Buch lesen: «Thomasina»

CHAPTER ONE

Mr Andrew MacDhui, veterinary surgeon, thrust his brick-red, bristling beard through the door of the waiting-room next to the surgery and looked with cold, hostile eyes upon the people seated there on the plain pine chairs with their pets on their laps or at their feet awaiting his attendance.

Willie Bannock, his brisk, wiry man-of-all-work in surgery, dispensary, office and animal hospital, had already gossiped a partial list of those present that morning to Mr MacDhui and which included his friend and next-door neighbour, the Minister, Angus Peddie. Mr Peddie, of course, would be there with, or because of, his insufferable pug dog whose gastric disturbances were brought on by pampering and the feeding of forbidden sweets. Mr MacDhui’s glance dropped to the narrow lap of the short-legged, round little clergyman and for a moment his eye was caught up in the unhappy, milky one of the pug rolled in his direction, filled with the misery of belly-ache, and yet expressing a certain hope and longing as well. The animal had come to associate his visits to this place, the smells and the huge man with the fur on his face with relief.

The veterinary disentangled himself from the hypnotic eye and wished angrily that Peddie would follow his advice on feeding the animal and not be there wasting his time. He noted the rich builder’s wife from Glasgow on holiday with her rheumy little Yorkshire terrier, an animal he particularly detested, with its ridiculous velvet bow laced into its silken top-knot. There was Mrs Kinloch over the ears of her Siamese cat which lay upon her knee, occasionally shaking its head and complaining in a raucous voice, and, too, there was Mr Dobbie, the grocer, whose long and doleful countenance reflected that of his Scots terrier who was suffering from the mange and looked as though a visit to the upholsterer would be more practical.

There were half a dozen or so others, including a small boy, who he seemed to have seen somewhere before, and at the head of the line he recognised old, obese Mrs Laggan, proprietress of the newspaper and tobacco shop who, with her nondescript mongrel, Rabbie, his muzzle greyed, his eyes rheumy with age, was a landmark of Inveranoch and had been so for years.

Mrs Laggan was a widow, and had been for the past twenty-five years of her seventy-odd. For the last fifteen of them, her dog, Rabbie, had been her only companion, and his bulk draped across the doorstep of Mrs Laggan’s shop was as familiar a figure to natives as well as visitors to the Highland town as that of the fat widow in her Paisley shawl. Since the doorstep was Rabbie’s place, nose between forepaws, eyes rolled upwards, customers of the widow Laggan had learned to step over him when entering and departing. It was said in the High Street that descendants of these clients were already born with this precaution bred into them.

Mr MacDhui looked his patients over and the patients looked back at him with varying degrees of anxiety, hope, deference, or in some cases a return of the hostility that seemed to be written all over the well-marked features of his face, the high brow, the indignantly flaring red-tufted eyebrows, commanding blue eyes, strong nose, full and sometimes mocking lips, half seen through the bristle of red moustache and beard and the truculent and aggressive chin.

His eyes and, above all, his manner always seemed cold and angry, perhaps because, it was said in Inveranoch, he was on the whole a cold and angry man.

A widower of the stature and flamboyance of Mr Veterinary Surgeon MacDhui was subject enough for gossip in a Highland town the size of Inveranoch, in Argyll, where he had been in practice for only a little over eighteen months. By the nature of his profession he was a figure of importance there since he looked after not only the personal and private pets of the townspeople, but was responsible also for the health of the livestock raised in the outlying farms of the district, the herds of Angus cattle and black-faced sheep, pigs and fowl. In addition, he was the appointed veterinary of the district for the inspection of meat and milk and hygienic dairies as well.

The gossips allowed that Andrew MacDhui was an honest, forthright and fair-dealing man, but, and this was the opinion of the strictly religiously inclined, a queer one to be dealing with God’s dumb creatures, since he appeared to have no love for animals, very little for man, and neither the inclination or the time for God. Whether or not he was an out and out unbeliever as many claimed, he certainly never was seen in Mr Peddie’s church, even though the two were known to be good friends. Others claimed that when his wife had died his heart had turned to stone, all but the corner devoted to his love for his seven-year-old child, Mary Ruadh, the one who was never seen without that ill-favoured, queer-marked ginger cat she called Thomasina.

