I brooded hard for a long time, then said, “What you last said is mainly true, apart from your remark about the impossibility of improving things scientifically. As a member of the Liberal Party I am bound to disagree there. As to you shortening Bell’s life, remember that the only sure thing we know about ageing is that misery and pain age folk faster than happiness does, so Bella’s emphatically happy young brain may prolong her body well past the common span. If you committed a crime by making Bell as she is I am thankful for that crime because I love her as she is, whether she marries Wedderburn or no. I also doubt if the woman who chloroformed me will be anyone’s helpless plaything. Maybe we should pity Wedderburn.”
Baxter stared at me then reached across the table. He gripped my right hand so that the knuckles cracked, I roared with pain and sustained bruises which took a month to heal. He apologized and said he had been expressing heart-felt gratitude. I begged him to keep his gratitude to himself in future.
After this we grew slightly more cheerful. Baxter began strolling about the kitchen, smiling as he only did when he thought of Bell and forgot himself.
“Yes,” he said, “not many two-and-a-half-year-olds are so sure-footed, steady-handed, quick-witted. She remembers everything that happens to her and every word she hears, so even when it makes no sense she picks up the meaning later. And I have saved her from one crushing disadvantage I never had myself: she has never been small so has never known fear. Do you remember all the sizes of midget you were before reaching the height you are now, McCandless? The twenty-four-inch-long gnome? Yard-tall goblin? Four-foot dwarf? Did the giants who owned the world when you were wee let you feel as important as they were?”
I shuddered and said that all childhoods were not like mine. “Perhaps not, but even in the homes of the rich screaming babies, terrified toddlers, sulky adolescents are commonplace, I hear. Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it. Now Bella (and this is why you may be right about pitying Wedderburn) Bella has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood. Her menstrual cycle was in full flood from the day she opened her eyes, so she has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting or to dread what she desires. Not having learned cowardice when small and oppressed she only uses speech to say what she thinks and feels, not to disguise these, so she is incapable of every badness done through hypocrisy and lying — nearly every sort of badness. All she lacks is experience, especially the experience of decision making. Wedderburn is her first major decision but she has no delusions about his character. Mrs. Dinwiddie has sewn enough money into the lining of her coat to ensure she will not lack funds if she and Wedderburn suddenly part. My main fear is that someone who interests her more will attract her into an adventure we cannot imagine. Still, she knows how to send a telegram.”
“Her worst fault,” I said (Baxter at once looked indignant) “is her infantile sense of time and space. She feels short intervals are huge, yet thinks she can grasp all the things she wants at once, no matter how far they are from her and each other. She talked as if her engagement to marry me and her elopement with Wedderburn were simultaneous. I had no heart to tell her time and space forbid this. I did not even explain that the moral law forbids it.”
Baxter was halfway through explaining that our ideas of time, space and morality were convenient habits, not natural laws, when I yawned in his face.
There was daylight and bird-song outside the window. Mournful hooters were summoning workers into shipyards and factories. Baxter said a bed was prepared for me in a guest-room. I answered that I would be on duty in a couple of hours and wanted nothing from him but the use of a wash-basin, razor and comb. As he led me upstairs he said, “We have talked about Bella exactly as she foretold in her letter, so you had better live here too. I ask this as a favour, McCandless. The company of elderly women is not enough for me now.”
“Park Circus is very far from the Royal Infirmary compared with my digs on the Trongate. What would your terms be?”
“A rent-free room with free gas-light, free coal fire and free bed-linen. Free laundering of your small clothes and shirts, free starching of your collars, polishing of your boots. Free hot baths. Free meals when you choose to eat with me.”
“Your food would sicken me, Baxter.”
“You would be given the same meals Mrs. Dinwiddie and the cook and housemaid give themselves — plain fare excellently cooked. You would have the free use of a good library which has been greatly enlarged since Sir Colin’s time.”
“And in return?”
“When you have a spare moment you could help me in the clinic. From dogs, cats, rabbits and parrots you may learn much to help you mend featherless bipedal patients.”
“Hm! I will think it over.”
He smiled as if he thought my remark an empty show of manly independence. He was right.
That evening I borrowed a big trunk, packed it, paid my Trongate landlord a fortnight’s rent for notice of quittal, and came in a cab to Park Circus with all my goods, gear and chattels. Baxter received me without comment, showed me my new room and handed me a telegram wired from London a few hours before. It said M HR (am here) with no name at the end.
11. Eighteen Park Circus
If hard rewarding work, interesting, undemanding friendship, and a comfortable home are the best grounds for happiness then the following months were perhaps the pleasantest I have known. All Baxter’s servants had begun life as country girls of my mother’s class, and though none were much less than fifty I believe they liked having a comparatively young man in the house who enjoyed the food they prepared. They never saw me eat because my meals were hoisted up to the dining-room on a dumb-waiter, but I often sent a cheap bunch of flowers or note of thanks down to the kitchen with the dirty plates.
I ate with Baxter at a huge table, sitting as far from him as possible. Having little or no pancreas he made his digestive juices by hand, stirring them into his food before chewing and swallowing. When I asked about the ingredients he evaded the question in a shamefaced way which suggested some were extracted from his bodily wastes. The odour at his end of the table confirmed this. Behind his chair was a sideboard loaded with carboys, stoppered vials, graduated glasses, pipettes, syringes, litmus papers, thermometers and a barometer; also the Bunsen burner, retort and tubing of a distillation plant. This last bubbled on a low gas throughout the day. At unpredictable moments in every meal he would stop chewing and stay absolutely still as if listening to something remote, yet inside himself. After seconds like this he would slowly stand, carefully carry his plate to the sideboard and spend minutes concocting messes for addition to it. On the sideboard lay a chart where every four hours he recorded his pulse, respiration and temperature, besides chemical changes in his blood and lymphatic system. One morning before breakfast I studied it and was so disturbed that I never looked at it again. It showed daily fluctuations too irregular, sudden and steep for even the strongest and healthiest body to survive. Times and dates (noted in Baxter’s clear, tiny, childish yet firm script) showed that when talking to me the day before his neural network had passed through the equivalent of an epileptic seizure, yet I had noticed no change in his manner. Surely all this apparatus and charting must be pretences, ploys by which an ugly hypochondriac exaggerated his diseases in order to feel superhuman?