CHAPTER IV
Bastian Cautley, M.D.
It was half-past five and Dr. Bastian Cautley had put on his house jacket, loosened his waistcoat, settled down by his library fire with a pipe and a book, and was thanking Heaven that for once he had an hour to himself between his afternoon round and his time for consultation. He had been working hard ever since nine o'clock in the morning; but now nobody could have looked more superlatively lazy than Bastian Cautley as he stretched himself on two armchairs in an attitude of reckless ease. His very intellect (the most unrestful part of him) was at rest; all his weary being merged in a confused voluptuous sensation, a beatific state in which smoking became a higher kind of thinking, and thought betrayed an increasing tendency to end in smoke. The room was double-walled with book-shelves, and but for the far away underground humming of a happy maidservant the house was soundless. He rejoiced to think that there was not a soul in it above stairs to disturb his deep tranquility. At six o'clock he would have to take his legs off that chair, and get into a frock-coat; once in the frock-coat he would become another man, all patience and politeness. After six there would be no pipe and no peace for him, but the knocking and ringing at his front door would go on incessantly till seven-thirty. There was flattery in every knock, for it meant that Dr. Cautley was growing eminent, and that at the ridiculously early age of nine-and-twenty.
There was a sharp ring now. He turned wearily in his chairs.
"There's another damned patient," said Dr. Cautley.
He was really so eminent that he could afford to think blasphemously of patients; and he had no love for those who came to consult him before their time. He sat up with his irritable nerves on edge. The servant was certainly letting somebody in, and from the soft rustling sounds in the hall he gathered that somebody was a woman; much patience and much politeness would then be required of him, and he was feeling anything but patient and polite.
"Miss Rhoda Vivian" was the name on the card that was brought to him. He did not know Miss Rhoda Vivian.
The gas-jets were turned low in the consulting-room; when he raised them he saw a beautiful woman standing by the fire in an attitude of impatience. He had kept her waiting; and it seemed that this adorable person knew the value of time. She was not going to waste words either. As it was impossible to associate her with the ordinary business of the place, he was prepared for her terse and lucid statement of somebody else's case. He said he would look round early in the morning (Miss Vivian looked dissatisfied); or perhaps that evening (Miss Vivian was dubious); or possibly at once (Miss Vivian smiled in hurried approval). She was eager to be gone. And when she had gone he stood deliberating. Miss Quincey was a pathological abstraction, Miss Vivian was a radiant reality; it was clear that Miss Quincey was not urgent, and that once safe in her bed she could very well wait till to-morrow; but when he thought of Miss Vivian he became impressed with the gravity and interest of Miss Quincey's case.
While the doctor was making up his mind, little Miss Quincey, in her shabby back bedroom, lay waiting for him, trembling, fretting her nerves into a fever, starting at imaginary footsteps, and entertaining all kinds of dismal possibilities. She was convinced that she was going to die, or worse still, to break down, to be a perpetual invalid. She thought of several likely illnesses, beginning with general paralysis and ending with anemia of the brain. It might be anemia of the brain, but she rather thought it would be general paralysis, because this would be so much the more disagreeable of the two. Anyhow Rhoda Vivian must have thought she was pretty bad or she would not have called in a doctor. To call in a doctor seemed to Miss Quincey next door to invoking Providence itself; it was the final desperate resort, implying catastrophe and the end of all things. Oh, dear! Miss Quincey wished he would come up if he was coming, and get it over.
After all he did not keep her waiting long, and it was over in five minutes. And yet it was amazing the amount of observation, and insight, and solid concentrated thought the young man contrived to pack into those five minutes.
Well—it seemed that it was not general paralysis this time, nor yet anemia of the brain; but he could tell her more about it in the morning. Meanwhile she had nothing to do but to do what he told her and stay where she was till he saw her again. And he was gone before she realized that he had been there.
Again? So he was coming again, was he? Miss Quincey did not know whether to be glad or sorry. His presence had given her a rare and curiously agreeable sense of protection, but she had to think of the expense. She had to think too of what Mrs. Moon would say to it—of what she would say to him.
Mrs. Moon had a good deal to say to it. She took Juliana's illness as a personal affront, as a deliberate back-handed blow struck at the memory of Tollington Moon. With all the base implications of her daily acts, Juliana had never attempted anything like this.
"Capers and nonsense," she said, "Juliana has never had an illness in her life."
She said it to Rhoda Vivian, the bold young person who had taken upon herself to bring the doctor into the house. Mrs. Moon spoke of the doctor as if he was a disease.
Fortunately Miss Vivian was by when he endured the first terrifying encounter. Her manner suggested that she took him under her protection, stood between him and some unfathomable hostility.
