Читать книгу The Battle Within - Philip Gibbs - Страница 11

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Dr. Haddon, whose practice radiated out from Ashleigh to about fifteen miles in any direction, drove himself about by day and only relied on his wife for night calls. Being an absent-minded man because his thoughts were apt to concentrate on odd ideas which came into his head, he sometimes forgot addresses of his patients and, what made things more difficult, sometimes forgot their names, so that before the advent of Mrs. Bellairs, who came to help him, he had to telephone back to his wife from some public-house or garage to put himself right. Of course, Irene laughed at him, but that didn’t matter as he liked her laughter.

Punctuality was not his strong point. He was held up on the road at times by the sight of a rare bird whose nest he located in a wayside hedge or thicket through a pair of field-glasses which he carried for that purpose. He was also held up longer than he ought to have been by games with small patients who liked this tall burly man because he treated them on the level and was very good at conjuring tricks. Then, again, he lingered in conversation with any patient of unusual intelligence or interesting character, especially if he came across anybody who shared his passion for Bach or eighteenth-century music. It was a family joke against him that he had answered an urgent call from an elderly colonel who had been taken ill at Burley Cross, twelve miles from Ashleigh Heath, and after spending three-quarters of an hour with him, talking about the last war, had departed without enquiring about his illness. The Colonel himself had spread this story about the countryside as a first-class joke, but confessed that Dr. Haddon’s visit had done him a power of good and brought down his blood-pressure to normal.

It was this familiarity with her husband’s absent-mindedness which prompted Mrs. Haddon to give him a reminder when he drove his car out of the garage one morning, after the capture of Tunis and Biserta.

“Don’t be late for lunch if you can help it, John. That young American is coming.”

“What young American?” asked Dr. Haddon vaguely.

Mrs. Haddon jeered at him.

“Don’t say you’ve forgotten. That boy who bears our name and has the blood of your disreputable ancestors.”

“Oh lord, yes. Confound the fellow. Still, I quite agree we have to be civil to him. I’ll be back at one o’clock or thereabouts. Don’t hold up lunch if I’m a little late:”

Mrs. Haddon, who was talking through the window of the doctor’s car, game him a little slap on the cheek.

“Oh, yes, I know what that means. You’ll play tiddly-winks with Timothy Martindale; you will discuss the character of Stalin and the Red Revolution with Vera Narishkin; you will talk for an hour with that doddering old General on the coming invasion of Europe; and you’ll not give a single thought to an earnest young American who is coming down from London specially to see you.”

“My family holds me up to ridicule and contempt,” said the doctor. “No man is a prophet in his own country. And, oh lord, I’ve forgotten my box of tricks.”

His box of tricks included his stethoscope and other instruments. It was brought forth by Mrs. Bellairs, who came rushing out of the front door with it.

“Just in the nick of time,” she cried. “Oh dear, oh dear, what is the good of my orderly mind. Are you sure you have your list of appointments?”

“Certainly I have,” said Dr. Haddon, feeling in his fob pocket for a slip of paper.

“Mrs. Stripling 9.15; old Mother Longmore 9.40; Betty Cuddingford 10.15; the Loveday lass 11; Vera Narishkin ... Lydia Allison. God help me!”

He groaned heavily as though he would find these patients intolerable.

“Oh, yes, we know all about it,” said Mrs. Haddon. “They only send for you because they love you.”

She waved her hand to him as he started the car and drove slowly down the drive.

His car was almost the only one on the road, apart from the bus to Farningham, which went thundering by within an inch of the hedge. He picked up a Canadian soldier who wanted a lift as far as Bulford.

“How are things going?” asked the doctor, by way of friendly conversation.

A nice-looking fellow, he thought, glancing at this young man in khaki with a corporal’s stripe on his arm.

“Going all right in Tunisia,” said the Canadian. “The Jerries haven’t a chance of escape.”

“No; it looks as if we had got them this time. After that, what?”

The Canadian laughed.

“Then it will be our turn. The invasion of Europe at last. It’s time we did a bit of fighting. Some of us have been here three years fooling round. Too many girls. Too much beer. Too long an exile for those with families. A bit of a strain on morale.”

“Standing the strain pretty well?” asked Dr. Haddon good-naturedly.

The Canadian laughed again.

“Not too badly. I’ve been attending classes and other things. It helps to pass the time. Besides, I’m going to get married before there’s a chance of getting killed. One has to get all one can out of life these days. The future is very uncertain for everyone.”

He spoke with a good accent and seemed an educated young man. Before the war, he told the doctor, he had been a bank clerk in Toronto. He would never go back to that job.

“Thanks a lot,” he said, when he got out at Bulford.

“Good luck,” said the doctor.

Two khaki-clad wenches were standing at the cross-roads.

“Any chance of a lift to Farningham?” asked one of them.

