"PAINSTAKING."
SICKNESS, like sorrow, is a prison-house. Pain or misery conducts the sentenced man to tho cells. Outside is the lovely garden of convalescence, but only a faw of the prisoners can see out of the windows. Within the walls there is a graded system of distress. Torture is endured only by is few, but freedom and comfort are known to none. A strange delusion afflicts very many of the prisoners—they feel that they are alone. The gulf between the sick and the well seems almost impassable. Like how many other delusions of the spirit, it can be disproved to the intellect of those who lie under its evil enchantment—disproved, but not dispelled. A man may lack no service in his sickness and no pity, and yet seem to himself to toss in solitude. Perhaps ho may oven resent the VOiC3 and gaze of those who surround but never truly approach him. He would rather be alone, he says. He means that he would rather endure his solitude apart from those unreal figures who never spiritually approach. Intense affection can, of .course, draw near at a cost ; but apart from the bond of love, there are men and women who are gifted to break the solitude of the sick. They literally visit "the spirits in prison.** The present writer once saw a letter.from a native of India in which the word " painstaking " was used for "sympathetic." It is an incomprehensible power this of "painstaking," and tempts those who have watched it to wonder whether sympathy is roused- in certain people to a degree enabling them to offer a vicarious sacrifice. and for a short space of time to ease another man's shoulder from his burden at a cost of strength which they can hardly afford. One would expect that this Divine quality should accompany very exceptional endowments, both mental and moral, but this is not always the case. Neither does the gift always show itself in very early life. Sympathy sometimes gives a certain timidity. Young people dimly fear the risk to faith and equanimity which comes of too much association with the stricken. It is strange how often very sympathetic people seem to be groat seekers of distraction. They often shirk what we consider the definitely philanthropic professions. They are not to be found among doctors and clergy so often as wo might expect. Neverthelear, in the memory of the present writer, it is a doctor who stands out as having pre-eminently this gift of "painstaking." He had it in such a degree as to suggest occultism to the fancifully inclined. He is dead now. In life the supernatural suggestion would have irritated him, for he was a materialist. He saw no mental foothold, he said, between materialism and Roman Catholicism, and the problem of suffering left him no choice as to which position he must hold. Even in his rare moods of bitterness, however, he never denied that the Christian ideal was the highest. "Christians are the salt of the earth," he would say, "and I speak from experience, for I have known three."
A good physician on the staff of a groat hospital must often feel a sad misgiving as he thinks of the country parishes soon to
be delivered over to his students. The gifted doctor of the writer's recollection was a student much like the herd. Perhaps he worked harder than most that he might take himself off the bands of a father with many sons. Perhaps he- played less than most, for he had been brought up at a London day-school and had not the physique- for eport. His pleasures were- entirely social, and, such as they were, he enjoyed them intensely-, and looked back on them in later life with a boyish delight, longed to have them again, repeated them if he could. Perhaps they were not taken in the midst of a very elevating or interesting circle. He was never a person of very much discrimination. He never knew one man, from another, as the seeing is, nor one woman either; for the matter of that. His student recreations left upon him a superficial stamp more light-hearted than dignified. He was small, fair, dapper, and insignificant He had no shyness, no reserve, no deference but such as came of pity, no distinction of -any Fort whatever. He used to say that there were a few saints in the world and a few sinners—no temptation could touch tho one and no persuasion the other. For the- rest, moral attainment depended, he thought, on environment and circumstance. In the lame way, if a man were not an obvious dolt or genius, the develop- ment of his mind depended on his intellectual chances. He was persuaded that he could have done as well in any profession as he bad in medicine, "given the chance." Ho was not without a certain vanity which showed in his bearing, and his love of " pleasuring " was childish. He loved talk, even talk on serious subjects, but -he did not shine, in it. He gave an impression of being "a light weight" and very " viewy." Oddly enough, he never- bored any one, though he often tempted them to make comparisons very much in their own favour. So much for the doctor in the world of well people. In sickness and anxiety he was transformed into an angel, and it was with a feeling of some- thing like shock that the convalescent saw him once more in the likeness - of a very ordinary man. When the sick and anxious wore again themselves they perceived with a sort of bewilder- ment that the doctor was also himself.
Till he bought the practice at a distant and exceptionally ent-of-the-way village in East Anglia he had—broadly epeaking—never been out of London. But he dropped into country ways and learned country facts and entered into country hopes with amazing quickness. The poor people never felt him to be a stranger even while their tongue was strange to him. He had not the slightest interest in dialect, nor did mimicry ever amuse him. "They are just the same as London people, only that they live here," he said. As soon as he rot seed to their way of speaking he forgot that they had any
way." In every village a sort of cleavage between rich and poor exists. It is a feeling which might very easily be fanned into hestility. Doctors and clergy know both parties, and as a rule side with one or the other. This doctor never did.- Ho said he thought a great deal of nonsense was talked about classes. Happiness, le believed, was pretty equally divided, "and sooner or later we all suffer a deal more than we deserve "—" whatever we have been up to," he would add.
