St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student

To do my bidding, fallen and hateful sprites
To help me – what are these, at best, beside
God helping, God directing everwhere,
So that the earth shall yield her secrets up,
And every object there be charged to strike,
Teach, gratify, her master God appoints?”

His black arts were neither secret nor sublime, but the openly belauded methods of investigation, involving the tortures of sentient beings for the sake of learning the idle arts these pedants taught at the schools. He, too, had invoked the aid of the sullen forces of Nature, from which he had thrust Nature’s God, and they had done his bidding in a way – and the way was hopeless and dark. He had long felt this reckoning-day with himself must come; he was too honest to go on much longer leaving the question of his responsibility unsettled; he was too healthy-brained to give way to despair, till he had found a modus vivendi with his better nature impossible. Early bereft of a mother’s care, his father, wholly absorbed in his literary pursuits, and keeping up merely the slightest correspondence with his son, whom he had apparently almost forgotten, Elsworth had very few family ties, and was perfectly master of his own position. He had no fear of his father’s withdrawing his allowance of £300 a year. As it happened, he had the day before been paid a sum of rather over £100 by his agents; he was not in debt, save in a small sum to his landlady, and the hospital beadle, with some trifling amounts in the neighbourhood of St. Bernard’s which his man of business would pay. Why not cut the old familiar scenes? The wilderness period has to be gone through by every man with a work to do; the retreat is salutary for the stricken soul. Why not enter into it at once? He was a man of resolute will, possessed by a strong determination when the right and proper thing to be done confronted him. He had true stuff in his composition; originality, firm purpose. Boldness to do and dare came to him from his father, who had won his promotion in Indian warfare through a grandly conceived and brilliantly original movement, which had insured the enemy’s defeat at the moment his own seemed imminent. It should be done; he would go away early in the morning light. “Let him that is on the house-top not come down to take anything out of the house.” And he went not down, nor took anything of his old life, but made straight for Paris that same day, for, like his father when he made his brilliant move, he had formed a plan and carried it out.

He gave directions to his lawyer to discharge all claims upon him, to say that he had gone abroad, and would not return for some time, but begged him not to disclose his whereabouts to any one without first communicating with him at the address he should forward, when he had chosen his headquarters.

Now he began to enter into himself. He must seek some hallowed place of prayer to consecrate his remaining years to God, and renew his baptismal vows, to drink a deep draught of the Divine Spirit as he entered on his new work.

He turned into Notre Dame, to see the place again, and investigate some details of the architecture. He sat down on a bench before the high altar; they were singing the vesper service. A sense of heavenly calm pervaded his soul, his turbulent thoughts were quelled; his disquiet, his vague apprehensions, his disgust with life, all seemed to melt away as the influence of prayer lulled his troubled soul on the breast of God. The organ ceased to peal, the monotone of the priests and the clear young voices of the choir had died away. He peacefully slept in the house of prayer, and angels seemed to whisper sweet words to him, and glorified saints from out the storied panes to counsel him. He was aroused by a Suisse, who, noting him as a tourist, and having an eye to a douceur, invited him to come and see the relics, and the treasures in the sacristy and chapels. He declined, and moved away – moved to a less conspicuous place, and again sat down to muse on the great things the sacred fane had witnessed in the past. How many and great events of human history had been enacted under its shadow and beneath its roof! Here, and on that very altar, had been enthroned a vile woman to be worshipped as Goddess of Reason, a visible presentment of what a nation or a single human soul meant when it had cast out God. Could anything, had anything kept the intellect of man from madness when bereft of the idea of essential goodness outside the mean world of man? All history, he must confess, answered “No.” And “No” was thunder-pealed from that desecrated altar, where the idea of God had been openly crucified amid the highest civilization of modern Europe, by the lusts and madness of the age of science. Dethroned and cast out for what? When all was gone, and the last traces of the faith stamped out, as far as might be, what was to come in its place? What for that market woman kneeling by his side rapt by devotion at least to an idea more exalted than her business or her pleasures could have suggested? Surely something ennobling her small surroundings, if only by its poetry and sentiment. And that workman there under the sculpture of the Cross-bearer? Not altogether waste of time for him to meditate a few moments on sacrifice of self for good of other men. It might help him perhaps to bear a hand at a neighbour’s overpressing burden. And those little children before the picture of the Infant Saviour? At least for them such idealism must be a factor in their mental development which could ill be spared. Philosophy was good for men, the wisdom of the sages had often balanced a wavering mind, and strengthened the fibre of men to dare and do great things; but it was not possible for the masses of mankind to be so sustained any more than it was possible they could be all fed and housed like princes. Was not this contemned Christian religion which he had been helping to push aside, philosophy made easy for simple folk, unlearned and without culture? Would it not still further belittle their poor lives to take their faith from them? For them Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare were not horn-books. Was it so very wise to take away their gospels, and their psalms, and leave them nothing to elevate the daily round of life’s task above the muddy floor of their miserable dwellings?

