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CHAPTER XXV. A WATERING-PLACE DOCTOR
Nothing is more distinct than the two classes of people who are to be met with in the morning and in the afternoon, sauntering along the allées of a German watering-place. The former are the invalid portion, poured forth in numbers from hotel and lodging-house; attired in every absurdity of dressing-room toilette, with woollen nightcaps and flannel jackets, old-fashioned douillettes and morocco slippers, they glide along, glass in hand, to some sulphur spring, or to repose for an hour or two in the delights of a mud bath. For the most part, they are the old and the feeble, pale of face and tottering in step. The pursuit of health with them would seem a vain and fruitless effort; the machine appears to have run its destined time, and all the skill of man is unavailing to repair it. Still, hope survives when strength and youth have failed, and the very grouping together in their gathering-places has its consolation; while the endless diversity of malady gives an interest in the eye of a sick man.
This may seem strange, but it is nevertheless perfectly true. There is something which predisposes an invalid to all narratives of illness; they are the topics he dwells on with most pleasure, and discourses about with most eagerness. The anxiety for the ‘gentleman next door’ is neither philanthropy, nor is it common curiosity. No, it is perfectly distinct from either; it is the deep interest in the course of symptoms, in the ups and downs of chance; it is compounded of the feelings which animate the physician and those which fill the invalid. And hence we see that the severest sufferings of their neighbours make less impression on the minds of such people than on those in full health. It is not from apathy nor selfishness they are seemingly indifferent, but simply because they regard the question in a different light: to take an illustration from the gaming-table, they have too deep an interest in the game itself to feel greatly for the players. The visit of the doctor is to them the brightest moment of the day; not only the messenger of good tidings to the patient, he has a thousand little bits of sick-room gossip, harmless, pointless trifles, but all fraught with their own charm to the greedy ear of the sick man. It is so pleasant to know how Mrs. W. bore her drive, or Sir Arthur liked his jelly; what Mrs. T. said when they ordered her to be bled, and whether dear Mr. H. would consent to the blister. And with what consummate tact your watering-place doctor doles out the infinitesimal doses of his morning’s intelligence! How different his visit from the hurried flight of a West-End practitioner, who, while he holds his watch in hand, counts the minutes of his stay while he feels your pulse, and whose descent downstairs is watched by a cordon of the household, catching his directions as he goes, and learning his opinion as he springs into his chariot! Your Spa doctor has a very different mission; his are no heroic remedies, which taken to-day are to cure tomorrow; his character is tried by no subtle test of immediate success; his patients come for a term, or, to use the proper phrase, for ‘a course of the waters’ – then they are condemned to chalybeates for a quarter of the year, so many glasses per diem. With their health, properly speaking, he has no concern; his function is merely an inspection that the individual drinks his fluid regularly, and takes his mud like a man. The patient is invoiced to him, with a bill of lading from Bell or Brodie; he has full information of the merchandise transmitted, and the mode in which the consignee desires it may be treated – out of this ritual he must not move. The great physician of the West End says, ‘Bathe and drink’; and his chargé d’affaires at Wiesbaden takes care to see his orders obeyed. As well might a forçat at Brest or Toulon hope to escape the punishment described in the catalogue of prisoners, as for a patient to run counter to the remedies thus arranged, and communicated by post. Occasionally changes will take place in a sick man’s condition en route which alter the applicability of his treatment; but, then, what would you have? Brodie and Chambers are not prophets; divination and augury are not taught in the London and Middlesex hospitals!
I remember, myself, a marquis of gigantic proportions, who had kept his prescription by him from the time of his being a stripling till he weighed twenty stone. The fault here lay not with the doctor. The bath he was to take contained some powerful ingredient – a preparation of iron, I believe; well, he got into it, and immediately began swelling and swelling out, till, big as he was before, he was now twice the size, and at last, like an overheated boiler, threatened to explode with a crash. What was to be done? To lift him was out of the question – he fitted the bath like a periwinkle in its shell; and in this dilemma no other course was open than to decant him, water and all – which was performed, to the very considerable mirth of the bystanders.
