The Corner of Harley Street / Being Some Familiar Correspondence of Peter Harding, M.D.

To Robert Lynn, M.R.C.S., Applebrook, Devon.

91b Harley Street, W.,

March 4, 1910.

My dear Bob,

Your letter of this morning, like the cream that it was, rose naturally to the surface of the little pile of correspondence that awaited me on the breakfast-table; and if I didn't read it then, and am only answering it now, in front of my dressing-room fire, there are more reasons than one for this. You might even detect a little pathos, perhaps, in the chief of these. For I can't help feeling that a younger man-myself, for example, twenty years ago-would have been into it before you could say scalpel, snatching his joy as one of your own parr will take a Wickham on a clear pool before the half-pounder beside him has even decided to inspect it. And if I have not done this, if I have learned the better way, the art of lingering, the value of the "bouquet," well, there's a rather forlorn piece of scalp in the opposite looking-glass to tell me the reason why.

So you see that I didn't rush headlong at your letter, tearing it open with a feverish, if mature, forefinger. I even ignored the twinkle in my wife's eye, and the more impertinent expression that Miss Molly was permitting to rest upon her usually calm features.

"Another lump, my pet," was all I said, and stirred my coffee with that inscrutable calm so justly associated with Destiny, Wisdom, and the Consulting Physician.

"He's pretending not to be excited," explained Miss Molly to a college friend across the table; and Claire, all chestnut mop and black-stockinged legs (and convalescent, by the way, from the mumps), gurgled suddenly over her Henty when she ought by rights to have been completely breathless.

Through the open window a pleasant breeze stirred lazily across the table, decked with its stolen sweets from our own and our neighbours' hyacinths. And in a welcome sunshine the windows of Sir Jeremy's consulting-room beamed as merrily as their owner's eyes.

"And not even one spark of enthusiasm," proceeded Molly. "Oh, who would have a mere physician for a parent?"

"For the elderly," I told her, "excitement is to be deprecated. Now if I were twenty-four, perhaps--"

"Twenty-three," put in Molly, adding, with very great distinctness, "to-morrow."

"And that reminds me," murmured Claire from her sofa under the window.

So I opened the other envelopes first, those that contained the bills, the appointments, the invitations, and the unpleasant letters, just as a wise man should, who is at his best, and realizes it, tubbed and shaved and over his breakfast bacon. And since Molly and her friend appeared to have interrupted themselves in the midst of some earnest political discussion, I begged them to resume this. For in making the breakfast-table their judgment-bar they were setting an example, as I reminded them, that the world would do well to follow. Breakfast-table verdicts, breakfast-table sermons, breakfast-table laws, for true and kindly sanity they might be safely backed, I observed, against any product of the midnight oil that has emerged from the brain of man-including even woman as produced by Newnham; or so, at any rate, thought a middle-aged physician whose opinions were dear to me. Only, of course, it would have to be a well-furnished table; and the marmalade, if possible, should have been made at home.

"You had better just glance at it though, hadn't you?" asked Esther-dear, wise Esther-from her throne behind the urn; after which there was quite obviously nothing else to be done. Applebrook-glorious postmark-it had already begun to weave its magic for me as I slipped a knife into the comfortable envelope, and ran a well-mastered eye over its contents.

"Nothing of importance," I announced; "only fish."

"Only fish," scoffed Molly, well into her third muffin.

And yet, though I have not actually read it till just now-my sacred ten minutes before the dinner-gong summons me downstairs-your letter has really followed me all day, even as Applebrook itself will follow a returning angler down the evening moor, and ripple through his after-supper dreams. It has blessed me, and made a dull day bright (for the sun began to sulk again at noon), and the more so because my wisdom kept it at a distance until just now. Applebrook-as I emerged from the District Railway into that faint but inexorable smell of burnt coffee and human unwashedness which broods over Whitechapel Road, the extra bulge in my breast-pocket reminded me suddenly of wind-blown gorse and all the hard-bitten, sunburnt heath that stands for Dartmoor. My step quickened. I entered the hospital gates with a jauntier tread, and could have sworn that a silver trout shot spectrally round the corner in front of me. A poor presage for my lucidity in the afternoon march round the wards, I can hear you murmur. But you are wrong there. For, on the contrary, the points of my discourse made their bows to my memory with unwonted briskness; and I contrived, I think, to keep the notebook-pencils pretty busy.

