Grand Canary (6 page)

He had no money, nor did he desire it, except for the bare necessities of life. He took rooms in Westminster and set to work. His struggles in London were severe, his privations many. But he gritted his teeth, tightened his belt, built everything upon his ideal. He discovered the prejudice which bogs the feet of genius, especially when that genius is sponsored by a provincial school of small repute. Yet rebuffs served merely to harden his purpose; he lived like a monk, he fought like a soldier. He obtained a minor hospital appointment in a nearer suburb; then, after three years' grilling work, he was given the post of clinical pathologist at the Victoria Hospital. A small and unimportant hospital, perhaps; old, too, and conservative in its methods; yet actually this marked the most important step in his career. That night he went home to his rooms in Vincent Street and stared at the portrait of Pasteur upon his desk – Pasteur whom alone he admitted to be great; then he smiled his rare, unusual smile. He felt the power surge up within him to conquer.

He had swung inevitably into the field of serum therapeutics. And he had a theory, based upon a long series of agglutination experiments, a vivid advance upon the work of Koch and Wright, which he felt would revolutionise the entire principle of scientific treatment.

It was immense, his idea, magnificent – bearing not merely upon one particular disease, but bigger, much bigger, embracing in its ramifications the whole wide field of preventative and curative inoculation. He burned with this conviction. Singling a specific point of attack, he chose the condition of cerebro-spinal fever; partly because of the mortality of the disease, partly because of the comparative failure of all previous sera.

So at the Victoria he began. For six months he worked intensely upon his serum, the routine work of his appointment accomplished through the day, this special work at night. His health began to suffer, but he exhibited no gratitude when advised by his friend Ismay to shorten his laboratory hours. Instead, he lengthened them, driven by that burning zeal within him. Nervous, irritable, and overstrung, he still felt himself approaching definitely towards success. Moreover, a seasonal outcropping of sporadic meningitis occurred about this time, and the mere consideration of the existing treatment in all its pre-Adamite ineffectuality – the phrase was his! – goaded him to further effort.

Late one night he completed his last conclusive tests against controls. Over and over again he checked his results. Satisfied? That was no word. He was elated! He flung his pen into the air. He knew that he had won.

The next day three early cases of cerebro-spinal fever were admitted to the hospital. It was for Harvey no mere coincidence but a logical concession from circumstance, the tacit pre-admission of his victory. At once he approached the hospital authorities and offered to exhibit his serum.

His offer was curtly refused.

Harvey was staggered. He did not know he had made enemies, that his careless dress, sardonic tongue, and arrogant disregard for etiquette had made him an object of antipathy and suspicion. Already the biting truth of his pathological reports had soured the temper of the diagnosticians and, like all who disdain the footsteps of their predecessors, he figured in the eyes of many as an upstart, a firebrand, a clever, but a dangerous fellow.

But, though he was staggered, Harvey did not accept defeat. No, no; that was not Harvey.

Instantly he launched a campaign. He approached individually the various members of the staff; produced the evidence of his experiments; he laboured painfully to convince those more favourably disposed to him of the value of his original work. Infuriated by the inertia of conservatism, by the whole muddling process of authority, he pressed his case urgently. The very bitterness of his air breathed conviction. There was humming and hawing; reference to the institution's sane policy; talk of a general staff meeting. Meanwhile the three patients progressed with inexorable rapidity into the advanced stages of the disease.

Then with suddenness and magnanimity the opposition weakened; it was decided with due gravity to permit the application of the new therapy; a sort of ponderous consent was conveyed – in writing – to Harvey. He leaped to the opportunity, rushed immediately to the ward.

It was, of course, too late. He should have known it. The three patients, now six days in hospital and ten in the grip of their morbidity, were comatose, clearly moribund. And the circumstances, alas! were no pre-admission of Harvey's victory, but a trap sprung by destiny in his face. On the one hand, an expectant and antipathetic audience awaiting with a sneer the consummation of the miracle; on the other, three subjects his calmer judgement would have instantly rejected as far beyond the aid of any human remedy.

But he was not calm. Strung to an unimagined tensity, he could not allow to his opponents the gratification of seeing him withdraw.

