Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

I have said something of Rose’s infirmary for crippled animals. With these creatures and Hannah and Suzanne and the maids and Briggs and myself, she would have had company enough; but there were others always ready to listen to her. There was, for instance, Mr. Wellicum.

In those primitive days I not only prescribed medicines but supplied them, and Mr. Wellicum was my dispenser, as he had been my father’s before me. He had seemed an old man when I was Rose’s age and ventured into his aromatic domain, and to her therefore he must have worn an air of extreme antiquity. There was this difference in his attitude to the two of us: he had disliked, or at any rate discouraged, my visits, but he rejoiced to have Rose about him. He was a short, bow-legged, grizzled man, very hairy and ursine, known to the villagers as “Crusty Bob,” and by playing tricks on him the boys increased his bearishness; but to Rose he was the mildest and most subservient slave. Others, including myself, his timid employer, were allowed in the dispensary itself only with ungracious reluctance—the lobby by the trap-door in the window being the place of the public—but Rose could do as she wished there, always on the one condition that she must not taste. He even permitted her to help in pill rolling, and not a few of the village children have been known to beg her collusion in seeing that their physic was made less nasty.

Those were the days before motor-cars—I did not see a motor-car until I was well over forty or own one until I was fifty—when a country doctor and his horse were allies and friends. I rode a little, but mostly drove, and Silver and I were on terms of the closest intimacy. She was a chestnut mare with a whitey-grey mane and tail: hence her name.

Speed, no doubt, is a great asset, especially for a busy doctor in a straggling district, but I shall always hold that we lost spiritually more than we gained materially when we substituted machinery for the horse. The horse, the school-book used to tell us, is the friend of man; and man needs friends. Petrol is his servant or his master, even his tyrant; petrol smoothes no difficulties, heals no wounds, restores no vitality, as a horse could do. On the other hand, justice compels me to admit that it has taken me to many a sick-bed at a pace that Silver would have thought unjust and have found impossible. In addition to Silver I had a bay mare named Jenny, as a second string. Both were affectionate and gentle, and Rose adored them and took astonishing and terrifying liberties with them. Some part of the ritual of grooming, in which she was proud to assist, she even carried into her own toilet. The peculiar hissing sound which ostlers make when they are curry-combing, Rose used to imitate (Hannah told me, with tears of mirth) as she brushed her hair.

That part of the ancient Persians’ simple system of education for their sons which bore upon the management of a horse (to shoot straight, manage a horse, and tell the truth, was the complete curriculum) is being missed to-day. I don’t pretend that Rose could manage one in the full sense of the word, but she had the qualities which such mastery demands—courage and confidence, mental quickness and sympathy, and a steady hand. It is not to a country’s good when the horse disappears and oil and metal take its place, for the management of a car is far less educative. To-day, roughly speaking, only farm-boys and stable-lads are being taught as the wise old Persians would wish.

Then there were the neighbours: the Rector and his family; Colonel Westerley and his wife; the old people at the post office, and the butcher and the baker, and, what is more to the point, the butcher’s and the baker’s errand boys. Rose was on the best of terms with all of these.

Some were too anxious to share in her upbringing. I exempt the butcher’s boy and the baker’s boy from this charge, and the old couple at the post office are honourably acquitted—or as honourably as persons can be who repeat telegrams to the whole village—but the Rector’s wife longed for Rose to join her two daughters in their lessons, and Mrs. Westerley was consumed by a desire to transform her into a pianist. The rectory offer I declined, but Rose sat for a while at Mrs. Westerley’s instrument, until it was decided that whatever genius she might possess lay in some other direction than music.

Mrs. Westerley, whose garden marched with mine on the other side, we could do without; but Colonel Westerley was one of Rose’s special intimates. And when I say Colonel, I mean Colonel. I mean an elderly upright man with a white moustache and courtly manners, who took the chair at meetings, and played a good game of croquet, and acted as sidesman on Sundays; the kind of army aristocrat who, by presenting the plate with a certain military éclat, made it a double privilege for the worshipper to drop in a shilling for God. I have to explain and amplify in this way because now, after the War, when I am writing, the word Colonel means nothing of the kind. Mere youths are colonels. A major called on me yesterday with a smooth-shaven white face and a baggy umbrella, to ask for my signature to some teetotal appeal. If I had trodden on his toe he would very likely have said that it was his fault. The word “Gad” has quitted the language.

Colonel Westerley had all the mildness and Christianity that, in some odd way, can seed in the composition of a certain kind of army man, to blossom forth in his retirement. One does not notice the seeding, but the flowers are very visible. He had been in India most of his life: had quelled border insurgencies and killed his country’s foes without a tremor; but now, among the croquet hoops and William Allen Richardsons, he was the soul of gentle courtesy and the Rector’s right-hand layman. The Colonel took over my “Times” at half-price at three o’clock every afternoon, and we shared a library subscription. Mrs. Westerley knitted continually for bazaars, and read aloud every evening until it was time for Patience and then bed.

Rose and the Colonel were great friends. I used to see her watching him as he pruned and grafted, and asking him searching questions as to the perils of life in India. When he corroborated her suspicions and stated that it was really true that snakes got into the bath through the hole that lets the water out, she instituted a hostility to enter that receptacle and be washed all over that was very distressing to her nurse. The Colonel’s stories of man-eating tigers had less serious results. The very good case which he made for himself as an intrepid fighting man and terror of the jungle deteriorated, however, when Rose discovered one day that he had not a single Indian coin to display to her. To see a rupee in the flesh, so to speak, had suddenly become a necessity, second only to that of beholding a real live anna, which she associated in some curious way with Hannah Banks; and the incompetent old warrior had neither. How one could leave India and not bring any such souvenirs away, Rose could not comprehend. An ivory model of the Taj Mahal, proffered in lieu of coinage, had no effect whatever, not even when fortified by the Colonel’s word-picture of the original by moonlight.