I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia1 for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous2 streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof3 among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
I told Tiaré the story of a man I had known at St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was a Jew named Abraham, a blond, rather stout4 young man, shy and very unassuming; but he had remarkable5 gifts. He entered the hospital with a scholarship, and during the five years of the curriculum gained every prize that was open to him. He was made house-physician and house-surgeon. His brilliance6 was allowed by all. Finally he was elected to a position on the staff, and his career was assured. So far as human things can be predicted, it was certain that he would rise to the greatest heights of his profession. Honours and wealth awaited him. Before he entered upon his new duties he wished to take a holiday, and, having no private means, he went as surgeon on a tramp steamer to the Levant. It did not generally carry a doctor, but one of the senior surgeons at the hospital knew a director of the line, and Abraham was taken as a favour.
In a few weeks the authorities received his resignation of the coveted7 position on the staff. It created profound astonishment8, and wild rumours9 were current. Whenever a man does anything unexpected, his fellows ascribe it to the most discreditable motives10. But there was a man ready to step into Abraham’s shoes, and Abraham was forgotten. Nothing more was heard of him. He vanished.
It was perhaps ten years later that one morning on board ship, about to land at Alexandria, I was bidden to line up with the other passengers for the doctor’s examination. The doctor was a stout man in shabby clothes, and when he took off his hat I noticed that he was very bald. I had an idea that I had seen him before. Suddenly I remembered.
“Abraham,” I said.
He turned to me with a puzzled look, and then, recognizing me, seized my hand. After expressions of surprise on either side, hearing that I meant to spend the night in Alexandria, he asked me to dine with him at the English Club. When we met again I declared my astonishment at finding him there. It was a very modest position that he occupied, and there was about him an air of straitened circumstance. Then he told me his story. When he set out on his holiday in the Mediterranean11 he had every intention of returning to London and his appointment at St. Thomas’s. One morning the tramp docked at Alexandria, and from the deck he looked at the city, white in the sunlight, and the crowd on the wharf12; he saw the natives in their shabby gabardines, the blacks from the Soudan, the noisy throng13 of Greeks and Italians, the grave Turks in tarbooshes, the sunshine and the blue sky; and something happened to him. He could not describe it. It was like a thunder-clap, he said, and then, dissatisfied with this, he said it was like a revelation. Something seemed to twist his heart, and suddenly he felt an exultation14, a sense of wonderful freedom. He felt himself at home, and he made up his mind there and then, in a minute, that he would live the rest of his life in Alexandria. He had no great difficulty in leaving the ship, and in twenty-four hours, with all his belongings15, he was on shore.
“The Captain must have thought you as mad as a hatter,” I smiled.
“I didn’t care what anybody thought. It wasn’t I that acted, but something stronger within me. I thought I would go to a little Greek hotel, while I looked about, and I felt I knew where to find one. And do you know, I walked straight there, and when I saw it, I recognised it at once.”
“Had you been to Alexandria before?”
“No; I’d never been out of England in my life.”
Presently he entered the Government service, and there he had been ever since.
“Have you never regretted it?”
“Never, not for a minute. I earn just enough to live upon, and I’m satisfied. I ask nothing more than to remain as I am till I die. I’ve had a wonderful life.”
I left Alexandria next day, and I forgot about Abraham till a little while ago, when I was dining with another old friend in the profession, Alec Carmichael, who was in England on short leave. I ran across him in the street and congratulated him on the knighthood with which his eminent17 services during the war had been rewarded. We arranged to spend an evening together for old time’s sake, and when I agreed to dine with him, he proposed that he should ask nobody else, so that we could chat without interruption. He had a beautiful old house in Queen Anne Street, and being a man of taste he had furnished it admirably. On the walls of the dining-room I saw a charming Bellotto, and there was a pair of Zoffanys that I envied. When his wife, a tall, lovely creature in cloth of gold, had left us, I remarked laughingly on the change in his present circumstances from those when we had both been medical students. We had looked upon it then as an extravagance to dine in a shabby Italian restaurant in the Westminster Bridge Road. Now Alec Carmichael was on the staff of half a dozen hospitals. I should think he earned ten thousand a year, and his knighthood was but the first of the honours which must inevitably18 fall to his lot.
