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II

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While composing these apparently interminable memoirs there have been moments when my main problem was what to select from the “long littleness”—or large untidiness—of life. Although a shell-shock hospital might be described as an epitome of the aftereffects of the “battle of life” in its most unmitigated form, nevertheless while writing about Slateford I suffer from a shortage of anything to say. The most memorable events must have occurred in my cranium. While Rivers was away on leave only one event occurred which now seems worth recording. The sun was shining brightly and I was giving my golf clubs a rub up after breakfast, when an orderly brought me a mysterious message. Dr. Macamble had called to see me. I had no notion who he was, but I was told that he was waiting in the entrance hall. Let me say at once that I do not know for certain whether Dr. Macamble has “passed to where beyond these voices there is peace.” But, whatever his whereabouts may be at the moment of writing, in October 1917 he was, to put it plainly, a quiet-looking man who talked too much. I will go even further, and suggest that at least half the time he was talking through his hat—that brown and broad-brimmed emblem of a cerebral existence, which he was holding in his left hand when I first encountered his luminous eye in the hall of the hospital.

“Second Lieutenant Sherston?” He grasped my hand retentively.

Now to be addressed as “Second Lieutenant” when one happens to be drawing Army pay for refusing to go on being one, was not altogether appropriate; and the—for him—undiffuse greeting, struck me as striking an unreal note. Had he said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” I should have accepted his hand with a fuller conviction that he was a kindred spirit. But he went from bad to worse and did it again. “Second Lieutenant Sherston,” he continued, in a voice which more than “filled the hall,” “I am here to offer you my profoundest sympathy and admiration for the heroic gesture which has made your name such a ...” (here he hesitated, and I wondered if he was going to say “byword”) ... “such a bugle-call to your brother pacifists.” Here, ignoring my sister pacifists, he relinquished my hand and became confidential. “My name is Macamble. I venture to hope that it is not altogether unknown to you. And I have been so bold as to call on you in the belief that I can be of some assistance to you in the inexpressibly painful confinement to which you are being subjected.” At this juncture the man with whom I was going to play golf paraded impatiently past us, clattering his clubs. “What you must have endured!” he went on, moderating his voice at last, as if he had just remembered that we might be “overheard by an unfriendly ear.” “More than two months among men driven mad by gunfire! I marvel that you have retained your reason.” (I might have reminded him that he hadn’t yet ascertained that I really had retained it, but I merely glanced furtively at my golfing partner, whose back view, with legs wide apart, was to be seen on the strip of grass in front of the hydro, solemnly swinging a brassy at an imaginary ball.) Dr. Macamble now proposed that we should take a little walk together; he very much wanted to discuss the whole question of the “Stop-the-War Campaign.” But I very much wanted to stop being talked to by Dr. Macamble, so I said that I’d got to go and see my Doctor. “Ah, the famous Dr. Rivers!” he murmured, with what appeared to be a conspiratorial glance. He then invited me to go down to Edinburgh and continue our conversation, and I agreed to do so on the following afternoon. I couldn’t very well refuse point-blank, and in any case I was due there for a haircut.

***

The aforementioned assignation was fixed for five o’clock in the lounge of the Caledonian Hotel, but I came down from Slateford by an early afternoon tramcar and spent a couple of hours strolling contentedly about the city, which happened to be looking its best in the hazy sunshine of one of those mild October days which induce mellow meditations. After my monastical existence at the hospital I found Princes Street a very pleasant promenading place. The War did not seem to have deprived Edinburgh of any of its delightful dignity; and when I thought of Liverpool, where I’d wandered about with my worries in July, my preference for Edinburgh was beyond question. The town-dweller goes out into the country to be refreshed by the stillness, and whatever else he may find there in the way of wild flowers, woods, fields, far-off hills, and the nobly-clouded skies which had somehow escaped his notice while he walked to and fro with his eyes on the ground. Those who live on the land come into the city and—if they are sensible people with an aptitude for experiencing—see it as it really is. It always pleases me to watch simple country people loitering about the London pavements, staring at everything around them and being bumped into by persons pressed for time who are part of that incessant procession which is loosely referred to as “the hive of human activity.” All this merely indicates that although I arrived in Edinburgh with a couple of hours to spare and had nothing definite to do except have a haircut, nevertheless I found no difficulty in filling up the time by gazing at shop windows, faces, and architectural vistas, while feeling that I was very lucky to be alive on that serenely sunlit afternoon.

Waiting for Dr. Macamble in the lounge of the Caledonian Hotel wasn’t quite such good value. Life was there, of course, offering itself ungrudgingly as material to be observed and ultimately transmuted into memoirs; but it was lounge life, and the collop of it which I indiscriminately absorbed was—well, I will record it without labouring the metaphor any further. (The word collop, by the way, is inserted for the sake of its Caledonian associations.) I sat myself down within easy hearing-distance of a well-dressed yellow-haired woman with white eyelashes; she was having tea with an unemphatic-looking Major with a sandy moustache. The subjects undergoing discussion were Socialism, Pacifism, Ramsay MacDonald, and Snowden, and the Major was acting as audience. His fair companion was “fairly on her hind legs” about it all. Pacifists, she complained, were worse than the Germans. As for MacDonald and Snowden—“I only hope that if they do start their beloved revolution,” she exclaimed, “they’ll both be strung up to the nearest lamppost by the soldiers they are now trying to betray.”

