Chapter XX

Nothing could have been less like Rochett than Number 27 Palace Court. It was one of thirty large, red, solid houses overlooking one another. It was sufficiently far from a main thoroughfare not to be noisy, and sufficiently near never to taste, except in the small hours of the morning, undiluted silence. It was a broad cul-de-sac of a street, neither green nor untidy, upon which the sun struck without the tenderness of shadows. In the summer it was full of hard, clear light, and in the winter it seemed particularly open to gloom.

The house looked as if every thought it had was born in London and had never gone outside it except for the week-end. All the other houses were the same; they employed the usual number of well-trained servants, and enjoyed the same number of good meals and carefully kept habits. The only difference between Number 27 and the others was that it had been taken over by the Government as a receptacle for human pain and helplessness. It was an officers’ hospital for cases which needed recurrent surgical skill.

Behind its solid face spun the slow, cruel hours of the fight between life and death, the sometimes stagnant, but ever progressing, fight between the courage of the mind, reinforced by skill, and the helplessness of the broken body.

It was a grim, persistent fight, shrouded in mystery. Sometimes skill got the better of the mystery, and men who came there expecting never to walk again went away cured and rejoicing; and more often mystery got the better of skill, and hopes and efforts were alike baffled.

The hospital was only one of Hilton Laurence’s many activities. He was an eminent surgeon, with his hands full, and glad to leave the unremunerative and more stationary work to Anthony.

Anthony didn’t want money; he wanted work. He had no tastes; two ugly rooms in a quiet street, with an occasional ill-cooked meal when he and his landlady remembered it simultaneously, were all he asked for. He had no expensive pursuits and no desire for expensive objects. He had a nervous horror of society, and refused every invitation he received.

Books contented him, and the only form of exercise he took was to walk out of London down the North Road with Max at his heels after his work on summer evenings. He walked straight out, sat in a hedge to smoke a pipe, and returned. When the weather became too cold, he went into a cottage for a cup of tea instead; but he never sought any companionship beyond Max’s, and he disliked all attempts at conversation.

Anthony did not realize that he was trying as far as possible to reproduce his prison conditions; but it was, nevertheless, what his mind fumbled toward. He wanted to feel about him the safety of inflexible habit, set work, and an increasing inhibition. He wanted to close all the avenues to his senses down which might come the haunting images which racked his heart. He wanted not to remember, not to feel, not to see. He felt that if he could only completely cut himself off from his old conditions, he might be as marooned in London as on a desert island.

It was easy to get rid of his family by the hedge of his work and the reassurance of an occasional letter. He seldom saw Henry, who had been severely discomposed by his own lack of judgment. He was, of course, glad Anthony had not gone out of his mind, but at the same time he disliked to think that he had been provided with all the materials for thinking so without the event taking place.

Hilton Laurence persisted from time to time in trying to draw Anthony out of his packed solitude; but Anthony disliked his excellent, well-chosen dinners, where men aired their theories of reconstruction, and carefully avoided the subject upon which their lives were spent. All talk which did not deal with the immediate became for Anthony a mere cheating of the intelligence, a bite on empty air. He wanted to see speech used only for the purpose of action.

Thought was different. You must, he knew, accumulate thought in order to provide the safe material for activity, but no after-dinner conversation went very deeply into thought. London traveled more easily upon the oiled surface of its hourly topics; and Anthony, who had got into the habit of thinking a thing out till he hit against his last idea, was often disconcertingly aware that people thought he ought to stop, and that politeness forced you to leave your social foxes at some distance from their holes.

“You ought to be a Trappist,” Hilton Laurence said to him once; “you have made a religion of silence.”

The only exception Anthony made was that he talked to his patients; for them he waived all his rules and inhibitions, he encouraged them to speak off the point, because they did not know what the point was, and, if confined to its preconceived direction, might miss it altogether.

Anthony was peculiarly gentle and patient with his cases. He would listen intently to the irrelevant, and no complaint ever escaped him.

“It is just as important for a mind that manufactures complaints to get rid of them by airing them,” he explained to Hilton Laurence, who suggested shorter methods, “as for a real complaint to be looked into and tackled; only the remedy in the first case is chiefly in the airing of it. It is always worth while to listen to what people say if they have anything wrong with them at all. Of course if their only ground is to present themselves picturesquely, one might try a different method. All introspection is selfish beyond a certain point, and all selfishness increases the difficulty of breaking a habit. It is a curious point that unselfishness is invariably bad for other people, and selfishness bad for the person himself. One would like to know the moral, if any, a bishop would draw from it.”

