Dr. Hurd sitting on the omnibus with amusement carving deep lines on his brick-red face and splintering out of his eyes into the hot afternoon glare; the neat new bowler with the red hair coming down underneath it, the well-cut Montreal clothes on his tough neat figure; immovable, there for the afternoon. Forced to go on and on isolated with the brick-red grin and the splintering green eyes through the afternoon heat, in the midst of a glare of omnibus people, on their way to a brass band in the Albert Hall, thinking they were going to a concert. He did not know what made a concert. Sitting with the remains of his grin, waiting for the things he had been taught to admire, unable to find anything without his mother and sisters; missing Canadian ladies with opinions about everything; waiting all the time to be managed in the Canadian women’s way. … He must have told the others about it afterwards, his face crinkling at them and they listening and agreeing.
It had begun the moment after he had suggested the concert. I’ll get a new top hat before then. The awful demand for a jest. His way of waiting as if one were some queer being he was waiting to see say or do something anyone could understand was the same as the English way only more open. But English people like that did not care for music and did not have books read to them. Perhaps his parents belonged to the other sort of English and he had the stamp of it, promising seriousness and a love of beautiful things, and forced by life into the jesting way of worldly people who seemed to have no sacred patches at all. Quick words, bathed in laughter heaped up into a questioning of what the matter was. Men, demanding jests and amusement; women succeeding only by jesting satirically about everything.
Von Heber’s a man who’ll carve his way. … My. He’s great. Carve his way; one of those phrases that satisfy and worry you; short, and leaving out nearly everything; Dr. von Heber going through life with a chisel, intent on carving; everybody envying him; the von Heber not seen or realised; his way is carved, he is his way … going ahead further and further away as one listened. His poverty and drudgery behind him, at Winnipeg, amongst the ice. Hoisting himself out of it, making himself into a doctor; a graduate of “McGill” … standing out among the graduates with even the very manner of success more marked in him than in them with their money and ease; sailing to England steady-minded in the awful risk of borrowed money … it’s wrong, insulting to him to think of it while he is still in the midst of the effort … a sort of treachery to know the details at all … the impossibility of not dwelling on them. But thinking disperses his general effect. In the strength and sunshine of him there is power. The things he has done are the power in him; no need to know the gossipy details; that was why the facts sounded so familiar; reproachful, as Dr. Hurd brought them out. …
I knew all about him when I met his sunshine. I ought to have rushed away garlanded with hawthorn, with some woman, and waited till he came again. Dr. Hurd looks like an old woman; an old gossip. Old men are worse gossips than old women. They can’t keep their hands off. They make phrases. Dr. Hurd is a dead, dead old woman. Handling things like an old man. It was so natural to listen. “Natural” things get you lost and astray … kiss-in-the-ring “just a little harmless nonsense … there’s no harm in a little gay nonsense chickie.” There’s no such thing as harmless nonsense: Dissipation makes you forget everything. Secret sacred places. George and John faithful and steady can’t make those. They smile personally and the room or the landscape is immediately silly and tame. …
“I never met a chap who could make so much of what he knows … pick up … and bring them out better than the chap could himself.” The four figures sitting in the little room round the lamp. Dr. Hurd talking his gynæcology simply; a relief, a clear clean place in the world of women’s doctors. … Dr. Winchester talking for Dr. von Heber, his brown beard and his frock-coat just for the time he was talking before Dr. von Heber had grasped it all, looking like a part of the professional world. Dr. Wayneflete’s white criminal face his little white mouth controlledly mouthing … Wayneflete’s brilliant; but he’s not got von Heber’s strength nor his manner. He’s quiet though that chap … he’d do well over here … that spreads your thoughts about, painfully and wholesomely. Dr. Hurd spreads his thoughts about quite simply. …
The moment was so surprising that I forgot it. I always forget the things that surprise me. She was hating me and hating everything. I must have told her I was going away. When I said you can have Bunnikin back she suddenly grew older than I. “Oh Bunnikin.” Their beloved Bunnikin, as smartly dressed as Mrs. Corrie, in the smart country house way and knowing how to gush and behave. … “Bunnikin’s too simple.” Sybil in her blue cotton overall in the amber light in the Louis Quinze drawing-room, one with me, wanting me because I was not simple. … I thought she hated me all the time because I was not worldly. I should not have known I was not simple
