Dr Archibald McCandless (1862–1911) was born in Whauphill, Galloway, the illegitimate son of a prosperous tenant farmer. He studied medicine at Glasgow University, worked briefly as a house surgeon and public health officer, then devoted himself to literature and the education of his sons. His once famous epic, The Testament of Sawney Bean, has long been unfairly neglected, and his wife suppressed the first edition of his greatest work, the autobiographical Poor Things. Recently rediscovered by the Glasgow local historian, Mike Donnelly, this weird narrative is as gripping as Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and in 1992 received both the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Prize.

Alasdair Gray, the editor, was born in Riddrie, Glasgow, 1934, the son of a cardboard-box manufacturer and part-time hill guide. He obtained a Scottish Education Department Diploma in Design and Mural Painting and is now a fat, balding, asthmatic, married pedestrian who lives by writing and designing things.

The doctor who wrote this account of his early experiences died in 1911, and readers who know nothing about the daringly experimental history of Scottish medicine will perhaps mistake it for a grotesque fiction. Those who examine the proofs given at the end of this introduction will not doubt that in the final week of February 1881, at 18 Park Circus, Glasgow, a surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman. The local historian Michael Donnelly disagrees with me. It was he who salvaged the text which is the biggest part of the book, so I must say how he found it.

Like most farm workers in those days my mother distrusted banks.¹ When death drew near she told me her life-savings were in a tin trunk under the bed and muttered, “Take it and count it.”

I did, and the sum was more than I had expected. She said, “Make something of yourself with it.”

I told her I would make myself a doctor, and her mouth twisted in the sceptical grimace she made at all queer suggestions. A moment later she whispered fiercely, “Don’t pay a penny toward the burial. If Scraffles puts me in a pauper’s grave then Hell mend him! Promise you’ll keep all my money to yourself.”

Scraffles was the local nickname for my father and for a disease that afflicts badly fed poultry. Scraffles did pay for her burial but told me, “I leave the stone to you.”

Twelve years passed before I could afford a proper monument, and by then nobody remembered the position of the grave.

I knew him by sight for three terms before we exchanged a word.

A private workspace had been made in a corner of the dissecting-room by taking a door off a cupboard and installing a bench. Baxter usually sat there, preparing and examining slide sections and making rapid notes, and here his big face, stout body and thick limbs gave him a dwarfish look. Sometimes he ran out to raid the tank of disinfectant where brains were heaped like cauliflowers, and as he passed other people you saw he was a whole head taller than most, but he kept as far from others as possible, being desperately shy. Despite the ogreish body he had the wide hopeful eyes, snub nose and mournful mouth of an anxious infant, with a brow corrugated by three deep permanent wrinkles. In the morning his coarse brown hair was oiled and combed flat on each side of a centre parting, but as the day wore on spiky tufts of it rose behind his ears, and by mid afternoon his scalp was as shaggy as a bear’s pelt. His clothes were of expensive grey cloth, quietly fashionable and beautifully tailored to make his odd figure appear as conventional as possible, yet I felt he would look more natural in the baggy pants and turban of a pantomime Turk.

This was the only son of Colin Baxter, the first medical man to be knighted by Queen Victoria.² Sir Colin’s portrait hung beside the portrait of John Hunter in our examination hall: a clean-shaven, sharp-faced, thin-lipped man who looked nothing like his son. “Sir Colin’s lack of interest in female beauty was legendary,” one of the gossips told me, “but his offspring proves he had a peculiar appetite for female ugliness.” It was said that Godwin’s father got him late in life by a domestic servant, but (unlike my father) gave his son his own surname, a private education and a small fortune. Nothing definite was known of Godwin’s mother. Some said she was in a lunatic asylum, others that Sir Colin kept her as his maidservant in black dress, white cap and apron, silently passing plates round the dining-table when he entertained colleagues and the wives of colleagues. The great surgeon died a year before Godwin enrolled as a student. He was a brilliant student apart from hospital work, where his strange appearance and voice frightened patients and offended the staff, so he did not graduate but continued as a research assistant. Nobody knew or was much interested in his line of research. He was allowed to come and go as he pleased because he paid his fees regularly, inconvenienced nobody, and had a famous father. Most thought him a scientific dabbler, but I also heard that he gave unpaid help to a clinic attached to an east-end iron foundry, and treated scorched limbs and fractured spines uncommonly well.

One day I asked him the exact nature of his researches.

“I am refining Sir Colin’s techniques.”

“You told me that once before, Baxter, but it is not a satisfying answer. Why refine on out-of-date techniques? Your famous father was a great surgeon but medicine has advanced hugely since his death. In the past ten years we have discovered things he would have thought incredible — microbes and phagocytes, how to diagnose and remove brain tumours and repair ulcerous perforation.”

“Sir Colin discovered something better than those.”

“What?”

“Well,” said Baxter, speaking slowly, as if against his will, “he discovered how to arrest a body’s life without ending it, so that no messages passed along the nerves, the respiration, circulation and digestion were completely suspended, the cellular vitality was not impaired.”

“Very interesting, Baxter. What use is it, medically speaking?”

“O, it has its uses!” he said, with a smile that greatly annoyed me.

“I hate mysteries Baxter!” I told him, “especially the man-made sort which are always a fraud. Do you know what most students in my year think of you? They think you a harmless insignificant madman, who dabbles with brains and microscopes in an effort to look important.”

My poor friend stood still and gazed at me, obviously aghast. I stared stonily back. In a faltering voice he asked if I, too, thought he was that. I said, “If you don’t answer my questions frankly, what else can I think?”

“Well,” he said, sighing, “come home and I will show you something.”

This pleased me. He had never invited me to his home before.

Then came the loneliest months I have known. Baxter no longer came to the University. The bench was removed from his old workspace, which became a cupboard again. I strolled round Park Circus at least once a fortnight, but saw nobody enter or leave his front door, and I lacked courage to climb the steps and knock. Yet clean unshuttered windows showed the house was occupied, and I should have realized that when not with a visitor he would prefer to use the servants’ entrance through the back garden. My longing for his company was not mercenary, for I no longer thought him a scientific miracle-worker. My studies showed we could not even graft the forepart of a worm or caterpillar to the hindpart of another. This was twenty years before Jannsky identified the main blood groups, so we could not even transfuse blood. I classified my experience of the rabbits as a hallucination based on a natural coincidence and provoked by something hypnotic in Baxter’s voice, yet at weekends I followed old paths through woodlands and moorlands because they recalled our conversation when we walked them together. And of course, I was hoping to meet him again.

“Geordie Geddes works for Glasgow Humane Society, who give him a rent-free house on Glasgow Green.⁸ His job is to fish human bodies out of the Clyde and save their lives, if possible. When not possible he puts them in a small morgue attached to his dwelling, where a police surgeon performs autopsies. If this official is not available they send for me. Most of the bodies are suicides, of course, and if no one claims them they are transferred to dissecting-rooms and laboratories. I have arranged such transfers.

Baxter returned, sat down and looked at me with his lips compressed and his eyebrows raised. Maybe I blushed. Certainly my face felt hot. He said patiently, “Use your memory, McCandless. I am an ugly fellow but have you known me do an ugly thing?”

I pondered then said sulkily, “What about Mopsy and Flopsy?”

He looked hurt at this but not very hurt, and after a while spoke thoughtfully as if to himself.

“Sir Colin, his nurses and dogs gave me more attention than most newcomers to this globe are given, but I wanted more than that. I dreamed of a fascinating stranger — a woman I had not yet met so could only imagine — a friend who would need and admire me as much as I needed and admired her. No doubt a mother supplies this want in most young creatures, though rich families often employ a servant to take the mother’s place. I formed no special attachment to those who fostered me, perhaps because there were so many of them. I was always a mighty big fellow and seem to recall at least three mature nurses feeding and washing and clothing me before I could do these things for myself. Perhaps there were more, for I think they worked in relays. I may be imposing on infancy an obsession of my later years, but I cannot remember a day when I did not feel inside me a woman-shaped emptiness that ached to be filled by someone stranger and bonnier than I ever met at home. This ache grew stronger with puberty, which happened with catastrophic suddenness. My voice, alas, did not break, and remains mezzo-soprano to the present day, but I woke one morning with the enlarged penis and heavy testes which afflict most of our sex.”

“And then, as you told me before, your father explained how female anatomies differed from yours and offered to provide you with a healthy specimen in full working order. You should have jumped at the chance.”

“Did you not hear me, McCandless? Must I say everything twice? I needed to admire a woman who needed and admired me. Will I say it anatomically? Spermatic ejaculation can only induce homoeostasis in me if accompanied by prolonged stimulation of higher nerve centres whose pressure upon the ductless glands changes the chemistry of my blood not for a few spasmodic minutes but for many tingling days. The woman I imagined stimulated me like that. I found her picture in Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare: a book that must have been left here by one of Sir Colin’s patients — it was the only work of fiction in the house. Ophelia was listening to her brother, an insipid looking lad despite his fierce little beard. He was saying something she was only pretending to take seriously, for her eager face looked toward something wonderful outside the picture, and I wanted it to be me. Her expression excited me more than her lovely body in a flowing violet gown, because I thought I knew all about bodies. Her expression excited me more than her lovely face, for I had seen women with such faces in the park — when they walked toward me their faces froze, grew pale or bright pink and tried not to see me at all. Ophelia could look at me with loving wonder because she saw the inner man I would become — the kindest, greatest doctor in the world who would save her life and the life of millions. I read the miserable story of the play in which she was the one true loving soul. It obviously described the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply. From an inconspicuous start among sentries on the battlements the infection spread through prince, king, prime minister and courtiers causing hallucinations, logomania and paranoia resulting in insane suspicions and murderous impulses. I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would be quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love.

Fifteen months passed before I met her again and they were unexpectedly happy. Scraffles died and astonished me by leaving me a quarter of his money — his widow and legitimate son divided the rest. I became a house-doctor in the Royal Infirmary with a wardful of patients who seemed to need me and some who pretended to admire. I hid how much I needed them under a smooth, lordly surface broken by unexpected flashes of genial humour. I flirted with the nurses under me to the usual extent — that is, with all of them equally. I was invited to smoking-concerts where everyone had to sing something. My songs in the Galloway dialect were laughed at when comic and applauded when pathetic. I mostly thought of Bella during unoccupied moments, especially in the half hour before going to bed and falling asleep. I was trying to read through the novels of Bulwer-Lytton at the time, but his characters seemed conventional puppets when I recalled her arms flapping above the pianola like ravens’ wings, her smile of continual delight, her jerky walk and swaying stance and arms outstretched as if to embrace me as nobody else had done. I did not dream of her because I never dream at all, but when we next met I believed for almost a minute that I was in bed dreaming although I was wide awake in a public park.

As she walked briskly between us from the park, a hand on the arm of each, I knew her instant recovery of health and high spirits must seem callous to Baxter; but though he was the sincerest man I ever met his ordinary new voice made me feel he was putting on an act when he said, “It is agony to find you treating me like a wrecked ship and McCandless like a life-boat, Bell. Your romances on the world tour were bearable because I knew they were transient. For nearly three years I have lived with and for you and wished that never to end.”

“I am not deserting you, God,” she told him soothingly, “or not right away. Candle is very poor so we’ll both find it handy to live with you for a long time. Turn your father’s old operating-theatre into a drawing-room for us and you will be a welcome guest whenever you call. And of course we will eat with you. But I am a very romantic woman who needs a lot of sex but not from you because you cannot help treating me like a child, and I cannot CAN NOT treat you like one. I am marrying Candle because I can treat him how I like.”

Baxter looked at me enquiringly. In a slightly ashamed voice I told him that though I had always tried to be a dour, independent sort of man Bella was correct: I had worshipped and longed for her from the moment he introduced us — everything about her seemed to me the acme of womanly perfection — I would gladly endure the most horrible agonies to save her from the smallest inconvenience. I added that Bella would always be able to do whatever she wanted with me.

Said Bella, “And Candle’s kisses are almost as strong as your yells, God, and would make me faint too if I was not a grown-up woman.”

