Rose and Rose

Fifty years ago, when I was a young medical student, I was in the habit of spending as manyweek-ends as possible at home with my father, to whose practice I was one day to succeed. On a certain Saturday the only other occupants of the railway compartment were an artistand his wife. I knew him to be an artist from certain scraps of his conversation that Ioverheard, but I should have guessed it also on the evidence of his hands and dress. I don'tmean that he wore a black velvet tam-o'-shanter and trousers tight at the ankles, as inplays; but his hands were eloquent, and there was a general careless ease about his tweedsthat suggested the antipodes of any commercial or anxious calling. After a while he turned to me and asked if I knew the town of Lowcester. I said that I had lived in the neighbourhood-at Bullingham, five miles away-all my life."We are going to spend a few days at the Crown at Lowcester," he said, "looking about totry and find a house.""There's a very good house at Bullingham," I said: "just empty. Jolly garden too. As amatter of fact it adjoins ours. My father's the doctor.""Next door to the doctor," said the lady, speaking now for the first time. "That would be agreat convenience."One result of this chance meeting was that they took the house and we became friends;another was the general shaping of my life; and a third is this narrative, the fruit of an oldman's egoism and leisure. I don't put my own case as an example to the medical profession, but you can't deny thereis a kind of fitness in it: it is surely more proper than not that the doctor who presides atthe birth of a child should continue to take an interest in that child throughout itslife. Being born is, after all, something of an event, and he who assists in that adventure andhelps to introduce a new soul (not to mention a new body) to this already overcrowded andover-complicated planet of ours, ought to be counted as something a little more importantthan a jobbing gardener, say, or any other useful ally that the householder calls in. For nomatter how mechanical his services, he is also an instrument of destiny.