Yet the afternoon did contain one of those disquieting surprises that used at one time to seem so catastrophic, and now appear only too wonderfully uncommon. For some weeks past I have had a poor fellow in one of my beds, a cheerful soul, for all he knew himself to be treading a downhill road. His condition, rather an obscure one, and in any event incurable, might have represented one of two causes. Week by week, to a respectful and intelligent body of students, I have demonstrated the signs and symptoms of this patient, and proved to them how, on the whole, they must be taken to indicate B-shall we say?-as the root of the mischief. And now to-day, before an expectant gathering, the uncompromising knife of the pathologist in the post-mortem room has revealed the precisely opposite. It was A all the time, and there was nothing for it but to accept defeat, and retire strategically in as good an order as might be. There was, at any rate, the consolation that the mistake could not have affected the unhappy issue of the malady. It was merely a sort of academic pride that was to suffer; and I suppose it is only an acquired familiarity with death that could have made so small a personal disaster even imaginable-for I don't think it ever really became actual-under its great shadow. So I made my retreat-in fair order, I believe, with baggage intact and a minimum of casualties. Nevertheless I caught young Martyn, the wing three, you know-what wouldn't I have given for his swerve thirty years ago!-smiling significantly across at your son, who was very tactfully endeavouring to appear oblivious. And it was Applebrook that fortified my powers of forgiveness-Applebrook rippling peacefully over its immemorial granite.

And so there's plenty of water, is there, and the colour has been just right? And you have already been into a pounder, and landed him too. That's good, for though we miss a lot of pounders in Applebrook-"a pound, sir, if it weighed an ounce, and took half the cast away with it"-we seldom land one. And am I game to come down on May 1st as usual?

A day-dream, or dusk-dream, has been interrupted here-I might have prophesied it-by one of those earnest, cadaverous persons whose pride it is that they have never taken-never felt the need of it, they usually add-a holiday in their lives.

"Not for thirty-five years, sir," said this latest specimen to me just now, rubbing his hands with counting-house pride.

"God help you," I replied, which took him aback a little, and was not, I admit, a tactful welcome to a prospective two guineas. But then, you see, he had fetched me back from a dusk-dream.

"Does that mean you can't?" he inquired a little acidly. And really I should not have been quite so abrupt with him, for his confession gave me the right cue to his treatment. A holiday, in fact, was all that he needed, though I doubted his ability to use one. So I assumed my heaviest manner, as one must when it is to be unaccompanied by an expensive prescription.

"If you don't take one," I proceeded to tell him, "though you will probably survive with the aid of iron, arsenic, and an occasional Seidlitz powder, you will become eventually like those sorrowful civil servants that may be met at almost any time in Somerset House or the General Post Office. They have been pensioned for months, but there they are, unable to inter themselves decently among the mashies and geraniums of Wimbledon and Weybridge, haunting their former desks, poor forlorn creatures, whose one bond of life has been severed-a torture to themselves and their successors."

While I was taking breath after this rather impressive harangue, he stared at me gloomily.

"It has always," he said, "been my one great desire to die in harness."

After congratulating him on the possession of so modest, if somewhat cheerless, an ambition, I asked him why he had come to see me. A physician, to a man with such a goal, seemed, on the face of it, something of a superfluity. But I learned that there was a wife at home, poor soul. And it was her doctor, he said, who had recommended this visit.

"And I may tell you," he added, "that your opinion coincides with theirs." He handed me his two guineas. "Where shall I go?" he asked.

By now of course I could see that my advice was going to be useless; but there was no better alternative.

"Have you any hobbies?" I inquired. But he shook his head. No; he had never had time for hobbies. And by to-morrow afternoon he will be reading his Financial News on Brighton Pier, and wondering when he can decently return.

* * *

But the dressing-gong has sounded already, and the embers in my fire are reddening into darkness. Outside, the wheels of a myriad motor-cars and carriages pass ceaselessly, and repass; and from beyond and beneath them, through the open window, comes the roar of London. I believe you sigh for it sometimes, don't you, down there among your moorland silences? Give me three weeks of it a year, and, as far as I am concerned, you might monopolise the orchestra for the other forty-nine. I don't particularly want my dinner, and I am still less inclined to talk amiably with the two dull, but worthy, guests-may the gods of hospitality forgive me-who are to sit at our board to-night. With the tired girl-poet, I am praying instead;

God, for the little streams that tumble as they run.

