Читать книгу Thomasina - Paul Gallico - Страница 11

On Thursday mornings, Mr MacDhui left his house before seven for farm calls in the immediate neighbourhood so as to return in time for his office hours, which were from eleven to one, leaving him the afternoon, if need be, for more distant visits.

Before departing on this day, he rattled off instructions to Willie Bannock: “I shall be stopping at Birnie Farm to see a case of scour, and Jock Maistock suspects the blackleg amongst his Ayrshires, so see that there is an ampoule or two of vaccine in the bag. I will be testing John Ogilvie’s herd, and I may stop at the Macpherson chicken farm if there is time and relieve the mind of the widow. If I am late getting back, tell the folk to bide.”

He did not neglect the morning round through his modest animal hospital with the indispensable Willie in his train. On this particular day the veterinary seemed more aware than usual of the irony of this routine, which convenience and necessity had dictated should be almost an imitation if not a burlesque of that in the great hospitals in Edinburgh and Glasgow. There, he knew, each morning, the house surgeon, followed by an interne or two, a matron and a train of nursing sisters, paraded through the wards, inspecting charts, having a thump or a look at a patient, diagnosing, prescribing, dropping a pleasant or cheery word at each bed, dispensing hope and courage along with medicines and leaving the ward behind him brighter, happier and at ease, each human armoured more strongly for his or her fight against injury or illness.

MacDhui, looking with a mind’s eye turned resentful, could see himself in this healer’s role as he had since he had been a boy, a doctor whose mere presence in the sick room was enough to banish sickness and bar the Angel of Death. Since it had been denied him, he denied in turn the warmth and love which is so much a part of the cure of any ailing mind.

They were immured in scrupulously clean cages in which paper or straw might be changed by Willie a dozen times a day, properly diagnosed, drugged, bandaged, fed, watered and thereafter ignored by him. Pausing before each cage, he regarded each inmate as a specimen and a problem from whose exhibition of symptoms or reaction to treatment there was further knowledge or experience to be gained. But as fellow creatures, prisoners like himself aboard the same revolving ball of rock, dirt and water, brothers and sisters in one great family of the living, he did not consider them at all.

They seemed to feel this as he went by and remained quiescent, regarding him with sad or morose eyes, or giving vent to minor-keyed complaints, whines, mews, snuffles.

They went through the aisles of cages with Mr MacDhui appraising and ordering dosage and treatment as always, to Willie’s intense admiration, for Willie was mortally in awe of this great, red pagan who could cure wee craturs. Nor were there any to be ‘put away’, which came as a great relief to the attendant, for one of his duties was to play the part of executioner when MacDhui decided that an animal was better off dead than alive, a decision from which it appeared nothing could turn him once it had been made.

It was a job Willie hated, but he never presumed to question the orders of his chief, and with gentleness, chloroform bottle and rag, got the unhappy business over with as quickly as possible and put the remains on the heap out back of the house where he would not have to see them until the day’s end when the incinerator was fired and all waste matter from the hospital burned, including small corpses.

“Try a larger dose of the No. 4 formula on Mrs Sanderson’s dog and I’ll have another look at it when I return. If that confounded parrot keeps up its abominable noise, you have my permission to wring its neck.”

He took his bag into which Willie, who knew every ailment at each farm and what was required almost before MacDhui told him, had packed syringes, plungers, enemas, sprays, disinfectants, vaccines, dressings, sutures and needles, gauzes and plasters as well as various stock items against emergencies, went out, climbed into his jeep and drove off.

Willie waited until he saw him reach the end of Argyll and turn the corner into the High Street before with almost unseemly haste he hurried back to the animal hospital where he was received with a perfect pandemonium of enthusiastic barks, whines, howls, shrieks, squawks, mews and general animal hurrah for a loved human.

Willie, who just about came up to Mr MacDhui’s shoulder in height, was seventy, and fifty of those years he had devoted to the love and care of animals. MacDhui had inherited him from the man from whom he had bought the practice. Spry and alert, he had a friar’s atoll of white hair about his skull and melting brown eyes that gave away his character and kindness of heart.

This was The Hour. Dogs stood up frantically on their hind legs inside their cages, pawing and shouting at him, birds shrieked, cats stiffened their tails and rubbed their flanks against the cage doors in anticipation, even the dogs too sick for greater demonstrations managed at least a waving and a thumping of their flags.

“Now, now –” Willie said, surveying the pandemonium with the most intense satisfaction – “one at a time now, one at a time!” He stopped at the first cage of a fat dachshund who went hysterical in his arms when he took him out, screaming, wriggling, licking his face, singing a passionate obbligato over the general chorus of enthusiasm. “There there, now, Hansi – dinna excite yersel so, or ’twill appear on your chart no less and the doctor will read that I’ve had ye oot for a spell. Ye’ll be awa hame tomorrow or the next day –”

Thus he went from cage to cage, bestowing love, the secret medicine which surely effected as many cures as the doctor’s drugs, or helped them along. Cats and dogs that were well enough he had out for a hug, or a bit of play, the sick had their ears and bellies rubbed, the parrot his head scratched, the lot of them pampered, petted and spoiled until each had had its turn and been calmed down, when the regular routine of care and medication went forward.

