65 Short Stories (124 page)

The girl sitting on Ashenden’s other side suddenly spoke.

‘I should tell you that few persons can get a heartier laugh out of a hearse than Mr McLeod,’ she said.

McLeod chuckled.

‘I don’t know about that, but it wouldn’t be human nature if I didn’t say to myself: Well, I’m just as glad it’s him and not me they’re taking for a ride.’ It occurred to him that Ashenden didn’t know the pretty girl, so he introduced him.

‘By the way, I don’t think you’ve met Mr Ashenden-Miss Bishop. She’s English, but not a bad girl.’

‘How long have you been here?’ asked Ashenden.

‘Only two years. This is my last winter. Dr Lennox says I shall be all right in a few months and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go home.’

‘Silly, I call it,’ said McLeod. ‘Stay where you’re well off, that’s what I say.’

At that moment a man, leaning on a stick, came walking slowly along the veranda.

‘Oh, look, there’s Major Templeton,’ said Miss Bishop, a smile lighting up her blue eyes; and then, as he came up: ‘I’m glad to see you up again.’

‘Oh, it was nothing. Only a bit of a cold. I’m quite all right now’

The words were hardly out of his mouth when he began to cough. He leaned heavily on his stick. But when the attack was over he smiled gaily.

‘Can’t get rid of this damned cough,’ he said. ‘Smoking too much. Dr Lennox says I ought to give it up, but it’s no good-I can’t’

He was a tall fellow, good-looking in a slightly theatrical way, with a dusky, sallow face, fine very dark eyes, and a neat black moustache. He was wearing a fur coat with an astrakhan collar. His appearance was smart and perhaps a trifle showy. Miss Bishop made Ashenden known to him. Major Templeton said a few civil words in an easy, cordial way, and then asked the girl to go for a stroll with him; he had been ordered to walk to a certain place in the wood behind the sanatorium and back again. McLeod watched them as they sauntered off

‘I wonder if there’s anything between those two,’ he said. ‘They do say Templeton was a devil with the girls before he got ill.’

‘He doesn’t look up to much in that line just now,’ said Ashenden.

‘You never can tell. I’ve seen a lot of rum things here in my day. I could tell you no end of stories if I wanted to.’

‘You evidently do, so why don’t you?’

McLeod grinned.

‘Well, I’ll tell you one. Three or four years ago there was a woman here who was pretty hot stuff. Her husband used to come and see her every other week-end, he was crazy about her, used to fly up from London; but Dr Lennox was pretty sure she was carrying on with somebody here, but he couldn’t find out who. So one night when we’d all gone to bed he had a thin coat of paint put down just outside her room and next day he had everyone’s slippers examined. Neat, wasn’t it? The fellow whose slippers had paint on them got the push. Dr Lennox has to be particular, you know. He doesn’t want the place to get a bad name.’

‘How long has Templeton been here?’

‘Three or four months. He’s been in bed most of the time. He’s for it all right. Ivy Bishop’ll be a damned fool if she gets stuck on him. She’s got a good chance of getting well. I’ve seen so many of them, you know, I can tell. When I look at a fellow I make up my mind at once whether he’ll get well or whether he won’t, and if he won’t I can make a pretty shrewd guess how long he’ll last. I’m very seldom mistaken. I give Templeton about two years myself’

McLeod gave Ashenden a speculative look, and Ashenden, knowing what he was thinking, though he tried to be amused, could not help feeling somewhat concerned. There was a twinkle in McLeod’s eyes. He plainly knew what was passing through Ashenden’s mind.

‘You’ll get all right. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I hadn’t been pretty sure of that. I don’t want Dr Lennox to hoof me out for putting the fear of God into his bloody patients.’

Then Ashenden’s nurse came to take him back to bed. Even though he had only sat out for an hour, he was tired, and was glad to find himself once more between the sheets. Dr Lennox came in to see him in the course of the evening. He looked at his temperature chart.

‘That’s not so bad,’ he said.