The Spa doctor, then, it will be seen, moves in a very narrow orbit. He must manage to sustain his reputation without the aid of the pharmacopoeia, and continue to be imposing without any assistance from the dead languages.
Hard conditions! but he yields to them, like a man of nerve.
He begins, then, by extolling the virtues of the waters, which by analysis of ‘his own making,’ and set forth in a little volume published by himself, contain very different properties from those ascribed to them by others. He explains most clearly to his non-chemical listener how ‘pure silica found in combination with oxide of iron, at a temperature of thirty-nine and a half, Fahrenheit,’ must necessarily produce the most beneficial effects on the knee-joint; and he describes, with all the ardour of science, the infinite satisfaction the nerves must experience when invigorated by ‘free carbonic gas’ sporting about in the system. Day by day he indoctrinates the patient into some stray medical notion, giving him an interest in his own anatomy, and putting him on terms of familiar acquaintance with the formation of his heart or his stomach. This flatters the sick man, and, better still, it occupies his attention. He himself thus becomes a particeps in the first degree to his own recovery; and the simplicity of treatment, which had at first no attractions for his mind, is now complicated with so many little curious facts about the blood and the nerves, mucous membranes and muscles, as fully to compensate for any lack of mystery, and is in truth just as unintelligible as the most involved inconsistency of any written prescription. Besides this, he has another object which demands his attention. Plain, common-sense people, who know nothing of physic or its mysteries, might fall into the fatal error of supposing that the wells so universally employed by the people of the country for all purposes of washing, bathing, and cooking, however impregnated by mineral properties, were still by no means so capable, in proportions of great power and efficacy, of effecting either very decided results, curative or noxious. The doctor must set his heel on this heresy at once; he must be able to show how a sip too much or a half-glass too many can produce the gravest consequences; and no summer must pass over without at least one death being attributed to the inconsiderate rashness of some insensate drinker. Woe unto him then who drinks without a doctor! You might as well, in an access of intense thirst, rush into the first apothecary’s shop, and take a strong pull at one of the vicious little vials that fill the shelves, ignorant whether it might not be aqua fortis or Prussic acid.
Armed, then, with all the terrors of his favourite Spa, rich in a following which is as much partisan as patient, the Spa doctor has an admirable life of it. The severe and trying cases of illness that come under the notice of other physicians fall not to his share; the very journey to the waters is a trial of strength which guards against this. His disciples are the dyspeptic “diners-out” in the great worlds of London, Paris, or Vienna; the nervous and irritable natures, cloyed with excess of enjoyment and palled with pleasure; the imaginary sick man, or the self-created patient who has dosed himself into artificial malady – all of necessity belonging to the higher or at least the wealthier classes of mankind, with whom management goes further than medicine, and tact is a hundred times better than all the skill of Hippocrates. He had need, then, to be a clever man of the world; he may dispense with science, he cannot with savoir faire. Not only must he be conversant with the broader traits of national character, but he must be intimately acquainted with the more delicate and subtle workings of the heart in classes and gradations of mankind, a keen observer and a quick actor. In fact, to get on well, he must possess in a high degree many of those elements, any one of which would insure success in a dozen other walks in life.
And the Spa doctor must have all these virtues, as Swift says, ‘for twenty pounds per annum’ – not literally, indeed, but for a very inadequate recompense. These watering-place seasons are brief intervals, in which he must make hay while the sun shines. With the approach of winter the tide turns, and the human wave retires faster than it came. Silent streets and deserted promenades, closed shutters and hermetically sealed cafés, meet him at every step; and then comes the long, dreary time of hibernation. Happy would it be for him if he could but imitate the seal, and spend it in torpor; for if he be not a sportsman, and in a country favourable to the pursuit, his life is a sad one. Books are generally difficult to come at; there is little society, there is no companionship; and so he has to creep along the tedious time silent and sad, counting over the months of his durance, and longing for spring. Some there are who follow the stream, and retire each winter to the cities where their strongest connection lies; but this practice I should deem rather dictated by pleasure than profit. Your Spa doctor without a Spa is like Liszt or Herz without a pianoforte. Give him but his instrument, and he will ‘discourse you sweet music’; but deprive him of it, and he is utterly helpless. The springs of Helicon did not suggest inspiration more certainly than do those of Nassau to their votaries; but the fount must run that the poet may rhyme. So your physician must have the odour of sulphurets in his nose; he must see the priestess ministering, glass in hand, to the shivering shades around her; he must have the long vista of the promenade, with its flitting forms in flannel cased, ere he feel himself ‘every inch a doctor.’ Away from these, and the piston of a steam-engine without a boiler is not more helpless. The fountain is, to use Lord Londonderry’s phrase, the ‘fundamental feature on which his argument hinges,’ and he could no more exist without water than a fish.