He had a desperate belief in his serum. And he had the fatal urge of eagerness. Grimly he accepted the responsibility, injecting massive doses directly into the cerebral ventricles of all three subjects. All that night he remained in the ward. Again and once again he repeated the dosage.

Early next morning, within the compass of the same sad hour, the three patients died. They would have died in any case. It was inevitable. Yet it was a bad business for Harvey – though one from which his resilient spirit would inevitably have recovered. But there was worse to follow. A loose tongue wagged spitefully outside the hospital. News of the incident reached the newspapers, flared in a garbled form, and spread like wildfire through the popular Press. There was a terrific outcry levelled at the hospital and at Harvey. He gave no heed, meeting the biased clamour with quivering contempt. Unshaken, he saw now that he had intervened too late. To his cold and scientific mind the deaths of the three individuals represented no more than the termination of an inconclusive experiment. Because he desired no popular success, the flagrant uproar of the herd was to him as nothing.

But to the hospital it was not as nothing. And the authorities, alas! gave heed.

Pressed by the force of outside influence, the board met – a full meeting –
in camera.
The governor, like Pilate, washed his hands; the protests of the discerning few who believed in Harvey proved unavailing; there was a sort of scurried feeling that the incubus must be removed.

Upon the day following the meeting, Harvey went into his laboratory and found an envelope upon his desk. It was the formal demand for his resignation.

Incredulously he faced the shattering injustice of this final blow. It was beyond reason. The very walls rushed in upon him.

Four years' work, his whole soul straining in the cause of science; four years' searching for the heart of truth; and now – he saw it in a flash – outcast, no position, no opportunity, no money. And his name a public obloquy. With luck he might secure himself, perhaps, a paltry assistantship to some unknown practitioner. But for the rest – he was finished.

An agony of self-satire was in his soul. Without a word he rose, burned the records of his research, smashed the flasks which held the product of his work, and walked out of his laboratory.

He went home. He faced the situation with a scathing, pitiless irony. But he wanted to forget – to forget as quickly as he could. And he began, not from weakness, but from a bitter hatred of life, to drink. His attitude was not heroic, but derisive. Alcohol – it was a drug: and as such he would use it. He was alone; the thought of women had never entered his head; and, with no capacity for friendship, only Gerald Ismay, the surgeon, had been there to witness this spectacle of saturation.

But Ismay had been there. Yes. Each day of those three deadly weeks he had been – quite mildly – there; and by insinuation and insidious tact had finally advanced the suggestion of this voyage.

Why not? A man might drink the better and lose himself the quicker upon a lonely ship. He had agreed, unthinking of the trap which Ismay had contrived. And now he was here; aboard this wretched ship; deprived of liquor; feeling so ill the sensation was like death.

All at once he turned his head upon the pillow and with a start came back to himself. Someone had knocked upon the door. And immediately the handle turned and Jimmy Corcoran sidled his bony frame into the cabin. For a moment he stood grinning ingratiatingly, hat still on head, then he flexed both arms as though nonchalantly to elevate dumb-bells of enormous weight.

‘How goes it, me boy? In other words, how does it go? D'ye feel muscle comin' back on ye yet?'

Harvey stared at him with an injured eye.

‘How do you know that it doesn't go?' he muttered.

Corcoran smiled again – in a friendly, intimate way. He touched his hat a shade farther back.

‘No lunch, no tay, and now, by the looks on it, no dinner. Faith, it wouldn't take a detictive to see that ye was out. And, knowin' somethin' about the old K. O., I just looked in to see if you was scramblin' to your corner again.'

‘The Good Samaritan,' sneered Harvey.

‘Sure.'

A short silence came; then, at a sudden thought, Harvey raised himself upon his shoulder.

‘They've been talking about me.'

‘That's right,' Jimmy agreed; he hitched up his trousers and sat down easily upon the settee. ‘They've been talkin' about ye all right. Had the whole of yer history weighed in and tested. A gintleman was sayin' things. What they don't know about ye now could be writ on a threepenny piece. But don't get yer rag out. Stay cool and stick yer chin down, fella.'

‘For God's sake,' cried Harvey in an agony of irritation, ‘don't call me that. Call me anything under heaven but that.'