“You may be sure he wouldn’t accept it if he couldn’t draw a moral from it,” said Hilton Laurence. “But what method would you try with a case of sheer nerves?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve found one,” replied Anthony. “At present I don’t believe in sheer anything. I used to before I went to prison, and when I was first there—the first six months—I believed then in sheer misery; but other factors came in. There were curious, unexpected let-ups.”

“You must have had some odd experiences,” Hilton Laurence ventured tentatively. Anthony had never talked to him of his imprisonment.

“The most ordinary ones in the world,” Anthony answered dryly. “I learnt how to bear what I couldn’t, and I got this out of it—that now I know I can. The limit of human endurance is the limit of consciousness. When you get to a certain point you turn or break; or, what is perhaps more common, part of you breaks, and part of you turns. Life means you to have this process gradually. That’s why, in general, old people are weaker and wiser than the young; they don’t get their experiences all at once. But in this war some of us got it quick, and we have to pay for it slow.”

Number 27 Palace Court absorbed Anthony. He had cases outside it, private cases which came to him from his old practice or from the wide circle of the Arden family, and others came from his singular successes; but his life was the life of Number 27 Palace Court. He felt it move in him like the double consciousness of domesticity. He never took any obvious notice of the nurses, but nothing about them escaped him. If one of them needed a holiday, Anthony saw that she got it; and if another scamped her work, Anthony found out why, and if he couldn’t remove the cause—and he often could remove the cause—he removed the nurse. He rather disliked the capable and unattractive matron, who seemed to rely more than the unattractive should upon the exhibition of her capacities; but he saw that her rule was in the main just, good for the patients, and bringing out, with occasional flares, the best qualities of the nurses, and he knew that justice, even a rough-tongued justice, is too valuable a quality to pass over. When Hilton Laurence said: “I can’t stand that matron; let’s get rid of her. Women were meant to please, and she wouldn’t please an iron door-scraper,” Anthony bluntly refused.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t see that women were any more meant to please than men. When they do, they often do it to get out of other things. Matron knows her job; we’ve never had a scandal here, or lost a case through carelessness. You don’t want a woman you can fall in love with for a matron; you want a woman you can’t.”

Hilton Laurence looked rueful, but he agreed.

“I’m not at all sure _you_ can’t fall in love with her,” he said rather crossly. “You’re both made of cast-iron. The sisters are quite pretty, and I don’t believe you’ve looked at them!”

But Anthony had looked at them. He knew every detail of their work, and he had watched their absorbed complete self-consciousness, to which their daily life was a mere subsidiary fact. They were women long before they were nurses.

Anthony studied the Irish Roman Catholic sister, whose gay and joking exterior hid a determined unselfishness; he knew she would appear careless of details and be safe to leave patients with; he couldn’t trust her memory, but he felt certain of her punctual heart. She was one of the race of mother-women to whom all objects of care are more precious than their lives.

On the other hand, he deeply disliked a smart and neat-handed young woman whose interest centered in her own attractions, and who would sacrifice a patient’s comfort for a moment’s self-indulgence.

A flirtatious night sister once made an emergency call an opportunity for a determined attempt upon Anthony’s affections, but she did not do it again. He stared at her out of strange, gray eyes with ironic curiosity.

“I wonder why you are doing this kind of thing,” he said on the landing in his low, clear voice; “you do it very badly. I should strongly advise you to return to your duties.”

It was the first time that Anthony had realized that the nurses were of the same species as Kitty. It came over him as he looked at the confused and irate night sister how differently Kitty would have taken his question, and how in the end she would have triumphed over him. He could never have said that Kitty played the game of sex badly; she played it so well that half the time Anthony had never been aware that she played it at all.

Now he was aware. Every sense he had ached for her and demanded her perpetual stimulus. He was like a man athirst in a desert of sand; he could drug his brain with work, but at night his body and his heart beat out their revenge upon him; and this silly woman, with her unready eagerness for his attention, forced back his torture straight upon him.

He wondered, as he left her, if he had blamed her too sharply. Perhaps her desire to win his admiration had been aroused by the obstinate longing for another woman in himself. The invisible traffic between mind and mind is full of misleading messages. The night nurse hated him from that moment, but all the nurses preferred Hilton Laurence; he was less polite, much less considerate, and far more approachable.

It was the patients who wanted Anthony. There was something in his spare, tall figure, a little bent, in his grizzled hair and young gray eyes, which filled them with confidence and hope. He was young enough to inspire them, and old enough to reassure them by his steadiness, and they knew he cared.

They felt he was there for them, not for success or experience or money, not merely as a doctor, but as a personality. He would never let anything interfere between their cure and his efforts, nor would he give up helping them when help seemed useless.

