by A. J. Cronin
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
A. J. Cronin
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
A. J. Cronin
A Pocketful of Rye
Born in Cardross, Scotland, A. J. Cronin studied at the University of Glasgow. In 1916 he served as a surgeon sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteers Reserve, and at the war’s end he completed his medical studies and practiced in South Wales. He was later appointed to the Ministry of Mines, studying the medical problems of the mining industry. He moved to London and built up a successful practice in the West End. In 1931 he published his first book, Hatter’s Castle, which was compared with the work of Dickens, Hardy and Balzac, winning him critical acclaim. Other books by A. J. Cronin include: The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, Three Loves, The Green Years, Beyond This Place, and The Keys of the Kingdom.
Chapter One
The express letter came late in the afternoon.
I was standing comfortably with Matron Müller on the terrace of the clinic, putting on my usual act of kindly interest as the children packed into the big green departure coach that would take them through the mountains by the Echberg Pass to Basle for the chartered night flight back to Leeds. It hadn’t rained much during their six weeks and the little runts looked well and full of themselves, packing the open side windows to shout auf wiedersehen and other picked-up bits of Schweizerdeutsch. They were waving the paper Swiss flags that Matron always handed out with sample bars of patriotic milk chocolate. As the coach rolled down the drive they began to sing ‘Lili Marlene’. They had picked that up too, endlessly playing the old scratched record in the playroom.
‘Well, that’s the last batch of summer, Matron,’ I remarked on a poetic note, as the coach disappeared behind a frieze of firs. ‘ They weren’t bad brats.’
‘Ach, Herr Doktor.’ She raised a reproving finger, but fondly. ‘Why must you use that wort. Brats. These last were goot children and for me a goot child is the handwerk of Gott.’
‘But Matron,’ I improvised quickly, ‘ brat is just an affectionate English idiom. In Britain people of the highest rank will publicly refer to their offspring as brats.’
‘Ach, so? You are serious?’
‘I assure you.’
‘So! A fun affection. An English odium of well-born people.’
‘Exactly.’
Her small eyes approved me indulgently. Hulda Müller was a short, thick woman of about sixty, her architecture late Victorian, with a magnificent portico. Thorny grey hair protruded from her white stringed cap, her faint moustache was discreetly powdered. Draped to the heels in the shapeless white gown to which the cantonal nurses were condemned, she was the genuine Schweizer article. Correct, hygienic, humourless, unutterably dull, and while not, in the cheap sense of the word, a snob, imbued with an inherent Germanic reverence for rank. But capable and industrious, a worker fifteen hours a day, coping with shortage of staff in the ward and the kitchen, feeding me as I had never, in my spotty down-at-heel career, been fed before.
‘It is highly agreeable to me that you make explanations of such odiums, Herr Doktor Carroll. You, a person knowing and yourself coming from the Hochgeboren.’
‘A pleasure, Matron. You’ll have all the odium I’m capable of.’
Oh, careful, you clown, don’t push it too far. I flashed a smile at her, loaded with charm. In any institution it is the first rule of life to be in with the matron. And since my heaven-sent arrival seven months ago I had worked diligently on Hulda, soaping her with some inspired fictions, creating a few noble ancestors to strengthen my image. So now this fire-breathing old dragon, this veteran of the bedpans, this Hippocratic priestess in a white soutane was entirely mine or, rather, I was hers – her bright-eyed Junge.
‘Now we have the six weeks’ pause,’ she reflected. ‘You will recommence your post-graduates at the Zürich Kantonspital?’
‘I’ll go down at least once or twice a week,’ I agreed thoughtfully. ‘Beginning on Tuesday.’
‘Ach, it is goot to have the charge of a young, eager, scientific doktor. Our late Herr Doktor was …’ she shook her head, ‘ein Schrinker.’
‘Das war nicht gut für Sie,’ I responded, demonstrating my advance in colloquial German.
‘Nein, aber das ist ein Problem für seine neue Frau.’ The law that married doctors were unacceptable at the clinic thus defined, she examined the watch dangling from her bosom. ‘But now I must go to see for your tea.’ Moving off she glanced at me archly. ‘You like perhaps these ramekins I make special for you.’
‘Matron, they’re a dream and you … you’re a regular “dreamboat”.’
She giggled, not amused, just pleased.
‘Dreambote? That’s goot?’
‘The best.’
When she had gone I suddenly felt annoyed with myself. In her own way she was kind and decent. And shouldn’t I be thanking my lucky star to be here? On velvet at last after eight years of mucking around in the worst kinds of General Practice.
When I graduated at Winton University I had taken a voyage to Australia, as ship’s doctor in a cargo boat, then come back all set for the quick trip to Harley Street. It did not take long to demonstrate the financial and professional worth of a low grade Scots degree. Who wants you with that, with the dung of the kail yard on your boots, and the porridge still stuck to your chaps? At first a few locums, one in the highlands with a hard-drinking member of the Macduff clan, then a short assistantship, followed by another locum in the slums of Winton where, half starved, I worked overtime for an obese old sloth who staggered back from his holiday at Glendrum Hydro loaded with the menu cards for every meal, immediately sat down, still drooling all over his paunch, and one by one read them out to me.
