by A. J. Cronin
The letter was from Professor Challis. It stated that as the direct result of his researches into dust inhalation the CMFB – Coal and Metalliferous Mines Fatigue Board – had decided to open up the whole question with a view to reporting to the Parliamentary Committee. A whole-time medical officer was, for this purpose, to be appointed by the Board. And the Board, on the strength of his recent investigations, unanimously and without hesitation offered the appointment to him.
When she had read it she looked at him happily:
‘Didn’t I tell you something would turn up.’ She smiled. ‘Isn’t it splendid!’
He was throwing stones quickly, nervously at a lobster pot on the beach.
‘It’s clinical work,’ he reflected aloud. ‘Couldn’t be anything else. They know I’m a clinician.’
She observed him with a deepening smile.
‘Of course, darling, you remember our bargain. Six weeks here as a minimum, doing nothing, lying still – You won’t let this interrupt our holiday.’
‘No, no.’ Looking at his watch. ‘We’ll finish our holiday but – anyhow’ – he jumped up and gaily pulled her to her feet – ‘ it won’t do us any harm to run down to the telegraph office. And I wonder – I wonder if they’ve got a time-table there.’
Part Three
Chapter One
The Coal and Metalliferous Mines Fatigue Board – usually abbreviated to MFB – was housed in a large, impressive grey stone building on the Embankment, not far from Westminster Gardens, conveniently situated to the Board of Trade and the Mines Department, both of which alternately forgot about, and fought fiercely for, a proprietary interest in the Board.
On the 14th of August, a fresh, bright morning, in bustling health and immense spirits, Andrew ran up the steps of the building the look in his eye that of a man about to conquer London.
‘I’m the new Medical Officer,’ he told the commissionaire in the Office of Works uniform.
‘Yes, sir, yes, sir,’ said the commissionaire with a fatherly air. It was gratifying to Andrew that he seemed to be expected. ‘You’ll want to see our Mr Gill. Jones! Take our new doctor up to Mr Gill’s room.’
The lift rose slowly, revealing green tiled corridors, and many floors, on which the Office of Works uniform was again sedately visible. Then Andrew was ushered into a large, sunny room where he found himself shaking hands with Mr Gill, who rose from his desk and put down his copy of The Times to welcome him.
‘I’m a little late in getting in,’ Andrew declared with vigour. ‘Sorry! – we just got back from France yesterday – but I’m absolutely ready to start.’
‘That’s nice!’ Gill was a jolly little man, in gold-rimmed glasses, a near-clerical collar, dark blue suit, dark blue tie held in place with a flat gold ring. He looked on Andrew with prim approval.
‘Please sit down! Will you have a cup of tea, or a glass of hot milk? I usually have one about eleven. And yes – yes, it’s nearly that now –’
‘Oh, well –’ said Andrew, hesitating, then brightening. ‘Perhaps you can tell me about the work while we –’
Five minutes later the Office of Works uniform brought in a nice cup of tea and a glass of hot milk.
‘I think you’ll find that right, Mr Gill. It ’as boiled, Mr Gill.’
‘Thank you, Stevens.’ When Stevens had gone Gill turned to Andrew with a smile. ‘You’ll find him a useful chap. He makes delicious hot buttered toast. It’s rather awkward here – to get really first-class messengers. We’re bits and pieces of all departments – Home Office, Mines Department, Board of Trade; I myself’ – Gill coughed with mild pride – ‘am from the Admiralty.’
While Andrew sipped his boiled milk and chafed for information about his job, Gill pleasantly discussed the weather, Brittany, the Civil Service pension scheme, and the efficacy of Pasteurisation. Then, rising, he led Andrew to his room.
This also was a warmly carpeted, restful, sunny room with a superb view of the river. A large bluebottle was making drowsy nostalgic noises against the window-pane.
‘I chose this for you,’ said Gill pleasantly. ‘Took a little bit of arrangement. There’s an open coal fireplace, you’ll see – nice for the winter. I – I hope you like it?’
‘Why – it’s a marvellous room, but –’
‘Now I’ll introduce you to your secretary – Miss Mason.’ Gill tapped, threw open a communicating door revealing Miss Mason, a nice, elderly girl, neat and composed, seated at a small desk. Rising, Miss Mason put down her Times.
