XXVI
Into the peacefulness of Bettesworth's last working summer a disquieting circumstance had been slowly intruding; and now, with August, it developed into a subject of grave fears. I do not know when I first noticed a small sore on the old man's lower lip, but I think it must have been in May or early June. On being asked, he said it had been there since his illness in the spring, and "didn't seem to get no worse." Certainly he was not troubling about it.
Weeks passed, perhaps six weeks, in which, though the ugly, angry look of the thing sometimes took my attention, I forbore to speak of it again, being unwilling to arouse alarm. Then it occurred to me that if I was too fanciful, Bettesworth was not fanciful enough. In his robust out-door life he had never learnt to be nervous and anticipate horrors; and he might not be sufficiently alive to the dreadful possibilities which were presenting themselves to my own imagination. I urged him accordingly to see his club doctor.
He did so, not immediately, though after how long an interval I am unable to say, since none of this affair got into my note-book. The doctor no sooner saw the sore than he said it must be cut out. "Do you smoke?" was one of his first questions; and "Where is your pipe?" was the next. Bettesworth produced his pipe—an old blackened briar—and was comforted to learn that it was considered harmless. But he must have the sore removed, and his two or three remaining teeth near it would have to come out. When could he have it done? the doctor asked. Bettesworth said that he must consult me on that point, and came away promising to do so.
Considering how sure he must have been that I should put no obstacle in his way, I incline to think that by now he must himself have begun to feel alarm. He waited, however, about a week, and then one morning off he went again to see the doctor, half expecting, I believe, to have the operation done then and there, before he came home.
An hour afterwards I met him returning, looking worried. The doctor was just setting off for his holiday, and could not now undertake the operation, but advised him to go to Guildford Hospital. Perhaps Bettesworth would have liked me to pooh-pooh the suggestion—he little relished the idea of leaving his wife and his work, and taking a railway journey to so dismal an end; but even as he talked, I was watching on his lip that which might mean death. So I sent him off straightway to the Vicarage, where he could obtain a necessary letter of introduction to the hospital.
Of what immediately followed my memory is quite blank. I only recall that the old chap started at last all alone on his journey to Guildford, not knowing how long he would be away, or what was likely to happen to him. A niece of his had provided him with a stamped addressed envelope and a clean sheet of note-paper, in case he should need to get anyone at the hospital to send a message home.
August 6, 1904.—So he disappeared for a time. Three or four days, we supposed, would be the extent of his absence; but the days went by and no word came from him. For all we knew he might never have reached the hospital; and it began to be a serious question what would become of his wife, and whether she would not have to be sent to the workhouse for want of a protector. At last, I wrote for information to the matron of the hospital. Her answer, which lies before me now, and is the only piece of evidence I have preserved of the whole business, is dated August 6th. On that day, it stated, Bettesworth was to be operated upon, and, if all went well, he would most likely be able to leave the hospital in ten days or a fortnight.
Unless I mistake, the ten days or a fortnight dragged out to nearly three weeks, in which I had the old wife on my mind. A visit to her one Sunday morning reassured me. Poor old Lucy Bettesworth! I did not anticipate, then, that I should never again see her alive. Dirty and dishevelled as ever, alone in the squalid cottage, she received me with a meek simplicity that in my eyes made amends for many faults. She was more sane than I had dared to hope I should find her, eager for "Fred" to come home, but contented, it seemed, to wait, if it was doing him good. She did not want for anything; she ate no meat, and it cost her nothing to live. Would I like a vegetable marrow? There was a nice one in the garden that "wanted cuttin'."
Perceiving that she desired me to have the vegetable marrow, I allowed her to take me out into the garden to get it. "Could I cut it?" Of course I could, and did. Then a qualm struck her: perhaps I shouldn't like carrying it! But she might be able to wrap it up in a piece of newspaper....
To that, however, I demurred. There was no harm in being seen with a vegetable marrow on Sunday morning; and I took it, undraped by paper, aware that the despised old woman had done me the greatest courtesy in her power. And that was, as it proved, the last time I ever saw her.
Bettesworth, meanwhile, in the hospital, was not quite forgotten. His niece has been mentioned who gave him the stamped envelope which he had not used. We shall hear a good deal of her, later on—a helpful but delicate woman, who was Bettesworth's niece only by marriage with a nephew of his, of whom also we shall hear. These two on that Sunday morning—it being a quiet, half-hazy, half-sunny August day—walked over to Guildford, and brought back news that the old man was doing as well as could be hoped. They proposed to repeat the visit the following week. It made a pleasant Sunday outing.
But before that week was ended Bettesworth was suddenly home again, unannounced. An odd look about him puzzled me, until I realized that he had grown a beard—a white, scrubby, short-trimmed beard, which gave him a foxy expression that I did not like. His lip was in strapping, a little blood-stained, but he reported that all was going on well. The surgeons had carved down into his jaw, and believed the operation to have been quite successful. Satisfied as to this, I could endure his changed appearance.
Something about his manner was less satisfactory. Looking back, I think I know what was the matter; but at the time a sort of levity in him struck a false note. Besides, he seemed not to realize that his wife might have suffered by his absence, or that others had put themselves about on his behalf. He struck me as selfish and self-satisfied. I forgot what a lonely expedition his had been, and how he had had to start off and face this miserable experience without a friend at hand to care whether he came through it alive or not.
Left to himself (it is obvious enough now) and determined to go through the business in manly fashion, he had rather overdone it—had over-played his part. In refusing to admit fear, he had erred a little on the other side, and he still erred so in telling his experiences, perhaps because he was still not quite free of fear. By his account, his stay in the hospital had been an interesting holiday. Everything about it was a little too good to be believed. He had jested with the doctors and the nurses. They called him "Dad," and "a joking old man," and he felt flattered: they had had a "fire-drill," and from his bed, or his seat under the veranda among the convalescents, he had entered into the spirit of the thing. Grimmer details, too, did not escape him: the arrival of new patients in the night—"accident cases" brought in for immediate treatment; the sufferings he witnessed; the hopeless condition of a railway porter, and so forth. All this was told in his own manner, with swift realistic touch, convincingly true; with a genuine sense of the humour of the thing, he mentioned the operating-room by the patients' name for it—"the slaughter-house"; but none the less his narrative had an offensive emptiness, an unreality, a flippancy, unworthy, I thought, of Bettesworth.
A little more sense would have shown me the clue to it, in his behaviour just before the operation. He was dressed in "a sort of a white night-gown," waiting for his turn; and, he said, "I made 'em laugh. I got up and danced about on the floor. 'Now I be Father Peter,' I says." Then the nurse came to conduct him to "the slaughter-house." "'Old Freddy's goin' to 'ave something now,' they" (the nearer patients) "says. I took hold o' the nurse's arm. 'Now I be goin' out for a walk with my young lady,' I says. 'We be goin' out courtin'.'" And in such fashion, over-excited, he maintained his fortitude, with a travesty of the courage he was all but losing. He never confessed to having felt fear. The nearest approach to it was when he was actually lying on the operating-table. Left quite alone there (for half an hour, he alleged and believed), "I looked all round," he said, "and up at the skylight, and I says to myself, 'So this is where it is, is it?'"
With these tales he came home, repeating them until I was weary. By and by, however, he settled down to work, although one or two visits had to be paid to the hospital, for dressing the lip; and as he settled down, his normal manner returned. For some weeks—nay, for longer—his friends were not free of anxiety about him. There were pains in his jaw, and in his lip too, enough to draw dire forebodings from those of pessimistic humour. But Bettesworth owned to no fears. So it went on for a month or so, when that occurred which effectually banished from his mind all remembrance of this trouble.