Then came a long assistantship in Nottingham with the vague view to a partnership that was never meant to materialize. But why elaborate the sorry record: the long hours in sweaty surgeries, the night calls, the health insurance cards to be faked after hours, the scanty, irregular, over-desiccated meals, the unequal division of labour smugly passed off with: ‘Oh, by the way, Carroll, my wife and I are going out to dinner and the theatre. You won’t mind polishing off these three late calls that have just come in.’
And not every wife was taken out to dinner. ‘I often think I am wasting the best years of my life in Sudsbury, Doctor Carroll. Sidney is so wrapped up in his practice; you must see that – for a young man you are so understanding.’ Slipping me an extra slice of scraggy mutton under the mashed potatoes, with a lingering look, while Sidney had his mug in the B.M. J. Poor plump, but fading yearner, I helped you with kind words alone. How could one find romance in
those droopy drawers strung out every other Monday in the Sudsbury backyard?
My last stretch hit mud bottom when, as obstetric physician – so called – in a Medical Aid practice in the South Wales Rhondda Valley, knocked up by the mid-wife most nights of the week, staggering out into the shadow world of endless miners’ rows half dressed and still half asleep to grope up the ladder to the attic, clash on the forceps and pull, I seemed to be a robot performer, perhaps the cymbalist, in a bizarre symphony of sweat, tears, filth and blood.
It was in the murky dawn after such a night, as I stood on the concrete floor of the central surgery, still in my professional rig of pyjamas, old overcoat and pit clogs, wrapping a bottle of ergot – that panacea for the reluctant placenta – in a disembowelled page from the Lancet, that my blood-shot eye was caught by a small strip advertisement on the half-torn page.
Wanted: For the Maybelle Children’s Clinic and Holiday Home, Schlewald, Switzerland, as Medical Superintendent, British doctor, single and preferably under 30. Knowledge of German and pulmonary lesions a recommendation. Full board and comfortable quarters provided. Salary £500 per annum, payable in Sterling or Swiss francs. Further particulars and application forms from J. Scrygemour & Co. Solicitors, Halifax, Yorks.
I stood there, hypnotized, with a kind of prevision that this was precisely what I needed, wanted, and must have. And yet, as I stared through the dirty dispensary window, hung over by the gallows outline of mine headstocks against the coal tips, I did not fail to comprehend that normally I hadn’t an earthly. Nevertheless, a strange feeling had begun to form at the back of my mind that this was no fortuitous intervention in my life, that here was an opportunity specially designed for Laurence Carroll and one which I must take. Compulsively, I sat down and wrote to J. Scrygemour & Co.
The reply came within three days.
The clinic was a foundation from the estate of Mrs Bella Keighley, widow of a wealthy North of England cotton spinner, who had settled in Schlewald with her daughter Maybelle in the year 1896. The daughter was delicate, a consumptive case, consigned for the short span of her life to an Alpine existence. When she died some years later the mother, for sentimental reasons, or from a genuine attachment to Switzerland, had continued her Schlewald domicile, and on her death, under the terms of the will, the large chalet had been extended, a ward of twelve beds and a number of small out chalets constructed and the establishment set up for the benefit of under-privileged British children, ‘particularly those suffering from weakness or disorders of the lungs’. The staff consisted of the resident doctor, matron, and probationer nurse.
Six times a year batches of children were received for convalescence or holidays. Those requiring further treatment were retained in the ward.
Two weeks later I went to Halifax for the interview, which took place at the Scrygemour office in Market Street. Naturally I was nervous, yet in view of the preparations I had made, and for which I trust no one will misjudge me, not altogether lacking in hope. Four other candidates were in the waiting-room, not a bad-looking lot, in fact two had London degrees considerably better than mine, but when I sounded them it appeared that, of the four, none could speak. German. So far so good. Before I went in, last, I took a final glance at the old tourists’ phonetic phrase book I had found second hand in Cardiff and been mugging up for the past ten days, then tapped respectfully on the frosted panel of the door.
The committee had three members: Scrygemour, who was small, benevolent and shiningly bald, and two solid Yorkshire businessmen of the stand-no-nonsense school. When they had looked me over, the interrogation began. I was in my best form: quiet, alert, convincing, modestly forthcoming yet personally reserved: not pressing the advantages I had thought up, letting them winkle all the good points out of me as though it embarrassed me mildly to acknowledge them. Yes, I admitted I liked children, had always got on well with them, not only as one of a large family but in my extensive practice. At a mention of the excellence of my testimonials I betrayed no surprise naturally enough, since I had composed two of the better ones myself. Yes, I agreed calmly, a South Wales colliery town was not perhaps socially the most desirable field of action for an ambitious young man. Yet, oddly enough, it was: I had purposely chosen that location to study pneumoconiosis, adding a moment later when this floored them: ‘Which, as you obviously know, gentlemen, comprises the pulmonary diseases – anthracosis, silicosis, and tuberculosis – specially affecting workers in the mining industry.’
