Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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That was the tragic element in Hazzard’s career, the dislike that he inspired, and the persecutions it produced.

He loved his work, and he loved his hospital—almost with that most pathetic love which is despised and flouted by the beloved. Life had the eyes of a beautiful and hostile woman. He asked for nothing but to be let alone, and to be allowed to exercise the passionate devotion of a little man with a big head and a genius for taking trouble. There was not a corner of “Bennet’s” that was not precious and singular to him. He had loved the corner in the physiology lab. where he had sat in a patch of sunlight with his microscope before him, and his bottles of stains and box of slides and coverslips. Hæmatoxylin, fuchsin, methylene blue, they were more than mere colours. The smell of Canada Balsam was a precious perfume. Even the dissecting-room had had a bizarre homeliness, and those trussed-up or prone corpses a mystic significance. He had had qualms, especially over the fishing of a leg or arm out of a locker that reeked of preserved flesh and alcohol.

He loved the wards and the out-patient departments, the smell of humanity and of sick humanity, and all that sense of striving and learning and disentangling, of things done and doing, the adventures into diagnosis, and all the problems of the greatest of the professions. There a something in him went out to the maimed and the halt and the blind, but especially did his heart go out to sick and crippled children. For he had been a crippled child; he knew what a lame foot or a diseased spine or a tuberculous hip-joint meant. If there was one post that he coveted and saw himself filling in the future, it was that of physician to the Children’s Out-patient Department. A sick child moved him, stirred the bowels of his compassion.

Just that! But because of his very keenness and his genius, and because these virtues were displayed in an ugly and rather grotesque little body, he was disliked and actively disliked. Youth is apt to be both crude and cruel. These rather raw young men, who, in some quite marvellous way, would mellow and become general practitioners, and husbands and fathers, saw in Hazzard nothing but a little chopping-block, a swat, a horrid little sedulous ape. He was shabby. They doubted his physical cleanness, whereas he was cleaner than any of them. His hair grew in an unfortunate way. His black boots were very much boots. He always seemed to wear the same suit or the same sort of suit, cloth of a dingy blackness peppered with grey. He was not a social creature, and he was not allowed to be sociable. The telling of a dirty, sexual tale left his face blank. Life and his craft meant for him a patient asceticism which none of these full-blooded young males understood or troubled to understand.

Also, there are forms of persecution which, though passive, are as potent in discouraging enthusiasm as the more aggressive methods. To ignore may mean the depression and the discouragement of the person ignored.

When Ardron and his four clinical clerks set out to accompany and to follow Sir Dighton Fanshawe round his wards, Christopher was at the tail of the little procession, but on the day of the crushing of his hat, Moorhouse, who was one of the four clerks, hung back to keep Christopher company. Climbing the stone stairs side by side, with Moorhouse’s long legs in sympathy with Hazzard’s short ones, they suggested the big and the little dog. Moorhouse was all that Hazzard was not, slow of speech, comely in a man’s way, with a sleepy, blue-eyed dignity that took life in its stride. He came of old stock. He made you think of a field of wheat gold in the ear, oak trees, dogs, horses, a chair in the sun, the brown throat and arms of a cricketer at the wicket in the heat of a July day.

They said nothing to each other on the stairs. Moorhouse was not a man who said things. With his easy, deliberate poise he put himself in a certain position, and the picture needed no label.

Sir Dighton had paused to look at some specimens on the table between the glazed doors of the wards and the first red coverleted bed. He had made his little, debonair bow to the Sister. Two nurses stood like mutes. A ray of sunlight touched old Fanshawe’s white head.

“Number seventeen’s?”

Ardron, jerkily polite, held up the glass.

“Yes, sir.”

Sir Dighton, doing everything with that air of distinction, and with a faint smile of profound sagacity, turned to his four clerks.

“Gentlemen, you see that urine.”

He had a velvet touch. His voice and manner transmuted even the most indelicate substance into refined gold. It was his custom to address his clerks as “Gentlemen,” and they too—in a sense—were transmuted from mere conglomerations of crude young tissues and secretions into something that many of them were not. Often he would address a favourite with an air of fatherly intimacy. “Moorhouse, will you listen to that heart.” Moorhouse was Moorhouse to him. To Ardron he gave the Mr. because Ardron was a Mr. and nothing of the Esquire. When picking out one of the others he would indicate him with his eyes, and if the youth was to his liking, honour him by remembering his name.

