Adventures of a Black Bag

by A. J. Cronin

  He took some awful hammerings. The more he learned the harder Archie hit him. He found how soft he was – he – Finlay – who had always prided himself upon his rude health.

  He went into terrific training. He rose early, took a run and a cold bath before breakfast. Without a pang he cut out Janet’s delicious pastry from his diet.

  Deliberately, wickedly, he set out to make himself hard as nails.

  Cameron, of course, sniffed something in the air. His eye, penetrating and caustic, often lingered upon Finlay when he passed a dish at table or came down in the morning with a slight thickening of his ear. But, though once or twice he nearly smiled, he said nothing. Cameron had the gift of silence.

  By the end of one month Finlay was boxing well; by the end of three his improvement was really extraordinary. At the end of May he came on with a rush and, one night, having gone six fast three-minute rounds with Archie, he finished up with a terrific wallop to the jaw which rocked the sergeant to his heels.

  “That’s enough to be going on wi’,” said Archie decisively, as he peeled off his gloves. “I’m not taking no hammerin’ from a laddie half my age.”

  “What are you blethering about?” Finlay demanded, in wonder, with his gloves on his hips.

  Archie took a slug at the water bottle, and professionally squirted it from the corner of his mouth. Then he allowed himself the pleasure of a smile.

  “I mean just this, sir. I’ve taught ye all I can.” He grinned broadly. “It’s high time ye found somebody your own age to hit.”

  “Am I any good, then?”

  “Good! Man, ye’re damned good! This last couple of weeks ye’ve come on like a house on fire. But I aye said ye had the makings of a bonny fechter.”

  He paused, then, with a sudden curiosity, went on –

  “Now that we’re as guid as I can make ye, maybe ye’d be telling me something. What was that reason ye spoke about, if it’s not too big a question?”

  Finlay stood silent for a minute, then he told Archie about Cha. And again that slow grin broke over the sergeant’s rugged face.

  “Bell,” he declared. “ I ken him well – the bull-necked rowdy.

  He’s a slugger if ever there was one. But you’ve got the measure of him now. Ye’ll teach him a lesson he’s long been needin’.”

  “D’you honestly think so, Archie?”

  “Man, I’m sure on it. I’m not sayin’ but what it’ll be a bonny fecht. But as I’m a sodjer I wouldna like to be in Cha Bell’s shoes by the time ye’ve done wi’ him.”

  Finlay went home that night with determination in his eye. During those weeks of preparation he had somehow managed to keep the matter out of his mind, but now he knew himself to be fit and ready for the fray, all his black rage against Cha boiled up afresh.

  The memory of the scene of the surgery stung him more bitterly. The recollection of the rare occasions when he had subsequently encountered Cha, of Cha’s impudent stare crossing his own studiously detached gaze, of the shout of derisive laughter following him down the street, these burst on him with new violence and goaded him beyond the limit of his endurance.

  As he strode up the drive of Arden House he thought wickedly: “I’ll make him pay. I’ll take it out of him. Not another day will I wait. I’ve suffered long enough. Now I’m going to get my own back.”

  In this mood he entered the hall, and there, oddly enough, on the slate which was hung specifically for this purpose, he found a call written up for Mrs. Bell at the little house in Quay Side.

  Odd, in a way, but not unusual, for Mrs. Bell was something of a hypochondriac, and once a month or thereabouts Finlay was obliged to call and reassure her on the origin of some vague pain or indeterminate symptom.

  It suited him down to the ground. He would visit the old woman tomorrow – which was Saturday – prescribe for her, and blandly leave word that Cha was to fetch the medicine from the surgery in the afternoon.

  The same circumstances, the same time, the same place – but oh, how different the result! Finlay set his jaw hard. “I’ll give him medicine,” he thought viciously, “I’ll give him a dose he won’t forget.”

  The next day came, and Finlay made straight for No. 3 Quay Side the moment he was through his morning consultations. It was a lop-sided, single-gabled, old-fashioned bit of a house perched right on the river front behind the Elephant and Castle, and it protruded slightly in the rambling row as if the pressure of its neighbours had squeezed it out of shape.

  Mrs. Bell met him at the door, her fat, round face pulled into an anxious frown.

