Читать книгу The Dark House - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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Man is a jealous beast, and Mr. Bernard Steering, strolling across the college court towards the hospital’s back entrance, saw that familiar and detested figure ten yards ahead of him. Bernard Steering was a very tall young man, supercilious, sandy, with pale blue eyes that never varied their expression. He was a dressy person, cool, debonair, and assuming even in the presence of his intimates an air of infallibility. He walked with his hands in his trouser pockets, and stared at Richmond’s back. That was the offence. This other man had always been a step ahead of him, beaten him on the tape, and but for Richmond Mr. Steering would have felt himself facile princeps. Not that this tall, cold-eyed lad had taken the rivalry as casually as he demonstrated a case to his dressers. He cultivated a casual, princely facility in everything that he did, but the whole hospital knew that Steering had worked his eyelids red to snatch from Richmond that final and most notable of prizes, the Lester Medal.

And he had failed.

Yes, that damned fellow Richmond had always been in his way from the first year to the fifth, in chemistry and physics, in anatomy and physiology, in surgery and medicine. And he was still obstructed by him in the competitive scramble for possible honours. Sir Humphrey Jolland had chosen Richmond as his house-surgeon, and Steering had had to be content with an appointment under old Hobson, that garrulous, hairy and rather ineffectual veteran who blew upon his scalpels and was known, with irreverence, as Old Sepsis.

An iron bridge spanned the deep area between the courtyard and the hospital building, that cliff of yellow brickwork smudged with London soot, which many a country doctor riding his horse or driving his gig along English lanes remembered with affection. Strange, that this rather gaunt Georgian building should retain for its students a glamour and mystery, and Richmond, pausing to look up at those rows of windows regimented under the smoke-blackened stone cornice, was conscious on this spring day of the potent smell of the place. Not that its smell was singular, but a plurality of odours, floor polish and carbolic acid and soap and the scent of flowers on the ward tables, the vinous odours of the dispensary, the stuffy reek of unclean humanity and of foul clothes associated with the out-patient and casualty departments. The scent of blood could be included, and those other more sinister smells attached to the dissecting and the post-mortem rooms. Love was a word that the hard young pragmatist in Richmond had not yet learned to use with understanding, either about places or about people, but Richmond’s momentary loitering upon the steps of the iron bridge brought his enemy level with him.

“Morning, J.C. How are miracles this morning?”

Steering was the hospital’s wit, as well as its Beau Brummel, and if Richmond’s initials had always suggested the rather obvious jest, the supercilious young man gave to it the distinction of wearing an eye-glass. Richmond smiled at him. It was easy to smile at the fellow whom you had licked, and could lick again if needs be.

“Ever notice how bricks are laid, Steering?”

“Does it matter?”

“Oh, just a question of observation. We’re taught to cultivate it.”

Steering lounged up the steps and turned about.

“Oh, by the way, did that case in Victoria survive?”

“Which one?”

“One of Sir Humpty’s latest eggs. Brittle shells, some of them, what?”

“No, it didn’t.”

“We rather thought it wouldn’t. Nasty, dirty thing to interfere with. Miracles don’t always materialize, J.C. You can tell Sir Humpty that, with our compliments.”

Richmond was still smiling.

“Thanks, I will.”

Steering might now be floating ice to Richmond, but if it did not chill him, it may have helped him to divine the prime source of professional prejudice, professional jealousy. Doubtless it is irritating to established complacency to discover its ordered world thrown into confusion by some bounder with a new theory. Adaptation demands effort. If you have given years to the doing of difficult things you become cautious, and perhaps too ready to defend the city of convention. Moreover, most men are so ready to accept that which is fed to them, and may resent a change of diet. The eternal why is both a purge and a provocation, and Richmond had a curious and a questioning mind. He could not be hoodwinked with words, sonorous and reverberating phrases that explained nothing. Professional complacency! Was not the tale still told of an eminent physician who, when the wooden stethoscope first came into favour, appeared in his ward with one of the new, silly trumpets stuck in the breast-pocket of his coat and adorned with a rose. That was all the damned thing deserved, to carry a buttonhole and display scorn. The new can always be made to appear impertinent and ridiculous.

