Arthur and George (10 page)

“And what does he do, this fellow from Middlesbrough?”

“He is a writer. Like you, Arthur.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He has written a dozen novels.”

“A dozen! But he’s just a young pup.” An industrious pup, at least.

“I can lend you one if you wish to judge him that way. I have
Under Two Skies
and
The Boss of Taroomba.
Many of them are set in Australia, and I find them very accomplished.”

“Do you just, Connie?”

“But he realizes that it is difficult to make a living from writing novels, and so he works also as a journalist.”

“Well, it is a name that sticks,” Arthur grunted. He gave Connie permission to introduce the fellow into the household. For the moment he would give him the benefit of the doubt by not reading any of his books.

Spring was early that year, and the tennis ground was marked out by the end of April. From his study Arthur would hear the distant pop of racquet on ball, and the familiar irritating cry made by a female missing an easy shot. Later, he would wander out and there would be Connie in flowing skirts and Willie Hornung in straw hat and peg-topped white flannels. He noted the way Hornung did not give her any easy points, but at the same time held back from a full weight of shot. He approved: that was how a man ought to play a girl.

Touie sat to one side in a deckchair, warmed less by the frail sun of early summer than by the heat of young love. Their laughing chatter across the net and their shyness with one another afterwards seemed to delight her, and Arthur therefore decided to be won over. In truth, he rather liked the role of grudging paterfamilias. And Hornung was proving himself a witty fellow at times. Perhaps too witty, but that could be ascribed to youth. What was that first jest of his? Yes, Arthur had been reading the sporting pages, and remarked upon a story in which a runner was credited with completing the hundred yards in a mere ten seconds.

“What do you make of that, Mr. Hornung?”

And Hornung had replied, quick as a flash, “It must be a sprinter’s error.”

That August, Arthur was invited to lecture in Switzerland; Touie was still a little weak from the birth of Kingsley, but naturally accompanied him. They visited the Reichenbach Falls, splendid yet terrifying, and a worthy tomb for Holmes. The fellow was rapidly turning into an old man of the sea, clinging round his neck. Now, with the help of an arch-villain, he would shrug his burden off.

At the end of September, Arthur was walking Connie up the aisle, she pulling back on his arm for striking too military a pace. As he handed her over symbolically at the altar, he knew he should be proud and happy for her. But amid all the orange blossom and backslapping and jokes about bowling maidens over, he felt his dream of an ever-increasing family around him taking a knock.

Ten days later, he learned that his father had died in a Dumfries lunatic asylum. Epilepsy was given as the cause. Arthur had not visited him in years, and did not attend the funeral; none of the family did. Charles Doyle had let down the Mam and condemned his children to genteel poverty. He had been weak and unmanly, incapable of winning his fight against liquor. Fight? He had barely raised his gloves at the demon. Excuses were occasionally made for him, but Arthur did not find the claim of an artistic temperament persuasive. That was just self-indulgence and self-exculpation. It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.

Touie developed a persistent autumn cough, and complained of pains in her side. Arthur judged the symptoms insignificant, but eventually called in Dalton, the local practitioner. It was strange to find himself transformed from doctor to mere patient’s husband; strange to wait downstairs while somewhere above his head his fate was being decided. The bedroom door was closed for a long time, and Dalton emerged with a face as dismal as it was familiar: Arthur had worn it himself all too many times.

“Her lungs are gravely affected. There is every sign of rapid consumption. Given her condition and family history . . .” Dr. Dalton did not need to continue, except to add, “You will want a second opinion.”

Not just a second, but the best. Douglas Powell, consulting physician at the Brompton Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, came down to South Norwood the following Saturday. A pale, ascetic man, clean-shaved and correct, Powell regretfully confirmed the diagnosis.

“You are, I believe, a medical man, Mr. Doyle?”

“I rebuke myself for my inattention.”

“The pulmonary system was not your speciality?”

“The eye.”

“Then you should not rebuke yourself.”

“No, the more so. I had eyes, and did not see. I did not spot the accursed microbe. I did not pay her enough attention. I was too busy with my own . . . success.”

“But you were an eye doctor.”