The morning was misty and the smell of sea salt mingled with coal and peat smoke was in the air from the breakfast fires as Mr MacDhui drove through the streets of grey stone or whitewashed houses, tall, narrow and slate-roofed, down to the quay where the waters of the loch were grey too, and a blue fishing boat with a stumpy mast and the forward well loaded with lobster pots, floats and gear chuffed out of the harbour.

The veterinary breathed the smell of mingled sea and land, wild sea and rugged woodland and man and habitation smells with no particular enjoyment, nor did he look to the flight of gulls, or the curl of the tide lapping the shore; the beauty of the blue boat on the grey mirror of the loch in the pearly morning mist already shot through with the light of the mounting sun was lost upon him. He turned the jeep northwards on to the Cairndow road, crossing the river Ardrath by the old saddleback bridge and, when he reached Creemore, took the left fork up into the hills.

When he had climbed somewhat he could see the gipsy encampment lying at the foot of a fold in the valley to the south and noted from the smoke and the number of wagons that it was a large one. He recalled what Mary Ruadh had told him of it as seen through the eyes of Geordie McNabb, and the run-in that Constable MacQuarrie had had with them, but he shrugged the whole matter off as none of his business. If the police chose to let them remain there, that was their affair. There would no doubt be the usual neglect of their horses and livestock amongst these people who in some instances even in this day and age continued to live themselves like animals, but as long as the police were satisfied he did not care. This the curious paradox of the animal doctor who did not love animals.

But he would have denied vehemently and truculently, and had, in just such an argument with Mr Peddie, that he was a cold or loveless man, and with much outjutting of his beard had cited his affection for his daughter Mary Ruadh as the keystone of his life. Yet he admitted to loving little or nothing else but her.

The minister with whom he liked to tussle philosophically just because he was so unpredictable, and whose range was from the erudite through the theological to the poetic, had surprised him by indulging in flights of the latter in his reply.

He had maintained that in his opinion one could not love a woman without likewise loving the night and the stars that made even more of a mystery of her presence, or the soft air and sun that warmed and made fragrant her hair; that you could not love a little girl without loving too the field flowers, limp and wilted, with which she returned from a foray into the meadow, clutched in a damp hand. And he had said that you too would have to feel love for the mongrel she adored or the cat that she carried and even for the stuff of the frocks that clung to her body. He said that if you loved the wild sea lashed in storm, then you could not help loving the mountains too, which with their swelling hills and jagged and snow-topped peaks swirled by the wind like sea-froth imitated the waves and presented to one’s gaze the miracle of an ocean petrified in mid-storm. He declared that you could not love the bright, hot, lazy summer days without loving also the rains that came to cool them; that one could not love the flight of birds without loving too the flash of the trout or salmon in the dark pool, that one could not love man, any or all of him, without loving the beasts of the field and the forests, or the beasts without loving the trees and the grasses, the shrubs and the heather and the flowers of meadow and garden.

And here, dropping the rhetorical style into which he had drifted, and, truth to tell, held MacDhui rather speechless with astonishment, he slyly descended to a more ordinary and matter-of-fact routine of speech and said that it was difficult to understand how a man could love all or any of these without loving God as well from any point of view, philosophically, practically, theologically, or just plain logically. The result of course had been the usual scornful and indignant snort from MacDhui, who declared that Peddie was better and at least more plausible as poet.

Mr MacDhui turned in at the wagon track leading to the Birnie farm and, parking the jeep, entered the stone stalls of the stables with an expression of deep disgust upon his face. The stench was overpowering. Fergus Birnie, a wizened farmer, was almost as dirty as his cowsheds. He greeted the vet sourly at the entrance and complained: “’Tis the Lask come back again. Yon medicine ye gied me was gey unchancy. Ye swyked me wi’ it, Mr MacDhui, an’ I’ll thank ye fur the shillings back I laid oot fur it.”

MacDhui minced no words. With his red beard thrust into the farmer’s face as near as he could bear the smell of him, he bellowed, “Ye’re a filthy dog, Birnie. Yer cattle are in diarrhoea again because ye live dirtier than any swine wallowing out yonder in their ain glaur. I’ve warned ye often enough, Fergus Birnie. Noo I’m takin’ awa’ yer licence for the herd and the selling of yer milk until ye change yer ways.”

