The Narrative of John Smith, Page 4

  When I was a young fellow endeavouring to earn bread and cheese with my pen – a halfpenny worth of cheese to an intolerable amount of bread – I always had some hope to cheer me and some second string to my bow on which to depend if the first should snap. In that, I was of course more fortunate than many another poor devil who was toiling along the same narrow and thorny track. I had, however, my fair share of rebuffs and disappointments. The articles which I sent forth came back to me at times with a rapidity and accuracy which spoke well for our postal arrangements. If they had been paper boomerangs they could not have returned more infallibly to their unhappy dispatcher. There was one stale little cylinder of manuscript which described irregular orbits among the publishers until I became so weary of its perpetual reappearance that I consigned it to the flames. I am sore now, after a quarter of a century, when I think of it.42 Ah, these children of our mind – the strong and robust can look after themselves, but our heart turns towards the weakly and deformed! An author has always a pride in his successful work, but it is as nothing compared with his love and pity for his failures.

  But there was a brighter side to my own brief experiences. Occasionally, articles – even among the first which I evolved – went off without a hitch and made their appearance amidst the most august and select of company. Kindly letters from editors with allusions to enclosures made amends for many a failure. There was one gentleman, whose eminent position in the literary world must have made his time particularly valuable, but who managed to spare a few minutes in advising or exhorting the newest of novices. He superintended the whole garden of literature and the most unpromising and unattractive of plants might hope for some pruning and watering at his hands. I never received one of his brief and frequently illegible notes without a feeling of wonder and gratitude at the kindliness which prompted it.43

  I fancy that since Walter Scott’s famous dictum anent the staff and the crutch,44 and Charles Lamb’s still more pronounced opinion, there has been less inclination to take up literature as a profession. There is, I hope, no class now like the old garreteers in Grub Street, who must either write or starve.45 Unless a man has met with such success in literature as to assure him of a comfortable income he rarely looks to it entirely for his subsistence. I know of no man who is placed in so sad a position as he who is gifted with an amount of literary ability which is just short of the standard demanded by the caterers for the public. An irresistible impulse drives him to write – an impulse which failure can never entirely overcome. His whole life is a toiling and a slaving to get within that magic circle – and dreary heartbreaking work it is.

  Here are the three little Rundles coming home from school. I can see down the street from where I lie, thanks to the bow window. Dicky, Tommy and Maude are their names, of which if I remember right Dicky is the dirtiest and Tommy is the stickiest, while the little girl is chiefly remarkable for negative qualities. Hullo, some sort of a civil war has broken out among them! Dicky possesses something – toffee as I guess – which the other two are endeavouring to take away from him. Dicky fights gallantly but the allies are too strong for him. They bear away the plunder, but Tommy in the hour of victory refuses to share with Maude, so she relapses into tears and reproaches. What an epitome of all the wars and coalitions of history! And about as important perhaps in the eyes of omnipotence.

  I learn the cause of the quarrel from Mrs Rundle when she comes up to lay my cloth. The problem as submitted by the belligerent powers is certainly a knotty one, which explains if it does not justify the recent outbreak of hostilities. A penny, and not toffee, had been the casus belli. The said penny had lain in the roadway as they returned from school and all three had spied it at the same time. Dicky, however, by dint of superior speed, had reached it first and had appropriated it. The other two made a claim for equal shares on the grounds that they were co-discoverers. On a refusal from the greedy Dicky the joint powers sent a combined ultimatum and eventually a declaration of war. The question is too complex a one for me to adjudicate upon, beyond remarking that Tommy’s ultimate action was entirely indefensible. The fruit of this decision of mine became speedily apparent in a sound as of enthusiastic applause in the basement floor, followed by fearful howls and the slamming of a door, from which I surmise that Master Tommy has been dispatched to bed.

  Do you know what the meaning of that phenomenon is which some good people call ‘inherent wickedness’ and others ‘original sin’? Why is it that the child of four is apt to strike the child of three – or that the capture and ill usage of some little insect or animal is a sport which never palls upon the average infant? It is a painful thought that the young human being takes to cruelty as a young duck takes to water, until precept and punishment teaches it to control its impulses and gradually eradicates them. It arises, I think, from the hundred thousand years of barbarism which our race has gone through. Every squall-faced bald-headed baby is the lineal descendant of countless generations of savages and the heir to all their instincts and peculiarities. Remember that the era of civilisation is but the narrow golden border which trims the dense blackness of primeval history. Left to its own impulses the child would certainly revert to the type which is as inherent to it as the number of its limbs or the mechanism of its respiration. As reason dawns upon it, however, Christianity and civilisation are forcibly grafted upon it just as a calf’s lymph is injected into its arm. Elevation of the mind and vaccination of the body are equally artificial processes. If a nineteenth-century child were left entirely to its own devices upon a desolate island it would develop into a being who would be no whit better, either in morality or in knowledge, than its Euskarian ancestor who lived in a blue-lias cave and ground flints for arrowheads many many thousands of years ago.