He found the Old Lady disentangling herself with immense dignity from her maze of furniture. Mrs. Moon was a small woman shrunk with her eighty years, shrunk almost to extinction in her black woollen gown and black woollen mittens. Her very face seemed to be vanishing under the immense shadow of her black net cap. Spirals of thin grey hair stuck flat to her forehead; she wore other and similar spirals enclosed behind glass in an enormous brooch; it was the hair of her ancestors, that is to say of the Quinceys. As the Old Lady looked at Cautley her little black eyes burned like pinpoints pierced in a paste-board mask.
"I think you've been brought here on a wild goose chase, doctor," said she, "there is nothing the matter with my niece."
He replied (battling sternly with his desire to laugh) that he would be delighted if it were so; adding that a wild goose chase was the sport he preferred to any other.
Here he looked at Miss Vivian to the imminent peril of his self-control. Mrs. Moon's gaze had embraced them in a common condemnation, and the subtle sympathy of their youth linked them closer and made them one in their intimate appreciation of her.
"Then you must be a very singular young man. I thought you doctors were never happy until you'd found some mare's nest in people's constitutions? You'd much better let well alone."
"Miss Quincey is very far from well," said Cautley with recovered gravity, "and I rather fancy she has been let alone too long."
Cautley thought that he had said quite enough to alarm any old lady. And indeed Mrs. Moon was slowly taking in the idea of disaster, and it sent her poor wits wandering in the past. Her voice sank suddenly from grating; antagonism to pensive garrulity.
"I've no faith in medicine," she quavered, "nor in medical men either. Though to be sure my husband had a brother-in-law once on his wife's side, Dr. Quincey, Dr. Arnold Quincey, Juliana's father and Louisa's. He was a medical man. He wrote a book, I daresay you've heard of it; Quincey on Diseases of the Heart it was. But he's dead now, of one of 'em, poor man. We haven't seen a doctor for five-and-twenty years."
"Then isn't it almost time that you should see one now?" said he, cheerfully taking his leave. "I shall look round again in the morning."
He looked round again in the morning and sat half an hour with Miss
Quincey; so she had time to take a good look at him.
He was very nice to look at, this young man. He was so clean-cut and tall and muscular; he had such an intellectual forehead; his mouth was so firm, you could trust it to tell no secrets; and his eyes (they were dark and deep set) looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey. Indeed, at the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did see nothing but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather worn and wizened child than a middle-aged woman. He was very gentle and sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her. As it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so young but so formidably fastidious and refined. She had not expected him to look like that. All the clever young men she had met had displayed a noble contempt for appearances. To be sure, Miss Quincey knew but little of the world of men; for at St. Sidwell's the types were limited to three little eccentric professors, and the plaster gods in the art studio. But for the gods she might just as well have lived in a nunnery, for whenever Miss Quincey thought of a man she thought of something like Louisa's husband, Andrew Mackinnon, who spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and wore flannel shirts with celluloid collars, and coats that hung about him all anyhow. But Dr. Cautley was not in the least like Andrew Mackinnon. He had a distinguished voice; his clothes fitted him to perfection; and his linen, irreproachable itself, reproved her silently.
Her eyes left him suddenly and wandered about the room. She was full of little tremors and agitations; she wished that the towels wouldn't look so much like dish-cloths; she credited him with powers of microscopic observation, and wondered if he had noticed the stain on the carpet and the dust on the book-shelves, and if he would be likely to mistake the quinine tabloids for vulgar liver pills, or her bottle of hair-wash for hair-dye. Once released from its unnatural labours, her mind returned instinctively to the trivial as to its home. She glanced at her hat, perched conspicuously on the knob of the looking-glass, and a dim sense of its imperfections came over her and vanished as it came. Then she tried to compose herself for the verdict.
It did not come all at once. First of all he asked her a great many questions about herself and her family, whereupon she gave him a complete pathological story of the Moons and Quinceys. And all the time he looked so hard at her that it was quite embarrassing. His eyes seemed to be taking her in (no other eyes had ever performed that act of hospitality for Miss Quincey). He pulled out a little book from his pocket and made notes of everything she said; Miss Quincey's biography was written in that little book (you may be sure nobody else had ever thought of writing it). And when he had finished the biography he talked to her about her work (nobody else had ever been the least interested in Miss Quincey's work). Then Miss Quincey sat up in bed and became lyrical as she described the delirious joy of decimals—recurring decimals—and the rapture of cube-root. She herself had never got farther than cube-root; but it was enough. Beyond that, she hinted, lay the infinite. And Dr. Cautley laughed at her defence of the noble science. Oh yes, he could understand its fascination, its irresistible appeal to the emotions; he only wished to remind her that it was the most debilitating study in the world. He refused to commit himself to any opinion as to the original strength and magnitude of Miss Quincey's brain; he could only assure her that the most powerful intellect in the world would break down if you kept it perpetually doing sums in arithmetic. It was the monotony of the thing, you see; year after year Miss Quincey had been ploughing up the same little patch of brain. No, certainly not—she mustn't think of going back to St. Sidwell's for another three months.