“Three years ago I went to Berlin to report on Koch’s findings—supposed findings—about this very disease. I wrote about it for Stead, in the
Review of Reviews.
”

“I see.”

“And yet I did not recognize a case of galloping consumption in my own wife. Worse, I let her join me in activities which will have made it worse. We tricycled in every weather, we travelled to cold climates, she followed me in outdoor sports . . .”

“On the other hand,” said Powell, and the words briefly lifted Arthur’s spirits, “in my view there are promising signs of fibroid growth around the seat of the disease. And the other lung has enlarged somewhat to compensate. But that is the best I can say.”

“I do not accept it!” Arthur whispered the words because he could not bellow them at the top of his voice.

Powell took no offence. He was accustomed to pronouncing the gentlest, courtliest sentence of death, and familiar with the ways it took those affected. “Of course. If you would like the name—”

“No. I accept what you have told me. But I do not accept what you have not told me. You would give her a matter of months.”

“You know as well as I do, Mr. Doyle, how impossible it is to predict—”

“I know as well as you do, Dr. Powell, the words we use to give hope to our patients and those near to them. I also know the words we hear within ourselves as we seek to raise their spirits. About three months.”

“Yes, in my view.”

“Then again, I say, I do not accept it. When I see the Devil, I fight him. Wherever we need to go, whatever I need to spend, he shall not have her.”

“I wish you every good fortune,” replied Powell, “and remain at your service. There are, however, two things I am obliged to say. They may be unnecessary, but I am duty-bound. I trust you will not take offence.”

Arthur stiffened his back, a soldier ready for orders.

“You have, I believe, children?”

“Two, a boy and a girl. Aged one and four.”

“There is, you must understand, no possibility—”

“I understand.”

“I am not talking to her ability to conceive—”

“Mr. Powell, I am not a fool. And neither am I a brute.”

“These things have to be made crystal clear, you must understand. The second matter is perhaps less obvious. It is the effect—the likely effect—on the patient. On Mrs. Doyle.”

“Yes?”

“In our experience, consumption is different from other wasting diseases. On the whole, the patient suffers very little pain. Often the disease will proceed with less inconvenience than a toothache or an indigestion. But what sets it apart is the effect upon the mental processes. The patient is often very optimistic.”

“You mean light-headed? Delirious?”

“No, I mean optimistic. Tranquil and cheerful, I would say.”

“On account of the drugs you prescribe?”

“Not at all. It is in the nature of the disease. Regardless of how aware the patient is of the seriousness of her case.”

“Well, that is a great relief to me.”

“Yes, it may be so at first, Mr. Doyle.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that when a patient does not suffer and does not complain and remains cheerful in the face of grave illness, then the suffering and the complaining has to be done by someone.”

“You do not know me, sir.”

“That is true. But I wish you the necessary courage nonetheless.”

For better, for worse; for richer, for poorer. He had forgotten: in sickness and in health.

The lunatic asylum sent Arthur his father’s sketchbooks. Charles Doyle’s last years had been miserable, as he lay unvisited at his grim final address; but he did not die mad. That much was clear: he had continued to paint watercolours and to draw; also to keep a diary. It now struck Arthur that his father had been a considerable artist, undervalued by his peers, worthy indeed of a posthumous exhibition in Edinburgh—perhaps even in London. Arthur could not help reflecting on the contrast in their fates: while the son was enjoying the embrace of fame and society, his abandoned father knew only the occasional embrace of the straitjacket. Arthur felt no guilt—just the beginnings of filial compassion. And there was one sentence in his father’s diary which would drag at any son’s heart. “I believe,” he had written, “I am branded as mad solely from the Scotch Misconception of Jokes.”

In December of that year, Holmes fell to his death in the arms of Moriarty; both of them propelled downwards by an impatient authorial hand. The London newspapers had contained no obituaries of Charles Doyle, but were full of protest and dismay at the death of a non-existent consulting detective whose popularity had begun to embarrass and even disgust his creator. It seemed to Arthur that the world was running mad: his father was fresh in the ground, and his wife condemned, but young City men were apparently tying crepe bands to their hats in mourning for Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Another event took place during this morbid year’s end. A month after his father’s death, Arthur applied to join the Society for Psychical Research.