Baxter nodded his head rapidly for several seconds then said, “I will help you both to do whatever you want but first please grant me one favour, a favour which may save my life. Do not see each other for a fortnight. Give me fourteen days to strengthen myself for the loss of you, Bell. I know you mean to keep me as a friendly convenience but you cannot foresee how marriage may change you, Bell — nobody can. Please grant me this. Please!”

His lips trembled, his mouth seemed shaping for another outcry, so we hurriedly agreed. I doubted if he could have screamed a second time as loudly as the first, but I feared that another sudden enlargement of his oral cavity would disconnect his spine and cranium.

I ran upstairs in a rage which melted into grief at the sight of Bella, for her thoughts were not on me. Through an open door on the first landing I saw her sitting at an open window, an elbow on the sill and her hand supporting her cheek. She wore a travelling-costume; there was a strapped-up portmanteau at her feet with a broad-brimmed hat and veil resting on top. Though looking into the garden she appeared to me in profile, and in her expression and pose I saw what had never been there before: contentment and serenity tinged with melancholy at some thought of the past or future. She was no longer violently, vividly in the present. I felt like a small boy spying on a mature woman, and coughed to attract her attention. She looked round and gave me a sweetly welcoming smile. She said, “How kind of you to come, Candle, and keep me company during my last few minutes in the old, old home. I wish God could be here but he’s so miserable I can’t stand him just now.”

“I’m miserable too, Bella. I thought you and I were to marry.”

“I know. We arranged that years ago.”

“Six days — less than a week.”

“Anything more than a day seems eternity to me. Duncan Wedderburn suddenly touched me in places you never did and now I’m daft about him. When the gloaming comes so will he, stepping quietly from the lane through that door in the far-away wall¹² and padding the latch with a cloth so it won’t click. Then tiptoe tiptoe tiptoe up the path he will come, and stealthily lift the ladder hidden in that bed of curly kail — it is not well hidden, you can easily see it — and O how tenderly how expertly he will raise it upright, how slowly tilt the top toward me till I can grip it and with my own hands place it on the sill of my window. You never did that with me. Then he will hurry us off to life, love and Italy, the coast of Coromandel where Afric’s sunny fountains pour down the golden sands. I wonder where we will end? Poor dear Duncan so enjoys being wicked. He probably would not want me if he knew God would let us walk together out of the front door in broad daylight. And Candle, besides our engagement I will always remember how often you visited me in the old days, and listened when I played to you on the pianola, and what a wonderful woman you made me feel by always kissing my hand afterwards.”

“Bella, I have met you only three times in my life and this is the third.”

“Exactly!” cried Bella with a frightening gust of anger. “I am only half a woman Candle, less than half having had no childhood, the bit of life Miss MacTavish said we dragged clouds of glory into, no sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice-little-girlhood, no early-love’s-young-dream-womanhood. A whole quarter century of my life has vanished crash bang wallop. So the few wee memories in this hollow Bell tinkle clink clank clatter rattle clang gong ring dong ding sound resound resonate detonate vibrate reverberate echo re-echo around this poor empty skull in words words words words wordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswords that try to make much of little but cannot. I need more past. On our boat up the Nile a fine lady travelled alone and someone told me she was a woman with a past, O how I envied her. But Duncan will give me a lot of past fast. Duncan is quick.”

“Bell!” I pled, “you will NOT go off and marry this man! You will NOT carry his bairns!”

“I know!” said Bella, looking at me in a startled way. “I am engaged to you.”

She pointed to the lapel of her travelling-coat where I saw the tiny pearl of my tie-pin. She said cunningly, “I bet you’ve eaten all my gobstoppers.”

I told her I had placed the gobstoppers in a glass jar with a lid which now stood on a sideboard of my lodgings, because the heat of my body would gradually melt them into a shapeless lump if I carried them in my pocket. I also said that since Baxter refused to protect her from this bad and worthless man, and since she refused to protect herself, I would go down and wait for him in the lane; if my words did not turn him away I would knock him down. She glowered at me — I had never seen her glower before — and her lower lip swelled and stuck out like an angry baby’s, and for a moment I feared she would bawl like one.

I heard the faint steady hissing of a gas chandelier. I had a headache, but did not open my eyes because light would hurt them. I knew something horrible had happened, that something essential was taken from me, but I did not want to think of it. Nearby someone sighed and whispered, “Evil. I am evil.”

Bella came to mind. I sat up and a blanket slipped from me.

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.

We were silent for a while after Baxter stopped reading. At last I said, “Can we do nothing to save that poor fellow’s sanity?”

“Nothing,” said Baxter crisply. He had put the sheaf of pages back in an envelope and from a brown paper packet drew out a bulkier sheaf. Holding it carefully on his knees he smiled down at it, gently caressing the topmost page with the tiny delicate tips of his conical thumbs.

“A letter from Bell?” I asked. He nodded and said, “Why worry about Wedderburn, McCandless? He is a middle-class male in the prime of life with legal training, a secure home and three supportive females. Think of your fiancée, the attractive woman with the three-year-old brain he has left penniless in Paris. Do you not fear for her?”

“No. With all his advantages Wedderburn is a poor creature. Bell is not.”

“True. Right. Correct. Exactly. Yes indeed!” cried he in an ecstasy of agreement. I said grimly, “Bell’s use of synonyms seems infectious. Has she many in that letter?”

He smiled at me like a wise old teacher whose favourite pupil has answered a difficult question and said, “Forgive my excitement, McCandless. You cannot share it because you have never been a parent, have never made something new and splendid. It is wonderful for a creator to see the offspring live, feel and act independently. I read Genesis three years ago and could not understand God’s displeasure when Eve and Adam chose to know good and evil — chose to be Godlike. That should have been his proudest hour.”

“They deliberately disobeyed him!” I said, forgetting The Origin of Species and speaking with the voice of The Shorter Catechism. “He had given them life and everything they could enjoy, everything on earth, except two forbidden trees. Those were sacred mysteries whose fruit did harm. Nothing but perverse greed made them eat it.”

Baxter shook his head and said, “Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us — it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.”

“Utter blethers, Baxter!” I cried. “Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others. The second law of thermo-dynamics proves the universe will end by turning into cold porridge, but nobody knows how it began, or if it began. Our science stems from Kepler’s discovery of gravitation, but though we can describe how the vastest galaxies and flimsiest gases gravitate we don’t know what gravity is or how it works. Kepler speculated that it was a form of inorganic intelligence. Modern physicists do not even speculate, but hide their ignorance under formulae. We know how species began but cannot create the smallest living cell. You grafted a baby’s brain into a mother’s skull. Very clever. It does not make you an all-knowing god.”

“I disagree with your language, not your facts, McCandless,” said Baxter with another annoyingly generous smile.

“Of course no single mind can know more than a fraction of past, present and future existence. But what you call mysteries I call ignorances, and nothing we do not know (whatever we call it) is more holy, sacred and wonderful than the things we know — the things we are! The loving kindness of people is what creates and supports us, keeps our society running and lets us move freely in it.”

“Lust, fear of hunger and the police also play a part. Read me Bell’s letter.”

“I will, but let me start by astonishing you. This letter is a diary written over a period of three months. Compare the first page with the last.”

He handed me two pages.

Dear God,

I had no peace to write before

we are afloat upon this blue blue sea.

Wedder is snug in bunk and glad at last

not to be do do doing all the time—

the silly chap has done some silly things.

How Auld Lang Syne seems that soft warm bright night

when I bade you good-bye, chloroformed Candle,

then skipped down ladder into Wedder’s arms.

Swift as the wind we sped in cab to train

and curtained carriage where we wed wed wed,

went wedding all the way to London town

and booked into Saint Pancras’s Hotel.

And yet poor Duncan wanted marriage too!

He did not get it. Please tell Candle so.

You never wedded, God, so may not know

eight hours of it takes much more out of men

than they can give without a lot of rest.

Next day was all my own. I saw some sights,

then waked my Wedder with a good high tea.

“Where have you been?”

I used to think this a very big world, but yesterday something made me doubt it. The morning was fine again. The ship was leaving Odessa at noon. I sat with Wedder in the one place outside our cabin I can persuade him to go, a nook between two ventilators. He was reading a French Bible because all other books in the passengers’ lounge are Russian. Luckily he knows French so that book and he are now inseparable. He reads some parts again and again, then stares a long time at nothing, frowning and whispering “I see.” I was reading Punch or The London Charivari, an English magazine of art and comedy. The pictures showed many kinds of people. The ugliest and most comical are Scots, Irish, foreign, poor, servants, rich folk who have been poor until very recently, small men, old unmarried women and Socialists. The Socialists are ugliest, very dirty and hairy with weak chins, and seem to spend their time grumbling to other people at street corners.

“What are Socialists, Duncan?” I asked.

“Fools who think the world should be improved.”

“Why? Is something wrong with it?”

“The Socialists are wrong with it — and my infernal luck.”

“You told me once that luck is a solemn name for ignorance.”

“Do not torture me, Bell.”

He always says that when he wants me to shut my mouth. I watched the gulls circling in a blue sky full of big slow-moving clouds. I saw the huge harbour full of shipping with bright flags and funnels, masts and sails. I looked at the sunlit quay with its cranes, bales, busy brawny dockers and uniformed officers. I wondered how to improve all this, but it looked all right. Then I studied Punch again and wondered why the well-dressed English people in the pictures were handsomer and less comic than anyone else, unless they were newly rich. Noisy shouts and clattering hooves interrupted these thoughts. Three galloping horses brought a peculiar carriage lurching along the quay and were pulled to a halt at the end of our gangway. Out climbed one of the well-dressed, handsome people I had been puzzling over in Punch. As he came aboard past the Russian seamen and officers I nearly laughed aloud — his thin stiff figure, stiff face, glossy top-hat and neat frock-coat looked so comically English.

Bell Baxter likes meeting new people. Wedder will not eat outside our cabin so last night I tied a clean napkin round my poor man’s neck, settled him with his dinner tray and headed for the dining-saloon. I am now a well-known character on this ship, and passengers who speak English are always placed at my table. This time I had only two. Both had boarded at Odessa. One was a stout, brown-faced American doctor called Doctor Hooker; the other was the obvious Englishman — Mr. Astley! I got very excited. I said, “Do you work for a London firm called Lovel and Co?”

“I am on the board of directors.”

“Are you a cousin of Lord Pibroch?”

“I am.”

“How wonderful! I am a friend of a great friend of yours, a lovely little Russian gambler who drifts around the German betting-shops in a very poor way — he has even been to jail, but not for anything very nasty. The odd thing is, I do not know his name, but he thinks of you as his best friend because you have been so very good to him.”

After a long pause Mr. Astley said slowly, “I cannot say I am a friend of the person you describe.”

He took up his soup-spoon and so did puzzled Bell Baxter. We would have eaten in silence if Doctor Hooker had not cheered me up with stories of his missionary work in China. Just before the meal ended Mr. Astley, thoughtfully stirring his coffee, said, “However, I know the fellow you spoke about. My wife is Russian, the daughter of a Russian general. I once gave some assistance to a servant in her father’s household, a sort of male nurse who looked after the younger children. That was years ago.”

I said accusingly, “He is a very good wise kind soul! He helped me a lot, and gained nothing by it, and likes all Englishmen because of you!”

“Ah.”

I would not have hated him had he said “O!” or “Eh?” but he said “Ah” as if he knew more than everyone else in the world, knew so much that talking was useless. The outchatel called him shy. I think him stupid and cold. I was glad to hurry back to my warm warm Wedder who can be blown up into giving all the solid heat a woman wants. But do not worry, Candle. Your tie-pin still gleams in the lapel of Bell’s travelling-coat.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dr. H. looks glad whenever he sees me, unlike Mr. Astley. He is a doctor of medicine as well as divinity so today I asked him to look in on Wedder who still acts like a sick man, though no longer pale and shivering. I stayed outside the cabin during the consultation, but near enough to hear the kindly, rumbling voice of Dr. H. punctuated by short answers (I suppose) from Wedder, who at last started shouting. When Dr. H. came out he said Wedder’s illness was not physical.