Mind you, said the tattlers, no one denied that he was a good and efficient doctor for the beasties. Quick to cure or kill, and a mite too handy with the chloroform rag was the word that went around. Those who felt kindly towards him held that he was a humane man not disposed to see a hopelessly sick animal suffer needlessly, while those who disliked him and his high-handed ways called him a hard, cruel man to whom the life of an animal was nothing, and who was openly contemptuous of people who were sentimentally attached to their pets.

And many of those who did not encounter him professionally were inclined to the belief that there must be some good in the man else he would not have had the friendship and esteem of Mr Angus Peddie, pastor of the Presbyterian flock of Inveranoch. It was said that the minister who had known MacDhui in their student days had been largely instrumental in persuading his friend, upon the death of his wife, Anne, to purchase the practice of Inveranoch’s retiring vet and move thither leaving behind him the unhappy memories that had bedevilled him in Glasgow.

Several of the inhabitants of Inveranoch remembered Mr MacDhui’s late father, John, himself a Glasgow veterinary, a dour, tyrannical old man with a strong religious bent who, holding the purse strings, had compelled his son to follow in his footsteps. The story was that Andrew MacDhui had wished to study to become a surgeon in his youth but in the end had been compelled for financial reasons to yield to his father’s wishes and likewise become a veterinary.

One of these inhabitants had once paid a visit to the gloomy old house in Dunearn Street in Glasgow where for a time father and son practised together until the old man died, and had nothing good to say about it, except that it was not much to wonder at that Mr MacDhui had turned out as he had.

Mr Peddie had known MacDhui’s father as a psalm-singing old hypocrite in whose home God served merely as an auxiliary policeman. Whatever seemed healthy or fun, old John MacDhui’s God was against, and Andrew MacDhui had grown up hating Him and then denying Him. The tragedy of the loss of his wife, Anne, when his daughter, Mary Ruadh, was only three had confirmed him in his bitterness.

His scrutiny completed, MacDhui now pointed his beard at old, fat Mrs Laggan and jerked his head in the direction of his office. She gave a little bleat of fright, picked Rabbie up out of her lap and arose painfully, holding him in her arms where he lay on his back, forepaws bent limply, watery eyes revolving. He resembled an over-stuffed black and grey porker and he wheezed at every breath like a catarrhal old man snoring.

Mr Angus Peddie pulled in his feet to let her by and gave her a warm, cherubic smile of encouragement, for he was the very opposite of the figure that a dour Scots churchman is supposed to resemble. He was short, inclined to stoutness, sweet-natured and extraordinarily vital. He had a round, dimpled face and mischievous eyes and smile which, however, could instantly express the deepest sympathy, penetrating understanding and concern.

Peddie’s pug dog, who, as well as suffering from chronic indigestion, staggered under the name of Fin-du-Siècle, an indication of the kind of humour one might be expected to encounter in the large Peddie family, lay likewise wheezing in the minister’s lap. Peddie lifted him into a sitting position so that he could better see Mrs Laggan and her sick dog go by. He said: “That’s Mrs Laggan’s Rabbie, Fin. The poor wee thing isn’t feeling well just now.” The rolling eyes of the two dogs met for a moment in melancholy exchange.

Mrs Laggan followed Mr MacDhui into the examining room of the surgery and deposited Rabbie on his back upon the long, white-enamelled examining table where he remained, his forepaws still limp and his breath coming in difficult gasps.

The veterinarian lifted the lip of the animal, glanced at his teeth, pulled down its eyelids and placed one hand for a moment upon its heaving belly. “How old is this dog?” he asked.

Mrs Laggan, traditionally dressed as became a respectable widow, in rusty black with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders, seemed to shrink inside her clothes. “Fifteen years and a bit,” she replied. “Well, fourteen, since he’s grown from the wee pup he was the day I got him,” she added, as though by quickly subtracting a year from his age she might lure fate into permitting him to remain a year longer. Fifteen was old for a dog. With fourteen there was always hope they might live to be fifteen, like Mrs Campbell’s old sheepdog, which was actually nearly sixteen.

The veterinarian nodded, glanced perfunctorily at the dog again and said: “He ought to be put out of his misery. You can see how bad his asthma is. He can hardly breathe.” He picked the dog up and set him on his feet on the floor where he promptly collapsed on to his belly with his chin flat on the floor and his eyes turned up adoringly at Mrs Laggan. “Or walk,” concluded MacDhui.

The widow had many chins. Fear set them all to quivering. “Put him away? Put the poor beastie to death? But whatever should I do then when he’s all I’ve got in this world? We’ve been together for fifteen years now, and me a lonely widow for twenty-five. What would I be doing without Rabbie?”

