“Before long, in one of two ways,” Traherne said, “assuredly. He will win out now, or he’ll die. He is very much better of his failing. But his nerves are about frazzled, and his body won’t stand too much more. Let him keep his uniform, sir. I’ll see that he doesn’t openly disgrace it. I promise you that. Let him fit it once more, or let him die in it. That will mean a great deal to him. Take it from him, and I give you my word his game is up.”
At which Colonel Agnew “damned” Dr. Traherne, and yielded to him.
Agnew, too, often wondered if Mrs. Crespin knew what Traherne felt towards her. The Colonel had no doubt.
Whether Mrs. Crespin knew all, little or nothing, Major Crespin knew now; and, knowing his own handicap and the other man’s worthiness, was bitterly, blackly jealous.
That mended nothing, helped nothing, and retarded and impeded much.
The children and their ayah and bearer had been sent to Pahari about a month before Major Crespin’s leave was due, nearly two years after the American General had broken Colonel Agnew’s regiment’s bread, and honored its salt. Dr. Traherne watching, without seeming to, thought he saw a breakdown threatening. At such times to get Crespin away and out of sight was always his first concern; it sometimes averted, and—the next best thing—it always hid.
Traherne had a new “bus,” a costly, beautiful “flyer,” of which he was boyishly proud. There was a good deal of boy still in Dr. Basil Traherne in spite of his natural gravity and his thirty-five years. The boy persists longest in the biggest men.
He urged the Crespins to let him fly them to Pahari, where they proposed to spend their not long leave with Iris and Ronald in the cool of the hills. Mrs. Crespin was eager to fall in with Traherne’s suggestion, and Major Crespin, a little to their surprise, agreed to it placidly; for the last two years scarcely had improved things between Crespin and Traherne, and had distinctly made them worse between husband and wife. And Major Crespin had almost as little flair for aircraft adventure as his Colonel had.
It is said that the offender never forgives. Certainly it is quite explicitly hard for the one in the wrong to do so. And it takes more spiritual asset than continued alcohol often leaves. Antony Crespin was not ungrateful to Dr. Traherne for the physician’s ministrations that “next morning,” and on several others that had followed it. But the memory rankled. And he made it harder and harder for the physician to succor and brace him, or to keep up the show of a cordial friendship, which in India Crespin never much had felt, and which Traherne on his part found wearing steadily thin. The physician’s interest in his “case” never slackened or wavered, but the man’s liking for the man very nearly went. He stood to his merciful professional guns undauntedly—but he did it not a little grimly.
The curly-cue thing that your doctor writes at the head (or if he’s a “big man,” has printed there—to save him the trouble) of the prescription he instructs you to have made up at the chemist’s, and take inside you three times a day before meals, is a prayer to Apollo. “Grant health, O Apollo!” It seems almost a scandal, a medical lapse and neglect, that every physician does not write it himself, and put his thought and heart into it as he does; and seems too a trifle surprising in these piping days of spiritual-healing and psycho-all-sorts-of-things. Every physician aims to give the same professional devotion—of course!—to the patient who does not attract his personal liking as to the patient who does. But, because doctors are only human, even the most truly vocated rarely quite succeed. Dr. Traherne tried determinedly to give Crespin the same care and help that he had while his old affection for him still held—and the physician succeeded as well as the man could. But Crespin’s continued, though perhaps on the whole rarer and less, misconducts and his growing surliness and peevishness, rasped Traherne’s patience and turned his once sincere liking to a feeling very different. And his growing love and longing for the woman whom Crespin’s name still claimed, and whose coldness and aloofness towards her husband visibly grew from month to month, made any real feeling of friendship for Crespin impossible now to Basil Traherne. His memory of Tony Crespin, Harrow boy and fag-master, was tender and beautiful still. But it grew faint, or, at least, more remote, and even a little blurred—and rarely vividly associated with the heavy, flushed, dulled-eyed Major Crespin whose wife Traherne pitied and desired.