The Dop Doctor

Yes! the big black opulent city was greatly changed. But the change in the people, affecting all ranks and every class, was even greater. There were compensations, if you could balance against the decay of good manners the improvements in sanitation, or set against the crop of evil sown by the dissemination of the vilest literature in the cheapest printed forms, the attainability, by the poorest, of the noblest productions of literary genius. Or if in congratulating yourself upon the marvellous progress of Scientific Inventions, hailing from the keen-brained West, you could condone the degradation of the English language in the mouths of Shakespeare's countrymen and countrywomen by the use of American slang phrases, common, vulgar, coarse, alternating with choice expressions culled from the vocabulary of the East End costermonger.

Privacy and reticence had become unfashionable, impossible in this, the era of the guinea-hunting Press-Interviewer. The barriers of social exclusiveness had given way before the push of the plutocrat. The Rubicon between good Society and bad Society had become invisible. Racial suicide and sexual licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile disease from rank to rank, and class to class. Woman had become less womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer any meaning. Religion had decayed; the fear of God had been forgotten. But Socialism was springing up, a rank and lusty weed, in crude neglected soil that might have been tilled to good purpose; and a cheap and rowdy form of patriotism was in a very healthy state, although the Union Jack had not yet replaced the Bible in the Board Schools.

Yes, things had changed, and not for the better! There was a tang upon the moral atmosphere that made the material petrol-fumes of the motor-omnibus almost acceptable by comparison. The air of Gueldersdorp had been cleaner, even with that taint from the crowded trenches heavy on it. Things had changed; and in the midst of all these changes, the last sands of the Great Victorian Age were running out of the glass.

That wonderful life was drawing to its simple, peaceful, noble, profoundly touching close, this January of 1901. And its ending had been hastened by the War.

Truly of her it has been said, and shall be; even when scholars of another race and another civilisation, springing from the ashes of this, wrest from the relics of a history of to-day the secrets of an ancient Past:

"She was not only the Sovereign, but the Mother of her people."

* * * * *

Saxham turned into Cavendish Square, and was in Harley Street. The white-enamelled door of a prosperous-looking corner-house bore a solid brass plate with his name. He thought, as he opened the door with his Yale key, how strange it was that this, the very house he had planned to live in with Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and decorated for her, should have been offered for his inspection by the first West End house-agent he applied to upon returning to London, whose dust he had shaken off the soles of his feet forever, barely six years before.

The practitioner who occupied the house – not the same man who had taken over the lease and fittings from Saxham – was ready to give it up, with all its costly appurtenances and up-to-date appointments, together with the practice, for quite a moderate slice of that legacy of thousands that had come to Saxham from Mildred's dead boy. Saxham, diagnosing the man's fever to realise and depart, wondered what secret, desperate motive lay at the back of his hurry? The reason was soon evident. Like thousands of other men, professional and private, the physician had been a dabbler on the Stock Exchange, and had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock, and had been ruined by the War.

It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Washington P. Jukes and Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-blooded buck niggers, elegantly scented, white-gloved, and arrayed in evening garments of Bond Street cut, danced the newly-imported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and reception-saloons, with laughter on its reddened lips, and paste imitations of its family jewels in its waved coiffure and on its powdered bosom, and Ruin in its heart.

Great manufacturing enterprises, paralysed by lack of funds and lack of hands, were ruined. Managers producing plays to empty houses were ruined. Publishers publishing books that nobody cared any longer to buy, were ruined. Painters expending time, and money, and toil, upon pictures that no longer found purchasers were ruined. Millions of smaller folks were ruined by the ruin of their betters. Only the great Mourning Warehouses prospered exceedingly, like the Liquor Trade and the Drug Trade. And the Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army-Contractors, flourished as the green bay-tree.

Saxham's motor-brougham had gone on in advance, twisting knowingly in and out of various corkscrew thoroughfares. It was waiting outside the house in Lower Harley Street as the Doctor reached the door. The chauffeur, a spare, short young man, punctiliously buttoned up in a long dark green, white-faced livery overcoat, a cap with a white-glazed peak shading a lean, brickdust-coloured face, with ugly, honest eyes that are familiar to the reader, cocked one of the eyes inquiringly at his employer, and receiving a sign implying that his services would not be required for some space of time to come, pulled up the lever, moved on, and turned down the side-street where were the entrance-gates of the stable-yard that had been turned into a garage. He had been in Saxham's employment nearly two months.

