24

Good-Bye

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.

It is with a heavy heart that I now describe the last days of he who I will always consider the wisest and the best of men.

On the day after General Blessington’s defeat Baxter’s health deteriorated in ways he carefully hid from even his closest friends. He called us to his bedside, explained that he would need rest for a few weeks, and asked us to shift the apparatus for his feeding to a bench beside his bed. We did so. Happiness made Bell and I selfish, for we enjoyed our meals better without the queer smell from his end of the table and his sudden, disconcerting adjournments to the distillation plant. A week later our honeymoon took us abroad. When we returned Bella resumed her nurse’s training in Duke Street Hospital, and I my doctoring in the Royal Infirmary, for the careers we aimed at were still beyond our reach. Each night before retiring we spent an hour or more by Baxter’s bedside, I playing chess or cribbage with him while Bella discussed her work. It sometimes drove her into rages. Miss Nightingale has designed the British nursing service like the army it was first created to assist. The doctors correspond to superior officers, the matrons and sisters to sergeant-majors, the common nurses to private soldiers. Lower ranks seldom address the superiors unless ordered, since much of their intelligence is deliberately not employed. I saw the wisdom of this, but wisely did not say so, because Bella could not see it. Baxter told her, “Do not quarrel with the institution before you have seen through all its workings and understand them. Meanwhile use your free intelligence to plan better ways of doing things.”

He also pointed out the flaws in what she planned, not to stop her seeking better ways, but to help her make them practical. The Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic is organized in ways they discussed through the spring of 1884. By then we took Baxter’s bed-ridden state for granted. He had kept the mysteries of his metabolism a secret from us, so we were powerless to advise him.

One morning as I left for work Mrs. Dinwiddie gave me a note from him.

Dear Archie, Please persuade someone to relieve you today, and return to see me as near noon as possible. I would like a private talk. Bella must not hear of it till afterwards. If you take this trouble, I will not trouble you again.

Sincerely, G.

I was disturbed by the tremulous and broken character of his pen strokes; also by his use of my Christian name. I could not remember him using it before. I returned prompt at noon and met Mrs. Dinwiddie in the lobby. She seemed to have been weeping, and said, “I have just helped Mr. Godwin dress and go into Sir Colin’s old study. He needs you terribly, Dr. McCandless. Go quickly.”

I ran.

As I entered the room I heard a mixture of thudding, buzzing and twanging in which I recognized the rhythm of a hugely amplified heart-beat. It came from Baxter who sat at the table, gripping the edge of it so tightly that the terrible vibration blurring the outlines of his face was not communicated to the arms.

“Quick! Do! Subcute!” he called in a blurred voice, writhing his head in a beckon. I saw a filled hypodermic syringe on a plate before him, a shirtsleeve rolled back from his forearm. I seized the syringe, gripped a fold of skin between thumb and forefinger and gave him a subcutaneous injection. A moment later the vibration ceased and the dreadful sound grew quieter. He sighed, mopped his face with a handkerchief, smiled and said, “Thank you, McCandless. I am glad you came. I am about to die.”

I sat down and wept uncontrollably, for I could not pretend to misunderstand. He smiled even more at that and patted my shoulder saying, “Thank you again, McCandless, those tears console me. They mean I have been good for you.”

“Can you not live longer?”

“Not without pain and indignity. Sir Colin told me from my earliest youth that my life depended on keeping a continuously even temper—strong feelings would lethally emphasize incompatibilities in my internal organs. When Bella told me she had engaged to marry you the agony damaged my respiration. On the night she returned from Paris she asked a frightening question from which my neural network never recovered. Six weeks later Blessington’s solicitor so convulsed me with anger that my alimentary canal was damaged beyond repair. You perhaps notice no great alteration to my apparent bulk, but I am starving to death, McCandless, and only derivatives of opium and cocaine have let me enjoy your evening visits with an appearance of ease. I had hoped to see April out with you, but when we separated last night I knew I had no time left. It is weak of me to want company in my last minutes but . . . I am weak!”

“I must fetch Bella,” I cried, jumping up.

“No, Archie! I love Bella too much. If she begged me to live longer I could not refuse, and her last sight of me would be of an uncontrollably filthy, paralytic idiot. I will leave life while I can say Good-bye with dignity. But too much dignity is pompous. Let us share a deoch an doruis, a glass of my father’s port together. I seem to remember two years ago locking up a decanter you had only half emptied. Wine is supposed to improve with keeping. Here is the key. You know the cupboard.”

There was a cheerful zest in his speech which almost made me smile; yet I trembled as I brought out the ancient decanter and two delicate stemmed glasses. I dusted the glasses clean with my breast-pocket handkerchief, half filled them and we clinked them. He sniffed his curiously then said, “My will leaves all to Bella and you. Have children and teach them good behaviour and honest work by example. Never be violent with them, and never preach. Make sure Mrs. Dinwiddie and the other servants live comfortably here when they can no longer work, and be kind to my dogs. Finally—” (here he emptied the glass in one quick swallow) “—that is how wine tastes.”

He put the glass down, gripped his gigantic knees with his gigantic fists, threw back his head and laughed. I had not heard him laugh before. The sound started small and swelled up huge, so huge that I flattened my hands over my ears, though the throbs and twangs of his heart-beat swelled loud too until it and the laughter stopped in a sudden sharp snap. Complete silence. He swayed neither forward nor back, but sat perfectly rigid.

A moment later I stepped over and, trying hard not to peer into the huge tooth-edged cavity which gaped so horribly at the ceiling, discovered his neck was broken and that rigor mortis had instantly ensued. Rather than break his joints in order to lay him out flat I ordered a cubical coffin four and a half feet wide, with a shelf inside on which he was placed, sitting. He sits like that to the present day, under the floor of the mausoleum Sir Colin acquired in the Necropolis overlooking Glasgow Cathedral and Royal Infirmary. In due course I and my wife (who was very upset by his death) will join him there, and so can all our children and grandchildren if they make room for themselves by getting cremated.

This record of our early struggles is dedicated to my wife, though I dare not show it to her since it tells of things neither she nor medical science dare yet believe. But scientific progress accelerates from year to year. In a short time the discovery may be made which Sir Colin Baxter communicated only to his son, and which will prove the factual ground of all I have written here.

FINIS