The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (19 page)

Huddled up on the sofa between the two women, who
seemed to belong to another species, and who discussed her
before her face as if she had been an inanimate object, the girl
looked a typical low-grade defective. Now, defectives fill me
with nothing but disgust, my pity I reserve for their families, but
the girl before me did not inspire me with disgust, but only pity.
She reminded me of a caged lark in some wretched animal
dealer's shop, its feathers dull with dirt and frayed with the bars,
apathetic, unhealthy, miserable, which will not sing because it
cannot fly. What nature had intended her to be it was impossible
to say, for she had been so thoroughly worked over by the two
ardent disciplinarians who flanked her that nothing of the
original material remained. Her personality displeased them, and
they had effectually repressed it, but alas, there was nothing they
could put in its place, and they were left with an unensouled
automaton which they dragged off to alienist after alienist in the
hopeless attempt to get the damage repaired while maintaining
the conditions that had done the damage.

I awoke from my abstraction to hear the mother, who
evidently had a taste for economy where the ugly duckling was
concerned, bargaining shrewdly with Taverner with regard to
fees, and he, who was always more interested in the human than
the commercial aspect of the work was meeting her more than
half way.

"Taverner," I said as soon as the door closed behind them,
"what they are paying won't cover her board and keep, let alone
treatment. They're not paupers, look at the car. Hang it all, why
don't you make `em fund up?"

MS

"My dear boy," said Taverner mildly, "I have got to undercut
the governess or I shouldn't get the job."

"Do you think the job is worth having at that price?" I
growled, for I hate to see a man like Taverner imposed upon.

"Hard to say," he replied. "They have driven a square peg
into a round hole with such determination that they have split the
peg, but to what extent we cannot tell until we have got it out of
the hole. But what are your impressions of our new patient? First
impressions are generally the truest. What reaction does she
awake in you? Those are the best indications in a psychological
case."

"She seems to have given life up as a bad job," I replied.
"She's an unlovely object, and yet she is not repellent. I don't so
much pity her as sympathize with her, there is a difference you
know. I can't put it clearer than that."

"You have put it very clearly indeed," said Taverner. "The
distinction between pity and sympathy is the touchstone in this
case; we pity that which we ourselves are not, but we
sympathize when, but for the grace of God, there goes you or I.
You feel kinship for that soul because, whatever the husk of her
may have been reduced to, she is `one of us,' marred in the
making."

"And marred with a heavy hand," I added. "I should think it
would have been a case of the S.P.C.C., if they had been poor
people."

"You are wrong," said Taverner. "It is a case for the
S.P.C.A." With which cryptic remark he left me.

The next day the new patient, who answered to the in-
appropriate name of Diana, appeared. She looked about fifteen,
but as a matter of fact was nearer eighteen. Gaunt, slovenly,
ungainly, and morose, she had all the furtive ineptitude of a dog
that has been ruined by harsh treatment. She was certainly not an
addition to the social amenities of the place, and I should not
have been surprised if Taverner had segregated her, but he did
not seem disposed to, neither did he place her under any
supervision, but gave her complete freedom. Unaccustomed to
this lack of restraint, she did not seem to know how to employ
herself, and slunk about as if at any moment outraged powers
might exact retribution for some misdeed.

There was a good deal of comment upon the way our new
patient was neglected, and she was certainly not a credit to the
establishment, but I began to see what Taverner was driving at.
Left entirely to her own devices the girl was beginning to find
her level. If she wanted food, she had to prowl into the
dining-room somewhere about the time it was being served;
when her hands became uncomfortably sticky, she washed them,
as the towels bore evidence, for we could not always observe
any difference in the hands. And in addition to all this she was
thinking and watching all that went on about her.

"She will wake up presently," said Taverner, "and then we
shall see how the primitive wild animal will adapt itself to
civilized society."

We were summoned one day by the outraged matron and
went along to Diana's den; one could hardly call it a room after
she had occupied it for twenty-four hours. As we went down the
corridor a strong smell of burning assailed our nostrils, and
when we arrived we found the young lady in question sitting
cross-legged on the hearth rug wrapped in the bedspread, a
bonfire of the whole of her personal belongings smouldering in
the fireplace.

"Why have you burnt your clothes?" enquired Taverner, as if
this interesting and harmless eccentricity were a daily
occurrence.

"I don't like them."

"What is wrong with them?"

"They are not `me'."

"Come along to the recreation room and dig among the
theatrical costumes and see if you can find something you like."

