‘In the name of God,’ Con cried, his moustache bristling along the dashboard. ‘I’m wastin’ juice. What’s happened? Am I short circuited or what?’
‘It’s the button, father,’ Mary told him calmly. She took her little finger-nail and edged it out. The racket ceased.
‘Ah! that’s better,’ Con sighed. ‘How are you, Manson, my boy? How d’you like the old car now? I’ve lengthened her a good two feet. Isn’t she grand? Mind you there’s still a little bother with the gear-box. We didn’t quite take the hill in our stride, as ye might say!’
‘We only stuck a few minutes, father,’ interposed Mary.
‘Ah! never mind,’ said Con. ‘I’ll soon have that right when I strip her again. How are ye, Mrs Manson! Here we all are to wish ye a merry Christmas and take our tea off ye!’
‘Come in, Con,’ Christine smiled. ‘I like your gloves!’
‘Christmas present from the wife,’ Con answered admiring the flapping gauntlets. ‘Army Surplus. Would ye believe they were still dishin’ them out! Ah! what’s gone wrong with this door?’
Unable to open the door he threw his long legs over it, climbed out, helped the children and his wife from the back, surveyed the car – fondly removing a lump of mud from the windscreen – then tore himself away to follow the others to Vale View.
They had a cheerful tea party. Con was in high spirits, full of his creation. ‘ You’ll not know her when she has a lick of paint.’ Mrs Boland abstractedly drank six cups of strong black tea. The children began upon the chocolate biscuits and ended with a fight for the last piece of bread. They cleared every plate upon the table.
After tea while Mary had gone to wash the dishes – she insisted that Christine looked tired – Andrew detached the baby from Mrs Boland and played with it on the hearthrug before the fire. It was the fattest baby he had ever seen, a Rubens infant, with enormous solemn eyes and pads of plumpness upon its limbs. It tried repeatedly to poke a finger into his eye. Every time it failed a look of solemn wonder came upon its face. Christine sat with her hands in her lap, doing nothing. Watching him playing with the baby.
But Con and his family could not stay long. Outside the light was fading and Con, worried about his ‘juice’, had doubts which he did not choose to express concerning the functioning of his lamps. When they rose to go he delivered the invitation:
‘Come out and see us start.’
Again Andrew and Christine stood at the gate while Con packed the car with his offspring. After a couple of swings the engine obeyed and Con, with a triumphant nod towards them, pulled on his gauntlets and adjusted his derby to a more rakish tilt. Then he heaved himself proudly into the driving-seat.
At that moment Con’s union broke and the car, with a groan, collapsed. Bearing the entire Boland family the over extended vehicle sank slowly to the ground like some beast of burden perishing from the sheer exhaustion. Before the bedazzled eyes of Andrew and Christine, the wheels splayed outwards. There was the sound of pieces dropping off, a vomit of tools from the locker, then the body of the car came to rest, dismembered, on street level. One minute there was a car and the next a fun-fair gondola. In the forepart was Con clutching the wheel, in the aft part his wife, clutching the baby. Mrs Boland’s mouth had dropped wide open, her dreamy eyes well fixed upon eternity. The stupefaction on Con’s face, at his sudden loss of elevation, was irrestible.
Andrew and Christine gave out a shriek of laughter. Once they began they could not stop. They laughed till they were weak.
‘In the name of God,’ Con said, rubbing his head and picking himself up. Observing that none of the children were hurt, that Mrs Boland remained, pale but undisturbed in her seat, he considered the wreckage, pondering dazedly. ‘Sabotage,’ he declared at last, glaring at the windows opposite as a solution struck him. ‘Some of them devils in the Rows has tampered with her.’ Then his face brightened. He took the helpless Andrew by the arm and pointed with melancholy pride to the crumpled bonnet, beneath which the engine still feebly emitted a few convulsive beats. ‘ See that, Manson! She’s still runnin’.’
Somehow they dragged the remains into the backyard of Vale View. In due course the Boland family went home on foot.
‘What a day!’ Andrew exclaimed when they had secured peace for themselves at last. ‘ I’ll never forget that look on Con’s face as long as I live.’
