Dr. Bowker’s birth was reputable and sound; his father had been a doctor before him in a country town, and an earnest preacher in the local chapel; his grandfather a sturdy miner, his great-grandfather a turnkey in Nottingham Gaol.
He was therefore of the middle rank of society; but after all, his social gospel such as it was weighed upon him less than his scientific creed. He did not think: he knew. What he did not know he did not pretend to know. For the rest he was always a little nervous and awkward in society, and preferred the communion of his books and an occasional spin upon a bicycle to the conversation of the rich.
I should add that he revered Sir Charles Repton not only as all men of the world must revere a great statesman who has found it possible for many years of the strain of public life to be of service to his country, but also as a man of inestimable value in proving that the solid Nonconformist stock could do in administration, when it chose to enter that sphere, what it had so triumphantly shown it could do in commerce.
The two men were shown into an enormous room on the ground floor where it was the custom of Sir Charles (in happier days!) to receive those whom he feared or would inveigle. Lady Repton at once joined them.
She was agitated; it was even distressing to watch her agitation. She described to them the violent pain which her husband had suffered twice, first the yesterday evening just before dinner, next at this moment on driving up to his house in a cab. She described as best she could the situation of these spasms of suffering, and she more than hinted that she connected with them a novel and very astonishing demeanour on her husband’s part which (here she almost broke down) she hoped would justify them in ordering him if necessary with their fullest authority, to take a rest cure. She warned them that she had told him nothing; she had always heard it was wise in such cases. He thought they had come merely as advisers upon the pains he had felt behind the ear, but a few words of his conversation would be enough to convince them of that much graver matter.
She left them for a moment together, and went to prepare her husband. She was a woman of heroic endurance. Her father had been in his time a God-fearing man, and had accumulated a small competence in the jute line.
Dr. Bowker, let it be remembered, was a specialist in nervous diseases. Sir Anthony Poole, let it also be remembered, was not, but he was something infinitely better in his own estimation: he was a man who had attended more distinguished people and with greater success than any other physician in London. Dr. Bowker’s word as a specialist could not be doubted. Sir Anthony Poole had only to express an opinion upon a man’s health in any particular and that opinion became positive gospel to all who heard it.
The medical judgment of no two men given concurrently could carry greater weight. By an accident not infrequent in all professions, these two great men, though their rivalry was not strictly in the same field, each undervalued the scientific aptitude of the other. Each would have gone to the stake for the corporate value of that small ring to which both belonged, but neither would admit the claim of the other to a special if undefined precedence.
On the rare occasions when they met, however, they observed all the courtesies of life, and on this occasion in the large ground-floor room of Sir Charles Repton’s house, they sat, when Lady Repton had gone out, exchanging platitudes of a very attenuated, refined sort, in a tone worthy of their correct grooming and distinguished appearance. By a singular inadvertence they were summoned together.