Adventures in Two Worlds

by A. J. Cronin

  I wish I might end the incident of this astral telephone call, this message coming so dramatically from the great beyond, on an eerie note of mystery. I should then receive many letters of appreciation from my spiritualist and crystal-gazing friends, from theosophical groups, and other bodies dedicated to the occult. Alas, my veracity compels me to record the truth, which I learned shortly afterward.

  Evans’s daughter had a solitary friend, a woman who knew the family’s tragic history, knew also that the girl was desperately ill, and who, taking her courage in her hands but disguising her identity lest Evans should find her out, had at the last moment resolved to act, and put a call through in the name of Evans’s wife.

  She was the switchboard operator on the Tregenny telephone exchange.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Time was fleeting – days, weeks, and months – and I was getting nowhere. In the first flush of my enthusiasm I had promised my darling wife – although now I did not use this term of endearment when her efforts at Welsh cooking made me dose myself with bicarbonate of soda and groan that she was slowly poisoning me – I had promised her, I repeated, riches, position, a house in Harley Street, and, if I recollect correctly, a villa on the Mediterranean. And here we still were, plodding along, trying to save a little money – a depressing state of affairs under any circumstances – never ‘getting out of the bit’, as the Scots say, still buried alive in these wretched mountains. I chafed, used many strong words, and applied for many situations, all without avail. Then, one memorable day, I burst in with a letter.

  ‘We’re leaving. At the end of the month.’

  My partner in distress gazed back at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘Leaving! But I’m just getting to like it here.’

  Was there ever so perverse a woman, trying to convince me that she had nobly settled down? I restrained myself.

  ‘You’ll like it better where we’re going. It’s a much finer job.’

  I handed her the letter. It was from the secretary of the Medical Aid Society in a neighbouring valley of Tredegar, offering me a post as doctor to the society. The salary was only slightly more than I was now being paid, but what caught the eye and made the pulse bound was the fact that a house – a real house – was included in the terms of the appointment. Her nobility melted before such a temptation: she could scarcely bear to wait.

  We remained long enough to enable the company to secure another doctor – Dai Lewis was a sad man to see us go – then, packing our few belongings into a borrowed truck, we took leave of the manager, of Olwen Davies, and of melancholy Mrs Morgan, and climbed in beside the driver, and set out over the high ridges for for our new home.

  Tredegar was a colliery town, too, but it was trim and clean and set on the verge of still unspoiled hill country. There were several decent stores, a public library, and – one could scarcely believe it – a town hall where moving pictures were shown twice a week.

  The little house to which my wife had looked forward was stoutly built of red brick, with a gabled roof. Standing in a wild patch of garden beside a clear mountain stream spanned by a wooden bridge, it was appropriately named ‘ The Glen’. It seemed almost a mansion after the two rooms we had previously occupied, and although her brief but close association with me no longer permitted her to claim to be a saintly character, she thanked Heaven sincerely for the blessing of at last having a place of her own. To such an end the labour of moving in was as nothing – she greatly enjoyed getting things into shape.

  Also, there was plenty of interesting work for me. Under the medical-aid scheme which had engaged me, all the miners paid a small weekly contribution to the society and were entitled thereby to free medical treatment for their families and themselves. In actual fact, this scheme can definitely be regarded as the foundation of the plan of socialised medicine which was eventually adopted by Great Britain. Aneurin Bevan, who was mainly responsible for the national project, was at one time a miner in Tredegar, and here, under the local aid organisation, the value of prompt and gratuitous treatment for the worker was strongly impressed upon him.

  There is certainly virtue in the scheme, but it also has its defects, of which the chief one, in Tredegar, was this – with complete carte blanche in the way of medical attention the people were not sparing, by day or night, in ‘fetching the doctor’. In a word, the plan fostered hypochondriacs, malingerers, and those obnoxious ‘hangers-on’ who haunt a doctor’s surgery in the hope of obtaining something – spectacles, crepe bandages, cotton-wool and dressings, even a Seidlitz powder – for nothing.