They were silent for a moment, then, turning to her, he asked:
‘You did enjoy your Christmas?’
She replied oddly:
‘I enjoyed seeing you play with baby Boland.’
He glanced at her.
‘Why?’
She did not look at him. ‘I’ve been trying to tell you all day. Oh, can’t you guess, darling? – I don’t think you’re such a smart physician after all.’
Chapter Thirteen
Spring once more. And early summer. The garden at Vale View was a patch of tender colours which the miners often stopped to admire on their way back from their shift. Chiefly these colours came from flowering shrubs which Christine had planted the previous autumn, for now Andrew would allow her to do no manual work at all.
‘You’ve made the place!’ he told her, with authority. ‘Now sit in it.’
Her favourite seat was at the end of the little glen where, beside a tiny water-splash, she could hear the soothing converse of the stream. An overhanging willow offered protection from the rows of houses above. It was the difficulty with the garden of Vale View that they were completely overlooked. They had only to sit outside the porch for all the front windows of the Rows to be tenanted and the murmur to go round: ‘Eh! There’s nice! Come an’ ’ave a look, Fan-ee! Doctor and his missis are havin’ bit of sun, like!’ Once indeed, in their early days, when Andrew slipped his arm round Christine’s waist as they stretched by the bank of the stream, he had seen the gleam of focused glass from old Glyn Joseph’s parlour. ‘ Damn it!’ Andrew had realised hotly. ‘The old dog – he’s got his telescope on us!’
But beneath the willow they were completely screened and here Andrew defined his policy.
‘You see, Chris’ – fidgeting with his thermometer; it had just occurred to him in a passion of precaution to take her temperature – ‘ we’ve got to keep calm. It’s not as if we were – oh! well – ordinary people. After all you’re a doctor’s wife and I’m – I’m a doctor. I’ve seen this happen hundreds, at least scores of times before. It’s a very ordinary affair. A phenomenon of nature, survival of the race, all that sort of thing, see! Now don’t misunderstand me, darling, it’s wonderful for us, of course. The fact is I’d begun to ask myself if you weren’t too slight, too much of a kid ever to – oh well, I’m delighted. But we’re not going to get sentimental. Slushy I mean. No, no! Let’s leave that sort of thing to Mr and Mrs Smith. It would be rather idiotic, wouldn’t it, for me, a doctor, to start – oh, say to start mooning over those little things you’re knitting or crocheting, or whatever it is. No! I just look at them and grunt: “Hope they’ll be warm enough!” And all this junk about what colour of eyes she – er – it, will have and what sort of rosy future we’ll give her – that’s right off the map!’ He paused, frowning, then gradually a reflective smile broke over his face. ‘ I say, though, Chris! I wonder if it will be a girl!’
She laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks. She laughed so hard that he sat up, concerned.
‘Now stop it, Chris! You’ll – you might bring on something.’
‘Oh, my dear.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘As a sentimental idealist I adore you. As a hard-boiled cynic – well! – I wouldn’t have you in the house!’
He did not quite know what she meant. But he knew he was being scientific and restrained. In the afternoons when he felt she ought to have some exercise he took her for walks in the Public Park, climbing up the uplands being severely forbidden. In the Park they strolled about, listened to the band, watched the miners’ children who came to picnic there with bottles of liquorice water and sherbet sucke
rs.
Early one May morning as they lay in bed he became aware, through his light sleep, of a faint movement. He awoke, again conscious of that gentle thrusting, the first movement of the child within Christine. He held himself rigid, scarcely daring to believe, suffocated by a rush of feeling, of ecstasy. Oh, hell! he thought a moment later, perhaps I’m just a Smith after all. I suppose that’s why they make the rule a medico can’t attend his own wife.
The following week he felt it time to speak to Doctor Llewellyn whom from the outset they had both decided must undertake the case. Llewellyn, when Andrew rang him, was pleased and flattered. He came down at once, made a preliminary examination. Then chatted to Andrew in the sitting-room.
