St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student

And so he mused on all these things, and the worshippers came and went, knelt in prayer, and laid their poor burdens at the feet of God; took in from the infinite a draught of the water of life, wept their tears, sighed up to the throne of the Heavenly their anxieties; asked direction from the Wisest they knew of, wandered a little out of themselves a while; felt that bread and meat were not alone the sustenance of man, and went on their way. And as he thought and pondered in his heart, the sinking sun gloaming through the great west window scattered a thousand jewels over the floor around him, and he rose and knew that religion brightens life, and colours with rose and gold the dark shadow brooding over the soul of man. Not altogether was it a fact that man had been wholly wrong in his faith, and had done nothing but “build him fanes of fruitless prayer,” or had reaped from them nothing but the opportunities to “roll the psalm to wintry skies.”

As he rose from his long meditation, and went into the gay, busy world without, he felt how inconsistent with his previous mental attitude were the thoughts he had entertained. How often had he not dedicated himself to the overthrow of superstition, and pledged his energies to do what he could to erase its traces from the minds of his friends! It was but a few weeks since he had angrily tossed a crucifix from a patient’s couch, who he had directed should not be bothered by religion or priests. Had he not scoffed openly at a poor old woman’s simple assurance that God was helping her in her sickness, and that to her ears came often “songs in the night season?” At St. Bernard’s how many times had he not endeavoured to laugh or reason young freshmen out of the religion of their mothers, unworthy of belief now that facts, and facts only, were to be the study of their lives! There was a little band of true Christian men at the hospital, who met for prayer and Bible reading from time to time. He could not deny that they did their work in the wards conscientiously – did it more faithfully than the ardent young Comtists and Secularists, who made so much noise about Humanity and its claims. They were so cheerful, too, and helpful in their attitude towards the afflicted and poor who sought their aid, that they were a constant reproach to him for not living up to the faith with which, in his secret thoughts, he had never really broken.

CHAPTER XXIII.

IN EXILE

And Wisdom’s selfOft seeks to sweet retired solitude,Where with her best nurse Contemplation,She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings,That in the various bustle of resortWere all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired.– Milton.No star is ever lost we once have seen:We always may be what we might have been.– Proctor.

Elsworth spent a few days in Paris, and then determined he would go on to Spain. He dreaded discovery, for ridicule was more terrible to him than any bodily danger. He had been only two days in Paris when he passed a London friend, who, however, did not notice him. He neither wanted to be chaffed by old companions, nor urged back to a life with which he had resolved to break. He was not strong enough to fight – the highest bravery is sometimes to fly. He felt that, though the world is so small, he would be less likely to meet acquaintances in Spain, especially if he did not stay in the capital.

As he entered the night express for Madrid, and settled himself in a corner of the carriage for sleep, he felt some sinking at heart, a sense of his isolation and a misgiving of the adequacy of his motive which had driven him into his solitude. This age of ours, he thought, is not the time for sacrifice to principle. Retreats for clergymen and devotees might be right because customary; but, whoever heard of a medical man, scarcely emerged from his hospital, giving up all his professional prospects, abandoning friends and position, country and habits, because a great sense of non-response to the higher call of duty, had suddenly come upon him? Yet history was full of such precedents. Men had done all this and more to seek an island in unknown seas, to trace the sources of a river, to get gold, to seek for novelty, to gratify small ambitions, to chase the merest butterfly of a pleasure. He had seen, as a lightning flash in an instant reveals a yawning precipice or some great danger in time to be averted, that he was descending from his higher self, and leading a life which could not be worth living for any man who had once known a better and followed nobler things. Could it be wrong to break with the past like this? Was it not just this that the Great Teacher meant when He said, “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off?” Was it not good for him to go out into the desert for awhile, and let God speak to him in the silence? He had said to himself that he would live to make the world better for his living. He had vowed himself to the order of those who smooth away some of the roughnesses of this life for weaker brethren; not a very wonderful thing after all, to do, in face of what had been done for him by others. True, this is the age of “doing nothing without a quid pro quo” paid down in hard cash. A cruel and a soul-benumbing maxim, which, if acted upon universally would turn the brightness of the world into the grimness and noisy whirl of a mere factory. Let him for awhile, at least, see if it were possible to live the life of an early Christian; such a life as was common enough in the dawn of the new civilization which had love and self-abnegation for its motive power. And so musing, with heart-aspirations going up to God for help and His sustaining power in following this better ideal, he fell asleep.