  My real invalids were numerous, but I had also to deal with the other sort. There was one hale young woman who lay in bed all day long, and insisted on being visited, in the belief that she was consumptive – an idée fixe which no amount of argument could dispel. Many of the old time miners affected the symptoms of nystagmus and beat-knee, occupational diseases which entitled them to a pension, and as they were adept at what was known as ‘swinging the lead’, they sometimes succeeded in confusing me. Also there were cases where the imagination held even greater sway upon tissues and mechanism of the body. I had in those early weeks a most remarkable example of that rare medical condition – pseudocyesis. This was a childless woman, aged forty, eminently respectable and married for fifteen years, who suddenly decided that she was pregnant and who, therefore, developed every sign and symptom of the condition. She had morning sickness, capricious appetite, typical breast changes, swelling of the abdomen, and, of course, amenorrhoea. Nothing could convince her that the condition was a pure neurosis. I could only repeat Lord Asquith’s famous phrase: ‘Madam, we will wait and see.’ And, indeed, at the end of nine months, though she labored greatly, she only brought forth … wind!

  At first I was conciliatory towards such cases, but soon my patience wore thin and I developed a brusqueness which would have pleased that master of invective whose ‘Dammit to hell’ had so often resounded in the cottages of Tannochbrae. On one occasion, at two in the morning, I was routed out, dog-tired, to see an old woman who, when I entered her room, exclaimed from her comfortable bed: ‘Oh, Doctor, Doctor bach, I cannot stop yawning.’ At which I glared at her and, as I made for the door, replied over my shoulder in broad Scots ‘Then shut your b—— mouth!’

  We had come in the month of October and winter was soon upon us. Then, indeed, the going became fairly rough. Our finances were still so straitened that a car was out of the question, and I would tramp miles through the snow in leggings and oilskins, carrying my heavy black bag. It was a relief when, for fifty pounds, I was able to purchase a second-hand motorcycle. Unfortunately this machine, bought through a seductive advertisement in a Birmingham paper extolling its beauty and speed, proved to be a heavy twin-cylinder racer with a huge exhaust and no kick starter. How often, panting and sweating, did I push this brutal contraption halfway along the road before it suddenly flamed and exploded into action. Yet once in motion, it went like the wind.

  This was a time of great happiness. Our simple furnishings came from the local store, our rugs were certainly not from Persia, nor were our pictures from the best galleries, yet we had both pride and comfort in our small domain. On the cold nights we sat before our blazing fire – coal was plentiful and free – reading, talking, arguing. We had tremendous arguments. Unvelievably, my wife’s cooking improved. She even revealed herself as a skilful gardener, raising tulips and noble hyacinths in the tiny glassed porch of the house.

  Many sunny days came that winter, and when we were free to explore it we found a wild beauty on the high, bare heath which stretched far and away above ‘The Glen’. A breeze always blew there, intoxicating as wine, which made me misquote Walt Whitman ‘There’s a wind on the heath; when I feel it on my cheek I want to live forever.’ For miles under the racing clouds one would be lost in the exhilarating vastness of this primitive moorland, cut only by a few sheep tracks – then suddenly, breasting a crest, we would see the little town with the colliery headstocks far be
neath, and would sit down to rest and to pick out, with pride, the toylike house which was our home.

  Much of our outdoor leisure was spent up there. We took prodigious walks, gathered ‘whinberries’ for deep-dish pie in the summer, and in the autumn, borrowing the colliery under-manager’s gun, I went out after the snipe which wheeled and darted and always seemed to elude me.

  In my medical knowledge I was progressing steadily, making friends among my patients and, at the cost of a few humiliations, learning that I did not quite know everything. The chief doctor of the district, Dr Davies, was not only a highly skilled physician, with several exclusive London diplomas, but a brilliantly successful surgeon as well. When he consulted with me over a difficult or serious case, rolling up in his large spotless chauffeur-driven limousine while his younger colleague arrived on foot or on that execrable mud-spattered machine, often he differed, in the kindest manner, yet with authority, with my diagnosis.

