Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

In putting before the public the last work by Mr. Grant Allen, the publishers desire to express their deep regret at the author’s unexpected and lamented death—a regret in which they are sure to be joined by the many thousand readers whom he did so much to entertain. A man of curiously varied and comprehensive knowledge, and with the most charming personality; a writer who, treating of a wide variety of subjects, touched nothing which he did not make distinctive, he filled a place which no man living can exactly occupy. The last chapter of this volume had been roughly sketched by Mr. Allen before his final illness, and his anxiety, when debarred from work, to see it finished, was relieved by the considerate kindness of his friend and neighbour, Dr. Conan Doyle, who, hearing of his trouble, talked it over with him, gathered his ideas, and finally wrote it out for him in the form in which it now appears—a beautiful and pathetic act of friendship which it is a pleasure to record.

CHAPTER I

THE EPISODE OF THE PATIENT WHO DISAPPOINTED HER DOCTOR

Hilda Wade’s gift was so unique, so extraordinary, that I must illustrate it, I think, before I attempt to describe it. But first let me say a word of explanation about the Master.

I have never met anyone who impressed me so much with a sense of GREATNESS as Professor Sebastian. And this was not due to his scientific eminence alone: the man’s strength and keenness struck me quite as forcibly as his vast attainments. When he first came to St. Nathaniel’s Hospital, an eager, fiery-eyed physiologist, well past the prime of life, and began to preach with all the electric force of his vivid personality that the one thing on earth worth a young man’s doing was to work in his laboratory, attend his lectures, study disease, and be a scientific doctor, dozens of us were infected by his contagious enthusiasm. He proclaimed the gospel of germs; and the germ of his own zeal flew abroad in the hospital: it ran through the wards as if it were typhoid fever. Within a few months, half the students were converted from lukewarm observers of medical routine into flaming apostles of the new methods.

The greatest authority in Europe on comparative anatomy, now that Huxley was taken from us, he had devoted his later days to the pursuit of medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall, thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning’s, he represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for life. His long white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, just curled in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping shoulders. His pale face was clean-shaven, save for a thin and wiry grizzled moustache, which cast into stronger relief the deep-set, hawk-like eyes and the acute, intense, intellectual features. In some respects, his countenance reminded me often of Dr. Martineau’s: in others it recalled the knife-like edge, unturnable, of his great predecessor, Professor Owen. Wherever he went, men turned to stare at him. In Paris, they took him for the head of the English Socialists; in Russia, they declared he was a Nihilist emissary. And they were not far wrong—in essence; for Sebastian’s stern, sharp face was above all things the face of a man absorbed and engrossed by one overpowering pursuit in life—the sacred thirst of knowledge, which had swallowed up his entire nature.

He WAS what he looked—the most single-minded person I have ever come across. And when I say single-minded, I mean just that, and no more. He had an End to attain—the advancement of science, and he went straight towards the End, looking neither to the right nor to the left for anyone. An American millionaire once remarked to him of some ingenious appliance he was describing: “Why, if you were to perfect that apparatus, Professor, and take out a patent for it, I reckon you’d make as much money as I have made.” Sebastian withered him with a glance. “I have no time to waste,” he replied, “on making money!”

So, when Hilda Wade told me, on the first day I met her, that she wished to become a nurse at Nathaniel’s, “to be near Sebastian,” I was not at all astonished. I took her at her word. Everybody who meant business in any branch of the medical art, however humble, desired to be close to our rare teacher—to drink in his large thought, to profit by his clear insight, his wide experience. The man of Nathaniel’s was revolutionising practice; and those who wished to feel themselves abreast of the modern movement were naturally anxious to cast in their lot with him. I did not wonder, therefore, that Hilda Wade, who herself possessed in so large a measure the deepest feminine gift—intuition—should seek a place under the famous professor who represented the other side of the same endowment in its masculine embodiment—instinct of diagnosis.

Hilda Wade herself I will not formally introduce to you: you will learn to know her as I proceed with my story.

