by A. J. Cronin
There now began for Stillman a different and more protracted struggle, the battle for recognition of his work. He had sunk every dollar he possessed in establishing his Institute and the cost of maintaining it was heavy. He hated publicity and resisted all inducements to commercialise his work. Often it seemed as though material difficulties, affied to the bitterness of the opposition, must submerge him. Yet Stillman with magnificent courage survived every crisis – even a national newspaper campaign conducted against him.
The era of misrepresentation passed, the storm of controversy subsided. Gradually Stillman won a grudging recognition from his opponents. In 1925 a Washington Commission visited and reported glowingly upon the work at the Institute. Stillman, now recognised, began to receive large donations from private individuals, from trust executives and even from public bodies. These funds he devoted to the extension and perfection of his Institute, which became, with its superb equipment and situation, its herds of Jersey cattle and pure-bred Irish serum horses, a show place in the state of Oregon.
Though Stillman was not entirely free from enemies – in 1929 for instance the grievances of a dismissed laboratory attendant set alight another flare of scandal – he had at least secured immunity to pursue his life work. Unchanged by success, he remained the same quiet and restrained personality who nearly twenty-five years before had grown his first cultures in the attic on Beacon Hill.
And now, seated in the restaurant of Brooks Hotel, he gazed across at Andrew with quiet friendliness.
‘It’s very pleasant,’ he said, ‘to be in England. I like your countryside. Our summers aren’t so cool as this.’
‘I suppose you’ve come over on a lecture tour?’ Andrew said.
Stillman smiled.
‘No! I don’t lecture now. Is it vanity to say that I let my results lecture for me? As a matter of fact I’m over here very quietly. It so happens your Mr Cranston – I mean Herbert Cranston who makes those marvellous little automobiles – came to me in America about a year back. He’d been a martyr to asthma all his life and I – well, at the Institute we managed to set him right. Ever since then he’s been bothering me to come over and start a small clinic here on the lines of our place at Portland. Six months ago I agreed. We passed the plans and now the place – we’re calling it Bellevue – is pretty near completion – out on the Chilterns near High Wycombe. I’m going to get it started, then I’ll turn over to Marland – one of my assistants. Frankly, I look upon it as an experiment, a very promising experiment with my methods, particularly from the climatic and racial angles. The financial aspect is unimportant!’
Andrew leaned forward.
‘That sounds interesting. What are you specially concentrating on? I’d like to see over your place.’
‘You must come when we are ready. We shall have our radical asthma régime. Cranston wants that. And then I have particularly specified for a few early tuberculosis cases. I say a few because’ – he smiled – ‘mind you, I don’t forget I am just a bio-physicist who knows a little about the respiratory apparatus – but in America our difficulty is to keep ourselves from being swamped. What was I saying? Ah, yes. These early TB’s. This will interest you, I have a new method of inducing pneumothorax. It is really an advance.’
‘You mean the Emile-Well?’
‘No, no. Much better. Without the disadvantages of negative fluctuation.’ Stillman’s face lighted up. ‘You appreciate the difficulty of the fixed bottle apparatus – that point when the intra-pleural pressure balances the fluid pressure and the flow of gas ceases altogether. Now, at the Institute, we’ve devised an accessory pressure chamber – I’ll show you when you come out – through which we can introduce gas at a decided negative pressure, right at the start.’
‘But what about gas embolism?’ Andrew said quickly.
‘We eliminate the risk entirely. Look! It’s quite a dodge. By introducing a small bromoform manometer close to the needle we avoid rarefaction. A fluctuation of – 14 cm provides only 1 cc of gas at the needle point. Incidentally our needle has a four-way adjustment that goes a little better than Sangman’s.’
Andrew, in spite of himself – and his honorary appointment at the Victoria – was impressed.
‘Why,’ he said. ‘If that is so – you’re going to diminish pleural shock right down to nothing. You know, Mr Stillman – well, it seems strange, quite startling to me, that all this should have come from you. Oh! forgive me, I’ve said that badly, but you know what I mean – so many doctors, going on with the old apparatus –’
‘My dear physician,’ Stillman answered with amusement in his eyes. ‘ Don’t forget that Carson, the first man to urge pneumothorax, was only a physiological essayist!’