W. Keyse, late Corporal, Gueldersdorp Town Guards, had learned to clean, manage, and drive a motor-car belonging to an officer of the Garrison in spare hours during the Siege. This accomplishment, with some other learning gained in those strenuous and bracing times, had justified him in answering a Times advertisement for a sober, active, and intelligent young man, possessing the requisite knowledge of London – "Cripps!" said W. Keyse, "as if I couldn't pick my way about the Bally Old Dustbin blindfolded!" – to act in the capacity of chauffeur to a West End medical practitioner.

An acquaintance who was a waiter at a Pall Mall Club gave him the tip, and the chance came in the nick of time, for Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse were up against it, and no gay old error. "If you was to offer to blooming-well work for people for nothing," said Mrs. Keyse, "my belief is, they wouldn't 'ave you at the price!"

The Old Shop, as W. Keyse affectionately called his native island, had drawn the exiles home. Good-bye to the bronzed, ungirdled vastness of veld and karroo, and the clear, dark, distant blue of level-topped mountains bathed in the pure stimulating atmosphere that braces like champagne. Old England called with a voice there was no resisting, great draggle-tailed, grimy London beckoned to her boy and girl, as the big grey liner, with the scarlet smoke-stacks, engulfed her mails and passengers, dipped the Red Ensign in farewell to Table Mountain, and sped homewards on even keel over the heaving sapphire plain.

Southampton Dock was a pure delight to Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse. The Waterloo Arrival platform sent thrills through their boot-soles to the roots of their hair. They sat in the Pit at the Oxford that night, and there was a South African sketch on with two of the chronic-est jossers you ever see, gassing away in khâki behind earthworks of sacks stuffed with straw, and standing up to chuck sentimental and patriotic ballads off their chests, while the Enemy, who had kept up an intermittent rifle-practice at the wing, left off – presumably to listen. "After being used to the Reel Thing," W. Keyse said, "it was enough to make you up and blub!"

That was the first disillusion. Others followed. The aunt who had inhabited one of the ginger-brick almshouses over aginst 'Ighgyte Cemetery was dead when they took her a whole pound of tea and three-quarters of best cooked ham, and the delicacies had to be given to the old woman next door, with whom the deceased had always had words. You couldn't 'ave expected the old gal to last much longer, but still it was a blow.

Lobster had long ago given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, in return for the ham and the tea; and they got her address and hunted her up in a back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise his charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated German in the baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you ever – ! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated upon the subject of his family, maintained a portentous dumbness, punctuated with ringing sniffs, during the visit, and was sarcastic on the bus, and tearfully penitent when they got back to the Waterloo Road lodging that was cheap at the weekly rent, she said, if you were paying for dirt and live-stock.

You couldn't spend your time enjoying yourself for ever, she added a little later on, as their small joint purse of savings dwindled and that pale ghost that men call Want began to hover about their hired bolster. W. Keyse had thought of soliciting a re-engagement at the fried-fish shop in the High Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept away in favour of an establishment where they mended your boots while you waited. So he sought elsewhere. The War had drained away so many men, one would have thought employment could be had by any chap who took the trouble to walk about and look for it. But the soles of W. Keyse's boots were worn to their last thickness of brown paper, and all his clothes and Emigration Jane's, with the exception of the things him and her had on, had been pawned before it occurred to the man that that kind of walking ended in the Workhouse. The woman had known it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of W. Keyse stood him in no good stead. London was stiff with liars who boasted of having been through the Siege, and their lies were more ornamental and sparkling than his truths.

Mrs. W. Keyse would have took a situation as General, and glad, but there were family reasons against that. She had broke down and cried somethink dreadful on her William's shabby tweed shoulder the morning he went out to answer the West End Doctor's advertisement. He kissed her and told her to keep her hair on, but she was so hysterical that he was fair afryde to leave 'er. So he took her along, and his good Angel must have suggested that.

Cripps! – when the manservant in plain clothes said, "Step this way, upstairs please" – W. Keyse and wife having applied at the area-door – "and Dr. Saxham will see you," the name, not having been mentioned in the advertisement, which gave only the address and an initial, imparted to both an electrical shock of surprise. They had looked a very small and very shabby and very lost and lonely little couple under those high-moulded ceilings and upon the Turkey carpets that covered the polished parquet of the handsomely-furnished and well-appointed consulting-room that the practitioner who had caved in through South African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate setting for his bald-browed and portly presence. Now both curved backbones assumed the perpendicular, and their wide Cockney mouths were wreathed in joyful smiles.

The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing-table that matched it, the man with the black head and square pale face and heavy muscular shoulders, who looked up from among his papers and notebooks with the receiver of a telephone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them with a kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a word or forgot a face. And here were two faces from Gueldersdorp. He shook the hands that belonged to them, and said in his curt way:

"How are you, Mrs. Keyse? And you, Keyse? You may guess when I heard that somebody had called to answer my advertisement I hardly imagined that two old patients had dropped down on me from the skies!"