Dr Lennox was small, brisk, and genial. He was a good enough doctor, an excellent business man, and an enthusiastic fisherman. When the fishing season began he was inclined to leave the care of his patients to his assistants; the patients grumbled a little, but were glad enough to eat the young salmon he brought back to vary their meals. He was fond of talking, and now, standing at the end of Ashenden’s bed, he asked him, in his broad Scots, whether he had got into conversation with any of the patients that afternoon. Ashenden told him the nurse had introduced him to McLeod. Dr Lennox laughed.

‘The oldest living inhabitant. He knows more about the sanatorium and its inmates than I do. How he gets his information I haven’t an idea, but there’s not a thing about the private lives of anyone under this roof that he doesn’t know. There’s not an old maid in the place with a keener nose for a bit of scandal. Did he tell you about Campbell?’

‘He mentioned him.’

‘He hates Campbell, and Campbell hates him. Funny, when you come to think of it, those two men, they’ve been here for seventeen years and they’ve got about one sound lung between them. They loathe the sight of one another. I’ve had to refuse to listen to the complaints about one another that they come to me with. Campbell’s room is just below McLeod’s and Campbell plays the fiddle. It drives McLeod wild. He says he’s been listening to the same tunes for fifteen years, but Campbell says McLeod doesn’t know one tune from another. McLeod wants me to stop Campbell playing, but I can’t do that, he’s got a perfect right to play so long as he doesn’t play in the silence hours. I’ve offered to change McLeod’s room, but he won’t do that. He says Campbell only plays to drive him out of the room because it’s the best in the house, and he’s damned if he’s going to have it. It’s queer, isn’t it, that two middle-aged men should think it worth while to make life hell for one another? Neither can leave the other alone. They have their meals at the same table, they play bridge together; and not a day passes without a row. Sometimes I’ve threatened to turn them both out if they don’t behave like sensible fellows. That keeps them quiet for a bit. They don’t want to go. They’ve been here so long, they’ve got no one any more who gives a damn for them, and they can’t cope with the world outside. Campbell went away for a couple of months’ holiday some years ago. He came back after a week; he said he couldn’t stand the racket, and the sight of so many people in the streets scared him.’

It was a strange world into which Ashenden found himself thrown when, his health gradually improving, he was able to mix with his fellow patients. One morning Dr Lennox told him he could thenceforward lunch in the dining-room. This was a large, low room, with great window space; the windows were always wide open and on fine days the sun streamed in. There seemed to be a great many people and it took him some time to sort them out. They were of all kinds, young, middle-aged, and old. There were some, like McLeod and Campbell, who had been at the sanatorium for years and expected to die there. Others had only been there for a few months. There was one middle-aged spinster called Miss Atkin who had been coming every winter for a long time and in the summer went to stay with friends and relations. She had nothing much the matter with her any more, and might just as well have stayed away altogether, but she liked the life. Her long residence had given her a sort of position, she was honorary librarian and hand in glove with the matron. She was always ready to gossip with you, but you were soon warned that everything you said was passed on. It was useful to Dr Lennox to know that his patients were getting on well together and were happy, that they did nothing imprudent and followed his instructions. Little escaped Miss Atkin’s sharp eyes, and from her it went to the matron and so to Dr Lennox. Because she had been coming for so many years, she sat at the same table as McLeod and Campbell, together with an old general who had been put there on account of his rank. The table was in no way different from any other, and it was not more advantageously placed, but because the oldest residents sat there it was looked upon as the most desirable place to sit, and several elderly women were bitterly resentful because Miss Atkin, who went away for four or five months every summer, should be given a place there while they who spent the whole year in the sanatorium sat at other tables. There was an old Indian Civilian who had been at the sanatorium longer than anyone but McLeod and Campbell; he was a man who in his day had ruled a province, and he was waiting irascibly for either McLeod or Campbell to die so that he might take his place at the first table. Ashenden made the acquaintance of Campbell. He was a long, big-boned fellow with a bald head, so thin that you wondered how his limbs held together; and when he sat crumpled in an arm-chair he gave you the uncanny impression of a manikin in a puppet-show. He was brusque, touchy, and bad-tempered. The first thing he asked Ashenden was:

‘Are you fond of music?’

‘Yes:

‘No one here cares a damn for it. I play the violin. But if you like it, come to my room one day and I’ll play to you.’