After that they plunged into technicalities. They discussed apicolysis and phrenicotomy. They argued over Brauer’s four points, passed on to oleothorax and Bernon’s work in France – massive intra-pleural injections in tuberculous empyema. They ceased only when Stillman looked at his watch and realised, with an exclamation, that he was half an hour late for an appointment with Churston.
Andrew left Brooks Hotel with a stimulated and exalted mind. But, on the heels of that, came a queer reaction of confusion, dissatisfaction with his own work. I let myself get carried away by that fellow, he told himself, annoyed.
He was not in a particularly amiable frame of mind when he arrived at Chesborough Terrace yet, as he drew up opposite his house, he composed his features into a noncommittal mould. His relations with Christine had come to demand this blankness, for she now presented to him a face so acquiescent and expressionless he felt, however much he raged internally, that he must answer it in kind.
It seemed to him that she had retired within herself, fallen back upon an inner life where he could not penetrate. She read a great deal, wrote letters. Once or twice when he came in he found her playing with Florrie – childish games, played with coloured counters, which they bought at the Stores. She began also, with unobtrusive regularity, to go to church. And this exasperated him most of all.
At Drineffy she had accompanied Mrs Watkins every Sunday to the parish church and he had found no reason for complaint. But now, unsympathetic and estranged from her, he saw it only as a further slight upon himself, a gesture of pietism directed at his suffering head.
This evening as he entered the front room she was seated alone in the room with her elbows on the table, wearing the glasses she had recently taken to, a book before her, a small occupied figure like a scholar at her lesson. An angry swell of exclusion swept over him. Reaching over her shoulders he picked up the book which, too late, she attempted to conceal. And there, at the head of the page, he read: The Gospel According to St Luke.
‘Good God!’ He was staggered, somehow furious. ‘Is this what you’ve come to? Taken to Bible thumping now.’
‘Why not? I used to read it before I met you.’
‘Oh, you did, eh?’
‘Yes.’ A queer look of pain was in her eyes. ‘ Possibly your Plaza friends wouldn’t appreciate the fact. But it is at least good literature.’
‘Is that so! Well let me tell you this in case you don’t know it – you’re developing into a blasted neurotic woman!’
‘Quite probably. That again is entirely my fault. But let me tell you this. I’d rather be a blasted neurotic woman and be spiritually alive than a blasted successful man – and spiritually dead!’ She broke off suddenly, biting her lip, forcing back her tears. With a great effort she took control of herself. Looking at him steadily, with pain in her eyes, she said, in a low contained voice:
‘Andrew! Don’t you think it would be a good thing for us both if I went away for a little while? Mrs Vaughan has written me, asking me to spend a fortnight or three weeks with her. They’ve taken a house at Newquay for the summer. Don’t you think I ought to go?’
‘Yes! Go! Damn it all! Go!’ He swung round and left her.
Chapter Thirteen
Christine’s departure for Newquay was a
relief, an exquisite emancipation. For three whole days. Then he began to brood, to wonder what she was doing and whether she was missing him, to fret jealously as to when she would return. Though he told himself he was now a free man he had the same sense of incompleteness which had kept him from his work at Aberalaw when she had gone to Bridlington, leaving him to study for his examination.
Her image rose before him, not the fresh young features of that earlier Christine, but a paler, maturer face with cheeks faintly drawn and eyes shortsighted behind their round glasses. It was not a beautiful face but it had some enduring quality which haunted him.
He went out a great deal, played bridge with Ivory, Freddie and Deedman at the club. Despite his reaction to their first meeting he frequently saw Stillman, who was moving between Brooks Hotel and the nearly completed clinic at Wycombe. He wrote asking Denny to meet him in London but it was impossible at this early stage of his appointment for Philip to get to town. Hope was inaccessible in Cambridge.
