Moon Magic Page 3

  His students hated him because he bullied and drove them mercilessly, yet he could have a sanguinary row with a fellow examiner over an unfair viva; the nurses disliked him because he was exacting, yet he would move heaven and earth to get sick-leave for them when he thought they needed it; patients were terrified at his brusque, harsh manner, yet he never spared either himself or the hospital in their service; in addition to which a large portion of his work consisted in weeding out the hysterics from the genuine organic cases, and it did not add to his already scanty popularity when his duty obliged him to tell the professional paralytic to take up his bed and walk.

  He camped out year after year in furnished rooms; books, papers, and specimens in various states of preservation accumulating around him; letting his landlady feed him how she liked and his tailor dress him how he would. It was less than half a life but the half that was lived, though singularly barren for himself, was fruitful for others. The blind, the halt, the dumb, the epileptic, the lunatic, were freed from their bondage and returned to normal life when this man who never touched a knife himself, stood at the elbow of the surgeon and directed him to the precise spot in the brain where lay the root of the trouble that expressed itself in so many grotesque and bizarre guises. What he did not know about the machinery of the mind was not worth knowing, but what he knew about the mind itself was precious little.

  He resumed his walk, striding along beside the darkly-running water, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to use this route before instead of the crowded Underground. He had not bothered with a car of his own of recent years, preferring to rely on taxis, a car being an intolerable nuisance in the City area, and parking space at the hospital congested by the magnificent vehicles of the junior staff, who could ill afford them but had to have them for the sake of prestige; he, who had all the prestige that any man could need, turned up at a consultation in a taxi.

  He liked walking; whenever he went down to see his wife he always spent the day in a long tramp over the downs, returning in the evening tired out by the fresh air and unaccustomed exercise and falling asleep in an armchair over the fire, the irony of it all never occurring to him. He had often thought of taking a tramping holiday, but somehow he never managed to take a holiday at all, doing three men's work all through August when the hospital was short-handed, to the consternation of old chronics accustomed to more urbane methods. He had no interests outside his profession and no relaxation save reading the international literature of his own speciality.

  It was a grim, joyless, hard-driven existence. Most of his work was diagnostic, little treatment being possible in his speciality. There had been a time when, improbable as it might appear to his colleagues, he worried over his cases; but of recent years he had begun to accept the acts of God with some degree of philosophy, barking out a diagnosis and a prognosis and dismissing the matter from his mind—save in the cases of children. Sometimes he thought of refusing to take children, but it was not feasible in his hospital work, where he had to take all comers. Children worried him. He would detect the first slight sign of trouble in some hitherto bonny youngster, and the future would rise before his eyes and haunt him for days. In consequence his manner of dealing with children was even more unfortunate than that of dealing with adults—the yelling child, the indignant mother and the disgusted students forming a singularly unpleasing picture, especially as it was believed that from his judgment there was no appeal to God or man—if he said a child would grow up a cripple, grow up a cripple it would. It seemed sometimes as if he were passing sentence rather than giving an opinion.

  He was a man who habitually walked fast, going charging down hospital corridors and letting trolleys and stretcher-bearers do the dodging, and he was covering the ground on the Embankment in his usual manner, overtaking and leaving behind all other pedestrians going in the same direction as himself, when he noticed that one shadowy figure on ahead was not being overtaken, but keeping its distance steadily. He must have noticed it subconsciously for some time, for when he noticed it consciously, he was aware that he had been following it for a considerable distance, and with the dawning awareness his imagination was intrigued, for it so closely resembled a recurring dream that had come to him on and off for years whenever he was more than usually overworked.

  On such occasions his normally insufficient sleep became unsatisfactory in quality as well as in quantity, and he would lie in a curious half-dreaming state between sleeping and waking, not sufficiently asleep to be immersed in his dream, and not sufficiently awake to know that it was a dream. He would spend the night sliding backwards and forwards over the borderline of sleep, sometimes actually in the kingdom of dream, sometimes looking into it more or less consciously and watching its shadow-show like a cinematograph picture.