* * * * *

The morning broke struggling through the mists that hung over the strange, weird country of the Landes. The train ran through miles of fir-trees – nothing but fir-trees, grown for the sake of their resin. Every tree had its cup slowly but steadily filling with the fragrant exudation. Every tree, as he saw, gave up its blood to help mankind; not one refused to fill with resin the cup affixed to it. Was not all Nature at work to keep the world a-going, and to better its life? And then he rebuked himself in George Herbert’s lines: —

“All things are busy; only INeither bring honey with the bees,Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandryTo water these.“I am no link of Thy great chain,But all my company is as a weed.Lord! place me in Thy concert, give one strainTo my poor reed.”

Soon Bordeaux was reached; then, as the afternoon drew on, the Pyrenees were passed, and at midnight he alighted at Burgos, to rest a day or two before going on. An old-world place, where the railway was a gross anomaly, and the telegraph poles a violation of the fitness of things. At least two hundred years behind the times, the great offence to the eye being smart French-looking soldiers where one looked for mailed knights with their esquires. Here was a market-place with its traffic much as it had been conducted any day this five hundred years. True, by ferreting amongst the stalls you could find some nineteenth-century novelties in the shape of wax matches and paper collars; there were books, too, in secluded corners, “printed on scrofulous grey paper with blunt type,” which evidenced some demand for modern literature; but, these indications of our advanced civilization excepted, the rest of the dealing was in things which cannot have much changed their form or their use for many generations. A sleepy, quiet, leisurely place, with plenty of time to be wicked in, but also with much opportunity to be good. In such a place, indeed in the whole peninsula, there is every inducement to lead the devout life; there is so little else to do. One’s activities have small outlets, except towards the other world. Yet for a busy Londoner, a blasé Parisian, what a blessed sense of peace comes over the soul resting in such a becalmed water-way on one’s voyage!

But a terrible sense of loneliness possessed Elsworth. The day after his arrival here it was Sunday. The wind was bitterly cold. His Spanish was not quite Castilian in its perfection, though he could make himself understood; and when he had spent some hours in the cathedral, visited what a young fruit-seller called the Mercado de la Llendre, which is not quite literally rendered as Rag Fair, and wandered round and round the quaint old market-place half a dozen times, his questioning spirit disturbed him as to why he had ever left London, and how was a nineteenth-century life to be supported long under such conditions? St. Simeon Stylites, on the top of his pillar, must have had some such misgivings for the first few days at least, and St. Francis could not have found all at once the birds and the fishes supply the place of familiar friends, nor their sentiments, if they expressed any, a sufficient substitute for his human interests of former days. The dinner table did not mend matters. The company at the hotel consisted of some half a dozen priests, as many young officers of the army from the barracks opposite, and some of the towns-people, who evidently were quite at home in their surroundings and particularly provincial in their breeding. No one took the least notice of him, and his attempts at conversation, like sparks of damp wood, went out dismally. The truth was, the Castilians had paid for a good Sunday dinner, and the matter of making the most of it was of too serious importance to every one of them to permit of their being beguiled in their work by any such trivial considerations as the young Englishman’s conversation could offer. So everybody ate as became good hearty Burgolese, and poor Elsworth was left to his meditations.

