The Corner of Harley Street Part 10

"And you'll call yourself 'A London Physician,' I suppose?"

"Something like that," he confessed. "You see, a newspaper discussion like this is all right when once it's started--that is, if it's a live one, as Mr. Pole calls it. The other letters simply pour in."

"From Balham and Holloway and Tottenham and Ilford----"

"Oh yes," he smiled, "and from Kensington and Mayfair as well."

"You think that a good many of your readers will like to tell the public all about their nerves?"

"Thousands of 'em," he said confidently.

"And you'll select a certain number of letters from each district, and fill up a couple of your daily columns for nothing?"

"That's the idea. And we shall give a lot of pleasure too."

"And the writers and the writers' friends will rush to buy copies, I suppose, and cut out their letters, and stick them in alb.u.ms."

He laughed.

"I shouldn't wonder," he said. "Making personal friends for the paper--that's what Mr. Pole calls it. He says that nothing pays better."

"And presently, perhaps, you'll collect all the letters, and put them in a little booklet of which you'll sell large numbers for sixpence in a comfortable dressing-gown of advertis.e.m.e.nts."

"Possibly," he said, "if it goes really well."

I looked at him for a moment, upon the threshold of his life-work. He was a nice boy, though the shades of Franciscan House were fast closing about him.

"D'you think it's worth it?" I asked him.

"Why rather," he said. "Pays like anything."

"Forty per cent, perhaps?"

"Very likely."

"The Franciscan heaven," I admitted, and he winced a little. By which I knew, of course, that he was as yet no true Franciscan--who never winces, and whose conscience, to use a borrowed phrase, is merely his accomplice.

"Do you object to forty per cent?" he asked.

"_Per se?_" I answered, "not at all."

"But to the correspondence perhaps?"

"I'm not enamoured of the idea," I confessed. "Are you?"

He reached for the ash-tray, and knocked out his pipe.

"We must give 'em what they want, you know," he said.

I bowed.

"The Franciscan creed," I told him. "But perhaps they don't know yet that they do want it."

"Then we must show 'em," he replied.

"The Franciscan gospel," I sighed, for, as I have said, he was a nice boy, still trailing a wisp or two of glory.

"And besides," he went on, "people always like to talk about their weak nerves, don't they?"

He was getting in under my guard now to bleed me of copy, so I stepped aside.

"Play cricket?" I asked him.

"A bit," he confessed.

"Ever stopped a rot?"

"Sometimes," he replied warily.

"How did you do it?" I inquired.

He laughed again.

"Now you're getting at me, aren't you?" he said.

"Of course I am. Haven't you been trying to get at me?"

"Do you think you're going to score?" he asked.

"I shouldn't wonder," I told him; "because you didn't encourage those panicky fellow-batsmen of yours to talk about their nerves, did you? On the contrary, you swaggered a bit yourself, and told 'em that the bowling was poor stuff. You didn't even tell 'em to forget that growing excavation behind their belt-buckles. You were subtler. You took it for granted that they hadn't got one. You surrounded 'em with the proper atmosphere. You were more than half a nerve specialist already--the better half. You infected them with your own health. But what are you proposing to do now?"

The journalist in him died hard.

"Then you think there _is_ a rot?" he asked.

"I didn't say so."

He put his pipe in his pocket, and picked up his hat and gloves.

"After all," he smiled, "you've only been preaching the old doctrine of responsibility, you know. And the modern journalist is a detached person." But I shook my head.

I repeat that he was a nice boy, and had borne my little pi-jaw with admirable fort.i.tude.

"Only semi-detached," I ventured, "with a half-educated brother next door."

I fancy that I can see you lying snugly aft upon the "Nautilus" at anchor--a bronzing cynic, smiling gently over this ingenuous little duel. And perhaps you have already made up your mind to transfer this incomplete disciple of yours to some other department, or even (according to a fundamental Franciscan tradition) to dispense with his services altogether. For if he cannot bring himself to demolish one prehistoric physician, what can he do? And I shall be sorry if he is put to any real inconvenience. But on the other hand I shall rejoice openly to see him save his soul alive. For though I didn't tell him so, and though I am convinced that at the core--the germ-plasm, if you like--the race is still happily sound enough, yet if there is a rot, a temporary epidemic of nervous instability, it is largely confined to those who draw their mental nourishment from Franciscan House, and whose twitterings you are now proposing to exploit.

_Autres temps, autres moeurs_, for while there was a time when our more ignorant forefathers were wont to scoff (mistakenly, no doubt, but on balance with a tonic effect) at the possessors of "weak nerves," now that we have learned just enough to talk about them in bad Greek "neurasthenia" is an affection of which no man need be ashamed. "Poor chap," we say, and begin to wonder if we are not sufferers ourselves.