James Hilton: Collected Novels (81 page)

“The court would be obliged if the prisoner would pay attention.”

“I beg your pardon,” answered the little doctor, almost inaudibly.

If you were born in Calderbury during the first decade of the twentieth century, David Newcome may well have ushered you into the world, for he had begun to practise in 1899. A year after that he married the daughter of a rural dean; they had one child, a boy. Jessica mixed with the best Cathedral society and was always on the committee of this, that, and the other. David didn’t share many of her interests; sometimes he went to Sunday service with her, but more often not, for a doctor has all the best excuses. He was generous, however, with subscriptions, and some of the Cathedral people called him “our doctor” because of his wife. Perhaps that was really why they also called him “little,” since it was not he who was less than average in height, but Jessica who was more. She was five feet ten, which is tall enough in any woman.

Perhaps too there was endearment in the diminutive, for a film of guilelessness often covered his brown eyes when he looked one over; and when he examined a child, one could think of two children examining each other. He had beautiful hands, simple manners (no manners at all, Jessica sometimes said), and a way of telling the truth if he thought you needed it. “There’s nothing the matter with you,” he would declare, quite simply, and leave you to try another doctor if you wanted coddling. His voice was quiet, and to those who preferred their own he would listen for a while—or, at any rate, seem to be listening. He smoked cherry-wood pipes which he bought for a penny each, and he always wore the same sort of dark blue suit. When he was seen about the town with Jessica people would say, acknowledging her by the adjective they bestowed on him, “There goes the little doctor.”

Calderbury was a pleasant town in those days. I always thought it the right kind of place for civilized living—small enough to be walked through in half an hour, yet of a dignity and importance beyond mere size. Its Cathedral was good fourteenth-century Gothic with later accretions, and the only building of any rival conspicuousness was the massive stone jail, built in the thirties by an architect who took an evidently depressing view of the extent and permanence of Calderbury’s criminality. The town itself, though you had heard of it, was probably one that you missed visiting thirty years ago, if only because the railway had sent it no more than the branch line of a branch line. Yet this was perhaps a lucky chance, for after half a century this line had come to easy terms with the town’s prevalent mood, so that the time-table could conveniently dismiss the inquirer with a sentence: “See trains to Marsland and thence about five times daily.”

Behind the streets rose the Knoll, a wooded hill surmounted by a stone obelisk; the best way to climb it was by the footpath from the steep part of Shawgate, beyond a row of Georgian houses. The little doctor lived in one of these. It was well-built and elegantly proportioned, but rather dark, owing to a cedar tree in the back garden and close-mesh curtains which, for front windows right on the street, were a needed barrier to the inquisitive. Calderbury folk were not more than normally curious, but the doctor’s house stood halfway up the hill and most people climbed slowly, with halts to stare at shop windows, dogs in the gutter, or the butcher’s boy freewheeling dangerously down. Assuredly the interior of Jessica’s drawing-room, if visible, would have added to these attractions. It was very prim and chintzy, with water colors and illuminated mottoes and a model of a church, carved in sandalwood, which a missionary uncle had brought back from Ceylon.

Along the side of the house ran a narrow alley, flanked by rows of white shells, spoils from some unidentifiable seashore. These pointed the way to the doctor’s surgery, which, at some earlier period of its existence, had been a lean-to greenhouse, so that a faintly horticultural atmosphere still clung to its shelving and glass roof, even though the former was crowded with bottles and the latter covered by adjustable paper blinds. It was, if you came to think about it, an exceedingly cramped, unsuitable, and ill-arranged structure, but it had, for David, the incomparable advantage of being a place apart.