Having said so much of the genus, let me be excused if I do not dilate on the species; nor, indeed, had I dwelt so long on the subject, but in this age of stomach, when every one has dyspepsia, it is as well to mention those who rule over our diets and destinies; and where so many are worshippers at the Temple, a word about the Priest of the Mysteries may not be unseasonable.
And now, to change the theme, who is it that at this early hour of the morning seems taking his promenade, with no trace of the invalid in his look or dress? He comes along at a smart walk; his step has the assured tramp of one who felt health, and knew the value of the blessing. What! is it possible – can it be, indeed? ‘Yes, it is Sir Harry Wycherley himself, with two lovely children, a boy and a girl – the eldest scarcely seven years old; the boy a year or so younger. Never did I behold anything more lovely. The girl’s eyes were dark, shaded with long deep fringe, that added to their depth, and tempered into softness the glowing sparkle of youth. Her features were of a pensive but not melancholy character, and in her walk and carriage ‘gentle blood’ spoke out in accents not to be mistaken. The boy, more strongly formed, resembled his father more, and in his broad forehead and bold, dashing expression looked like one who would become one day a man of nerve and mettle. His dress, too, gave a character to his appearance that well suited him – a broad hat, turned up at the side, and ornamented with a dark-blue feather, that hung drooping over his shoulder; a blue tunic, made so as to show his chest in its full breadth, and his arms naked the whole way; a scarlet scarf, knotted carelessly at his side, hanging down with its deep fringe beside his bare leg, tanned and bronzed with sun and weather; and even his shoes, with their broad silver buckles, showing that care presided over every part of his costume.
There was something intensely touching in the sight of this man of the world – for such I well knew he was – thus enjoying the innocence and fresh buoyancy of his children, turning from the complex web of men’s schemes and plottings, their tortuous paths and deep designings, to relax in the careless gaiety of infant minds. Now pursuing them along the walk, now starting from behind some tree where he lay in ambush, he gives them chase, and as he gains on them they turn sharp round, and spring into his arms, and clasp him round the neck.
Arthur, thou hast had a life of more than man’s share of pleasure; thou hast tasted much happiness, and known but few sorrows; but would not a moment like this outnumber them all? Where is love so full, so generous, so confiding? What affection comes so pure and unalloyed, not chilled by jealous doubts or fears, but warm and gushing – the incense of a happy heart, the outpourings of a guileless nature. Nothing can be more beautiful than the picture of maternal fondness, the gracefulness of woman thrown like a garment around her children. Her look of love etherealised by the holiest sentiment of tenderness; her loveliness exalted above the earth by the contemplation of those, her own dear ones, who are but a ‘little lower than the angels’ – is a sight to make the eyes gush tears of happiness, and the heart swell with thankfulness to Heaven. Second alone to this is the unbending of man’s stern nature before the charms of childhood, when, casting away the pride of manhood and the cold spirit of worldly ambition, he becomes like one among his children, the participator in their joys and sorrows, the companion of their games, the confidant of their little secrets. How insensibly does each moment thus passed draw him further from the world and its cares; how soon does he forget disappointments, or learn to think of them less poignantly; and how by Nature’s own magnetism does the sinless spirit of the child mix with the subtle workings of the man, and lift him above the petty jarrings and discords of life! And thus, while he teaches them precepts of truth and virtue, they pour into his heart lessons of humility and forbearance. If he point out the future to them, with equal force they show the past to him, and a blessing rests on both. The populus me sibilat of the miser is a miserable philosophy compared to his who can retire from the rancorous assaults of enemies and the dark treachery of false friends, to the bosom of a happy home, and feel his hearth a sanctuary where come no forms of malice to assail him!