  After such interviews I would sit all evening, grinding my teeth, muttering invectives against my worthy superior. Then suddenly I would jump up. ‘Damn it all, he’s right and I’m wrong. It was the meningitis, and I should have spotted it days ago. I know nothing, absolutely nothing, but I will – I tell you I will!’

  To my audience of one, knitting sedately on the other side of the fireplace, this might well have seemed a natural pique, soon to be passed over and forgotten. But no, I was in dead earnest. Davies had shown me my limitations; I knew I should never progress until I had overcome them.

  I could sense my spouse wondering how this quest of knowledge would reveal itself. And soon she knew, for presently there began to arrive at ‘The Glen’ a succession of large crates which at first sight looked as though they might contain interesting articles like new sheets or table linen or a set of dinner china (which she badly needed), but which, under my vigorous assaults with the hammer, revealed nothing more exciting than dozens of large, thick, and horribly abstruse-looking medical textbooks. Not having enough spare cash to purchase the books, I had joined the library of the Royal Society in London – in fact, it looked as though the entire library now were here, and it was only the beginning.

  Now, every night when I came in from my eight o’clock surgery, I sat down before these books. Often, after a punishing day’s work, I was so weary I could scarcely keep my eyes open. But with relentless determination – a grim strain strangely incompatible with my mild and amiable disposition – I forced myself to study, often reading until one o’clock in the morning.

  After several months it became necessary for me to put in some practical work in biochemistry. The nearest laboratory was in the Health Department of Cardiff, more than fifty miles away. But this did not deter me. I applied to the secretary of the Medical Aid Society for four hours off duty on Thursday afternoons, and when this request was granted I departed every week on my motorcycle for the distant city. By making the journey at breakneck speed, I could secure two full hours in the laboratory before returning to my evening surgery.

  It was misery, not for me, but for my poor wife, who had a ghastly premonition that I would kill myself on that winding valley road. These afternoons became a nightmare for her, and as six o’clock drew near she would sit with her eyes on the clock, her ears straining for the sound of that infernal exhaust. Quarter past six … then half past … At last, when she saw herself already a widow – young, no doubt, and interesting, but still desperate with grief – a shattering roar would make her gasp with relief.

  I would enter, dusty, covered with methylene blue and Canada balsam, but in the highest of spirits and usually bearing a small gift which I had brought her from civilisation – a certain kind of coffee-cake which she was specially fond of, or, more rarely, since I rather liked the coffee-cake myself, a bunch of violets. How pleased she was by such consideration, how gay were these evening reunions!

  Of course, neither of us realised in the slightest the craziness of my project, which was to take no less than three major post-graduate degrees to supplement my M.B., Ch. B. – the M.D., the M.R.C.P., and the D. P.H. of London. For a practitioner commanding the expert teaching and highly technical resources of the great hospitals and universities, this constitutes a formidable enterprise, in which the average failures are more than 75 per cent. For an overworked colliery assistant, equipped only with borrowed books, prepared by no more than a few hasty dashes to a provincial laboratory, the thing was surely an impossibility.

  I shall never forget the wet and windy day on which I departed for London to sit the examinations, nor the pessimistic bulletins, each gloomier than its predecessor, which I felt obliged to send home during the ensuing week. It is a strange contradiction in my character that, despite the confidence which sustains me during months of effort, the actual test of that effort finds me dispirited and hopeless. All my striving, my frenzied efforts, my almost hysterical outbursts seemed far away and done with. My brain was inactive, almost dull. I felt that I knew nothing. Indeed, when I began the written part of the examination, which was held at the College of Physicians, in Trafalgar Square, I found myself answering the papers with a blind automatism. I wrote and wrote, never looking at the clock, filling sheet after sheet, until my head reeled.

