Of Human Bondage (51 page)

  "Are you taking the Conjoint?" he asked Philip.

  "Yes, I want to get qualified as soon as I can."

  "I'm taking it too, but I shall take the F. R. C. S.
afterwards. I'm going in for surgery."

  Most of the students took the curriculum of the
Conjoint Board of the College of Surgeons and the College of
Physicians; but the more ambitious or the more industrious added to
this the longer studies which led to a degree from the University
of London. When Philip went to St. Luke's changes had recently been
made in the regulations, and the course took five years instead of
four as it had done for those who registered before the autumn of
1892. Dunsford was well up in his plans and told Philip the usual
course of events. The "first conjoint" examination consisted of
biology, anatomy, and chemistry; but it could be taken in sections,
and most fellows took their biology three months after entering the
school. This science had been recently added to the list of
subjects upon which the student was obliged to inform himself, but
the amount of knowledge required was very small.

  When Philip went back to the dissecting-room, he was
a few minutes late, since he had forgotten to buy the loose sleeves
which they wore to protect their shirts, and he found a number of
men already working. His partner had started on the minute and was
busy dissecting out cutaneous nerves. Two others were engaged on
the second leg, and more were occupied with the arms.

  "You don't mind my having started?"

  "That's all right, fire away," said Philip.

  He took the book, open at a diagram of the dissected
part, and looked at what they had to find.

  "You're rather a dab at this," said Philip.

  "Oh, I've done a good deal of dissecting before,
animals, you know, for the Pre Sci."

  There was a certain amount of conversation over the
dissecting-table, partly about the work, partly about the prospects
of the football season, the demonstrators, and the lectures. Philip
felt himself a great deal older than the others. They were raw
schoolboys. But age is a matter of knowledge rather than of years;
and Newson, the active young man who was dissecting with him, was
very much at home with his subject. He was perhaps not sorry to
show off, and he explained very fully to Philip what he was about.
Philip, notwithstanding his hidden stores of wisdom, listened
meekly. Then Philip took up the scalpel and the tweezers and began
working while the other looked on.

  "Ripping to have him so thin," said Newson, wiping
his hands. "The blighter can't have had anything to eat for a
month."

  "I wonder what he died of," murmured Philip.

  "Oh, I don't know, any old thing, starvation
chiefly, I suppose.... I say, look out, don't cut that artery."

  "It's all very fine to say, don't cut that artery,"
remarked one of the men working on the opposite leg. "Silly old
fool's got an artery in the wrong place."

  "Arteries always are in the wrong place," said
Newson. "The normal's the one thing you practically never get.
That's why it's called the normal."

  "Don't say things like that," said Philip, "or I
shall cut myself."

  "If you cut yourself," answered Newson, full of
information, "wash it at once with antiseptic. It's the one thing
you've got to be careful about. There was a chap here last year who
gave himself only a prick, and he didn't bother about it, and he
got septicaemia."

  "Did he get all right?"

  "Oh, no, he died in a week. I went and had a look at
him in the P. M. room."

  Philip's back ached by the time it was proper to
have tea, and his luncheon had been so light that he was quite
ready for it. His hands smelt of that peculiar odour which he had
first noticed that morning in the corridor. He thought his muffin
tasted of it too.

  "Oh, you'll get used to that," said Newson. "When
you don't have the good old dissecting-room stink about, you feel
quite lonely."

  "I'm not going to let it spoil my appetite," said
Philip, as he followed up the muffin with a piece of cake.

  Philip's ideas of the life of medical students, like
those of the public at large, were founded on the pictures which
Charles Dickens drew in the middle of the nineteenth century. He
soon discovered that Bob Sawyer, if he ever existed, was no longer
at all like the medical student of the present.

  It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical
profession, and naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless.
They think it is an easy life, idle away a couple of years; and
then, because their funds come to an end or because angry parents
refuse any longer to support them, drift away from the hospital.
Others find the examinations too hard for them; one failure after
another robs them of their nerve; and, panic-stricken, they forget
as soon as they come into the forbidding buildings of the Conjoint
Board the knowledge which before they had so pat. They remain year
after year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men: some of
them crawl through the examination of the Apothecaries Hall; others
become non-qualified assistants, a precarious position in which
they are at the mercy of their employer; their lot is poverty,
drunkenness, and Heaven only knows their end. But for the most part
medical students are industrious young men of the middle-class with
a sufficient allowance to live in the respectable fashion they have
been used to; many are the sons of doctors who have already
something of the professional manner; their career is mapped out:
as soon as they are qualified they propose to apply for a hospital
appointment, after holding which (and perhaps a trip to the Far
East as a ship's doctor), they will join their father and spend the
rest of their days in a country practice. One or two are marked out
as exceptionally brilliant: they will take the various prizes and
scholarships which are open each year to the deserving, get one
appointment after another at the hospital, go on the staff, take a
consulting-room in Harley Street, and, specialising in one subject
or another, become prosperous, eminent, and titled.