‘Good morning, Miss Mason.’
‘Good morning, Mr Gill.’
‘Miss Mason, this is Doctor Manson.’
‘Good morning, Doctor Manson.’
Andrew’s head reeled slightly under the impact of these salutations, but he collected himself, joined in the conversation.
Five minutes later, as Gill stole pleasantly away, he remarked to Andrew, encouragingly:
‘I’ll send you along some files.’
The files arrived, borne tenderly by Stevens. In addition to his talents as toastmaker and dairyman, Stevens was the best file-bearer in the building. Every hour he entered Andrew’s office, with cradled documents which he placed lovingly upon the desk in the japanned tin marked IN, while his eye, searching eagerly, besought something to take away from the tin marked OUT. It quite broke Steven’s heart when the OUT tin was empty. In this lamentable contingency he slunk away, defeated.
Lost, bewildered, irritated, Andrew raced through the files – minutes of past meetings of the MFB, dull, stodgy, unimportant. Then he turned urgently to Miss Mason. But Miss Mason, who came, she explained, from the Home Office Frozen Meat Investigation Department, proved a restricted source of enlightenment. She told him of the office hockey team – ‘the Ladies’ XI, of course, Doctor Manson’ – of which she was vice-captain. She asked him if he would care to have her copy of The Times. Her gaze entreated him to be calm.
But Andrew was not calm. Fresh from his holiday, longing to work, he began to weave a pattern on the Office of Works carpet. He gazed chafingly at the brisk river scene where tugs fussed about and long lines of coal barges went spattering against the tide. Then he strode down to Gill.
‘When do I start?’
Gill jumped at the abruptness of the question.
‘My dear fellow. You quite startled me. I thought I’d given you enough files to last you for a month.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Come along. It’s time we had lunch.’
Over his steamed sole, Gill tactfully explained, while Andrew battled with a chump chop, that the next meeting of the Board did not, and could not take place until September the eighteenth, that Professor Challis was in Norway, Doctor Maurice Gadsby in Scotland, Sir William Dewar, chairman of the Board, in Germany, and his own immediate chief, Mr Blades, at Frinton with his family.
Andrew went back to Christine that evening with his thoughts in a maze. Their furniture was still in storage and, so that they might have time to look round and find a proper home, they had taken for a month a small furnished flat in Earl’s Court.
‘Could you believe it, Chris! They’re not even ready for me. I’ve got a whole month to drink milk in, and read The Times, and initial files – oh! and have long intimate hockey talks with old girl Mason.’
‘If you don’t mind – you’ll confine your talks to your own old girl. Oh really, darling, it’s lovely here – after Aberalaw. I had a little expedition this afternoon, down to Chelsea. I found out where Carlyle’s house is, and the Tate Gallery. Oh! I planned such lovely things for us to do. You can take a penny steamboat up to Kew. Think of the Gardens, darling. And next month Kreisler’s at the Albert Hall. Oh, and we must see the Memorial to find out why everyone laughs at it. And there’s a play on from the New York Theatre Guild and wouldn’t it be lovely if I could meet you some day for lunch.’ She reached out a small vibrant hand. He had rarely seen her so excited. ‘ Darling! Let’s go out and have a meal. There’s a Russian restaurant along this street. It
looks good. Then if you’re not too tired we might –’
‘Here!’ he protested as she led him to the door. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the matter-of-fact member of this family. But believe me, Chris, after my first day’s toil, I could do with a lively evening.’
Next morning he read every file in his desk, initialled them, and was ranging about his room by eleven o’clock. But soon the cage became too small to hold him and he set out, with violence, to explore the building. It proved uninteresting as a morgue without bodies until, reaching the top storey, he suddenly found himself in a long room, half fitted as a laboratory where, seated on a box which had once held sulphur, was a young man in a long dirty white coat, disconsolately trimming his finger-nails, while his cigarette made yellower the nicotine stain upon his upper lip.
‘Hello!’ Andrew said.
A moment’s pause, then the other answered uninterestedly:
‘If you’ve lost your way, the lift is the third on the right.’
Andrew propped himself against the test bench and picked a cigarette from his pocket. He asked:
‘Don’t you serve tea here?’
