“How did things go to-day, Robert?”
To reassure her, I forced a smile, at which she nodded with a pleased expression, puffed away her hair and went out.
Miss Ailie’s heart was softer than her prunes! For the next five minutes, no sounds were audible but those of troubled mastication, the clash of Muss’s errant canines upon the flinty fruit.
When nothing edible remained on the table, the meal ended with Beth Dearie rising like the chatelaine of a castle who has dispensed a banquet. We then dispersed to our rooms, Harold Muss absently extracting fish-bones with his forefinger, Lal Chatterjee belching musically, with a kind of Oriental majesty, en route.
“Mr. Shannon.” Hastening after me, Miss Law breathed my name—I had at least broken her of the habit of addressing me as “Doctor,” a title which, with its implications of professional mediocrity, I at this stage thoroughly resented. “I’m not sure of the paper I’ve written on Trypanosoma gambiense … you know the question you set us to-day. It’s so specially interesting to me … Would you … could you be so terribly good as to look it over?”
Although harassed and preoccupied, I had not the strength of will to refuse—somehow that unguarded freshness in her face turned back my rudest answers.
“Bring it along,” I growled.
Five minutes later, sustained by the broken springs of the one chair in the conservatory, I read her paper, while she sat very erect on the edge of a stool covered with cracked waxcloth, her hands clasping her serge skirt across her ankles, watching me with an earnest and anxious air.
“Will it do?” she asked, when I had finished.
The essay was remarkably well done, with several quite original observations, and a series of sketches of the flagellated parasite’s development, extremely accurate. As I considered her, I had to admit that she was not like most of the young women who came in droves to the University, presuming to “ go in” for medicine. Some of these came for a lark, others were pushed forward by aspiring middle-class parents, a few were merely seeking to get married to an eligible young man who would one day, in some suburban community, become a stodgily respectable practitioner, more or less incompetent but financially secure. None had any real talent or capacity for the profession.
“You see,” she murmured, as though to encourage my opinion, “there’s work waiting for me. I am so anxious to get my degree.”
“This is well above pass standard,” I said. “ In fact, it’s extremely good.”
A warmth crept into her soft cheeks.
“Oh, thank you, Dr.… Mr. Shannon. That means everything, coming from you. I can’t tell you how much, we students respect your opinion … and your … Yes please let me say it, your brilliance.… And of course I know what a hard time you had in the war.”
I took off my slipper and examined the crack beginning in the toe. I have tried to explain why I could not wound this strange neighbour of mine; nevertheless I had to have some outlet for my vexed sensibilities. My nature was reserved and secretive, I was not constitutionally a liar, yet under that starry, trustful gaze, some devil, which perhaps I had inherited from my incorrigible grandfather, had begun, in these past weeks, screened by my thoughtful, even melancholy visage, to play outrageous pranks.
During our frequent conversations I had confided in her that I came of a wealthy and aristocratic Levenford family, but that, being left an orphan and preferring medical research to the career mapped out for me, I had been cut off and forbidden my ancestral home.
Her innocent credulity goaded me to further efforts.
For the four years of the war I had led an uneventful, dreary existence as the surgeon of a light cruiser detailed for duty with submarines in the North Sea. Our weekly missions through the enemy mine-fields were probably dangerous enough, but they were unutterably dull. In harbour we drank gin, played van-john, and fished for eels. Once our senior officer was surprised in undress uniform in his cabin with a pretty woman to whom, he subsequently told us, he was teaching the abstruse arts of navigation. Beyond this, nothing broke the monotony until we got into the Battle of Jutland, then everything happened so quickly that there remained only a confused impression of noise and light flashes, of myself sweating between decks in the sick-bay, doing everything badly, with shaking fingers, my inside so turned to water that for a whole week afterwards I suffered abominably from colic.
Naturally, this would not do for Miss Jean Law, so while she hung upon my words I invented a new and more picturesque adventure. We had been torpedoed, marooned for days in mid-Pacific on a raft, there were dramatic scenes of thirst and hunger, we fought off sharks, and so on, through the most horrific hazards, until I woke up, pale but triumphant, a hero in fact, in a South American hospital.
During my present silence she had apparently been nerving herself, and now her eyelashes began to flicker, always a sign of her inner stress.
“I’ve been thinking … I mean … it seems scarcely fair, Mr. Shannon, that I should have learned so much about you … while you know nothing about me.” She faltered slightly, then continued valiantly, her colour high. “I was wondering if, some Saturday, you would care to come out to my home at Blairhill.”
“Well,” I said, rather taken aback. “I’m going to be pretty busy all winter.”
“I realize that. But you have been so kind to me I’d like you to meet my people. Of course,” she added hurriedly, “we’re very simple folk, not like you. My father”—and again she flushed, yet, with the air of one who after long self-communion has taken a difficult resolution, went on bravely—“ is not a very important person. He is … a baker.”
There was a longish pause. Not knowing what to say, or do, I sat rather too still. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, when suddenly she smiled, showing that some spark of humour enlivened her seraphic fervour.