“We disagreed over the doctrine of the Atonement,” he told me, “and the inevitability of Hell — he thinks me too liberal. But religion is not his main problem. He is using it to distract him from a very painful recent memory he refuses to discuss. Do you know what it is?”

I told him that the poor man had made a fool of himself in a German betting-shop.

“If that is all,” said Dr. H., “let hint sulk himself better in his own good time. Treat him with affection, but do not spoil your own lovely bloom by refraining from cheerful social exercise. Do you play chequers? No? Allow me to teach you.”

He is a gorgeous man.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dear God we are passing once again between the Isles of Greece where burning Byron loved and sang and I am very glad that the breasts of the girls here no longer suckle slaves and I have just had a glorious breakfast at which Dr. H. and Mr. A. argued tremendously and Mr. Astley started it! We were astonished. For the last two days he has eaten with us and said nothing but “Good morning,” “Good afternoon,” “Good evening,” so we were used to chatting as though he did not exist. This morning my American friend was telling me how the smaller Chinese skull made it hard for the Chinese to learn English when: “Did you find it easy to learn Chinese, Dr. Hooker?” asked Mr. Astley.

“Sir,” said Dr. H., facing round to him, “I did not visit China to learn the language of Confucius and Lao-tsze. For fifteen years I have served a federation of American Bible societies which — with some assistance from our chambers of commerce and the United States government — employed me to teach the natives of Peking the language and faith of the Christian Bible. For this purpose I found the simplest jargon of the poorest coolies (you call it pidgin English) more useful than Mandarin complexities.”

Mr. Astley said softly, “The Spaniards who first colonized your continent think Latin the language of the Christian faith and Bible.”

“The brand of religion I preach and try to practise,” said Dr. H., “was preached by Moses and Jesus long before the Roman Emperors took it up and tricked it out in the superfluous pomps of earthly kingship.”

“Ah.”

“Mr. Astley sir!” said Dr. H. sternly, “by a simple question and an oblique comment you have drawn from me a confession of faith. Let me ask the same from you. Have you invited Jesus into your heart as your personal saviour? Or are you a Roman Catholic? Or do you support the English State Church whose pope is Queen Victoria?”

“When I am in England,” said Mr. Astley slowly, “I support the Church of England. It keeps England stable. For the same reason I support the Church of Scotland in Scotland, Hindooism in India, Mahometanism in Egypt. The British Empire would not be governing a quarter of the globe if we opposed the local religions. Had our government made Catholicism the official religion of Ireland it would now easily control that troublesome colony with the help of the popish priests, though of course the Ulstermen would need a corner to themselves.”

“Mr. Astley, you are worse than an atheist,” said Dr. H. gravely. “An atheist has at least a strong conviction of what he does not believe. You believe in nothing firm or fixed. You are a timeserver — a faithless man.”

“Not quite faithless,” murmured Mr. Astley. “I am a Malthusiast — I believe in the gospel according to Malthus.”

“I thought Malthus was a Church of England clergyman with bats in his belfry about expanding populations. Do you tell me he has founded a new religion?”

“No, a new faith. Religions involve congregations, preachers, prayers, hymns, special buildings or codes or rituals. My brand of Malthusiasm does not.”

“Your brand, Mr. Astley? Are there many?”

“Yes. All systems prove their vigour through subdivision: Christianity, for instance.”

“Touché!” said Dr. H., chuckling. “It is a pleasure to cross swords with you. And now sir, explain your sect of Malthusiasm. Convert me to it!”

“You are better as you are, Dr. Hooker. My faith offers no comfort to the poor, the sick, the cruelly used and those on the point of death. I have no wish to spread it.”

“A faith without hope and charity?” cried Dr. H. loudly.

“Then fling it from you, Mr. Astley, for it has obviously frozen the blood in your veins! Ditch it. Tie a weight to it and fling it overboard. Get a faith which warms the heart, binds you to your fellow men and points us all toward a golden future.”

“I dislike intoxicating fluids. I prefer the bitter truth.”

“Mr. Astley, I see you are one of those sad modern souls who think the material world a harsh machine which destroys the feeling hearts and seeing minds who enter it. Think ye, by the bowels of Christ, that ye may be wrong! Our gloriously varied universe could not have sprouted brains and hearts like ours if the Maker of All had not designed them for this planet, designed the planet for them, and all for Himself!”

“Your vision of the world as a place where God grows human vegetables for his own consumption may appeal to a market gardener, Dr. Hooker,” said Mr. Astley, “but not to me. I am a businessman. Have you a faith, Mrs. Wedderburn?”

“Is that something to do with God?” I asked, pleased that he had spoken to me.

“Indeed it is, Mrs. Wedderburn,” cried Doctor H., “for most people, if not for Mr. Astley. Even he is a child of God though he won’t admit it — but you are especially so. The faith, hope and charity shining from your clear eyes guarantee it. Pray tell us, Mrs. Wedderburn, how you perceive Our Father Which Art in Heaven.”

Since my quack with the outchatel in the German park I had not had a chance to talk about the great big ordinary queer things because Wedder finds them a torture. And now these two clever men wanted me to talk about EVERYTHING! Out the words tumbled.

“All I know about that god,” I said, “is what I was told by my own God — by my guardian, Godwin Baxter. He said god is a handy name for all and everything: your top-hat and dreams Mr. Astley, sky boots Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond bortsch me molten lava time ideas whooping-cough ecstasies of wedded bliss my white rabbit Flopsy AND the hutch she lives in — everything named in every dictionary and book there has ever been and ever could be adds up to god. But the wholly-est bit of god is movement, because it keeps stirring things to make new ones. Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoonful of milk into Abernethy biscuits,¹⁸ and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them. And movement causes pain when solid bodies knock into living ones or living ones knock each other, so to stop us getting knocked dead before life wears us out we have generated developed evolved acquired invented matured gained and grown eyes and brains to let us see knocks coming and dodge them. And how beautifully the whole godly clamjamfrie works! I thought of improving the port of Odessa three days ago and could not see where to start. I know things were not always thus. I have read The Last Days of Pompeii and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Wuthering Heights so know that history is full of nastiness, but history is all past so nowadays nobody is cruel to each other, just stupid sometimes when they get into betting-shops. Punch says only lazy people are out of work so the very poorest must enjoy being poor. They also have the consolation of being comic. I know of course that bad accidents sometimes happen, but life goes on. My parents were killed in a train crash but I cannot remember them so I hardly ever weep. Anyway, they must have been old, so nearly worn out. I have been told I lost a baby somewhere else, but I know my little daughter is being cared for. My guardian looks after sick dogs and cats without being paid so a lost little girl is bound to be safe. What bitter truth were you talking about, Mr. Astley?”

While I spoke a strange thing happened. Both men were staring at my face hard harder hardest, but Mr. Astley leaned closer and closer as he did so while Dr. H. leaned further and further back. Yet when I stopped speaking Mr. Astley did not reply, and Dr. H. said in a low voice, “My child, have you never read God’s holy Bible?”

“I am nobody’s child!” I told him sharply, but of course I had then to explain about the amnesia. When I had done it Dr. H. said, “But ch! — Mrs. Wedderburn, your husband seems to be a devout Christian. Has he given you no religious instruction?”

I told him I could hardly get a word out of poor Wedder since he went biblical. Dr. H. gazed silently at me until Mr. Astley said in a strange voice, “Dr. Hooker, do you intend to instruct Mrs. Wedderburn in the doctrines of original sin and eternal punishment for worldly transgressions?”

“No sir,” said Dr. Hooker shortly.

“Mrs. Wedderburn,” said Mr. Astley, “your guardian’s account of the universe is one to which neither of us object. The bitter truth I spoke of is a statistical matter — a detail of political economy. I was joking when I called it a faith — I said that to annoy Dr. Hooker. I am a phlegmatic fellow, so his American exuberance annoyed me. But we are both glad you find the world a good and happy place.”

“Shake,” said Dr. H. quietly, and held out his hand, and Mr. Astley shook it.

“I like seeing you two gentlemen friendly,” I told them, “but I feel you are in a conspiracy to hide something from me, and I am going to find out what it is. Shall we take a walk on deck?”

So I strolled on deck with them. A lovely morning. Now I am going to have lunch in our cabin with my Wedder, followed by an afternoon of cuddles. I wonder what Dr. H. and Mr. A. will talk about over dinner this evening?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“What brought you to Odessa, Astley?”

“Beetroot, Dr. Hooker. My firm refines and sells cane sugar but German beet sugar may cheapen that unless we compete with the German product. But British farmers refuse to grow sugar-beet — they get more for other root crops. To undercut the Germans we need sugar-beet from farmers who work for Asiatic, not European wages, hence my visit to Russia. We also need a port linked to international shipping lanes, hence my visit to Odessa.”

“So the British Lion is forging trade links with the Russian Bear?”

“Too early to say, Dr. Hooker. The Russians offer us land and labour to build a sugar refinery on very good terms, but the soil and climate may not be best for sugar-beet. What brought you to Odessa? Does your federation of Bible societies plan to convert the followers of the Russian Orthodox Church?”

“Nope. Fact is, I have retired from missionary work. I came to China fifteen years ago by the straight Pacific line. I am wending my way home to the Land of the Free by the pleasantest and most roundabout route I can find.”

“Siam, India, Afghanistan?”

“Not quite.”

“The Outer Mongolian and Turkestan or Siberian routes are not exactly pleasure trips either, Dr. Hooker. You must have needed an armed escort for much of the way. Did the United States government pay for that or the American chambers of commerce?”

“You are a deep and dangerous man, Astley!” said Dr. Hooker, chuckling a bit. “I would rather be up against ten wily oriental warlords than a single Englishman of your stamp. Yes, a few far-seeing American citizens asked me to report on some aspects of central Asia, the world’s largest sink of unclaimed heathendom. Can you blame us? Britain has carved up the rest of the planet. Less than two years ago you grabbed Egypt from the French — and from the Egyptians.”

“We needed their canal. We paid them for it.”

“You also shelled Alexandria, our next port of call.”

“They were arming it against us and we needed their canal.”

“And now British regiments are fighting the Dervishes in the Sudan.”

“We cannot tolerate religions which urge the natives to rule themselves. Home rule would disturb trade and our smooth running of the canal.”

Up piped Bell Baxter: “What are natives, Mr. Astley?”

I had been keeping quiet, hoping to learn things, but “undercut”, “report on aspects”, “unclaimed heathendom”, “carved up the planet”, “grabbed Egypt”, “home rule”, “disturb trade” made no sense to me. However, “natives” sounded like people.

“Natives,” said Mr. Astley carefully, “are people who live on the soil where they were born, and do not want to leave it. Not many English can be regarded as natives because we have a romantic preference for other people’s soils, though we are very loyal to our old schools and school friends, our regiments and businesses. Some even feel loyal to the Queen, who is a very selfish old lady.”

“Are there no British natives?”

“In Wales, Ireland and Scotland perhaps. In England we still have a class of farmers, farm servants, estate workers et cetera, but the landowners and city dwellers regard them as useful animals, like horses and dogs.”

“But why are British soldiers fighting Egyptian natives? It makes no sense to me.”

“I am glad it makes no sense to you, Mrs. Wedderburn. Politics, like filling and emptying cesspools, is filthy work and women should be protected from it. Let us talk of cleaner things, Dr. Hooker.”

“Halt there, Astley!” said Dr. Hooker sternly. “In the States we have a high regard for the intelligence and education of the fairer sex. In a few words I can tell Mrs. Wedderburn the whole political state of the planet earth, and do so without for one moment wounding her womanly instincts and your patriotic ones. May I proceed?”

“If Mrs. Wedderburn is interested, and will allow me to smoke a cigar with my coffee, I also am interested.” Of course I said “yes” to both of them. Mr. A. then offered his cigar case to Dr. H. who thanked him, selected one, sniffed it, said it was excellent, bit the end off, lit it, then forgot all about it, because his speech was so very interesting.