He knew the only remedy for this depression was to get out of cities into the country. There is no such loneliness as that experienced in a crowd where one knows nobody; so he determined henceforth to live chiefly in villages, roadside inns, and places where he might hope to make friends with the less sophisticated of the people. Sending therefore, his luggage on to Madrid, he packed a small knapsack, took his stout walking-stick, and set off for a good spell of pedestrian work. He resolved to purchase a bicycle when he reached the capital. He was an ardent cyclist, but had not brought his machine with him, and now missed it sadly. He loved his steel roadster as men love a favourite horse, and felt shorn of his strength without it. His Spanish stood him in good stead, not only at the posadas, but with the people he met on the roads. Spain is so little known from the play-ground point of view, that he felt sure of the retirement he sought, and had been but a few days on the tramp ere he found his healthy life invite healthy thoughts; and as the London smoke got out of his lungs, a clearer spirit entered him in its place. The smoke of the great city had penetrated deeper even than his lungs: it had begun to pollute his mind. It was time he broke with it. Thank God, he was not out of tune for Nature altogether, and as he sat beside a mountain stream could lift up his heart and meditate, and say with old Isaac Walton: —

“Here we may think and pray, before death stop our breath.Other joys are but toys, and to be lamented.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITY

For those that fly may fight again,Which he can never do that’s slain;Hence timely running’s no mean partOf conduct in the martial art.– Butler.

The Divine origin of Christianity is manifested in nothing more powerfully than by the progress it rapidly made among the Latin races. Tho soft, voluptuous climates of Southern Europe would have bred, one would have thought, nations whose chief characteristics would have been gentleness and tenderness. But it is not so, and the cruelty that was deeply ingrained in the Roman nature lives on in Christian Italy and Spain, uninfluenced by some sixteen centuries of Christianity, so far as regards the treatment of the lower animals. To have softened towards their neighbours and dependents, the cruel patricians of Nero’s reign needed the greatest miracle of the Christian religion. The actual reception of the code of Christ by the men of old Rome is evidence enough that there was no mere human agency at work. We may estimate the magnitude of the task Christianity had to accomplish by marking the condition of the shores which its tide has failed to overflow. Up to the present it would seem, in Spain and Italy at least, the high-water mark of mercy stops short of the animals which serve us. “To them Christianity has no duties,” they say. The women and children of Italy do not think for a moment that they are not justified in torturing the trapped wolves and foxes the shepherds have taken, just as our sailors used to torment sharks. “What rights have such naughty beasts?” say they.

The long, stern contention of the men of the North against the rigour of the elements, or some other profound cause, has produced in the Teutonic races a tenderness of heart, and a sympathy with every phase of wrong, which have made the Anglo-Saxon race the pioneers of mercy throughout the whole world.

The progress of Christianity was assured when the men of the North were converted; and if they owe to warmer climates the message of the Friend of man, they have in their turn blessed the birth lands of the Gospel with the broader humanity which has help for everything that lives and suffers.

Elsworth was amazed to find how the bull-fight cultus had permeated and moulded every Spanish mind. That it was a pastime, he knew; that it was a religion, he did not imagine till he had lived in Spain. The very landscapes were cruel; the mountains and rocks had no softness, they were all angles, with stern, hard outlines that seemed reflected in the Spanish nature. Man, modified by his surroundings, often formed the subject of his meditations. Here, if anywhere, cruelty would be apotheosized! The railway journey to Madrid, and the landscape of the Escorial threw a light on many chapters of Spanish history which had often seemed hard to understand.

Having reached Madrid in due course he made some necessary purchases. First of all he bought a bicycle from Singer’s agents in the Puerta del Sol, also some good road maps and all the necessary tools and materials for repairing any accident that might happen to his machine. Then a good medicine chest and some well-selected medical appliances to enable him to be useful to any sick folk he might fall in with. A few books, dictionaries, grammars, and guides were added to his slender baggage and sent forward to Granada to the Hotel Washington Irving, where he determined to remain till he should decide his future course of life. He knew the cholera was raging at this city, and without rashness, yet with confidence in God and the wisdom of sanitary precautions which he should adopt, he decided to do what he could to help the dreadful misery that hung over the unfortunate city. His work at St. Bernard’s had familiarized him with the terrible disease on its last visitation of London, and he trusted to the measures which had been followed there to keep him from danger in Spain. At Madrid he wrote to his father, telling him the exact state of affairs, and assuring him that he had fled from temptation that could not be safely parreyed with, but was better conquered by flight.

A few months later he received a reply from the Major, who so far from being annoyed at his son’s conduct, praised him for it.