The purpose of his being was to relieve pain, and in the depths of his quiet eyes was the full knowledge of it. He had that understanding of suffering, complete and without shrinking, which few doctors possess. He did not want, as Hilton Laurence did, to rush in with his health, his skill, and his brisk cheerfulness, and then get out again as soon as possible, forgetting.

Laurence’s “cut and come again” attitude frightened the weak and gave no encouragement to men who had been slowly undermined by recurrent pain. They could not believe in quick or cheap escapes.

Anthony offered them none; he never deluded them or hurried from them. If there was nothing he could do, he listened carefully to what they had to bear; the most he ever said was, “I think this trouble will improve in time,” or, “I hope this may help you a little,” and when he said this, improvement and help always followed, and renewed the smoking flax of hope.

He succeeded in persuading men to make efforts who had given up the attempt in despair, because they saw that he had personal dealings with despair.

“You see,” Anthony explained, “it is always worth while trying, because no one knows the exact place where courage takes over from failure, and it is a pity to stop at failure if one can help it. Miracles are merely getting the hang of a thing suddenly that you’ve tried at deliberately till you’re sick of it; you’ve got to help yourself just as far as you can before anything else helps you, and few of us know how far we can till we try.”

“It’s much easier,” he explained to another man suffering from general debility after a severe wound, “to get over a bad time than to get over having had one. That’s your trouble now. The bad time is finished, but it took half of you to get through it; you’ve got to win that half back. It will be quicker if you keep reminding yourself that you really _are_ on the right side of things, though of course it won’t be easy. You must go on calling the other half of you back.”

But if his patience was endless with the weak, he was sharp with those who did forbidden things from bravado. Anthony had always despised the false courage which wants to be admired; it cloaked too clearly an invisible cowardice.

“Don’t think you are showing courage,” he would assert to a man who had disobeyed a restriction. “Courage is the patient handling of danger; it is not the foolish manufacturing of it for purposes of showing off. No one in a busy hospital is going to admire a fool. We should deeply regret it if we threw away your case by our carelessness, but no one is going to mind your throwing it away by your own.”

Anthony took endless trouble to divert his patients’ minds; he never rested till he found some taste or hobby which he could encourage. Nothing in the hospital was allowed to prevent a man’s carving out a healthy interest.

Hilton Laurence was often surprised, and the matron frequently irate, at Anthony’s waiving of the rules to suit the oddest occupations.

“In a short case,” he explained to Hilton Laurence, “you can concentrate on the disease, and one needs only to know enough of a man’s mind to keep his nerves quiet and his common sense uppermost; but in a long case you _must_ know your man, and get him an object—virtually _any_ object outside of himself—to hook on to. Any invalid’s attention gets concentrated on discomfort and sensation, and the longer the case is, the more water-logged and self-centered the mind gets. You’ve got to fill it, if it’s only for half an hour a day, and never mind on what—comic songs, theosophy, tall stories, well-cooked food, the study of the Welsh language, or a music-hall star. Look at that jockey you handed over to me a month ago. I couldn’t think what to do with him, he seemed such a stuck case; all that septic business, going on so long, had just rotted him to pieces. Actually, the mischief had stopped, but I couldn’t start him up. He’d been ill too long. I wrote to my father to unearth some old racing papers I knew my brother Tom had kept for years, and the man lighted up immediately. Sister got him an album, and I found him sitting up in bed, a thing he assured me he would never do again, pasting in different records of horses as fast as he could go. Then we started getting a sporting editor to visit him and keep him up in what was going on now, and it’s astonishing to see the change in him. He’s sleeping and eating and getting quite a healthy color back, and all because he’s succeeded in finding something that interests him more than his own inside.

“All these long cases need humoring; they are beyond drugs and knives. We doctors have got to learn how to give them desires.”

“Desires,” murmured Hilton Laurence. “Well, I dare say you’re right. I’ve often acted on that theory without analyzing it.” He hesitated for a moment, then he risked, “Come to think of it, I did it in your own. You know, my dear fellow, six months ago, when I blew in to Henry’s flat, you were as near going bang off your head as any fellow I ever saw. I wondered how I dared trust you in an operating theater with the instruments.”

“I’d have been much more dangerous without them,” agreed Anthony. “Things you are accustomed to handle give you sanity straighter than ideas. I once knew a pianist who was so drunk before his performance he couldn’t walk across the stage. The manager asked him how on earth he was going to play? And he said, ‘Just get me to the piano somehow; it’ll take care of me.’ They put him on the music-stool before the curtain rose, and he played divinely. No one guessed why he didn’t get up to bow afterward.”

“Do you think your piano has cured you?” asked Laurence, curiously.

Anthony looked at him steadily for a moment, then he turned away.

“The man was still drunk,” he observed, “after he’d finished playing.”