“Over breakfast this morning Mrs. Wedderburn spoke of how much better the world is than in the bad old days. She was right, and why? Because the Anglo-Saxon race to which she and I and Mr. Astley belong have begun to control the world, and we are the cleverest and kindliest and most adventurous and most truly Christian and hardest working and most free and democratic people who have ever existed. We should not feel proud of our superior virtues. God arranged it by giving us bigger brains than anyone else, so we find it easier to control our evil animal instincts. This means that compared with the Chinese, Hindoos, Negroes and Amerindians — yes, even compared with the Latins and Semites — we are like teachers in a playground of children who do not want to know that the school exists. Why is it our duty to teach them? I will tell you.

“When children or childish people are left to themselves the strongest overcome the rest and treat them unkindly. In China judicial torture is a roadside entertainment. Hindoo widows are burned alive beside their husbands’ corpses. Black people eat each other. Arabs and Jews do unmentionable things to the private parts of their infants. The talkative French go in for bloody revolutions, the carefree Italians join murderous secret societies, we all know about the Spanish Inquisition. Even the Germans, who are racially closest to us, have a taste for brutally violent orchestral music and sabre duels. God created the Anglo-Saxon race to stop all that, and we will.

“But we cannot improve people suddenly, everywhere. The bullying rulers of the inferior races hate to see us replace them, so to teach them sense we have first of all to thrash them. Our rifles and machine-guns and iron-clad warships and superior military discipline ensure that we always do thrash them, but the process takes time. From their headquarters in the tiny island of Britain the Anglo-Saxons have conquered over a quarter of the planet in a little more than two centuries. But west of the Atlantic another, vaster Anglo-Saxon nation is starting to feel its strength and stretch its limbs — the United States! Who can doubt that, before the end of the twentieth century, the United States will dominate the rest of the planet? Do you doubt it, Astley?”

“What you predict is possible,” said Mr. A. deliberately, “if the subject races learn nothing from us. But the Japanese seem clever little pupils, and Germany’s industrial strength has almost overtaken Britain’s.”

“You sort out the Prussians and leave the Nippons to us, for in our school the pupils can never become masters— their smaller skulls prevent it. I admit the German cranium is on a par with yours and mine, but it lacks flexibility. The point I want to make, Mrs. Wedderburn, is this. Another century of fighting will elapse before the world is finally civilized, but the fighting should not be regarded as warfare. When the British invade Egypt— when the States go into Mexico or Cuba — they are policing and civilizing the natives, not hurting them. Yes, the Anglo-Saxon police-force may take a century to rid the world of bullies, but we will do it. By the year 2000 the Chinese teacup-maker, Indian pearl-diver, Persian carpet-weaver, Jewish tailor, Italian opera-singer et cetera will at last pursue their occupations in peace and prosperity, for Anglo-Saxon law will have at last allowed the meek to inherit the earth.”

There was a long pause while Dr. H. looked eagerly from me to Mr. Astley and back, but chiefly at Mr. Astley, who at last said, “Ah.”

Dr. H. said sharply, “Sir, do you disagree with my prediction?”

“Not if it pleases Mrs. Wedderburn.”

Both of these clever men looked hard at me. I suddenly felt very warm and saw from my hands that I was blushing. I said awkwardly, “You said a thing that surprised me, Dr. Hooker. You said brainy people find it easier to control their evil animal instincts. I have seen and played with a lot of animals, and none of them were evil to me. A bitch with a broken leg growled and snapped while I fixed the splint, but only because I was hurting her. When she felt better she treated me like a pal. Are there many evil animals?”

“There are NO evil animals,” said Dr. Hooker warmly, “and you are right to correct me on that point. Let me explain it another way. Human beings contain two natures, a higher and a lower. The higher nature loves clean, beautiful things: the lower one loves dirty, ugly ones. You are a well-bred young lady so have no lower impulses. You have received an Anglo-Saxon education suited to your sex and class, which has protected you from the degrading spectacle of human filth and misery. You come from Britain, where a fine police-force keeps criminals, the unemployed and other incurably dirty creatures away from places where the nobler natures, the Anglo-Saxon natures live. I hear that in Britain the lower class is predominantly Irish.”

I said indignantly, “I am a woman of the world, Dr. Hooker. My guardian took me all round it while I was recovering from my accident. I saw all sort of people, and some wore cracked boots and patched coats and grubby underwear, just like the poor people we laugh at in Punch. But none were ever as horrid as you suggest.”

“You have been to China and Africa?”

“Parts of them. I have been to Cairo, in Egypt.”

“And you have seen the fellahin whining for Baksheesh?”

“Change the subject, Hooker!” said Mr. Astley sharply, but I would not allow that. I said, “When God took me to see the pyramids we left the hotel in the middle of a crowd. Some people were shouting words like aaa-ee, aaa-ee at the edge of the crowd, but I did not see them. What does Baksheesh mean, Dr. Hooker? I never asked at the time.”

“If you disembark with me in Alexandria tomorrow I will show you what it means in fifteen minutes or less. The sight will shock but educate you. When you have seen it you will understand three things: the innate depravity of the unredeemed human animal; why Christ died for our sins; why God has sent the Anglo-Saxon race to purify the globe with fire and sword.”

“You have broken your word, Hooker,” said Mr. Astley coldly. “You have not kept our bargain.”

“I am sorry for it yet glad of it, Astley!” cried Dr. H. (and I had not seen a man so excited since Candle proposed to me and Wedder won at roulette). “Mrs. Wedderburn’s speech shows she has recovered from the worst effects of her railway accident. Though she has not regained her earliest memories her speech displays a mind as clear and logical as yours and mine, but if we do not provide the information she craves it will remain the mind of a precocious infant. You English may prefer to keep your women in that state, but in the American West we want our women to be equal partners. Do you accept my invitation to see the seamy side of Alexandria, Mrs. Wedderburn? Perhaps you could persuade your husband to come.”

“I will accept whether my poor man comes or not,” I told him, feeling fearfully excited.

“You come too, Astley,” said Dr. H. “Let us give our fair companion a joint Anglo-American escort.”

Mr. A. blew out a thoughtful-looking stream of smoke, shrugged and said, “So be it.”

I left the table at once. I needed quietness to think of all the new strange things I had heard. Maybe my cracked knob is to blame but I feel less happy since Dr. H. explained there is nothing wrong with the world which the Anglo-Saxons are not curing with fire and sword. Before now I thought everyone I met was part of the same friendly family, even when a hurt one acted like our snappish bitch. Why did you not teach me politics, God?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

At this point Baxter’s voice faltered into silence and I saw him struggling to overcome a very deep emotion.

“Read the next six pages for yourself,” he said suddenly, and passed them over. I give the pages here as they were given to me:

They are printed by a photogravure process which exactly reproduces the blurring caused by tear stains, but does not show the pressure of pen strokes which often ripped right through the paper.

“A catastrophic reversion to an earlier phase with a brisk recovery at the end,” I said. “What do the scrawls mean, Baxter? Here — take them back. Only you can decipher them.”

Baxter sighed and in a steady, uninflected voice told me, “They say, no no no no no no no no no, help blind baby, poor little girl help help both, trampled no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no where my daughter, no help for blind babies poor little girls I am glad I bit Mr. Astley.”

Baxter then laid the letter down, pulled out a handkerchief, folded it into a cushion (his handkerchiefs were a quarter the size of a bed-sheet) and pushed his face into it. For a moment I feared he was trying to smother himself, then muffled eruptions showed he was using it to absorb glandular evacuations. When he removed it his eyes were extra bright.

“What then?” I asked impatiently. “What then? Does the next entry explain all that?”

“No, but what happened emerges eventually. The remaining entries are written weeks or months after her romance with Harry Astley—“

“ROMANCE!” I screamed—

“Calm yourself, McCandless. On her side it was a Platonic affair. That it helped her mental growth is shown in the writing which suddenly becomes small, regular and upright; in her spelling which rapidly conforms to the standard dictionaries; in the separation between her entries, where a straight horizontal line replaces the playful row of stars. But her growth appears most clearly in the quality of her reflections. From now onward these blend the spiritual insights of an oriental sage with the analytical acuteness of David Hume and Adam Smith. Attend!”

Thinking has maddened me for weeks. My one relief has been argument with Harry Astley. He says I will only find peace by embracing his bitter wisdom — and him. I want neither — except as enemies. He says cruelty to the helpless will never end because the healthy live by trampling these down. I say if this is true we must stop living so. He has given me books which he says prove this is impossible: Malthus’ Essay on Population, Darwin’s Origin of Species and Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. They make my head ache. I was changing the dressing on his hand today when he told me his wife had died a year ago, then said, “You are not legally married to Wedderburn, are you?”

“How clever of you to guess, Mr. Astley.”

“Please call me Harry.”

His hand is almost healed though the thumb is very stiff — my teeth have left a circular scar where they nearly met in the ball of it. He said thoughtfully, “That mark will be with me for ever.”

“I am afraid so, Harry.”

“May I regard it as an engagement ring? Will you marry me?”

“No, Harry. I am engaged to another.”

He asked about my fiancé so I told him of Candle. When I had finished fixing the new bandage he said he knew many women of rank and title, the Duchess of Sutherland and Princess Louise of Connaught among them, but I was the purest aristocrat he had met.

At last, no Wedder! And my own little room in a narrow street in the heart of beautiful sane Paris! Do you remember bringing me here a long time ago? How we gaped at huge pictures in the Louvre? And ate at little tables under trees in the Tuileries Gardens? And visited Professor Charcot at the Salpêtrière,²¹ and how hard he tried to hypnotize me? At last I pretended he had done it, because I did not want him to feel silly in front of his huge audience of adoring students. I believe he saw I was pretending — which is why he smiled so wisely and announced that I was the sanest English woman he had ever professionally examined. Let me tell you how I got back here.

In Gibraltar Wedder made me wait outside the bank while he collected his money. He emerged with the careless swagger I so admired, though I now knew there was not much underneath. On the boat to Marseilles he ordered bottles of wine with our meals. This was new. I drank none because one sip of it makes me giddy, but he said a meal without wine was no meal at all, and pointed out that the French were all drinking it. This ship, unlike the Cut-use-off, was mainly for passengers. In the afternoons and evenings Wedder played cards with men in a corner of the main saloon, and kept at it long after I went to bed. The night before we docked in Marseilles he came back to the cabin whistling and chirping, “My hinny my hen my humming-bird my pretty partridge my Scots blue Bell, you were right in what you once said! Games of skill not games of chance are this man’s mètier.”

He counted his winnings then got into bed the right way round for the first time in weeks. I was starting to enjoy what he called “our second honeymoon” when he suddenly fell asleep. Not me. I knew what was going to happen and that I could not stop it.

Instead of going straight to Paris from Marseilles we put up in a hotel recommended by one of the card players on the boat. The same friend introduced him to a café or club or card-school where he played every afternoon and evening while I waited in the hotel drinking cup after cup of chocolate and brooding over Malthus’ On Population. It took Wedder five days to lose all he had. He behaved better over it than I expected, coming to our room in the afternoon and saying, “Here I am at your mercy again, Bell. I hope you have enough to pay the hotel — I’m totally cleaned out. But you prefer me this way.”

I had no intention of using your money until the last possible moment, God. I packed some essentials into a handbag, smartened myself up, smartened up Wedder, then took him for a stroll to a railway station where we caught an overnight train to Paris. While waiting for it he tried to break away once or twice, begging to return to the hotel to collect a dressing-case with silver-mounted brushes which had belonged to his father. I said, “No, Wedder, you booked that room for us. Be glad the hotel is getting something valuable in return.”

I was so relieved to get clean away from Marseilles that I slept sound though sitting upright on the wooden bench of a French third-class carriage.