  These dreams were invariably of landscapes and sea-scapes—very often of land and sea-scape combined, which he attributed to his walks over the downs when visiting his wife, and in these scenes there were never any figures, with one exception—occasionally there appeared a cloaked figure in a wide-brimmed hat, which he attributed to an advertisement of Sandeman's port in coloured lights that flickered up and down on a building he had occasion to pass when travelling between his consulting rooms in Wimpole Street and his lodgings in Pimlico. It was quite simple, quite obvious; and though psychology was merely a side-line with him, and only for differential diagnosis, he had a sufficient working knowledge of its theories to trace one set of symbols to the bungalowsprinkled downs behind the seaside town, and the other to the frequently seen advertisement. He attributed the one to sex-repression, a safe guess in the case of most respectable citizens, and a particularly safe one in the case of a professional man placed as he was; the other symbol he attributed to his subconscious desire for the stimulant thus picturesquely advertised—a very understandable desire in an over-worked man given to worrying. Both desires being repressed without any shadow of compromise, even Dr. Rupert Annersley Malcolm, neurologist and endocrinologist, could see that they might turn round on him and escape into his dreams. That they might do more than that never entered his head.

  It intrigued his imagination to see this cloaked figure of dream moving ahead of him in the dusk over the wet London pavement as it had so often done through the landscapes of sleep. True, he knew it was only a woman in a mackintosh cape, but nevertheless it thrilled him to meet his subconscious fantasy thus exteriorised.

  The figure moved some twenty yards ahead and kept its distance. Dr. Malcolm put on a spurt in order to come up with it and inspect it more closely, but as he invariably moved as fast as he could, his spurt did not greatly increase his speed or perceptibly reduce the distance between himself and the figure he was now pursuing—for the failure to achieve his intention had, for his cross-grained temperament, turned a passing interest into a determined pursuit.

  His first impulse was to break into a run, but he knew that such conduct might not escape the notice of the guardians of law and order, and he had no wish to figure in a police court on a charge of insulting behaviour, where his explanation that he was merely analysing one of his own dreams was hardly likely to be accepted.

  He therefore pressed on determinedly, heel and toe, confident that he could, given time, walk any female down. He was a man who had no use whatever for women, and for whom women, so far as he knew, had likewise no use. This woman, however, continued to keep ahead, and though he was slowly lessening the distance between them, it was clear that, even if the traffic lights favoured him, he was unlikely to come up with her unless her walk was very prolonged. Dr. Malcolm found that he was getting the last ounce out of himself that could be done without attracting the attention of the police; as it was, he observed a policewoman, looking exactly like Mrs Noah in her unbecoming uniform, eyeing him with suspicion.

  Then the thing he greatly feared came upon him—the traffic lights gave the object of his pursuit free passage, changed before he could come up with them, the released traffic poured over th
e bridge in a solid mass, and the cloaked figure disappeared in the shadows of the London dusk, leaving him with an inexpressible sense of loss, frustration and emptiness. Another five minutes at a slightly easier pace took him to his lodgings in Grosvenor Road, chosen for cheapness when he was struggling for a footing in his profession and retained from habit, indifference and lack of incentive to move. In their slovenly comfort he stripped and had a rub-down, for he had been sweating profusely from his exertions in the mild mugginess of the evening. Then, and only then, did it occur to him to marvel at the pace at which the woman had moved.

  In bed, later in the evening, he wondered whether the extra fatigue of the long walk home would be sufficient to cause the cloaked figure to appear in the landscape of dream where he had been wandering almost nightly for the last fortnight. But that night he passed swiftly into more normal sleep than he had known for many a long day. It was as if all the pent-up ennui of his joyless existence had discharged itself into his fantastic interest in the figure of an unknown woman half seen in the dusk.

