Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Across a nearby meadow now trudged Alphonse Chowser. The meadow was quite crowded at the moment, having been turned into a rugby football field by a number of the upper form Chowser School boys. There were moans from some, as the headmaster’s sudden distracting presence upon their “pitch” led to a muddled, collapsing scrum; but there were cheers, as well, for the boys’ beloved leader. “Carry on!” shouted Chowser to the pile of players, who were now all heads and limbs and youthful guffaws.

Reaching Maggy and Muntle, Chowser addressed the latter: “Has our very own Bow Street Runner solved the mystery of the captured cabbages?”

“I have,” laughed Muntle. “And the solution is as follows: that there are no cabbage sprouts to be restored to their rightful owner, but there is a cook who in filing a patently false report has deterred a busy sheriff most egregiously from his appointed rounds.”

“Even the busiest of sheriffs is entitled to the occasional holiday, Muntle, and now that you are here, you will not be permitted to return to your wonted offices until you have had a bit of leisure and a happy helping or two of Maggy’s batter pudding with saveloy and pickled kidneys.”

“And that is only the first course!” exclaimed Maggy with a lick of the lips, for Maggy loved her cooking just as much as did any of its other myriad partakers.

As the three crossed the improvised rugby field, inadvertently dismantling in their passage a fine play with significant advance, and thus engendering a polyphonic chorus of both groans and whoops (distinguished by the degree of allegiance to the player carrying the ball at the time), Chowser threw an arm round Muntle’s neck. “If you ever decide to retire your badge and enter the field of pedagogy and boy-herding, I should very much like you to come and work for me. I know that Maggy would, too.”

“And what if the opposite occurs?” asked Muntle. “That I should take Maggy away from you to join me in Milltown as my…” Then with a whisper into that man’s ear, so that Maggy should not hear, “… bride ?”

“Well, I should be most unhappy to lose her. But I should nonetheless understand the very good reason why.”

Maggy blushed, knowing exactly the gist of that which was said, and how very close her beloved was edging toward a full marriage proposal.

completed my draft of the medical review board’s annual report and delivered the pages next morning to the board’s chairman, a portly, wheezing, slack-gaited man by the name of Sir Seth Dabber, who quickly dismissed the latter section of my work as superfluous. “I know what the doctors in the Dell have been doing as of late, Mr. Trimmers, and whose work has been meritorious and whose has fallen short of the mark. I’ve commended the former and petitioned my colleagues on the Board for dismissal of the latter, who number only two, and who should, in my opinion, be removed to some other line in which they will not misdiagnose and make a dangerous nuisance of themselves.”

“May I ask if you count Dr. Fibbetson amongst that second group?”

“I do not. I must say, Trimmers, that you make a compelling case of malpractise against him with regard to the Pyegrave case, but it doesn’t quite rise to the level of de-certification, as the evidence against him is based upon anecdotal hearsay without sufficient peer corroboration. As to the doctors for whom there is sufficient cause for dismissal, there is a problem with that course of action: we, at present, have no replacements at the ready, save the two fledgling lads who passed their exams only last week, both of whom, I warrant, will promptly upon instatement prescribe something or other out of youthful inexperience that will place a burden upon the lung or heart, and incite a claim before the Petit-Parliament for financial compensation on the part of the unfortunate patient’s survivors, and as head of the Medical Review Board all will fall upon my head. So you see, sir, what a fix I’m in, and how I should like to chop out the last paragraphs of your report like some ugly boil to be lanced.”

Dismissing the analogy (Dabber’s medical similes often clanged and thudded as ill-executed attempts to burnish his medical credentials, which were in a word none , the man having gained his position on the basis of his standing in the community and his generous charitable support of three village infirmaries), I noted that I was on friendly terms with one of the two medical training graduates. “In fact, I know the young man quite well,” I added, “and can state without equivocation that you should put your utmost confidence in him.”

“Timberry?”

I nodded. “Mulberry Timberry’s father and my father both worked for a time as sawyers in the saw-pit at the Folkstone Mills Furniture Works, before the elder Timberry bought a cow and became a dairyman. I watched the young man grow up from a baby and know him to be a very bright and conscientious physician-in-training. He will be a credit to the profession, I assure you.”

“Has the lad finally begun to shave?”

“For a couple of years now, or was that a jest?” (I could never tell when Sir Dabber was having his bit of a laugh, for his expression never changed; the man always seemed to be in the midst of making a very serious effort at catching his breath and then contemplating how he would devise the next breath to come.) “If I may be so bold, Sir Dabber, you do Timberry a great disservice by presuming youthful incompetence.”

Dabber opened his snuffbox and took a pinch. The large man displayed a tendency to foppishness that was undeserved. In his youth he had wrestled upon a mat in the manner of the Greeks and had downed the largest buck in the eastern wood as was ever felled by bow and arrow— that record holding itself in perpetuity given the fact that hunting in both woods was now prohibited (though the law was broken now and again, almost exclusively by members of the congenitally-venatic Scadger clan). Over time, Dabber had settled into a semi-indolent life of service on somnolent supervisory boards (in which one was rarely charged with much to do but listen and nod and cast votes with the prevailing majority in the spirit of approbative accord), and membership in music societies and art leagues and the like, his having acceded to his father’s sizeable fortune, garnered in the line of coal extraction. It had never been Dabber’s wish to run for a seat in the Petit-Parliament, leaving such doings to those “whose eyes do not cross at the very mention of budgetary allocation, taxonomic contingencies, periodic parliamentary review of statutory instruments, commission report abstracts, continuing resolution debates, and rules of order begetting paradoxical disorder through self-serving misapplication. The mere thought of such a culture of prolix bombast brings a tight constriction to my delicate throat.”

Semi-indolence had not, however, served well the quinquagenarian’s constitution. His excessive avoirdupois had taken its toll upon his locomotion. He had also begun to drink more than one in his condition ought, one night stumbling in a drunken stupor upon his housemaid and breaking two of her ribs.

The family mining interest had been sold and his wife had passed away, and the one child, an imbecilic boy, had been placed under the care of Bedlam custodians, and Sir Dabber’s days were much too long and languorous and his humour often splenetic and his eyes rheumy from his affinity for both port and porter. I dreaded meeting with him upon each occasion in which my offices as a writer-for-hire were required to put down some medical matter or other that required formal documentation, the aforementioned report being an ongoing example.