Craik A Life for a Life, Volume 1 (of 3)

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-95864-915-6
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 468 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Excerpt: “I am not, the least in the world which I would fain have explained, only mere friends can never understand the ins and outs of a family. If I offered to assist her in the house, how Penelope would stare Or even in her schools and parish--but that I cannot do. Teaching is to me perfectly intolerable. The moment I have to face two dozen pairs of round eyes, every particle of sense takes flight, and I become the veriest of cowards, ready to sink through the floor. The same, too, in district visiting. What business have I, because I happen to be the clergyman's daughter, to go lifting the latch, and poking about poor people's houses, obliging them to drop me curtseys, and receive civilly my tracts and advice--which they neither read nor follow, and might be none the better for it if they did.”

Autoren/Hrsg.

Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock

Leseproben

CHAPTER III. HIS STORY.
Sept. 30th:—Not a case to set down to-day. This high moorland is your best sanatorium. My “occupation’s gone.” I have every satisfaction in that fact, or in the cause of it; which, cynics might say, a member of my profession would easily manage to prevent, were he a city physician instead of a regimental surgeon. Still, idleness is insupportable to me. I have tried going about among the few villages hard by, but their worst disease is one to which this said regimental surgeon, with nothing but his pay, can apply but small remedy—poverty. To-day I have paced the long, straight lines of the c from the hospital to the bridge, and back again to the hospital—have tried to take a vivid interest in the loungers, the foot-ball players, and the wretched, awkward squad turned, out in never-ending parade. With each hour of the quiet autumn afternoon have I watched the sentinel mount the little stockaded hillock, and startle the camp with the old familiar boom of the great Sebastopol bell. Then, I have shut my hut-door, taken to my books, and studied till my head warned me to stop. The evening post—but only business letters. I rarely have any other. I have no one to write to me—no one to write to. Sometimes I have been driven to wish I had; some one friend with whom it would be possible to talk in pen and ink, on other matters than business. Yet, cui bono? To no friend should I or could I let out my real self; the only thing in the letter that was truly and absolutely me would be the great grim signature: “Max Urquhart.” Were it otherwise—were there any human being to whom I could lay open my whole heart, trust with my whole history;—but no, that were utterly impossible now. No more of this. No more, until the end. That end, which at once solves all difficulties, every year brings nearer. Nearly forty, and a doctor’s life is usually shorter than most men’s. I shall be an old man soon, even if there come none of those sudden chances against which I have of course provided. The end. How and in what manner it is to be done, I am not yet clear. But it shall be done, before my death or after. “Max Urquhart, M.D.” I go on signing my name mechanically, with those two business-like letters after it, and thinking how odd it would be to sign it in any other fashion. How strange,—did any one care to look at my signature in any way except thus, with the two professional letters after it—a common-place signature of business. Equally strange, perhaps, that such a thought as this last should have entered my head, or that I should have taken the trouble, and yielded to the weakness of writing it down. It all springs from idleness—sheer idleness; the very same cause that makes Treherne, whom I have known do duty cheerily for twenty-four hours in the trenches, lounge, smoke, yawn, and play the flute. There—it has stopped. I heard the postman rapping at his hut-door—the young simpleton has got a letter. Suppose, just to pass away the time, I, Max Urquhart, reduced to this lowest ebb of inanity by a paternal government, which has stranded my regiment here, high and dry, but as dreary as Noah on Ararat—were to enliven my solitude, drive away blue devils, by manufacturing for myself an imaginary correspondent? So be it. To begin then at once in the received epistolary form:— “My dear—” My dear—what? “Sir?”—No—not for this once. I wanted a change. “Madam?”