An impressive silence followed this well-thought-out gambit; after glancing at the other two, Scrygemour remarked: ‘That is a point of considerable interest to us, Dr Carroll.’ Then, diffidently as though scarcely hoping, he cleared his throat:
‘I don’t suppose you would happen to know German, doctor?’
I smiled, staking my entire position on the clincher. Either I was in, or out flat on my ear.
‘Aber, mein Herr, Ich können das Deutsch gut sprechen.’
It knocked them cold – they hadn’t one word of German amongst them. And before they could recover I let them have a few more fluent, though not particularly appropriate, cuttings from my little green book.
‘Entschuldigen Sie, mein Herr, können Sie mir zeigen wo der nächste Abort ist?’ (Excuse me, sir, can you direct me to the nearest lavatory?)
‘Zimmermädchen, ich glaube unter mienem Bett ist eine Maus.’ (Chambermaid, I think there is a mouse under my bed.)
‘Very satisfactory, doctor. Very.’ This actually from one of the hard types. ‘May we ask how you acquired such proficiency in the language?’
‘Mainly from my study of pulmonary diseases in the original German text books,’ I murmured, knowing that I was home, even before they had me in again, after a short wait outside, to congratulate me and shake me warmly by the hand.
Of course, it was a thoroughly discreditable performance. It was cheap, contemptible, despicable, downright dishonest. But when you have been on the verge of the bread line and been kicked around for seven years, your sense of ethics becomes somewhat blunted. And although next morning I was prepared to cry ‘mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,’ I was happy, that same afternoon, to be packing my bag for Schlewald. After all, in my usual fashion, I could try to exonerate myself. The Jesuits, who were partly responsible for my schooling, had, in the brief term of our relationship which occurred when I was extremely young, imbued me with their most practical principle, that the end justifies the means. And in utilizing my only means of persuasion upon these worthy Yorkshiremen I was no more than accomplishing a necessary act to achieve a necessary end.
So at least, for the moment, let us admit that I was safely here in Schlewald, happily anchored in the Maybelle Clinic, breathing the delicious mountain air and gazing about me with a mildly proprietory air. It was one of these perfect Alpine afternoons that lit the landscape with a pale translucent blue. In the pasture before the clinic, which stood high on the southern slope, autumn crocuses, still unfolded, stained the vivid green where rivulets of cold clear water tumbled over each other downhill to the river. In the pinewoods across the valley the toy train that ran to Davos had begun its slow vertiginous climb, turning on its own tail, stopping now on a loop of the higher grade as though to recover steam, but actually to allow the Davos down train to pass. Above, on the scar of the Gotschna Grat, a faint dusting of early snow was already anticipating the sunset, turning from gold to a rich rose madder. Distantly, and far below, dwarfed by the mountain, the roofs of Schlewald Dorf looked cosy, gemütlich was the word. Lush descriptions apart, it was a sweet spot, and when you thought of those miners’ rows, the slag heaps without a blade of grass, the surgery bell going day and night and Tonypandy Blodwen croaking in your half awakened ear: ‘Eh, doctor bach, I’m mortal sorry to ’ave you out again but it’s a britch and I canna’ get the ’ead away:’ – well, it was peaceful as a bottle of tranquillizers. I liked it here, in fact I was completely sold on it.
A young moon, pale as a sliver of Emmentaler in
the persistent light, was beginning to slide over the ridge and suddenly from across and far away came the sound of an Alpine horn. A herdsman sitting by his lonely hut on the upper pastures with that ridiculous six-foot wooden tube which, like the Scottish bagpipes, is hideous near the eardrums but which, floating down from the hills, has a magic all its own. Again it came, vibrating in the still air. It hits you, that prolonged deep sadness, losing itself in the distance, silenced by the peaks. It cuts the cord, and suddenly you too are lost. You sink into yourself, and given a chance, some secret misery sneaks up from your subconscious.
With me it is always the same – a torment and a mystery – I am in that dark empty street of an unknown city and in the dead silence of the night I hear footfalls behind me, slow, persistent, menacing. I cannot turn round and must sweat out the agony of that unknown pursuit until suddenly a dog barks and all is still again.
Oh, come off it, Carroll, and stay happy. No one is interested in your private little phobia, at least not yet. It was time for me to get back to my tea and ramekins.
Then, as I turned, I saw someone come through the lodge gates – Hans, the postmaster’s son, hurrying up the drive, now waving to me with something in his hand. A letter.
‘Express, Rekommandiert, Herr Doktor.’ It was probably my monthly cheque and for this the Swiss post never keeps you waiting.
He was pretending to be out of breath, but as I was in a soft mood, when I signed the receipt, I told him to hold on, went into my sitting-room which opened off the terrace. This was a snug little room with a warm red carpet, solid, well-polished, comfortable furniture upholstered in brown velveteen, while on the table Matron very thoughtfully kept me supplied with a bowl of the Valais fruits, apricots, pears, apples and cherries, which were so plentiful at this season.
‘Catch, Hans.’ I threw him a big Golden Delicious apple from the open window.
He wouldn’t eat it now, I felt sure, but as a true little Swiss, to whom possession is ten points of the law, take it home, polish it, and keep it – at least until Sunday. I watched him go off with a vielen Dank, Herr Doktor.