And so he mused on all these things, and the worshippers came and went, knelt in prayer, and laid their poor burdens at the feet of God; took in from the infinite a draught of the water of life, wept their tears, sighed up to the throne of the Heavenly their anxieties; asked direction from the Wisest they knew of, wandered a little out of themselves a while; felt that bread and meat were not alone the sustenance of man, and went on their way. And as he thought and pondered in his heart, the sinking sun gloaming through the great west window scattered a thousand jewels over the floor around him, and he rose and knew that religion brightens life, and colours with rose and gold the dark shadow brooding over the soul of man. Not altogether was it a fact that man had been wholly wrong in his faith, and had done nothing but “build him fanes of fruitless prayer,” or had reaped from them nothing but the opportunities to “roll the psalm to wintry skies.”

As he rose from his long meditation, and went into the gay, busy world without, he felt how inconsistent with his previous mental attitude were the thoughts he had entertained. How often had he not dedicated himself to the overthrow of superstition, and pledged his energies to do what he could to erase its traces from the minds of his friends! It was but a few weeks since he had angrily tossed a crucifix from a patient’s couch, who he had directed should not be bothered by religion or priests. Had he not scoffed openly at a poor old woman’s simple assurance that God was helping her in her sickness, and that to her ears came often “songs in the night season?” At St. Bernard’s how many times had he not endeavoured to laugh or reason young freshmen out of the religion of their mothers, unworthy of belief now that facts, and facts only, were to be the study of their lives! There was a little band of true Christian men at the hospital, who met for prayer and Bible reading from time to time. He could not deny that they did their work in the wards conscientiously – did it more faithfully than the ardent young Comtists and Secularists, who made so much noise about Humanity and its claims. They were so cheerful, too, and helpful in their attitude towards the afflicted and poor who sought their aid, that they were a constant reproach to him for not living up to the faith with which, in his secret thoughts, he had never really broken.

CHAPTER XXIII.

IN EXILE

And Wisdom’s self
Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude,
Where with her best nurse Contemplation,
She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired.

    – Milton.

No star is ever lost we once have seen:
We always may be what we might have been.

    – Proctor.

Elsworth spent a few days in Paris, and then determined he would go on to Spain. He dreaded discovery, for ridicule was more terrible to him than any bodily danger. He had been only two days in Paris when he passed a London friend, who, however, did not notice him. He neither wanted to be chaffed by old companions, nor urged back to a life with which he had resolved to break. He was not strong enough to fight – the highest bravery is sometimes to fly. He felt that, though the world is so small, he would be less likely to meet acquaintances in Spain, especially if he did not stay in the capital.