“Every chance,” said the doctor. “Hop in.”

They hopped in joyfully.

“My, this is a bit of luck,” said one of them. “We missed the bus by half a minute. Not another for half an hour. What a life!”

“I daresay you get a bit of fun out of it,” suggested the doctor.

The two girls giggled. One of them answered.

“Oh, quite a bit. We went to a dance last night and overslept ourselves this morning. Our commandant will have something to say about it. Strict discipline and all that, you know. Not that I worry.”

“She’s very catty,” said the other girl. “No sense of humour, you know. One of the acid sort. Still, we have a good time on the whole. Most of the girls are good sports, aren’t they, Phyllis? It’s better than serving in a Lyons’ teashop. They’ll never get us back to that kind of job, not if I know it. It’ll be a different world after the war. We girls won’t go back to the same old drudgery.”

“Oh shut up, Jenny,” cried the other girl. “The gentleman doesn’t want to hear your beastly socialism at this hour in the morning.”

“Keep a civil tongue in your head, dearie,” answered her friend. “Unless you want a thick ear.”

They jumped out at Farningham.

“Very kind of you, I’m sure,” said one of those buxom lasses. “Thanks awfully.”

“Take care of yourselves,” said the doctor. “Don’t go to too many dances. Don’t cheek your lady Commandant.”

He liked these passing conversations with those to whom he gave a lift. They were rather illuminating, he thought. They gave him a better idea of England in war time. It brought him into touch with many different types and the spirit of the people. On the whole it seemed to him very high in spirit and as sound as a bell. There was something Shakespearean in the frankness of the woman freed from the old inhibitions of their sex. A good many of them were enjoying the war—the younger crowd in uniform. It was a jolly kind of adventure—a bit rough now and then, and hard on girls who liked privacy and had to harden themselves against free and easy ways of speech—not at all nice at times—but more amusing than serving in little shops or going into domestic service with querulous mistresses. It was the married women with small children obliged to stand, in queues for their daily shopping, anxious about the week’s rations, who were getting sick and tired of the war. Sick and tired for the return of their men and getting a bit overstrained, poor dears.

Dr. Haddon picked up soldiers and sailors and heard strange stories between one village and another. There was a merchant seaman who had been torpedoed five times and made a joke of it.

“They can’t drown me,” he said. “I’m unsinkable. Likely I was born to be hanged.”

He told amazing stories of his ship being bombed in convoy and getting to port with half its crew dead and its engine kept going by wounded men—of whom he was one. His nerve was still unrattled.

The doctor had shaken hands with him, knowing that he was shaking the hand of a man born in a slum but surpassing Hector and Achilles in human valour. There were thousands like him down in Limehouse and in every British port, and with damn bad pay and damn bad conditions, though without them we should all starve and go down in ruin.

The reserve of courage in this country, thought Dr. Haddon as he drove around to pay his morning calls, is super-human. The old tradition surges up in time of war. The spirit of Agincourt and of Drake’s men and the thin red lines of Torres Vedras, and the defence of Ypres when I was there, and the spirit of our men who crawled out of the mud of Passchendæle.

He was a hater of war, having seen the flower of British manhood mown down in the fields of the Somme and smashed to bits in the dull routine of trench warfare and blinded and gassed. Had he not been a young surgeon out there? But he could not go as far as Marlow, the vicar, in Christian pacifism. In any case, Hitler and his gang would have to be destroyed. The enslaved countries would have to be liberated. Of course the war ought never to have happened. We had made the most ghastly mistakes after the last war. Our own folly and carelessness had helped to produce Hitler. It was World War Number II, and it was a struggle to the death on both sides. There could be no compromise; and, as always, the innocent would have to suffer for the guilty—German women and children, good-natured Italians, French civilians bombed by our boys—his son Peter among them—if they happened to be in the neighbourhood of our targets.

A ghastly contrast to this beauty of Nature, thought Dr. Haddon, stopping his car on a grass track outside a cottage gate and looking over a hedge to a field spangled with gold and silver, and to a line of little hills blue in the distance. Outside the garden gate wallflowers were in bloom and their rich scent reached his nostrils. There was going to be a great apple harvest judging from a little orchard here and others he had seen. It was a wonderful Spring, here in England, while the Eighth Army was pounding the enemy in their last strongholds. England was drenched in beauty.

After the war, thought Dr. Haddon, we ought to move forward a step or two in human intelligence. Surely we shall learn something out of these two bloody wars—enough to say, Never again. Enough to control the machines of slaughter. Enough to scotch the sinister brains who only care for profit and power and would lay the world in ruin again for their own megalomania. I wonder—

He pulled himself together, remembering that he had a patient to see—a young girl who was going to have an illegitimate baby and was frightened about it. Poor child. There was a lot of that sort of thing. It was due to the war, of course. What had that soldier said? Something about getting all one could out of life.