For there are times when I think that the best thing about Harley Street is that there are exactly twelve ways out of it, and this, I think, is one of them.

If to-morrow now were only the 1st of May, and that doorstep of mine opened into Paddington, cheeriest of railway stations. By the way, somebody ought to write an essay on the Personality of Railway Stations. Liverpool Street, for example, smokes cheap cigarettes, and lives at Walthamstow-does its baggage up with string, and takes dribbly children to Clacton-on-Sea. And Paddington is a sun-tanned country squire, riding a good thirteen stone, and with an eye for an apple. His luggage is of a well-ripened leather, and he is a bit lavish with his tips.

* * *

But, alas, my door merely opens to admit the timid nose of a new maid who announces the arrival of the visitors. Dressing-gowns must be shed, and tails donned. I am grasping your hairy brown hand. Can you feel it?

"Lucky dog," I am saying to you, "the wind's up-stream, and the trout are hungry, and for all your scattered practice you can still nip down for one perfect hour to Marleigh Pool-still feel your rod-point bending to some heaven-sent troutling of the true fighting stock." Will I come? Won't I! And till then I can merely remain London-bound.

Your envious old friend,

P. H.

* * *

To Horace Harding, Trinity College, Cambridge.

91b Harley Street, W.,

March 11, 1910.

My dear Horace,

Casting a remorseful eye at the date upon your letter, I perceive that it is already almost a week since I resolved to sit down, and answer it immediately; and the postscript that follows "your aff. son H." gazes at me with a rebuking stare, as if to remind me how very far I have been from bucking up, as you so tactfully suggested, and flooring the problem with which you have presented me. And yet you mustn't suppose that I have been altogether too careless or too busy to deal with it as you wished. On the other hand, I have been dodging it round the ring of everyday happenings ever since I first beheld it eyeing me beneath the Trinity crest. For the fact of the matter is, my dear Horace, that your revered Daddy has all along been more than doubtful about his ability to stretch the fellow on the carpet. And now, at the end of a week's somewhat cowardly-footwork, shall we call it?-he has decided to crawl under the ropes, and make room for a lustier substitute.

Shall you become a doctor? Well, I'm afraid, after all, that you must tackle the question for yourself. As an American patient, with a doubtful liver, observed to me this morning, the problem is right up against you; and nobody else can defeat it in your stead. The thought of this has cheered me so amazingly that from now onwards you may safely imagine, I think, an almost contented physician, sitting plumply in a front stall, smiling at the fight over contemplative finger-tips, and merely tendering, between the rounds, some well-worn pieces of ring-side advice.

And so the peaks are challenging you, eh? The wig, the gaiters, the gold pince-nez, and the bedside manner, they have risen up to bid you choose your future path. For twenty-two years, you tell me, you haven't greatly disturbed yourself about these things. You have accepted parental orders: you have taken, in consequence, a respectable, if not distinguished, degree in classics; you have mastered enough science to rob your "first medical" of most of its fears; and you have obtained, by the way, a Rugger "blue," of which you are, no doubt, a great deal more proud. And now that all this has been accomplished you turn to your former guide, and say to him, "Whither away?" And like Gilbert's poor wit, I feel inclined to retort very truthfully that I do indeed wither away. Behold, I have vanished. The mountain range is before you. Choose your summit.

* * *

As if to point a moral, I have been here interrupted by a pitiful voice over the telephone. Indeed for a week past, I have been its victim at varying intervals. For Mrs. Cholmondeley, let us call her, cannot make up her mind between the rival hygienic attractions of Cannes and Torquay. As a matter of fact Camberwell or Camden Town would be equally, probably more, effectual. Organically she is perfectly sound. For the rest she is merely over-fed and under-occupied. She has deleted very nearly every healthful activity from her list of physical employments. And now those of her will are to be similarly abandoned; delegated to paid assistants like myself.

Cannes or Torquay? Well, I have refused the responsibility of deciding. In league with her long-suffering family physician, I am endeavouring to force her faculties to make this little effort by themselves. For I doubt if the sorrowful gates of illness behold anything more entirely pitiable than the spectacle of a will on crutches.