Three months! Impossible! It was a whole term.
Dr. Cautley scowled horribly and said that if she was ever to be fit for cube-root and decimals again, she positively and absolutely must. Whereupon Miss Quincey gave way to emotion.
To leave St. Sidwell's, abandon her post for three months, she who had never been absent for a day! If she did that it would be all up with Miss Quincey; a hundred eager applicants were ready to fill her empty place. It was as if she heard the hungry, leaping pack behind her, the strong young animals trained for the chase; they came tearing on the scent, hunting her, treading her down.
When Rhoda Vivian looked in after morning school, she found a flushed and embarrassed young man trying to soothe Miss Quincey, who paid not the least attention to him; she seemed to have shrunk into her bed, and lay there staring with dilated eyes like a hare crouched flat and trembling in her form. From the other side of the bed Dr. Cautley's helpless and desperate smile claimed Rhoda as his ally. It seemed to say, "For God's sake take my part against this unreasonable woman."
Now no one (not even Miss Quincey) could realize the insecurity of Miss Quincey's position better than Rhoda, who was fathoms deep in the confidence of the Head. She happened to know that Miss Cursiter was only waiting for an opportunity like this to rid herself for ever of the little obstructive. She knew too that once they had ceased to fill their particular notch in it, the world had no further use for people like Miss Quincey; that she, Rhoda Vivian, belonged to the new race whose eternal destiny was to precipitate their doom. It was the first time that Rhoda had thought of it in that light; the first time indeed that she had greatly concerned herself with any career beside her own. She sat for a few minutes talking to Miss Quincey and thinking as she talked. Perhaps she was wondering how she would like to be forty-five and incompetent; to be overtaken on the terrible middle-way; to feel the hurrying generations after her, their breath on her shoulders, their feet on her heels; to have no hope; to see Mrs. Moon sitting before her, immovable and symbolic, the image of what she must become. They were two very absurd and diminutive figures, but they stood for a good deal.
To Cautley, Rhoda herself as she revolved these things looked significant enough. Leaning forward, one elbow bent on her knee, her chin propped on her hand, her lips pouting, her forehead knit, she might have been a young and passionate Pallas, brooding tempestuously on the world.
"Miss Vivian is on my side, I see. I'll leave her to do the fighting."
And he left her.
Rhoda's first movement was to capture Miss Quincey's hand as it wildly reconnoitred for a pocket handkerchief among the pillows.
"Don't worry about it," she said, "I'll speak to Miss Cursiter."
Dr. Cautley, enduring a perfunctory five minutes with Mrs. Moon, could hear Miss Vivian running downstairs and the front door opening and closing upon her. With a little haste and discretion he managed to overtake her before she had gone very far. He stopped to give his verdict on her friend.
She had expected him.
"Well," she asked, "it is overwork, isn't it?"
"Very much overwork; and no wonder. I knew she was a St. Sidwell's woman as soon as I saw her."
"That was clever of you. And do you always know a St. Sidwell's woman when you see one?"
"I do; they all go like this, more or less. It seems to me that St. Sidwell's sacrifices its women to its girls, and its girls to itself. I don't imagine you've much to do with the place, so you won't mind my saying so."
Rhoda smiled a little maliciously.
"You seem to take a great deal for granted. As it happens I am Classical
Mistress there."
Dr. Cautley looked at her and bit his lip. He was annoyed with himself for his blunder and with her for being anything but Rhoda Vivian—pure and simple.
Rhoda laughed frankly at his confusion.
"Never mind. Appearances are deceitful. I'm glad I don't look like it."
"You certainly do not. Still, Miss Quincey is a warning to anybody."
"She? She was never fit for the life."
"No. Your race is to the swift and your battle to the strong."
He was still looking at her as he spoke. She was looking straight before her, her nostrils slightly distended, her grey eyes wide, as if she sniffed the battle, saw the goal.
"We must make her strong," said he.
She had quickened her pace as if under a renewed impulse of energy and will. Suddenly at the door of the College she stopped and held out her hand.
"You will look after her well, will you not?" Her voice was resonant on the note of appeal.
Now you could withstand Rhoda in her domineering mood if you were strong enough and cool enough; but when she looked straight through your eyes in that way she was irresistible. Cautley did not attempt to resist her.
He went on his way thinking how intolerable the question might have been in some one else's mouth; how suggestive of impertinent coquetry, the beautiful woman's assumption that he would do for her what he would not do for insignificant Miss Quincey. She had taken it for granted that his interest in Miss Quincey was supreme.