“I’ve done pretty well,” he said, “but the strange thing is that I owe it all to one piece of luck.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, do you remember Abraham? He was the man who had the future. When we were students he beat me all along the line. He got the prizes and the scholarships that I went in for. I always played second fiddle19 to him. If he’d kept on he’d be in the position I’m in now. That man had a genius for surgery. No one had a look in with him. When he was appointed Registrar20 at Thomas’s I hadn’t a chance of getting on the staff. I should have had to become a G.P., and you know what likelihood there is for a G.P. ever to get out of the common rut. But Abraham fell out, and I got the job. That gave me my opportunity.”
“I dare say that’s true.”
“It was just luck. I suppose there was some kink in Abraham. Poor devil, he’s gone to the dogs altogether. He’s got some twopenny-halfpenny job in the medical at Alexandria—sanitary officer or something like that. I’m told he lives with an ugly old Greek woman and has half a dozen scrofulous kids. The fact is, I suppose, that it’s not enough to have brains. The thing that counts is character. Abraham hadn’t got character.”
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation21, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. But I said nothing, and Alec Carmichael proceeded reflectively:
“Of course it would be hypocritical for me to pretend that I regret what Abraham did. After all, I’ve scored by it.” He puffed22 luxuriously23 at the long Corona24 he was smoking. “But if I weren’t personally concerned I should be sorry at the waste. It seems a rotten thing that a man should make such a hash of life.”
I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight16?
1 nostalgia [nɒˈstældʒə] 第9级 | |
n.怀乡病,留恋过去,怀旧 | |
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2 populous [ˈpɒpjələs] 第9级 | |
adj.人口稠密的,人口众多的 | |
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3 aloof [əˈlu:f] 第9级 | |
adj.远离的;冷淡的,漠不关心的 | |
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4 stout [staʊt] 第8级 | |
adj.强壮的,结实的,勇猛的,矮胖的 | |
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5 remarkable [rɪˈmɑ:kəbl] 第7级 | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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6 brilliance ['brɪlɪəns] 第8级 | |
n.光辉,辉煌,壮丽,(卓越的)才华,才智 | |
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7 coveted [ˈkʌvɪtid] 第9级 | |
adj.令人垂涎的;垂涎的,梦寐以求的v.贪求,觊觎(covet的过去分词);垂涎;贪图 | |
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8 astonishment [əˈstɒnɪʃmənt] 第8级 | |
n.惊奇,惊异 | |
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9 rumours [ˈru:məz] 第7级 | |
n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 );风闻;谣言;谣传 | |
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10 motives [ˈməutivz] 第7级 | |
n.动机,目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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11 Mediterranean [ˌmedɪtəˈreɪniən] 第7级 | |
adj.地中海的;地中海沿岸的 | |
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12 wharf [wɔ:f] 第9级 | |
n.码头,停泊处 | |
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13 throng [θrɒŋ] 第8级 | |
n.人群,群众;v.拥挤,群集 | |
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14 exultation [egzʌl'teiʃən] 第10级 | |
n.狂喜,得意 | |
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15 belongings [bɪˈlɒŋɪŋz] 第8级 | |
n.私人物品,私人财物 | |
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16 knight [naɪt] 第7级 | |
n.骑士,武士;爵士 | |
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17 eminent [ˈemɪnənt] 第7级 | |
adj.显赫的,杰出的,有名的,优良的 | |
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18 inevitably [ɪnˈevɪtəbli] 第7级 | |
adv.不可避免地;必然发生地 | |
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19 fiddle [ˈfɪdl] 第9级 | |
n.小提琴;vi.拉提琴;不停拨弄,乱动 | |
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20 registrar [ˌredʒɪˈstrɑ:(r)] 第9级 | |
n.记录员,登记员;(大学的)注册主任 | |
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21 meditation [ˌmedɪˈteɪʃn] 第8级 | |
n.熟虑,(尤指宗教的)默想,沉思,(pl.)冥想录 | |
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22 puffed [pʌft] 第7级 | |
adj.疏松的v.使喷出( puff的过去式和过去分词 );喷着汽(或烟)移动;吹嘘;吹捧 | |
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23 luxuriously [lʌɡ'ʒʊərɪəslɪ] 第7级 | |
adv.奢侈地,豪华地 | |
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