Gentian Hill Page 9

  There were plenty of the other sort about. For one malingerer, he’d say, you’d meet fifty who carried pain like a banner, and for one skinflint there were a dozen who’d give you their last penny and never let you know there wasn’t a pocketful where that one came from. But he liked to catch ’em young, and batter their minds and hearts wide open with whatever tool came readiest to his hand. He had caught Stella very young, and was mercilessly beating her mind into shape with all possible speed, before domesticity submerged her altogether. But her heart he tried to touch not at all, because for some reason or other she had been born with a wounded heart. In his opinion it was balm that it needed, not a hammer.

  Stella parted with Sol at the doctor’s gate, and with Daniel leaping around her, ran up the paved path between the bushes of rosemary and lavender to the open front door. Here she paused, gripping Daniel’s collar.

  "Come in, can’t you," shouted the doctor impatiently from the shadows within. "Don’t dawdle. If you think that mind of yours is already sufficiently well informed to permit of dawdling upon the threshold of education, then say so, and I’ll waste no further time upon you."

  "I’ve got Daniel," interrupted Stella, who was no more afraid of the doctor than she was of Father Sprigg, for if the rage of the one was as invigorating as a sou’wester, the irritation of the other had the bracing quality of one of his own tonics. "I don’t know what to do with him."

  "What in the name of thunder made you bring that great gangling ninny of a beast to a lesson on the death of Socrates?"

  "I had to. I promised."

  "Then bring him in and tie him to the table leg."

  Stella towed Daniel over the scrupulously scrubbed flags of the dark little hall to the open door of Dr. Crane’s study. Only in the worst weather were any of his doors shut; his passion for hospitality was only equaled by his passion for fresh air. The study was as clean as the hall, but mercifully not quite so dark and bare. It was stone-flagged, the walls completely lined with books. An old table of Spanish chestnut stood in the center of it, with two beautifully carved chairs pulled up on either side. The one with its back to the window, the doctor’s, had no cushion, but the one facing the light was comfortably supplied with a couple of them. Patients and pupils, and many who came to consult the doctor about problems other than physical or intellectual, sat in this chair. While they poured their troubles into the comforting depth of his comprehending silence, he watched their faces in the soft light that shone through the spotless muslin curtains in the window, and learned more from the shadows around the eyes and the play of expression about the mouth than he did from the How of confused words. Yet he listened attentively while he watched, quick to detect alike the hesitant truth and the glib evasion, and though he was impatient by nature, he never interrupted until the last word had been uttered. He knew how a flow of words, like a flow of blood, can wash away poison.

  The room had an Adams mantelpiece and a basket grate filled with firecones. Pipes, tobacco jars, and medicine bottles were piled on the mantelpiece, and over it hung an engraving of one of the doctor’s three heroes, Lord Nelson, with whom he had once been shipmates. His writing desk was in one corner of the room and in another corner was a big locked cupboard containing his drugs, bandages, and splints. An engraving of Shakespeare and another of Socrates, his other two heroes, hung over these. He had no surgery, he lived, studied, taught and healed in this room, but on the other side of the hall was a dining parlor that served as a waiting room for his patients. He never dined in it unless he had guests, he ate at his study table surrounded by his books, and studied while he ate. His hunger for knowledge gave him no rest, it was both his bane and his joy.

  He glanced up from the great book he was reading when Stella entered, pointed to the chair opposite, and was at once engrossed again. She tied Daniel to the table leg and sat down to wait patiently till he got to the end of the paragraph. "Never stop in the middle of a paragraph," he had said to her once, "for any reason whatever except the dire need of another or your own sudden death. Finish one thing as completely as possible before turning your attention to the next, even though the next be invasion by the enemy, and allow other people to do the same. A divided allegiance leads to woolly-mindedness, and that to senility of the intellect at an unnecessarily early age."

