CHAPTER X

A SCIENTIFIC OPINION

THE Duke of Trent and Colonsay sat at his great office table in his room at the Home Office thinking.

The table was piled high with official papers. The permanent staff of a Government Department are quick to detect the weakness of each new chief put over their heads by the changing tide of parliamentary warfare. The weakness of the new Home Secretary was for details and statistics. A return of a hundred foolscap pages showing exactly how many pounds of beef and how many pounds of rice are consumed in the prisons of the country every year, or how many miles a policeman tramps over in the same period in the course of his beat, afforded a real satisfaction to his intellect. His staff catered for this taste as if they had been the conductors of a popular magazine. They kept their new chief busy and contented, and he let them alone.

But it was not about his important functions in the State that the Minister was thinking at this moment, but about a more personal concern.

His discovery of his mother’s project had left him for some time in a state of indecision, due partly to the fact that his desire was not so much to marry Hero Vanbrugh as to prevent his brother from marrying her. The appearance of a rival on the scene is generally sufficient to decide a hesitating wooer, but then the Duke had not been exactly a wooer, and this was another cause of embarrassment. Suddenly to begin paying the attentions of a lover to a girl whom he had been accustomed to treat familiarly as his mother’s friend seemed to a man of the Duke’s stiff habit of mind an awkward, and possibly a ridiculous, proceeding.

On the other hand, he saw that his mother was actively pushing her design, and he could not shut his eyes to the fact that Alistair was a rival to be feared.

It is difficult at all times for a man with a strong sense of his own dignity to make love, and for a man animated by the calm and temperate regard of the Duke of Trent to try to make love according to the accepted English convention struck even his imagination as dangerously foolish.

He condemned in his own mind the national custom which requires the man to do his own love-making.

“Now, in France,” he reflected, “there would be no trouble about the matter. I should tell my mother to send for Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, and they would settle it between them.”

Sir Bernard’s name suggested an alternative which recommended itself the more the longer he considered it. He would carry his proposal to Hero’s father, and leave it to him to break the ice with Hero herself.

His acquaintance with the great scientist and physician was of the slightest, but he could hardly distrust the reception such a son-in-law as himself was likely to receive, and he might count on the father’s influence with his daughter to overcome any possible hesitation on her part.

Desirous to give every possible distinction to his overture, the Home Secretary drew towards him a sheet of the official notepaper, and wrote a few lines requesting the physician to name an hour at which he would receive him on a private matter. The note folded and sealed, he handed it to his private secretary, with injunctions to send it by a messenger, and bring back the reply.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s answer, which arrived within half an hour, was even more formal than the Duke’s request, simply stating that the physician would be at liberty that day at five o’clock.

The Duke ordered his carriage, and alighted at Sir Bernard’s door in Stratford Place punctually at the hour named. Rather to his surprise, but even more to his relief, he was taken, not into the drawing-room, but into the physician’s consulting-room, and offered the patient’s chair.

The man whose grey powerful eyes, under their square wall of forehead, were turned on him with something of the penetrative power of a searchlight, across a fragile-looking desk in some decorative wood, was a man with a remarkable history.

There are some men of whom their friends are accustomed to say that they should like them better if they were not so clever. Vanbrugh had started in life with this handicap. He was an intellectual monster, a brain-giant whose understanding was to the understandings of those about him what the magnesium light is to a tallow candle.

Those into whose company he was thrown suffered somewhat as they would have done in a strong light. Moreover, they were conscious that Vanbrugh silently looked through them and over them, and they resented the process in proportion to their conceit of themselves.

Thus it happened that the ablest man of his time was the most unpopular.

The unpopularity was the most marked among the members of his own profession. To Vanbrugh the usages and traditions of his class were so much rubbish. He saw in the etiquette of medicine nothing but the precautions of dunces to protect their incapacity from discovery. He was unable to make allowance for that infirmity of the human mind which clings to custom through sheer terror of the unknown. Where he ought to have imputed cowardice he imputed fraud.

He was a revolutionist by sheer force of insight. His mind covered at a single bound the slow progress of years, and he was too impatient to wait for the laggards to catch him up. The stupid are in a great majority at all times, and in all situations, but some men, not less great than Vanbrugh, have possessed the art of coaxing them, and leading them on. It was just this art that Vanbrugh lacked. Unconscious of his own brutality, he trampled on folly and dullness with feet of iron, and the dull and foolish turned and rent him.

Up to the age of forty Bernard Vanbrugh’s life had been one long record of disaster.

As a student he had been deeply unpopular, even with his professors, who saw that they had in him a critic rather than a pupil. While still walking the hospitals, the young man had ventured to argue with the great lights of the profession whom he was there to watch reverently and believe implicitly. He had had the audacity to suggest to a celebrated gynecologist the use of ice at a critical stage of a well-known operation; and though the specialist found himself obliged to act on the advice, and subsequently enhanced his reputation by adopting the treatment in his private practice, he never forgave the young man’s presumption.

The medical authorities treated Vanbrugh with strict justice, up to the point at which justice ceased to be obligatory; that is to say, they awarded him as examiners every prize for which he chose to enter, but they refused him a house-surgeoncy. When the astonished and mortified young man tried to learn the reason for this refusal, he was met by polite excuses and the recommendation that he should start in practice as a consultant.