But what was he like-when he was with the sick, with the prisoners, and exercising his gift of " painstaking " ? The odd thing was that no one could exactly explain. "I couldn't tell you what be was," said the educated. "You wouldn't be- told," said them who kept to the Suffolk vernacular. The upper and the lower
evillages- e., the village which went to-the public-house and the-village which went to church—were for once in agreement. Outside the village herd lived the squire, the poet, and an old retired rogue known as the "Wrong 'un." The last two took a fancy to the doctor at once. The rogue liked persons who, he fancied, forgot his rank among regtee and did -not merely ignore it for the sake of his champagne. The poet was old and subject to attacks of melancholy. His gift of language enabled him vividly to describe sufferings which his friends thought he exaggerated. The doctor, on the contrary, was not misled by the woeful pleasure- which the old man drew from his power over words. From the fist he could relieve his distress, and before long he had become necessary to him. "I have- been shut down in a horrible place," the poet would say in answer to ordinary inquiries about his health. "No one was with me but the doctor," adding with a smile, "a perfect companion, even in Hell." The squire used to quote him with amusement. "Our doctor has a fine mind," the poet used also to affirm, and no one believed him but the pcor, who- thought be meant a kind heart. Nevertheless, the poet was a far better judge of mind- than any one else in the village. The squire looked on the new doctor as a "no account" person, and trusted—so be said--that ho "might have his chief Mimeses in London " ; . but he very:ranch modified his own opinion when he had pneumonia and knew what it meant. to "pull through," or rather to be pulled through by some one who still held on when lie -seemed to himself to have slipped down out of reach. After the squire got well, his wife, too, ceased to speak of the doctor as a "frivolous- little man." She bad a great contempt for any worldly pleasure not taken in the really fashionable world. She was amused when she had influenza to hear about the expensive doings at the rogue's ball, but she despised the doctor utterly for his boyish enjoyment of them. When, however, for three nights she had watched with the doctor beside her husband, 'eaten ashes as it were breed and mingled her drink with weeping," she suddenly realized what a ghost "the little doctor" looked after the crisis, and she said that she also "could never tell any-one" all that he had -done. It was then that she began to repeat a story told by her maid of the doctor, and the keeper's old father. The poor old fellow lived in the long sad dream we call senility, and in a moment.of fierce aberration had given the doctor a fairly. severe blow. The shock of his own act awoke him for a while to his senses, and the doctor spent till Ate middle of the night persuading him that he had had nightmare and had never struck his best friend. No one- but the poet thought very much of his medicines. "It seems as if it was more in himself than in the bottle," said the keeper's daughter.
None of these great people—the great lady, the great rogue, or the nearly great poet—ever saw anything of him at his home. He had no wife or children. His sister kept his house. She was a woman much older than himself, shy and eccentric, preoccupied by roses and animals. She had begun country' life late, and delighted in the convenience it offered for gardening and pet-keeping. She was very fond, however, of the doctor, and she kept a sort of open house for his admirers. There was always food for them all, a welcome, and an untidy place to sit down in. An old deaf lady resided with her as a sort of lady-help. All sorts of queer people hung about the house, most of them elderly single ladies who now seem to abound in the smallest villages. Big boys and girls who had been patients would arrive very hungry to tea, and a row of bicycles usually flanked the gate in the late afternoon. The deaf lady poured out the tea, the doctor considering that it made her feel "in it." Sometimes when not actually employed she would gaze wistfully at the speaking young faces whose words she could never hear. Then the doctor would emit a curious whistle, the only. sound which could get through to hor, and nod and smile.
Some people said it was a pity he did not marry. and have some one to look after him. They said it more often than over during a particularly bad winter, when a great many children died and the doctor looked daily more frail and had not a moment even to attend the rogue's Christmas festivities. The poor people said be was "like a woman" with the. children, and a man is not "like a woman" with a sick child at no cost. When one died specially sadly, the doctor spoke most bitterly and unadvisedly on the subject of theology. The rogue was considerably shocked. His moral tolerance did not extend to- opinion. "He leeks very ill," said the poet. "He is never, sure whether it is himself or the patient who is suffering, and unfortunately he doesn't know either which is the best worth saving." "God bless my soul, he doesn't 'mow you and me from the rogue," laughed the squire. "There is no discrimination in these saints." They were quite right— the doctor could not save himself, and that winter he died. "Ho worked day and night," said the keeper. "He was pretty well tore out when last I saw him."
Previous page
