“Please remember,” I told him, “that our hospitals have been improved since then.”
“They have indeed — thanks to good nursing. Our nurses are now the truest practitioners of the healing art. If every Scottish, Welsh and English doctor and surgeon dropped suddenly dead, eighty per cent of those admitted to our hospitals would recover if the nursing continued.”4
I remembered that Baxter was barred from hospital practice outside the poorest sort of charity clinic, which explained his bitterness toward the profession. However, before parting we arranged to go a walk on the following Sunday.
Our Sunday walks became a habit, though we still ignored each other in the dissecting-room, and avoided strolls through busy places. We both shrank from being stared at by others, and any companion of Baxter also became an object of curiosity. We were often quiet together as I could not help wincing sometimes at the sound of his voice. When this happened he would smile and fall silent. Half an hour might pass before I could prod him into saying more but I always did prod him. His voice was repulsive but his words highly interesting. One day I put plugs of cotton-wool in my ears before meeting him and found this let me listen with hardly any pain at all. I heard of his queer education on an autumn afternoon when we nearly lost our way in a network of small paths through the woods between Campsie and Torrance.
I had introduced the topic by speaking of my own childhood. Said he with a sigh, “I entered the world through Sir Colin’s dealings with a nurse many years before Miss Nightingale made nursing the good part of British medicine. At that time a conscientious surgeon had to train his own nursing staff. Sir Colin trained one to be his anaesthetist, and worked so closely with her that they managed to produce me, before she died. I have no memory of her. There is nothing she owned in our houses. Sir Colin never spoke of her except once in my teens, when he said she was the cleverest, most teachable woman he knew. That must have attracted him, for he had no interest in female beauty. He had very little interest in people, except as surgical cases. As I was educated at home, and saw no other families, and never played with other children, I was twelve before I learned exactly what mothers do. I knew the difference between doctors and nurses, and thought mothers an inferior kind of nurse who specialized in small people. I thought I had never needed one because I was big from the start.”
“But surely you read the begat chapter in Genesis?”
“No. Sir Colin taught me himself, you see, and only taught what interested him. He was a severe rationalist. Poetry, fiction, history, philosophy and the Bible struck him as nonsense—‘unprovable blethers’, he called them.”
“What did he teach you?”
“Mathematics, anatomy and chemistry. Each morning and evening he recorded my temperature and pulse, took samples of my blood and urine, then analysed them. By the age of six I was doing these things for myself. Because of a chemical imbalance my system needs alternating doses of iodine and sugar. I have to monitor their effect with great exactness.”
“But did you never ask him where you originally came from?”
“Yes, and he answered by bringing out diagrams, models, morbid specimens and giving me another lesson on how I was made. I enjoyed these lessons. They taught me to admire my internal organization. This preserved my self-respect when I learned how most people feel about my appearance.”
“A sad childhood — worse than mine.”
“I disagree. Nobody was cruel to me and I got all the animal warmth and affection I needed from Sir Colin’s dogs. He always had several of them.”
“I discovered procreation by watching cocks and hens. Did your father’s dogs never pup?”
“They were dogs — not bitches. Sir Colin waited till my early teens before teaching me exactly how and why the female body differs from the male. As usual he taught me through diagrams, models and morbid specimens, but said he would arrange a practical experiment with a healthy, living specimen if curiosity inclined me that way. It did not.”
“Forgive me asking, but — your father’s dogs. Was he a vivisectionist?”
“Yes,” said Baxter, and his cheek paled a little. I said, “Are you?”
He halted and confronted me with his mournful, huge, childish face which somehow made me feel like an even smaller child. His voice became so tiny and piercing that despite the cotton-wool plugs I feared damage to my eardrums. He said, “I have never killed or hurt a living creature in my life, and neither did Sir Colin.”
I told him, “I wish I could say that.”
He stayed silent for the rest of the walk.
3. The Quarrel
One day I asked him the exact nature of his researches.
“I am refining Sir Colin’s techniques.”
“You told me that once before, Baxter, but it is not a satisfying answer. Why refine on out-of-date techniques? Your famous father was a great surgeon but medicine has advanced hugely since his death. In the past ten years we have discovered things he would have thought incredible — microbes and phagocytes, how to diagnose and remove brain tumours and repair ulcerous perforation.”
“Sir Colin discovered something better than those.”
“What?”
“Well,” said Baxter, speaking slowly, as if against his will, “he discovered how to arrest a body’s life without ending it, so that no messages passed along the nerves, the respiration, circulation and digestion were completely suspended, the cellular vitality was not impaired.”
“Very interesting, Baxter. What use is it, medically speaking?”
“O, it has its uses!” he said, with a smile that greatly annoyed me.
“I hate mysteries Baxter!” I told him, “especially the man-made sort which are always a fraud. Do you know what most students in my year think of you? They think you a harmless insignificant madman, who dabbles with brains and microscopes in an effort to look important.”
My poor friend stood still and gazed at me, obviously aghast. I stared stonily back. In a faltering voice he asked if I, too, thought he was that. I said, “If you don’t answer my questions frankly, what else can I think?”
“Well,” he said, sighing, “come home and I will show you something.”
This pleased me. He had never invited me to his home before.
It was a tall, gloomy terrace house in Park Circus, and in the lobby he and his Newfoundland dog were noisily welcomed by two Saint Bernards, an Alsatian and an Afghan hound. He led me straight past them, down a stair to the basement and out into a narrow garden between high walls.5 Near the house was a paved part with a wooden doocot and pigeons, then came vegetable plots and a small lawn surrounded by a low fence. There were hutches on the lawn and some rabbits grazing. Baxter stepped over the fence and bade me do so too. The rabbits were perfectly tame. Baxter said, “Examine these two and tell me what you think.”
He lifted and handed me one, cradling and gently stroking another on his sleeve until I examined it too.
The most obvious oddity in the first was the colour of the fur: pure black from nose to waist, pure white from waist to tail. Had a thread been tied round the body at the narrowest part all hairs on one side would have been black, all on the other side white. Now, in nature such straight separations only occur in crystals and basalt — the horizon of the sea on a clear day may look perfectly straight, but is actually curved. Yet by itself I would have assumed this rabbit was what any one else would assume — a natural freak. If so, the other rabbit was a freak of an exactly opposite sort: white to a waistline as clean and distinct as if cut by the surgeon’s knife, after which it was black to the tail. No process of selective breeding could produce two such exactly equal and opposite colorations, so I examined them again with my fingertip, noticing that Baxter was watching me with the same cool, close, curious look I was giving his rabbits. One had male genitals with female nipples, one had female genitals with almost imperceptible nipples. Beneath the fur where it changed colour I felt on one body a barely perceptible ridge where the whole body shrank minutely but suddenly toward the tail, in the other was an equally minute ridge where it expanded. The little beasts were works of art, not nature. The one in my hands suddenly felt terribly precious. I set it carefully down on the grass and gazed at Baxter with awe, admiration and a kind of pity. It is hard not to pity those whose powers separate them from all the rest of us, unless (of course) they are rulers doing the usual sort of damage. I think there were tears in my eyes as I said, “How did you do it, Baxter?”