Fitfully he tried to concentrate on his clinical research at the hospital. Impossible. He was too restless. With this same restless intensity he went over his investments with Wade, the bank manager. All satisfactory; all going well. He began to thresh out a scheme for buying a freehold house in Welbeck Street – a heavy investment but one which should prove highly profitable – of selling the Chesborough Terrace house, merely retaining the surgery at the side. One of the building societies would help him. He woke during the still hot nights, his mind seething with schemes, with his work in the practice, his nerves overwrought, missing Christine, his hand reaching automatically to his bedside table for a cigarette.
In the middle of it all he rang up Frances Lawrence.
‘I’m all alone here at present. You wouldn’t care to run out somewhere in the evening? It’s so hot in London.’
Her voice was collected, oddly soothing to him. ‘ That would be frightfully nice. I was hoping somehow you might ring. Do you know Crossways? Flood-lit Elizabethan, I’m afraid. But the river is too perfect there.’
The following evening he cleared his surgery in three quarters of an hour. Well before eight, he had picked her up at Knightsbridge and set the car in the direction of Chertsey.
They ran due west through the flat market gardens outside Staines into a great flood of sunset. She sat beside him, as he drove, saying little yet filling the car with her alien, charming presence. She wore a coat and skirt of some thin fawn material, a dark hat close to her small head. He was overwhelmingly conscious of her gracefulness, her perfect finish. Her ungloved hand, near to him, was curiously expressive of this quality – white, slender. Each long finger tipped by an exquisite scarlet oval. Fastidious.
Crossways, as she had inferred, was an exquisite Elizabethan house set in perfect gardens on the Thames, with age-long topiary work and lovely formal lily ponds all outraged, in the conversion from mansion to roadhouse, by modern conveniences and an infamous jazz band. But although a fake lackey sprang to the car as they ran into the courtyard, already filled by expensive cars, the old bricks glowed behind the wistaria vine and the tall angled chimneys clustered serenely against the sky.
They went into the restaurant. It was smart, full, with tables placed round a square of polished floor and a head waiter who might have been brother to the grand vizier of the Plaza. Andrew hated and feared head waiters. But that, he now discovered, was because he had never faced them with a woman like Frances. One swift glance and they were ministered with reverence to the finest table in the room, surrounded by a corps of servitors, one of whom unflicked Andrew’s napkin and placed it holily upon his knees.
Frances wanted very little: a salad, toast melba, no wine, only ice water. Undisturbed, the head waiter seemed to see in this frugality a confirmation of her caste. Andrew realised with a sudden qualm of dismay that had he walked into this sanctuary with Christine and ordered such a trivial repast he would have been hounded forth upon the highway with scorn.
He recollected himself to find Frances smiling at him.
‘Do you realise we’ve known each other for quite a period of time now. And this is the first occasion you have asked me to come out with you.’
‘Are you sorry?’
‘Not noticeably so, I hope.’ Again the charming intimacy of her faintly smiling face elevated him, caused him to feel wittier, more at ease, of a superior status. It was no mere pretentiousness, no silly snobbishness. The stamp of her breeding was somehow extended until it caught up and included him. He was aware of people at the adjoining tables viewing them with interest, of masculine admiration to which she was calmly oblivious. He could not help visualising the stimulus of a more constant association with her.
She said:
‘Would it flatter you too much if I told you I had put off a previous theatre engagement to come here. Nicol Watson – do you remember him? He was taking me to the ballet – one of my favourites – what will you think of my infantile taste? Massine in La Boutique Fantasque.’
‘I remember Watson. And his ride through Paraguay. Clever fellow.’
‘He’s frightfully nice.’
‘But you felt it would be too hot at the ballet?’
She smiled without answering, took a cigarette from a flat enamel box on which was depicted in faded colours an exquisite Boucher miniature.
‘Yes, I heard Watson was running after you,’ he persisted with sudden vehemence. ‘What does your husband think of that?’