The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth agape and the tears trickling down her hollow cheeks. The young man swallowed something with a violent effort, and blurted out:

"Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out of the Other Shop – an' landin' in the middle of New Jerusalem! Weeks along" – he picked up the shabby bowler that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet – "for weeks along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me! Now I knows! I've bin 'omesick – fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of the very plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of four months back. Good old Gueldersdorp!" He winked the wet out of his eyes and pointed to Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?"

Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said, touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the inner corner of the right eye:

"You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you at the Hospital."

"Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since she's bin' my wife – " The prominent Adam's apple in his thin throat jerked. He gulped a sob down as he looked at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her mate, there shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face darkened with angry blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage impulse to dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his own beggary.

Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet fire in answer to the challenge of his own! Empty, empty the heart whose chambers were swept and decked and garlanded for a guest who never came! Lonely, lonely, desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of her – dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was yet to man!

He had said to her: "But come to me, and I shall be content – even happy. Live under my roof, take the shelter of my name – I ask no more!"

He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be companioned, in the silence that would never be broken by Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He was not content; his craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and gnawed his heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal. Happy – was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this happiness she had conferred upon him – and that was to be without her.

He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling misery, and kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the absurd little couple. W. Keyse was tested, proved capable of manipulating the steering-wheel, duly certificated, and engaged. There were a couple of living-rooms over the coach-house that was now a garage. Saxham sent in some plain furniture, and behold an Eden! Pots of ferns purchased from a street hawker showed greenly behind the tidiest muslin blinds you ever sor! and Mrs. William Keyse, expectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and as she patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn – and whether they're let out on hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat 'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come back from Them Plyces is something chronic! – she sang, sometimes "Come, Buy My Coloured 'Erring," which they learned you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board School in Kentish Town; and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come True!"

This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two rooms – one of them opening upon nothing by a loft-door – over a garage that had been a coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin running on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights were switched on, before the inner blinds were drawn down, you could see quite plain into the consulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat at his big writing-table that was heaped with notebooks and papers and had a telephone on it, and all sorts of mysterious instruments in shining brass and silver, as brightly polished as the gleaming thing with a lid, shaped like a violin-case and with a spirit-lamp underneath it, in which all sorts of wicked-looking knives and forceps were boiled when they were taken out of the black bag; or into Mrs. Saxham's bedroom, that was on the floor above, and was done up in the loveliest style you ever! "Not that Missis W. Keyse would exchange 'er present quarters for Buckin'am Palace," she declared, pouring out her William's tea, "if invited to do so by 'er Majesty the Queen 'erself."

William stopped blowing at his smoking saucer.

"They s'y She's dyin'!" His face lengthened. He put the saucer down. "They 'ave it in the evenin' pypers!"

Mrs. Keyse had a flash of inspiration.

"I reckon it don't seem dyin' to 'Er!"

"Wot are you gettin' at?" asked the man in bewilderment.

"I'm gettin' at it like this," said the lighter brain. "All 'er long life she's 'ad to be a queen first, an' a wife after. Now she lays there she's no more than a wife – a wife wots goin' to meet 'er 'usband agin after yeers an' yeers o' waitin'. For 'er Crown she leaves be'ind 'er for 'er son, but 'er weddin' ring goes wiv' 'er in 'er coffin! See?"

"I pipe. Wonder wot 'Er an' 'Im 'll s'y to one another fust thing they meet?"

"They won't s'y nothink," said the visionary, soberly taking tea. "But I shouldn't be surprised but wot they'd stand an' look in one another's fyces wivout s'yin' a word, for a week or so by the Time Above, an' the tears a-runnin' down an' never stoppin'!"

"Garn! There ain't no cryin' in 'Eaven," said W. Keyse, beginning on the bread-and-butter. "The Bible tells you so!"

"That's right enough. But I lay Gawd lets folks do a bit o' blub – just once," said Emigration Jane, "before 'E wipes their eyes, becos you don't begin to know wot 'appiness means until you've cried for joy!"

"I pretty near did when the Doctor give me this chauffeuring job, and so I tell you stryte," affirmed her lord. "D'you know I 'ad a shy at thankin' 'im agyne, an' got my 'ead bit orf. 'Shut your damned mouth!' – that's wot the Doctor s'ys to me. Well, I 'ave shut it!" He closed his jaws upon an inch-thick slice. "But wot I s'y to myself is," he continued, masticating, "that makes the Third Time, an' the Third Time's the Charm!"