Not that, in any conscious way, he had grown tired of Jessica. It was rather that his attitude towards her had leveled into a passive acceptance of her status as his wife; no flicker of impulse disturbed something which was not quite serenity and not quite boredom either. This condition, which some people flatteringly call happiness, David did not call anything; he did not even think about it. He just did his job, year by year, and would have been tolerably content with the wrong sort of wife if only he could have had the right sort of child. It didn’t seem, as the years went by, that Gerald was going to be that. There was a nervousness in the boy that was almost pathological, and none the less so because Jessica regarded it as mere naughtiness. Upon this point of interpretation David and Jessica had their rare quarrels; for the boy’s tantrums stirred David to a degree of patience which to Jessica was an added irritation. Curious foolery, so it was reported by those who had access to overlooking windows, went on in the Shawgate garden between father and son—foolery in which it would have been hard to say whose behavior was the more fantastically infantile. Jessica always thought the whole thing was rather disgraceful. But when Gerald developed one of his notorious crying fits it was David who would devote hours to pacifying him, fighting the enemy with fear-stilling hands; for David knew the terror a child can have when a shadow climbs a wall, or when a train screams through a station, or when, in some story book, a page is turned shudderingly upon a hated picture. And he knew how terror can sometimes fascinate till the dreaded thing is loved and the mind twists into lonely corridors; he knew, too, that nothing is terrible if it is not felt to be. For there was that picture of angels looking like a skull; by some chance the boy liked it, and was overjoyed when David produced a real skull—relic of student days—to give meaning to what had hitherto been a merely entertaining mystery. And David, demonstrating thus, was inspired to do so by an intrepidity he could hardly explain—a desire to establish one thing at least of which the boy should never be afraid; and that was Death.

David’s practice was one of the best in Calderbury, but that was not so very good, and there was nothing sensational about it—thousands of small-town doctors followed a similar routine. The brass plate said “Physician and Surgeon,” and of these functions the latter consisted of emergency work and operations on his own patients at their homes or in the local hospital. In those days there was less specialization and more all-round versatility; David could clip off an appendix or chisel a mastoid with as much confidence as he would invade territory now held by the dentist and the chiropodist. He was, indeed, an excellent surgeon and there was a sense, difficult for the laymen not to misinterpret, in which he
enjoyed
a morning at the operating table. Physicking was the more arduous, since it entailed a daily tour of Calderbury’s narrow streets, the climbing of innumerable dark and steep stairways, and—every evening except Sunday—a two-hour session in the surgery. You did not, unless you belonged to Cathedral society, make a special appointment to see the little doctor. If you were well enough you came, you waited, and you were seen. And if, unfortunately, you weren’t well enough, then a familiar phenomenon turned the corner of the street—the little doctor on a very shabby bicycle, with his bag strapped to a carrier over the rear mudguard. The streets of Calderbury were mostly steep and cobbled, and he rode along them with a degree of peril well orchestrated by experience. He always said that he couldn’t afford to motor, and when it was suggested that he could, he fell back on a second line of defense by saying that cycling gave him hard exercise and that otherwise he would have none. But the truth was probably that he disliked changes and found it hard to make up his mind for them. So he went on cycling throughout the year, in rain and cold wind, and fog; and one day in 1910, after a crash into the back of a farm cart on Lissington Hill, it was wondered amongst Calderbury citizens whether he would buy a car at last. But no; he bought another bicycle. And he had, by the way, a peculiar style of mounting and dismounting: he would wheel the machine a few paces, stare at it intensely for a second or two, and then, with an extraordinary upward and sideways leap, launch himself on to the saddle by means of a projecting “step” on the back axle. I never saw another cyclist do anything like it, and I do not know whether the little doctor was ever taught it in those far-off nineties when people
were
taught cycling, or whether he invented it himself.

He was well liked in Calderbury. He did not waste much time in spoken sympathy, or even seem to worry much if his patients died, though he was sometimes inclined to boast if they didn’t die—as when, for instance, in an epidemic that killed scores of other doctors’ patients, all of his recovered. He spoke of it as if it were some unique athletic feat of his own that deserved a trophy. But this boasting was only juvenile and superficial. Actually he was no more appalled by death than by life—he had seen it too often, and knew from what agonies it could bring release. He had, quite unsentimentally, a sense of human fellowship that passed beyond tearful bedside faces to the sublime muteness of suffering—contact compared with which mere personal grief was exhibitionism. And there was something more, a sense of the sheer awfulness of physical existence that gave him sympathy with every whimpering child, yet also, remotely, with the ills he had to combat, so that he could muse upon the progress of a disease as he might upon the quickening of spring in his own back garden.

