DOCTOR
GREENSLADE THEORISES
That evening, I remember,
as I came up through the Mill Meadow, I was feeling peculiarly happy
and contented. It was still mid-March, one of those spring days when
noon is like May, and only the cold pearly haze at sunset warns a man
that he is not done with winter. The season was absurdly early, for
the blackthorn was in flower and the hedge roots were full of
primroses. The partridges were paired, the rooks were well on with
their nests, and the meadows were full of shimmering grey flocks of
fieldfares on their way north. I put up half a dozen snipe on the
boggy edge of the stream, and in the bracken in Sturn Wood I thought
I saw a woodcock, and hoped that the birds might nest with us this
year, as they used to do long ago. It was jolly to see the world
coming to life again, and to remember that this patch of England was
my own, and all these wild things, so to speak, members of my little
household.
As I say, I was in a very
contented mood, for I had found something I had longed for all my
days. I had bought Fosse Manor just after the War as a wedding
present for Mary, and for two and a half years we had been settled
there. My son, Peter John, was rising fifteen months, a thoughtful
infant, as healthy as a young colt and as comic as a terrier puppy.
Even Mary's anxious eye could scarcely detect in him any symptoms of
decline. But the place wanted a lot of looking to, for it had run
wild during the War, and the woods had to be thinned, gates and
fences repaired, new drains laid, a ram put in to supplement the
wells, a heap of thatching to be done, and the garden borders to be
brought back to cultivation. I had got through the worst of it, and
as I came out of the Home Wood on to the lower lawns and saw the old
stone gables that the monks had built, I felt that I was anchored at
last in the pleasantest kind of harbour.
There was a pile of
letters on the table in the hall, but I let them be, for I was not in
the mood for any communication with the outer world. As I was having
a hot bath Mary kept giving me the news through her bedroom door.
Peter John had been raising Cain over a first tooth; the new
shorthorn cow was drying off; old George Whaddon had got his
granddaughter back from service; there was a new brood of
runner-ducks; there was a missel-thrush building in the box hedge by
the lake. A chronicle of small beer, you will say, but I was by a
long chalk more interested in it than in what might be happening in
Parliament or Russia or the Hindu Kush. The fact is I was becoming
such a mossback that I had almost stopped reading the papers. Many a
day The Times would remain unopened, for Mary never
looked at anything but the first page to see who was dead or married.
Not that I didn't read a lot, for I used to spend my evenings digging
into county history, and learning all I could about the old fellows
who had been my predecessors. I liked to think that I lived in a
place that had been continuously inhabited for a thousand years.
Cavalier and Roundhead had fought over the countryside, and I was
becoming a considerable authority on their tiny battles. That was
about the only interest I had left in soldiering.
As we went downstairs, I
remember we stopped to look out of the long staircase window which
showed a segment of lawn, a corner of the lake, and through a gap in
the woods a vista of green downland. Mary squeezed my arm. "What
a blessed country," she said. "Dick, did you ever dream of
such peace? We're lucky, lucky people."
Then suddenly her face
changed in that way she has and grew very grave. I felt a little
shiver run along her arm.
"It's too good and
beloved to last," she whispered. "Sometimes I am afraid."
"Nonsense," I
laughed. "What's going to upset it? I don't believe in being
afraid of happiness." I knew very well, of course, that Mary
couldn't be afraid of anything.
She laughed too. "All
the same I've got what the Greek called aidos. You
don't know what that means, you old savage. It means that you feel
you must walk humbly and delicately to propitiate the Fates. I wish I
knew how."
She walked too delicately,
for she missed the last step and our descent ended in an undignified
shuffle right into the arms of Dr. Greenslade.
Paddock--I had got Paddock
back after the War and he was now my butler--was helping the doctor
out of his ulster, and I saw by the satisfied look on the latter's
face that he was through with his day's work and meant to stay to
dinner. Here I had better introduce Tom Greenslade, for of all my
recent acquaintances he was the one I had most taken to. He was a
long lean fellow with a stoop in his back from bending over the
handles of motor-bicycles, with reddish hair, and the greeny-blue
eyes and freckled skin that often accompany that kind of hair. From
his high cheek bones and his colouring you would have set him down as
a Scotsman, but as a matter of fact he came from Devonshire--Exmoor,
I think, though he had been so much about the world that he had
almost forgotten where he was raised. I have travelled a bit, but
nothing to Greenslade. He had started as a doctor in a whaling ship.