Again she did not speak, merely lifting an eyebrow as if mildly deprecating some lack of sublety. After a moment she said:
‘Surely you understand? Jackie and I are the best of friends. But we each have our own friends. He’s at Juan at present. But I don’t ask him why.’ Then lightly, ‘Shall we dance – just once?’
They danced. She moved with that same extraordinarily fascinating grace, light in his arms, impersonal.
‘I’m not altogether good,’ he said when they returned. He was even falling into her idiom – gone, gone were the days when he would have grunted, ‘ Damn it, Chris, I’m no hoofer.’
Frances did not reply. That again he felt to be eminently characteristic of her. Another woman would have flattered, contradicted him, made him feel clumsy. Driven by a sudden impulsive curiosity he exclaimed:
‘Please tell me something. Why have you been so kind to me? Helping me the way you’ve done – all those months?’
‘You are extraordinarily attractive to women. And your greatest charm is that you do not realise it.’
‘No, but, really –’ he protested flushing; then he muttered, ‘ I hope I’m some kind of a doctor as well.’
She laughed, slowly fanning away the cigarette smoke with her hand. ‘You will not be convinced. Or I should not have told you. And, of course, you’re an excellent doctor. We were talking of you only the other night at Green Street. Le Roy is getting a little tired of our company dietitian. Poor Rumbold! – he wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing le Roy bark, “We must put the skids under grandpa.” But Jackie agrees. They want someone younger, with more drive, on the board – shall I use the cliché? – a coming man. Apparently they plan a big campaign in the medical journals, they want really to interest the profession – from the scientific angle – as le Roy put it. And of course Rumbold is just a joke among his colleagues. But why am I talking like this? Such a waste of a night like this. Now don’t frown as though you were about to assassinate me, or the waiter, or the band-leader – I wish you would actually – isn’t he odious? You look exactly as you did that first day – when you came into the fitting-room – very haughty and proud and nervous – even a little ridiculous. And then – poor Toppy! By the ordinary convention it is she who should be here.’
‘I’m very glad she’s not,’ he said with his eyes upon the table.
‘Please don’t think me banal. I couldn’t bear that. We are fairly intelligent I hope – and we – well, I for one – just do not believe in the grand passion – isn’t the phrase enough? But
I do think life is so much gayer if one has – a friend – to go a bit of the way with one.’ Her eyes showed high points of amusement again. ‘Now I sound completely Rossetti-ish – which is too frightful.’ She picked up her cigarette-case. ‘And anyhow it’s stuffy here, and I want you to see the moon on the river.’
He paid the bill and followed her through the long glass windows which an act of vandalism had inset in the fine old wall. On the balustered terrace the music of the dance band came faintly. Before them a wide avenue of turf led down to the river between dark borders of clipped yew. As she had said, there was a moon which splashed great shadows from the yews and glinted palely upon a group of archery targets standing on the bottom lawns. Beyond lay the silver sheen of water.
They strolled down to the river, seated themselves upon a bench that stood beside the verge. She took off her hat and gazed silently at the slowly moving current, its eternal murmur strangely blended with the muted hum of a high-powered car travelling at speed into the distance.
‘What queer night sounds,’ she said. ‘The old and the new. And searchlights across the moon there. It’s our age.’
He kissed her. She gave no sign either way. Her lips were warm and dry. In a minute she said:
‘That was very sweet. And very badly done.’
‘I can do better,’ he mumbled staring in front of him, not moving. He was awkward, without conviction, ashamed and nervous. Angrily he told himself that it was wonderful to be here on such a night with such a graceful, charming woman. He ought by all the canons of moonshine and the magazines to have swept her madly into his arms. As it was he became aware of his cramped position, of a desire to smoke, of the vinegar in the salad touching up his old indigestion.
And Christine’s face in some unaccountable way was mirrored in the water before him, a jaded and rather harassed face, on her cheek a plaintive smudge of paint from the brush with which she had painted the heavy folding doors, when first they came to Chesborough Terrace. It worried and exasperated him. He was here, bound by the obligation of circumstances. And he was a man, wasn’t he – not a candidate for Voronoff? Defiantly, he kissed Frances again.
