We have been in many parts of the world since then, and I have come across a great number of doctors. Many of them are amongst the dearest creatures on earth, but, like all our other loved ones, they have their little ways. Clara was ill once, and Dr. Smithson’s partner came. He explained everything to me with the greatest care.
“What I should get, Mrs. Molyneux, if I were you,” he said with great emphasis, “is a piece of bread. Get your cook to give you some nice bread, not new you know, stale—stale bread a couple of days old—and steep it in a little milk. Heat the milk (you have a saucepan I expect? that’s capital!)—get a nice saucepan, then, and I should wash it first—get it washed for you—your maid can do that—get it well washed with soap and hot water, that’s right, wash it, and then pour the milk in. You have the milk, say, in a jug—a china jug—quite so—no doubt it stands in the larder, precisely—well, you get your cook to give you that jug of milk, and pour a little into the saucepan and heat it; I shouldn’t boil it—no, I shouldn’t indeed. I should heat it and pour it very gently on the bread. Cut the bread, you know—get a knife and cut it; don’t crumb it—that would be too small—cut it into nice pieces and pour the milk over it—you’ll find the girl will do capitally on it.”
We all hear from doctors about the tendency of women to be faddy about their health. The truth of the matter is that every one likes to feel that something about them is of importance to some one, and not only to some one in their own family, but to the outside world. I used to feel that James was an interesting personality to many people; he expounded his views to them, his remarks were received with sympathy, and he got a great deal of patting on the back. I didn’t. Clara and Ruth thought me an eccentric, amiable creature of another breed from themselves, a sort of finish to the house in a way, an ultimate cat on whom to lay responsibility for failure and domestic sin; but they were not interested in me. My women friends were more interested in my habits than in my personal psychology; James was mainly interested in my interest in him. It was sometimes a sore temptation to have a disease, something that would make at least three men shake their heads and wonder what I was doing. They would find out then what an exceptional character I had—what courage, what wit under trying circumstances, what intelligence in household management (the vacant chair, the cold bacon, that would bring it all home to them). James would hurry home in the evening and read letters to me from people who were all interested; he would chat—not quite so long as I wanted, so that I could have the pleasant qualm of missing him—then he would be dispatched downstairs to horrid discomfort where his darling was not, and I should not have to change into a cold evening dress. At last I should fall asleep, comfortable, warm, and washed, knowing that I need not get up next morning and slave and worry in unrecognised monotony. Can anyone wonder that we do it?
But anyone will do as well as a doctor; a clergyman or a lover if they will take an interest in one’s soul. I believe that a chiropodist who was really concerned for one’s toes would fill a long-felt want. It is a curious fact that no one goes to a lawyer for sympathy, and yet why we suppose that abnormalities in our liver will make us interesting in the eyes of a doctor to whom livers are no treat, while we neglect our lawyers who will investigate disorders in our conduct for the moderate sum of six-and-eightpence, must remain a mystery.
Suppose that one of us went to a solicitor’s office and said: “Do you know, such a queer thing has happened to me! I went and burgled a poor old gentleman the other day—stole his watch and a lot of valuable plate—and outside I met a policeman, whom I drugged with chloroform on a handkerchief.” One imagines the solicitor gravely investigating the matter, finding no old gentleman, no watch, no stolen plate, and no policeman. He charges the usual fee, puts a pair of handcuffs on the lady, and tells her to come back in a fortnight and have them altered.
A doctor whom I love very much once made this startling remark to me: “You lead a very nice life for a lady.”
The words brought to my mind such pictures as I have never forgotten. Such vistas of flat, dull landscape stretched before me; such dead seas of sensible conversation; such mountains made of interminable molehills; such continents of golf links and tennis lawns. All the shores were strewn with correctly balanced account books and the débris of tea parties; the trees were hung with carefully selected and well-boiled legs of mutton; first-rate parlourmaids with slight moustaches who understood the telephone peeped from behind every bush, and family butchers mated on St. Valentine’s Day in the place of nightingales. The sky was made of chill-proof Jaeger, and the stars were all turned so that their light fell from behind and on the left side of the book. My thoughts took the form of a parody on Lear’s poem about the Jumblies:
Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;
Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve.
The last line will not bear analysis, but I think that the word “ladies” as he used it gave me an impression of something that lets the juice of life escape and retains only a few husks and skins. A very nice life for a lady seemed to me little more than a very nice tissue of habits, but then, no words mean quite the same thing to any two people.