I was Sebastian’s assistant, and my recommendation soon procured Hilda Wade the post she so strangely coveted. Before she had been long at Nathaniel’s, however, it began to dawn upon me that her reasons for desiring to attend upon our revered Master were not wholly and solely scientific. Sebastian, it is true, recognised her value as a nurse from the first; he not only allowed that she was a good assistant, but he also admitted that her subtle knowledge of temperament sometimes enabled her closely to approach his own reasoned scientific analysis of a case and its probable development. “Most women,” he said to me once, “are quick at reading THE PASSING EMOTION. They can judge with astounding correctness from a shadow on one’s face, a catch in one’s breath, a movement of one’s hands, how their words or deeds are affecting us. We cannot conceal our feelings from them. But underlying character they do not judge so well as fleeting expression. Not what Mrs. Jones IS in herself, but what Mrs. Jones is now thinking and feeling—there lies their great success as psychologists. Most men, on the contrary, guide their life by definite FACTS—by signs, by symptoms, by observed data. Medicine itself is built upon a collection of such reasoned facts. But this woman, Nurse Wade, to a certain extent, stands intermediate mentally between the two sexes. She recognises TEMPERAMENT—the fixed form of character, and what it is likely to do—in a degree which I have never seen equalled elsewhere. To that extent, and within proper limits of supervision, I acknowledge her faculty as a valuable adjunct to a scientific practitioner.”

Still, though Sebastian started with a predisposition in favour of Hilda Wade—a pretty girl appeals to most of us—I could see from the beginning that Hilda Wade was by no means enthusiastic for Sebastian, like the rest of the hospital:

“He is extraordinarily able,” she would say, when I gushed to her about our Master; but that was the most I could ever extort from her in the way of praise. Though she admitted intellectually Sebastian’s gigantic mind, she would never commit herself to anything that sounded like personal admiration. To call him “the prince of physiologists” did not satisfy me on that head. I wanted her to exclaim, “I adore him! I worship him! He is glorious, wonderful!”

I was also aware from an early date that, in an unobtrusive way, Hilda Wade was watching Sebastian, watching him quietly, with those wistful, earnest eyes, as a cat watches a mouse-hole; watching him with mute inquiry, as if she expected each moment to see him do something different from what the rest of us expected of him. Slowly I gathered that Hilda Wade, in the most literal sense, had come to Nathaniel’s, as she herself expressed it, “to be near Sebastian.”

Gentle and lovable as she was in every other aspect, towards Sebastian she seemed like a lynx-eyed detective. She had some object in view, I thought, almost as abstract as his own—some object to which, as I judged, she was devoting her life quite as single-mindedly as Sebastian himself had devoted his to the advancement of science.

“Why did she become a nurse at all?” I asked once of her friend, Mrs. Mallet. “She has plenty of money, and seems well enough off to live without working.”

“Oh, dear, yes,” Mrs. Mallet answered. “She is independent, quite; has a tidy little income of her own—six or seven hundred a year—and she could choose her own society. But she went in for this mission fad early; she didn’t intend to marry, she said; so she would like to have some work to do in life. Girls suffer like that, nowadays. In her case, the malady took the form of nursing.”

“As a rule,” I ventured to interpose, “when a pretty girl says she doesn’t intend to marry, her remark is premature. It only means—”

“Oh, yes, I know. Every girl says it; ‘tis a stock property in the popular masque of Maiden Modesty. But with Hilda it is different. And the difference is—that Hilda means it!”

“You are right,” I answered. “I believe she means it. Yet I know one man at least—” for I admired her immensely.

Mrs. Mallet shook her head and smiled. “It is no use, Dr. Cumberledge,” she answered. “Hilda will never marry. Never, that is to say, till she has attained some mysterious object she seems to have in view, about which she never speaks to anyone—not even to me. But I have somehow guessed it!”

“And it is?”

“Oh, I have not guessed what it IS: I am no Oedipus. I have merely guessed that it exists. But whatever it may be, Hilda’s life is bounded by it. She became a nurse to carry it out, I feel confident. From the very beginning, I gather, a part of her scheme was to go to St. Nathaniel’s. She was always bothering us to give her introductions to Dr. Sebastian; and when she met you at my brother Hugo’s, it was a preconcerted arrangement; she asked to sit next you, and meant to induce you to use your influence on her behalf with the Professor. She was dying to get there.”