George

In the Solicitors’ Final Examinations George receives Second Class Honours, and is awarded a Bronze Medal by the Birmingham Law Society. He opens an office at 54 Newhall Street with the initial promise of some overflow work from Sangster, Vickery & Speight. He is twenty-three, and the world is changing for him.

Despite being a child of the Vicarage, despite a lifetime of filial attention to the pulpit of St. Mark’s, George has often felt that he does not understand the Bible. Not all of it, all of the time; indeed, not enough of it, enough of the time. There has always been some leap to be made, from fact to faith, from knowledge to understanding, of which he has proved incapable. This makes him feel a sham. The tenets of the Church of England have increasingly become a distant given. He does not sense them as close truths, or see them working from day to day, from moment to moment. Naturally, he does not tell his parents this.

At school, additional stories and explanations of life were put before him. This is what science says; this is what history says; this is what literature says . . . George became adept at answering examination questions on these subjects, even if they had no real vivacity in his mind. But now he has discovered the law, and the world is beginning finally to make sense. Hitherto invisible connections—between people, between things, between ideas and principles—are gradually revealing themselves.

For instance, he is on the train between Bloxwich and Birchills, looking out of the window at a hedgerow. He sees not what his fellow passengers would see—a few intertwined bushes blown by the wind, home to some nesting birds—but instead a formal boundary between owners of land, a delineation settled by contract or long usage, something active, something liable to promote either amity or dispute. At the Vicarage, he looks at the maid scrubbing the kitchen table, and instead of a coarse and clumsy girl likely to misplace his books, he sees a contract of employment and a duty of care, a complicated and delicate tying together, backed by centuries of case law, all of it unfamiliar to the parties concerned.

He feels confident and happy with the law. There is a great deal of textual exegesis, of explaining how words can and do mean different things; and there are almost as many books of commentary on the law as there are on the Bible. But at the end there is not that further leap to be made. At the end, you have an agreement, a decision to be obeyed, an understanding of what something means. There is a journey from confusion to clarity. A drunken mariner writes his last will and testament on an ostrich egg; the mariner drowns, the egg survives, whereupon the law brings coherence and fairness to his sea-washed words.

Other young men divide their lives between work and pleasure; indeed, spend the former dreaming of the latter. George finds that the law provides him with both. He has no need or desire to take part in sports, to go boating, to attend the theatre; he has no interest in alcohol or gourmandising, or in horses racing one another; he has little desire to travel. He has his practice, and then, for pleasure, he has railway law. It is astonishing that the tens of thousands who travel daily by train have no useful pocket explicator to help them determine their rights vis-à-vis the railway company. He has written to Messrs. Effingham Wilson, publishers of the “Wilson’s Legal Handy Books” series, and on the basis of a sample chapter they have accepted his proposal.

George has been brought up to believe in hard work, honesty, thrift, charity and love of family; also to believe that virtue is its own reward. Further, as the eldest child, he is expected to set an example to Horace and Maud. George increasingly realizes that, while his parents love their three children equally, it is on him that expectation weighs the heaviest. Maud is always likely to be a source of concern. Horace, while in all respects a thoroughly decent fellow, has never been cut out for a scholar. He has left home and, with help from a cousin of Mother’s, managed to enter the Civil Service at the lowest clerical level.

Still, there are moments when George catches himself envying Horace, who now lives in diggings in Manchester, and occasionally sends a cheery postcard from a seaside resort. There are also moments when he wishes that Dora Charlesworth really did exist. But he knows no girls. None comes to the house; Maud has no female friends he might practise acquaintance on. Greenway and Stentson liked to boast experience in such matters, but George was often dubious of their claims, and is glad to have left those two behind. When he sits on his bench in St. Philip’s Place eating his sandwiches, he glances admiringly at young women who pass; sometimes he will remember a face, and have yearnings for it at night, while his father growls and snuffles a few feet away. George is familiar with the sins of the flesh, as listed in Galatians, chapter five—they begin with Adultery, Fornication, Uncleanness and Lasciviousness. But he does not believe his own quiet hankerings qualify under either of the last two heads.