  “Oh, doctor, doctor,” she protested. “It was last night I wanted ye to come and not this mornin’. What way did ye not come when I sent down word? I’ve been worried fair sick the livelong night”

  “Don’t you worry now, Mrs. Bell,” he reassured her. “We’ll soon put you to rights.”

  “But it’s no’ me,” she wailed. “ It’s no’ me at all. It’s Cha!”

  Cha. Finlay stared at her with an altered face; then, very thoughtfully, he followed her up the narrow wooden stairs into a little uncarpeted attic room.

  There, propped up in a chipped truckle bed, garbed in a not very clean day shirt and the famous muffler, with a sporting newspaper on one side and a packet of Woodbines on the other, was Char.

  He greeted Finlay derisively.

  “What do you want? The rag and bottle man doesn’t call till Tuesday.”

  “Be quiet Cha, now do!” pleaded Mrs. Bell. “And show the doctor your arm.” Turning to Finlay – “ it was a scratch he got at his work, doctor, the back end of last week. But it started to heel and, oh, dearlie me, it’s come up something fearful.“

  “My arm’s fine,” Cha declared rudely. “I’m not wantin’ ony make-down doctor to look at lit.”

  “Oh, Cha! Oh, Cha!” groaned Mrs. Bell. “Will ye not mind that terrible tongue of yours!”

  Finlay stood with a stiff face trying to control his temper. At last, in a difficult voice, he said:

  “Suppose you show me the arm.”

  “Aw, what the hell!” protested Cha. But from beneath the patchwork counterpane he produced the arm heavily, as though it were made of lead.

  Finlay took one look at it, then his eyes widened in surprise. An enormous swelling stretched from wrist to elbow, an angry boggy tumefaction – of the diagnosis there was not the slightest doubt. Cha had acute sellulitis of the arm.

  Making his attitude detached, completely professional, Finlay set about his examination. He took Cha’s temperature – Cha’s remark as he stuck the thermometer rakishly in his mouth being:

  “Whit do you take me for – an ostrich?”

  But for all Cha’s pretence of coolness his temperature registered 103.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

  “Have you any headache?”

  “Naw,” Cha lied. “And don’t think you’ll present me with one.”

  There was a pause; then Finlay looked at Mrs. Bell.

  “I shall have to give him a whiff of chloroform and open up the arm,” he declared impassively.

  “Not on your life,” said Cha. “There’s no chloroform for me. If you’re going to butcher me at a’, ye can butcher me without it.”

  “But the pain –”

  “Aw! What the hell!” Cha interposed scornfully. “Ye know fine ye’re wantin’ to hurt me. Go ahead and see if you can make me squeal. Now’s the chance to get a little of your own back.”

  The blood rushed to Finlay’s face.

  “That’s a lie and you know it. But just you wait. I’ll get you better. Then I’ll teach you a lesson that you won’t forget.”

  He swung round abruptly, and, opening his bag, began to prepare his instruments. Cha’s answer was to whistle: “The Bluebells of Scotland” with satiric variations.

  Cha didn’t go on whistling, of course – though, no doubt, he would have liked to.

  It was a nasty business opening the mass of inflammation without an anaesthetic.

  His
stocky figure went quite rigid, and his face a dirty grey, as Finlay made two swift, deep incisions, then started to probe for pus.

  There was very little pus, a bad sign – merely some dark serous fluid which oozed from the drainage cuts, though Finlay looked at it with almost painful care before he packed the wound with iodoform gauze.

  When it was finished, Cha drew a stump of cigarette from behind his ear, lit up, and hardily regarded his bandaged arm. “You’ve made a bonny hash of it, right enough!” he exclaimed critically. “But what else could we expect?”

  Then, with the cigarette in his hand, he promptly fainted.

  He came to, of course, but he was far from being right. That afternoon when Finlay called again he found him in the grip of a raging septicaemia. The infection had spread into the blood stream. Cha was delirious; his temperature 105, his pulse 140; he was dangerously ill. Mrs. Bell resolutely opposed his removal to hospital.

  “Cha wouldn’t have it! Cha wouldn’t have it!” she kept on repeating, wringing her hands. “He’s a guid son to me for all his wildness. I winna go against him now he’s badly.”