“It is very odd,” I mused. “But there!—women are inexplicable!”

“And Hilda is in that matter the very quintessence of woman. Even I, who have known her for years, don’t pretend to understand her.”

A few months later, Sebastian began his great researches on his new anaesthetic. It was a wonderful set of researches. It promised so well. All Nat’s (as we familiarly and affectionately styled St. Nathaniel’s) was in a fever of excitement over the drug for a twelvemonth.

The Professor obtained his first hint of the new body by a mere accident. His friend, the Deputy Prosector of the Zoological Society, had mixed a draught for a sick raccoon at the Gardens, and, by some mistake in a bottle, had mixed it wrongly. (I purposely refrain from mentioning the ingredients, as they are drugs which can be easily obtained in isolation at any chemist’s, though when compounded they form one of the most dangerous and difficult to detect of organic poisons. I do not desire to play into the hands of would-be criminals.) The compound on which the Deputy Prosector had thus accidentally lighted sent the raccoon to sleep in the most extraordinary manner. Indeed, the raccoon slept for thirty-six hours on end, all attempts to awake him, by pulling his tail or tweaking his hair being quite unavailing. This was a novelty in narcotics; so Sebastian was asked to come and look at the slumbering brute. He suggested the attempt to perform an operation on the somnolent raccoon by removing, under the influence of the drug, an internal growth, which was considered the probable cause of his illness. A surgeon was called in, the growth was found and removed, and the raccoon, to everybody’s surprise, continued to slumber peacefully on his straw for five hours afterwards. At the end of that time he awoke, and stretched himself as if nothing had happened; and though he was, of course, very weak from loss of blood, he immediately displayed a most royal hunger. He ate up all the maize that was offered him for breakfast, and proceeded to manifest a desire for more by most unequivocal symptoms.

Sebastian was overjoyed. He now felt sure he had discovered a drug which would supersede chloroform—a drug more lasting in its immediate effects, and yet far less harmful in its ultimate results on the balance of the system. A name being wanted for it, he christened it “lethodyne.” It was the best pain-luller yet invented.

For the next few weeks, at Nat’s, we heard of nothing but lethodyne. Patients recovered and patients died; but their deaths or recoveries were as dross to lethodyne, an anaesthetic that might revolutionise surgery, and even medicine! A royal road through disease, with no trouble to the doctor and no pain to the patient! Lethodyne held the field. We were all of us, for the moment, intoxicated with lethodyne.

Sebastian’s observations on the new agent occupied several months. He had begun with the raccoon; he went on, of course, with those poor scapegoats of physiology, domestic rabbits. Not that in this particular case any painful experiments were in contemplation. The Professor tried the drug on a dozen or more quite healthy young animals—with the strange result that they dozed off quietly, and never woke up again. This nonplussed Sebastian. He experimented once more on another raccoon, with a smaller dose; the raccoon fell asleep, and slept like a top for fifteen hours, at the end of which time he woke up as if nothing out of the common had happened. Sebastian fell back upon rabbits again, with smaller and smaller doses. It was no good; the rabbits all died with great unanimity, until the dose was so diminished that it did not send them off to sleep at all. There was no middle course, apparently, to the rabbit kind, lethodyne was either fatal or else inoperative. So it proved to sheep. The new drug killed, or did nothing.

I will not trouble you with all the details of Sebastian’s further researches; the curious will find them discussed at length in Volume 237 of the Philosophical Transactions. (See also Comptes Rendus de l’Academie de Medecine: tome 49, pp. 72 and sequel.) I will restrict myself here to that part of the inquiry which immediately refers to Hilda Wade’s history.

“If I were you,” she said to the Professor one morning, when he was most astonished at his contradictory results, “I would test it on a hawk. If I dare venture on a suggestion, I believe you will find that hawks recover.”

“The deuce they do!” Sebastian cried. However, he had such confidence in Nurse Wade’s judgment that he bought a couple of hawks and tried the treatment on them. Both birds took considerable doses, and, after a period of insensibility extending to several hours, woke up in the end quite bright and lively.