For the first time the young man raised his head, jet black and glossily brushed, singularly at variance with the upturned collar of his soiled coat.
‘Only to the white mice,’ he answered with interest. ‘The tea leaves are particularly nourishing for them.’
Andrew laughed, perhaps because the jester was five years younger than himself. He explained:
‘My name’s Manson.’
‘I feared as much. So you’ve come to join the forgotten men.’ A pause. ‘I’m Doctor Hope! – at least I used to think I was Hope. Now I am definitely Hope deferred.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘God only knows – and Billy Buttons – that’s Dewar! Some of the time I sit here and think. But most of the time I sit. Occasionally they send me chunks of decomposed miner and ask me the cause of the explosion.’
‘And do you tell them?’ Andrew inquired politely.
‘No,’ Hope said rudely. ‘I fart!’
They both felt better after that extreme vulgarity and went out to lunch together. Going up to lunch, Doctor Hope explained, was the sole function of the day which enabled him to cling to reason. Hope explained other things to Manson. He was a Backhouse Research Scholar from Cambridge, via Birmingham, which probably – he grinned – accounted for his frequent lapses of good taste. He had been loaned to the Metalliferous Board through the pestering application of Professor Dewar. He had nothing to do but sheer mechanics, a routine which any lab. attendant could have tackled. He inferred that he was surely going mad through indolence and the inertia of the Board, which he now referred to tersely as Maniac’s Delight. It was typical of most of the research work in the country: controlled by a quorum of eminent mugs who were too busy squabbling amongst themselves to shove the waggon in any one definite direction. Hope was pulled this way and that, told what to do instead of being allowed to do what he wished, and so interrupted he was never six months on the same job.
He gave Andrew thumb-nail sketches of the council of Maniac’s Delight. Sir William Dewar, the doddering but indomitable nonagenarian Chairman, he alluded to as Billy Buttons because of Sir William’s propensity for leaving certain essential fastenings unlatched. Old Billy Buttons was chairman of almost every scientific committee in England, Hope told Andrew. In addition he gave those riotously popular wireless talks: Science for the Children.
Then there was Professor Whinney, aptly known to his students as the Nag, Challis, who wasn’t bad when he forgot to dramatise himself, as Rabelais Pasteur Challis, and Doctor Maurice Gadsby.
‘Do you know Gadsby?’ Hope asked.
‘I’ve met the gentleman.’ Andrew related his examination experience.
‘That’s our Maurice,’ said Hope bitterly. ‘And he’s such a damned little thruster. He’s into everything. He’ll stick himself into a Royal Apothecaryship one of these days. He’s a clever little beast all right. But he’s not interested in research. He’s only interested in himself.’ Hope laughed suddenly. ‘Robert Abbey has a good one about Gadsby. Gadsby wanted to get into the Rumpsteak Club, that’s one of those dining-out affairs that occur in London, and a pretty decent one, as it happens! Well, Abbey, who’s an obliging pot, promised to do his best for Gadsby, though God knows why. Anyhow a week later Gadsby met Abbey. “Am I in?” he asked. “No,” Abbey said. “You’re not.” “Good God,” blusters Gadsby. “You don’t mean I was blackballed.” “Blackballed,” Abbey said. “ Listen, Gadsby! Have you ever seen a plate of caviar?”’ Hope lay back and howled with laughter. A moment later he added: ‘Abbey happens to be on our Board as well. He’s a white man. But he’s got too much savvy to come often.’
This was the first of many lunches which Andrew and Hope took together. Hope, despite his undergraduate humour and a natural tendency to flippancy, was well endowed with brains. His irreverence had a wholesome ring. Andrew felt that he might one day do something. Indeed, in his serious moments, Hope often exposed his eagerness to get back to the real work he had planned for himself, on the isolation of gastric enzymes.
Occasionally Gill came to lunch with them. Hope’s phrase for Gill was characteristic: a good little egg. Though veneered by his thirty years in the Civil Service – he had worked his way from boy clerk to principal – Gill was human underneath. In the office he functioned like a well oiled, easy-moving little machine. He arrived from Sunbury by the same train every morning, returned, unless he was ‘detained’, by the same train every night. He had in Sunbury a wife and three daughters and a small garden where he grew roses. He was superficially so true to type he might have stood as a perfect pattern of smug suburbia. Yet there existed, beneath, a real Gill who loved Yarmouth in winter and always spent his holiday there in December, who had a queer Bible, which he knew almost by heart, in a book named Hadji Baba, who – for fifteen years a fellow of the Society – was quite fatuously devoted to the penguins in the Zoo.