Well then, having, as you see, completely foisted the ultimate issue upon your own shoulders, it seems to me that there are three main standpoints from which you must regard our profession before finally deciding to embark upon it. To take the least important of these first, you must bear in mind, I think, that while you should undoubtedly be able to pay your way, and to make an honest living, yet the financial rewards that medicine has to offer are scarcely worth considering. Given an equal amount of capital, both in brain-power and pounds sterling, your hours of work, your expenditure of energy, your capacity for diagnosis and research, your readiness at the reading of human nature, would bring you a far greater return of this world's goods in almost any other occupation that you care to name-incomparably so in commerce. At the same time I don't think that this point of view will detain you very long; because, however little fathers may really know of their own sons (and the sum of parental ignorance under this heading must be something rather stupendous), I am quite sure that the financial laurel, per se, has no overwhelming attraction for you.

Having deigned then to consider the problem from this lowest and most sordid standpoint, you should shift your ground, I think, and reflect upon it from the midmost of my three Pisgahs, the scientific one. If I haven't led you to this first, it is because you have probably scrambled up it already, and paid no attention at all to the one that I have just recommended to you. And in a sense your instinct will perhaps have taken you by a straighter route to the heart of this matter than that which your more prudent parent has indicated. Because ultimately it is from this point that you will have to make your final decision. You must ask yourself, with all the earnestness of a novice at his altar-vigil, "Am I prepared to know?"

For the long day of the charlatan and the quack is drawing at last to its close, and their sun is even now setting in a blaze of patent-medicine advertisements. Modern Europe has almost ceased to be possible for the would-be Paracelsus; even America will not contain him, I think, for very much longer. And through a dissolving mist of white spats and atrocious Latin the eyes of humanity are turning slowly, but very surely, towards the man who knows. Are you prepared to become such a man?

I fancy that I can see your forehead wrinkling a little here; so let me explain myself in a parable. There is an old story, familiar in the hospitals, of a bygone practitioner whose simple habit it was to tie a piece of string about the waist of his patient. He would then ask the sufferer to locate the pain. If this were above the string he administered an emetic, if below a purgative; while if the pain and the string coincided, the unhappy victim would receive both. Now it is melancholy to reflect that this gentleman has never been without disciples. And yet how difficult at times may it become to avoid such a fate. Are you prepared to avoid it?

Let me put the question in yet another shape. Some day a patient will come to you-you may be quite certain that he will-at the end of a long round or an exhausting afternoon at hospital; will complain to you of his lamentable depression of spirits, his entire loss of appetite, his slight but continual headache; and will show you, in confirmation of these symptoms, nothing graver, let us say, than a dull eye and a yellowish tongue. You will be tired; you will see at a glance that his subjective troubles are altogether disproportionate to the objective gravity of his complaint, and perhaps justifiably you will send him away happy, or at any rate contented, in the belief that he is a bit "liverish." But are you going to allow "liverish" to satisfy yourself? "Of course not," you reply; and yet, believe me, my son, it will be a very real temptation. Why bother, at a long day's end, to worry your tired faculties into presenting to your mind as exact a mental picture of the man's actual condition as they can draw? Nevertheless, unless you do this, you will be treating him with less respect than your old bicycle in the coach-house; as though, if it should creak or wheeze or begin to run less smoothly, you would merely tell yourself that it was "wheelish," and drop oil at random into its most convenient aperture. Do you begin to see what I am driving at?

And then you will probably turn upon me and say, "But to cultivate this habit of forming proper mental pictures, I shall have to be at least a chemist, a physicist, a pathologist, a bacteriologist, to say nothing of a philosopher; and how can a single human being, however industrious, contain as many persons as these?" And of course he cannot. Upon no more than one branch of the tree of Healing will it be given to you to climb out a little farther than your fellows; but, at any rate, you can keep your eye upon the others. It is in this way alone that you can become a scientific physician in the best and broadest sense. And you can take my word for it that it will never be worth your while to become any other sort of a sawbones-an exacting prospect? I agree with you. And many an hour will come to you with the easy question, "Why lavish all this time and trouble in gathering up some very trifling grain of extra knowledge-knowledge that, in all probability, will never become of the least importance in your hands?"

And then, perhaps, a moment will flash into your life when this very grain shall shape a million destinies. Are you prepared to live for that moment?

I am almost tempted to finish my letter at this question mark; and the more so because the great public, or such of it as has been led away by a certain school of literary sentimentalists, has plastered my final mound of observation-shall we call it the human one?-with such a viscid layer of adulation that it has become a little hard for a self-respecting physician to take his stand there even for two and a half moments. Has ever, I wonder, a doctor figured in fiction or drama who, being neither a clown nor a fool, was not described as noble? Have we not tracked him on his rounds through unconscionable horrors, and wept big tears at his preposterous death-bed? No wonder such a fellow finds it hard to get his bills paid. To offer him mere money would seem little less than sacrilege.