  I had taken a room at the —— Hotel, a modest establishment where I had stayed during the war on my first visit to London. Here it was extremely cheap. But the food was vile, adding the final touch to my upset digestion, and literally doubling me up with a bad attack of dyspepsia. I was compelled to restrict my diet to hot malted milk. A tumblerfull of this innocuous beverage in an A.B.C. tearoom in the Strand was my lunch. Between my papers I lived in a kind of daze. I did not dream of going to a cinema, a music-hall, or any other place of amusement. I scarcely saw the people in the streets. Occasionally, to clear my head, I took a ride on the top of an omnibus.

  After the written papers the practical and viva-voce part of the examination began, and I was more afraid of these than of anything which had gone before. There were perhaps thirty other candidates, all of them men older than myself, and all with an unmistakable air of assurance and position. The candidate placed next to me, for instance, a man named Harold Beaumont whom I had once or twice spoken to, had an Oxford B.Ch., an out-patient appointment at St Bartholomew’s, and a consulting-room in ultra-fashionable Brook Street. When I compared Beaumont’s charming manners, immaculate professional attire, and obvious standing with my own provincial awkwardness I felt my chances of favourably impressing the examiners to be small indeed.

  My practical, at the South London Hospital, went, I thought, well enough. My case was one of bronchiectasis in a young boy of fourteen, which, since I had met this condition in my practice, was a piece of good fortune. I felt I had written a sound report. But when it came to the viva-voce my luck seemed to change completely. The ‘viva’ procedure at the College of Physicians had its peculiarities. On two successive days each candidate was questioned, in turn, by two separate examiners. If at the end of the first session the candidate was found inadequate, he was handed a polite note telling him he need not return on the following day. Faced with the imminence of this fatal missive, I found to my horror that I had drawn as my first examiner a man I had heard Beaumont speak of with apprehension, Dr Maurice Gadsby.

  Dr Gadsby was a youngish, handsome man, with a brilliant medical reputation. Recently elected to his Fellowship, he had perhaps less tolerance than the older examiners. Somewhat to my surprise, he greeted me, repeated my name several times, then demanded:

  ‘Are you Richard’s younger brother? Dick was at Cambridge with me, you know.’

  When I confessed, reluctantly, that I had no brother, he was plainly disappointed. He inspected me through his monocle.

  ‘Were you at Cambridge?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘The other shop?’

  ‘What shop, sir?’

  ‘Oxford, of course.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then what university?’
/>   ‘Glasgow.’

  A hollow, devastating silence. He did not deign to comment, but, with a lift to his brows, placed before me six slides. Five of these slides I named correctly, but the sixth I could not name. It was on this slide that Gadsby concentrated with all the contempt of one to whom the mere mention of a Scots university was almost obscene. For five minutes he harassed me on this section – which, it appeared, was the ovum of an obscure West African parasite – then languidly, without interest, he passed me on to the next examiner, who was none other than Lord Dawson of Penn, physician to the King.

  I rose and crossed the room with a pale face and a heavily beating heart. All the lassitude, the inertia I had experienced at the beginning of the week was gone now. I had an almost desperate desire to succeed. But I was convinced that Gadsby would fail me. I raised my eyes to find Lord Dawson contemplating me with a friendly, half-humorous smile.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, unexpectedly.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ I stammered. ‘I think I’ve done rather badly with Dr Gadsby – that’s all.’

  ‘Never mind about that. Have a look at these specimens. Then just say anything about them that comes into your head.’

  Dawson smiled encouragingly. He was a handsome, fair-complexioned man of about sixty with a high forehead and a long, humorous upper lip masked by a cropped moustache. Though now perhaps the second most distinguished physician in Europe, he had known difficulties and sharp struggles in his earlier days when, coming to London, he had encountered prejudice and opposition. As he gazed at me, without seeming to do so, he could not but observe my ill-cut suit, the soft collar and shirt, the cheap, ill-knotted tie, above all, the look of strained intensity upon my serious face, and it may have been that memories of his own youth came back to him, instinctively enlisting his sympathy on my behalf. He nodded encouragingly, as, with my eyes fixed upon the glass jars before me, I stumbled unhappily through a commentary upon the specimens.