Then he had been in the South African War and afterwards a temporary
magistrate up Lydenburg way. He soon tired of that, and was for a
long spell in Uganda and German East, where he became rather a swell
on tropical diseases, and nearly perished through experimenting on
himself with fancy inoculations. Then he was in South America, where
he had a good practice in Valparaiso, and then in the Malay States,
where he made a bit of money in the rubber boom. There was a gap of
three years after that when he was wandering about Central Asia,
partly with a fellow called Duckett exploring Northern Mongolia, and
partly in Chinese Tibet hunting for new flowers, for he was mad about
botany. He came home in the summer of 1914, meaning to do some
laboratory research work, but the War swept him up and he went to
France as M.O. of a territorial battalion. He got wounded of course,
and after a spell in hospital went out to Mesopotamia, where he
stayed till the Christmas of 1918, sweating hard at his job but
managing to tumble into a lot of varied adventures, for he was at
Baku with Dunsterville and got as far as Tashkend, where the
Bolsheviks shut him up for a fortnight in a bath-house. During the
War he had every kind of sickness, for he missed no experience, but
nothing seemed to damage permanently his whipcord physique. He told
me that his heart and lungs and blood pressure were as good as a
lad's of twenty-one, though by this time he was on the wrong side of
forty.
But when the War was over
he hankered for a quiet life, so he bought a practice in the deepest
and greenest corner of England. He said his motive was the same as
that which in the rackety Middle Ages made men retire into
monasteries; he wanted quiet and leisure to consider his soul. Quiet
he may have found, but uncommon little leisure, for I never heard of
a country doctor that toiled at his job as he did. He would pay three
visits a day to a panel patient, which shows the kind of fellow he
was; and he would be out in the small hours at the birth of a gipsy
child under a hedge. He was a first-class man in his profession, and
kept abreast of it, but doctoring was only one of a thousand
interests. I never met a chap with such an insatiable curiosity about
everything in heaven and earth. He lived in two rooms in a farmhouse
some four miles from us, and I dare say he had several thousand books
about him. All day, and often half the night, he would scour the
country in his little run-about car, and yet, when he would drop in
to see me and have a drink after maybe twenty visits, he was as full
of beans as if he had just got out of bed. Nothing came amiss to him
in talk--birds, beasts, flowers, books, politics,
religion--everything in the world except himself. He was the best
sort of company, for behind all his quickness and cleverness, you
felt that he was solid bar-gold. But for him I should have taken root
in the soil and put out shoots, for I have a fine natural talent for
vegetating. Mary strongly approved of him and Peter John adored him.
He was in tremendous
spirits that evening, and for once in a way gave us reminiscences of
his past. He told us about the people he badly wanted to see again;
an Irish Spaniard up in the north of the Argentine who had for
cattle-men a most murderous brand of native from the mountains, whom
he used to keep in good humour by arranging fights every Sunday, he
himself taking on the survivor with his fists and always knocking him
out; a Scots trader from Hankow who had turned Buddhist priest and
intoned his prayers with a strong Glasgow accent; and most of all a
Malay pirate, who, he said, was a sort of St. Francis with beasts,
though a perfect Nero with his fellow-men. That took him to Central
Asia, and he observed that if ever he left England again he would
make for those parts, since they were the refuge of all the superior
rascality of creation. He had a notion that something very odd might
happen there in the long run. "Think of it!" he cried. "All
the places with names like spells--Bokhara, Samarkand--run by seedy
little gangs of communist Jews. It won't go on for ever. Some day a
new Genghis Khan or a Timour will be thrown up out of the maelstrom.
Europe is confused enough, but Asia is ancient Chaos."
After dinner we sat round
the fire in the library, which I had modelled on Sir Walter
Bullivant's room in his place on the Kennet, as I had promised myself
seven years ago. I had meant it for my own room where I could write
and read and smoke, but Mary would not allow it. She had a jolly
panelled sitting-room of her own upstairs, which she rarely entered;
but though I chased her away, she was like a hen in a garden and
always came back, so that presently she had staked out a claim on the
other side of my writing-table. I have the old hunter's notion of
order, but it was useless to strive with Mary, so now my desk was
littered with her letters and needlework, and Peter John's toys and
picture-books were stacked in the cabinet where I kept my fly-books,
and Peter John himself used to make a kraal every morning inside an
up-turned stool on the hearth-rug.