‘Sure,' said Jimmy agreeably.

A silence fell, during which Harvey pressed his damp hand on his brow; then suddenly, with a concentrated bitterness of tone, he exclaimed:

‘Why do you come in here? Can't you see I want to be left alone?'

Jimmy pulled the metal snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, dipped in a broad forefinger and thumb, inhaled gravely, then dusted himself gently with the palm of his hand.

‘“Whin the object of his desire has faded,”' he quoted oracularly, ‘“then he departs and is seen no more.” That's Playto, that is. But faith, ye wouldn't be askin' me to go yet awhile. Me that took a proper notion On ye the minnit ye come into the saloon. Sure, I knew booze was the trouble as soon as I clapped oi on ye. It's sent many's a good man for the count. I followed the beer meself in the ould days. Cyards and the dthrink – ah! –' He sighed and looked at the other sideways with a sort of sly solemnity. ‘But divil the one or t'other am I after touchin' now. Mind ye, despite me faults and failings I've always spoke the thruth. Let a man be tinder to the thruth and I'll rispect him. And me heart draws to a man that's had a rap from distiny. Faith, I've had a troublous life meself, up and down, off and on, since first I seen the light in Clontarf sixty odd year ago. Me folks was poor – proud people, mind ye, from Tralee, but poor. I got me early eddication holdin' horses' heads in Sackville Street, and learned me letters spellin' the Guinness's advertisements. Ye wouldn't believe it, me that reads Playto like a scholard.' He paused, as for encouragement, but Harvey's eyes remained tightly shut. ‘ Then I went in for the game, the glorious game. A foine set figure of a lad was I. Unsurpassable. There wasn't a man could stand in the ring against me. In Belfast I knocked Smiler Burge over the ropes with one crack of me left. Sure, I'd have been the world's champeen if I hadn't bruk me leg. But bruk me leg I did. And carry the mark to this day. Faith, it robbed the world of a champeen. That's how I came to emigrate in the black nineties.'

Harvey groaned.

‘Is that the end? If so, will you kindly get out?'

‘The end?' cried Jimmy. ‘Faith, 'twas only the beginning. Since then hivin alone knows what I done. I marked billiards in Sydney. Then I marked time in Mexico in wan of them popgun revolutions. The next year I was in the Bull Gulch gold rush, and the next I took a pub in San Francisco. But sure, I couldn't stand the loife. Then I tried a turn at farmin' in the Southern States. And I liked that best of all. If ever the ship comes in, that's where ye'll find Jimmy C. – wid a cow and some hens in his own backyard. But I took a foolish fit and wandered off to Colorado, scratchin' silver. And after that I travelled with Professor Sinnott's circus. Dear old Bob, I hopes to see him soon. I'm joinin' him in Santa Cruz, ye see – there's business all fixed and waitin' – a great affair. Ah, but these was the palmy days with old Bob Sinnott's show. Every evenin' for a twelve-month I intered the din of the untamable lioness Dominica. She'd attacked and killed three keepers – so 'twas said upon the posthers. But in the end she died on Bob and me. 'Twas somethin' out of the monkey-house got in her grub. And thin the circus busted.' He sighed, thrust his thumb in his armhole. ‘'Twas a sorry day, I tell ye, when I took good-bye of Bob.'

Harvey turned restlessly in his bunk.

‘I wish to God you'd take good-bye of me.'

‘I'm goin',' cried Jimmy. ‘Of course I'm goin'. I can see yer feelin' none too grand. I only wanted to inthrojuice meself and let ye know I'm at yer service. Faith and I am. And don't be judgin' by appearances, me boy. I may look down on me luck.' He stopped and straightened his paste tie-pin with an air. ‘Sure, 'tis only timporary. 'Tis now I'm on the best thing ever was. Wid the Professor, ye understand. A foine affair. It's goin' to make a fortune for yer good friend Jimmy C.'

He paused so impressively that Harvey was compelled to look up. And he found that disarming grin upon him. He hesitated. There was about the shabby old adventurer an irresistible humbugging charm that killed the angry words upon his tongue. For a moment the two looked at each other. Then Corcoran stood up.