As he entered the night express for Madrid, and settled himself in a corner of the carriage for sleep, he felt some sinking at heart, a sense of his isolation and a misgiving of the adequacy of his motive which had driven him into his solitude. This age of ours, he thought, is not the time for sacrifice to principle. Retreats for clergymen and devotees might be right because customary; but, whoever heard of a medical man, scarcely emerged from his hospital, giving up all his professional prospects, abandoning friends and position, country and habits, because a great sense of non-response to the higher call of duty, had suddenly come upon him? Yet history was full of such precedents. Men had done all this and more to seek an island in unknown seas, to trace the sources of a river, to get gold, to seek for novelty, to gratify small ambitions, to chase the merest butterfly of a pleasure. He had seen, as a lightning flash in an instant reveals a yawning precipice or some great danger in time to be averted, that he was descending from his higher self, and leading a life which could not be worth living for any man who had once known a better and followed nobler things. Could it be wrong to break with the past like this? Was it not just this that the Great Teacher meant when He said, “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off?” Was it not good for him to go out into the desert for awhile, and let God speak to him in the silence? He had said to himself that he would live to make the world better for his living. He had vowed himself to the order of those who smooth away some of the roughnesses of this life for weaker brethren; not a very wonderful thing after all, to do, in face of what had been done for him by others. True, this is the age of “doing nothing without a quid pro quo” paid down in hard cash. A cruel and a soul-benumbing maxim, which, if acted upon universally would turn the brightness of the world into the grimness and noisy whirl of a mere factory. Let him for awhile, at least, see if it were possible to live the life of an early Christian; such a life as was common enough in the dawn of the new civilization which had love and self-abnegation for its motive power. And so musing, with heart-aspirations going up to God for help and His sustaining power in following this better ideal, he fell asleep.

* * * * *

The morning broke struggling through the mists that hung over the strange, weird country of the Landes. The train ran through miles of fir-trees – nothing but fir-trees, grown for the sake of their resin. Every tree had its cup slowly but steadily filling with the fragrant exudation. Every tree, as he saw, gave up its blood to help mankind; not one refused to fill with resin the cup affixed to it. Was not all Nature at work to keep the world a-going, and to better its life? And then he rebuked himself in George Herbert’s lines: —

“All things are busy; only I
Neither bring honey with the bees,
Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry
To water these.

“I am no link of Thy great chain,
But all my company is as a weed.
Lord! place me in Thy concert, give one strain
To my poor reed.”

Soon Bordeaux was reached; then, as the afternoon drew on, the Pyrenees were passed, and at midnight he alighted at Burgos, to rest a day or two before going on. An old-world place, where the railway was a gross anomaly, and the telegraph poles a violation of the fitness of things. At least two hundred years behind the times, the great offence to the eye being smart French-looking soldiers where one looked for mailed knights with their esquires. Here was a market-place with its traffic much as it had been conducted any day this five hundred years. True, by ferreting amongst the stalls you could find some nineteenth-century novelties in the shape of wax matches and paper collars; there were books, too, in secluded corners, “printed on scrofulous grey paper with blunt type,” which evidenced some demand for modern literature; but, these indications of our advanced civilization excepted, the rest of the dealing was in things which cannot have much changed their form or their use for many generations. A sleepy, quiet, leisurely place, with plenty of time to be wicked in, but also with much opportunity to be good. In such a place, indeed in the whole peninsula, there is every inducement to lead the devout life; there is so little else to do. One’s activities have small outlets, except towards the other world. Yet for a busy Londoner, a blasé Parisian, what a blessed sense of peace comes over the soul resting in such a becalmed water-way on one’s voyage!

But a terrible sense of loneliness possessed Elsworth. The day after his arrival here it was Sunday. The wind was bitterly cold. His Spanish was not quite Castilian in its perfection, though he could make himself understood; and when he had spent some hours in the cathedral, visited what a young fruit-seller called the Mercado de la Llendre, which is not quite literally rendered as Rag Fair, and wandered round and round the quaint old market-place half a dozen times, his questioning spirit disturbed him as to why he had ever left London, and how was a nineteenth-century life to be supported long under such conditions? St. Simeon Stylites, on the top of his pillar, must have had some such misgivings for the first few days at least, and St. Francis could not have found all at once the birds and the fishes supply the place of familiar friends, nor their sentiments, if they expressed any, a sufficient substitute for his human interests of former days. The dinner table did not mend matters. The company at the hotel consisted of some half a dozen priests, as many young officers of the army from the barracks opposite, and some of the towns-people, who evidently were quite at home in their surroundings and particularly provincial in their breeding. No one took the least notice of him, and his attempts at conversation, like sparks of damp wood, went out dismally. The truth was, the Castilians had paid for a good Sunday dinner, and the matter of making the most of it was of too serious importance to every one of them to permit of their being beguiled in their work by any such trivial considerations as the young Englishman’s conversation could offer. So everybody ate as became good hearty Burgolese, and poor Elsworth was left to his meditations.