  The medical profession is the only one which a man
may enter at any age with some chance of making a living. Among the
men of Philip's year were three or four who were past their first
youth: one had been in the Navy, from which according to report he
had been dismissed for drunkenness; he was a man of thirty, with a
red face, a brusque manner, and a loud voice. Another was a married
man with two children, who had lost money through a defaulting
solicitor; he had a bowed look as if the world were too much for
him; he went about his work silently, and it was plain that he
found it difficult at his age to commit facts to memory. His mind
worked slowly. His effort at application was painful to see.

  Philip made himself at home in his tiny rooms. He
arranged his books and hung on the walls such pictures and sketches
as he possessed. Above him, on the drawing-room floor, lived a
fifth-year man called Griffiths; but Philip saw little of him,
partly because he was occupied chiefly in the wards and partly
because he had been to Oxford. Such of the students as had been to
a university kept a good deal together: they used a variety of
means natural to the young in order to impress upon the less
fortunate a proper sense of their inferiority; the rest of the
students found their Olympian serenity rather hard to bear.
Griffiths was a tall fellow, with a quantity of curly red hair and
blue eyes, a white skin and a very red mouth; he was one of those
fortunate people whom everybody liked, for he had high spirits and
a constant gaiety. He strummed a little on the piano and sang comic
songs with gusto; and evening after evening, while Philip was
reading in his solitary room, he heard the shouts and the
uproarious laughter of Griffiths' friends above him. He thought of
those delightful evenings in Paris when they would sit in the
studio, Lawson and he, Flanagan and Clutton, and talk of art and
morals, the love-affairs of the present, and the fame of the
future. He felt sick at heart. He found that it was easy to make a
heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results. The worst of it
was that the work seemed to him very tedious. He had got out of the
habit of being asked questions by demonstrators. His attention
wandered at lectures. Anatomy was a dreary science, a mere matter
of learning by heart an enormous number of facts; dissection bored
him; he did not see the use of dissecting out laboriously nerves
and arteries when with much less trouble you could see in the
diagrams of a book or in the specimens of the pathological museum
exactly where they were.

  He made friends by chance, but not intimate friends,
for he seemed to have nothing in particular to say to his
companions. When he tried to interest himself in their concerns, he
felt that they found him patronising. He was not of those who can
talk of what moves them without caring whether it bores or not the
people they talk to. One man, hearing that he had studied art in
Paris, and fancying himself on his taste, tried to discuss art with
him; but Philip was impatient of views which did not agree with his
own; and, finding quickly that the other's ideas were conventional,
grew monosyllabic. Philip desired popularity but could bring
himself to make no advances to others. A fear of rebuff prevented
him from affability, and he concealed his shyness, which was still
intense, under a frigid taciturnity. He was going through the same
experience as he had done at school, but here the freedom of the
medical students' life made it possible for him to live a good deal
by himself.

  It was through no effort of his that he became
friendly with Dunsford, the fresh-complexioned, heavy lad whose
acquaintance he had made at the beginning of the session. Dunsford
attached himself to Philip merely because he was the first person
he had known at St. Luke's. He had no friends in London, and on
Saturday nights he and Philip got into the habit of going together
to the pit of a music-hall or the gallery of a theatre. He was
stupid, but he was good-humoured and never took offence; he always
said the obvious thing, but when Philip laughed at him merely
smiled. He had a very sweet smile. Though Philip made him his butt,
he liked him; he was amused by his candour and delighted with his
agreeable nature: Dunsford had the charm which himself was acutely
conscious of not possessing.

  They often went to have tea at a shop in Parliament
Street, because Dunsford admired one of the young women who waited.
Philip did not find anything attractive in her. She was tall and
thin, with narrow hips and the chest of a boy.

  "No one would look at her in Paris," said Philip
scornfully.

  "She's got a ripping face," said Dunsford.

  "What DOES the face matter?"

  She had the small regular features, the blue eyes,
and the broad low brow, which the Victorian painters, Lord
Leighton, Alma Tadema, and a hundred others, induced the world they
lived in to accept as a type of Greek beauty. She seemed to have a
great deal of hair: it was arranged with peculiar elaboration and
done over the forehead in what she called an Alexandra fringe. She
was very anaemic. Her thin lips were pale, and her skin was
delicate, of a faint green colour, without a touch of red even in
the cheeks. She had very good teeth. She took great pains to
prevent her work from spoiling her hands, and they were small,
thin, and white. She went about her duties with a bored look.

  Dunsford, very shy with women, had never succeeded
in getting into conversation with her; and he urged Philip to help
him.

  "All I want is a lead," he said, "and then I can
manage for myself."

  Philip, to please him, made one or two remarks, but
she answered with monosyllables. She had taken their measure. They
were boys, and she surmised they were students. She had no use for
them. Dunsford noticed that a man with sandy hair and a bristly
moustache, who looked like a German, was favoured with her
attention whenever he came into the shop; and then it was only by
calling her two or three times that they could induce her to take
their order. She used the clients whom she did not know with frigid
insolence, and when she was talking to a friend was perfectly
indifferent to the calls of the hurried. She had the art of
treating women who desired refreshment with just that degree of
impertinence which irritated them without affording them an
opportunity of complaining to the management. One day Dunsford told
him her name was Mildred. He had heard one of the other girls in
the shop address her.