  While he read to the end of the paragraph, Stella sat still and upright in her chair and studied him lovingly. She could not see his face very clearly, sitting with his back to the light as he was, but the window behind him threw his rugged old head and the huge breadth of his shoulders into splendid relief. Though he was nearly seventy, his rough iron-gray hair was still thick and plentiful, receding only on the temples, and he wore it neatly brushed back and tied in a queue on the nape of his neck. The hot suns of his seafaring life had burned his skin mahogany color, and the endurance of many things had seamed it as though it had been gouged with a bradawl. He had a huge domed forehead, a

  large ugly broken nose twisted slightly to the right, and dark penetrating eyes beneath bushy white eyebrows. His jaw was aggressive but his mouth was mobile and sensitive. He was always scrupulously clean-shaven, and his large yet delicate hands well tended. His well-cut shabby clothes were well brushed, and the voluminous stock worn around his throat was snowy white.

  He had a few little vanities: an eyeglass on a watered silk ribbon, a bunch of fine old seals attached to his watch chain, and a fresh flower always in his buttonhole. When he sat, his large head and broad shoulders and long arms gave the impression that he was an unusually tall man, but when he stood he was seen to be very short. He was bow-legged to the point of deformity, and slightly hunchbacked. As a young man he must have been painfully grotesque, but as an old man his very infirmities seemed to add to his impressiveness, just as the steady grandeur of his face showed that here was a man who had won the battle against enormous odds.

  He reached the end of the paragraph, shut the book, and looked up to meet the direct and loving glance of the child opposite. Some, meeting his eyes, dropped theirs. Others, aware of the revealing light upon their faces, stirred uneasily. Stella did neither. She had nothing to hide. The light seemed to reflect back from the still, lovely little face as from the surface of some pool pellucid to its depths.

  The old man’s face twisted suddenly. God, how he loved the child! To keep her just as she was, unsullied and happy, he would have given his surgeon’s skilled right hand. Happy? But she was not happy. Though she was smiling now, both her dimples showing, she was not the same Stella that she had been when she came to him last. There were no candles burning in her eyes. There was a new maturity in the thin brown face, a wistfulness about the mouth that had not been there before. Some new experience had come to her. She had been told of some past sorrow, or met some present adversity in the person of another, and being what she was, she had lived in that past or been that other. He said nothing. It was not his way to win confidence by questioning, but only by the unspoken invitation of his vast compassion. But he abruptly abandoned any idea of saying anything whatever about the death of Socrates. He had been taking her gently through carefully chosen passages of the Phaedo, but he would not tell her today of the death of that "most noble, meek, and excellent man." Instead he shut the open book in front of him, screwed in his eyeglass, and looked at her comically. "Like a history lesson in the gig, Stella?"

  Delight rippled over Stella’s face. Now and then, for a great treat, if he had a patient to visit at a distance or some business to transact in one of the neighboring villages, he would take her with him, and as they drove along, he would talk of the history of this lovely land and tell her the legends connected with the houses, the churches, wells, and bridges that they passed. He was a born story-teller. So was Stella. It was their mutual love for story-telling that had first made her his pupil.

  4

  Three years before, leaving the farm one evening after a visit to Mother Sprigg, who had been taken with a sudden and alarming colic, h
e found the little Stella standing at the gate of the flower garden gazing up at the stars. It was already cold and dark, and had the house not been in a turmoil, she would doubtless have been sent to bed an hour ago. But she stood there with her cloak held loosely about her, apparently neither lonely nor afraid, completely absorbed in the glory above her. "There’s the Great Bear," she informed him. "I’ve made up a story about him. Shall I tell it to you?"

  He expressed eagerness to hear the story and she told him a gay little tale that delighted him. Then she pointed to another glorious light and asked, "What’s that one?"

  "That’s the hunter Orion," said the doctor. "The Great Bear keeps an eye on him, you see, for fear of being attacked. Those are Castor and Pollux. They were two brothers famous for their love. Zeus, to make their memory immortal, placed them among the stars."

  "Are there lots of people and animals in the sky?" she asked.