It was a cold night and
very pleasant by the fireside, where some scented logs from an old
pear-tree were burning. The doctor picked up a detective novel I had
been reading, and glanced at the title-page.
"I can read most
things," he said, "but it beats me how you waste time over
such stuff. These shockers are too easy, Dick. You could invent
better ones for yourself."
"Not I. I call that a
dashed ingenious yarn. I can't think how the fellow does it."
"Quite simple. The
author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it
deductively. Do you see what I mean?"
"Not a bit," I
replied.
"Look here. I want to
write a shocker, so I begin by fixing on one or two facts which have
no sort of obvious connection."
"For example?"
"Well, imagine
anything you like. Let us take three things a long way apart--"
He paused for a second to consider--"say, an old blind woman
spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegiansaeter, and
a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed
beard. Not much connection between the three? You invent a
connection--simple enough if you have any imagination, and you weave
all three into the yarn. The reader, who knows nothing about the
three at the start, is puzzled and intrigued and, if the story is
well arranged, finally satisfied. He is pleased with the ingenuity of
the solution, for he doesn't realise that the author fixed upon the
solution first, and then invented a problem to suit it."
"I see," I said.
"You've gone and taken the gilt off my favourite light reading.
I won't be able any more to marvel at the writer's cleverness."
"I've another
objection to the stuff--it's not ingenious enough, or rather it
doesn't take account of the infernal complexity of life. It might
have been all right twenty years ago, when most people argued and
behaved fairly logically. But they don't nowadays. Have you ever
realised, Dick, the amount of stark craziness that the War has left
in the world?"
Mary, who was sitting
sewing under a lamp, raised her head and laughed.
Greenslade's face had
become serious. "I can speak about it frankly here, for you two
are almost the only completely sane people I know. Well, as a
pathologist, I'm fairly staggered. I hardly meet a soul who hasn't
got some slight kink in his brain as a consequence of the last seven
years. With most people it's rather a pleasant kink--they're less
settled in their grooves, and they see the comic side of things
quicker, and are readier for adventure. But with some
it's pukka madness, and that means crime. Now, how
are you going to write detective stories about that kind of world on
the old lines? You can take nothing for granted, as you once could,
and your argus-eyed, lightning-brained expert has nothing solid with
which to build his foundations."
I observed that the poor
old War seemed to be getting blamed for a good deal that I was taught
in my childhood was due to original sin.
"Oh, I'm not
questioning your Calvinism. Original sin is always there, but the
meaning of civilisation was that we had got it battened down under
hatches, whereas now it's getting its head up. But it isn't only sin.
It's a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general
loosening of screws. Oddly enough, in spite of parrot-talk about
shell-shock, the men who fought suffer less from it on the whole than
other people. The classes that shirked the War are the worst--you see
it in Ireland. Every doctor nowadays has got to be a bit of a mental
pathologist. As I say, you can hardly take anything for granted, and
if you want detective stories that are not childish fantasy you'll
have to invent a new kind. Better try your hand, Dick."
"Not I. I'm a lover
of sober facts."
"But, hang it, man,
the facts are no longer sober. I could tell you--" He paused and
I was expecting a yarn, but he changed his mind.
"Take all this
chatter about psycho-analysis. There's nothing very new in the
doctrine, but people are beginning to work it out into details, and
making considerable asses of themselves in the process. It's an awful
thing when a scientific truth becomes the quarry of the half-baked.
But as I say, the fact of the subconscious self is as certain as the
existence of lungs and arteries."
"I don't believe that
Dick has any subconscious self," said Mary.
"Oh yes, he has.
Only, people who have led his kind of life have their ordinary self
so well managed and disciplined--their wits so much about them, as
the phrase goes--that the subconscious rarely gets a show. But I bet
if Dick took to thinking about his soul, which he never does, he
would find some queer corners. Take my own case." He turned
towards me so that I had a full view of his candid eyes and hungry
cheek-bones which looked prodigious in the firelight. "I belong
more or less to the same totem as you, but I've long been aware that
I possessed a most curious kind of subconsciousness. I've a good
memory and fair powers of observation, but they're nothing to those
of my subconscious self. Take any daily incident. I see and hear,
say, about a twentieth part of the details and remember about a
hundredth part--that is, assuming that there is nothing special to
stimulate my interest. But my subconscious self sees and hears
practically everything, and remembers most of it. Only I can't use
the memory, for I don't know that I've got it, and can't call it into
being when I wish. But every now and then something happens to turn
on the tap of the subconscious, and a thin trickle comes through. I
find myself sometimes remembering names I was never aware of having
heard, and little incidents and details I had never consciously
noticed. Imagination, you will say; but it isn't, for everything that
that inner memory provides is exactly true. I've tested it. If I
could only find some way of tapping it at will, I should be an
uncommonly efficient fellow. Incidentally I should become the first
scientist of the age, for the trouble with investigation and
experiment is that the ordinary brain does not observe sufficiently
keenly or remember the data sufficiently accurately."
