'On the other hand,' said Powell, and the words briefly lifted Arthur's spirits, 'in my view there are promising signs of fibroid growth around the seat of the disease. And the other lung has enlarged somewhat to compensate. But that is the best I can say.'
'I do not accept it!' Arthur whispered the words because he could not bellow them at the top of his voice.
Powell took no offence. He was accustomed to pronouncing the gentlest, courtliest sentence of death, and familiar with the ways it took those affected. 'Of course. If you would like the name-'
'No. I accept what you have told me. But I do not accept what you have not told me. You would give her a matter of months.'
'You know as well as I do, Mr Doyle, how impossible it is to predict-'
'I know as well as you do, Dr Powell, the words we use to give hope to our patients and those near to them. I also know the words we hear within ourselves as we seek to raise their spirits. About three months.'
'Yes, in my view.'
'Then again, I say, I do not accept it. When I see the Devil, I fight him. Wherever we need to go, whatever I need to spend, he shall not have her.'
'I wish you every good fortune,' replied Powell, 'and remain at your service. There are, however, two things I am obliged to say. They may be unnecessary, but I am duty-bound. I trust you will not take offence.'
Arthur stiffened his back, a soldier ready for orders.
'You have, I believe, children?'
'Two, a boy and a girl. Aged one and four.'
'There is, you must understand, no possibility-'
'I understand.'
'I am not talking of her ability to conceive-'
'Mr Powell, I am not a fool. And neither am I a brute.'
'These things have to be made crystal clear, you must understand. The second matter is perhaps less obvious. It is the effect – the likely effect – on the patient. On Mrs Doyle.'
'Yes?'
'In our experience, consumption is different from other wasting diseases. On the whole, the patient suffers very little pain. Often the disease will proceed with less inconvenience than a toothache or an indigestion. But what sets it apart is the effect upon the mental processes. The patient is often very optimistic.'
'You mean light-headed? Delirious?'
'No, I mean optimistic. Tranquil and cheerful, I would say.'
'On account of the drugs you prescribe?'
'Not at all. It is in the nature of the disease. Regardless of how aware the patient is of the seriousness of her case.'
'Well, that is a great relief to me.'
'Yes, it may be so at first, Mr Doyle.'
'What do you mean by that?'
'I mean that when a patient does not suffer and does not complain and remains cheerful in the face of grave illness, then the suffering and the complaining has to be done by someone.'
'You do not know me, sir.'
'That is true. But I wish you the necessary courage nonetheless.'
For better, for worse; for richer, for poorer. He had forgotten: in sickness and in health.
The lunatic asylum sent Arthur his father's sketchbooks. Charles Doyle's last years had been miserable, as he lay unvisited at his grim final address; but he did not die mad. That much was clear: he had continued to paint watercolours and to draw; also to keep a diary. It now struck Arthur that his father had been a considerable artist, undervalued by his peers, worthy indeed of a posthumous exhibition in Edinburgh – perhaps even in London. Arthur could not help reflecting on the contrast in their fates: while the son was enjoying the embrace of fame and society, his abandoned father knew only the occasional embrace of the straitjacket. Arthur felt no guilt – just the beginnings of filial compassion. And there was one sentence in his father's diary which would drag at any son's heart. 'I believe,' he had written, 'I am branded as mad solely from the Scotch Misconception of Jokes.'
In December of that year, Holmes fell to his death in the arms of Moriarty; both of them propelled downwards by an impatient authorial hand. The London newspapers had contained no obituaries of Charles Doyle, but were full of protest and dismay at the death of a non-existent consulting detective whose popularity had begun to embarrass and even disgust his creator. It seemed to Arthur that the world was running mad: his father was fresh in the ground, and his wife condemned, but young City men were apparently tying crepe bands to their hats in mourning for Mr Sherlock Holmes.
Another event took place during this morbid year's end. A month after his father's death, Arthur applied to join the Society for Psychical Research.
George
In the Solicitors' Final Examinations George receives Second Class Honours, and is awarded a Bronze Medal by the Birmingham Law Society. He opens an office at 54 Newhall Street with the initial promise of some overflow work from Sangster, Vickery amp; Speight. He is twenty-three, and the world is changing for him.
Despite being a child of the Vicarage, despite a lifetime of filial attention to the pulpit of St Mark's, George has often felt that he does not understand the Bible. Not all of it, all of the time; indeed, not enough of it, enough of the time. There has always been some leap to be made, from fact to faith, from knowledge to understanding, of which he has proved incapable. This makes him feel a sham. The tenets of the Church of England have increasingly become a distant given. He does not sense them as close truths, or see them working from day to day, from moment to moment. Naturally, he does not tell his parents this.
At school, additional stories and explanations of life were put before him. This is what science says; this is what history says; this is what literature says… George became adept at answering examination questions on these subjects, even if they had no real vivacity in his mind. But now he has discovered the law, and the world is beginning finally to make sense. Hitherto invisible connections – between people, between things, between ideas and principles – are gradually revealing themselves.
For instance, he is on the train between Bloxwich and Birchills, looking out of the window at a hedgerow. He sees not what his fellow passengers would see – a few intertwined bushes blown by the wind, home to some nesting birds – but instead a formal boundary between owners of land, a delineation settled by contract or long usage, something active, something liable to promote either amity or dispute. At the Vicarage, he looks at the maid scrubbing the kitchen table, and instead of a coarse and clumsy girl likely to misplace his books, he sees a contract of employment and a duty of care, a complicated and delicate tying together, backed by centuries of case law, all of it unfamiliar to the parties concerned.
He feels confident and happy with the law. There is a great deal of textual exegesis, of explaining how words can and do mean different things; and there are almost as many books of commentary on the law as there are on the Bible. But at the end there is not that further leap to be made. At the end, you have an agreement, a decision to be obeyed, an understanding of what something means. There is a journey from confusion to clarity. A drunken mariner writes his last will and testament on an ostrich egg; the mariner drowns, the egg survives, whereupon the law brings coherence and fairness to his sea-washed words.
Other young men divide their lives between work and pleasure; indeed, spend the former dreaming of the latter. George finds that the law provides him with both. He has no need or desire to take part in sports, to go boating, to attend the theatre; he has no interest in alcohol or gourmandising, or in horses racing one another; he has little desire to travel. He has his practice, and then, for pleasure, he has railway law. It is astonishing that the tens of thousands who travel daily by train have no useful pocket explicator to help them determine their rights vis-a-vis the railway company. He has written to Messrs Effingham Wilson, publishers of the ' Wilson 's Legal Handy Books' series, and on the basis of a sample chapter they have accepted his proposal.