  "A great many," he replied. "Come and see me one of these days and I will read you a story about a man called Trygaeus who made an expedition to heaven and found that we all become stars when we die."

  Then he had told her to run in out of the cold, and had gone home and thought no more about it. But next day, when he had just got home from his rounds and was sitting down to hot tea and buttered toast in his study, there was a knock at the door. Answering it, he had found Stella and Hodge on the doorstep, her red cloak shining like a poppy in the dusk.

  “Got a pain" he inquired.

  "No," said Stella. "I have come to hear about Trygaeus." She had remembered the name perfectly correctly. Dr. Crane put on his eyeglass and had a good look at her. He had always been fond of her, but now he perceived her to be a lady of quality.

  "Who brought you?" he asked.

  "Hodge," said Stella.

  "But you’ve not been here before. How did you find my house?"

  "I asked the way at a cottage," said Stella. "Now, please, may I come in and hear about Trygaeus?"

  He sent his servant, Tom Pearse, to tell them at the farm that she was safe, 'brought her and Hodge into the candle-lit study, and fed them on tea and buttered toast. They both ate daintily, spoke little, but were quite at home. Afterwards he pulled his two chairs close to the fire, and with Hodge at their feet and the "Pax" of Aristophanes open on his knee, he and Stella made the journey with Trygaeus to heaven and back again, having there a good many adventures with the shining spirits that perhaps owed more to the imagination of Dr. Crane than to that of Aristophanes. The encounter with those seven little girls, the Pleiades, for instance, was certainly not in the book. Stella laughed as the story unfolded, and when it was over she had a good many questions to ask. "Who is the moon?" was one of them.

  "The identity of the moon has never been quite certainly established," Dr. Crane told her seriously. "The people of India say he is a very noble hare, who lived such an exemplary life upon earth that when translated to the sky he became a very great light indeed. The Eskimos say the moon is a girl; we say he is a man, an old man carrying a bundle of sticks."

  "I think he is a boy," said Stella. "A boy not much bigger than me, carrying a bag full of toys on his back. I wish he’d come down and play with me. Do the star people ever come down to the earth again?"

  "About that, too, I lack certain information," he told her. "But I should think it quite possible." Then he resettled his eyeglass, looking at her thoughtfully. From her last remark he guessed her to be a lonely child. Mother Sprigg had told him that Stella did not get on very well with the village children, and that an attempt to send her to the village dame’s school had not been successful and had had to be abandoned. She learned too quickly and easily, and the other children had teased her because of it.

  "That’s another language, not English," said Stella, laying a slim brown hand on the book still open on the doctor’s knee. "What is it?"

  "Greek," replied the doctor.

  "Say a bit," commanded Stella.

  He was a passionate classical scholar and he said a bit as perfectly as he could.

  "I like that language," Stella told him. "Please, sir, will you teach it to me?"

  He took her home that night and demanded of Mother Sprigg that Stella become his pupil. He was so determined that Mother Sprigg, still feeling weak after the colic, was unable to argue with him and gave in without having given the plan her mature consideration, a circumstance which she afterward regretted.

  But Stella and Dr. Crane never had any regrets. From that day on, there began between them one of the most perfect of human relationships, that of teacher and disciple from whose mutual love of learning has blossomed a love for each other as purged of selfishness and passion as any love can be; for they demand nothing of each other, the teacher and disciple, except a mutual devotion to the mutual goal.

  CHAPTER VI

  1

  Stella put on her cloak again, and untied Daniel from the table leg, while Dr. Crane went to tell Tom Pearse to put in the horse. Ten minutes later, having told old Sol at the forge to expect Stella home when he saw her, they were trotting through the village, bound for the sea. Stella’s face was pink with pleasure. Though she lived only a few miles from it, she seldom saw the sea except in the distance. The market town to which she was taken occasionally was inland, and Father and Mother Sprigg had no time for pleasure trips. They were so much a part of the beauty that surrounded them that they never regarded it objectively. The distant roar of the sea on stormy nights, the sea wind blowing in at their open windows, was as much a part of them as the breath of their bodies, but to go to the sea just to look at the sea would have seemed to them sheer idiocy. But Stella had been born with the gift of wonder, and the fact that something was a part of herself did not prevent her from contemplating it with awe and delight. There were times when she seemed to herself the most astonishing thing of all.