  So the whole responsibility of the case fell on Finlay.

  For a whole week he battled for Cha’s life. He loathed Cha – yet he felt that he must save him. He came three times a day to the house in Quay Side, religiously dressing the arm himself; he sent specially to Stirrock’s in Glasgow for some new anti-toxin; he even went into Paxton’s in the High Street, and ordered the nourishment which kept Cha alive.

  Not a labour of love, you may be sure; for lack of a better phrase you might call it a labour of hate.

  At last, after a horrible week, Cha had his crisis on the eighth day. As he sat late into the night beside Cha’s bed, Finlay saw positively that Cha would recover. Indeed, towards midnight Cha stirred and opened his sunken eyes, which, out of his gaunt, unshaven face, fastened themselves on Finlay. He looked and looked; then, moving his pale lips, he sneered:

  “Ye see – I’m getting better in spite of ye.”

  Then he went off to sleep. During his convalescence Cha was even worse. The stronger he got the more outrageous he became.

  “Thought ye’d take my arm off so ye’d have the beating of me!” or “ Ye’d have finished me. I suppose, if ye’d had the guts to do it!”

  Not that Finlay stood it stoically. Oh dear no! With Cha out of danger, he dropped his professional dignity and thoroughly let himself go. Hammer and tongs they went at it, slanging each other unmercifully, the young riveter and the young doctor, until Mrs. Bell would thrust her hands upon her ears and run in terror from the room.

  Finally, when Cha was up and ready to depart for a month at the Ardbeg Home, Finlay took him pointedly aside:

  “Your treatment’s finished now. You’re better. You’re going down to get braced up at the seaside. Well, when you’re back again and thoroughly fit, come and see me at the surgery. I’m going to give you the hiding of your life.”

  “Right!” Cha nodded defiantly. “ That suits me down to the ground.”

  The four weeks passed slowly. Indeed, they passed extremely slowly.

  One by one Finlay counted the days. He hated Cha so much he missed him. Yes, he actually missed him.

  Life was rather flat without Cha’s scornful grin and bold, satiric tongue. But eventually, on the last Saturday of the month, Cha returned and came bustling into the surgery, bronzed and fit, as strong, stocky and sardonic as he had ever been before.

  Up he came to Finlay. They faced each other. There was a pause. But what happened next was terrible – so terrible it can hardly be set down.

  Finlay looked at Cha. And Cha looked at Finlay.

  They grinned at each other sheepishly. Then, with one accord, they delightedly shook hands.

  6. Wee Robison’s Lost Memory

  If that Friday evening had not been so fine and inviting for a walk, Finlay might easily have postponed his call on the Robertsons, of Barloan Toll, until the morning.

  He suspected something trivial, for Sarah Robertson was such a fusser. A large, full-bosomed, heavy-footed woman with a plain, flat face and a heart of gold, she fussed over her big daughter, Margaret, and her small husband, Robert, until Robert at last could hardly call his soul his own.

  She aired his flannels, knitted his socks, escorted him to church, selected his neckties at the sale, religiously superintended his diet – (“ No, no, Robert, you may like these curds, but you know they always bind you, dear. Tit, tit, take the dish away from your father, Margaret!”)

  Among her bosom friends of the Toll she was rightly known as a paragon.

  “Ours is the happiest marriage that ever was!” she would frequently exclaim with an indrawing of her lips and ecstatic upcasting of the whites of her eyes.

  She was the best kind of devoted wife. Or the worst.

  But, however much her proprietory fondness redounded to Sarah’s credit, the unkind of tongue in Levenford – and they were perhaps a few – found mild amusement in Robert’s submission to the wifely yoke.

  “He’s a hen-pecked little deevil,” Gordon had once declared in the club, and Paxton had acquiesced with a snigger – “Ay, it’s her that wears the breeks all right.”

  Although a master at the Academy, Robert did not belong to the club – it had been laid down kindly that smoking and drinking were “not the thing” for him, at all, at all.

  It was extraordinary, in fact, the number of things that were not the thing for Robert. He seemed to go to so few places; never to the football matches, or to the bowling green, or to Glasgow with the other masters to visit the theatre.