Richmond found his dressers waiting for him in Peel ward, three young men as unlike in their faces as they were in their capacities. A number of new cases had been admitted, and Richmond portioned them out to his dressers, but before these youngsters touched them, he examined each case himself. Damage could be done by clumsy and unenlightened handling, and Richmond had no faith in two of his three students. To Snaith, of the eager head and the bright eyes he could allow some latitude, for Snaith was sensitive and had hands, but Bullock and Webster were rather turgid oafs, particularly Bullock. Richmond took trouble with his dressers, for he could teach these younger men many things, yet he would sometimes wonder whether the effort was worth while. Snaith would make a surgeon, but the other two were more fitted for driving cattle.

“Bullock.”

“Hallo.”

Bullock halloed to everything. He had no manners, and like many large and muscular males was devastatingly stupid, and just as devastatingly self-satisfied.

“Come here. See anything?”

Richmond was curt with this young steer. He had drawn back the bedclothes from one of the new cases and turned up a red flannel night-shirt. The man’s abdomen lay exposed, rising and falling as he breathed. The skin had a faint, yellowish tinge, and the face on the pillow was starved and sharp.

“Observe anything?”

Bullock stood at the bottom of the bed and stared.

“Bit adipose, isn’t he?”

Richmond’s smile was revealing.

“Snaith. Just a moment.”

Snaith came across from a neighbouring bed, and stood beside the hulking Bullock.

“What do you see?”

Snaith’s bright glance ran over the figure on the bed.

“Skin rather yellow. Some emaciation. Distinct swelling there under the right ribs.”

“Good! Now, hands, feel, gently. Can you see anything now, Bullock? Or only just what you call fat?”

Bullock’s heavy lips moved.

“Lipoma.”

Richmond’s mouth was scornful.

“Like your head! No use guessing. If you can’t learn to see, what’s the use?”

John Richmond’s college window looked towards the west, and he kept his table in this window, and upon it his microscope, notes and books. It was a sunset window, for over the London roofs and chimneys he could watch the sky flush or fade in all its moods and cloud drapings. Richmond was no mere sedulous ape, and to say that the sunset was a study in red or gold was neither adequate nor pure poetry, and from that window the young doctor discovered all manner of colour shades in the sky, and with the same exactness of observation that would have chronicled the characteristics of a skin-rash. At this period of his life he saw things photographically and without mystery. The colours of the spectrum were scientific verities, but he did not see God in the spectrum.

He possessed a biggish bookcase full of books, and some of his confrères twitted him on the contents of his library. It was the Darwin-Huxley age, and Richmond was all Darwin and Huxley. Certainly, he had laughed and exulted a little over Huxley’s smashing of Soapy Sam. But there were other volumes on Richmond’s shelves that dealt with architecture, the Italian and Flemish painters, history, Gibbon, Cobbett, and a few of the poets. All John Keats was there. At night a colza lamp with a green shade would stand upon John’s table. He was more interested in what could be found in books than in the smutty stories of the college common-room.

He sat and watched the sunset fade and die on this particular spring evening, and as he watched it his spirit leapt over roofs and chimney pots to the wild west country where he and brother Lawrence had bathed, and tickled trout, and raided orchards, and scrambled about the moors. He was fond of brother Lawrence, and admired him, for Lawrence possessed some of the graces that he himself lacked, social gifts, a conversational cleverness. There was more of the Celt in Lawrence Richmond. John dined once a month at his brother’s house, and maybe John realized that Lawrence and his decorative wife were people with ambitions that were subtly different from his own. Already, the Lawrence Richmond dinner-parties were occasions of distinction where Lawrence’s wines and his witty tongue, and his wife’s blonde beauty, pleased people who could be useful in the social adventure. Not that Lawrence was a snob. He was an æsthetic person who preferred to play upon the most perfect of pianos, and who liked his colours exquisite and rich. The Law was a ladder which might carry him to the notable and oratorical House to which so many lawyers tend. Lawrence was a master of words. The danger was, though John did not know it, that his facile, brilliant brother was a young man in a perilous hurry.