  Accustomed as she was to the slow-moving pack horses and wagons of the farm, Dr. Crane’s gig seemed to Stella near Hying. The seat, suspended from curved springs by leather braces between the two great wheels, swung excitingly as Aesculapius, the doctor’s fine gray gelding, went at a brisk pace. The doctor, in a many-caped brown overcoat, with his tall beaver hat cocked at any angle and his eyeglass in place, drove well; and Stella, sitting very upright beside him in her scarlet cloak, was delightedly conscious of being part of a very smart turnout indeed. Daniel, on the floor between them, his nose just poking out from beneath the plaid rug that covered their knees, rent the air with his shrill whimpering of excitement and scourged their legs with his tail, but otherwise behaved well. Hodge, had he been with them, would have kept perfectly still and not made a sound, but then Hodge was a gentleman and Daniel was not.

  They passed through the village, the doctor acknowledging the friendly greetings of the villagers with his whip raised to the brim of his hat, and slowed down as they came to the steep rutted lane that led up through Hangman’s Wood, named from the gallows that until only a few years ago had stood at the crossroads not far away. It was really a beautiful wood, oak, ash, and birch all growing thickly together, with beneath them a dense undergrowth of blackberry and hazel bushes, yet it had a sinister reputation and after dark was said to be a haunt of footpads. But today it looked beautiful with the sunlight falling on the gold of the turning oaks, and the slender silver stems of the birches, and the blackberry bushes gemmed with scarlet leaves, and from the safety of the gig Stella could marvel that anyone should ever shun such a lovely place.

  They breasted the hill and were out in the open again, bowling along between green meadows to Smoky. Stella was never allowed to go to Smoky by herself, and the sight of its gold and white cottages, lurching with so abandoned and yet so gay an air in gardens ablaze with dahlias, with the brightly painted inn sign swinging in the wind, thrilled her to the marrow. Here, too, the doctor had his friends. A little old woman, hanging out washing in a cottage garden, smiled at him, and a red-bearded giant of urbane yet disreputable appearance, wearing a seaman’s tr
ousers and tattered shirt and lolling in the doorway of the inn, waved his clay pipe in the doctor’s direction and called out a greeting. This time the doctor took his hat right off to both of them, without a hint of mockery in his deference. "They say Granny Bogan is a witch, but she’s a brave woman," he explained. "And of all the scoundrels of my acquaintance, and I know a good many, George Spratt is the one I’d choose to have with me in a tight place."

  They were driving now very slowly down a lane with high banks crowned with gorse bushes and storm-twisted oaks that arched over their heads, but so steep that down below, between the gray lichened branches, they could see the sea, pale blue and aquamarine, soft as silk, with golden lights upon it. Then the lane took a turn to the left and flattened out a little, taking the curve of the hill, the bank changing into a low stone wall, and the whole stretch of Torbay was spread out below them. Dr. Crane stopped the gig. "Take a good look, Stella," he said gently. "I have sailed from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, but I have never seen any sight as beautiful as this. To my mind, the Bay of Naples can’t touch it, nor the coast of Corsica, nor Crete. Keep still.

  Take a good look."

  The coast swept in a great half-moon about the gleaming sea, from the rocks beyond Torquay to the amethyst colored heights of Berry Head above the ancient port of Brixham. It was so clear today that they could just make out the tall old houses of Brixham climbing the rocky cliff behind the harbor, and the splendid hulls and towering masts of two frigates riding there at anchor, with sails hanging loose to dry. Torquay looked a fairy place that you could have picked up in your hand.