CHAPTER LI.
ANOTHER CHAT BY THE FIRE.
The last sodden leaves had fallen from the London trees, and autumn was fast merging into winter. Mona sat alone in her study, deep in a copy of Balfour On the Heart, which she had picked up second-hand, on her way from hospital, and had carried home in triumph. It was the height of her ambition at this time to be "strong on the heart and lungs"; and as she read she mechanically percussed the arm of her big chair, with a lightness of touch which many doctors might have envied.
There was a knock at the door, and Miss Lascelles entered the room.
"That's right," said Mona, holding out her hand, "sit down."
"Thanks," was the reply, in Miss Lascelles's cultured, musical drawl. "I am not going to stay. I came to ask if you would lend me your notes of that leucocythæmia case. I am working up the spleen just now."
"I will, with pleasure. But don't be in such a hurry, now that you have come so far. I never get a chance to speak to you in hospital. Sit down and tell me what the scientist thinks of it all."
Miss Lascelles pulled off her hat unceremoniously, and passed her hand through her dark hair.
"Oh, reform it altogether!" she cried. "There is a deal of humbug in the profession, and I don't know that the women have lessened it."
Mona laughed.
"What a born reformer you are!" she said admiringly.
"I suppose I am. In other words, I shall never be a successful doctor. Kismet! I don't see how any honest man can live in this world and not be a reformer."
"Don't you? Oh, I do."
Miss Lascelles glanced round the pretty room.
"I almost envy you," she said. "It must be very pleasant to be able to shut one's eyes to abuses, and eat one's pudding in comfort."
"Ay, or to shut one's eyes to one's father's shortcomings, and make the best of them."
"It is not the shortcomings I object to, it is the false pretensions. Give me honesty at all costs. Let everything be open and above-board."
"Honesty—honesty—honesty!" said Mona. "I sometimes think I hate honesty; it is so often another name for ingratitude and brutality. I care more for loyalty than for all the other virtues put together. It is the loyal souls who prepare the way for the reformer. His actual work is often nothing more than the magnificent thrust with which a child knocks down a castle of cards."
"I believe in loyalty, too; but let us be loyal to the right, not loyal to the wrong."
"With all my heart, if you can contrive to separate the right from the wrong. I never could. I am always brought back to that grand bold line—
'Mit ihm zu irren ist dir Gewinn.'
You don't believe that?"
Miss Lascelles laughed, and shook her head. "I don't mean to go astray with anybody, if I can help it. I had no idea, Miss Maclean, that you were so desperately—mediæval."
Mona smiled.
"I think it is rather Greek than mediæval to shut one's eyes to abuses, and eat one's pudding in comfort. The mediæval spirit renounces the pudding, and looks beyond the abuses."
Miss Lascelles sprang to her feet, and carelessly threw on her broad picturesque hat.
"I am neither Greek nor mediæval, then," she said, involuntarily drawing up the sleeves from her plump pretty wrists as she spoke; "for I choose to share my pudding, and wage war to the death against the abuses."
"Brava!" said Mona. "You are one of the sort that live in history."
"For knocking down a castle of cards?"
"Nay, nay; I did not say that of all reformers."
"Well, Miss Maclean, whatever your theories may be, you have worked a grand reformation in Miss Reynolds."
"Now that is precisely a case of the wrong man getting the credit. That, at least, was the work of her own loyal self."
"If only she would be quite natural, and not treat the doctors with that half-coquettish air!"
"But that is natural to her, and I can't say I altogether object to it. Perhaps I am partial. Here are the notes in the meantime."
"Many thanks. Good-bye."
"Au revoir! Come back again—when you want another chapter out of the Middle Ages."
Mona returned to her books, but she had not read a page before another visitor was announced.
"I really shall have to sport my oak," she said; but when she took the card from the salver, her whole face beamed.
"Show him in," she said, wheeling an arm-chair up to the fire. "Mr Reynolds, there are not three people in the world whom I should be so glad to see. What lucky wind blows you here now?"
"I have come partly to look after my two daughters," said the old man, smiling. "Let me have a good look at this one. Lucy tells me you are working yourself to death."
"One of Lucy's effective statements." But Mona flushed rather nervously under his steady gaze. "I suppose you have just come from her now."
"Yes."
"She is working splendidly if you will."
"So I gather." He smiled. "She is very indignant to-night about the rudeness of the doctor under whom she is working at hospital."
"I don't think it is very serious. They are excellent friends in the main, and you cannot expect all men to be gentlemen. The fact is"—Mona drew down her brows in earnest consideration—"we women are excellent, really excellent, at taking a good hard blow when we are convinced that we deserve it. That is where our metal comes in. But if we really mean to share men's work, we have got to learn within the next generation to take a little miscellaneous knocking about from our superiors, without enquiring too closely whether we have deserved it or not. That is where our ignorance of the world comes in."
"I should think that was extremely true," Mr Reynolds said reflectively, "especially in a busy life like a doctor's, where there is so little time for explanations. There must be a good deal of give and take. But, my dear girl, don't let your common-sense run away with one atom of your womanliness. One would not think it necessary to say so, if one had not been disappointed in that respect, once and again."