  The term being over, he went down the following day to spend the weekend with his wife; but she, poor soul, having one of her bad turns, definitely did not desire his company, so he was free to take his usual walk over the downs and to prolong it beyond its usual range. He came back to the red-brick villa as dusk was falling, tired out, for the walk had been unduly prolonged by the unexpected boon of freedom from an evening meal with his wife and her companion. Sandwiches and a bottle of milk had been left for him beside a banked-up fire in his bedroom, but the sandwiches were dry and curling at the edges, so he drank the milk and left them alone. Then he fell into an uneasy doze in the wicker armchair drawn up beside the fire.

  It was not a particularly comfortable chair, moreover it creaked with his breathing and disturbed him; but in spite of everything, he realised that the dream that had eluded him all the week was about to come, and resisting all temptations to move and so rouse himself, he lay watching the shifting pictures on the threshold of sleep forming and dissolving and forming again into more and more definite shapes.

  At first they concerned themselves with scraps of everyday life. His landlady; the laboratory cleaner at the hospital; his wife's companion; the elderly maid who was half nurse, half housekeeper. He waited patiently, knowing that it was the usual trick of his mind to disburden itself of surface impressions before opening the deeper strata. Some lingering remnant of his conscious mind, disciplined by his scientific training, observed that he was seeing a procession of elderly, plain and “itless” women. Then there appeared the policewoman he had seen on the Embankment, and his hopes rose; but she merely took her place in the procession.

  Movements on the landing roused him momentarily, and he heard his wife's voice, faintly querulous, coming through her open bedroom door. They were evidently having a bad night. His first instinct was to go in and do what he could, but he knew from past experience that this would merely fuss and upset her. Her own local doctor was competent; he would hear from him what was amiss, and through him could do whatever could be done for the unhappy woman who alternated between her bed, her couch, and her wheeled chair since her unsuccessful attempt to bring his child into the world.

  The slight disturbance had been sufficient to rouse him temporarily, from the torpor induced by the long day in the open. He lit a cigarette, and stared into the fire; his mind went back to the night twenty years ago that had changed the vivacious, petite, childlike girl he had married, into a neurotic, obese, semi-paralysed invalid. He did not rail against fate, he was long past that, he merely sat with his cigarette smouldering between his tobacco-stained fingers and thought about it.

  In fact he did not blame fate. In an obscure way he blamed himself, as if he had made some gross error of judgment over a diagnosis. It was true that they had both eagerly desired the child that had wrought all the havoc, but that did not seem to make any difference. In the end the responsibility was his; if it had not been for him there would have been no child—the logic of that was inescapable. But it did not do to dwell on what might have been. That was an expensive luxury which exacted its price in days of depression. Only by a rigorous control of mind and imagination could the Ephesian wild beasts be managed. He had discovered that trick for himself years ago, and it was always a surprise to him that it had never occurred to his colleagues in the psychiatric department.

  To turn his mind away from the dangerous subject, he called up before his imagination the picture of the Thames Embankment on a mild wet winter night, the last of the fallen plane-tree leaves making patterns on the pavement and the river running down swift and dark and full of eddies. He lived that incident over again in vivid imagination, going back further and further towards its inception as its savour took hold on him. He could see the scene at the prize-giving—the students coming up for their diplomas, coltish and shambling, immature boys entrusted with responsibilities too great to be fairly borne by any human being liable to err. He considered their faces, and wondered how many of them he would trust to set a mousetrap, let alone to hold the issues of life and death—it was a miscalculation on the part of his own professor of obstetrics that had resulted in the wreck in the next room.

  He pulled his mind back again, and thought of the puzzled face of the little old lady when he had mistaken her for a patient, and the grinning countenance of her son, well aware of certain of the implications of his speciality that called for routine exclusion; and remembered how, his nerve completely gone, the professor of obstetrics had hinted in self-excuse at some such predisposing cause for the disaster his own lack of discretion had precipitated, and he thought with bitterness of the ideals and selfdiscipline of his youth and young manhood that had served to spare him nothing of either humiliation or self-reproach.