‘Don’t you go,’ said McLeod, who heard him. ‘It’s torture.’

‘How can you be so rude?’ cried Miss Atkin. ‘Mr Campbell plays very nicely.’

‘There’s no one in this beastly place that knows one note from another,’ said Campbell.

With a derisive chuckle McLeod walked off. Miss Atkin tried to smooth things down.

‘You mustn’t mind what McLeod said.’

‘Oh, I don’t. I’ll get back on him all right.’

He played the same tune over and over again all that afternoon. McLeod banged on the floor, but Campbell went on. He sent a message by a maid to say that he had a headache and would Mr Campbell mind not playing; Campbell replied that he had a perfect right to play and if Mr McLeod didn’t like it he could lump it. When next they met high words passed.

Ashenden was put at a table with the pretty Miss Bishop, with Templeton, and with a London man, an accountant, called Henry Chester. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered, wiry little fellow, and the last person you would ever have thought would be attacked by T.B. It had come upon him as a sudden and unexpected blow. He was a perfectly ordinary man, somewhere between thirty and forty, married, with two children. He lived in a decent suburb. He went up to the City every morning and read the morning paper; he came down from the City every evening and read the evening paper. He had no interests except his business and his family. He liked his work; he made enough money to live in comfort, he put by a reasonable sum every year, he played golf on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday, he went every August for a three weeks’ holiday to the same place on the east coast; his children would grow up and marry, then he would turn his business over to his son and retire with his wife to a little house in the country where he could potter about till death claimed him at a ripe old age. He asked nothing more from life than that, and it was a life that thousands upon thousands of his fellow-men lived with satisfaction. He was the average citizen. Then this thing happened. He had caught cold playing golf, it had gone to his chest, and he had had a cough that he couldn’t shake off. He had always been strong and healthy, and had no opinion of doctors; but at last at his wife’s persuasion he had consented to see one. It was a shock to him, a fearful shock, to learn that there was tubercle in both his lungs and that his only chance of life was to go immediately to a sanatorium. The specialist he saw then told him that he might be able to go back to work in a couple of years, but two years had passed and Dr Lennox advised him not to think of it for at least a year more. He showed him the bacilli in his sputum, and in an X-ray photograph the actively-diseased patches in his lungs. He lost heart. It seemed to him a cruel and unjust trick that fate had played upon him. He could have understood it if he had led a wild life, if he had drunk too much, played around with women, or kept late hours. He would have deserved it then. But he had done none of these things. It was monstrously unfair. Having no resources in himself, no interest in books, he had nothing to do but think of his health. It became an obsession. He watched his symptoms anxiously. They had to deprive him of a thermometer because he took his temperature a dozen times a day. He got it into his head that the doctors were taking his case too indifferently, and in order to force their attention used every method he could devise to make the thermometer register a temperature that would alarm; and when his tricks were foiled he grew sulky and querulous. But he was by nature a jovial, friendly creature, and when he forgot himself he talked and laughed gaily; then on a sudden he remembered that he was a sick man and you would see in his eyes the fear of death.

At the end of every month his wife came up to spend a day or two in a lodging house near by. Dr Lennox did not much like the visits that relatives paid the patients, it excited and unsettled them. It was moving to see the eagerness with which Henry Chester looked forward to his wife’s arrival; but it was strange to notice that once she had come he seemed less pleased than one would have expected. Mrs Chester was a pleasant, cheerful little woman, not pretty, but neat, as commonplace as her husband, and you only had to look at her to know that she was a good wife and mother, a careful housekeeper, a nice, quiet body who did her duty and interfered with nobody. She had been quite happy in the dull, domestic life they had led for so many years, her only dissipation a visit to the pictures, her great thrill the sales in the big London shops; and it had never occurred to her that it was monotonous. It completely satisfied her. Ashenden liked her. He listened with interest while she prattled about her children and her house in the suburbs, her neighbours and her trivial occupations. On one occasion he met her in the road. Chester for some reason connected with his treatment had stayed in and she was alone. Ashenden suggested that they should walk together. They talked for a little of indifferent things. Then she suddenly asked him how he thought her husband was.