“What do you see there, Moorhouse?”

Moorhouse hesitated and smiled.

“Urates, sir.”

Old Dighton gave Moorhouse one of those tolerant and half-humorous glances which said, “My dear boy, take your time; think again,” but Moorhouse remained serenely mute, though Hazzard who stood next him, felt moved to pinch his arm and to whisper, “Pus, Moorhouse, pus.” One of the other clerks, Soames, had the beginnings of a simper on his soapy face. Milord Moorhouse might be the best-dressed and the best-looking fellow in the hospital, but he was a bit slow in his reactions and in the superficial smartness of the game of bedside ragging. You felt that you had shot your cuffs and scored a point when you wiped Moorhouse’s stately eye.

Sir Dighton’s glance travelled and fell on Hazzard. He did not address Hazzard, but looked at him challengingly.

“Urates, sir.”

Sir Dighton glared faintly, and passed to Soames, and Soames the soapy concluded that if that little beast Hazzard had said “Urates,” that cloud of sediment must consist of urates.

“Urates, sir.”

Sir Dighton went no further.

“Pus, gentlemen, pus.”

His glance rested for a moment on Hazzard as though there was some purulence in that small person. He spoke to Ardron.

“Your clerks ought to know that, Mr. Ardron.”

Ardron, too, glanced at Christopher. Little Snob! Backing up Moorhouse. No. 17 was Hazzard’s case, Ardron was sure of that, and Hazzard knew quite well what was in the test glass.

The progress continued. Leading the way, and followed by his house-physician and the Sister, his four clinical clerks, and sundry students who had gathered to listen to his words of wisdom, Sir Dighton Fanshawe went round the ward. He would pause at the foot of each bed, and combining the airs of the beau with the dignity of the sage, repeat the same question, “Well, how are we to-day?” He did not listen to the patient’s answer. Time was precious and clinical facts are of more importance than feelings, and the case sheet and the temperature chart and his house-physician’s report were the realities that mattered. If the ward happened to be a female one Sir Dighton was more of the beau; in a male ward he was the benign autocrat. When a case was new to him he would sit down on the edge of the bed, ask a few questions, and then call upon the clerk who was responsible.

“Whose case is this?”

“Mine, sir.”

The first new case happened to be Soames’s. It was that of a woman of forty or so, with very red lips and a patch of bright colour on either cheek, who lay propped against three pillows, and looked at Sir Dighton with anxious, cow-like eyes. The diagnosis was almost obvious to the experienced eye.

“Have you examined this case, Mr. Soames?”

“Not yet, sir. She was only admitted——”

“Very good. Begin.”

Soames, who was apt to get flustered in spite of the soapiness of soul and skin, lugged at the stethoscope in his pocket, dropped it on the bed, and with his eyes invited the Sister to deal with the patient’s nightdress. Sir Dighton put up a hand.

“Mr. Soames, too much hurry. Eyes, man, eyes. Observe, observe.”

Soames, smirking faintly, stared at the woman, whose eyes were fixed like those of a sick animal on old Dighton.

“What do you observe, Mr. Soames?”

Soames was mute, and Sir Dighton turned to Hazzard, who happened to be next him.

“You?”

The word had a curtness, and there was a slight tremor of Hazzard’s upper lip. But he had no compunction about putting Soames in his place, for Soames was not Moorhouse.

“The colour of the lips, sir; the redness of the cheeks; the position of the patient.”

Old Dighton’s eyes narrowed.

“Well, what would you be led to suspect?”

“Heart, sir, mitral disease.”

Fanshawe gave Hazzard a nod of the head, and a glance of cold and curious dislike. Probably he was not conscious of the glance’s temper. There was too much cleverness in this little fellow; like a monkey he was rather irrepressible.

“Never jump at conclusions, Mr. Hazzard. Distrust your inner consciousness.”

Hazzard’s lips moved as though he were about to answer, but old Dighton’s face was turned again to the patient, and the snub spread like a smoke ring to be sensed by the other young men about the bed. Hazzard stood very still, with his eyes on the woman’s face. She had a something that reminded him of his mother.