On reaching Paris I saw Wedder had not slept a wink and was on the verge of collapsing. I dragged him into the crooked streets on the less posh side of the river where hotels were likely to be cheap, but they were not yet open. In a cobbled space where three narrow lanes met I plonked us both down at a café table and said, “Rest here Wedder. I will go to the station where trains leave for Calais and buy tickets. We could be in Glasgow three days from now.”

“Impossible — it would mean social ruin. We are not man and wife.”

“Then dear Duncan let us return to Glasgow separately.”

“Fiend-woman! Demon! Have I not proved that I love and need you? That parting with you would be tearing my heart out by the roots?” et cetera.

“But you said there were people you wanted to stay with in Paris. Maybe I can arrange that.”

“What people?”

“The midinettes and little green fairy.”

“Hoist with my own petard ha ha ha ha ha.”²²

When Wedder does not want to explain his funny words he gets out of it by using others. At that moment a waiter making the café ready for customers asked if we wanted anything and Wedder said, “Oon absongth.”

The waiter went away and brought back a little stemmed glass of what seemed water and a tumbler of more water. Wedder added drops from the tumbler to the small glass then held this up. The liquid in it turned a pretty milky green. “Meet the little green fairy!” he said and swallowed it in a gulp. Then he cried, “Oon otray!” to the waiter, folded his arms on the table top and hid his face in them. At this moment I saw a well-dressed man come out of a nearby doorway with “Hôtel de Notre-Dame” painted on the wall above it.

“Excuse me, Duncan,” I said and went inside.

The foyer was so small that a heavy mahogany desk in the middle nearly cut it in two. Folk going in or out had to squeeze round the sides. Behind the desk sat a woman who looked like Queen Victoria but younger and friendlier, a neat plump alert little woman in the black silk gown of a widow.

“Do you speak English, Madame?” I asked and, “It is me muver tongue, dear,” she answered in a London voice, “and what can I do for you?”

I told her I had a poor man outside who badly needed rest; that we had not much money and hardly any baggage, so wanted her smallest and cheapest room. She said I had come to the right shop — a cubicle here would cost only twenty francs for the first hour, to be paid in advance, with twenty for each additional hour or fraction of an hour to be paid before either party left. A cubicle had just been vacated and would be ready for use in ten or fifteen minutes — where was my gentleman friend? I said he was drinking green fairies at the café next door. She asked if he was likely to run away. I laughed and said, “No, I only wish he was!”

She laughed too and invited me to drink a cup of coffee with her while waiting. She said, “Judging by your voice you come from Manchester, and it is years since I had a heart-to-heart talk with a sensible down-to-earth English woman.”

I popped out and told Wedder this. He stared at me blearily then swallowed the second green fairy. I went back in.

She began by telling me she had once been Millicent Moon of Seven Dials and keen on the hotel trade, but London hotel regulations made life hard for beginners so she had come to Paris where new hôteliers were encouraged. In the Notre-Dame she had first occupied a very subordinate position, but became so indispensable to the manager that he married her — she was now known as Madame Cronquebil, but I should call her Millie. She had become manager herself after the Franco-Prussian war, when the Communards had suspended Cronquebil from a lamp bracket because of his international sympathies. She said she regretted his demise, but pursued her avocation with a facility and acumen which were appreciated in the correct quarters. French men were a lot easier to manage than British. The British pretended to be honest and practical but were at bottom a race of eccentrics. Only the French were sensible about the important things — did I not agree? I said, “I cannot say, Millie. What are the important things?”

“Money and love. What else is there?”

“Cruelty.”

She laughed and said that was a very English idea, but people who loved cruelty had to pay for it, which proved love and money came first. I asked what she meant? She stared and asked what I meant. I said I was afraid to tell her. At this she stopped being motherly and jolly, and asked in a low voice if a man had hurt me?

“O no Millie — nobody ever hurt me. I’m talking about worse things than that.”

I was trembling and starting to weep but she held my hands. This strengthened me so much that I told her what happened in Alexandria. And now I have the strength to tell you about it too, God, but it is so important that I will divide it from the rest of my letter with another line.

I am no longer a parasite. For three days I have earned a wage by doing a job as well and fast as possible, not for pleasure but cash like most people do. Each morning I sink into slumber, glad to have knocked off forty and earned four hundred and eighty francs. I am surprised at my popularity. Bell Baxter is certainly a splendid looking woman, but if I was a man there are at least a dozen here I would want more than me: soft little cuddlies, tall supple elegants, wild brown exotics. Millie describes me in our brochure as “The beautiful Englishwoman (la belle Anglaise) who will fully compensate you for the pains (travail) of Agincourt and Waterloo.” She is careful that I only deal with Frenchmen, because (she says) it might embarrass me to meet some of her English clients in later life. Perhaps she also thinks it might embarrass them! She has a lot of these at the weekends who require special services from some of our girls who are between employments at the Comédie Française. I watched one of the performances through an aperture last night. Our client was Monsieur Spankybot who arrives in a cab wearing a black mask which he never removes, though he takes off everything else. He has very elaborate requirements for which he pays a great deal, being first treated as a baby, then as a little lad on his first night in a new boarding-school, then as a young soldier captured by a savage tribe. His screams were out of all proportion to what was actually done to him.

My best friend here, Toinette, is a Socialist, and we often talk about improving the world, especially for the miserable ones, as Victor Hugo calls them, though Toinette says Hugo’s special insights are très sentimental and I should apply myself to the novels of Zola. We discuss these things at the café next door because Millie Cronquebil says politics should be detached from the hotel trade. The intellectual life of Paris is in its cafés, and our quarter (which contains the University) has cafés whose customers are writers or painters or savants of other kinds, and the academics have different cafés from the revolutionaries. Our café is mostly frequented by revolutionary hôteliers who say the rich will only disgorge through a bouleversement of the structure totale.

No time to write more. Someone’s coming.

Had Bella not arrived so soon after her letter I think Baxter would have had a reply prepared for that question, but it came now as a shock and changed him horribly. I do not know if the blood drained from his sallow skin or flushed into it, but in two seconds the colour turned greyish-purple. Sweat that suddenly beaded his face did not trickle but sprang from it, for he did not tremble, he vibrated. His loose clothing stayed unmoved but the outlines of boots, hands and head grew indistinct like plucked guitar strings. Yet he answered her. From a woeful cavity in that huge dim head tolled a slow, hollow, iron-sounding voice, each word blurred but not drowned by an echo of itself.

“THE. EVENTS. WHICH. LED. TO. YOUR. CRACKED. HEAD. ALSO. DEPRIVED. YOU. OF. YOUR. . YOUR. . YOUR. . . YOUR. . . ” Silence. His lips were wrestling to say a word for which he could find no breath. I watched the tongue flicker against the back of his upper teeth, saw the word began with L so must be life. Half his brain was trying to tell Bella the truth about her origin, the other half was appalled by the attempt and so was I.

“Your child, Bella!” I shouted. “The shock that destroyed your memory killed the child in you!”

Baxter grew perfectly still, staring at her with aghast eyes and mouth wide open. So did I. She sighed and said softly, “I feared that,” then smiled at Baxter as kindly as if no tears were flowing down her cheeks. Then she sat on his knee, embraced him as far round the waist as her arms could reach, rested her head upon his chest and seemed to fall asleep. He too closed his eyes and his normal colour slowly returned.

Maybe an hour passed. She roused us by yawning and sitting up. The following conversation began in the study. It ended round the kitchen table where Bella demolished most of a cold boiled ham with bread, cheese, pickles and two or three pints of sweet milky tea. Though used to her quick recovery from emotional shocks I had never before seen it happen so physically. Her face lost the thin haggard look, her cheeks grew rounder, her brow smoother and softer, the tiny lines and wrinkles faded from her freshening skin. From looking any age between twenty-five and forty she became any age between twenty-five and fifteen. Was my strictly scientific eye dazzled by the loving glance she gave me? Surely not, yet more than ham and tea were erasing her marks of weariness and strain. Her eyes fed on our faces, her ears and brain digested our words into the substance of her thought, strengthening it as swiftly as her teeth and stomach used the eatables to renew her body. Between chewing and swallowing she spoke very wisely, provoking a debate which decided her future career, and mine too, and a date for our marriage. But perhaps her radiance did daze me slightly. I talked as much as Baxter and she put together but I remember hardly anything I said. However, I very distinctly recall exactly how the debate began.

Though an atheist I am no bigot. When we knew Bella was free from disease I arranged a simple presbyterian wedding service, for I thought this a harmless and traditional way to solemnize our vows. The Park church was nearest but I did not want the neighbours’ children scrambling at the door, so chose Lansdowne United Presbyterian, less than ten minutes’ walk away beside Great Western Road.²⁵ English readers may blink when I say the service was to be at 9 a.m. on December the 25th. It was the earliest date possible, and the Scottish Church does not think Christmas day holier than other unless it fills on the Sabbath. As I stepped out arm-in-arm with Bella, Baxter and Mrs. Dinwiddie arm-in-arm at our heels, I felt a kind of glee that on my wedding-day people were having holidays all round the world, though the Glasgow shops and offices and factories were as throng with business as ever.

I knew of General Blessington long before Baxter read his name aloud from Wedderburn’s letter. In those days “Thunderbolt” Blessington was as popular with newspaper readers as Sir Garnet Wolseley and “Chinese” Gordon. Viscount Wolseley became commander-in-chief of the British armed forces. General Gordon, by getting the dervishes to dismember him, is venerated as an imperial martyr. My wife’s first husband has been less kindly treated. The Times of London and Manchester Guardian now ascribe his greatest actions to officers who were never named when the actions were first reported. The popular press follows their example. Why has the unhappy end of a brave warrior eclipsed a lifetime of patriotic effort? The best biography of him is still an entry in the 1883 edition of Who’s Who. He is not mentioned in later editions.

It is a remarkable fact that since Bella had pulled her hand so abruptly from his, the General had lain perfectly flat and still, apart from the movements of lips and tongue, eyelids and flickering eyes: thus when old Mr. Hattersley had called him “three-quarters dead” it seemed more of a diagnosis than an insult. Now he asked softly, “What is your opinion, Harker?”

“They cannot win a divorce action against you, Sir Aubrey. Your alleged adultery with Dolly Perkins is irrelevant. A husband’s adultery is no ground for divorce unless it is unnatural — committed anally, incestuously, homosexually or with a beast. If they appeal on grounds of extreme cruelty their own witnesses must testify that you locked Lady Blessington in the cellar because she was raving mad, and to keep her safe while you fetched medical help. A divorce action will end with Lady Blessington taken into protective custody as a ward of court. Were it not for the scandal we should welcome it.”

“No scandal, please,” said the General smiling slightly. “I am leavin, Harker. Go down and bring the cabs to the front door. Make sure me own cab is directly opposite the door, and send up Mahoun to help me downstairs. I find goin down harder than comin up.”

The solicitor arose and left the room without a word.

Reader, she married me and I have little more to tell. Our family prospers happily. Our public work is useful and noticed as such. Dr. Archibald McCandless is chairman of the Glasgow Civic Improvement Trust; Dr. Bella McCandless — through her management of the Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic, her Fabian pamphlets and promotion of female suffrage — has been invited to speak on platforms in nearly all the European capitals, while her old friend Dr. Hooker is currently organizing a lecture tour for her in America. When my friends in the Glasgow Arts Club twit me with my wife’s greater fame I have a ready reply: “One famous McCandless is enough for any family.” I believe our sons find their stolid father a welcome counterpoise to their brilliant, unconventional mother. I believe their mother finds me that too. She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and busy sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht; I am the low hull with the invisible ballast and keel. This metaphor greatly contents me.