  He was a small, mild, unassuming man of about forty-four, rather round-shouldered, with a habit of saying very little out of school. He had dog-like, rather harassed brown eyes, a fine tenor voice, and was known affectionately to his class as “Wee Robison.”

  His voice apparently was useful, for Sarah, the lady wife, always pressed him to sing when they had company, and through Sarah’s more influential pressing he secured year after year the single honour – for it could be nothing else – of preparing the children of the parish church for the cantatas, sacred or otherwise, which they regularly gave about Christmas.

  Such was “wee Robison,” and all this passed through Finlay’s mind as he strolled towards the Toll through the balmy evening air, already sweet with the breath of early summer.

  He rang the bell of Robertson’s house and he was not kept waiting long, for Mrs. Robertson, in a flurry, pranced to the door and showed him in.

  “I do declare, doctor, I’m awful glad you’ve come,” she cried in the parlour, where, supported by the big, gawky Margaret – nineteen years old and almost the image of her mother – she stood in devoted concern over Robertson.

  He was wearing a discomfited look, and moved restlessly in his chair under the chandelier and the inquisition of their united stares.

  “Nothing serious. I hope. Mrs. Robertson?” said Finlay cheerily.

  “It’s nothing at all,” protested Robertson uncomfortably. “Nothing, nothing! I don’t know what in all the world they fetched you out for.”

  “Now, you be quiet, father,” said Margaret warningly, “and let mother speak.”

  Robertson subsided, and Finley looked interrogatively at Mrs. Robertson, who drew a long sibilant breath of wifely concern.

  “Well, it’s like this, Dr. Finlay. I don’t say it’s serious, mind you, far from it, but still I’m worried about my Robert. He’s been fair overdoing it lately! Mr. Douglas, the master of the class above his, has been away for some reason or another, and Robert’s been taking the two classes together. It’s an absolute put upon, if you ask me; he’s been working himself to death.

  “And, forbye, there’s the cantata. They’re going to give a special performance of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ come Saturday week on account of the church jubilee. It’s just one thing after another that’s come on the poor man, and you know I’m the most devoted wife in the whole world, a
nd –”

  “Yes, yes, but what’s all this got to do with fetching me out here?” interposed Finlay, smiling.

  “Why, everything, doctor!” expostulated Mrs. Robertson with an air of supreme concern. “ It’s got Robert into such a state of nerves that the man doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’ll swear he’s losing his memory.”

  “For God’s sake, woman,” muttered Robertson, “ it’s nothing at all. You know I was aye absent-minded –”

  “Now, father,” cut in Margaret again, reprovingly.

  “It’s not just as if it was the once,” went on Mrs. Robertson, bending forward towards Finlay in another spasm of wifely anxiety.

  “He never knows where he puts a thing now. He forgot my wool I asked him to buy this afternoon. He forgot Margaret’s music yesterday. It’s one thing after another, forgetting this and forgetting that. He’s in such a state he’ll be forgetting where he lives next.

  “And so, doctor,” continued Mrs. Robertson, “ will you take the poor man in hand, for goodness sake, and tell him not to work so hard and what to do and everything, for I am fair worried. I wouldn’t have him miss the cantata for worlds.”

  Finlay could have laughed out loud at the terrible solicitude of Mrs. Robertson. He felt it was wholly unjustified, and yet he did not know either.

  Perhaps Robertson had been overworking. He was such a downtrodden little man he was likely to have everything shoved upon him, and besides, he did look oddly nervous, fidgeting with his hands, letting his eye roam about the room with a queer and rather restless look.

  Finlay sat down and, in his own particular way, making himself at home, he talked to them. He reasoned with Robertson upon the dangers to the mind of overworking. He talked pleasantly and reassuringly on the subject, and then, before he rose to go, he warned him, referring to a case which had actually come within the bounds of his own experience.

  “You know,” he said, “real overstrain does throw the memory out – aphasia we call it. And it happens quite suddenly. I remember when I was at the Royal I saw a case. It was a businessman. He had forgotten who he was, or rather, he thought himself somebody else. He had come all the way from Birmingham, and he had been living for a fortnight in Glasgow before his people got in touch with him.”