The Corner of Harley Street Part 11

You will have observed that my reference is masculine, although the older historians have regarded the complaint as being chiefly confined to women. But you are not to deduct from this, as I can see you trying to do, that the neurasthenia of to-day is therefore a new variety, whose exhibition in your halfpenny daily paper is justifiable on public grounds. For if it attacked mainly a certain cla.s.s of our great-grandmothers and their maternal ancestors, this was less, I think, on account of their s.e.x than of their circ.u.mstances--the predisposing combination in some of them of slender academic endowment with unexercised mental activity.

Times have changed, but even then it was not the woman of affairs, whose education, ample or the reverse, had been salted by the winds of action--it was not the queens and the stateswomen at the one pole, or the workers in the fields at the other, but the secluded gentlewomen between them, who fainted daily, and agonised over beetles and mice.

_Requiescant in pace_, for their day is no more, and their busier daughters have no longer time to write pathetic little self-revelations in unventilated boudoirs, or collapse at a knock upon the door. Instead, they will vault nimbly over the window-sill; while as for the beetles, they will kill them for you mercifully, and explain their pedigree in Latin.

But the cla.s.s that they have thus vacated has not, alas, been suffered to die out, and is now perhaps even fuller than ever. Gone, it is true, with the conditions that produced them, are the vaporous women of Richardson and Fielding. But here in their stead, and in a very similar soil, is the twopenny clerk of to-day. And it is typically in his Harringay villa that one must search for the modern neurasthenic. A little cheap education, a long period of physical security, a comfortable, if inexpensive, a.s.surance of at any rate the more primal necessities, and the demand of ever coalescing industries for an innumerable army of semi-automatic dependents--all these have been at work. And they have built up for us a hundred airless mental chambers, whose inhabitants, desperately aware of their gentility, and sufficiently educated for a little self-probing, have nothing more demanded from them than to copy out stereotyped letters or manipulate a Morse key. To obtain their chance of doing these things they had to acquire a small amount of knowledge--since seldom added to; and to do them automatically a few months of mental apprentices.h.i.+p became necessary. No more was asked of them. And after a little while, and in the great majority of cases, they have ceased to ask more of themselves.

And I have seen men crying in my consulting-room over some trivial, unexpected appeal that has been too much for their paralysed initiative.

You may think that my a.n.a.logy is far-fetched, and superficially I'll admit that it is. But probe a little deeper, and you'll find how exactly the related conditions have produced corresponding types. Look at my sequestered lady busy with her eternal crochet, but in reality not busy at all. And then behold my little clerk occupied with his letters and his envelope-licking, but with a brain as really unemployed as my lady's. Read out to me the writings of my sequestered lady or the records of her conversations. How little she had read or seen or studied, and yet with what confident persistence she uttered her superlatives. And now talk to my little clerk, who likewise has climbed no mountains of comparison, and his tiniest headache is "shocking," his least calamity "terrible." Why, only this afternoon I was asked for a tonic by such an one (your halfpenny ill.u.s.trated was peeping out of his pocket) on the ground that yesterday he had seen a small child cut its forehead, and held it till the doctor came. Listen to my sequestered lady, innocence herself, and her talk, with t.i.tters, is of my lord's _liaisons_, my lady's cure, and what the neighbours think. And listen to my little clerk, and what are his topics but these?

G.o.d forbid that I should hold either of them up for ridicule (it's you that I'm ultimately to annihilate), for such generalities as these are never more than half true. My lady was only waiting for the marching years to become a Florence Nightingale and a Madame Curie. She was only waiting to be shown, and admitted into, the great worlds outside her boudoir to prove a right of way that has long since ceased to be questioned. And who shall say what s.h.i.+ning destiny awaits my little clerk? For it is not, as we are so often told, the mere rush of our modern industrialism that is at the root of so much neurasthenia--it is its blank automatism, with its endless opportunities for self-pity. And one can only suppose that as we advance in knowledge much of this human drudgery will be delegated to other instruments. But the time is not yet, alas, and meanwhile all that is best of him has to struggle with circ.u.mstances only too sorrowfully adapted to morbid mental imaginings.

"The result of all this free education," you will be told by a certain type of elderly _raisonneur_. But of course he is wrong. It's not less education that we want, but more. For even in the good old days, as I have said, it was not the Marie Stuarts and the Queen Elizabeths, delivering their Latin orations and translating their "Mirrors of the Sinful Soul" at thirteen and fourteen years old, it was not the full-tide women of the Renaissance, who were afterwards conspicuous for nervous debility. And nor is it the really well-educated clerk of to-day. For while a little education is chiefly dangerous in so far as it increases a man's self-consciousness without showing him where it is gently to be laughed at, a little more will generally remedy this defect, to the lasting benefit of his sanity. No, it's in his awful self-seriousness that lurks the subtlest enemy of the half-educated man.

