James Hilton: Collected Novels (85 page)

T
HE LITTLE DOCTOR WAS
modest, if one had to think of a single adjective for him; but his modesty was more accurately a lack of worldly ambition combined with a dislike of comparing himself with other people. It never occurred to him that he was a better doctor than his colleagues (though he was), and if anyone had suggested that this made him too good for Calderbury, he would have replied that nothing was too good for Calderbury. He cared little about money or position and had long ceased to regret the brilliant career that had once been forecast for him and was now out of reach. Indeed to every might-have-been he offered the crowning indignity of forgetfulness, save when some specific reminder nudged him.

Such a reminder was the German primer which he took down from a dusty shelf on the Thursday after meeting Leni in Sandmouth. Since he had to see her the next day he thought he might as well look over a few words. The book brought memories of student days in London, when he had walked the wards at St. Thomas’s Hospital and lodged near by in Battersea. He had studied German then with some idea of having a year’s specializing in Vienna, but the plan was abandoned when his father died and left far less money than had been expected. Feeling that he must begin to earn something to support his mother, he had then used up a small inheritance to buy a general practice in a Manchester suburb, where for several years he was both overworked and under-rewarded. He fell ill, debts accumulated, his mother died, and eventually there was nothing left but to sell out at a loss and take a long holiday. After this he bought the Calderbury practice, then an inferior one, and settled down in the more congenial atmosphere of a small cathedral market town. But he still could not convert his skill and effort into anything that would pay rates and bills. He was one of those men who have no knack of extracting financial profit, and very soon he might have become that pathetic thing, a bankrupt doctor, had not Jessica taken his affairs in hand.

Jessica was a year or two older than he. Even in those days she had had a tough, leathery skin (the result of much gardening) and a rigid eye (the result of much chairmanship of small meetings). Indefatigable at the tea urn, both in drawing-rooms and in church halls, she might have made an admirable colonial bishop’s wife—and, indeed,
would
have if a certain young vicar, since raised to the episcopacy, had not preferred someone far less suitable. After that she had taken pains to marry the little doctor.

And he, worried by debts (not really worried, but just bothered, for botheration was as much as anything connected with money could ever cause him), allowed himself for a short time the necessary illusion that passive willingness was really active desire.

It had been, by outward signs, a successful marriage. Jessica had reorganized all of David’s life that was reorganizable; the house at the corner of Shawgate was bought with her money; and though David jibbed at complete supervision of his business affairs, her secret interferences were more frequent and more considerable than he ever suspected. She turned a loss into a profit and David gave her all the credit for doing it without any profound conviction that it was worth doing.

Friday morning came—only a few hours after he had closed the German primer at his bedside. The day promised to be fine, and as the train left Calderbury the twin towers of the Cathedral rose above a film of mist that covered the town. They looked spectral, sailing through the sky when a curve of the line kept them long in view. Presently the line crossed the water meadows to the bridge over the river, then entered a cutting. It was all such a simple thing, to travel these few miles, yet that morning it seemed to David inexpressibly strange and lovely. He opened his paper and began to read, but as soon as the train emerged from the cutting his eyes wandered again, over fields where cattle stood and where the steam from the engine, rolling in little clouds, caused them hardly to stir. Serene and secure, this world, poised on an edge it could not glimpse. The train wheels caught a rhythm which, for some reason, translated into German words, words that he must have read in the text-book the night before:—

Noch erkannt und sehr gering

Unser Herr auf der Erde ging…

Lissington…Stamford Magna…Pumphrey…Marsland Junction. One changed there, and, with nothing else to do for ten minutes, one often watched the tank engine shunting round to the other end of the train, ready for the return journey to Calderbury. Then the second train came in, for Creston and Sandmouth only. The little doctor found a compartment, saw someone he knew slightly, nodded, and settled down with his paper again. For half a mile the express went back along the same line, then at the junction swerved aside to show the single track to Calderbury wandering away into a green distance. And somehow, vagrantly, the thought came to David that Calderbury was lost and that the line was trying to find it.

At Sandmouth he walked immediately to the Promenade, turning into the side street where the clifflike boarding houses soared from area basement to attic, bourgeois castles, flaunting their cruets on bay-window dining tables with an air of buxom integrity. How little it mattered where anything happened compared with what did happen; and this sense of fatefulness came to him as he climbed the flight of steps that led to one of the closed front doors. He was really rather nervous about this visit, and with some idea of getting it over he took it first on his list.

The landlady showed him to a room on the first floor overlooking the street. He had not, a week earlier, disclosed his own profession, lest admission might be refused to a sick person; and now he thought it simpler to keep up the assumption of some private friendship with the girl. He was startled a little, though he made no comment, when the woman said: “I don’t think your young lady’s very well. Maybe it’s her arm. I’d take her to see a doctor if I were you.”

A moment later he was investigating. The girl seemed less agitated in mind—that was something; she greeted him cheerfully. But her wrist was still inflamed and obviously painful—which was not surprising, after her previous neglect of it. He told her frankly that it was her own fault for not obeying the instructions he had given her at Calderbury; how could she possibly have danced with broken bones chafing each other at every sudden movement? And now, as a result, the mending would be more difficult; there might even be complications; at any rate, she would have to carry her arm in a sling for weeks.

She nodded when he had finished, accepting both the situation and the blame for it. That made him smile and ask, more gently: “Do you like it here?”

She nodded and smiled back.

Yes, she was more cheerful; that was a great deal—more important, really, than her wrist.

“I think you’d better stay another week—since it seems to be doing you good. You’re not lonely?”

“No.”

“Made any friends?”

“The landlady’s little boy. I take him for walks sometimes.”

“Good. Can you understand anything he says?”

“He doesn’t talk a great deal. And I’m learning English lessons from a book. I never had time before.”