A letter from

Victoria McCandless M.D.

to her eldest surviving descendant

in 1974

correcting what she claims are errors

in

EPISODES FROM

the EARLY LIFE

of a

SCOTTISH PUBLIC

HEALTH OFFICER

by

her late husband

Archibald McCandless M.D.

b.1857 — d.1911

Dear Grand- or Great-Grandchild,

By 1974 my three strong, sprouting lads will be dead or senile, so all other surviving members of the McCandless dynasty will have two grandfathers or four great-grandfathers, and will easily laugh at the aberration of one. I cannot laugh at this book. I shudder at it and thank the Life Force that my late husband had just this single copy printed and bound. I have burned every scrap I could find of the original manuscript and would have burned this too, as he suggests in his verse on the fly-leaf; but alas! it is almost the only evidence left that the poor fool existed. He also paid a small fortune for it — enough to feed, clothe and educate twelve orphans for a year. The illustrations must have doubled the printing costs. The portrait of me is copied from one in an illustrated newspaper of 1896, and strikes me as a good likeness. If you ignore the Gainsborough hat and pretentious nickname it shows I am a plain, sensible woman, not the naïve Lucrezia Borgia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci described in the text. So I post the book to posterity. I do not care what posterity thinks of it, as long as nobody now living connects it with ME.

Having reread that first paragraph I notice it suggests my second husband was as repulsive as the first. Untrue. I married Archibald McCandless because he was convenient, and as the years slipped by I came to like and rely upon the man. He was not much use to anyone else. He calls his book “Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer”—he was a Glasgow municipal health officer for exactly eleven months, resigning from the job as soon as he became chairman of the Glasgow Civic Improvement Trust. Our investments, not his brilliant mind, got him that position. It required him to preside at certain meetings, but he had most of the week to himself. Not all this free time was wasted. He helped Mrs. Dinwiddie (my faithful housekeeper) with the early nurture of our children, taking them for walks, telling them stories, crawling about the floor with them, helping them build fantastical cities out of bricks and cardboard, and draw up fantastical maps and histories of invented continents. These tales and games gave them a rich variety of ideas and information. His scientific bent ensured that the queerest monsters had impeccable Darwinian-evolutionary pedigrees; the weirdest machines never contradicted the laws of thermo-dynamics. The education he gave them was very like the playful one I had been given by Godwin Baxter, and used many of the same toys, books and instruments. We still kept a small zoo in the back-garden, though the last of Godwin’s dogs died five years after he did.

There is an old Scots proverb: “The shoemaker’s bairns are aye the worst shod.” It is a fact that I, the fearless advocate of homely cuddling and playful teaching, was kept out of the house by my clinical work for most of the week, while other responsibilities took me out of Glasgow for part of every year. My husband practised what I preached. I sometimes feared he was making early childhood too attractive for the lads so that their adult lives (like those of my first husband, and Bismarck, and Napoleon, and more commonplace criminals) would become bad boyish day dreams made real. I need not have feared. When they joined the society of other boys in Glasgow High School (founded in the twelfth century) they grew ashamed of their idle, dreamy fantastical father and emulated their practical, busy-in-the-world mother. The eldest, Baxter McCandless, is our mathematician. He took an honours degree last year and now works in London for the Department of Imperial Statistics. Godwin, our engineer, moves so briskly between Gilmorehill and the Andersonian Institute that I never know where he is studying. He says steam and oil-fired engines are dangerous anachronisms, that we must prepare to draw energy electrically from the highland lochs and cataracts while gradually abandoning coal-mines and oil-wells whose wastes poison the air and soil the lungs. The youngest, Archibald, is in his last year at school and has two obsessions. One is painting garish water-colour landscapes, the other is commanding the Glasgow High School Army Cadet Corp. I hate military training, of course. The sight of young men marching in regular rows, each imitating the stiff movements of a clockwork doll while their movements are controlled by a single screaming sergeant — that sight sickens me even more than the sight of young women in a music-hall chorus-row, kicking up their heels in unison. However, I recognize that young Archie’s love of uniformed comrades balances his Bohemian individualism. When these sides of his nature at last harmonize he too may become a fine public servant — perhaps the best of them.

In writing about my boys I have forgotten their father: always an easy thing to do in his later years. He spent more and more time in his study, scribbling books printed at his own expense since no publisher would pay for them.³⁰ Every second year I would come down to breakfast and find another blue-black volume beside my plate, with a marker in the dedication page which always bore the message TO SHE WHO MAKES MY LIFE WORTH LIVING. As I leafed through it, trying to show interest I could not possibly feel, he would watch my face with a maddening expression of timid hope and humorous resignation: an expression which made the soul of me want to grip him and shake him into useful activity. He would have been a decent general practitioner had he not used Baxter’s money to buy the idleness he mistook for freedom. Having fulfilled his mother’s ambition by joining the middle class he had no wish to reform it from inside, no wish to help the labouring class reform us (and themselves) from outside. But example is the best reproof I know. I would lay the book down, walk round the table, kiss him kindly, thank him and go off to work at my clinic.

In 1908 we found he had disseminated sclerosis (he diagnosed it himself) so it became easy to be kind. He relaxed into the disease, shifting his bed into the study and ordering a special table which let him write without getting up. He could easily have lived longer had he exercised, but he knew that and I would not bully him. I kept the marriage sweet by having a game of draughts, a light supper and a chat with him most nights before retiring. Increasingly our talk recalled our earlier days with Godwin Baxter. I also saw he was engaged on another book.

“Do you want to know about it?” he asked one night, with a kind of mischievous vivacity which he clearly attributed to creative inspiration and I to a mild fever caused by disease.

“Tell me if you want to,” I said, smiling.

“Ah, but this time I want not to. I want you to read it with astonishment after I am gone. Promise to read it through at least once. Promise not to bury it in my coffin.”

I promised.

The bound volume at last arrived from the printers and gave him pleasure for many weeks. He slept with it under his pillow. He would lie on the sofa while the maid changed his sheets, turning pages forward or backward and chuckling over them. Later, as he weakened, a bitter impatience was what he mainly felt, and at the end he wanted nothing but the pressure of my hand on his brow, for he whimpered when I removed it. I stayed beside him though I could have done more good at other bed-sides. Never mind. I may want company during my own last days, so am glad I did not refuse it to him.

I read the book three years ago soon after the funeral and it made me unhappy for a fortnight. I am still unhappy when I remember it. To explain why I must tell my own life story as simply as possible.

The first home I remember was two small rooms and a kitchen where five of us lived, sometimes six when my father stayed with us. Our only water supply was a shared tap in a yard at the back. Father could have afforded a house with better sanitation. He was chief foreman (or works manager, as we call such nowadays) in a nearby Manchester foundry, and saving money was his major passion. He seldom gave my mother enough to buy proper food.

“I cannot give us a proper start in life before I control a good patent,” he told us, “and that needs all the money I can get.”

He treated his wife and children like he treated the workmen: as potential enemies who must be kept poor by violence or the threat of it. He thought any remark which did not obviously flatter him was rebellion. When five years old I once watched him stand before the looking-glass in our dank little kitchen, adjusting his dark-green cravat and waistcoat with green velvet facings, for he spent money on his appearance though not on ours, and in a coarse way was something of a dandy. Impressed by the contrast between the colour of the clothes and his dark-red face I said, “You are a poppy, Dad.”

I remember no more until I awoke in bed. He had clubbed me down with his fist, my head had struck the brick-cobbled floor, I had been bleeding and unconscious for several hours. I doubt if my mother had dared call a doctor. I still have an irregular three-inch-long scar above my left ear under the hair. It follows an abnormal widening of the squamosal suture, but apart from that period of unconsciousness it has never affected my memory. This is the crack my late husband describes as “mysteriously regular” and “ringing the entire skull under the hair line”.

Of my mother I have only this to say: she was unselfish and hard-working, and taught me how useless these virtues are when separated from courage and intelligence. She felt positively wicked when not washing or darning clothes, scrubbing floors, beating carpets or making a gallon of soup out of scraps a butcher could not sell for cat-food. I do not know if she was able to read, but if she ever saw me with a book it was snatched away because “Girls need no excuses for idleness.” I remember most clearly the misery of washing our bodies and clothes in cold water during the winter months, when we had no coal to heat it and hardly any soap. Life for Mother and me was mainly a struggle to keep the family and home clean, yet we never felt clean before my brothers died and Father (as if he had been waiting for that) shifted us into a three-storey house with a garden all round it, saying “I can afford this now.”

I think he had afforded it for at least a year.³¹ It was richly furnished, with ten or twelve servants who took their orders from a fine-looking lady with yellow hair and a brighter dress than worn by housekeepers I met in later years. She was kind to us.

“Here is your private parlour,” she said, showing us into a room with strongly patterned wallpaper and curtains, thickly carpeted floor, heavily upholstered furniture, the biggest fire I had ever seen and a bright brass scuttle of coal in the hearth.

“Here are biscuits, cake, sherry, port wine and spirits,” she said, opening the door of a huge sideboard, “also a soda-water gazogene which is recharged by the handy-man in an outhouse. If you ever want anything pull that bell-rope twice and a maid will call for orders. What would you like just now? Will I send up tea?”

“What does HE want?” whispered Mother, tilting her head toward Father who stood on the hearth-rug smoking a cigar.

“Blaydon, your wife wants to know if you want tea!” said the lady, and we realized she was not afraid of Father.

“Not now, Mabel,” he replied, yawning. “Give me a brandy. Give Mrs. Hattersley and young Vicky a sherry then go downstairs. I’ll see you in ten minutes. For God’s sake Mother sit down and stop twisting your hands together.”

Mother obeyed and when the housekeeper left sipped the sherry uneasily and asked him, “You got it, then?”

“Got what?”

“Got patent.”

“Got patent and heck of a lot more,”³² said Father, chuckling. “Got a lot from your brother.”

“My brother Elia?”

“Your brother Noah.”

“Shall I see him then?”

“No, nobody sees Noah now,” said Father, chuckling harder. “There is nothing much left of him to see. Take a word of advice, Mother. Don’t ask visitors here until you can act ladylike. Ask Mabel to teach you how to sit and dress and stand and walk. And how to speak, of course. She knows a heck of a lot. She’s taught ME a few new tricks. I’ll leave you now. You’ve had to wait a while for this but it’s solid. Depend on it.”

He finished the brandy and walked out.

I met him a fortnight later on the stairs and said, “Father, Mother gets drunk every day. She has nothing else to do.”

“Well, if she wants to kill herself by that particular road why should I object? As long as she does it quiet-like in her own parlour. What do you want from me?”

“I want to read books and learn about things.”

“Things Mabel cannot teach?”

“Yes.”

“All right then.”

A week later I was taken to a convent school in Lausanne.

I will not describe my foreign education in detail. Mother had taught me to be a working man’s domestic slave; the nuns taught me to be a rich man’s domestic toy. When they sent me back Mother was dead and I could speak French, dance, play the piano, move like a lady and discuss events as Conservative newspapers reported them, for the nuns thought husbands might prefer wives who knew some things about the world. General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington was indifferent to what I knew but waltzed beautifully in spite of his wounds. No doubt the uniform helped. I was tall but he taller and the other dancers stopped to gaze on us. I loved him for many reasons. Girls of my age were expected to have husbands, homes, babies. He was rich, famous and still handsome. Also I wanted to escape from my father, who had provided this escape route. I felt truly happy on my wedding-day. That night I discovered why “Thunderbolt” Blessington was called “The Arctic Pole” by his fellow officers, yet thought the fault was mine. Six months later I had my third hysterical pregnancy and was begging for a clitoridectomy. Dr. Prickett told me a skilful Scottish surgeon was in London and might “handle the job”. So one afternoon I was visited by the only man I have truly loved, Godwin Baxter.

Why did my second husband describe Godwin as a monster whose appearance made babies scream, nursemaids flee and horses shy? God was a big sad-looking man, but so careful and alert and unforcing in all his movements that animals, small people, hurt and lonely people, all women (I repeat and emphasize it) ALL WOMEN AT FIRST SIGHT felt safe and at peace with him. He asked why I wanted the operation Dr. Prickett was arranging. I explained. He questioned my explanation. I told him about my childhood, my schooling, my marriage. After a long pause he said gently, “My dear, you have been badly treated all your life by selfish, greedy, silly men. Yet they are not to blame. They too were horribly educated. Dr. Prickett really believes the operation the General wants for you will help you. It cannot. Have nothing to do with it. I will tell Prickett what I have just told you. He will not accept my opinion, but you have a right to know what it is.”