If you can make a man laugh at himself, you can make him laugh at his nerves--which is better than a hecatomb of bromides.

Well then, there's my a.n.a.logy; and here's where it breaks down. My lady's prison walls were concrete as well as abstract; my clerk's are chiefly abstract. She was in the world but not of it. He is both in it and of it. She could scarcely touch upon its treasures if she would.

For him they are waiting--the real ones--if he will only take them. Long ago we have recognised the merely physical dangers of his daily enforced imprisonment. And we have framed a hundred sanitary laws to provide him with his oxygen unsullied. But what about his half-developed mind? You will tell me that good lectures are abundant, and that cla.s.sics may be bought for a s.h.i.+lling. Yet what are these, at the best, but occasional winds of thought, too often resented as a draught? And who is it but you, creeping under his door for a halfpenny, that creates his mental atmosphere? You may tell me that you only reproduce it, with its const.i.tuents very faithfully proportioned--a nebulous sermonette once a week, an inch to the scientific progress of both the hemispheres, and three columns to the personal appearance of the Camden murderer. And you may justify yourself on the same grounds for covering your nakedness, as you did last week (I'm glad that you yourself were away), with an appeal in big letters that he should buy your orange-coloured weekly, wherein--with delicious exclusiveness--he might find, in all its details, the life-history of this same criminal's flimsy little paramour, written (G.o.d forgive you--and him) by her own father; and the nadir, one can only pray, of your efforts for forty per cent. But you cannot at the same time lay a finger on your paragraph of Health Hints, and boast complacently about the influence of the Press. Nor do you, I suppose, with any real conviction; and I may have exaggerated, perhaps, in crediting you with the creation of anybody's atmosphere. For the true brain-worker pa.s.ses you by, and the manual labourer has his antidote at hand; while the little clerk is not, in a modern and abominable phrase, "a person who matters." But then he is. And in the battle for mental vigour that, under present conditions, he must consciously fight or die, you might so easily be playing the biggest rather than the least worthy part. For our help still cometh from the hills. And surely it's of the hill-top men, the men who are climbing, the men with a view, that you should be telling him, morning and evening, as he sits in his London cellule. Whereas instead, with his birthright ever broadening about him, you still drearily drag him after you to Bow Street, where you photograph him in his pitiful queue for to-morrow's ill.u.s.tration. Dear me, I'm afraid that I'm tub-thumping; and you'll think that I've forgotten your farm and your balloon-house and your daily reports upon the cuckoo and the corn-crake. But I haven't; and what's more, I'm quite ready to believe that if Bow Street went out of fas.h.i.+on you'd be the first to appreciate the fact. We should soon be hearing indeed that you had led the movement. And that's why you don't really stem the onward march of sanity, though there are casualties _en route_ of which it would be difficult to acquit you. While as for your National Neurosis, one foreign battery on Primrose Hill would bury it for two generations.

It might also blow the roof off Franciscan House.

"But poor Reggie can't do anything by himself," says Esther.

"They all say that," I grumble.

"And haven't you been just a little bit rude?"

"I'm attacking a point of view," I explain, "and I feel rather heated."

She looks over my shoulder reproachfully.

"And you've never even _mentioned_ our having the baby when they take the 'Nautilus' to Italy."

"No more I have."

"And it's the very thing I told you to write about."

And this is true. For we _must_ have the baby.

Yr. sorrowful friend, P. H.

P.S.--This letter almost makes me wonder why I like you.

XXIII

_To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _September_ 6, 1910.

MY DEAR SALLY,

There was a young American, Stephen Crane, who wrote, a few years ago, a little volume called "Wounds in the Rain." You may have read it. It was rather a grim book, but written with a good deal of power, and a promise of more to come that the author, alas, never lived to fulfil. And not the worst part of it was its t.i.tle, with its suggestion of grey suffering, the aftermath alike of victory and defeat. And yet I am not sure that "Wounds in the Sun" would not literally have stood for a far greater sum of misery. Only he would never have made us feel it.

For there's an implicit sadness in the monosyllable rain--in the very sound of it--that depends, I think, when you come to a.n.a.lyse it, less upon the ideas of water and wetness and possible chill that it conjures up, than upon an underlying suggestion of something falling. It's a little hard to account for it--I would commend the subject to a metaphysician if I could be certain that it hasn't already been dealt with by him--and yet it's a fact, I think, that we have invested all falling things with a certain quality of tragedy, with at any rate no single idea of cheerfulness. Think of what you will, from little Susan's tear to Lucifer, son of the Morning, and of all the more material phenomena that lie between them--cascades, avalanches, autumn leaves--and you will find that while your vision perceives in them pity, or solemnity, or terror, or even disgust, it clothes no falling thing with actual joy. And the swifter the fall the more profound are these sentiments that it engenders.