—that is formal. Shall I invent a name? When I think of it, how strange it would feel to me to be writing “my dear” before any Christian name. Orphaned early, my only brother long dead, drifting about from land to land till I have almost forgotten my own, which has quite forgotten me—I had not considered it before, but really I do not believe there is a human being living, whom I have a right to call by his or her Christian name, or who would ever think of calling me by mine. “Max,”—I have not heard the sound of it for years. Dear, a pleasant adjective—my, a pronoun of possession, implying that the being spoken of is one’s very own,—one’s sole, sacred, personal property, as with natural selfishness one would wish to hold the thing most precious. My dear;—a satisfactory total. I rather object to “dearest” as a word implying comparison, and therefore never to be used where comparison should not and could not exist. Witness, “dearest mother,” or “dearest wife,” as if a man had a plurality of mothers and wives, out of whom he chose the one he loved best. And, as a general rule, I dislike all ultra expressions of affection set down in ink. I once knew an honest gentleman—blessed with one of the tenderest hearts that ever man had, and which in all his life was only given to one woman; he, his wife told me, had never, even in their courtship days, written to her otherwise than as “My dear Anne,”—ending merely with “Yours faithfully,” or “yours truly.” Faithful—true—what could he write, or she desire more? If my pen wanders to lovers and sweethearts, and moralises over simple sentences in this maundering way, blame not me, dear imaginary correspondent, to whom no name shall be given at all—but blame my friend,—as friends go in this world,—Captain Augustus Treherne. Because, happily, that young fellow’s life was saved at Balaclava, does he intend to invest me with the responsibility of it, with all its scrapes and follies, now and for evermore? Is my clean, sober hut to be fumigated with tobacco and poisoned with brandy-and-water, that a lovesick youth may unburden himself of his sentimental tale? Heaven knows why I listen to it! Probably because telling me keeps the lad out of mischief; also because he is honest, though an ass, and I always had a greater leaning to fools than to knaves. But let me not pretend reasons which make me out more generous than I really am, for the fellow and his love-affair, bore me exceedingly sometimes, and would be quite unendurable anywhere but in this dull camp. I do it from a certain abstract pleasure which I have always taken in dissecting character, constituting myself an amateur demonstrator of spiritual anatomy. An amusing study is, not only the swain, but the goddess. For I found her out, spelled her over satisfactorily, even in that one evening. Treherne little guessed it—he took care never to introduce me—he does not even mention her name, or suspect I know it. Vast precautions against nothing! Does he fear lest Mentor should put in a claim to his Eucharis? You know better, dear. Imaginary Correspondent. Even were I among the list of “marrying men,” this adorable she would never be my choice, would never attract me for an instant. Little as I know about women, I know enough to feel certain that there is a very small residuum of depth, feeling, or originality, in that large handsome physique of hers. Yet she looks good-natured, good-tempered; almost as much so as Treherne himself. “Speak o’ the de’il,” there he comes. Far away down the lines I can catch his eternal “Donna é mobile,”—how I detest that song! No doubt he has been taking to the post his answer to one of those abominably-scented notes that he always drops out of his waistcoat by the merest accident, and glances round to see if I am looking—which I never am. What a young puppy it is! Yet it hangs after one kindly, like a puppy; after me too, who am not the pleasantest fellow in the world. And as it is but young, it may mend, if it falls into no worse company than the present. I have known what it is to be without a friend when one is very inexperienced, reckless, and young. Evening. “To what base uses may we come at last.” It seems perfectly ridiculous to see the use this memorandum-book has come to. Cases forsooth! The few pages of them may as well be torn out, in favour of the new specimens of moral disease which I am driven to study. For instance:— No. 1—Better omit that. No. 2—Augustus Treherne, æt. 22, intermittent fever, verging upon yellow fever occasionally, as to-day. Pulse, very high, tongue, rather foul, especially in speaking of Mr. Colin Granton. Countenance, pale, inclining to livid. A very bad case altogether. Patient enters, whistling like a steam-engine, as furious and as shrill, with a corresponding puff of smoke. I point to the obnoxious vapour. “Beg pardon, Doctor, I always forget. What a tyrant you are!” “Very likely; but there is one thing I never will allow; smoking in my hut. I did not, you know, even in the Crimea.” The lad sat down, sighing like a furnace. “Heigho, Doctor, I wish I were you.” “Do you?” “You always seem so uncommonly comfortable; never want a cigar or anything to quiet your nerves and keep you in good humour. You never get into a scrape of any sort; have neither a mother to lecture you, nor an old governor to bully you.” “Stop there.” “I will then; you need not take me up so sharp. He’s a trump, after all. You know that, so I don’t mind a word or two against him. Just read there.” He threw over one of Sir William’s ultraprosy moral essays—which no doubt the worthy old gentleman flatters himself are, in another line, the very copy of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. I might have smiled at it had I been alone,—or laughed at it were I young enough to sympathise with the modern system of transposing into “the Governor,” the ancient reverend name of “Father.” “You see what an opinion he has...