Upon the occasion Christine made a fourth at this table. Gill surpassed himself in upholding the civility of the Service. Even Hope behaved with admirable gentility. He confided to Andrew that he was a less likely candidate for the strait jacket since meeting Mrs Manson.
The days slipped past. While Andrew waited for the meeting of the Board, Christine and he discovered London. They took the steamboat trip to Richmond. They chanced upon a theatre named the Old Vic. They came to know the windy flutter of Hampstead Heath, the fascination of a coffee-stall at midnight. They walked in the Row and rowed on the Serpentine. They solved the delusion of Soho. When they no longer had occasion to study the Underground maps before entrusting themselves to the Tube they began to feel that they were Londoners.
Chapter Two
The afternoon of the 18th of September brought the MFB council together, and to Andrew, at last. Sitting beside Gill and Hope, conscious of the latter’s flippant glances upon him, Andrew watched the members roll into the long gilt-corniced Boardroom: Whinney, Doctor Lancelot Dodd-Canterbury, Challis, Sir Robert Abbey, Gadsby and finally Billy Buttons Dewar himself.
Before Dewar’s entry Abbey and Challis had spoken to Andrew – Abbey a quiet word, the professor an airy gush of graciousness – congratulating him upon his appointment. And whenever Dewar came in he veered upon Gill, exclaiming in his peculiar high-pitched voice:
‘Where is our new Medical Officer, Mr Gill? Where is Doctor Manson?’
Andrew stood up, confounded at Dewar’s appearance, which transcended even Hope’s description. Billy was short, bowed and hairy. He wore old clothes, his waistcoat much dropped upon, his greenish overcoat bulging with papers, pamphlets and the memoranda of a dozen different societies. There was no excuse for Billy for he had much money and daughters, one of them married to a millionaire peer, but he looked now, and he always looked, like a neglected old baboon.
‘There was a Manson at Queens with me in eighteen-eight
y,’ he squeaked benevolently by way of greeting.
‘This is he, sir,’ murmured Hope, to whom the temptation was irresistible.
Billy heard him. ‘ How would you know, Doctor Hope?’ He squinted urbanely over the steel-rimmed pince-nez on the end of his nose. ‘You weren’t even in swaddling clothes then. Hee! Hee! Hee! Hee!’
He flapped away, chuckling, to his place at the head of the table. None of his colleagues, who were already seated, took any notice of him. Part of the technique of this Board was a proud unawareness of one’s neighbours. But this did not dismay Billy. Pulling a wad of papers from his pocket he took a drink of water from the carafe, picked up the little hammer in front of him and hit the table a resounding thwack.
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen! Mr Gill will now read the minutes.’
Gill, who acted as secretary to the Board, rapidly intoned the minutes of the last meeting, while Billy, giving to this chanting no attention whatsoever, alternately pawed amongst his papers and let his eye twinkle benevolently down the board towards Andrew whom he still vaguely associated with the Manson of Queens, 1880.
At last Gill finished. Billy immediately wielded the hammer.
‘Gentlemen! We are particularly happy to have our new Medical Officer with us today. I remember, as recently as nineteen hundred and four, I emphasised the need of a permanent clinician who should be attached to the Board as a solid adjuvant to the pathologists whom we occasionally filch, gentlemen – hee! hee! – whom we occasionally filch from the Backhouse Research. And I say this with all respect of our young friend Hope on whose charity – hee! hee! – on whose charity we have been so largely dependent. Now I well remember as recently as eighteen-eighty-nine …’
Sir Robert Abbey interposed:
‘I’m sure, sir, the other members of the Board wish to join you wholeheartedly in congratulating Doctor Manson on his silicosis paper. If I may say so, I felt this to be a particularly patient and original piece of clinical research and one which, as the Board well knows, may have the most far-reaching effects upon our industrial legislation.’
