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.
At university my clothes and manners announced my farm-servant origins, and as I would let nobody sneer at me on that account I was usually alone outside the lecture theatres and examination hall. At the end of the first term a professor called me to his room and said, “Mr. McCandless, in a just world I could predict a brilliant future for you, but not in this one, unless you make some changes. You may become a greater surgeon than Hunter, a finer obstetrician than Simpson, a better healer than Lister, but unless you acquire a touch of smooth lordliness or easy-going humour no patient will trust you, other doctors will shun you. Don’t scorn a polite appearance because many fools, snobs and scoundrels have that. If you cannot afford a good coat from a good tailor, search for one that fits you among forfeited pledges in the better pawnshops. Sleep with your trousers neatly folded between two boards under your mattress. If you cannot change your linen every day at least contrive to attach a freshly starched collar to your shirt. Attend conversaziones and smoking-concerts arranged by the class you are studying to join—you will not find us a bad set of people, and will gradually fit in by a process of instinctive imitation.”
I told him my money could pay for no more than my fees, books, instruments and keep.
“I knew that was your trouble!” cried he triumphantly. “But our senate handles bequests for deserving cases like yours. Most of the grants go to divinity students but why should science be excluded? I think we can arrange to give you at least the price of a new suit, if you approach us in the right way and I put in a word. What do you say? Shall we attempt it?”
Had he said—“I think you are entitled to a bursary, this is how to apply, and I will be your referee”—had he said that I could have thanked him; but he lolled back in his chair, hands clasped on bulging waistcoat, simpering up at me (for I had not been invited to sit) with such a sweet coy smug smile that I pocketed my fists to avoid punching his teeth. Instead I told him I came from a part of Galloway where folk disliked begging for charity, but since he had a high opinion of my talents we could arrange to profit us both. I suggested he lend me a hundred pounds, for which I would repay seven and a half per cent on the anniversary of the loan until my fifth year as general practitioner or third as professional consultant, when I would refund the original lump and add a twenty pound bonus. He gaped, so I added swiftly, “Of course I will be bankrupt if I fail to graduate, or get struck early off the Register, but I think I am a safe investment. What do you think? Shall we try it?”
“You are joking?” he murmured, staring at me hard, his lips twitching with the beginnings of a smile he wanted me to imitate. Being too angry to grin at the joke I shrugged, said good-bye and left.
There was perhaps a connection between this interview and an envelope addressed in an unknown hand which came through the post a week later. It contained a five-pound banknote, most of which I spent on a second-hand microscope, the rest on shirts and collars. I could now dress less like a ploughman and more like an indigent bookseller. My fellow students thought this an improvement, for they started greeting me cheerily and telling me the current gossip, though I had no news for them. Godwin Baxter was the only one I talked with as an equal because (I still believe) we were the two most intelligent and least social people attached to the Glasgow medical faculty.