“I see your principle,” the Professor broke out. “It depends upon diet. Carnivores and birds of prey can take lethodyne with impunity; herbivores and fruit-eaters cannot recover, and die of it. Man, therefore, being partly carnivorous, will doubtless be able more or less to stand it.”

Hilda Wade smiled her sphinx-like smile. “Not quite that, I fancy,” she answered. “It will kill cats, I feel sure; at least, most domesticated ones. But it will NOT kill weasels. Yet both are carnivores.”

“That young woman knows too much!” Sebastian muttered to me, looking after her as she glided noiselessly with her gentle tread down the long white corridor. “We shall have to suppress her, Cumberledge.... But I’ll wager my life she’s right, for all that. I wonder, now, how the dickens she guessed it!”

“Intuition,” I answered.

He pouted his under lip above the upper one, with a dubious acquiescence. “Inference, I call it,” he retorted. “All woman’s so-called intuition is, in fact, just rapid and half-unconscious inference.”

He was so full of the subject, however, and so utterly carried away by his scientific ardour, that I regret to say he gave a strong dose of lethodyne at once to each of the matron’s petted and pampered Persian cats, which lounged about her room and were the delight of the convalescents. They were two peculiarly lazy sultanas of cats—mere jewels of the harem—Oriental beauties that loved to bask in the sun or curl themselves up on the rug before the fire and dawdle away their lives in congenial idleness. Strange to say, Hilda’s prophecy came true. Zuleika settled herself down comfortably in the Professor’s easy chair and fell into a sound sleep from which there was no awaking; while Roxana met fate on the tiger-skin she loved, coiled up in a circle, and passed from this life of dreams, without knowing it, into one where dreaming is not. Sebastian noted the facts with a quiet gleam of satisfaction in his watchful eye, and explained afterwards, with curt glibness to the angry matron, that her favourites had been “canonised in the roll of science, as painless martyrs to the advancement of physiology.”

The weasels, on the other hand, with an equal dose, woke up after six hours as lively as crickets. It was clear that carnivorous tastes were not the whole solution, for Roxana was famed as a notable mouser.

“Your principle?” Sebastian asked our sibyl, in his brief, quick way.

Hilda’s cheek wore a glow of pardonable triumph. The great teacher had deigned to ask her assistance. “I judged by the analogy of Indian hemp,” she answered. “This is clearly a similar, but much stronger, narcotic. Now, whenever I have given Indian hemp by your direction to people of sluggish, or even of merely bustling temperament, I have noticed that small doses produce serious effects, and that the after-results are most undesirable. But when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous, overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk with excitement—drive them into homicidal mania.”

Sebastian nodded his head. He needed no more explanation. “You have hit it,” he said. “I see it at a glance. The old antithesis! All men and all animals fall, roughly speaking, into two great divisions of type: the impassioned and the unimpassioned; the vivid and the phlegmatic. I catch your drift now. Lethodyne is poison to phlegmatic patients, who have not active power enough to wake up from it unhurt; it is relatively harmless to the vivid and impassioned, who can be put asleep by it, indeed, for a few hours more or less, but are alive enough to live on through the coma and reassert their vitality after it.”

I recognised as he spoke that this explanation was correct. The dull rabbits, the sleepy Persian cats, and the silly sheep had died outright of lethodyne; the cunning, inquisitive raccoon, the quick hawk, and the active, intense-natured weasels, all most eager, wary, and alert animals, full of keenness and passion, had recovered quickly.

“Dare we try it on a human subject?” I asked, tentatively.

Hilda Wade answered at once, with that unerring rapidity of hers: “Yes, certainly; on a few—the right persons. I, for one, am not afraid to try it.”

“You?” I cried, feeling suddenly aware how much I thought of her. “Oh, not YOU, please, Nurse Wade. Some other life, less valuable!”

Sebastian stared at me coldly. “Nurse Wade volunteers,” he said. “It is in the cause of science. Who dares dissuade her? That tooth of yours? Ah, yes. Quite sufficient excuse. You wanted it out, Nurse Wade. Wells-Dinton shall operate.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Hilda Wade sat down in an easy chair and took a measured dose of the new anaesthetic, proportioned to the average difference in weight between raccoons and humanity. My face displayed my anxiety, I suppose, for she turned to me, smiling with quiet confidence. “I know my own constitution,” she said, with a reassuring glance that went straight to my heart. “I do not in the least fear.”

