Читать книгу The Impudence of Youth - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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J.J. spent a part of his last long vacation learning German in Germany, and another month in acting as emergency dispenser to Dr. Dibble of Dewhurst.

Both experiences were not without significance. Since the Germans were leading the world in chemistry, especially so as it applied to the art of the physician, J.J. had decided that he wanted to be able to read German technical journals in their natural language. Also, he and Aunt Jane, after serious discussion, had agreed that he should combine chemistry with medicine.

"It is a matter of money, my dear. Take a ride on the Golden Calf in order to reach heaven."

J.J. was a little surprised at his aunt's realism, or was it cynicism? But he could chuckle over it. Pure science, as a producer of funds, spelt poverty. The world would accord you a salary which any successful butcher would have despised. As for the brewers, beer was more than the man.

"One can be sure of some sort of income."

"How many years will you have to spend at a hospital?"

"About two more, after Cambridge."

"I can manage that all right, John."

"It won't be all on your shoulders. I expect I can get some work coaching the dull."

"That you will never be, my dear."

"Thanks to you, Auntie."

So, J.J. went to Germany as a third class tourist, visiting Cologne, Heidelberg and Munich. Vienna called to him across the mountains, but lack of funds kept him from crossing the frontier into the country of Strauss and Freud. He settled at Mannheim for a month, and was fortunate in finding a family who agreed to give him bed and board in return for English lessons for their two small boys, Gunther and Fritz. J.J.'s host was employed in a great chemical factory at Mannheim, and through him, Pope gained an introduction to one of the firm's younger chemical experts, a big, blond young man who took a liking to the little Englishman.

J.J. returned from Germany, and its cleanliness and its almost frightening efficiency to the England of Epsom, Lords, and the Oscar Wilde scandal. He crossed at night, and arriving at Liverpool Street Station in the chill of the morning, was struck by the filthy platforms and the stink of stale fish. J.J. had read his Cobbett, and he did sometimes wonder whether the world would suffer any catastrophic loss if London, Paris, and Berlin were treated like the Cities of the Plain. As he lugged his bag up the slope of the station approach to catch a bus that would take him to Waterloo, he remembered that he was coming to live in this London, and that no city could be one vast sepsis. Beauty has to live on the Beast.

John James had not been back in Yatley three days when Dr. Dibble of Dewhurst, who had been visiting Miss Plender at Brickwall House, met young Pope strolling across Yatley Green. Young Pope, as Dr. Dibble called him, had become known as far as Dewhurst as something of a prodigy, and Dr. Dibble hailed him.

"Morning, Pope. By the way, do you happen to want a temporary job?"

"What kind of job?"

"My dispenser is laid up. I don't know whether you have done any pharmacology, but you might be able to help me dispense."

J.J. smiled at Dr. Dibble.

"I think I could manage that."

Dr. Dibble was quite impervious to irony. He was a florid, good-natured soul in whom the habit of professional pity had developed into a passion for patronage. Little Pope might be glad of a few guineas and the chance to gain experience in a country surgery.

"Very good. Turn up to-morrow, if you like. Good experience, you know."

Dr. Dibble was walking towards his dog-cart, and J.J. strolled with him.

"And, the remuneration, sir?"

Remuneration! What a word! It smelt of Miss Pope's shop, and Dr. Dibble's blue eyes stared.

"Say two guineas a week, Pope."

"And what hours?"

"Nine till seven. I like someone to be in charge when I am out. Take messages, you know. And you can write up the books, under my supervision."

J.J. Pope stood by the dog-cart with his hands in his pockets. He hesitated, and became aware of Dr. Dibble's surprised and displeased stare. Didn't the youngster appreciate the favour that was being shown him?

"I'll turn up to-morrow."

"Very good, Pope. Punctually at nine."

J.J. bicycled into Dewhurst each morning. Dr. Dibble's house was a big, red Georgian structure in the main street, with a fine doorway and fanlight. A path led to the stable, the offices, and the surgery, and here in this rather stuffy and sunless little sanctum, John Pope made his first contact with general practice. From the first J.J. discovered a certain perfunctoriness in Dr. Dibble's treatment of the poorer patients. Two or three stock bottles were kept from which the obscure Judes and Judies were dosed. Dr. Dibble would even empty into these vessels of utility the contents of unused mixtures.

He was blandly cheerful in explaining the inwardness of the economy to Pope.

"All they need, Mr. Pope, is just something in a bottle. Imaginary ailments, too often. By the way, we cannot afford to dispense tinctures to the club patients. There are so many people who make a hobby of being ill. That is a fact you will discover. When I write or say 'Haust. Omnibus' you will know what to dispense."