“You have done what the Lord Gautama Buddha felt compelled to do. When he left his royal home, and in the night passing through the dimly lighted pavilions where the sleeping Nātch girls lay, conceived an overpowering loathing for worldly pleasure, and was assailed in vain at the outset of his great renunciation by the voice of the tempter Māra urging him to cling to all the good things he was giving up, he set an example which I rejoice to know my son has followed. You are seeking the Nirvana. Do not think yourself singular in this step; one cannot be saved without a renunciation.”

Elsworth thought of a higher example and a nobler Prince, who left His throne to teach us the way of salvation; but was glad he had the approbation of his father. No one else except his lawyers, knew of his whereabouts; and he asked his father and agents not to give the curious inquirer any clue to his place of retreat.

Ever since as a boy he had read “Washington Irving” and Mr. Prescott’s “Conquest of Granada,” he had longed to see that celebrated city of which one Spanish proverb declares, “He is loved of God who lives in Granada,” and another, that “He who has not seen Granada has seen nothing.”

George Borrow’s books on the Spanish gipsies, their customs, and their curious language had fascinated him, and made him anxious some day to see these strange people for whom he had acquired a singular liking. The Spanish character has in it something strangely akin to the Puritan severity, honesty, and fibre of the English race, and no true Englishman can read the history of the conquests of Peru and Mexico without feeling his heart go forth towards those brave followers of Pizarro and Cortez, who seemed possessed of a character so much like our own in their invincible courage, daring, and hardihood in dealing with difficulties.

Elsworth had Puritan blood in him, inherited from his mother, more than one of whose ancestors had fought for England’s liberties under the great Protector. Good blood has the peculiarity of helping its possessor at a critical turn in life; and at this juncture in Elsworth’s history it served to stimulate him with something of the nerve force that enabled his forefathers to cast off the trammels of a licentious and drunken age, and go forth to a purer atmosphere for their souls’ salvation. He knew from many an old book treasured at home, the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, and what they had done for what the world called a mere idea. His favourite book, the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” came to his aid. Was he not, like Christian, setting forth from the City of Destruction? And so one bright autumn day he found himself in the famous city, the Queen of Cities, as Ibn-Batuta calls it.

The Arab writers used to say it was a fragment of heaven that had fallen to the earth. Elsworth had not gone forth into a waste, howling wilderness; he did not see there was any use in making himself wretched. He wanted, if possible, to do some good; and as he knew the language of the Gitanos, he thought if he could devote himself to their interests for a while in a missionary way, he would be the happier for being useful in his retirement. For he had great faith in the eternal freshness of the New Testament, and he concluded that its doctrines were as potent, as life-giving now as when they first shed their beams on a benighted world; he was determined that now religious liberty was permitted in Spain he would circulate the Caló New Testament amongst the gipsies, and do what he could to bring them to its teaching.

He took a couple of charmingly situated rooms in a venerable house on the banks of the Darro, looking down upon an old bridge which spanned the golden stream that comes down from the Sierra Nevada. The Alhambra Hill was close by, and the old city, rich with historic memories, in the plain below. He had little difficulty in ingratiating himself with the Gitanos. Knowing their language so well, they insisted that he must be of their race; and his dark complexion, fine eyes, and jet-black hair made it almost useless for him to deny that he was of gipsy stock. They argued that he must have their blood in his veins, even though he might not know it.

He soon became very popular, and having no prejudice, but being of a thoroughly cosmopolitan mind, it was not long before he was looked upon as one of themselves. His hospital life helped him, and he soon became at home in the Sacro Monte.

The gipsy quarter of Granada is one of the great sights of the place, and is the most romantic spot one can imagine. The pencil of a Doré and the pen of a Théophile Gautier have made it familiar enough to students of Spain and its people.

CHAPTER XXV.

“WHAT’S BECOME OF WARING?”

Oh, never starWas lost here but it rose afar!Look east, where whole new thousands are!In Vishnu-land what Avatar!– Browning.