"Wot do you mean by the third time, deer?" asked Mrs. Keyse, putting more hot water in the teapot.

"The First," said W. Keyse, with an air of mystery, "was in a saloon-bar full o' Transvaal an' Free State Dutchies at Gueldersdorp."

"Lor'! You don't ever mean – " began his wife, and stopped short. The scene of her first meeting with W. Keyse flashed back upon her mental vision. She saw the big man waking up out of his drunken stupor and lurching to the rescue of the little one. "Was it 'im?" she panted, as the teapot ran over on the clean coarse cloth. "Was it Dr. Saxham?"

"You may tyke it from me it was." W. Keyse rescued the kettle, restored it to the hob, returned to his place, and shook his finger at her warningly. "And if you go to remind me as wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e did – " He looked portentous warnings.

"I never would. Oh, William!"

"Mind as you never do, that's all!.. I tried to thank 'im then," went on W. Keyse, "an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im agyne at the Hospital – an' e' wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is own doorstep, an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is – Wait! When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion back…"

"I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse, "But it was a mouse" – she repressed a shudder – "an' not the – thing you said."

"Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse with burning eyes. "And the Doctor's goin' to find it does." He held up his lean right hand and swore it. "So 'elp me, Jimmy Cripps!"

LVIII

Lynette Saxham came into the consulting-room that was on the ground-floor of the house in Harley Street, behind the room where patients waited their turn. Her quick, light step and the silken rustling of the lining of her gown broke the spell that had bound the man who sat motionless in the armchair before the Sheraton writing-table, staring with fixed eyes and gripping the arms of his chair with unconscious force …

A faint, pleasant odour of Russia leather and camphor-wood came from the dwarf bookcases that dadoed the walls. The room was quite dark; the two high windows, screened by clear muslin blinds running on gilded rods, showed pale parallelograms of cold twilight. The coachhouse and stable building at the end of the paved yard showed as a cube of blackness. One window in the centre of the wall was lighted up, and on its white cotton blind the shadows of a man and woman acted a Domestic Play.

Perhaps Saxham had been watching this? The shadow-man seemed to sit at a table reading a newspaper by the light of the lamp behind him, the shadow woman sat nearer the window, employed upon some homely kind of needlework. Her outline when she rose, showed that the woman's great, mysterious ordeal, the sacrament of keenest anguish by which her dearest and most sacred joy is won, was very close upon her. She passed behind the man as if to fetch something, stopped behind his chair, and drew her arm about his neck, leaning her cheek down to his so that their two shadows became one.

The starving waif outside the window of the cook-shop knows no more excruciating aggravation of his pangs than to look at food, and yet keeps on looking. It may have been like this with Saxham, empty of all love, and gnawed by the tooth of a sharper hunger than that which is merely physical. He started out of his lethargy when his wife's voice reached him.

"Owen!.. Why, you are sitting in the dark!"

Lynette heard someone moving among the shadows. The electric reading-lamp upon the writing-table diffused a mellow radiance under its green silk shade. Two other globes sprang into shining life, and showed her, smiling, and shrinking a little from the sudden incursion of light, as Saxham, with the quiet, unhurried, scrupulous courtesy he always showed towards his wife, received the heavy driving-mantle of sables that she dropped from her shoulders, and laid it over a chair. A frosty breath from the outer atmosphere clung to it, but the silken lining was penetratingly warm, and instinct with the sweetness of the woman, so much so that it was agony to the man…

She wore a white cloth gown of elegantly-simple cut, that revealed with unostentatious art the lovely lines of the slender shape. A knot of white and golden freesias, exhaling a clean, delicate perfume, was fastened at her breast; her wonderful red-brown hair was shaded by a broad-brimmed brown felt hat of Vandyke shape, with creamy drooping plumes. The rare promise of her beauty had fulfilled itself in the last six months. She was bewilderingly lovely.

She drew out the jewelled pins that fastened her hat, and threw it down, and took a favourite seat of hers beside the fire, and looked across at the man who was her husband, smiling faintly as she held her little foot, delicately shod, high-arched and slim, to the blaze of the wood-fire.

"Do I interfere with your work? Are any patients waiting?"

"It is past my hour for seeing patients," said Saxham, with a smile. "And if anyone were waiting, you are an older client, and have the prior claim."

"We will have tea in here, then," she said, and touched the bell, adding: "I am fond of this room."

It was just now a place that was dear to Saxham. He came across to the hearth and stirred the fire to a ruddier blaze, and stood at the opposite side of it, leaning an arm upon the mantelshelf. The shining mirror above it reflected a square black head that was getting grizzled, and the profile of a face that was haggard and worn.