J.J. was never a very talkative person, and to Dr. Dibble's air of bland condescension he responded with docile silence. He was earning two guineas a week and gaining experience, but not the kind of experience that Dr. Dibble understood. His food cost him nothing, for Aunt Jane supplied him with a sandwich lunch, and the kitchen sent him in tea. He dispensed the doctor's very limited series of prescriptions, and learned to make them appear more varied by the colouring matter and the flavouring ingredients that were introduced into them. He wrote up the books in his very neat script, took messages, dusted the shelves, bottles and counter, was taught to economise over paper, sealing-wax and string. To all appearances he was a most dutiful and conscientious little drudge, and Dr. Dibble could say to his wife: "Quiet little fellow, Pope. Got a wrong impression of him at first. Thought he was rather bumptious. Those jumped-up lads generally are. As a matter of fact I don't think he could say boo to a goose."

J.J. Pope, after a month's experience of the Dibble practice, was satisfied as to its relativity. What Dr. Dibble did not know, he did not want to know. It was so much more comfortable and tissue-saving to shut the unknown up in a cupboard. J.J. would observe the old chronics whom the doctor treated with a kind of bluff and jocular tolerance. Were pains in the joints imaginary? Were chronic dyspepsia and old man's cough and varicose veins mere figments of fancy? Hardly. Well, what was to be done about it? Burk the issue, indulge in platitudes, talk about anno Domini, or seek, ponder, experiment? J.J. Pope had no doubt as to which inspiration he would choose.

If life moves in an ascending spiral, J.J. arrived during the summer months at one of those curves of consciousness when a sudden more vivid awareness of the loveliness of the world was quickened in him. He could wander up to Yatley Heath on a summer evening, and in that lovely solitude watch the sunset die among the great trees, and the distant hills blaze and grow dim. The almost too poignant beauty of Nature, its complex cunning, its amazing artistry, forced him by contrast to reflect upon the strange ugliness of humanity. He thought of Dewhurst High Street and Dr. Dibble's waiting-room for the poor. Old shrivelled faces, hands worn down like old teeth, ulcerous legs, grotesque bodies. How rarely did he see a lovely face, or a sailing, stately body! How different were the animals, in pelt, grace, completeness! Had man's soul turned sour in him and made him the unappetising creature he appeared, a mockery of what he might be, of the Greek idea? Did not women desire beauty, and yet in the whole of this little country town J.J. Pope could not discover one feminine face that made him desire to look at it again. Maybe there had been grim fun in the Circe legend. Homo sapiens was more presentable when transformed into the shape of a leopard, lion or gazelle.

What of his own little legs? Would they have carried him into the spear-clash of Marathon?

There were moments when he laughed at the undistinguished gaucherie of man, clumsy figures, splodged faces, silly voices, a kind of fleshly bathos that was boring. Had Shakespeare's England been like this? Had the men of Agincourt lacked all swiftness, grace and splendour?

J.J. Pope pondered this problem. Man possessed the earth, and had lost his artistry. Did civilisation make of him what a Lancashire mill made of its men and women, dollop-headed, stunted, bandy-legged dwarfs? And was he seeing life only in terms of matter, as a pagan person seeking profane beauty, and ignoring sacred love? Aunt Jane could not be described as a beauty, and yet——! But, if he was but a neophyte in the Temple of Reality, he could boggle at the old phrases. Beauty is only skin deep. A heart of gold. Handsome is as handsome does! Were not these old phrases excuses invented by man, and woman, with which to drape his or her own plainness? Was there a spirit that transcended the flesh, and shone through the often too shoddy surface? It should show in the eyes, those windows of the soul. J.J. began to study eyes and mouths, and to pay less attention to undistinguished bodies, and for the first time, perhaps he realised that Aunt Jane had rather beautiful eyes set in an old dumpling of a face. However, in his search for the soul in the eyes Dewhurst gave him no very positive data. It seemed very dull of eye, bovine or porcine, and not even dog-like. So many dogs had beautiful eyes.

He had wandered up to Yatley Heath on a brilliant September afternoon. It was a Sunday, but the green wilderness knew not man. And to him came a picture of himself as a small boy dancing naked on the sweet turf, and playing upon an imaginary pipe. Yes, just by this same monstrous old beech tree. Maybe that for a moment he recaptured the spirit of a child, or the divine madness woke in him and protested. Why not follow the impulse, shed his clothes and run naked over the grass? After all, it was no more than bathing in the sea.

