Bella Donna. Robert Hichens
Читать онлайн книгу.
Israel. Someone said that he "looked as if he came from the East," to which a cynic made answer, "The East End." There was, perhaps, a hint of both in the Doctor of Cleveland Square. Certain it is that in the course of a walk down Brick Lane, or the adjacent thoroughfares, one will encounter men of his type; men of middle height, of slight build, with thick, close-growing hair strongly curling, boldly curving lips, large nostrils, prominent cheek-bones, dark eyes almost fiercely shining; men who are startlingly un-English. Doctor Meyer Isaacson was like these men. Yet he possessed something which set him apart from them. He looked intensely vital—almost unnaturally vital—when he was surrounded by English people, but he did not look fierce and hungry. One could conceive of him doing something bizarre, but one could not conceive of him doing anything low. There was sometimes a light in his eyes which suggested a moral distinction rarely to be found in those who dwell in and about Brick Lane. His slight, nervous hands, dark in colour, recalled the hands of high-bred Egyptians. Like so many of his nation, he was by nature artistic. An instinctive love of what was best in the creations of man ran in his veins with his blood. He cared for beautiful things, and he knew what things were beautiful and what were not. The second-rate never made any appeal to him. The first-rate found in him a welcoming enthusiast. He never wearied of looking at fine pictures, at noble statues, at bronzes, at old jewelled glass, at delicate carvings, at perfect jewels. He was genuinely moved by great architecture. And to music he was almost fanatically devoted, as are many Jews.
It has been said of the Jew that he is nearly always possessed of a streak of femininity, not effeminacy. In Doctor Meyer Isaacson this streak certainly existed. His intuitions were feminine in their quickness, his sympathies and his antipathies almost feminine in their ardour. He understood women instinctively, as generally only other women understand them. Often he knew, without knowing why he knew. Such knowledge of women is, perhaps fortunately, rare in men. Where most men stumble in the dark, Doctor Meyer Isaacson walked in the light. He was unmarried.
Bachelorhood is considered by many to detract from a doctor's value and to stand in the way of his career. Doctor Meyer Isaacson did not find this so. Although he was not a nerve specialist, his waiting-room was always full of patients. If he had been married, it could not have been fuller. Indeed, he often thought it would have been less full.
Suddenly he became the fashion, and he went on being the fashion.
He had no special peculiarity of manner. He did not attract the world of women by elaborate brutalities, or charm it by silly suavities. He seemed always very natural, intelligent, alive, and thoroughly interested in the person with whom he was. That he was a man of the world was certain. He was seen often at concerts, at the opera, at dinners, at receptions, occasionally even at a great ball.
Early in the morning he rode in the Park. Once a week he gave a dinner in Cleveland Square. And people liked to go to his house. They knew they would not be bored and not be poisoned there. Men appreciated him as well as women, despite the reminiscence of Brick Lane discoverable in him. His directness, his cleverness, and his apparent good-will soon overcame any dawning instinct summoned up in John Bull by his exotic appearance.
Only the unyielding Jew-hater hated him. And so the lines of the life of Doctor Meyer Isaacson seemed laid in pleasant places. And not a few thought him one of the fortunate of this world.
One morning of June the doctor was returning to Cleveland Square from his early ride in the Park. He was alone. The lively bay horse he rode—an animal that seemed almost as full of nervous vitality as he was—had had a good gallop by the Serpentine, and now trotted gently towards Buckingham Palace, snuffing in the languid air through its sensitive nostrils. The day was going to be hot. This fact inclined the Doctor to idleness, made him suddenly realise the bondage of work. In a few minutes he would be in Cleveland Square; and then, after a bath, a cup of coffee, a swift glance through the Times and the Daily Mail, there would start the procession that until evening would be passing steadily through his consulting-room.
He sighed, and pulled in his horse to a walk. To-day he was reluctant to encounter that procession.
And yet each day it brought interest into his life, this procession of his patients.
Generally he was a keen man. He had no need to feign an ardour that he really felt. He had a passion for investigation, and his profession enabled him to gratify it. Very modern, as a rule, were those who came to him, one by one, admitted each in turn by his Jewish man-servant; complex, caught fast in the net of civilized life. He liked to sit alone with them in his quiet chamber, to seek out the hidden links which united the physical to the mental man in each, to watch the pull of soul on body, of body on soul. But to-day he recoiled from work. Deep down in his nature, hidden generally beneath his strong activity, there was something that longed to sit in the sunshine and dream away the hours, leaving all fates serenely, or perhaps indifferently, between the hands of God.
"I will take a holiday some day," he said to himself, "a long holiday. I will go far away from here, to the land where I am really at home, where I am in my own place."
As he thought this, he looked up, and his eyes rested upon the brown façade of the King's Palace, upon the gilded railings that separated it from the public way, upon the sentries who were on guard, fresh-faced, alert, staring upon London with their calmly British eyes.
"In my own place," he repeated to himself.
And now his lips and his eyes were smiling. And he saw the great drama of London as something that a schoolboy could understand at a glance.
Was it really idleness he longed for? He did not know why, but abruptly his desire had changed. And he found himself wishing for events, tragic, tremendous, horrible even—anything, if they were unusual, were such as to set the man who was involved in them apart from his fellows. The foreign element in him woke up, called, perhaps, from repose by the unusually languid air, and London seemed meaningless to him, a city where a man of his type could neither dream, nor act, with all the languor, or all the energy, that was within him. And he imagined, as sometimes clever children do, a distant country where all romances unwind their shining coils, where he would find the incentive which he needed to call all his secret powers—the powers whose exercise would make his life complete—into supreme activity.
He gripped his horse with his knees. It understood his desire. It broke into a canter. He passed in front of the garden of Stafford House, turned to the left past St. James's Palace and Marlborough House, and was soon at his own door.
"Please bring up the book with my coffee in twenty minutes, Henry," he said to his servant, as he went in.
In half an hour he was seated in an arm-chair in an upstairs sitting-room, sipping his coffee. The papers lay folded at his elbow. Upon his knee, open, lay the book in which were written down the names of the patients with whom he had made appointments that day.
He looked at them, seeking for one that promised interest. The first patient was a man who would come in on his way to the city. Then followed the names of three women, then the name of a boy. He was coming with his mother, a lady of an anxious mind. The Doctor had a sheaf of letters from her. And so the morning's task was over. He turned a page and came to the afternoon.
"Two o'clock, Mrs. Lesueur; two-thirty, Miss Mendish; three, the Dean of Greystone; three-thirty, Lady Carle; four, Madame de Lys; four-thirty, Mrs. Harringby; five, Sir Henry Grebe; five-thirty, Mrs. Chepstow."
The last name was that of the last patient. Doctor Meyer Isaacson's day's work was over at six, or was supposed to be over. Often, however, he gave a patient more than the fixed half-hour, and so prolonged his labours. But no one was admitted to his house for consultation after the patient whose name was against the time of five-thirty.
And so Mrs. Chepstow would be the last patient he would see that day.
He sat for a moment with the book open on his knee, looking at her name.
It was a name very well known to him, very well known to the English-speaking world in general.
Mrs. Chepstow was a great beauty in decline. Her day of glory had been fairly long, but now it seemed to be over. She was past forty. She said