This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler
ROSE AND ROSE
BY E. V. LUCAS
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
First Published
September 15th, 1921
Second Edition
1921
ROSE AND ROSE
Fifty years ago, when I was a young medical student, I was in the habit of spending as many week-ends as possible at home with my father, to whose practice I was one day to succeed.
On a certain Saturday the only other occupants of the railway compartment were an artist and his wife. I knew him to be an artist from certain scraps of his conversation that I overheard, but I should have guessed it also on the evidence of his hands and dress. I don’t mean that he wore a black velvet tam-o’-shanter and trousers tight at the ankles, as in plays; but his hands were eloquent, and there was a general careless ease about his tweeds that suggested the antipodes of any commercial or anxious calling.
After a while he turned to me and asked if I knew the town of Lowcester.
I said that I had lived in the neighbourhood—at Bullingham, five miles away—all my life.
“We are going to spend a few days at the Crown at Lowcester,” he said, “looking about to try and find a house.”
“There’s a very good house at Bullingham,” I said: “just empty. Jolly garden too. As a matter of fact it adjoins ours. My father’s the doctor.”
“Next door to the doctor,” said the lady, speaking now for the first time. “That would be a great convenience.”
One result of this chance meeting was that they took the house and we became friends; another was the general shaping of my life; and a third is this narrative, the fruit of an old man’s egoism and leisure.
I don’t put my own case as an example to the medical profession, but you can’t deny there is a kind of fitness in it: it is surely more proper than not that the doctor who presides at the birth of a child should continue to take an interest in that child throughout its life. Being born is, after all, something of an event, and he who assists in that adventure and helps to introduce a new soul (not to mention a new body) to this already overcrowded and over-complicated planet of ours, ought to be counted as something a little more important than a jobbing gardener, say, or any other useful ally that the householder calls in. For no matter how mechanical his services, he is also an instrument of destiny.
None the less, if accoucheurs were expected to follow the fortunes of every new arrival from the cradle to the grave one of two things would happen: either the medical profession would disappear for want of recruits, or home life (with the addition of the semi-parental doctor intervening between father and mother) would become more difficult than it already is. Perhaps then it is as well that the man-with-the-black-bag remains the piano-tuner that he more or less appears to be. But I shall continue to believe that so tremendous an affair as a birth should carry more fatefulness with it; although for the well-being of patients I can see that it is better that doctors should be machines rather than sympathetic temperaments. Good Heavens! if we were not so mechanical into what sentimental morasses should we land ourselves!
All this, however, is more or less irrelevant and too much concerned with myself. But you will find that preoccupation, I fear, throughout this story, such as it is. I commenced author, you see, at a time of life when it is not easy to keep to the point or exclude garrulity. When one does not take to writing until one is over seventy—I shall be seventy-one this year, 1920—readers must expect a certain want of business-like adroitness. Had you known me in the days when I was in practice, before I was established on the shelf, you would have found me, I hope, direct and forcible and relevant enough. The stethoscope was mightier than the pen.
Still, there is more relevance than perhaps you would think, for I am coming to a case where the doctor and the newly-born established an intimacy that was destined to grow and to endure through life. For, as it chanced, my father died very soon after I was qualified, and when our new neighbours, the Allinsons, became parents, it was I who was called in to assist. I was then twenty-seven. Circumstances of personal friendship and contiguity alone might have promoted a closer association than is customary between the babe and the intermediary; but the controlling factors were the death of the mother, after which many of the decisions which a mother would have to make devolved on me; and Rose’s delicate little body, which caused her during her early years to need fairly constant watching. The result was that until a certain unexpected event happened she moved about almost exclusively between her father’s house and mine, and was equally at home in both. But even with such a beginning it never crossed my mind that the strands of our fate were to be so interwoven.
Rose’s father was a landscape painter of rather more than independent means: sufficient at any rate to make it possible for him to seek loveliness in no matter how distant a land. He had sketches which he had made all over Europe, in Morocco, in Egypt, in Japan. But France was his favourite hunting ground, partly, I think, because he liked the comments of the French peasants who stood behind his easel better than those of any other critic.
Artists, even when they are poor, are enviable men. They live by enjoyment—their work is fun—for even if the unequal struggle to persuade pigments to reproduce nature fills them with despair, they are still occupied with beauty, still seeing only what they want to see, and remote from squalor and sordidness and the ills of life.
Theodore Allinson took the fullest advantage of his artistic temperament and his private fortune. The one enabled him to ignore whatever was unpleasing, and the other to fulfil every wandering caprice. It was all in keeping with such a man’s destiny that he should have as a next-door neighbour an ordinary trustworthy fellow like myself, who could be depended upon to keep an eye on his motherless infant when he was absent. Or, for that matter, when he was present too. He would have taken it as a very cruel injustice on the part of the gods if I had moved to any other part of the kingdom—as probably any decently ambitious young man in my position would have done. How he would have raised his clenched fists to Heaven and railed against fate! But, luckily for him, I could eat the lotus too.
My lotus-eating, however, would have been only half as delightful if Allinson were not my neighbour and his small daughter my protegée. For he was easy and amusing and full of whimsical fancies, with a very solid foundation of culture beneath all, and his little girl was a continual joy.
She had taken to me at once, or at any rate had taken to my watch—watches having always been useful links between infantile patients and their medical men. Mine was a gold repeater, very satisfying to immature gums and surprising and amusing to the ear. I still have it, and sophisticated though the world has grown, and mechanically melodious with gramophone and piano-player, it still chimes for the young with all its old allurement.
As Rose developed, the function of the repeater as a mediator decreased in importance, and she and I took to more ordinary means of communicating our sympathy; but the watch laid the foundations and laid them truly.
It is extraordinary what a small child’s tongue can do with an honest English name. Every one has had experience of this fantastic adaptive gift, but none could be more curious than my own. My name is Greville—Julius Greville, M.D., if you please—and if there is a sound less like Greville than “Dombeen” I should like to be told of it; but Dombeen was Rose’s translation of what she so often heard her father call me, and Dombeen I have remained to her. Of all the music in the world none was more sweet to me than her cool clear voice calling “Dombeen! Dombeen!”
Our gardens were separated only by an old fruit wall with a gate in it, both sides of the gate being equally Rose’s domain; and I used to rejoice when on returning from my rounds I saw her dainty proud little head among the fruit bushes.