He went outside and removed a small metal plate from the door of the barn and put it in his pocket while Birnie stood there regarding him bleakly. “I’ll be back here within the hour,” the veterinarian said. “Call your misbegotten sons over here and wash down thee stables and sheds – and yourselves along with it. And wash those cattle until they are clean enough to buss. If there’s so much as a smitch of dirt about here when I return I’ll charge ye to Constable MacQuarrie for endangering the public health and it’s to jail ye’ll all go.”

He drove on to the Maistock farm back in the hills, a well-run place where he complimented Jock Maistock for giving him an early warning of the symptoms in one of his long-horned, fringe-browed Ayrshire cattle of the dreaded blackleg. He ordered the suspected animal slaughtered at once, vaccinated the remainder of the herd against the disease, and placed a temporary quarantine on them until time should reveal the extent of the immunity obtained.

He called in at the Macpherson chicken farm and calmed the fears of the widow Macpherson that she was in for an outbreak of the gapes, a disease of fowls caused by worms in the windpipe. The laboratory report had been negative and the suspected chicks were suffering from a harmless respiratory attack and were already perking up in their isolation pen. MacDhui certified them for release.

He called in at the farm of a wealthy experimental cattle farmer who was trying out a herd in the hills, and gave the cattle the Tuberculin Test, visited several other small farms and crofters’ cottages for minor complaints, and on his way back looked in again on Fergus Birnie’s stalls.

Fear of loss of bread and butter had worked upon the farmer, and stables and cattle were in passable condition, clean enough at least for the veterinarian to get on with the treatment. He inoculated each animal, promised to restore the licence when the disease had abated, provided the standard of cleanliness was maintained. With a final threat to drop in any day unannounced to check up on them, he climbed into his jeep and headed down the twisting, winding track to the main road back to the valley and Inveranoch.

Yet he dawdled with his driving, hunched about the wheel, dwarfing it with his great bulk since he was in no hurry to get back. For all there was to and about his work and profession, this was the part he liked best, poking about in the rugged hill country above the loch, visiting the farms and practising a medicine that was almost human medicine in that it was designed to aid in the protection of human beings, and where the beasts he was called upon to treat were doughty bread-winners and servants of man, from the clever, bright-eyed sheepdogs to the black-faced sheep they herded and the stalwart hardy breeds of Highland cattle.

Here too, he was received almost with the same respect as Dr Strathsay who came out likewise to the back country to deliver their children, set their fractures, or treat occasional illnesses. To the crofter who lived by his sheep, pigs, fowl, or cattle, Mr MacDhui was a man of importance. A person could well recover from a sneeze or feverish cough, a hand or foot cut with axe or scythe, but a dead animal that could not even be sold for meat was money out of pocket, and an infection which might condemn an entire herd to slaughter was a catastrophe. To them Mr MacDhui was a man of value and in most quarters he was treated with deference.

Thus it was with reluctance that the veterinary found himself again in Inveranoch where his office/waiting-room would no doubt be filled once more with both locals as well as visitors from as far off as Liverpool, Birmingham and London with their useless and pampered pets.

It was a quarter past eleven when he drove the jeep around to the back and, entering the premises from the rear, turned his bag over to Willie Bannock along with a quick account of the morning’s doings back in the hills, washed his hands, still talking and giving his assistant no chance to speak, and donning a fresh white coat, made his usual entrance, beard out-thrust into the doorway of the waiting-room.

He noted that as usual every bench and chair was occupied, the locals in their sober clothes, overalls, or work aprons, the city dwellers more flamboyantly clad, including a lady in a most grand and fashionable hat holding a chocolate-coloured Pomeranian with rheumy eyes. And, as always, the sight inspired the same choler and truculent impatience it seemed to bring on every day at this hour. He hated them and he hated his work.

Yet he looked them over and looked again and this time became aware of a startling presence amongst the group of waiting clients. Seated quietly and most upright on the edge of the last chair at the far end of the room, the very last in line was his daughter Mary Ruadh.

MacDhui coloured red at this challenging evidence of disobedience, for the child was under strict orders, and Mrs McKenzie knew it too, that she was never to come next door to the surgery, hospital, or consulting-room as many of the diseases suffered by animal patients were likewise infectious and communicable to man. One such tragedy in his life had been sufficient.

As he stared with rising anger, he noted that what had seemed to be an extension of her red-gold hair tumbling down her shoulder was her ginger cat held in her arms close to her breast, its head cuddled under her chin in the manner of a child. Before he could enquire sharply as to what kind of play or nonsense this was, and in direct contravention to his orders, Willie Bannock was at his elbow whispering: “The puir puss has some unco ailment. It can walk nae mair. The chiel has been biding anxiously for your return.”

Mr MacDhui said – “You know as well as I she is not to come here. Well, since she is here then she must await her turn like the rest.” To the woman seated nearest the door he said – “If you will take your dog inside now, Mrs Kechnie, we’ll have a look at those ears,” when a great noise and hubbub was heard without in the street, approaching nearer and a moment later the door swung open and it burst in upon them.