"That's interesting,"
I said. "I'm not at all certain I haven't noticed the same thing
in myself. But what has that to do with the madness that you say is
infecting the world?"
"Simply this. The
barriers between the conscious and the subconscious have always been
pretty stiff in the average man. But now with the general loosening
of screws they are growing shaky and the two worlds are getting
mixed. It is like two separate tanks of fluid, where the containing
wall has worn into holes, and one is percolating into the other. The
result is confusion, and, if the fluids are of a certain character,
explosions. That is why I say that you can't any longer take the
clear psychology of most civilised human beings for granted.
Something is welling up from primeval deeps to muddy it."
"I don't object to
that," I said. "We've overdone civilisation, and personally
I'm all for a little barbarism. I want a simpler world."
"Then you won't get
it," said Greenslade. He had become very serious now, and was
looking towards Mary as he talked. "The civilised is far simpler
than the primeval. All history has been an effort to make
definitions, clear rules of thought, clear rules of conduct, solid
sanctions, by which we can conduct our life. These are the work of
the conscious self. The subconscious is an elementary and lawless
thing. If it intrudes on life two results must follow. There will be
a weakening of the power of reasoning, which after all is the thing
that brings men nearest to the Almighty. And there will be a failure
of nerve."
I got up to get a light,
for I was beginning to feel depressed by the doctor's diagnosis of
our times. I don't know whether he was altogether serious, for he
presently started on fishing, which was one of his many hobbies.
There was very fair dry-fly fishing to be had in our little river,
but I had taken a deer-forest with Archie Roylance for the season,
and Greenslade was coming up with me to try his hand at salmon. There
had been no sea-trout the year before in the West Highlands, and we
fell to discussing the cause. He was ready with a dozen theories, and
we forgot about the psychology of mankind in investigating the
uncanny psychology of fish. After that Mary sang to us, for I
considered any evening a failure without that, and at half-past ten
the doctor got into his old ulster and departed.
As I smoked my last pipe I
found my thoughts going over Greenslade's talk. I had found a snug
harbour, but how yeasty the waters seemed to be outside the bar and
how erratic the tides! I wondered if it wasn't shirking to be so
comfortable in a comfortless world. Then I reflected that I was owed
a little peace, for I had had a roughish life. But Mary's words kept
coming back to me about "walking delicately." I considered
that my present conduct filled that bill, for I was mighty thankful
for my mercies and in no way inclined to tempt Providence by
complacency.
Going up to bed, I noticed
my neglected letters on the hall table. I turned them over and saw
that they were mostly bills and receipts or tradesmen's circulars.
But there was one addressed in a handwriting that I knew, and as I
looked at it I experienced a sudden sinking of the heart. It was from
Lord Artinswell--Sir Walter Bullivant, as was--who had now retired
from the Foreign Office, and was living at his place on the Kennet.
He and I occasionally corresponded about farming and fishing, but I
had a premonition that this was something different. I waited for a
second or two before I opened it.
"MY DEAR DICK,
"This note is in the
nature of a warning. In the next day or two you will be asked, nay
pressed, to undertake a troublesome piece of business. I am not
responsible for the request, but I know of it. If you consent, it
will mean the end for a time of your happy vegetable life. I don't
want to influence you one way or another; I only give you notice of
what is coming in order that you may adjust your mind and not be
taken by surprise. My love to Mary and the son.
"Yours ever,
"A."
That was all. I had lost
my trepidation and felt very angry. Why couldn't the fools let me
alone? As I went upstairs I vowed that not all the cajolery in the
world would make me budge an inch from the path I had set myself. I
had done enough for the public service and other people's interests,
and it was jolly well time that I should be allowed to attend to my
own.