  Courage though! There will come a time when the virtuous instincts will gain the upper hand of the vicious ones. It will be long – very long – in coming, but its advent is as certain as that drops of acid falling constantly into an alkaline solution will eventually precipitate a salt. When aeons of light and progress have cancelled the effect of aeons of darkness and crime, then our offspring will inevitably be born with a strong natural bias towards all that is high and noble. In those happy days a child if abandoned and untaught would from its own innate and hereditary instincts lead a merciful, cleanly and innocent existence. Such a child would avoid evil, as a kitten avoids puddles, not from any personal or acquired knowledge of it, but from an ingrained and overpowering impulse. When infants do what is right without being told, and would rather help an insect on its way than pull its leg off, the millennium is not very far off.

  This Education Act of ours is a wonderful measure, though still no doubt capable of improvement.46 The coming Englishman looking back at nineteenth-century legislation will be astonished at its thorough provisions and admirable administration. Indeed I think we have hardly realised yet what its full effect will be upon the next generation. Competition is keen enough now – heaven knows – in every art and profession. If a man advertises for a clerk the street traffic is blocked with the applicants. What will it be then? Fifty per cent of the children may settle down into whatever their fathers were before them, but the other fifty with all this unwanted knowledge seething in their brains are not going to devote their lives to clipping hedges or digging drains. Ambition will lead them to crowd into what is already overcrowded with, I fear, disastrous results. The educated workman is excellent in theory but too often the workman ceases when the education begins. Still, however much individuals may suffer, what raises the standard of intelligence in a country must raise the country itself. The best educated country will eventually prove to be the strongest, and the welfare of the individuals makes the welfare of the community.

  Ah me, it is colchicum time again, so I had best drop platitudes and look after realities. ‘Write something!’ says Doctor Turner, but how am I to write anything worth reading while my ankle is burning and starting? However, tomorrow if all is well I shall get out foolscap
and goose-quill and make an effort. If I can be so garrulous in these wandering incoherent notes there should be some capacity for work in me yet. There’s nothing I hate so much as idleness – except perhaps labour.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SATURATED with lithic acid,’47 said Dr Turner gravely. ‘Your blood is in a most impure condition.’

  ‘Then you think I am worse?’

  ‘I think you are no better,’ he answered. ‘You must take great care of yourself or you will be in for a really serious attack. What is that little red spot on your wrist?’

  ‘Nothing of any importance,’ I replied.

  ‘Humph!’ said he. Some doctors can compress a good deal into that monosyllable. ‘There’s a good deal of fever about.’

  The conversation began to get depressing. ‘Talking of fevers,’ I said, ‘I have just been glancing over Monsieur Pasteur’s researches on splenic fever in cattle. Don’t you think they open up a great field of possibilities?’48

  I had evidently hit upon a congenial topic. My physician laid down his hat and squared his elbows with his ten finger-tips in contact as was his habit when he intended to lay down the law. ‘My dear sir,’ said he, ‘the happy issue of that series of experiments promises in time to revolutionise our medical practice and to make the healing art one of the exact sciences. It is a subject in which I take a deep professional interest and I am pleased to find that you, who have no direct interest in the matter, should have been turning your thoughts in that direction.’

  ‘I am a dabbler in many things,’ I remarked. ‘Besides, I consider that every man has a direct interest in knowing what steps are being taken to stamp out disease.’

  ‘Why, so they have,’ the doctor answered, ‘but our scientists use so many technicalities that it is not always easy for the uninitiated to follow them. “The inoculation of sterilized and attenuated virus caused inhibition of the vaso-motor centres and a modified cachexia tending towards peripheral and centripetal paralysis.”49 What layman is going to ruin his brain-digestion by taking such a tough morsel as that into it? In this matter of splenic fever the facts are, however, simple enough when denuded of polysyllables. Devaine in 1850 discovered the little rod-like body in the blood of the diseased cattle – “bacterium anthracis” he called it – and Koch of Wollstein proved that it would increase and multiply in chicken broth or any other nourishing medium just as well as in the animal’s circulation. Then Pasteur took the matter up and showed that if bred in this artificial manner the little organisms, after prolonged exposure to the atmosphere, lose all their malignancy and can be injected into the veins of a bullock without producing more than a slight constitutional disturbance. And now comes the all-important practical conclusion. It was discovered that the cattle which had been treated with this weak solution of germs – or “inoculated by attenuated virus,” to use the jargon of science – were rendered incapable of ever taking the original disease.’

  ‘The cattle should be eternally grateful to Monsieur Pasteur,’ I remarked.

  ‘Not more than we should,’ cried Dr Turner warmly. ‘What applies to splenic fever among beasts will apply equally to every infectious disease which afflicts the human frame. They depend, each and all of them, upon the presence in the blood of these minute creatures, and their varying symptoms are due to the different malignancy of the microbes, or to their preference for this or that part of the body.50 In time we shall have the attenuated virus of every one of these diseases, and by mixing them together will be able, by a single inoculation, to fortify the constitution against them. Zymotic disease, sir, will be stamped out. Typhus, typhoid, cholera, malaria, hydrophobia, scarlatina, diphtheria, measles and probably consumption will cease to exist – and all owing to the labours of Louis Pasteur – God bless him!’