Up to then he had talked in German; now he said, in English: “I shall have to brush up my German, too, then we’ll be quits. Do you really like children?”

“Yes, indeed.”

He had a sudden idea.

“I’ve got a little boy, you know. He’s nine. It would be a change for him to come to Sandmouth, but I’ve never known quite what to do with him while I make my round of visits. I wonder if…if I were to bring him next week…I could leave him in your charge for a few hours?”

“Yes, please.”

“But I’m afraid he’s not quite an ordinary little boy.”

“No?”

“He’s rather nervous and excitable—and sometimes difficult—do you know what I mean?”

“I don’t mind. Please bring him.”

It was just an idea, and one which, had he thought twice, he might never have put forward; for it was always possible that Jessica would object, and he disliked arguing with her. Jessica, however, was glad enough to have Gerald out of the house for a day, and quite indifferent when David explained that he had a patient at Sandmouth who had promised to act as nursemaid while he made his calls.

The arrangement, therefore, stood; but it entailed a good deal of trouble which Jessica herself would scarcely have thought worth while. David did not mind. He was careful to wait at the very front end of the stations at both Calderbury and Marsland Junction, so that the train did not rush by as it entered the station; that always terrified Gerald, and David understood as if it were the most natural thing in the world; which, indeed, he knew it was, in Gerald’s world. And then there were the actual hours of travel, during which the boy was apt to get tired and fidgety, so that he sometimes made himself a nuisance to others in the compartment.

Nevertheless, they reached Sandmouth without trouble and called immediately at the boarding house. David was a little apprehensive, because Gerald was apt to take sudden dislikes to strangers; but the first encounter seemed to him to pass well enough, and he left on a tiptoe of hopefulness that did not quite amount to confidence. When he called back later in the afternoon he found the two of them eating pink ice cream out of huge cones. “Ice cream is a thing you should
never
have unless you know where it comes from!” Jessica would have exclaimed, indignantly; but David, neither knowing nor caring where it came from, merely smiled: for the boy at that moment looked just like any other boy. It had been a dream that that should begin to happen some day.

“How did you manage?” he asked later.

“All right.”

“He’s really been
good?”

“Yes.”

“He can’t help it, you know, even when he isn’t. Wasn’t he frightened at all—by anything?”

“He didn’t like the big waves when we walked along the beach, but I made him laugh.”

“You did?”

“I said things in German. I said,
‘Hurtig mit Donnergepolter entrollte der tückische Marmor’
—and he began to laugh and then made me say it over and over again.”

David smiled eagerly. “You know, that’s just the way I do it too—anything to make him laugh, anything I can think of, when he gets into one of those panics. I believe that’s the only way to tackle them until he can tackle them himself.”

“Is it true that when he was younger he was run over by a train?”

“Good God, no! Did he say that? Oh, he’s an awful little story-teller—you mustn’t believe everything he says. He just
imagines
things, you know, and everything he imagines is more the truth to him than what really happens. That’s why he has these panics—through imagining things. He doesn’t really tell
lies.”

“I know.”

“If you do know, you belong to a very small minority, I can tell you. And I think he must feel you do—that’s why you get on so well with him.”

He had been talking English and she German most of the time. They couldn’t either of them be sure that the other grasped an exact meaning; but David didn’t care. He had never found it possible to put everything he meant into speech; indeed, he had sometimes felt that words offered a merely surface exactness that was both an illusion and a danger. That was why he avoided scientific jargon, preferring to write on medical certificates “bad cold,” because he knew well enough that a bad cold might mean anything, and that a bad cold was in this respect rather like life. And so, listening to Leni’s German, which she no longer tried to simplify for him, he caught the mood rather than the detail, and felt no more eager to dispel an occasional word obscurity than Whistler must have wanted the mists to disappear before he would paint a sunset.

The following Friday he took Gerald to Sandmouth again. The repeated experiment was almost too successful, for the boy enjoyed himself so much that when the time came to return to Calderbury he burst into tears and refused to be comforted. That, clearly, was as big a danger as anything else; and David, promising that he should sec Leni again, was privately aware that it had better not happen. It would be disastrous if Gerald should develop some deep attachment that could not continue; and how could it, since the girl would soon recover and be at work again? At least he assumed so, and she assumed so too; for her money was coming to an end, and even if she could not dance again for some time (as she certainly could not), there might be some other temporary job to tide over the interval; they had talked over that possibility together, and he had been quite optimistic about her getting a commercial post requiring knowledge of German.

They walked to the railway station, the three of them, with these thoughts and possibilities somewhat strangled by the need for pacifying Gerald. He made a scene on the platform, clinging to Leni’s hand and refusing to budge. “Good-bye,” said David, harassed by all this, as he leaned out of the window when the struggle was over. “Good-bye—and good luck about the job…” Something in her eyes made him add, as the guard began whistling: “By the way, if it doesn’t come off—the job, I mean…” Then the train began to move. “Well, write and let me know,” he added, lamely.

She didn’t have to write and let him know. Jessica wrote. Jessica, in fact, handled the situation as she always handled situations—masterfully, with a fine eye for essentials and a bold seizure of opportunities. She was a shrewd woman, and after Gerald’s successive Fridays at Sandmouth and his delighted chatter about them, it did not take her long to realize that whatever had happened there had been fortunate. In her remarkably efficient way she wished well to the boy, though the well-wishing hardly lessened her impatience of his tantrums. If someone else had both the knack and the inclination to deal with them, then by all means let it happen. “Who
is
this woman who looks after Gerald when you’re in Sandmouth?” she asked David.

David had acquired a habit of reticence about his patients’ private affairs, added to which there was the vagueness that existed in his own mind when he asked himself who Leni was. Come to think about it, he simply didn’t know.