Thus the sheer waterfall, spilling itself unbroken over some brooding crag into a pit of blackness, contains just so much more gloom than the torrent, leaping down from rock to rock, as its descent is more vertical and headlong. The thistledown, sliding earthwards upon the wind, is less tragic than the rain-sodden beech-leaf by just the measure of its longer pa.s.sage through the air. While the rain that drives horizontally against one's Burberry may be a good deal more penetrating, but is seldom so dismal as that which drops down undisturbed from the drab sky to earth.

I believe that there is a sermon in all this somewhere--in the universal instinct with which we find sorrow, or at least some factor of it, in all that falls; and joy, or at any rate its suggestion, in most things that rise up, and open, and turn themselves towards the heavens. But I'll spare you the preaching of it, since these reflections merely spring to my mind as the result, last Sat.u.r.day, of a particularly wet tramp from Beer to Sidmouth.

I had been called down in consultation on Friday, and having spent the night in the sick man's house, decided next morning to walk the eight miles along the coast. It was one of those baffling Devons.h.i.+re mornings of rain and mist with rhythmical promises, never fulfilled, of a watery suns.h.i.+ne to come; and both my hostess and the local doctor were fain to press motor-cars upon me. But I had made up my mind, and a.s.sured them that I was one of those many people--possibly foolish--who rather enjoyed a walk in the rain.

My host, who was by way of being a philosopher as well as an invalid, looked at me with a twinkle.

"So you really think you like it?" he asked me.

"Yes," I told him. "I really do like it."

He put a hand on my shoulder.

"No, you don't," he said. "Just think it over between here and Sidmouth."

And he was right. Before I had walked two miles I knew that he was right. I don't enjoy walking in the rain, though I often do it, and always claim to like it. I merely walk in it for the rather subtle enjoyment of getting out of it, and for the sake of plumbing a little more deeply, at my journey's end, the everyday delights of dryness, warmth, and a deep-bosomed chair. I become a Tibetan at the prayer-wheel storing up joys to come in a whetted appet.i.te for to-morrow's blue sky.

For though I must admit that there's a certain decorative effect about rain over a countryside, yet it's an effect of pure melancholy, scientifically unfounded of course--at any rate until science can explain the proposition at the beginning of this letter--heightening loneliness, exaggerating the hards.h.i.+p of toil, deepening the horror of death, but adding quite an extraordinary power to any gleam of even the tearfullest of suns.h.i.+ne that may have stumbled into some corner of the landscape. And there's always the possibility of that gleam being the herald of a sudden conquest of glory, in whose triumph your merely fair-weather pedestrian can never have a part.

Thus a memory comes back to me, for instance, of a dreary five-in-the-morning start, a hopeless breakfast, a dogged rain-soaked tramp up the steep hillside--and then the summit of Ben Lomond, a very ark above the flood, borne up, as it were, into the midmost sanctuary of heaven, with the submerging seas rolling out to the world's end, and the wind thrilling over them like an organ. Ten minutes ago, and the sun had lost itself for ever. And now it flamed there like the white throne of G.o.d, till the horizons melted before its gaze, and the great dead began majestically to rise--Ben More, Ben Lawers, the Cairngorms, and the distant peaks of Arran.

My suns.h.i.+ne on Sat.u.r.day last however was not, I should think, more than twelve years old. She was standing rather pensively (but without agitation) near a cottage gate; and fortunately I had provided myself with some bulls'-eyes at a village called Brans...o...b.., where a kindly old lady had a.s.sured me that there was still a great demand for them. I extracted one from the bag, and was thanked politely but by no means deferentially. There was a moment's pause during which a damp physician was being gravely relegated to his proper sphere in the natural scheme of things--an obviously humble one. Then she threw me a fact.

"Nellie arn't got one," she observed.

So I gave her one for Nellie.

"Anybody else?" I inquired.

She looked down for a minute at the plump and striped confection.

"Mother likes _them_ things," she said--and I had seen by this time, of course, that her mother must be a very nice mother. So she accepted one for mother.

"And is that all?" I asked.

"Well," she said doubtfully, "_Baby's_ just arf to sleep."

And this is all that I shall ever remember about the road from Beer to Sidmouth.

I am finding it harder than ever this year to get a summer holiday. And while these little glimpses of the country merely sharpen my desire for more, I find myself telling myself sternly that I must really learn to be contented with them. And at any rate I have been enabled to see more of the hospital than for some time past; and, as you know, this is to be my last year there as a visiting physician.