‘I’m glad to help you, Manson,’ accepting a cigarette. ‘ I always felt you didn’t like me enough to ask me to do this for you. Believe me, I’ll do my best. By the way, it’s pretty stifling in Aberalaw at present. Don’t you think your little missus ought to have a change of air while she can?’
‘What’s happening to me?’ Andrew asked himself when Llewellyn had gone. ‘I like that man! He was decent, damned decent. He’s got sympathy and tact. He’s wizard at his work. And twelve months ago I was trying to cut his throat. I’m just a stiff, jealous, clumsy Highland stot!’
Christine did not wish to go away but he was gently insistent.
‘I know you don’t want to leave me, Chris! But it’s for the best. We’ve got to think of – oh! everything. Would you rather have the seaside or maybe you’d like to go up North to your aunt. Dash it all, I can afford to send you, Chris. We’re pretty well off now!’
They had paid off the Glen Endowment and the last of the furniture instalments and now they had nearly one hundred pounds saved in the bank. But she was not thinking of this when, pressing his hand, she answered steadily:
‘Yes! We’re pretty well off, Andrew.’
Since she must go, she decided to visit her aunt in Bridlington, and a week later he saw her off at the Upper Station with a long hug and a basket of fruit to sustain her on the journey.
He missed her more than he could have believed, their comradeship had become such a part of his life. Their talks, discussions, squabbles, their silences together, the way in which he would call to her whenever he entered the house and wait, his ear cocked, for her cheery answer – he came to see how much these meant to him. Without her, their bedroom became a strange room in an hotel. His meals, conscientiously served by Jenny according to the programme written out by Christine, were arid snatches behind a propped-up book.
Wandering round the garden she had made, he was struck, suddenly, by the dilapidated condition of the bridge. It offended him, seemed an insult to his absent Christine. He had several times spoken to the Committee about this, telling them the bridge was falling to pieces, but they were always hard to move when it came to repairing the assistants’ houses. Now, however, in an access of sentiment he rang up the office and pressed the point strenuously. Owen had gone away upon a few days’ leave but the clerk assured Andrew that the matter had already been passed by the Committee and referred to Richards the builder. It was only because Richards was busy with another contract that the work had not been put in hand.
In the evenings he betook himself to Boland, twice to the Vaughans who made him remain for bridge and once, greatly to his surprise, he found himself playing golf with Llewellyn. He wrote letters to Hamson and to Denny who had at last left Drineffy and was journeying to Tampico, as the surgeon of a tanker. His correspondence with Christine was a model of illuminating restraint. But he sought distraction, chiefly, in his work.
His clinical examinations at the anthracite sinkings were, by this time, well under way. He could not hasten them since, apart from the demands of his own patients, his opportunity for examining the men came as they went to the minehead baths at the end of the shift and it was impossible to keep them hanging about for any length of time when they wanted to get home for their dinners. He got through on an average two examinations a day, yet already the results were adding further to his excitement. He saw, without jumping to any immediate conclusion, that the incidence of pulmonary trouble amongst the anthracite workers was positively in excess of that existing in the other underground workers in the coal mines.
Though he distrusted text-books, in self-defence, since he had no wish to find afterwards that he had merely put his feet in footprints made by others, he went through the literature on the subject. Its paucity astounded him. Few investigators seemed to have concerned themselves greatly with the pulmonary occupational diseases. Zenker had introduced a high-sounding term, pneumonokoniosis, embracing three forms of fibrosis of the lung due to dust inhalation. Anthracosis, of course, the black infiltration of the lungs met with in coal miners had long been known and was held by Goldman in Germany and Trotter in England to be harmless. There were a few treatises on the prevalence of lung trouble in makers of mill-stones, particularly the French mill-stones, and in knife and axe grinders – ‘grinder’s rot’ – and stone cutters. There was evidence, mostly conflicting, from South Africa upon that red rag of Rand labour troubles, gold miners’ phthisis, which was undoubtedly due to dust inhalation. It was recorded also that workers in flax and in cotton and grain shovellers were subject to chronic changes in the lungs. But beyond that nothing!