“Yes, he bakes bread. Works in the bakehouse with my young brother and another man. And sends the batches round the countryside by a horse-drawn van. Quite a small business, but old-established, as you might gather. So although you are so well-connected, please don’t look down on us.”
“Good Lord, what do you take me for?” Stung, I threw her a quick glance, but she was quite innocent of any double meaning.
“Then you’ll come.” With a pleased expression she rose, took up her paper from the arm of my chair and stood looking at it. “I’m most grateful for your help with these trypanosomes. Tropical medicine interests me so much.” My inquiring glance provoked a final confidence. “You see … we belong to the Brethren in Blairhill … and … immediately I get my degree … I am going out as a doctor to our settlement … at Kumasi, in West Africa.”
My jaw must have dropped at least an inch. Was there no end to her preposterous capacity to startle me? My first impulse was to laugh, but the look in her eyes, which shone as though she glimpsed the Holy Grail, restrained me. And as I considered her, I had to admit that at least she had the virtue of sincerity.
“How long have you had this wild idea?”
“Ever since I started Medicine. That’s why I went in for it.”
So she hadn’t come to the University for a lark, or to get married, like the others. Even so, I still was unconvinced.
“It all sounds very noble,” I said slowly. “Romantic and self-sacrificing … on paper. But if you did go … I wonder if you really know what you’ll be up against.”
“I ought to.” She smiled calmly. “ My sister has been out there as a nurse for the last five years.”
That silenced me. She paused at the door and with a smile slipped from the room. After an interval during which I sat motionless, staring somewhat foolishly at nothing, and listening unconsciously, rather uncomfortably, to her quiet movements next door, I shrugged my shoulders and, with compressed lips, turned to the consideration of my own situation.
Must I submit to Professor Usher’s direction or should I in my own way, seen as unclear and hazardous, take issue with authority and fate?
Chapter Three
The next day, Saturday, was my weekly holiday, and at six o’clock in the morning, I set out from the sleeping house to walk to the village of Dreem, some twenty-six miles away. The Winton streets were still dark, damp with dew, and except for the footfalls of an early workman, silent and deserted. When the sun broke through I had passed the city outskirts, leaving behind, with relief, the last of the bungalows scattered among market gardens, and was in open country, with the broad estuary of the Clyde reaching away to the sea before me, a luminous, familiar vision which always lifted up my heart.
Towards noon I ate an apple which Miss Ailie, daring her sister’s displeasure, had slipped in my pocket the night before. Then, crossing the river at Erskine Ferry, five miles above the town of Levenford, I entered the stretch of splendid farm land which fringed the waters of the Firth, a terrain richly pastoral, with sheep and cattle grazing on the rolling meadows, enclosed by grey stone walls.
As I approached my destination, the purpose of this journey, naïve though it might be, dominated my mind. All that year, since the University Senate, following my demobilization in 1918, had awarded me the Eldon Fellowship, I had been employed by Professor Usher upon a routine investigation of certain opsonins, a subject interesting to him, but regarded by me as of slight importance—indeed, the entire opsonic theory was already being discredited by advanced scientific workers.
Perhaps I was prejudiced by my deep regard for the previous head of the Department, Professor Challis, who, at the University, had taught and inspired me: a fine old man, now retired, at the age of seventy, to the obscurity of private life. Yet I neither liked nor trusted his successor. Frigid, at times ingratiating, spurred by a rich and socially ambitious wife, Hugo Usher seemed lacking in inspiration of creative force, unprepared to make the sacrifice of blood and tears demanded by research, an opportunist who had achieved his position through a facility for tabulating statistics, but more especially through push, well-timed publicity, and a remarkable capacity for picking other people’s brains. By attaching promising young men to his department, he had acquired a reputation for original investigation—my previous monograph, for example, on Pituitary Function, a small drudgery perhaps, yet painfully achieved, had been published as the joint work of Professor Hugo Usher and Dr. Robert Shannon.
While under this bondage, I had been seeking, with pathetic eagerness, a really significant subject for research, a broad, original thesis, a thesis so unmistakably momentous that it would influence, or even alter, the course of general medicine.
A tall order, naturally. But I was young, only twenty-four, passionately bound up in my work, burning with the painful ambition of a silent and retiring nature, longing, in my poverty and obscurity, to astound the world.
For months I had sought in vain until suddenly, out of the blue, an opportunity presented itself. During that autumn a number of rural areas all over the country had been stricken by a curious epidemic which, perhaps for lack of a better term, had been loosely classified as influenza. The death rate of the infection was high and its incidence wide—in the popular Press there had been sporadic headlines of a sensational nature and indeed, in the medical journals I had traced several reports from America, Holland, Belgium, and other foreign sources recording outbreaks of a comparable condition. The symptoms of acute chill, fever, intense headache, and body pains were of considerable severity, often leading to a fatal pneumonia or, in cases which recovered, to prolonged after-effects of debility. And as I studied them I began to feel that here was a new and different disease, a suspicion which increased as time went on, and sent a current of excitement through my veins.