He knew the only remedy for this depression was to get out of cities into the country. There is no such loneliness as that experienced in a crowd where one knows nobody; so he determined henceforth to live chiefly in villages, roadside inns, and places where he might hope to make friends with the less sophisticated of the people. Sending therefore, his luggage on to Madrid, he packed a small knapsack, took his stout walking-stick, and set off for a good spell of pedestrian work. He resolved to purchase a bicycle when he reached the capital. He was an ardent cyclist, but had not brought his machine with him, and now missed it sadly. He loved his steel roadster as men love a favourite horse, and felt shorn of his strength without it. His Spanish stood him in good stead, not only at the posadas, but with the people he met on the roads. Spain is so little known from the play-ground point of view, that he felt sure of the retirement he sought, and had been but a few days on the tramp ere he found his healthy life invite healthy thoughts; and as the London smoke got out of his lungs, a clearer spirit entered him in its place. The smoke of the great city had penetrated deeper even than his lungs: it had begun to pollute his mind. It was time he broke with it. Thank God, he was not out of tune for Nature altogether, and as he sat beside a mountain stream could lift up his heart and meditate, and say with old Isaac Walton: —

“Here we may think and pray, before death stop our breath.
Other joys are but toys, and to be lamented.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITY

For those that fly may fight again,
Which he can never do that’s slain;
Hence timely running’s no mean part
Of conduct in the martial art.

    – Butler.

The Divine origin of Christianity is manifested in nothing more powerfully than by the progress it rapidly made among the Latin races. Tho soft, voluptuous climates of Southern Europe would have bred, one would have thought, nations whose chief characteristics would have been gentleness and tenderness. But it is not so, and the cruelty that was deeply ingrained in the Roman nature lives on in Christian Italy and Spain, uninfluenced by some sixteen centuries of Christianity, so far as regards the treatment of the lower animals. To have softened towards their neighbours and dependents, the cruel patricians of Nero’s reign needed the greatest miracle of the Christian religion. The actual reception of the code of Christ by the men of old Rome is evidence enough that there was no mere human agency at work. We may estimate the magnitude of the task Christianity had to accomplish by marking the condition of the shores which its tide has failed to overflow. Up to the present it would seem, in Spain and Italy at least, the high-water mark of mercy stops short of the animals which serve us. “To them Christianity has no duties,” they say. The women and children of Italy do not think for a moment that they are not justified in torturing the trapped wolves and foxes the shepherds have taken, just as our sailors used to torment sharks. “What rights have such naughty beasts?” say they.

The long, stern contention of the men of the North against the rigour of the elements, or some other profound cause, has produced in the Teutonic races a tenderness of heart, and a sympathy with every phase of wrong, which have made the Anglo-Saxon race the pioneers of mercy throughout the whole world.

The progress of Christianity was assured when the men of the North were converted; and if they owe to warmer climates the message of the Friend of man, they have in their turn blessed the birth lands of the Gospel with the broader humanity which has help for everything that lives and suffers.

Elsworth was amazed to find how the bull-fight cultus had permeated and moulded every Spanish mind. That it was a pastime, he knew; that it was a religion, he did not imagine till he had lived in Spain. The very landscapes were cruel; the mountains and rocks had no softness, they were all angles, with stern, hard outlines that seemed reflected in the Spanish nature. Man, modified by his surroundings, often formed the subject of his meditations. Here, if anywhere, cruelty would be apotheosized! The railway journey to Madrid, and the landscape of the Escorial threw a light on many chapters of Spanish history which had often seemed hard to understand.