Andrew drew back from his reading with excitement in his eyes. He felt himself upon the track of something definitely unexplored. He thought of the vast numbers of underground workers in the great anthracite mines, the looseness of the legislation upon the disabilities from which they suffered, the enormous social importance of this line of investigation. What a chance, what a wonderful chance! A cold sweat broke over him at the sudden thought that someone might forestall him. But he thrust this from him. Striding up and down the sitting-room before the dead fire long after midnight, he suddenly seized Christine’s photograph from the mantelshelf.
‘Chris! I really believe I’m going to do something!’
In the card-index he bought for the purpose, he carefully began to classify the results of his examinations. Though he never considered this, his clinical skill was now quite brilliant. There, in the changing room the men stood before him, stripped to the waist, and with his fingers, his stethoscope, he plumbed uncannily the hidden pathology of those living lungs: a fibroid spot here, the next an emphysema, then a chronic bronchitis – deprecatingly admitted as ‘a bit of a cough’. Carefully he localised the lesions upon the diagrams printed on the back of every card.
At the same time he took sputum samples from each man and, working till two and three in the morning at Denny’s microscope, tabulated his finding on the cards. He found that most of these samples of mucopus – locally described by the men as ‘white-spit’ – contained bright angular particles of silica. He was amazed at the number of alveolar cells present, at the frequency with which he came upon the tubercle bacillus. But it was the presence, almost constant, of crystalline silicon, in the alveolar cells, the phagocytes, everywhere, which riveted his attention. He could not escape the thrilling idea that the changes in the lungs, perhaps even the coincident infections, were fundamentally dependent on this factor.
This was the extent of his advance when Christine returned at the end of June and flung her arms round his neck.
‘It’s so good to be back. Yes, I enjoyed myself, but oh! I don’t know – and you look pale, darling! I don’t believe Jenny’s been feeding you!’
Her holiday had done her good, she was well and her cheeks had a fine bloom upon them. But she was concerned about him, his lack of appetite, his perpetual fumbling for a cigarette.
She asked him seriously.
‘How long is this special work going to take?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was the day after her return, a wet day, and he was unexpectedly moody. ‘It might take a year, it might take five.’
‘Well, listen to me. I’m not reforming you, one in the family is enough, but don’t you think if sin
ce it’s going on so long as that you’ll have to work systematically, keep regular hours, not stay up late and kill yourself!’
‘There’s nothing the matter with me.’
But in some things she had a peculiar insistence. She got Jenny to scrub out the floor of the Lab., brought in an armchair and a rug. It was a room cool on these hot nights and the pine boards had a sweet resinous smell which mingled with the pungent ethereal scent of the reagents he used. Here she would sit, sewing and knitting while he worked at the table. Bent over the microscope he quite forgot about her, but she was there, and at eleven o’clock every night she got up.
‘Time for bed!’
‘Oh, I say –’ Blinking at her near-sightedly over the eyepiece. ‘You go up, Chris! I’ll follow you in a minute.’
‘Andrew Manson, if you think I’m going up to bed alone, in my condition –’
This last phrase had become a comic by-word in the household. They both used it, indiscriminately, facetiously, as a clincher to all their arguments. He could not resist it. With a laugh he would rise, stretch himself, swing round his lenses, put the slides away.
Towards the end of July a sharp outbreak of chicken pox made him busy in the practice, and on the 3rd of August he had an especially heavy list which kept him out from morning surgery until well after three o’clock. As he came up the road, tired, ready for that combination of lunch and tea which would be his meal, he saw Doctor Llewellyn’s car at the gate of Vale View.
The implication of that static object caused him to start suddenly, and to hasten, his heart beating rapidly with anticipation, towards his house. He ran up the porch steps, threw open the front door and there, in the hall, he found Llewellyn. Gazing at the other man with nervous eagerness he stammered:
‘Hello, Llewellyn. I – I didn’t expect to see you here so soon.’
‘No,’ Llewellyn answered.
Andrew smiled. ‘Well?’ In his excitement he could find no better words but the question in his bright face was plain enough.