When the sunset had faded, and the branches of the big plane tree in the college court had become black against the cold sky, John Richmond went down and supped in the college dining-room. He might be a laconic person, attending to the business of eating, and not easily provoked into argument, but he was popular with these other men. They accepted his silences in granting him his significance. Appealed to, he was always ready to help a confrère who might be worried about a case.

“I say, J.C., I wish you’d have a look at a woman in Alexandra. She was sent in as a gastric ulcer.”

“And isn’t?”

“I’m not sure. Symptoms pretty acute. I don’t want to bring old Murray round unless it’s urgent.”

“All right. After supper.”

“Thanks, muchly.”

Richmond having visited the case in Alexandra, examined the patient and reassured the young and worried house-surgeon, returned to his room, lit the lamp, drew the curtains and sat down to read. Sir Hector Ross had just published a monograph on the latest developments in antiseptic surgery, and Richmond sat at his table, making notes as he read. If he was happy in such work, that was its justification. He had the fierce pride of the craftsman. In half an hour he would turn down the lamp, put on his hat, and set out in search of exercise.

Ex-Sergeant Ruggles, squatting in his box, spectacles on nose and laboriously enjoying an account of the latest murder horror, heard footsteps approaching the Gifford Street door. They were crisp and hurried footsteps, suggesting to Ruggles a young husband in a hurry. They stopped, and the bell above his head jangled. Ruggles put his paper aside, and emerging from his box, opened the door. There was a gas lamp over the door, and its light played upon a tall, slim gentleman wearing a top-hat and a fashionably cut grey overcoat.

“Evening, Sergeant. Dr. Richmond in?”

Ruggles grinned. He recognized the gentleman.

“Yes, sir, not gone out yet. You’ll find him upstairs. Y’know the room.”

“Second floor, first on right.”

“That’s it, sir. You’re just in time. The doctor takes his walk at nine.”

Lawrence Richmond crossed the vestibule and made towards the stairs, and Ruggles, watching him rather like a shrewd and hairy old dog with his head on one side, told himself that Mr. Lawrence Richmond seemed tucked up about something. Yes, rather like a nervy sub. just before a bayonet charge, when bullets were going plop into other fellows’ bodies. Ruggles returned to his box and his paper.

John Richmond was not conscious of having heard footsteps in the corridor. Someone was in the room, and he turned sharply in his chair.

“Hallo, Lawrie! You came in like a ghost.”

As he raised the lamp shade and looked at his brother, the words that he had uttered seemed to fit themselves to Lawrence’s face. Lawrence Richmond was a handsome fellow, dark as a Cornishman, with a narrow face amplified by what were known as Piccadilly Weepers. He was apt to be a little over-mannered, and as his enemies described it—“Too Frenchy.” He had much more of the woman in him than had John. He had taken off his glossy hat, and his black and wavy hair looked as glossy as the hat. His brown eyes were bright in a face that concealed some inward strain.

“Still the slave of the lamp, John.”

He sat down in his brother’s one arm-chair, and placing his very beautiful hat on the floor beside him, unfastened his coat, and feeling in an inner pocket, produced a gold-washed cigar-case.

“Mind if I smoke, my dear fellow? Try one. A Sir Jonathan Harvey recommendation.”

John was standing by the table with his back to the light, observing his brother. He saw that the long, delicate fingers were faintly tremulous as they handled the cigar-case. Lawrence appeared to be suffering from some secret excitement, an excitement that over-stimulated him, and exaggerated all his little mannerisms.

“Sorry, Lawrie, but you know my idiosyncrasy.”

“Still cigar-shy?”

“Yes, they lay me out. I can smoke three pipes one after the other, and not feel the effects.”

“Well, smoke your pipe.”

Lawrence lit his cigar, and putting the case away, lay back in the chair, and crossed one leg over the other. He wanted to appear at ease, and he wasn’t. His cocked right foot jogged up and down.