Having reached Madrid in due course he made some necessary purchases. First of all he bought a bicycle from Singer’s agents in the Puerta del Sol, also some good road maps and all the necessary tools and materials for repairing any accident that might happen to his machine. Then a good medicine chest and some well-selected medical appliances to enable him to be useful to any sick folk he might fall in with. A few books, dictionaries, grammars, and guides were added to his slender baggage and sent forward to Granada to the Hotel Washington Irving, where he determined to remain till he should decide his future course of life. He knew the cholera was raging at this city, and without rashness, yet with confidence in God and the wisdom of sanitary precautions which he should adopt, he decided to do what he could to help the dreadful misery that hung over the unfortunate city. His work at St. Bernard’s had familiarized him with the terrible disease on its last visitation of London, and he trusted to the measures which had been followed there to keep him from danger in Spain. At Madrid he wrote to his father, telling him the exact state of affairs, and assuring him that he had fled from temptation that could not be safely parreyed with, but was better conquered by flight.

A few months later he received a reply from the Major, who so far from being annoyed at his son’s conduct, praised him for it.

“You have done what the Lord Gautama Buddha felt compelled to do. When he left his royal home, and in the night passing through the dimly lighted pavilions where the sleeping Nātch girls lay, conceived an overpowering loathing for worldly pleasure, and was assailed in vain at the outset of his great renunciation by the voice of the tempter Māra urging him to cling to all the good things he was giving up, he set an example which I rejoice to know my son has followed. You are seeking the Nirvana. Do not think yourself singular in this step; one cannot be saved without a renunciation.”

Elsworth thought of a higher example and a nobler Prince, who left His throne to teach us the way of salvation; but was glad he had the approbation of his father. No one else except his lawyers, knew of his whereabouts; and he asked his father and agents not to give the curious inquirer any clue to his place of retreat.

Ever since as a boy he had read “Washington Irving” and Mr. Prescott’s “Conquest of Granada,” he had longed to see that celebrated city of which one Spanish proverb declares, “He is loved of God who lives in Granada,” and another, that “He who has not seen Granada has seen nothing.”

George Borrow’s books on the Spanish gipsies, their customs, and their curious language had fascinated him, and made him anxious some day to see these strange people for whom he had acquired a singular liking. The Spanish character has in it something strangely akin to the Puritan severity, honesty, and fibre of the English race, and no true Englishman can read the history of the conquests of Peru and Mexico without feeling his heart go forth towards those brave followers of Pizarro and Cortez, who seemed possessed of a character so much like our own in their invincible courage, daring, and hardihood in dealing with difficulties.

Elsworth had Puritan blood in him, inherited from his mother, more than one of whose ancestors had fought for England’s liberties under the great Protector. Good blood has the peculiarity of helping its possessor at a critical turn in life; and at this juncture in Elsworth’s history it served to stimulate him with something of the nerve force that enabled his forefathers to cast off the trammels of a licentious and drunken age, and go forth to a purer atmosphere for their souls’ salvation. He knew from many an old book treasured at home, the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, and what they had done for what the world called a mere idea. His favourite book, the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” came to his aid. Was he not, like Christian, setting forth from the City of Destruction? And so one bright autumn day he found himself in the famous city, the Queen of Cities, as Ibn-Batuta calls it.

The Arab writers used to say it was a fragment of heaven that had fallen to the earth. Elsworth had not gone forth into a waste, howling wilderness; he did not see there was any use in making himself wretched. He wanted, if possible, to do some good; and as he knew the language of the Gitanos, he thought if he could devote himself to their interests for a while in a missionary way, he would be the happier for being useful in his retirement. For he had great faith in the eternal freshness of the New Testament, and he concluded that its doctrines were as potent, as life-giving now as when they first shed their beams on a benighted world; he was determined that now religious liberty was permitted in Spain he would circulate the Caló New Testament amongst the gipsies, and do what he could to bring them to its teaching.

He took a couple of charmingly situated rooms in a venerable house on the banks of the Darro, looking down upon an old bridge which spanned the golden stream that comes down from the Sierra Nevada. The Alhambra Hill was close by, and the old city, rich with historic memories, in the plain below. He had little difficulty in ingratiating himself with the Gitanos. Knowing their language so well, they insisted that he must be of their race; and his dark complexion, fine eyes, and jet-black hair made it almost useless for him to deny that he was of gipsy stock. They argued that he must have their blood in his veins, even though he might not know it.