It revealed itself to be composed of small children in various stages of excitement, housewives from neighbouring cottages wiping their hands on their aprons, several men, likewise attracted by the noise, and at its centre the minister, Mr Angus Peddie, old Tammas Moffat, the blind man who was licensed to sell pencils and shoe-laces at the corner of High and Fore Streets, and Constable MacQuarrie. In the constable’s arms, muddied and bloodied, still in his harness with the guide handle, lay the quivering form of Bruce, the Seeing Eye dog that had been provided for Tammas through subscription by the parish at the instigation of Mr Peddie.

The noise caught Mr MacDhui as he was closing the door and he returned quickly – “Now, now – what’s all this? I’ll have no crowding in here. Come now, out with you, all of you who have no business here, everyone except Mr Peddie, Tammas and the policeman. Angus, what has happened?”

“Run over, sir,” the constable replied in place of the pastor, who busied himself clearing the followers-on out of the room. “It happened only a few moments ago, one of the visitors speeding. We’ll have him under lock and key in short order, but in the meantime, I’m afraid the dog’s done for. Both wheels went over him. We brought him here as quickly as we could.”

Mr Peddie returned fluttering anxiously. “He’s still living, Andrew. Perhaps you can do something –”

The old blind man was in a state, his knees trembling and his head shaking from side to side, stunned by the accident, lost without his dog, bewildered by the people about. He moaned – “Where is he, my Bruce? Where is he? We were about to cross the street. I heard a noise and a shout. Where is he? Is he dead? What will I do? What will happen to me?”

Mr Peddie took him by the arm. “Gently now, Tammas. The dog is still alive and in good hands. Mr MacDhui will do the best he can for him.”

The blind man groped for an instant and then quavered – “Mr MacDhui? Mr MacDhui? Is that where we are?”

“Take the dog inside,” Mr MacDhui ordered Willie Bannock, who carefully relieved the policeman of his quivering burden. The veterinary glanced at the dog as it went by and wrinkled his nose; the life seemed all but crushed out of it.

“Is it Mr MacDhui?” the blind man said again, and turning his sightless face to him, put out his hand, touched and held his arm. “I’m an old man. I cannot be doing without him. Save my eyes for me, Mr MacDhui –”

The plea went into the bowels of Mr Veterinary Surgeon Andrew MacDhui like a knife thrust and turned there, for with three words – “Save my eyes” – the blind man had brought back again all of the frustration and failure of his forty-odd years of living. MacDhui would have given the next forty to have heard those words spoken to him as a doctor of medicine, to have been called upon to give of his skill, love and devotion to the saving of human sight, or health, or life itself, instead of being asked to put together again, like Humpty-Dumpty, the fragments of a dog.

Something of what was passing through his mind communicated itself to his friend Mr Peddie, either because of the tortured misery the minister thought he glimpsed at that moment in the face of the animal doctor, or because he himself was so well acquainted with MacDhui’s story since they had known one another since their schoolboy and student days in Glasgow.

It was to the young Peddie that the boy MacDhui had confided his ambition to become a great physician just about the time that the former had decided for the ministry and they had argued and discussed the respective merits of their chosen professions then, boasted, bickered and let their ambitions soar.

And it was only Peddie, the young divinity student, who saw fall the tears of grief, rage and frustration when the tyrannical father cut short his boy’s hopes and ambitions and compelled him to follow in his own profession of animal medicine.

“He means –” Mr Peddie began, but MacDhui quelled him with a look.

“I know what he means,” he said. “The dog is three-quarters dead and ought to be put out of his misery, but – I’ll save Tammas’s eyes if I can.” Then to all of those in the waiting-room he shouted – “Go home. Come back tomorrow. I have no time for you now.”

One by one they picked up their pets and filed out. MacDhui said to Peddie – “There’s no use your waiting. It will be some time before I can tell. Get Tammas home. I’ll let you know –” He went into the surgery and closed the door behind him.

The constable led the blind man out. Peddie was about to follow when his glance fell upon the child sitting quietly in the corner hugging her cat to her and he went over to her in surprise –

“Hello, Mary Ruadh. What are you doing here?”

She looked up at him confidingly, for they were old and trusted friends, and replied – “Thomasina’s very sick. She can’t walk at all. I’m bringing her to Daddy to make well.”

Mr Peddie nodded and absent-mindedly stroked the head of the ginger cat and scratched it under the chin as he always did when he came upon the two together. The accident to the blind man’s dog, though he had not witnessed it, had been a shock to him, and too, he had felt the depth of pain of MacDhui’s reaction.

Mr Peddie nodded again and said – “Ah, well I’ve no doubt he’ll put her right again,” and went out after Constable MacQuarrie.