As for Sebastian, he administered the drug to her as unconcernedly as if she were a rabbit. Sebastian’s scientific coolness and calmness have long been the admiration of younger practitioners.

Wells-Dinton gave one wrench. The tooth came out as though the patient were a block of marble. There was not a cry or a movement, such as one notes when nitrous oxide is administered. Hilda Wade was to all appearance a mass of lifeless flesh. We stood round and watched. I was trembling with terror. Even on Sebastian’s pale face, usually so unmoved, save by the watchful eagerness of scientific curiosity, I saw signs of anxiety.

After four hours of profound slumber—breath hovering, as it seemed, between life and death—she began to come to again. In half an hour more she was wide awake; she opened her eyes and asked for a glass of hock, with beef essence or oysters.

That evening, by six o’clock, she was quite well and able to go about her duties as usual.

“Sebastian is a wonderful man,” I said to her, as I entered her ward on my rounds at night. “His coolness astonishes me. Do you know, he watched you all the time you were lying asleep there as if nothing were the matter.”

“Coolness?” she inquired, in a quiet voice. “Or cruelty?”

“Cruelty?” I echoed, aghast. “Sebastian cruel! Oh, Nurse Wade, what an idea! Why, he has spent his whole life in striving against all odds to alleviate pain. He is the apostle of philanthropy!”

“Of philanthropy, or of science? To alleviate pain, or to learn the whole truth about the human body?”

“Come, come, now,” I cried. “You analyse too far. I will not let even YOU put me out of conceit with Sebastian.” (Her face flushed at that “even you”; I almost fancied she began to like me.) “He is the enthusiasm of my life; just consider how much he has done for humanity!”

She looked me through searchingly. “I will not destroy your illusion,” she answered, after a pause. “It is a noble and generous one. But is it not largely based on an ascetic face, long white hair, and a moustache that hides the cruel corners of the mouth? For the corners ARE cruel. Some day, I will show you them. Cut off the long hair, shave the grizzled moustache—and what then will remain?” She drew a profile hastily. “Just that,” and she showed it me. ‘Twas a face like Robespierre’s, grown harder and older and lined with observation. I recognised that it was in fact the essence of Sebastian.

Next day, as it turned out, the Professor himself insisted upon testing lethodyne in his own person. All Nat’s strove to dissuade him. “Your life is so precious, sir—the advancement of science!” But the Professor was adamantine.

“Science can only be advanced if men of science will take their lives in their hands,” he answered, sternly. “Besides, Nurse Wade has tried. Am I to lag behind a woman in my devotion to the cause of physiological knowledge?”

“Let him try,” Hilda Wade murmured to me. “He is quite right. It will not hurt him. I have told him already he has just the proper temperament to stand the drug. Such people are rare: HE is one of them.”

We administered the dose, trembling. Sebastian took it like a man, and dropped off instantly, for lethodyne is at least as instantaneous in its operation as nitrous oxide.

He lay long asleep. Hilda and I watched him.

After he had lain for some minutes senseless, like a log, on the couch where we had placed him, Hilda stooped over him quietly and lifted up the ends of the grizzled moustache. Then she pointed one accusing finger at his lips. “I told you so,” she murmured, with a note of demonstration.

“There is certainly something rather stern, or even ruthless, about the set of the face and the firm ending of the lips,” I admitted, reluctantly.

“That is why God gave men moustaches,” she mused, in a low voice; “to hide the cruel corners of their mouths.”

“Not ALWAYS cruel,” I cried.

“Sometimes cruel, sometimes cunning, sometimes sensuous; but nine times out of ten best masked by moustaches.”

“You have a bad opinion of our sex!” I exclaimed.

“Providence knew best,” she answered. “IT gave you moustaches. That was in order that we women might be spared from always seeing you as you are. Besides, I said ‘Nine times out of ten.’ There are exceptions—SUCH exceptions!”