“Well, Mabel, I suppose you’re old enough to know your own mind,” replied the stalwart and sleepy-eyed Major.

“And what will you do, Archie, if there’s ever a revolution?” she enquired.

“Oh, hide, I suppose,” he answered.

“Really, Archie, I sometimes wonder how you came to be my cousin!” She handed him back his automatic cigarette lighter, which he closed with a click, looking as if he’d prefer to be competing for the scratch medal at Prestwick or Muirfield instead of hearing Pacifists consigned to perdition. The hotel musicians then struck up with Mendelssohn’s (German) “Spring Song,” to which she was supplying a self-possessed and insouciant tra-la-la when Dr. Macamble trotted in with profuse apologies for being late.

The outspoken utterances of Mabel had at all events made me feel decidedly “pro-Macamble,” but I took the wise precaution of moving him a few tables farther away from her. I assumed that after hearing even a modicum of his antiwar eloquence she would be more than likely to join in, and might conceivably order her Cousin Archie to frog-march the Doctor out of the lounge; in fact, I feared that she might regard it as her duty to break up our little Pacifist meeting, thinly attended though it was.

Before rendering my account of the meeting I must explain that Macamble was a doctor not of medicine but of philosophy—a Ph.D. in fact—which may have been the cause of his being so chock-full of ideas and adumbrations. Urbanely regarding him across an interval of eighteen years I find him quite unobnoxious; but I must candidly confess that I obtained no edification while bearing the brunt of his fussy and somewhat muddled enthusiasms. After listening to him for about an hour and a half I could be certain of one thing only—that he believed himself to be rather a great man. And like so many of us who maintain that belief, he had so far found very few people to agree with him in his optimistic self-estimate. I suspect that he looked on me as a potential disciple; anyhow he urgently desired to shepherd me along the path to a salvation which was, unquestionably, the exact antithesis to Army life. Transmogrified into a music-hall ditty, Macamble’s attitude to army officers would have worked out something like this:

I couldn’t shake hands with a Colonel;

And Majors I muchly detest:

All Captains to regions infernal

I consign with both gusto and zest:

To Subalterns blankly uncivil,

I pronounce as my final belief,

That the man most akin to the “divvle”

Is that fiend—the Commander in Chief.

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I could manage to be amused by that sort of artless intolerance; but when “about the second hour,” he became disposed to speak disparagingly of Rivers, I realized that he was exceeding the limit. How much he knew about Rivers I didn’t enquire. What he did was to infer that a subtly disintegrating influence was at work on my Pacifist zealotry, and after these preliminaries he disclosed the plan which he had formulated for my liberation from the machinations of that uniformed pathologist. With all the good will in the world, Dr. Macamble advised me to abscond from Slateford. I had only to take a train to London, and once I was there he would arrange for me to be examined by an “eminent alienist” who would infallibly certify that I was completely normal and entirely responsible for my actions. The word “alienist” was one of many whose exact meaning I had never identified in the dictionary. (I dimly associated it with a celebrated Italian named Lombroso, who probably wasn’t an alienist at all.) Macamble’s man, he explained, was well known through his articles in the press; but unfortunately it transpired that it was the popular rather than the pathological press—the Daily Mail, in fact. I suppose I ought to have waxed indignant, but all I thought was, “Good Lord, he’s trying to persuade me to do the dirty on Rivers!” Keeping this thought to myself, I remained reticent and parted from him with the heartiest of handshakes. Did I ever see him again, I wonder? And have I been too hard on him? Well, I can only say that nothing I can do to Dr. Macamble could be worse than his advice to me—had I been imbecile enough to act on it.

***

On a pouring wet afternoon a day or two later I was in the entrance hall of the hospital, indulging in some horseplay with another young officer who happened to be feeling “dangerously well” at the moment. It was the hour when visitors came to see patients, and my somewhat athletic sense of humour had focussed itself on a very smug-looking brown felt hat, left to take care of itself while the owner conversed with elaborate cheerfulness to some “poor fellow” upstairs. I had just given this innocuous headgear a tremendous kick and was in the middle of a guffaw when I turned and saw Rivers standing just inside the door with a heavy bag in his hand. He was just back from leave. The memory of this little episode brings me a living picture of him, slightly different from his usual self. A spontaneous remembrance of Rivers would reveal him alert and earnest in the momentum of some discussion. (When walking he moved very fast, talking hard, and often seeming forgetful that he was being carried along by his own legs.) Standing there in the failing light of that watery afternoon, he had the half-shy look of a middle-aged person intruding on the segregative amusements of the young. For a moment he regarded me with an unreprimanding smile. Then he remarked, “Go steady with that hat, Sherston,” and went rapidly along the corridor to his workroom.

The hat, as I picked it up and restored its contours to their normal respectability, looked somehow as though it might have belonged to Dr. Macamble.