Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life Story 7 - Sweethearts

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:01)

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Round the Red Lamp by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Library. Section 7 Sweethearts It is hard for the general practitioner who sits among his patients both morning and evening, and sees them in the homes between, to steal time for one little daily breath of cleanly air.

To win it, he must slip early from his bed and walk out between shuttered shops, when it is chill but very clear, and all things are sharply outlined as in a frost.

It is an hour that has a charm of its own, when, but for a postman or a milkman, one has the pavement to oneself, and even the most common thing takes an ever-recurring freshness, as though causeway and lamp and signboard had all awakened to the new day. Then even an inland city may seem beautiful and bear virtue in its smoke-tainted air.

But it was by the sea that I lived, in a town that was unlovely enough were it not for its glorious neighbour. And who cares for the town when one can sit on the bench at the headland, and look out over the huge blue bay and the yellow scimitar that curves before it? I loved it when its great face was freckled with the fishing boats, and I loved it when the big ships went past, far out, a little hillock of white and no hull, with top sails curved like a bodice, so stately and demure. But most of all I loved it when no trace of man marred the majesty of nature, and when the sun burst slanted down on it from between the drifting rain clouds. Then I have seen the further edge draped in the gauze of the driving rain, with its thin grey shading under the slow clouds, while my headland was golden, and the sun gleamed upon the breakers and struck deep through the green waves beyond, showing up the purple patches where the beds of seaweed are lying. Such a morning as that, with the wind in his hair, and the spray on his lips, and the cry of the eddying gulls in his ear, may send a man back, braced afresh, to the reek of a sick room, and the dead drab weariness of practice.

It was on such another day that I first saw my old man. He came to my bench just as I was leaving it. My eye must have picked him out even in a crowded street, for he was a man of a large frame and a fine presence, with something of a distinction in the set of his lip and the poise of his head.

He limped up the winding path leaning heavily upon his stick, as though those great shoulders had become too much at last for the failing limbs that bore them. As he approached, my eyes caught nature's danger signal, that faint bluish tinge in nose and lip which tells of a laboring heart.

The bray is a little trying, sir, said I, speaking as a physician, I should say that you would do well to rest here before you go further. He inclined his head in a stately old-world fashion and seated himself upon the bench.

Seeing that he had no wish to speak, I was silent also, but I could not help watching him out of the corners of my eyes, for he was such a wonderful survival of the early half of the century, with his low-crowned, curly-brimmed hat, his black satin tie which fastened with a buckle at the back, and above all his large, fleshy, clean-shaven face, shot with its mesh of wrinkles. Those eyes, ere they had grown dim, had looked out from the box seat of mail coaches, and had seen the knots of navvies as they toiled on the brown embankments. Those lips had smiled over the first numbers of Pickwick, and had gossiped of the promising young man who wrote them. The face itself was a seventy-year almanac, and every seam and entry upon it, where the public as well as the private sorrow had left its trace. That pucker on the forehead stood for the mutiny, perhaps, that line of care for the Crimean winter, it may be, and that last little sheaf of wrinkles as my fancy hoped for the death of Gordon. And so, as I dreamed in my foolish way, the old gentleman with the shining stock was gone, and it was seventy years of a great nation's life that took shape before me on the headland in the morning.

But he soon brought me back to earth again. As he recovered his breath, he took a letter out of his pocket, and putting on a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses, he read it through very carefully. Without any design of playing the spy, I could not help observing that it was in a woman's hand. When he had finished it, he read it again, and then sat with the corners of his mouth drawn down, and his eyes staring vacantly out over the bay. The most forlorn-looking old gentleman that I have ever seen. All that is kindly within me was set stirring by that wistful face, but I knew that he was in no humour for talk, and so at last, with my breakfast and my patients calling me, I left him on the bench and started for home.