We Are Not Alone

A Novel

James Hilton

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781453240441
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Narrativa storica

New York Times Bestseller: Brilliant but naïve country doctor David Newcome courts tragedy when he invites a stranger into his home. In the English factory town of Calderbury, few figures are as respected as the "little doctor" David Newcome. His talents as a surgeon attract more renown than anything else associated with the tiny village. Kind to a fault, Dr. Newcome sees no problem with housing Leni, a nineteen-year-old dancer from Germany adrift in England—even over the objections of his strong-willed wife, Jessica. Soon Newcome's family is torn asunder as their country and the world outside are drawn into war. We Are Not Alone is a poignant portrait of one family's trials and tribulations on the eve of the First World War.

CHAPTER ONE

ONE COLD GUSTY NIGHT in December a boy rang the bell of the doctor’s house in Shawgate, and when Susan came to the door left word that there had been an accident to a dancer at the local theatre and would the doctor please come at once. Bestowing her usual skeptical scrutiny on such a messenger, Susan pressed for further details, but the boy could give none and ran off home, leaving her to waken David from the peacefulness of a last pipe in the surgery. He had had a busy day and was tired, but when she reported the message he nodded vaguely and began putting things in his bag.

“At the theatre, Susan? A dancer?”

“So the boy said. I don’t know why they should send for you, anyway — Dr. Cowell lives much nearer.”

“I’d better go.”

“It’s probably nothing much. Shall I light your bicycle lamp for you?”

“Oh, I think I’ll walk. It’s only over the hill past the Cathedral.”

“But it’s a rough night.”

“Do me good to get some fresh air. I can walk it in ten minutes.”

He put on his overcoat, wrapped a muffler round his neck, pulled the brim of his hat well down, and set out. He often walked if his destination were near the Cathedral, for the steepness of Shawgate made cycling hardly worth while. Besides, for a late evening call, it was a good way of waking up. Many times on similar occasions he had conquered the inertia of the body, moving in sheer automatism through the dark streets until physical effort or mental curiosity provoked a liveliness. And if anyone had said there was anything especially fine in such self-discipline, he would have answered that it was just a job, and that no one hated it sometimes more than he.

A rough night, indeed. There were few strollers in such weather, and the Cathedral, chiming the hour of ten, seemed to bowl the strokes along the corridors of the wind. It was one of those nights when, in imagination, the centuries slipped back and Calderbury was again a fortress of souls with a priestly garrison; every lighted window hinting at safety amidst peril, the warm, tranquil comfort of men who felt they were safe because they knew they were saved. Such an atmosphere had lingered from the age of Chaucer to the age of Dickens, and though modernity might seem to efface it in the daytime, there only needed a dark night for its return. It harbored, too, a feeling that earth and stones could hold some secret essence of all that had happened around and about them, so that after a thousand years a street became almost animate, leaning its walls a little forward to catch the sound of friendly footsteps. David felt that his own footsteps were friendly, both to past and to present; that he was a part of the continuous agony of existence that had clustered about this ancient hill since the first mason carved the first gargoyle. And even longer; for the whole span of centuries from cathedral to cinema was but a scratch upon the heritage of a million weather-beaten years.

So he mused (being slightly pagan and pantheist as well as Christian, and slightly agnostic about all of it) as he turned the angle whence Shawgate makes its steeper aim direct to the Cathedral towers. And because he was tired and a little breathless from climbing against the gale, he halted a moment by a street lamp; and again because there was a playbill of the local theatre in a shop window near by, he crossed the pavement to give it a second’s glance.

It advertised a show called Les Nuit [sic] de Paris, which it described as “A Riot of Mirth-Provoking Naughtiness, Direct from the Gay Capital, with a Galaxy of Continental Stars.”

The Theatre Royal in Calderbury dated from the fifties and had been modernized at various times to conform with fashions that afterwards made it seem more outmoded than ever; in structure it was the type that Crummies had played in, with horseshoe auditorium and a long-disused and very lofty “gods.” In its day it had ministered to the cream as well as to the milk of Calderbury society — even clerics had occupied its uncomfortable red plush seats to watch Mrs. Ebbsmith push her Bible into the fire, or to see Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn dive into a tank of real water and come up dripping to take a curtain call. Which, of course, was somewhat before the little doctor came to Calderbury, and a good deal before the first picture camera flickered in a converted mission hall off Briargate. By the time of Les Nuit [sic] de Paris the theatre had sunk to a level from which not even clerical visitation could or would effect a rescue. Stucco had peeled off the outside walls, the words “Theatre Royal” were spelt in empty sockets for which nobody could afford lights, moth and fleas inhabited the plush-hung boxes that nobody ever entered. The very boards of the stage sagged with dry rot, which was, indeed, the cause of mishap during the third act of one of those Parisian nights.