Such were my musings as I saw the father pass on with his children; and never before did my loneliness seem so devoid of happiness.
Would that I could stop here; would that I might leave my reader to ponder over these things, and fashion them to his mind’s liking; but I may not. I have but one object in these notes of my loiterings. It is to present to those younger in the world, and fresher to its wiles than myself, some of the dangers as well as some of the enjoyments of foreign travel; and having surveyed the cost with much care and caution, I would fix a wreck-buoy here and there along the channel as a warning and a guide. And now to begin.
Let me take the character before me – one of whom I hesitate not to say that only the name is derived from invention. Some may have already identified him; many more may surmise the individual meant. It is enough that I say he still lives, and the correctness of the portrait may easily be tested by any traveller Rhinewards; but I prefer giving him a chapter to himself.
CHAPTER XXVI. SIR HARRY WYCHERLEY
Sir Harry Wycherley was of an old Hampshire family, who, entering the army when a mere boy, contrived, before he came of age, so completely to encumber a very large estate that his majority only enabled him to finish the ruin he had so actively begun, and to leave him penniless at seven-and-twenty. Before the wreck of his property became matter of notoriety, he married an earl’s daughter with a vast fortune, a portion of which was settled on any children that might be born to their union. She, poor girl, scarcely nineteen when she married (for it was a love match), died of a broken heart at three-and-twenty – leaving Sir Harry, with two infant children, all but irretrievably ruined, nearly everything he possessed mortgaged beyond its value, and not even a house to shelter him. By the advice of his lawyer, he left England secretly and came over to Paris, whence he travelled through Germany down to Italy, where he resided some time. The interest of the fortune settled on the children sufficed to maintain him in good style, and enabled him to associate with men of his own rank, provided he incurred no habits of extravagance. A few years of such prudence would, he was told, enable him to return with a moderate income; and he submitted.
This career of quiet, unobtrusive character was gradually becoming more and more insupportable to him. At first the change from a life beset by duns and bailiffs, by daily interviews with Jews and consultations with scheming lawyers, was happiness itself; the freedom he enjoyed from pressing difficulties and contingencies which arose with every hour was a pleasure he never knew before, and he felt like a schoolboy escaped from the drudgery of the desk. But by degrees, as he mixed more with those who were his former associates and companions – many of them exiles on the same plea as himself – the old taste for past pleasures revived. Their conversation brought back London with all its brilliant gaiety before him. Its clubs and coteries, the luxurious display of the dinners at the ‘Clarendon’ or the reckless extravagance of the nights at Crockford’s, the triumphs of the Derby, and the glories of Ascot, passed all in review before him, heightened by the recollection of the high spirits of his youth. He began once more to hanker after the world he believed he had quitted without regret; and a morbid anxiety to learn what was doing and going forward in the circles he used to move in took possession of his mind. All the gossip of Tattersall’s, all the chitchat of the Carlton, all the scandal of Graham’s, became at once indispensable to his existence, Who was going it ‘fastest’ among the rising spirits of the day, and which was the favourite of ‘Scott’s lot,’ were points of vital interest to him; while he felt the deepest anxiety about the fortunes of those who were tottering on the brink of ruin, and spent many a sleepless night in conjectures as to how they were to get through this difficulty or that, and whether they could ever ‘come round’ again.
Not one of the actors in that busy scene, into whose wild chaos fate mixes up all that is highest and everything the most depraved of human nature, ever took the same interest in it as he did. He lived henceforth in an ideal world, ignorant and careless of what was passing around him; his faculties strained to regard events at a distance, he became abstracted and silent. A year passed over thus, twelve weary months, in which his mind dwelt on home and country with all the ardour of a banished man. At last the glad tidings reached him that a compromise had been effected with his principal creditors; his most pressing debts had been discharged, and time obtained to meet others of less moment; and no obstacle any longer existed to his returning to England.