We set off for the recreation room, Diana, swathed in her
bedspread, pattering behind Taverner's tall form, and the
disgusted matron bringing up the rear of the ridiculous
procession. I had no mind to play nursery maid to Miss Diana,
so I left them to their own devices and went along the corridor to
see a man we had there of the name of Tennant. His was a
dreary existence, for, although a charming man when in his
normal state, he had made several attempts at suicide, and had
been placed with us by his family as a voluntary patient as an
alternative to certification and an asylum. He could not be called
mad in the ordinary sense of the word, but as one of those
curious cases of tedium vitae, the desire for life had failed him.
What tragedy lay hidden we did not know, for Taverner, unlike
the psychoanalysts, never asked questions; he had his own way
of finding out what he wanted to know and despised all such
clumsy machinery.

To my surprise I found Tennant turning over a pile of music.
I elicited by my questioning that he not only had a great love of
music, but had studied seriously with a view to making a
profession of it. This was news to us, for his family had given no
hint of this when they placed him with us, merely leading us to
believe that his means were sufficient for existence, but not for
any fullness of life, and that he had passively resigned himself to
his lot, sinking into a melancholy in consequence.

I told Taverner of this when we were having our usual
after-dinner chat in the office, half gossip, half report, which
took place nightly while we smoked our cigars. "So," he said,
and rose forthwith and went up to Tennant's room, fetched him
down, set him at the piano, and bade him play. Tennant, who,
started off with a push, went on like an automaton till the
impulse died down, played fluently, but without the slightest
feeling. I have little sense of music, but this hurdy-gurdy
rendering distressed even me. Several of the other patients
present in the drawing room made their escape.

At the end of the piece he made no attempt to start another,
but sat motionless for a while; Taverner, likewise, sat silent,
watching him to see what he would do next, as his custom was
with his patients. Tennant slowly twisted round the revolving
stool till he sat with his back to the keyboard and his face to us,
with his hands hanging limply between his knees, gazing intently
at the toes of his shoes. He was a prematurely aged man of
thirty-five or thirty-six. His hair iron-grey, his face deeply lined.
The brow was low but broad, the mouth full and curving, the
eyes set well apart were very bright on the few occasions when
the lids were raised sufficiently to let one see them but the ears
were the thing that attracted my attention. I had not noticed them
before, for when he came to us his hair was rather long, but
Matron had fallen upon him with a pair of automatic hair
clippers and given him such a shearing that everything now
stood revealed, and I saw that the convolutions of the ear were
so arranged that they formed a little peak at the apex, that put me
in mind of Hawthorne's story of the Marble Fawn and his little
tufted ears.

While I was making this inventory Tennant had slowly raised
his eyes to ours, and I saw that they were strangely luminous and
animal, gleaming green in the shaded lamp, as a dog's will at
night.

"I have got a violin in my room," he said in a toneless voice.

It was the first sign of initiative he had shown, and I went off
forthwith to fetch his instrument down. Taverner gave him the
note on the piano, but he brushed it aside and tuned his fiddle
according to his own liking, to some pitch known only to
himself. When he first began to play, it sounded horribly flat,
but after a few moments we became accustomed to the strange
intervals, and, for me at any rate, they began to exercise an
extraordinary fascination.

They exercised a fascination for someone else also, for out of
a dark corner where she had tucked herself away unobserved by
us, Diana came creeping; for a moment I hardly realized who it
was, for a profound change had been wrought in her since the
morning. Out of the garments available for her in our theatrical
wardrobe she had chosen a little green tunic we had had for
Puck when we did A Midsummer Night's Dream. Someone (I
found out afterwards it was Taverner) had `Bobbed' her hair;
long green stockings showed under the tagged edge of the tunic
and revealed the lean and angular lines of her limbs. Some freak
of imagination carried my mind back to my school days, and as I
sat listening to the strange wailing of the violin, in which the
voices of seagulls and moor-birds and all creatures of barren and
windy spaces seemed to be crying and calling to each other, I
seemed to see myself coming in from hare and hounds, glowing
with the beat of wind and rain, to tub and change in the steam
and babel of the dressing-rooms. For a moment, under the magic
of that music, the sense of power and prestige was mine again,
for I had been a great man in my school, though of the rank and
file in my profession. Once again I was Captain of the Games,
running my eye over the new boys in the hope of finding
something promising, and then in a flash I found the linking idea
that had taken my mind back to those dead and gone days--the
sprawling limbs in the long green stockings were those of a
runner. The lay-on of the muscles, the length of the bones, all
denoted speed and spring. She might not be a hopeful sight for a
matchmaking mamma, but she would have rejoiced the heart of
a captain of the games.

Matron appeared at the door like an avenging Nemesis; the
hour for lights-out was long overpast, but in our absorption in
the music we had forgotten it. She looked at me reproachfully;
we were usually allies in upholding discipline, but tonight I felt
like a rebellious urchin, and wanted to join Tennant and Diana
and the other unmanageables in some outrageous escapade
against law and order.