"I know," Mona answered hurriedly. "It is a case of Scylla and Charybdis. We don't want to be mawkish and sentimental, and in the first swing of reaction we are apt to go to the other extreme and treat the patients in hospital as mere material. But you know, Mr Reynolds, if one realises that the occupant of each bed is a human soul, with its own rights and its own reserves—if one takes the trouble to knock at the door, in fact, and ask admission instead of leaping over the wall—life becomes pretty intense; a good deal gets crowded into a very few hours."
"I know. That is quite true. But all things become easier by practice. It may be the view of a half-informed outsider, but I cannot help thinking that, if you take the trouble, when you first begin ward-work, as Lucy calls it, to gain admission with the will of the patient, you will in time become the possessor of a magic passe-partout, which will make entrance not only infinitely more satisfactory and complete, but also even easier than by leaping over the wall."
"You should preach a sermon to women-doctors," Mona said, smiling; "and have it printed. I would lay it to heart for one."
"You will do far more good by preaching it yourself in your daily life, as indeed I believe you are doing now. But in any case, I did not come here to preach to you."
"You don't know how much I stand in need of it."
"I want you to talk to me. Do you know it is more than a year since I saw you?"
Mona sighed. "It seems five to me sometimes."
"I suppose it has been very full of events?"
Mr Reynolds had not forgotten the man whose presence at Borrowness made "all the difference" in Mona's life there.
"Yes. There was first my life with my cousin; and then the examination; and then Switzerland with the Munros; and then hospital. Four different Mona Macleans,—each living as hard as ever she could."
"And enjoying life?"
"I don't know. I have been so restless, so unsettled."
"I fancied I could read that in your face, but it is passing over now."
"I hope so. I don't know. Don't let us talk of it."
"You enjoy your hospital work?"
Mona was sitting opposite him on the corner of the tiled fender. She looked into the fire now, with an amount of expression in her face that was almost painful.
"Hospital," she said, "is—salvation! All one's work apart from that tends to make one self-centred. It is a duty to think much of my knowledge, my marks, my success, my failure. Hospital work gives one a chance to 'die to live.'"
She laughed softly.
"It must seem incredible to you, but I actually thought once that I had died to live,—I, with my books and my pictures, and my pretty gowns, and my countless toys! I thought I held them with so light a hand, that I valued them only for the eternal that was in them."
She paused and went on without much logical sequence. "It is so easy to die to live, when the life one dies to is something vague and shadowy and unknown; but let one brilliant ray of promised happiness cross one's path, and then it becomes a very different thing to die to that—to nothing abstract, nothing vague, but just to that! One realises what one's professions are worth.
"All the time I was at Borrowness I hardly once said a cross word to my cousin, and I suppose I took great credit to myself for that; but I see now that there was no true selflessness in it at all. It was simply because she was so unlike me that she never came into my real life. I conquered my hardships in a sense, by escaping them. I thought I had attained, and I have only learned now that I have attained nothing. The whole lesson of self-renunciation has still got to be learned."
"You are thinking much of the duty of self-renunciation; what of the duty of self-realisation?"
"Is there such a duty?"
"You have acted instinctively up till now on the theory that there is. Have you any reason to distrust your instincts?"
"I don't know. I seem to have got into a muddle about everything. How can they both be duties when they are so absolutely incompatible?"
"One can only unite them certainly by seeking for a higher truth that combines them both. It may seem a strange thing for a Christian minister to say, but it has always seemed to me that those words, 'die to live,' were an admirable expression of a philosophy, but a very poor maxim for daily life; partly because they ignore that duty of self-realisation, in which I for one believe, and partly because, so long as a man says, 'Am I dying to live?' he cannot possibly do it. The maxim accentuates the very element we want to get rid of. If we are indeed to die to live, we must cease to think about it; we must cease to know whether we live or die."
"But the higher truth, Mr Reynolds, what is that?"
"Nay, I should be doing you a poor service by telling you."
"There is only one higher truth conceivable," Mona said boldly, "and that is—God in all."
"And is not that enough? God in me. God to have His way in me, and to find the fullest possible expression there. God in all men—in the church, the ball-room, the Blum. If we see all things through the medium of God, what becomes of the strife between self-renunciation and self-realisation?"
Mona pressed his hand in silence. "You knew all that before, dear child," he said; "you had only got confused for the moment."
Mona shook her head. "I knew it vaguely," she said, "but you must not think I am living up to that level. I thought, in my infinite conceit, that I had risen above happiness and attained to blessedness; and now—and now—I want the happiness too."
He laid his hand on her shoulder. "And so you are wearing yourself out at hospital," he said quietly, as though that were the natural outcome of what she had said; "but don't forget the friends who love you, and who are depending on you."
Mona looked up gratefully into his face. The advice was almost the same as that which she herself had given to Lucy some months before; but the value of advice is rarely intrinsic—we think far less of its substance than we do of the personality of the giver. The words that are empty platitudes on the lips of one man, become living inspiration on those of another.
To-night, however, even Mr Reynolds had not the power to raise Mona above the longing for happiness. As the months went on, the strain of uncertainty was becoming almost unendurable. Never, since that night when he drove her home in his gig from Colonel Lawrence's Wood, had she heard anything from Dr Dudley; never, since the chance glimpses at Burlington House, had she even seen him. It seemed incredible that he could have failed to find her, if he had really tried; and yet—and yet——
"Oh, my friend, my friend!" she said wearily, "I have waited so long. Where are you?”