“Get another dog,” MacDhui replied. “It shouldn’t be difficult. The village is full of them.”

“Och, how can you be speaking like that? It would not be Rabbie. Can you not be giving him a wee bit of medicine that will keep him going till he gets well? He’s been a very healthy dog.”

Animals, reflected Mr MacDhui, were never a problem, it was the sentimentality of their owners that created all the difficulties. “The dog must die soon,” he said. “He is very old and very ill. Anyone with half an eye can see that his life has become a burden to him and that he is suffering. If I gave him some medicine you would be back here within a fortnight. It might prolong his life for a month, at the most six months. I am a busy man,” he concluded, but then added more gently: “It would be kinder to make an end to him.”

The quivering of her chins now had spread to her small mouth as Mrs Laggan looked fearfully into the day that would be without Rabbie; no one to talk to, no one to whose breathing she would hearken whilst she had her evening cup of tea, or lay in bed at night. She said what came into her head, but not what was bursting in her heart. “The customers who come to my shop will miss Rabbie sore if he’s not there for them to be stepping over.” But she was meaning: “I’m an old woman. I have not many days left myself. I am lonely. The dog has been my companion and my comfort for so long. He and I know one another’s ways so well.”

“Yes, yes, Mrs Laggan, no doubt. But you must make up your mind, for I have other patients waiting.”

Mrs Laggan looked uneasily to the big, vital man with the red moustache and beard.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be selfish if poor Rabbie is suffering …”

Mr MacDhui did not reply, but sat waiting.

Life without Rabbie – the once cold nose pressing against her hand, the edge of pink tongue that protruded when he was contemplative, his great sigh of contentment when he was fed full – but above all his presence; Rabbie always within sight, sound, or touch. Old dogs must die; old people must die. She was minded to plead for the bit of medicine, for another month, a week, a day more with Rabbie, but she was rushed and nervous and fearful. And so she said: “You would be very gentle with him –”

MacDhui sighed with impatient relief: “He will not feel a thing, I assure you.” He rose. “I think you are doing what is right, Mrs Laggan.”

“Very well, then. Make away with him. What will it be I’ll be owing you?”

The vet had a moment’s pang brought on by the sight of the trembling lips and chins and cursed himself for it. “There will be no charge,” he said curtly.

The widow Laggan regained sudden control of her face and her dignity, though her eyes were wet. “I’ll be paying you for your services—”

“Two shillings, then.”

She paid out of a small black purse, setting the florin on to his desk with a snap that caused Rabbie to prick up his greying ears for a moment. Without another glance at her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs Laggan made for the door. She held herself as proudly and erectly as she could, for she would not be a fat old woman dissolving into grief before this hard man. She bore up to pass through and close it behind her.

Thin women in sorrow have both the faces and figures for bleakness and woe, but there is nothing quite as futile and shaking as the aspect of an obese woman in affliction. The small mouth unable to form into the classic lines of tragedy can but purse and quiver. Grief is bowed, but fat keeps the stout woman’s curves constant, except that the flesh suddenly greys and looks as though the juices of life had gone out of it for all its roundness.

When the widow Laggan emerged from the surgery and entered the waiting-room once more, all eyes were turned upon her, and the Rev. Peddie recognised the symptoms at once, got up and went to her, crying: “Oh, dear – don’t say that something ill has befallen Rabbie. Is he to remain in hospital?” And then he echoed the prior remarks of the widow. “Why, whatever would the town do without the presence of Rabbie across the doorstep?”

Safe within the circle of her own people, Mrs Laggan could let the tears flow freely as she told of the sentence passed upon her friend. “The doctor said it would be better if he were to be put away just now. Why must the ones we love always go while we are remaining behind? Och, it will not be the same any more without Rabbie. But I’m thinking I’ll be following him soon and it will be all for the best.” She dabbed at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief and essayed a smile. “Do you remember how Rabbie would be blocking the door, and all the gentry would be raising up their knees to pass over him?”

It was so small a thing that had happened, yet the waiting-room was stiff with the tragedy of it, and Mr Peddie felt the horror clamped like a hand about his heart, squeezing that member until it felt in some similar measure the pain that was oppressing the widow Laggan. Mr Peddie had one of those awful moments to which he was prone when he could not decide what it was that God would wish him to do, what God Himself would do, were He to stand there with them all in the presence of the misery of the widow Laggan.

