[XXX]
To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone.
91b Harley Street, W.,
December 25, 1910,
10.30 p.m.
My dear Hugh,
This seems an odd sort of time at which to begin a letter—even to you. But this has been an odd sort of Christmas, a kind of aftermath, as far as its festivities have been concerned, of those demanded by Molly's marriage. The two water-colours that you sent them, by the way, were both lovely, quite in your happiest vein; and I am sorry that at present they have no permanent wall to hang them on. But Rupert's colonial tour, upon which they had to start early last week, will scarcely be finished, I suppose, for twelve months; and even then their place of habitation seems likely to be very movable. So, upon the whole, we have been a quiet little party, or as quiet, at any rate, as Claire and Tom will allow; and we decided to spend the afternoon at the hospital, which is en fête for some twenty-four hours, at the price, possibly, of a few subsequent temperatures, but to the immediate benediction of all concerned.
Have you ever been to the hospital? I think not. And I daren't attempt to describe it to you, chiefly, I suppose, on account of the natural reticence, the mauvaise bonte, or the golden silence—I leave you to select—with which most men avoid such subjects as their wives, their souls, and their alma mater; but secondarily because, by the time my letter reached you, the description would most probably have ceased to be true. It would have added a storey, or sprouted a wing. Let me content myself therefore with pointing out to you those two boys standing rather awkwardly in one corner of the entrance-hall—the left-hand corner between the cloak-room and the porter's desk. Both of them have only just left school. The shiny-haired one, with the crimson tie, and the gold buttons on his waistcoat, and the creases on his rather striking trousers, was at one of our older foundations. The other, with yesterday's collar round his neck, and a stain or two of nitric acid upon his sleeves, has just won an entrance scholarship from a private school at Camberwell. The second is the shyer of the two perhaps, in spite of his ardent Fabianism and his bitter independence of revealed religion. But both are a little nervous in that they are only in their first year, and still, academically speaking, confined to the study of the dog-fish in a remoter corner of the college. They are feeling rather young, in fact, though the hospital's name is on their visiting cards—something like new boys again, at the bottom of the first form.
Three Christmases from now, however, and they will be sauntering here very much at their ease, waiting about with their house-physicians for the two o'clock arrival of their chiefs from Harley Street. The gold buttons will have disappeared, I think, by then, and the trousers will be modester in hue; while on the other hand that collar will be above suspicion, and you might search in vain for a trace of red corrosive. Both, too, will be dangling stethoscopes, and would like, if they were quite certain of the chairman, to be smoking a Virginian cigarette. In other words, they have deserted the college for the "house." They have become critics of the nursing staff, and their talk—not on Christmas Day, of course—is of râles and rhonchi and the merits of their respective H.P.'s. There are some of them standing about in the hall as our party dismounts from the carriage. But the majority are already in their favourite wards, whose walls they have been helping to decorate. Far removed are they from the Sawyers of yesterday, though at times they grow merry with wine. For the demands of examiners have become annually more stringent; their hospital duties are arduous; and hard work, as everybody knows, is the next-door neighbour to virtue.
Give them but three Christmases more, and they will be even as this white-coated and dignified young man whom Horace and I are watching as he deals with the patients in the receiving-room. For these will drift in from the streets and tenements, whether or no the day be a Festival, and partly, perhaps, with an eye to possible good cheer. We wait a little, as he stands there by the pillar, a curious contrast, with his fresh face and athletic figure, to the slouching fleshiness of these big navvies and the stunted urbanity of the rest.