________________________________________________
_ I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.
Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they
have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are
strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have
known from childhood or the populous streets in which they
have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend
their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof
among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is
this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the
search for something permanent, to which they may attach
themselves. Perhaps some deeprooted atavism urges the
wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim
beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to
which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home
he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never
seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were
familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
I told Tiare the story of a man I had known at St. Thomas's
Hospital. He was a Jew named Abraham, a blond, rather stout
young man, shy and very unassuming; but he had remarkable gifts.
He entered the hospital with a scholarship, and during
the five years of the curriculum gained every prize that was
open to him. He was made house-physician and house-surgeon.
His brilliance was allowed by all. Finally he was elected to
a position on the staff, and his career was assured. So far
as human things can be predicted, it was certain that he would
rise to the greatest heights of his profession. Honours and
wealth awaited him. Before he entered upon his new duties he
wished to take a holiday, and, having no private means,
he went as surgeon on a tramp steamer to the Levant.
It did not generally carry a doctor, but one of the senior
surgeons at the hospital knew a director of the line,
and Abraham was taken as a favour.
In a few weeks the authorities received his resignation of the
coveted position on the staff. It created profound
astonishment, and wild rumours were current. Whenever a man
does anything unexpected, his fellows ascribe it to the most
discreditable motives. But there was a man ready to step into
Abraham's shoes, and Abraham was forgotten. Nothing more was
heard of him. He vanished.
It was perhaps ten years later that one morning on board ship,
about to land at Alexandria, I was bidden to line up with the
other passengers for the doctor's examination. The doctor was
a stout man in shabby clothes, and when he took off his hat I
noticed that he was very bald. I had an idea that I had seen
him before. Suddenly I remembered.
"Abraham," I said.
He turned to me with a puzzled look, and then, recognizing me,
seized my hand. After expressions of surprise on either side,
hearing that I meant to spend the night in Alexandria, he
asked me to dine with him at the English Club. When we met
again I declared my astonishment at finding him there. It was
a very modest position that he occupied, and there was about
him an air of straitened circumstance. Then he told me his story.
When he set out on his holiday in the Mediterranean he
had every intention of returning to London and his appointment
at St. Thomas's. One morning the tramp docked at Alexandria,
and from the deck he looked at the city, white in the
sunlight, and the crowd on the wharf; he saw the natives in
their shabby gabardines, the blacks from the Soudan, the noisy
throng of Greeks and Italians, the grave Turks in tarbooshes,
the sunshine and the blue sky; and something happened to him.
He could not describe it. It was like a thunder-clap, he
said, and then, dissatisfied with this, he said it was like a
revelation. Something seemed to twist his heart, and suddenly
he felt an exultation, a sense of wonderful freedom. He felt
himself at home, and he made up his mind there and then, in a
minute, that he would live the rest of his life in Alexandria.
He had no great difficulty in leaving the ship, and in twenty-four
hours, with all his belongings, he was on shore.
"The Captain must have thought you as mad as a hatter," I smiled.
"I didn't care what anybody thought. It wasn't I that acted,
but something stronger within me. I thought I would go to a
little Greek hotel, while I looked about, and I felt I knew
where to find one. And do you know, I walked straight there,
and when I saw it, I recognised it at once."
"Had you been to Alexandria before?"
"No; I'd never been out of England in my life."
Presently he entered the Government service, and there he had
been ever since.
"Have you never regretted it?"
"Never, not for a minute. I earn just enough to live upon,
and I'm satisfied. I ask nothing more than to remain as I am
till I die. I've had a wonderful life."
I left Alexandria next day, and I forgot about Abraham till a
little while ago, when I was dining with another old friend in
the profession, Alec Carmichael, who was in England on short leave.
I ran across him in the street and congratulated him on
the knighthood with which his eminent services during the
war had been rewarded. We arranged to spend an evening
together for old time's sake, and when I agreed to dine with
him, he proposed that he should ask nobody else, so that we
could chat without interruption. He had a beautiful old house
in Queen Anne Street, and being a man of taste he had
furnished it admirably. On the walls of the diningroom I saw
a charming Bellotto, and there was a pair of Zoffanys that I envied.
When his wife, a tall, lovely creature in cloth of gold,
had left us, I remarked laughingly on the change in his
present circumstances from those when we had both been medical
students. We had looked upon it then as an extravagance to
dine in a shabby Italian restaurant in the Westminster Bridge Road.
Now Alec Carmichael was on the staff of half a dozen hospitals.
I should think he earned ten thousand a year, and his
knighthood was but the first of the honours which must
inevitably fall to his lot.
"I've done pretty well," he said, "but the strange thing is
that I owe it all to one piece of luck."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Well, do you remember Abraham? He was the man who had the future.
When we were students he beat me all along the line.
He got the prizes and the scholarships that I went in for.
I always played second fiddle to him. If he'd kept on he'd be
in the position I'm in now. That man had a genius for surgery.
No one had a look in with him. When he was
appointed Registrar at Thomas's I hadn't a chance of getting
on the staff. I should have had to become a G.P., and you
know what likelihood there is for a G.P. ever to get out of
the common rut. But Abraham fell out, and I got the job.
That gave me my opportunity."
"I dare say that's true."
"It was just luck. I suppose there was some kink in Abraham.
Poor devil, he's gone to the dogs altogether. He's got some
twopenny-halfpenny job in the medical at Alexandria --
sanitary officer or something like that. I'm told he lives
with an ugly old Greek woman and has half a dozen scrofulous kids.
The fact is, I suppose, that it's not enough to have brains.
The thing that counts is character. Abraham hadn't got character."
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of
character to throw up a career after half an hour's
meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more
intense significance. And it required still more character
never to regret the sudden step. But I said nothing, and Alec
Carmichael proceeded reflectively:
"Of course it would be hypocritical for me to pretend that I
regret what Abraham did. After all, I've scored by it."
He puffed luxuriously at the long Corona he was smoking.
"But if I weren't personally concerned I should be sorry at the waste.
It seems a rotten thing that a man should make such a hash of life."
I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life.
Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that
please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life;
and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a
year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what
meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to
society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my
tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight? _
Read next: CHAPTER 51
Read previous: CHAPTER 49
Table of content of Moon and Sixpence
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
