with which occidental carnality was merely loutish. He was, in all probability a respectable young man, with nothing more sinister about him than his devotion to Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, though he managed to keep his belief in her as therapeutist distinct from his local practice at Barnham.

The Matron, Miss Wetherell, was not immune from the ribald theorizings which luxuriated in the midnight jungles of Dr. Packenham’s alleged saturnalia. She certainly seemed sensitive to the good looks of male patients, though more reserved commentators declared that the slight flicker in the eyelid was not a wink of invitation; it was a nervous tic which could just as easily be provoked by a thermometer, or a toad in a ditch.

Jim’s first examination took place in the ward next morning at eleven. It was a jovial performance. Really you felt that was the way Dr. Hillman got down to a round of golf. The joviality extended to Dr. Packenham, who sat close by, taking case-notes for his card-index file. Not that Dr. Packenham said anything funny, or said anything at all. But he smiled. You saw the top front teeth, one of which had a gold casing. Or perhaps it was not a smile. It was the way the mouth was made.

“Good morning, Mr. Gunning,” exclaimed Dr. Hillman, slapping his own chest, as if he had just dried himself after a cold bath. “How do you do? How do you do? So you’ve come to join us for a time, eh? I hope you’re going to be happy with us. I think you will.” That was the way he must have talked when he was mess adjutant somewhere and he was trying to put at his ease a new young subaltern who had come in to the mess for his first pink gin. “Ex-Army? Of course. The Norfolks? First-rate outfit, first-rate. Say ninety-nine.”

He handled his stethoscope as only an Englishman can, with the hint of a suggestion that it was part of a games outfit, like a golf-club, or a polo stick. He proceeded to the auscultation. The joviality was now extended from the patient to the symptoms.

“What’s this? Here, at the top of the right lobe: Râles? Yes, rough, quite rough.” The atmosphere of the golf-house and the golf-club thickened. It was as if he were comically chastising a ball for rolling into the rough from the fairway.

He went on tapping, prodding, with the expertness of a player with a low handicap. But the fourth hole, or the seventh, maybe, was rather difficult. “Rhonchi, I think. I don’t know, perhaps not.” He got to the end of the eighteenth hole, then studied Jim’s temperature chart as if it were a score-card. “Ninety-nine this morning. Well, well. We’ll soon get rid of that.” It was as if Jim was consistently poor with his mashie-shot. “Well, old chap. We’ll get the pyjama-jacket on, shall we?” He slapped Jim’s back cordially. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“Excuse me, doctor,” asked Jim hesitating. “I wanted to ask——”

There was a slight screwing up at the corner of Dr. Hillman’s mouth.

“You wanted to ask how long you’re likely to stay on with us?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“It’s hard to say, you know, hard to say. You have no anxiety about——” He did not complete the sentence, but stopped and looked at the card on which Dr. Packenham was writing down a last note or two. “Oh that’s fine. Your union will look after you.”

“I’d like to know, doctor, please.”

“So would I, my boy, so would I. Say six months, shall we? Make it nine. Might be a bit safer to make it nine.”

“But, doctor——”

“It could hardly be less than six. Very rarely is, you know.”

“But I’m all right, doctor. I know I am.” There was a bitter taste at the root of Jim’s tongue.

“Could be worse, Mr. Gunning, could be a lot worse,” said Dr. Hillman encouragingly. “Leave us to worry, won’t you? You’ve got a good physique. That should help. Play games in the army?”

“I was a boxer—professional.”

“Well, that’s fine. I used to put the old gloves on myself once. Well, take things easy now, Mr. Gunning. Good morning. Good morning.”

“Good morning,” said the little Siamese. It was a curious, thin, metallic voice, almost like the gold tooth talking.