  Once again he dragged his mind back under control and pictured the river and the Embankment and the shadowy, swiftly moving form which, after some tag from a forgotten school poetry-book, he named the beckoning fair one, though, God knows she hadn't beckoned, and he would have been most indignant if she had. Moreover it was highly problematical if she were even passably good-looking.

  He imagined himself walking behind her as he had on that evening; but this time there was no sense of haste and failure, but only the swift effortless flight of dream. The Embankment and its lights faded, and he was out once more in the wide landscape of sleep, colourless as shadowed silver in the light that never was on land or sea.

  But there was no vision. She had vanished. Holding himself desperately, on the threshold of sleep, he tried consciously to press on into the shadowy landscape, but it eluded him and threatened to turn to nightmare. Then the spell was broken by the voice of his wife's companion trying to make herself heard on the telephone in the hall, and he was wide awake again.

  He waited; he heard a car on the drive, steps on the stairs, a murmur of voices in the next bedroom, but he did not stir. Only when he heard the bedroom door open once more, and a heavy tread on the landing, did he rise, and moving quietly as a cat, open his own door and silently beckon his fellow doctor to enter. Then, in the dull glow of the dying fire, the two men faced each other, for it never occurred to Malcolm to turn on the light.

  The other, however, had known his patient's husband on and off for years, and was quite used to the many minor eccentricities of which he was so unconsciously guilty. He could just see the pale outline of the square, hard-set face in the dimness, with the high line of the swept-back hair and the glitter of the keen pale eyes that he used to think were just like those of a snake getting ready to strike. The perpetual alertness of the man always seemed to be his outstanding quality, and now, at 2 a.m. in a darkened room when he had obviously been dozing, he was as alert as ever.

  “Well?” said Malcolm, untroubled by the necessity for any of the normal small change of social intercourse.

  But Dr. Jenkins was used to that. “Nothing serious,” he replied. “Nerves mainly, but of course that upheaves the
other condition. If you don't mind my saying so frankly, I think it was the prospect of your visit that upset her. As a matter of fact, it happens every time you come, only it generally doesn't come to a head till after you have gone. If I were you, I should restrict your visits to the bare necessities, Christmas, her birthday, and so on, don't you know.”

  “I see,” said the other curtly. “Very good, I'll do as you say.”

  They took leave of each other, and Dr. Malcolm returned to his chair by the dying fire, wondering why this solution of his monthly purgatory had never been suggested before.

  Next morning Mrs Malcolm was still in a drugged sleep when the time came for him to leave. He had a few words with her companion, his explanations being received with such an air of devout thankfulness that he experienced a sharp pang of conscience as to whether he had always done all in his power to make his visits acceptable.

  Staring out of the window of the train on his journey back to town, he asked himself what he could have done that he had left undone, for he honestly did not think he had done anything in the course of all the long years with which to reproach himself. Finally he gave up the problem as insoluble and travelled on to the hospital, where the students scattered before him like frightened poultry and a clinical clerk kept dropping his pencil and muddling his papers out of sheer nervousness. The patients fared a little better, but not much, and after an exhausting morning for all concerned, he snatched a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the buffet at the Underground station, and went on to his rooms in Wimpole Street, where, with variations, the routine of the morning was repeated. Some doctors boast that their hospital patients get exactly the same treatment as their private patients, but Dr. Rupert Malcolm, without ever thinking about it, treated the patients in his private practice in exactly the same way as his out-patients. He could not possibly do more for either class than he already did, but it was characteristic of the man that he did it in precisely the same way. The prince had to scramble in and out of his clothes with the same precipitancy as the pauper, and he extracted the same reluctant admissions from the princess as from the charwoman, and by the same unmitigated methods.