One old professor told him the truth.

“Our honorary staff will not have you,” he said bluntly. “Not because they haven’t confidence in you, but because they think you haven’t confidence in them.”

With a bitter smile Vanbrugh acknowledged the justice of the excuse.

He made up his mind that he must accept a house-surgeoncy in the provinces. But when he came to apply for the usual testimonials from those who had superintended his education, he received documents so frigidly worded as to show clearly that they were given as a matter of obligation merely, and not with any good will. The local doctors in whose hands the appointments lay discerned the actual disapproval beneath the formal recommendation. Vanbrugh, the most distinguished student of his year, or for many years, was not even invited to present himself for a personal interview when he applied for a post of two hundred a year in a small country town.

He abandoned this useless attempt without much regret. He knew well enough that London contained his destiny, and that he had been guilty of treason to his own powers in seeking to escape it.

His enemies had advised him to become a consultant--that is to say, to take rooms in an expensive street in the West End, and wait for other doctors to send him patients as to a superior. Vanbrugh took this advice, and for fifteen years no patient ever crossed his threshold.

A consultant depends absolutely on the support of his own profession, and in his own profession Vanbrugh was hated as few men are hated. There were men who, if they had heard of a patient intending to consult him, would have walked across London to prevent it.

Vanbrugh was a poor man. The whole of the funds remaining from his scholarships, together with the remittances doled out grudgingly by his family, were set aside to pay the rent of the rooms in Brook Street. His brass-plate, once affixed to the doorpost there, became his flag, which he would not strike while life remained. In the meantime he had to live.

After endless trials in all directions, Bernard Vanbrugh succeeded in getting employment on the staff of one of those bureaus which undertake to supply information on any subject. Vanbrugh’s was the medical department, and he was paid at the rate of half a crown an hour. The work had mostly to be done at the British Museum, and his weekly earnings averaged about two pounds.

This, then, was the situation. The most brilliant follower of medicine in Europe, perhaps the keenest intellect of his time, was compelled to spend the best years of his life among broken-down journalists, and stranded governesses, and all the sad jetsam of the educated class, doing drudge’s work for the wages of a drudge. The celebrated Huxley had a narrow escape from the same fate. How many other Huxleys and Vanbrughs are to-day dreeing the same weird, while the millions of philanthropy roll about the gutters, and the billions of endowments pass into the pockets of the dunce?

Vanbrugh divided his scanty earnings into two equal portions. Fifty pounds a year paid for his food and clothes and the rare holidays conceded to health, with the other fifty he bought books and scientific instruments.

The subject he had chosen to investigate was the cells of the brain.

At the age of forty he completed his work on the brain, and the fifteen years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced by human stupidity and spite approached its term.

He carried the manuscript to an important publisher, and solicited a personal interview.

Strange to say, the publisher granted it. Vanbrugh’s name was well known to him. Some hints of his researches had leaked out from time to time, and the hospitals were already trembling. The meteoric career of the student had not been forgotten. Every now and then his brethren spoke of Vanbrugh as of a man from whom the world was certain to hear sooner or later. While he was toiling in the dust he was already reluctantly recognized as the coming man.

Vanbrugh placed his book in the publisher’s hands with something of his old arrogance, which half a lifetime of hardship had not been able to crush.

“This is a book which will, directly it appears, supersede every other book on the brain. But if your reader sees my name on the title-page, he will tell you it is rubbish. I ask you to submit it to him without allowing him to know whom it is by, and then he may tell you the truth.”

The publisher smiled. He glanced from his caller’s proud, harsh countenance to his shabby clothes and patched boots, and thought he could understand. “The man is a crank,” he said to himself. “His troubles have unhinged him.”

Nevertheless, he gave the required promise. He even went beyond his word. Lest his English reader should suspect the authorship of the book and be prejudiced in consequence, he took the trouble to forward the manuscript to Vienna, to a renowned specialist in that capital, saying that his usual advisers differed as to the merit of the work, and requesting an impartial opinion. This was the first stroke of fortune in Vanbrugh’s favour.

In less than a month the publisher was astonished by receiving back the manuscript with a letter in which the Viennese authority repeated Vanbrugh’s very words.

“I cannot understand what you tell me about your advisers,” the Austrian wrote. “This is one of the greatest works I have ever had the good fortune to read. It will supersede every existing work on the brain. The author has done you a high honour in offering this book to your house.”

The great publisher winced. It so happened that he had in the press a voluminous book on this very subject by a baronet and physician-in-ordinary to the Court, a book on whose preparation he had already spent a considerable sum. It was clear that one of these two books must kill the other. In either case he must be at a loss. On the other hand, if he were to refuse Vanbrugh’s work, it might be taken by the great rival house which divided the trade with his.

In this uncertainty he decided to submit the manuscript to his reader in the ordinary way. Scarcely had he sent it off when he received a second call from Vanbrugh.

The Austrian specialist, not dreaming that his opinion could be disregarded, and filled with enthusiasm for Vanbrugh’s achievement, had addressed a letter to him, congratulating him in the warmest terms. The