“We have always been pretty frank with each other, Jack.”

John Richmond sat down astride the chair he had been using.

“We have. Good reasons.”

“Thanks, old chap. Well, I’ll come to the point. I want you to help me, if you will.”

“Of course. And how?”

Lawrence lay back, blowing smoke.

“I want your financial backing for a week. I suppose you won’t object to making a hundred pounds?”

“Hardly. But——”

“Oh, I’ll explain. I have been given private information about a new mine, and I backed myself to take up shares. It’s a big thing, but I find I’m just short of my guarantee. I want cover for a week.”

“How much?”

“Could you manage a thousand?”

John’s eyes narrowed a little.

“A thousand!”

“Yes. You see, this is a confidential affair. I don’t want to have to go to my bank. If you could do this for me, I can promise you——”

“Look here, Lawrie, you’re not in Queer Street?”

“Good heavens, no, my dear man. I just need this extra bit to bring off the big thing. You’ll have your money back, with a pretty profit, in a month.”

“I shall have to sell out.”

“Well, you can re-buy again, and more. Can you manage the thousand?”

“Yes, if I realize all I have.”

“My dear chap, I knew you would trust me. I came to you because of that. You see, in my position, one likes to keep secrets in the family. By the way, have you a broker?”

“My financial affairs hardly require——”

“Oh, well, go to Bird & Massingham. Sound people. I’ll write down their address. A pen, thanks, and an envelope. There you are. What’s your money in?”

“Railway debentures.”

“Saleable in an hour. Bird & Massingham might arrange for you to let me have a cheque in a day or two. I suppose I had better send you an IOU.”

John Richmond took the pen and envelope from his brother, and placed them on his table.

“Hardly necessary between us, is it, Lawrie?”

His brother laughed, and putting out a hand, patted John’s sleeve.

“No, hardly, when one remembers all the scrapes we have been in together. Now, I ought to be getting home. I have some stuff I brought back from the office, a rather complicated case. Walking?”

“Yes, it’s my hour.”

“Come along. Walk my way.”

Ruggles let them out into Gifford Street, and glancing at the half-crown Mr. Lawrence Richmond had left in his palm, was sure that the doctor’s brother was a real toff, full of money and easy with it, as a gentleman should be.

John Richmond walked with his brother as far as Lancaster Gate, and there they parted, Lawrence, debonair, and carrying any obligation that had been placed upon his shoulders with the air of a man who had conferred a favour. After all, John was his younger brother and Lawrence had no mean opinion of himself. Success had come to him so easily that he had learnt to play the part of the man of fortune, even when a too-sanguine faith in his own cleverness had made him forget that other men might be equally clever and more unscrupulous. He stood under a street lamp, lighting a second cigar, his hair as glossy as his hat. It might be considered bad form for a professional man to smoke in a public street, but, after all, it was half-past nine, and Lawrence had saved his face.

“Good night, Jonathan. I’ll do the same thing for you some day when you want a lease in Harley Street.”

He smiled at his brother, and they parted, and John Richmond walked back towards the Marble Arch, vaguely dissatisfied with the evening’s adventure. Had Lawrence been more worried than he had seemed? Undoubtedly, he was worried about this affair. A gamble? Yes, but Lawrence was a clever beggar, and knew people who were wise as to the world’s affairs. He had always trusted Lawrence.

Good heavens, was he doubting his brother’s good faith? That was inconceivable. Lawrence was the last man to take advantage of him, especially when he knew how precious that money was. John hated meanness, a grudging gesture, and discovering these in himself, was challenged, and to counter the challenge he walked back to St. Martha’s, and sat down and wrote a letter to Messrs. Bird & Massingham, instructing them to sell his railway debentures, promising to forward the certificates, and giving his brother’s name as a reference.

John carried the letter downstairs and passed it to Ruggles.

“Post this for me, Ruggles.”

“Now, sir?”

“Yes, it’s important. It won’t take you three minutes.”

“Very good, sir.”