That third and last act was nearly over when David arrived. He found nobody on duty to admit or question him. Entering by the stage door, he made his way along a dimly lit corridor echoing with the sound of excessively nasal singing. Then he pushed through another door and found himself stumbling against a heap of bright-colored dresses. Here a stout man in shirt sleeves seemed to be manipulating scenery.

“I’ve been sent for —” began David.

“Just a minute,” answered the stout man, suddenly hauling till the veins of his forehead stood out; whereat the singing swelled into climactic frenzy, whistling and shouting answered it, and a moment later an avalanche of girls swept past the little doctor as he waited, bag in hand. They chattered together, some rough-voiced and crudely spoken, a few round-shouldered and flat-chested; one girl coughed and clung momentarily to an iron pillar; another stopped to scratch herself. It was a new atmosphere for him, but full of pathological landmarks, signals of flesh and blood which stood, so many of them, at danger. The girls shed their skirts to make another heap of clothes, and from this, as from some multi-petaled flower, there rose a mingled smell of dust, cheap perfume, old wood, and human bodies.

“I’m a doctor. Someone sent for me about an accident here.”

The stout man turned a casual eye. “Accident?” Then, into space: “Hey, Jim! Know anything about an accident?”

“To one of your dancers,” David added, recollecting.

A voice answered: “We ain’t got only one dancer. She slipped as she came off, if you call that an accident.”

The stout man jerked his hand. “Maybe it’s her. You’ll find her along there.”

“Thank you.”

David walked between cliffs of slowly swaying canvas till he came to a group of girls wiping grease paint from their faces. They took no notice of him and after a moment he asked: “Is there a girl here who dances?”

“Oh, you mean What’s-her-name? Try the door right at the end.”

He walked farther till a closed door stopped him; he tapped on the panel, but there was no answer; then he turned the handle and found the room empty. He went back to the girls.

“There’s nobody in.”

“No? Then she must have gone home.”

“But — well, I’m a doctor — I was sent for to see this girl — or to see someone, at any rate — about an accident.”

“An accident?”

“Hasn’t there been an accident? Didn’t she slip and hurt herself?”

“Don’t know, I’m sure. We weren’t on during her turn.”

Had they been less casual, had they been able to confirm or deny or explain anything, he would probably have concluded that since the girl had been well enough to go home she could not have been very badly hurt. And he would probably have gone home then himself, assuming his summons to have been a thing done hastily and afterwards regretted. But that air of casualness, so foreign to the routine of his own profession, stiffened his conscientiousness to the point of obstinacy; even if the whole thing were a hoax or a false alarm, he could not now be satisfied till he had definitely established it so. After some trouble he extracted the girl’s temporary address from the stage doorkeeper: Number 24, Harcourt Row.

He walked there in a drizzling mist; the wind had calmed suddenly, and the bare trees hung tired and still and heavy with raindrops. One might have noticed then that he wasn’t really little at all, merely that his well-proportioned figure marked a difference from the common identification of size and strength. There was something resolute in his stride along the pavements, and a look of quiet challenge in the way he turned the corner of the Row and glanced up at the dark facade.

At Number 24 an elderly woman answered his continued ringing; she had to unlock the door. He knew her by sight; she knew him in the same way; and only this prevented the voicing of her resentment at being dragged out of bed at such an hour. Even as it was, her manner was far from cordial. When David had stated his business she muttered truculently: “Well, so far as I know she’s in bed and asleep by now. She had her key. I never wait up. It’s bad enough to let to theatricals without having to keep their hours.”

“Is that her room immediately above the porch?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“There’s a light in the window.”

“And I suppose you want me to see if anything’s the matter?”

“Just find out if she sent for me, that’s all. You see, somebody sent for me.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve hoaxed a doctor,” she retorted, as she shuffled along in her slippers and began to climb the stairs. David remained in the dark hallway, trying to recall her name — ah yes, she was Mrs. Patterson; her husband had been Joe Patterson — worked at the brewery — diabetic — died of it — one of Cowell’s patients. A doctor remembers things that way. He could hear the creak of the joists as Mrs. Patterson walked over them, the sound of a door opening; he could smell stale cooking and stuffy rooms. He had waited in so many houses, had climbed so many stairs to so many bedrooms, that his nerves as well as his ears and eyes and nostrils had acquired a curious sensitivity to the atmosphere of an interior; and now, waiting in that small lodging house in Harcourt Row, awareness came to him of something strange and unusual. He had no time to wonder what it was, or even whether it had any existence outside his own mood; for Mrs. Patterson creaked her way down the stairs carrying a lighted candle.

“You’d better come up and see her. I can’t understand a word she says — she’s foreign. She’s hurt her arm, by the look of it.”

“All right.”