Two years had passed away since Elsworth’s disappearance, and a little party of house physicians and surgeons – all young men and recently qualified – were sitting round the roaring fire in the snug quarters of the senior house surgeon at our hospital, discussing the sad fate of their old comrade. Young Harvey Bingley – a thoughtful and cultivated man, who, besides passing his exams, with credit, found time and inclination for literary pursuits, and especially loved to dig into Robert Browning’s poetry and extract a nugget from time to time – propounded the theory that perhaps Elsworth had gone off like Waring in Browning’s poem. Nobody saw the allusion, because nobody there knew anything of Browning; but Bingley was always worth listening to when he got on his hobby, so he was required to explain.

“Well, you see, the poem opens with the question, —

‘What’s become of WaringSince he gave us all the slip,Chose land-travel or seafaring,Boots and chest, or staff and scrip,Rather than pace up and downAny longer London town?’

“He is described in the poem as walking with two or three friends one snowy night in December, when suddenly he was missed from the little company of students, who were returning home from a supper party, and none of them saw him again, nor could anything be learned of his whereabouts till years after, when one of his friends, sailing by Trieste, caught a glimpse of the lost Waring’s face under a great grass hat, in a fruit-boat, offering to trade with the English brig: caught that glimpse, and nothing more, as the boat which bore him went off —

‘Into the rosy and golden half o’ the sky to overtake the sun.’”

“How romantic!” exclaimed several of the party.

“Yes,” said the junior house physician; “very like young Sapsford; he disappeared just that way, after a supper party, and was not heard of till several days after, and then he was found in a boat off Margate jetty, with his landlady’s daughter!”

“Shut up!” cried Dr. Aubrey; “you’ve no poetry or sentiment in you – not a bit. You are saturated with ‘Mark Twain,’ and it’s blasphemy to quote Browning in your ribald hearing!”

“Do you think Elsworth has gone into the fruit business ‘in the rosy half of the sky?’” meekly asked Maberley the dresser.

“I’ve no idea,” said Bingley; “but I have known things quite as strange as that. By the way, you were all so anxious to laugh at my poetry that you didn’t wait to hear the dénouement.”

“Oh, isn’t it over?” asked a groggy individual on the sofa, smoking a churchwarden. “How could he get back out of the rosy sky?”

“That I can’t say; but he did, and is now living in a pretty villa on Hampstead Heath, is very fat and jolly, and sketches in fine weather ‘bits’ which he exhibits at the Academy.”

“Then I say it’s a beastly shame,” cried Ryder, the “Resident Acc.,” “to come to a public place like Hampstead and dissipate all that beautiful poetry and rend asunder those rosy skies and appear as a fat sketcher amongst donkey boys and nursemaids, to say nothing of girls’ schools. It’s indecent, and Robert Browning ought to go at him for damages. I would! ‘Avatar’ indeed.”

“Now, joking apart,” said Dr. Aubrey, “don’t you think poor Elsworth got a sudden sense of disgust with his rackety life, which was always, I thought, rather assumed – never sat upon him quite naturally – and in a moment resolved to cut it all? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear that he had settled down in some quiet nook abroad, and was leading a philosophical life. Do you remember Bartley Coleman? You do, don’t you, Fourneaux? – he was of your year. You remember how promising he was? We all made sure he would take the medical scholarship. One fine morning he was missed, and nobody heard of him here till Dr. Sales went into a little grocer’s shop in a Scotch village for some fish-hooks, and was served by the missing Coleman. His father had become bankrupt while he was a student, had a fit of apoplexy soon after, and died, leaving a widow and five girls unprovided for. Poor Coleman heard the call of duty, laid down the scalpel and took up the cheese-cutter, and so supported his mother and his sisters. Noble wasn’t it?”

“Oh, I say, Aubrey,” said Maberley, “you don’t mean to imply that Elsworth is keeping a chandler’s shop?”

“I imply nothing. I say we know very little of the under-currents of half the men’s lives we are familiar with; we see the surface-water and what floats on it; that is all. The wonder to me is how we keep between the banks as well as we do. Some from inclination, others from duty, more from defective control, get away from the old course, wander off down the rapids, under the rocks, and disappear. Is it any marvel? For my own part, there are times when I long to cast off the restrictions of your so-called civilized existence, and go with a gun or a lasso to the Pampas and the virgin forests.”