My interest in this matter was further heightened by the fact that one of the main local centres of the epidemic was the neighbourhood of Dreem. And now, at three o’clock in the afternoon, as I trudged into that little village of low, grey houses, straggling along the bank of a placid stream, always a quiet place, but at present, because of the recent sickness, even more silent and deserted, my eagerness, conquering fatigue, made me go faster. Without pausing for my usual bread and cheese at the one small village tavern, I went immediately to Alex Duthie.
He was in his cottage, seated, pipe in mouth, in his cosy kitchen, while Simon, his little boy, played on the rug at his feet and Alice, his wife, a sedate, matronly woman, rolled out pastry at the table.
Alex was a short, steady-looking man of thirty-five, dressed in clean moleskin trousers, thick socks, and a striped flannel shirt. He greeted me with an impenetrable motion of his head, a flicker rather, of his features, so faint as to be almost invisible, yet which somehow had more welcome than the longest speech. At the same time he took in, not without irony, my tired and dusty appearance.
“Did you miss the bus?”
“No, Alex. I wanted the walk.” Unable to restrain myself, I went on: “I hope I’m not late. Did you … make the arrangements?”
He appeared not to have heard; then, guardedly, he smiled, and removed the pipe from his lips.
“Ye’re a fine chap to choose Saturday afternoon. Most folks like a rest then … especially after what we’ve been through.” He paused long enough to make me anxious. “ But I managed the most of them, for ye. We’ll drop down to the Institute now.”
As I gave an exclamation of gratitude, he got up, went over to the fender and began to lace on his boots.
“Do you fancy a cup of tea, Doctor?” Mrs. Duthie asked. “A body needs something hot, a time like this.”
“No, thank you, Alice. I’d rather get to work.”
“You’re having supper and spending the night with us,” Alex announced, in the tone of one who will take no refusal. “ Sim here wants to show you the new fishing rod I cut down for him.”
He took his peaked cap and we went out. Sim, five years old, a self-contained and silent soul like his father, followed us to the door.
“I’m a confounded nuisance to you, Alex,” I said as we walked down the road. “I wouldn’t have asked you to do this if I didn’t think it was important.”
“Ay,” he agreed wryly. “ Ye’re a bit of a bother, Rob. But as we happen to be fond of ye, we maun put up wi’ it.”
My association with Alex Duthie, and indeed, with Dreem, went back six years, to before the war, when as a lonely student at the University I had forsaken my books to indulge my passion for fishing in those tidal waters where, each spring, the silvery sea trout make a wonderful run. On the river-bank, one evening, Alex had helped me to land a tremendous fish; and in that hectic encounter, in the exquisite triumph which succeeded it, the seeds of enduring friendship had been sown. Although a working man, being employed as head herdsman by the Dreem Farms Company, Duthie was locally a highly respected figure and for several years past had been elected to the office of “provost” of the little community. His manner could be difficult at times and his tongue, when he used it, was often rough, but never once had I known him do a mean or shabby thing. Since the village was too remote to possess a resident doctor, it was to him that I made my present unorthodox request, a request which could have come only from an ingenuous and enthusiastic young man, which in fact had in it a touch of the absurd.
The Institute was a small brick building, recently erected by the Farms Combine, and containing various club-rooms and a library. Alex led the way into one of the rooms off the main corridor where about thirty persons were gathered, reading and talking, but with an air of expectancy. A silence fell as we went in.
“Well!” Alex exclaimed. “ Here’s Dr. Shannon. Most of ye know him as a pretty fair fisherman. But forbye, he’s a sort of professor at the University, and he wants to find out about this damn ’flu that’s laid us out here. He’s come to ask a favour of you.”
This struck the right note and several of the people smiled, though many of them still looked pale and ill. When I thanked them for coming, I explained what was wanted and promised not to keep them long. Then I removed my haversack, took out a series of numbered capillar
y tubes and systematically set to work.
They were, of course, all village folk, most of them men who worked in the fields, and they had all had the recent infection. Some I knew personally, big Sam Louden, who often tied flies for me, keen-eyed Harry Vence, and others whom I had met, at twilight, knee-deep in the water, casting their long greenheart rods. It was a simple operation to obtain from each a small blood specimen and their friendly, good-natured patience made things easier. Even so, I took longer than I had expected, for, as I went on, a fine tremor crept into my fingers as I realized what this might mean to me.
At last it was over, my final subject had rolled down his sleeve, shaken hands with me and gone out. Then, as I looked up from my note-book, I saw Alex, seated on a nearby bench, watching me in alert summation of my character—a queer, penetrating look, mingled, too, with intelligent interest which, as our eyes met, he took pains to conceal.
There was a pause. I had already told him what was in my mind. I said steadily:
“I have to do it this way, Alex. I can’t help myself … I simply must find out.”
A silence followed; then, slowly, Duthie came over and gripped me by the hand.
“Ye’re a clever chap, Rob, and I’m sure I wish you luck. If I can help again, in any way, just let me know.” A dry smile wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “Meantime, come on back to supper. Alice has a grand steak-and-kidney puddin’ for us.”
I smiled back at him.
“You go ahead, Alex. I’ll join you when I finish off my notes.”