A large map of England hung on the wall of the surgery waiting room; Cornwall was yellow, Devon red, Hampshire cream, and you couldn’t tell the difference between Cumberland and Westmoreland because they were so far away at the top. There was an oblong mahogany table with nothing on it but a plantless plant pot and some tattered magazines. On the mantelpiece a gilt clock ticked loudly under a glass dome, and above this hung a framed diploma certifying in a very spidery handwriting something that nobody ever bothered to stand on a chair and read. Fifteen chairs, in fact, were ranged against the four walls, and when they were all occupied the assembly, with the big table in the middle, looked like some fantastic board meeting. You had time to notice all these things while waiting for your turn. And at intervals the inner glass-paneled door would open, a patient would emerge and the next one rise eagerly; and then you would hear two distinctive good-evenings: the one that meant “You’re calmer now, you can go away easier in mind; things aren’t quite so bad, are they?”—and the other that meant “You’re worried, I know. Please tell me all about it; I’m here to help you.” And when, on summer nights, the sunlight slanted in, you could watch the yellow bars climb up from the Isle of Wight to Birmingham—never higher because of the roof across the street; and after they had gone away altogether Susan would come in with a lighted taper for the gas. It burned green and pale, with a hissing sound. And then the inner door opening again…“Good evening”—“Good evening…” Oh, little doctor, please be kind to me when it comes my turn…

So, as a child, one watched and prayed while the Cathedral bells chimed the quarters; and the prayer was answered. He was kind, none ever kinder. Once, when he had pulled out a loose tooth not quite painlessly, he promised a child a real steam engine with real steam. It was absurd, since it would cost far more than the fee, and no one expected anything to come of it—no one except the child, who believed and waited in vain. But a story came from the man who kept the town’s toy shop—that David had been there to buy the steam engine, but that Jessica interfered and wouldn’t let him spend the money. One could hardly blame her.

The trouble with genius (because I think, in some ways there was a touch of that quality in the little doctor) is that it is essentially alone. The most you know is that it is there; you cannot really come to terms with it; it is something that gives and cannot take. There were times when David sat by the bedside of old and dying people, and something passed between them in a finger touch; but you could no more describe it or analyze it than you can trap the wisp of memory that strays from a forgotten dream. And it came again in his jokes with children. Most of these look rather silly on paper, but here is one which was remembered because it shocked Jessica so much. There were mice in the kitchen of the house and she had sent for Tom Riddle, who was Calderbury’s vermin catcher and insect exterminator—a friendly little fellow with a drooping moustache and a squeaky voice. It so happened that he arrived in the midst of a children’s party and announced himself as “the mice man.” This seemed to amuse David enormously and he began a sort of game with the children to find how many other kinds of men would rhyme with “mice man”—“rice man, ice man, nice man,” and so on. Whereupon Teddy Farrell suggested “Christ man” (he was the seven-year-old son of the Arch-deacon and had probably caught the phrase from one of his father’s sermons), and David, laughing like a child himself, began to make a jingle of it:—

Mice man or Christ man,

So long as you’re a nice man
—

but Jessica wouldn’t let him get any further. She thought it was blasphemous, and even more urgently wondered what Teddy would go home and tell his father.

I daresay I was too old, when I first met him, ever to know the little doctor in this childlike and more elemental sense. I was twelve and had for years suffered from recurring bouts of asthma. Other doctors had grown tired of me; patent medicines had been tried in vain. So I went at last to David, and it was then, one summer evening, that I watched the sunlight climb the counties over the map. When my turn came I sat in the leather armchair that had a footrest and a swivel arrangement for tilting backwards, and described (as clearly as only a bright grammar-school boy can) exactly what was the matter with me. Was it very serious? Would I ever get better? Was there a cure?