It was in Lindsay Street, and with Mrs. Jemima White, that Elsworth went to lodge. He had abundant strength of mind, and it was little to him that his fellow-boarders were a rather noisy set. He had full control of himself, and did not permit them to influence him unduly in the matter of sprees. He settled down steadily to his work, and did not find his friends interfere with him much when they saw his tastes were not quite their own; on the contrary, they rather respected him for his diligence, in which there was not the least element of the prig. As for his religion,—for Elsworth came to St. Bernard’s deeply imbued with the religious spirit,—they smiled at him when he talked of it, which was but seldom, as who should say, “Poor innocent! you will outgrow all that quickly here, and find faith and the scalpel, dogma and the microscope, go ill together!”
Yet they knew very well that several of their best men were earnest, faithful Christian souls, who found high scholarship and the deepest devotion to their profession accord extremely well with the doctrines they professed. Still, the prevailing tone of the place, of students and of teachers alike, was not in accord with religious feeling. The school atmosphere was prejudicial to the cultivation of the Christian sentiment; and whatever godliness was taken in by the first-year’s man had usually left him long before he left St. Bernard’s; for there was a new goddess, whose culture was daily in the ascendant, and St. Bernard’s was one of her sacred places. Here she was wont to be honoured, and the supreme God in the newer worship was forgotten. Her glory so far outshone His that the men never named Him, except in their expletives, nor was He in any of their thoughts. It was not held so much an error to believe in the God of the Bible and the Creator and Sustainer of the world, as an amiable weakness, a mark of defective education, a lay feebleness of mind, excellent in subscribers to and governors of hospitals, good also for patients as helping to teach them submission, not bad at all for sisters and nurses for a similar reason; but for medical men, the true high priests of science, utterly inconsistent with their training and their mental attitude, which was the demand for—facts! ever facts! and still more facts! Christianity in a medical man meant an imperfect medical man; one who had been arrested in his development,—a sort of spina bifida case, or a microcephalic idiot; want of lime in the bones, defective iron and phosphorus; excellent condition for a subscriber, wofully defective in a user. For it was discovered that the completely developed, the men full of lime, iron, and phosphorus, the men of robust intellect and of the full standard, did not, as a rule, subscribe anything to anything, least of all to hospitals. Hospital contributors all went to church, and read their Bibles, and then wrote cheques Q.E.D.; whereas they, the persons for whose benefit chiefly all these cheques were signed, did neither, because they were above such weaknesses, as became Fellows of Royal Colleges and Bachelors of Science.
It required, therefore, no small amount of courage for a St. Bernard’s man to profess Christianity there. He might don a philosophical religion of Humanity, profess an eclectic faith compounded of Buddhism and George Eliot, with a dash at Renan, because downright Bradlaugh and Besantism was vulgar and slightly fusty; but he must denounce priestcraft and other worldism, as became all true followers of medicine, and emancipated souls baptized into the spirit of the age.
Elsworth took lodgings in Lindsay Street, just opposite Mrs. Harper’s house. He soon became attached to little Murphy for his genial disposition and cheerful heart, and it was not long before he found some attraction in the lively company surrounding him. His own landlady was serious and prim, and rigorously excluded the fast set of men at the hospital. “What suited Mrs. Harper wouldn’t suit her,” she used to say; “and if medical students couldn’t behave themselves like other folk, she wouldn’t have anything to do with ’em.” So it was only quiet men who went to live at Mrs. White’s—men who kept good hours, and didn’t kick up rows in their rooms; “she wouldn’t have it at no price.” She went to the little Baptist chapel in Bethesda Court, hard by, and was a good, worthy woman, who made all about her the better for the faith she professed; and though her grammar was defective, and her notions crude, her religion made, as Rowland Hill remarked, “even her cat the better for it,” for her feline companion never drank her lodgers’ brandy, nor smoked their cigars, “nor took aught that wasn’t his’n.” She kept her rooms, as became a good Baptist, beautifully clean; and a man who wanted to read hard, and be quiet at his work, found it a privilege to be cared for by Mrs. White. Here, when not at the schools, Elsworth was almost always to be found; and human bones were scattered grimly about the room. A valuable microscope, with a large cabinet of preparations and sections, and a well-stocked bookcase of works of anatomy and physiology, gave the sitting-room a learned aspect, which of itself seemed to repress the rising desire of any young visitor to invite the occupant to “a shindy.”
CHAPTER V.
THE BEADLE AND THE THEATRE.
’Tis part of my proud fate
To lecture to as many thick-skulled youths
As please, each day, to throng the theatre.
—Browning (“Paracelsus”).