I wept with grief and gratitude, knowing what he said was true. I had always felt it was true, but could not know it until I heard it said. I cried out to him, “They will drive me mad if I stay here. Where can I go?”

“If you have no friend to shelter you, no money and no experience of earning it,” he said, “it will be suicide to leave your husband. I am sorry. I cannot help you.”

I was inspired — by his kindness. I rushed across to the chair where he sat, knelt between his legs and raised my clasped hands to the level of his face.

“If!” I demanded, “one night several weeks from now, or months or years from now, a homeless desperate friendless woman comes to your home in Scotland and begs for shelter — a woman you have once treated kindly — could you turn her away?”

“I could not,” he said, sighing and looking to the ceiling.

“That is all I need to know,” I said, standing up, “apart from your address which I suppose I can find in a British medical directory.”

“Yes,” he murmured, standing up also, “but leave me alone if possible, Lady Blessington.”

“Good-bye,” I said, shaking his hand and nodding.

Was ever surgeon in this manner wooed? Was ever surgeon in this manner won?

The last possible moment came two months later, and I was not pregnant, and had never considered leaping from a bridge when I arrived in Glasgow and took a cab to Park Circus and the house of the big dogs. I had just learned that the husband who would not give me a child was about to have one by a servant ten years my junior. Baxter received me without a single question. He led me to the room where Mrs. Dinwiddie sat (she must then have been forty-five years old, for he was thirty) and said, “Mother, this badly treated lady has come to us for a rest, and will stay here until she can afford a home of her own. Treat her as my sister.”

Yes, 18 Park Circus had one thing in common with 29 Porchester Terrace. A master there had got a son by a servant: a woman he did not marry. But Godwin loved and acknowledged his mother, though she had not his father’s name. The visitors Baxter most liked would be invited to drink tea with “my mother — Mrs. Dinwiddie”. Tea with her was no cosy formality. A keen-minded woman with a strong sense of humour, she could hold her end in a conversation with anyone.

“What are you inventing now, Sir William?” she would ask the scientist who had been knighted for making the Atlantic Cable work, “and will it undo the damage of your last big job?”—for she pretended to think wars and the weather had worsened since the development of the telegraph. My own mother had made me Mancunian. The nuns had made me French. The friendship and conversation of Mrs. Dinwiddie gave me the voice and manners of an unprejudiced, straightforward Scotswoman. Colleagues who knew nothing of my early years still amuse me sometimes by saying how SCOTTISH I am.

God could be honest about his unmarried mother because he was a bachelor with an unearned income. He could not be honest about sheltering the runaway wife of an English Baronet and Great British General. To save us from awkward questions he invented the South American married cousins, their death in a train crash and their amnesic daughter Bella Baxter, who was me. This was a good excuse for teaching me the important things I had never been taught, but he would not let me forget anything I had already learned.

“Forget nothing,” he said; “your worst experiences in Manchester and Lausanne and Porchester Terrace will enlarge your mind if you remember them with intelligent interest. They will stop you thinking clearly if you cannot.”

“I cannot!” I cried. “My fingers have ached scrubbing filthy clothes in a washtub of freezing water: they have ached playing Beethoven’s Für Elise nineteen times without stopping on the piano because the teacher made me start again whenever I hit a wrong note. My head has ached because my dad cracked my skull with his fist; it has ached because I had to memorize passages of Fénelon’s Télémaque, surely the dullest book ever. These things cannot be remembered intelligently — they belong to different worlds, God, and nothing connects them but pain I want to forget.”

“No, Bella. They seem in different worlds because you met them far apart, but see me open the hinged front of this big doll’s house and fold it back. Look into all the rooms. This is a type of house you will find by thousands in British cities, by hundreds in the towns, and tens in the villages. It could be Porchester Terrace or this house — my house. The servants live mostly in the basement and attics: the coldest and most crowded floors with the smallest rooms. Their body heat, while they sleep, keeps their employers in the central floors more snug. This little female doll in the kitchen is a scullery-maid who will also do rough laundry work, scrubbing and mangling the clothes. She will have plenty of hot water to use if her master or mistress is generous, and may not be overworked if the servants set over her are kind, but we live in an age when thrift and hard competition are proclaimed as the foundations of the state, so if she is meanly and cruelly used nobody will remark upon it. Now look into the parlour on the first floor. Here is a piano with another little female doll sitting at it. If her dress and hair-style were changed for the scullery-maid’s she might be the same girl, but that will not happen. She is probably trying to play Beethoven’s Für Elise without a wrong note — her parents want her one day to attract a rich husband who will use her as a social ornament and breeder of his children. Tell me, Bella, what the scullery-maid and the master’s daughter have in common, apart from their similar ages and bodies and this house.”

“Both are used by other people,” I said. “They are allowed to decide nothing for themselves.”

“You see?” cried Baxter delightedly. “You know that at once because you remember your early education. Never forget it, Bella. Most people in England, and Scotland too, are taught not to know it at all — are taught to be tools.”

Yes, Baxter taught freedom by surrounding me with toys I had never known as a child and by showing me how to work instruments (then called philosophical instruments) which his father had used to teach him. I cannot describe the heavenly feelings of power I enjoyed as I manipulated the terrestrial and celestial globes, the zoetrope, microscope, galvanic battery, camera obscura, regular solids and Napier’s bones. Fine manipulations came easily to me because of my mother’s needlework and the convent piano training. I also had botany, zoology, travel and history books with engraved and coloured pictures to brood over. Duncan Wedderburn, God’s legal friend, sometimes took me out to theatres because God could not do that — he had a horror of crowds. I loved the theatre — even the high-kicking pantomime chorus-row struck me as carefree and happy! But I loved Shakespeare most. So I started reading him at home, starting with Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, then the plays themselves. In the library (led on by the illustrations) I also discovered Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Alice in Wonderland and The Arabian Nights (this last in a French translation which included the erotic passages). For a while Baxter got a tutor for me, Miss MacTavish. She did not last. I wanted nobody but God to teach me. With him learning was a surprising meal; with her it was a discipline. Around this time I first met young Archie McCandless.

It was a warm fresh pleasant afternoon and I may have looked slightly childish, kneeling on the tiny kitchen-garden green and peering into a hutch where Mopsy and Flopsy were copulating. Baxter and an awkward, ill-dressed lad whose ears stuck out entered from the lane. Baxter introduced us, but the boy was too shy to say a word, and this made me equally awkward. We went upstairs to take a cup of tea, but not with Mrs. Dinwiddie, so I knew Baxter did not consider McCandless a close friend. While tea was prepared Baxter chatted pleasantly about university medical matters but McCandless was staring so hard at me that he said not a word in reply. Embarrassing! So I went to the piano and played one of the simpler songs of Burns. It may have been The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond,³³ but I did not use the treadles of the pianola roll. I played with my fingers, and the timing was perfect. Besides, I distinctly remember that we acquired the pianola in the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897. I don’t think the instrument had been invented before then. When McCandless left he insisted on kissing my hand. In Sir Aubrey’s house this flowery continental gesture had never been practised even by our French and Italian guests. I was astonished, and probably stared at my fingertips afterward in a bemused way. Our visitor’s salivation was extreme, and I did not want to dry my hand or touch my dress with it till he was out of sight. I did not see him again for a very long time, and certainly did not want to!

There was only one source of misery in those happy, happy days. God would not let me seduce him.

“Please do not fall in love with me, Bella,” he said. “I am not a man, you see, I am a big intelligent dog who is shaped like a man. Apart from that I have only one undoggy trait. I want no master — and no mistress.”

This was true, but I could not face that truth. I loved him with all my heart and all my mind and all my soul so wanted to convert him to humanity. One night, unable to sleep because of this desire, I took a candle in my hand and went naked into his bedroom. The dogs on the floor snarled jealously but I knew they would not bite. Alas, dogs were heaped beside him on the bed too and over his feet. They growled throatily.

“Victoria, I have no room for you,” he murmured, opening his eyes.

“O please let me in for a little while God!” I begged him, weeping. “Give me just enough of you to make a child for us, a little child made from both of us who I can feed and love and cuddle forever.”

“They grow up,” he murmured, yawning, “and there is a medical reason why I must not father a child.”

“You are sick?”

“Incurably sick.”

“Then I will become a doctor and cure you! Doctors can do things surgeons cannot! I will be your doctor.”

He made a clicking noise with his tongue. The two dogs on the floor nipped the calves of my legs gently between their great jaws and tugged me toward the door. I had to go.

Next day over breakfast God explained things fully, for he never made unnecessary mysteries. From his father, the great surgeon, he had inherited a syphilitic illness which would eventually cause insanity and general paralysis.

“I do not know exactly when the blow will fall,” he said. “Perhaps in a few months; perhaps in a few years. But I am prepared for it. The only doctoring which can help me is painless poison, self-administered when the first symptoms appear. I always carry my medicine with me, so you need not become a doctor on my account.”

“Then I will become a doctor on the world’s account!” I declared between sobs. “I will save some people’s lives, if not yours. I will replace you! I will become you!”

“That is a good idea, Victoria,” he said gravely, “and if you hold to it your studies shall be directed that way. But I would first like to see you equipped with a useful husband: an efficient, unselfish one who will help you do what you want while satisfying your amorous instincts — they have been terribly starved.”

“Starvation shall be my husband if you will not!” I told him through clenched teeth. He smiled and shook his head. We had stopped thinking about my famous husband in England.

He took me on a world tour. The idea was mine — I wanted to get him away from his dogs. He did it (I now see) to extend my knowledge, but also to get rid of me. We visited hospitals or attended medical lectures in fourteen capital cities. A Viennese specialist taught me the most modern techniques of sexual hygiene and birth control, after which he kept pushing me into the company of other men whenever he could. But although the sensual appetite was strong in me I could not or would not split it off from the moral appetite to embrace the admirable, and who could I admire more than God? When we returned at last to Glasgow I had made him very miserable. My company deprived him of all freedom. I let him do nothing, go nowhere without me. I was more cheerful than he, because though unable to swallow him all up in a marriage I still had more of him than anybody else could get. And then, walking one day by the memorial fountain in the West End Park, we met McCandless again.

I have mentioned how animals, children and all small or awkward people felt safer when God was near them. McCandless had first met God in the university anatomy department where God gave demonstrations when the usual lecturer was off sick. Small, awkward McCandless fell as passionately in love with God as I had done. He loved me too, of course, but only because he saw me as God’s female part — the part he could embrace and enter. But God was the first great love of his life, and the love was not returned. Long before I came to Park Circus McCandless had spied out the routes by which God took his dogs for their Sunday walk, and kept joining him on these. God was unable to be unkind to anybody, but once, when McCandless not only accompanied him home but had the insolence to force his way inside, my poor darling DID manage to say he needed more privacy than McCandless was allowing him. McCandless left God alone after that, unless they met by accident and God invited him home. Since God was infinitely good this sometimes happened, and that was how I had first met McCandless.

When we met the second time God positively thrust me onto the poor wee man. He sat on a bench, said he needed a rest and begged McCandless to take me a walk round the park. I see now (looking backward) that he wanted nothing but peace from the hideously talkative demanding creature I had become; but as I set off arm-in-arm through the shrubberies with McCandless I had another notion of his motives. Might he think McCandless was the useful, unselfish husband who would help me do what I wanted while satisfying my amorous et cetera? I realized such a man would have to be (in the eyes of the world and perhaps my own) a weakling, because he MUST NOT separate me from God. In fact, he would have to live with God and me, wanting no establishment of his own. While I pondered these things the vain little homunculus clinging to my arm babbled to me about the poverty of his childhood, his successes as a medical student and his wonderful achievements as a house doctor in the Royal Infirmary. Could THIS be the man I needed? I paused to stare at him more closely. He responded by kissing me, shyly at first, then with ardour. I had never been kissed by a man before. My only amorous pleasures had been a Sapphic affair with my piano teacher in Lausanne. I would have loved her till the end of time, but alas, she loved too many others for my selfish taste, so I had turned against her. I was amazed by the enjoyment I got from McCandless. When we separated I gazed at him with an emotion verging on respect. When he proposed marriage I agreed and said, “Let us tell God at once.” There was no doubt in my mind that God would be overjoyed to get more privacy by sharing me with McCandless.