A kind of wildness possessed him. He stripped off his clothes, piled them neatly by the beech tree, with the boots on top, and stepped out into the full sunlight. He stretched his arms above his head, stood on his toes, and tried to recapture that pagan memory. It was no use. Like Adam, he had become self-conscious. His wretched rational self was observing and criticising that other, inward, spontaneous creature. He was too much aware of his own little legs. What, prance about on those! Assuredly, they were better concealed in bags, like the bodies of most humans. Also, he found himself jumpy and scared. What if some Yatley lovers should appear and catch him naked? Clothes had made a coward of primitive man.

He was about to dash for his garments when the thing happened. He saw a figure rising in the gloom of the beech walk, a girl's figure, almost like the shape of a mediaeval saint appearing to confound mere mortals. Had she seen him?

J.J. dashed for cover. It was almost a header that he took into a mass of tall fern. He burrowed in and crouched, breathless, as shocked as any prude. For the moment he could not even laugh at himself or at the conventional shame that had sent him running to cover.

He peered. He could see through the fern fronds. He saw the girl standing and gazing at his pile of clothes. Assuredly they had disturbed her day-dreaming. But if those discarded garments surprised and challenged her, her face and figure were perhaps more astonishing to J.J. Pope.

God, if she wasn't the girl he had seen mounting the steps at the college dance to the music of Johann Strauss's waltz!

His was no comfortable hide-out. The fern fronds tickled him; last year's stems pricked his naked feet, and a little assembly of flies suddenly became interested. Yet, so much of him, or perhaps all of him was in his eyes, that he crouched there, gazing, not daring to move, and enduring the pin-pricks of nature. She was wearing an amber-coloured frock, and a straw hat of the same colour which sat on her dense black hair like a golden flower. Again, he was ravished by the slender height and grace of her, and by that lovely little face, so still and serious. She just stood and stared at his heap of clothes. Then, suddenly, she turned about, and her swift black eyes seemed to sweep the green world as though it might hold for her some ugly and sinister thing. Head up, she looked and listened, perplexed, disturbed. Who, why? Then, a kind of child's panic must have seized her. She went gliding back to the path by which she had come, not tumultuously so, but with a brittle and almost resentful pride, turning now and again to look back over her shoulder. Her figure sank away down the hillside into the gloom of the woods. She was gone.

J.J.'s head broke water above the green foam of the fern. A particularly vicious fly, biting at his left arm, was smacked and squashed, and fell into the bracken. He waded out, dashed for his clothes, grabbed them in both arms, and fled back again to cover.

Who was she? Thank God she had not caught him fooling about naked on that carpet of turf!

Lady Strange of Hardacre had a house-party. The Hardacre house-parties were, according to political opponents, infamous, which venomous assertion signified that in Sir Jocelin's day all manner of subtle schemes for the confounding of red ties had been concocted there. Now, things were different. Lady Strange was a tired and a sick woman. Her husband was dead, and their only son Lawrence so very much alive that his mother was proposing to persuade this infantile young man to drink the medicine of marriage. Lawrence had looks, and no brains, which might not have mattered if he had not inherited the soiled shirt of his father.

So, Mildred Marwood and her daughter had been asked to Hardacre, because Lawrence was showing some sense for once in his life in admiring the daughter. If he was a good-natured, amorous fool who had been in trouble with petticoats ever since he was sixteen, then some intelligent woman might be persuaded to manage him.

Sybil Marwood, returning to Hardacre with her strange tale about the abandoned clothes on Yatley Heath, was taken as seriously as she looked. To be somewhat in love with a man whom her intuitions knew to be a fool, was a serious business. She had gone out alone to be alone with her crisis, nor had it been decided for her, and here was an incident that might distract attention.

"My dear, a man's clothes!"

"Yes, all neatly piled in a heap."

"That means——" and Lady Strange recoiled from the naked inference.

"Some silly tramp," said Lawrence. "Perhaps too much vermin!"

"They were clean clothes."

Lawrence laughed.

"Did you explore them, my sweet?"

She was not feeling herself anything of his at the moment. Lawrence was so sure that all women loved him.

"Mightn't it be——?"

"What?"

"Well, suicide or something horrible."

"A corpse dangling!"

What a frivolous fool he was, and yet he roused in her elemental things.

"I think——"

"Certainly," said Lawrence's mother, "the police ought to be told. Don't you agree, Mildred?"

"I do."

So, P. C. Pook of Yatley was informed, and taking his bicycle, went out to explore. He rode and he trudged, pushing his machine up the steep woodland track, and hoping, as human nature does, for a sensation. But he found nothing. A yaffle, winging away into the trees, laughed at him.