He followed upstairs, till the woman opened the door of a very small room, crowded with shabby furniture and lit by a single unshaded gas light. A bed occupied most of the space, and on this sat a girl. David saw her face first of all through a wall mirror that happened to be in line with it; stained with grease paint, it struck him disturbingly, so that he stared for a moment, hardly realizing that the eyes he met in the glass could really be seeing him also.

They were amber-brown, curiously matched with reddish-tinted hair; matched, too, in their pained, difficult eagerness, with the set of lips and mouth. David went to her. He saw at once that her left wrist, resting over her knee as she sat, hung limply. She did not speak, but pointed to it, and when he stooped and held it, feeling what was amiss, her lips parted and blood came rushing into the marks that her teeth had made.

“It is broken?” she said.

“I’m afraid so,” he answered simply, kneeling to open his bag on a chair. He noticed then that a piece of stocking stuck to her leg in a smear of blood and dirt; nothing much, but the kind of thing he was always careful about. After bandaging the wrist he set about to clean this cut and asked Mrs. Patterson for warm water.

“You’re going to have to rest for a while,” he said to the girl. She nodded, but he was not sure that she knew what he meant.

“You dance, don’t you?”

Again she nodded.

“Well, you’ll have to rest. You can’t dance with an arm in a sling, and that’s what you’ll have to have.” He spoke plainly, as he always did, but with compassion and increasing doubt as to whether she understood him. “You know some English?” he queried.

“Ein wenig … a little …”

He smiled more easily. “That’s about how much I speak your language, too.”

He was prepared then for the torrent of words that usually outpours if one confesses even a slight knowledge of a stranger’s tongue; but to his surprise she was silent.

He tried to make conversation but soon come to the end of his scantily recollected German. He had never been in Germany or spoken the language colloquially; and it was fully fifteen years ago that he had studied it for some very elementary examination. Since then he would lazily have accepted the statement that he “knew German,” but now, on such sudden demand, he found he could not remember equivalents for even the commonest words. And her own meagre English did nothing to help him out. But he did manage to ask why she hadn’t waited for him at the theatre, since she had sent for him there.

“I didn’t send for you,” she answered, in German. “It was the boy who sells chocolates. He sent for you. He said you were always so very kind.”

David was just as embarrassed as most men would be by such a remark.

She went on: “He called you ‘the little doctor’ — is that right? … ‘Der kleine doktor?’”

Which completed his embarrassment, for he was one of those people who can live a whole lifetime without seeing or hearing the most obvious thing about themselves. He had not really known that he was called “the little doctor” until that moment, and he did not quite know whether he liked it or not; and, anyhow, the disclosure left him shyly disconcerted. And beyond all that he was troubled, perhaps by the rescoring of ancient mind tracks that the translation effort had entailed. He kept smiling the more steadfastly because he had used up all his German, and into a silence, as he packed his bag to go, came a revelation of her own mute solitariness in suffering. This made him feel towards her as to all such sufferers — that nothing could ever ease the embrace of pain and its victim except a gentle blessing on that embrace; and such a blessing he gave, in secret, on her behalf.

“Good night,” he said, adding that he would call and see her again on Monday morning.

On the way back to his house it occurred to him that he did not even know her name. He stopped again at the shop window and glanced down at the playbill till he came to “Leni Arkadrevna, Whirlwind Danseuse from St. Petersburg.” Goodness, he thought; that must be the one!

On Monday, when he called, the girl had left. “She just went off yesterday morning, same as the theatricals always do of a Sunday.”

“But she had a broken wrist! She couldn’t be any use like that!”

“Well, maybe she had to go with the rest of ’em. Not that they seemed to have much to do with her, and you can’t hardly blame them, with her not speaking the language.”

“But weren’t there other foreigners in the company? Wasn’t it a French play?”

“Bless you, they was all English except her. And the show’s not really foreign — it’s just what they call it to make it sound better. She acted a Russian dancer, so I suppose that’s why they gave her the name.’

“It wasn’t her real name, then?”

“Shouldn’t think so. They never have real names.”

“Do you know where the company’s moved on to?”

“That I couldn’t say for sure, but I’ve an idea it might be Addington or Polesby or one of them places. They’d tell you at the theatre, I daresay.”

But David didn’t bother to ask at the theatre. His curiosity was soon exhausted, for the theatrical world had seemed so unfamiliar when he had entered it momentarily that he could now accept any strangeness in its behavior. He was not passionately interested in the way touring companies functioned. Nor did he often think about the Russian-German-French girl (or whatever she really was) during the weeks that followed. He supposed she must be getting on all right somewhere or other; but it wasn’t his business, and he had too much other business, to inquire. He didn’t even put her down in his book, because he had forgotten her stage name, and, anyhow, he wasn’t going to send in a bill. And this was not wholly generosity, but partly mere trouble saving; for he had no secretary, and the extraction of small sums from patients who left the town was rarely worth the time and effort it would involve.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Epilogue
• Copyright