What a glorious thing it was to come back again once more to the old haunts and scenes of pleasure; to revisit the places of which his days and nights were filled with the very memory; to be once again the distinguished among that crowd who ruled supreme at the table and on the turf, and whose fiat was decisive from the Italian Opera to Doncaster! Alas and alas! the resumption of old tastes and habits will not bring back the youth and buoyancy which gave them all their bright colouring. There is no standing still in life; there is no resting-place whence we can survey the panorama, and not move along with it. Our course continues, and as changes follow one another in succession without, so within our own natures are we conforming to the rule, and becoming different from what we had been. The dream of home, the ever-present thought to the exile’s mind, suffers the rude shock when comes the hour of testing its reality; happy for him if he die in the delusion! Early remembrances are hallowed by a light that age and experience dissipate for ever, and as the highland tarn we used to think grand in its wild desolation in the hours of our boyhood becomes to our manhoods eye but a mere pond among the mountains, so do we look with changed feelings on all about us, and feel disappointment where we expected pleasure.
In all great cities these changes succeed with fearful rapidity. Expensive tastes and extravagant habits are hourly ruining hundreds who pass off the scene where they shone, and are heard of no more. The ‘lion’ of the season – whose plate was a matter of royal curiosity, whose equipage gave the tone to the time, whose dinner invitations were regarded as the climax of fashionable distinction – awakes some morning to discover that an expenditure of four times a man’s income, continued for several years, may originate embarrassment in his affairs. He finds out that tailors can be uncivil, and coachmakers rude and – horror of horrors! – he sees within the precincts of his dressing-room the plebeian visage of a sherrifs officer, or the calculating countenance of a West-End auctioneer.
He who was booked for Ascot now hurries away to Antwerp. An ambiguous paragraph in an evening paper informs London that one among the ranks of extravagance has fallen; a notice of ‘public competition’ by the hand of George Robins comes next; a criticism, and generally a sharp one, on the taste of his furniture and the value of his pictures follows; the broad pages of the Morning Post become the winding-sheet of his memory, and the knock of the auctioneer’s hammer is his requiem! The ink is not dried on his passport ere he is forgotten. Fashionable circles have other occupations than regrets and condolences; so that the exile may be a proud man if he retain a single correspondent in that great world which yesterday found nothing better than to chronicle his doings.
When Sir Harry Wycherley then came back to London he was only remembered – nothing more. The great majority of his contemporaries had, like himself, passed off the boards during the interval; such of them as remained were either like vessels too crippled in action to seek safety in flight, or, adopting the philosophy of the devil when sick, had resolved on prudence when there was no more liking for dissipation. He was almost a stranger in his club; the very waiters at Mivart’s asked his name; while the last new peer’s son, just emerging into life, had never even heard of him before. So is it decreed – dynasties shall fall and others succeed them; Charles le Dix gives place to Louis-Philippe, and Nugee occupies the throne of Stultz.
Few things men bear worse than this oblivion in the very places where once their sway was absolute. It is very hard to believe that the world has grown wiser and better, more cultivated in taste and more correct in its judgments than when we knew it of old; and a man is very likely to tax with ingratitude those who, superseding him in the world’s favour, seem to be forgetful of claims which in reality they never knew of.
Sir Harry Wycherley was not long in England ere he felt these truths in all their bitterness, and saw that an absence of a few years teaches one’s friends to do without them so completely that they are absolutely unwilling to open a new want of acquaintance, as though it were an expensive luxury they had learned to dispense with. Besides, Wycherley was decidedly rococo in all his tastes and predilections. Men did not dine now where they used in his day – Doncaster was going out, Goodwood was coming in; people spoke of Grisi, not Pasta, Mario more than Rubini. Instead of the old absolute monarchy of fashion, where one dictated to all the rest, a new school sprung up, a species of democracy, who thought Long Wellesley and D’Orsay were unclean idols, and would not worship anything but themselves.