  ‘Why, Doctor,’ said I, ‘you are quite an enthusiast.’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, mopping his flushed face. ‘It’s a subject which warms my very heart. We are at war with these pestilential atoms and when we gain a victory over them the whole human race should light up their candles and sing “Te Deum.”51 The most bloodthirsty tiger that ever trod a jungle is harmless compared to these microscopic spores and filaments, but the time is coming when they too will be forced to own man as the Lord of Creation. I’ll show you some of them if you can come round to my laboratory when you are able to get about. I have Koch’s bacillus of phthisis,52 and the comma-shaped bacterium of cholera, and a score more of the little villains. I’m sure you would like to have a look at them.’

  I’m sure I would rather keep at a distance from them, said I to myself as the good man took his departure. I wouldn’t have such a collection in my house for anything I could name. I’m not more nervous than my neighbours about what I can see, but to run a chance of breathing in the concentrated essence of disease and of having one’s blood choked up with fungoid growths is a little too much. I shall certainly keep clear of the doctor’s laboratory.

  It’s one of the most praiseworthy and admirable things I know, the way in which the faculty are continually endeavouring to promote sanitary improvements and to stamp out disease ab initio. If they were not a most disinterested and high-minded body of men they would let things take their course, and content themselves with reaping the harvest. Who ever heard of a congress of lawyers for the purpose of simplifying the law and discouraging litigation? Unhealthy times mean good times for the medics. If they were to follow no higher dictates than those of their own interests, we should have the British Medical Association setting a fund on foot for the impeding of drainage and stopping up of sewers, while the General Council busied itself in the importation of epidemics and the distribution of germs. Of the 30,000 physicians and surgeons in the British Islands, the vast majority are practical philanthropists of the highest order. There, if that paragraph does not put the doctor in a good humour tomorrow, it won’t be for want of showing it to him.

  Mrs Rundle appeared after breakfast this morning with a colossal mustard poultice in which she wished to envelop my ankle. Strange how that tendency to fly to mustard as a remedy pervades the whole female sex. If you are suffering from anything, from a hiccough to hydrophobia, the average man recommends a drop of brandy and the average woman reaches for the mustard pot. On this occasion by a judicious mixture of argument and authority I succeeded in inducing her to remove the abomination, but I can see that she looks upon me as one who has had salvation offered him but has refused it. As a matter of fact my ankle is somewhat easier today, but I have an occasional gnawing at my wrist which I fear means mischief.

  It is astonishing how seldom a sick man, be he where he may, meets with anything but kindness. There are more Good Samaritans than Levites in the world. I have been knocked over with malarial fever at Panama, with ague at Kimberley and with typhoid at a Monaco boarding house, but on each occasion I found some good-hearted Christian to give me a helping hand. I think it is Ruskin who remarks that if the Samaritan had been an Englishman he would have said, ‘Two pence I leave with you – and I shall expect four pence when I come again this way.’ I am very sure that my nurses were disinterested enough, for in those days the most sanguine of mankind would never have looked for anything at my hands.

  Can I not see one of them now? Conkey Bill of Winter Rush, better known as the Cock of the Mines, square-shouldered and bearded, with a face as red as his shirt and a hand like a leg of mutton! Charity is a strange plant and sprouts in unlikely places, but I have ever found that the stoutest heart is inclined to be the softest. See him with the tiny phial between his great fingers endeavouring to measure the due allowance of fever drops and pattering to himself some devil’s litany the while, for he always showed great freedom and finish in the use of adjectives. Or see the gleam of his white teeth and the broad smile of hearty delight when first I sat up on my couch and asked for food. Ah, Dick, my old pard, when you were shot in an obscure frontier skirmish, and buried like a dog on the banks of the Tugela, there was a seed pla
nted which may sprout into an angel some day.53

  Who says the human race is vicious, degenerate and biased towards evil? I do not envy the man who can say that he has found them so. He has either been most unfortunate in his associates, or he has viewed them with a jaundiced eye. It is true that, as I remarked yesterday, the infant has a tendency to relapse into savagery, but taking the adults of our acquaintance of either sex, where is this vileness of which we hear so much? Do we find the audience at the playhouse cheering the villain out of their sympathy with vice, or is the area-thief or wife-beater a popular character among the lower orders on the grounds of community of instincts? To hear some of our black-coated friends talk, one would think that if it were not for themselves and their sermons the citizens would become fiends and the state a pandemonium. ‘Look at the police news!’ they cry. Ah, but look at the lifeboat rescues, look at the annals of the Humane Society’s medals and of the Albert medals, look at the devotion of nurses, look at that young doctor the other day, sucking the diptheritic membrane from a patient’s throat and so catching the fatal malady. Is all this to go for nothing? There is seldom a fire that some brave man does not struggle through smoke and flame in search of human lives, seldom a man overboard that two do not spring to the rescue, never a mining accident that scores are not ready to face the deadly after-damp in the hope of lending aid to their companions. This is healthier reading than the police reports. Believe me, if the vice and the virtue of this world were thrown into the scales, the former would kick the beam.