For to Mr Angus Peddie there was neither gloom nor sourness, nor melancholy about either the God or the religion he served. Creation and the world created, along with the Creator were a perpetual joy to him and his mission seemed to be to see that his flock appreciated and was properly grateful for all the wonders and beauties of nature, man and beast as well as the great and marvellous unexplained mysteries of the universe. He did not try to explain God, the Father, or the Son, but worked to help his people love and enjoy Him. A man of unusual tolerance and breadth of vision, he believed that man could deny God for a time, but not forever, since God was so manifest in everything that lived and breathed, in things both animate and inanimate, that He was universal and hence undeniable.

And yet, human being that he was, he felt the panic when his God seemed to turn His back upon the likes of the widow Laggan and his own warm heart was riven with pity for her plight.

There stood a weeping fat woman dabbing at her eyes with a small cloth, the tears straggling unevenly over the curves of her cheek and her triple chins quaking and jouncing. And in a moment she would walk out of there and begin to die.

Peddie felt the strong push of the impulse to rush into the surgery of Mr MacDhui crying: “Stop, Andrew! Don’t kill the animal. Let it live out its time. Who are you who hate him to play God?” but he resisted it. What right had he to interfere? MacDhui knew his business, and veterinary surgeons, just as doctors, frequently had to make decisions and break news that was painful to people, except that to the former was sometimes given the additional mercy of destruction to save pain and suffering.

Mrs Laggan said once more, speaking as though to herself: “Twill no be the same wi’out Rabbie,” and went out. Mr MacDhui’s beard came in through the door again and he stood there a moment regarding them all truculently as though experiencing some remnant of the scene that had just taken place and the sympathy engendered for the old woman.

He asked: “Who’s next?” and his countenance took on an even greater expression of distaste when the Glasgow builder’s wife with the Yorkshire terrier half arose irresolutely from the hard, waiting-room chair and the dog gave a shrill yelp of terror.

A small voice said: “Please, sir, could you spare a moment?”

Someone remarked: “It’s little Geordie McNabb, the draper’s boy.”

Geordie was eight. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt and the kerchief of the Scout Wolf Cubs. He had a round, solemn face with dark hair and eyes and a curiously Chinesey cast of countenance. In his grubby hands he clasped a box and in the box palpitatingly reposed his good deed for that day. MacDhui strode over to him overpoweringly, overtoweringly, looming over him like a red Magog, thrusting his bristling beard nearly into the box as he boomed: “Well, lad, what is it you want?”

Geordie stood his ground bravely. Patently, inside the box there was a green frog with heaving sides. The boy explained: “There’s something wrong with his foot. And he cannot hop. I found him by the side of the lochan. He was trying very hard to hop but he couldn’t at all. Will you make him better, please, so that he can be hopping again?”

The waves of old bitterness had a way of rolling up inside Andrew MacDhui at the oddest and most ill-timed moments, causing him to do and say things that he did not mean to at all. Here he was in his waiting-room full of clients and it suddenly came over him as he stood bent over and looking down into the box – “Doctor to a frog with a broken leg, that’s what you are, my great, fine fellow—”

And thereupon the old angers and regrets returned to plague and irritate him. Had there been justice in the world, all of these people in the room, yes, and the child too, would have been there to consult him about ailing hearts, or lungs or throats or livers, aches and pains and mysterious cramps, sicknesses and diseases, which he would combat for them and put to rights. And there they were instead with their pampered, snuffling, mewing and whining little pets kept for their own flattery’s sake or because they had been too lazy or selfish to bring into the world a child on whom to lavish their affection.

The ailing Yorkie was quite near to him and MacDhui, his nostrils already flaring with disgust of himself and all humanity, caught a whiff of the perfume with which his mistress had scented him. He therefore replied to Geordie McNabb out of the black cloud of anger enveloping him: “I have no time for such foolishness. Cannot you see that I am busy with a room full of people? Go put the frog back by the pond again and leave it be. Off with you now.”

Into the dark, round eyes of Geordie came that expression reserved to children who have been hurt by and disappointed in their grown-ups. “But he’s sick,” he said, “he’s not well. Will he not die?”

MacDhui, not less unkindly this time, steered the child towards the door and gave him a farewell pat on the behind. “Off you go, boy. Put it back where you found it. Nature will look after it. Now, then, if you like, Mrs Sanderson –”