And yet, I think, you will agree with me that here is an aspect of medicine worth consideration. To the seeing eye and the tender hand there is no easier door into the warm heart of humanity. There is no other profession that will lead you quite so close to reality. And by this I don't mean realism in the modern sense, wherein, as it seems to me, the altogether ugly looms so disproportionately large. For after thirty years of tolerably wide opportunity I have still failed to find the altogether ugly. And though of course you will meet ugliness in plenty-a cancer that will find you shocked and, alas, largely impotent-yet, if you look long enough, and carefully enough, how often will you discover it to be but the shadow of some clearly shining spiritual beauty. No, you need not fear, I think, to tread behind the veil.

And now let me round off my epistle with a brief reminiscence. In my early twenties, just after I had qualified, I travelled down to a small fishing-village in Cornwall to act there as locum tenens for a practitioner who had finally broken down in health. The practice, mostly among a poor population, was a scattered one, and I was kept fairly busy; so busy, in fact, that beyond a hazy impression of buffeting across estuaries in big-bottomed ferryboats, and driving, upon a wild night or two, along as rough a coast-line as one could desire to see, I remember very little of that month's experiences.

One remains with me. And you must imagine a rather tumble-down, twopenny-halfpenny cottage, half-way down a cobbled street, with its front door opening directly into a tiny living-room. A youthful-looking Hippocrates is backing out of it rather more awkwardly than usual. And in front of him, still holding one of his hands, is a willowy, comely Cornish lass, mother of three, with the most disturbingly moist-looking eyes. In the background there would be, I think, a very old and rugged woman, crooning over her youngest grandchild, just recovered, happily, and rather miraculously, from a very tough attack of pneumonia. The young man had been telling them, this simple family, that he was going away now, back to London and the big hospital. And hence-dare I write it?-hence these tears.

"Ah, doctor," says the lassie, "'tis wisht you've made us. An' whatever'll us do now if the little uns take bad?"

"Oh, rot," says the blushing physician, jolted for the moment out of a rather elaborate bedside manner-"nonsense, I mean. You'll get along all right. There's another man coming. And I didn't do anything, you know, really."

"Didn't do nothen? D'you hear that, mother?" And the old woman looks up, with her wrinkled cheeks and cavernous, sea-blue eyes. "D'you think us don't know very well as you've saved the poor lamb's life?"

And so, as Pepys would say, into the wet, bright street, and up the hill to the surgery. She was under a misapprehension, of course. Presently, if you take up medicine, you will learn that a doctor's part in the treatment of pneumonia consists chiefly of a masterly inactivity. But a boy of twenty-four can't hear words like that spoken to him, and remain quite the same person; even if next week he is busy bashing hats in at a Hospital Cup-tie. By the way, I got mine rather badly damaged last Wednesday when Guy's won the cup again. And, I think, now you have read this letter, that I can almost hear you murmuring, "No wonder."

Your affect. father,

P. H.

* * *

To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds.

91b Harley Street, W.,

March 14, 1910.

My dear Aunt Josephine,

I am very glad to learn that your health on the whole has not been much worse since your visit to us last month. And I have no doubt that this last week's sunshine will have already improved it. Claire is now quite fit again after a mild attack of mumps, and goes back to Eastbourne in two days' time.

With regard to your rheumatism, there are, as you say, several kinds of this complaint, or at any rate a good many affections that go popularly under the same name. And I think that it is quite likely that the wearing of a ring upon your third finger might very probably benefit your own particular variety, though I am much more doubtful about its efficacy in the case of your coachman's wife. Yes, there are two I's in bacilli, as you point out, but I'm afraid that the article you read in the paper is quite correct in stating that our insides contain a very large number of these active little animals. Nor is the female sex exempt, I'm sorry to say. But it is an idea that one soon gets used to, and I doubt if the measures that you suggest will make a very great difference either to their health or your own. But there was once a wise old doctor who used to say that between milk and good sound blood there was no difference but the colour. Personally I prefer it sweet. But the sour kind is no doubt better than none at all.

With best love from Esther and the girls,

Your affect. nephew,

Peter Harding.

* * *