How astonishingly selfish I was in those days! I had no moral imagination, no intelligent sympathy for people. God wanted a good husband for me so that he might enjoy again the life I had interrupted; he had not expected my marriage to add ANOTHER person to his household! A person he did not greatly like! He nearly fainted when I told him the news. He begged us to consider the matter for at least a fortnight before making up our minds. We agreed, of course.

I hope the people of 1974 are less shocked by sexual facts than most of my late Victorian contemporaries. If not, this letter will be burned as soon as read.

In the following week the McCandless kiss filled my thoughts and daydreams. Was it because of McCandless, I wondered, or could any other man give me that feeling of exquisite power combined with exquisite helplessness? Perhaps (I even dared to think) ANOTHER MAN MIGHT DO IT BETTER! To find out I seduced Duncan Wedderburn, a man I had never considered before and who (to be fair to him) had never considered me! He was a conventional soul, so completely devoted to a selfish mother that the notion of marriage never occurred to him before he and I became lovers. However, it occurred to him immediately after. I did not realize that the elopement he proposed was to involve marriage. I thought of it as a delicious experiment, a voyage to discover how suitable McCandless was. I explained this to God who said forlornly, “Go your ways, Victoria, I cannot teach you about love. But be gentle with poor Wedderburn, he has not a strong head. McCandless, too, will suffer when he hears about it.”

“But you won’t shut me out when I come back?” I asked him brightly.

“No. But I may not be alive.”

“Yes you will,” I said, kissing him. I no longer believed he had syphilis. I found it easier to believe he had invented that to prevent women like me twisting him round their little fingers.

Well, I enjoyed my Wedderburn while he lasted and was gentle with him when he fell apart. I still visit him once a month in the lunatic asylum. He is bright and cheerful, and always greets me with a mischievous wink and knowing grin. I am sure his insanity began as a pretence to evade imprisonment for embezzling clients’ funds, but it is real enough now.

“How is your husband?” he asked me last week.

“Archie died in 1911,” I told him.

“No, I mean your OTHER husband — Leviathan Pit-Bottomless Baxter de Babylon, surgical king of the damned material universe.”

“Dead also Wedder,” I said with a heartfelt sigh.

“Teehee! That one will never die,” he giggled. How I wish he had never died.

When I returned to Park Circus he was dying already. I saw it in his shrunk figure and trembling hand.

“O God!” I cried, “O God!” and kneeling down I embraced his legs and pressed my weeping face into them. He was sitting in Mrs. Dinwiddie’s parlour, she on one side and McCandless standing behind. I was astonished to see my fiancé there, though of course I had kept in touch with him by letter. With the onset of the disease God had come to need medical help with some functions for which his mother’s strength was too little. The nearness of death had also driven out his dislike of McCandless.

“Victoria,” he murmured, “Bella-Victoria, you Beautiful Victory, my mind will soon be all gone, all gone, and you will no longer love me if our candle-maker friend does not give me a very strong medicine. But I am glad to see you before I drink it. Marry this candle, Bella-Victoria. All I own will be yours. Promise to look after my dogs for me, my poor poor lonely leaderless dogs. Poor dogs. Poor dogs.”

His head began to shake and his mouth dribble.

McCandless bared his arm and gave him an injection. He became sensible for a few more minutes.

“Yes, take the dogs for their Sunday walks, Archie and Victoria. Go along the canal bank to Bowling then go by Strowan’s Well to the Lang Crags above Dumbarton, cross the Stockiemuir to Carbeth, come back by way of Craigallion Loch, the Allander, Mugdock and Milngavie Waterworks. Or go up the Clyde to Rutherglen or Cambuslang, mount the Cathkin Braes by the Dechmont and stroll by way of Gargunnock and the Malletsheugh to Neilston Pad. There are glorious walks around Glasgow, all leading easily to high places where you can look out upon glorious tracts of the world: mountains, lochs, pastured hills, woodlands and the great Firth, all framing this Glasgow which we do not love enough, for we would make it better if we did. Enjoy these things for me: the stepping stones by Cadder Kirk, clear Bardowie Loch, The Auld Wives’ Lifts, The Devil’s Pulpit, Dumgoyach and Dungoyne. If you have sons, please name one after me. Mummy will help you with them. Mummy! Mummy! Treat the McCandless bairns like grandchildren. I am sorry I could give you none. And try to forgive my father, Sir Colin. What a damnably foul old scoundrel the man was. He started more than he could see the end of. But we all do that haha. Quick, McCandless! The medicine!”

Archie brought forward the draught but it was I who took it from him and, after pressing my lips to my beloved’s in the only kiss we ever shared, put my arm behind his head and helped him drink.

That is how Godwin Baxter died.

You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable. My second husband’s story positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth. He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg’s Suicide’s Grave with additional ghouleries from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from? I find traces of The Coming Race, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Rider Haggard’s She, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and, alas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass; a gloomier book than the sunlit Alice in Wonderland. He has even plagiarized work by two very dear friends: G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion and the scientific romances of Herbert George Wells. Ever since reading this infernal parody of my life-story I have been asking, WHY DID ARCHIE WRITE IT? I am now able to post this letter to posterity because I have at last found the answer.

As locomotive engines are driven by pressurized steam, so the mind of Archibald McCandless was driven by carefully hidden envy. His good fortune in later life never stopped him being at heart just “a poor bastard bairn”. The envy the poor and exploited feel toward the wealthy is a good thing if it works toward reforming this unfairly ordered nation. That is why we Fabians think the trade unions and Labour Party are as much our allies as any honest public servant (Liberal or Tory) who wants a decent minimum wage, a sanitary house, proper working conditions and the vote for every British adult. Unluckily my Archie envied the only two people he loved, the only two who could tolerate him. He envied God for having a famous father and tender, loving mother. He resented my wealthy father, convent education and famous first husband, resented my superior social graces. Most of all he envied the care and company God gave me and the strength of my love for God, and hated the fact that the most we felt for him was friendly goodwill tempered (on my side) with sensual indulgence. So in his last months he soothed himself by imagining a world where he and God and I existed in perfect equality. Having had a childhood which privileged people would have thought “no childhood” he wrote a book suggesting that God had none either — that God had always been as Archie knew him, because Sir Colin had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method. Then he deprived me of childhood and schooling by suggesting I was not mentally me when I first met him, but my baby daughter. Having invented this equality of deprivation for all of us he could then easily describe how I loved him at first sight, and how Godwin envied him! But of course, Archie was no lunatic. He knew his book was a cunning lie. When chuckling over it during his last few weeks what amused him was how cleverly his fiction outwitted the truth. Or so I believe.

Yet why did he not make it more convincing? In the twenty-second chapter, describing how my first husband shot me through the foot, he says “The bullet had luckily gone clean through into the carpet, PUNCTURING THE INTEGUMENT BETWEEN THE ULNA AND RADIUS OF THE SECOND AND THIRD METACARPALS without even chipping a bone.” The capitalized words might just convince someone who knows nothing of anatomy but they are blethers, havers, claptrap, gibberish, gobbledygook,³⁴ and since Archie cannot have forgotten his medical training to that extent he must have known it. He could easily have said “puncturing the tendon of the oblique head of adductor hallucis between the great and index proximal phalanges without chipping a bone”, because that was what happened. But I have no time to go through every page separating fact from fiction. If you ignore what contradicts common sense and this letter you will find that this book records some actual events during a dismal era. As I said before, to my nostrils the book stinks of Victorianism. It is as sham-gothic as the Scott Monument, Glasgow University, St. Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament. I hate such structures. Their useless over-ornamentation was paid for out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week in NEEDLESSLY filthy factories; for by the nineteenth century we had the knowledge to make things cleanly. We did not use it. The huge profits of the owning classes were too sacred to be questioned. To me this book stinks as the interior of a poor woman’s crinoline must have stunk after a cheap weekend railway excursion to the Crystal Palace. I realize I am taking it too seriously, but I am thankful to have survived into the twentieth century.³⁵

And so, dear grand- or great-grandchild, my thoughts turn to you because I cannot possibly imagine the world in which this message will be read — if it ever is read. Last month Herbert George Wells (that honey-smelling man!) published a book called The War in the Air. Set in the nineteen twenties or thirties it describes how a German air-fleet invades the U.S.A. and bombs New York. This draws the whole world into a conflict which destroys every major centre of civilized thought and skill. The survivors are left in a worse state than the Australian aborigines, for they lack the aboriginal skills of hunting and scavenging. H.G.’s book is a warning, of course, not a prediction. He and I and many others expect a better future because we are actively creating it. Glasgow is an exciting place for a dedicated Socialist. Even in its earlier Liberal phase it set the world an example through the municipal development of public resources. Our skilled labour force is now the best educated in Britain; the Co-operative movement is popular and expanding; the Glasgow telephone system is being adopted by the General Post Office for extension over the United Kingdom. I know that the money which pays for our confidence and achievement has a dangerous source — huge war-ships built along Clydeside by government contract, in response to equally big destroyers being built by the Germans. So H. G. Wells’ warnings should be heeded.

But the International Socialist Movement is as strong in Germany as in Britain. The labour and trade-union leaders in both countries have agreed that if their governments declare war they will immediately call a general strike. I almost hope our military and capitalistic leaders DO declare war! If the working classes immediately halt it by peaceful means then the moral and practical control of the great industrial nations will have passed from the owners to the makers of what we need, and the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and happier place. Bless you.

1. This was not the superstition of an ignorant woman. Bank failures were frequent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and poorer folk suffered most by them, as the prosperous were better informed as to which financial houses were unsound, or becoming so. In twentieth-century Britain such injustices only happen with pension funds.

2. In his history The Royal Doctors (published by Macmillan, 1963) Gervaise Thring gives most space to Godwin’s progenitor, Sir Colin Baxter, but says: “Between 1864 and 1869 his less well-known yet equally gifted son was attendant consultant during the delivery of three princes and a princess royal, and probably saved the life of the Duke of Clarence. For reasons perhaps connected with his precarious health Godwin Baxter withdrew into private life and died in obscurity a few years later.” In Register House, Edinburgh, there is no record of his birth, and on the death certificate of 1884 there are blanks in the spaces reserved for age and mother’s name.

3. Semmelweis was a Hungarian obstetrician. Appalled by the high death rate in the Viennese maternity hospital where he worked, he used antiseptics and cut the death rate from 12 to 1¼ per cent. His superiors refused to accept his conclusions and forced him out. He deliberately contracted septicaemia in a finger and in 1865 died in a mental hospital of the disease he had spent his life combating.

4. The following extract on this subject is from “Women and Medicine”, an entry by Johanna Geyer-Kordesch in the Encyclopaedia of Medical History, edited by W.F. Bynum: “Florence Nightingale once wrote that she didn’t wish women to become doctors at all, because they would become like their male colleagues. Nightingale’s objectives were breathtakingly broad. She wanted no less than a medical reform so thorough in prevention and care that doctors might become redundant.”

5. Michael Donnelly, indefatigable in his efforts to prove this history a work of fiction, points out that the garden here described does not mention a coach-house on the far side of it. He has visited Baxter’s old home (18 Park Circus) and asserts that the space between back entrance and coach-house is too small and sunken to have ever been more than a drying-yard. This, of course, only proves that the coach-house was built at a later date.

6. “Skeely” means “skilful”, as in the old Scots ballad Sir Patrick Spens:

The King sits in Dumfermline toun,

Drinking the bluid-red wine.

“O whaur will I find a skeely skipper

To sail this new ship o’ mine?”

7. The first ichthyosaurus was discovered by Mary Anning (the Fossil Woman of Lyme Regis) in 1810. The illustration here referred to is in Pouchet’s The Universe, a popular nineteenth-century introduction to natural history.