Now of all the marks of progress which distinguish men in the higher circles, there is none in these latter days at all comparable with the signs of – to give it a mild name – increased ‘sharpness,’ distinguishable amongst them. The traveller by the heavy Falmouth mail whisked along forty miles per hour in the Grand Junction, would see far less to astonish and amaze him than your shrewd man about town of some forty years back, could he be let down any evening among the youth at Tattersall’s, or introduced among the rising generation just graduating at Graham’s.
The spirit of the age is unquestionably to be ‘up and doing.’ A good book on the Oaks has a far higher preeminence, not to say profit, than one published in ‘the Row’; the ‘honours’ of the crown are scarcely on a par with those scored at whist; and to predict the first horse at Ascot would be a far higher step in the intellectual scale than to prophesy the appearance of a comet or an eclipse; the leader in the House can only divide public applause with the winner of the Léger, and even the versatile gyrations of Lord Brougham himself must yield to the more fascinating pirouettes of Fanny Ellsler. Young men leave Eton and Sandhurst now with more tact and worldly wit than their fathers had at forty, or than their grandfathers ever possessed.
Short as Sir Harry Wycherley’s absence had been, the march of mind had done much in all these respects. The babes and sucklings of fashion were more than his equals in craft and subtlety; none like them to ascertain what was wrong with the favourite, or why ‘the mare’ would not start; few could compete with them in those difficult walks of finance which consist in obtaining credit from coach-makers, and cash from Jews. In fact, to that generation who spent profusely to live luxuriously had succeeded a race who reversed the position, and lived extravagantly in order to have the means of spending. Wiser than their fathers, they substituted paper for cash payments, and saw no necessity to cry ‘stop’ while there was a stamp in England.
It was a sad thing for one who believed his education finished to become a schoolboy once more, but there was nothing else for it. Sir Harry had to begin at the bottom of the class; he was an apt scholar it is true, but before he had completed his studies he was ruined. High play and high interest, Jews and jockeys, dinners and danseuses, with large retinues of servants, will help a man considerably to get rid of his spare cash; and however he may – which in most cases he must – acquire some wisdom en route, his road is not less certain to lead to ruin. In two years from the time of his return, another paragraph and another auction proclaimed that ‘Wycherley was cleaned out,’ and that he had made his ‘positively last appearance’ in England.
The Continent was now to be his home for life. He had lost his ‘means,’ but he had learned ‘ways’ of living, and from pigeon he became rook.
There is a class, possibly the most dangerous that exists, of men, who without having gone so far as to forfeit pretension to the society and acquaintance of gentleman, have yet involved their name and reputation in circumstances which are more than suspicious. Living expensively, without any obvious source of income; enjoying every luxury, and indulging every taste that costs dearly, without any difficulty in the payment, their intimacy with known gamblers and blacklegs exposes them at once to the inevitable charge of confederacy. Rarely or never playing themselves, however, they reply to such calumnies by referring to their habits; their daily life would indeed seem little liable to reproval. If married, they are the most exemplary of husbands. If they have children, they are models for fathers. Where can you see such little ones, so well-mannered, so well-dressed, with such beautifully curled hair, and such perfectly good-breeding – or, to use the proper phrase, ‘so admirably taken care of’? They are liberal to all public charities; they are occasionally intimate with the chaplain of the Embassy too – of whom, a word hereafter; and, in fact, it would be difficult to find fault with any circumstance in their bearing before the world. Their connection by family with persons of rank and condition is a kind of life-buoy of which no shipwreck of fortune deprives them, and long after less well-known people have sunk to the bottom, they are to be found floating on the surface of society. In this way they form a kind of ‘Pont du Diable’ between persons of character and persons of none – they are the narrow isthmus, connecting the mainland with the low reef of rocks beyond it.
These men are the tame elephants of the swindling world, who provide the game, though they never seem to care for the sport. Too cautious of reputation to become active agents in these transactions, they introduce the unsuspecting traveller into those haunts and among those where ruin is rife; and as the sheriff consigns the criminal to the attentions of the hangman, so these worthies halt at the ‘drop,’ and would scorn with indignation the idea of exercising the last office of the law.
