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Improving Processes for Health Care Delivery: Lessons from Johns Hopkins Medicine Chester Chambers
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The Harriet Lane Handbook: Mobile Medicine Series Johns Hopkins Hospital
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CA ClinicalAssistant:TheroleofaCAistodirectlyassistphysicians,nurses andotherhealthcareprofessionalsinprovidingpatientcare,withthefocusbeingonperformingclinicaldutiesratherthanclericaltasks.
DES DiscreteEventSimulation:Amathematicalmodelthattrackschangesin elementstatusatdiscretemomentsintimesuchasapatientarrival,orthe startofendofanactivity.
ED EmergencyDepartment:Anentitythatacceptspatientswhoarriverandomlyforanymedicalcondition.Many(butnotall)ofthesepatientswill arrivewithlife-threateningconditions.
OM OperationsManagement:Fieldofsocialsciencefocusedonthedesign, management,andimprovementofsystemsthatdelivergoodsandservices.
OR OperationsResearch:Anareaofappliedmathematicsthatusedanalytical modelsfocusedonproblemsrelatedtothemanagementofprocessesor otherindustrialorbusinessfunctions.
C. Chambers et al., Improving Processes for Health Care Delivery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19043-8_1
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‘Your sentiments are very noble, Mr Cato,’ said Huxtable at last. ‘I should say that they did you every credit, if it were your own fortune that we were talking about. But it is not. And if you think it over, you will see that your conduct lies open to the very gravest criticism. By a series of unusual circumstances you find yourself practically master of the disposal of a vast fortune belonging to someone else. Instead of accepting an excellent offer for the benefit of the person whose interests you for some reason claim the right of defending, you go off at a tangent in pursuit of your own political theories.’
‘Political theories?’
‘Yes, sir; political theories. Your views are well known. You regard the ways of the money market as immoral; you preach saintliness in the conduct of business; you think our social and financial system a mistake; you are, in fact, opposed to our civilisation as you find it. Those are your politics. Excellent! Charming! That is what makes your speeches a success. Moreover, you have a perfect right to practise your theories with your own property if you please. This Sermon-on-the-Mount way of doing business would make you a delightful customer in the City, no doubt. But when it comes to Prince Dwala’s affairs, the case is different. You are in the position of a trustee.’
‘Then is a trustee to be without a conscience?’
‘Certainly not; that’s just the point. I wonder you mention it. A trustee’s conscience ought to be a very delicate affair.’
‘Do you mean to insinuate that I have acted without conscience?’
‘I don’t insinuate it, sir; I say it straight out. You have acted unconscientiously.’
‘You have the insolence to say that!’ cried Mr. Cato, jumping up, with tears of fury in his voice. ‘You dare to sit there and tell me I have no conscience; you ... you damnable young prig!’
The Huxtable sat with folded arms, looking at him coldly, magisterially. This young untroubled man was the World, the unrighteous, unanimous World, sitting in judgment on him.
‘You don’t improve your case by losing your temper and being abusive,’ said the World. ‘Your conscience, your whole conscience, should have been bent on serving the Prince’s interests; it was your duty to divest yourself of all personal theories, all prejudices, all principles, and devote yourself only to getting the best price you could. You are not a business man, and you had no right to experiment on the Prince’s behalf with theories of business that never have worked, never will work, and never could work. Nobody will offer you a better price than the Baron, because no one can afford a better price.’
‘Well, you have succeeded me. There are the mines intact. Go to the Baron and get him to renew his offer.’
‘The Baron will not make the same offer again.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I have seen the Baron.’
‘You have seen him!... Then all this long discussion was a trap for me?’
‘You can call it a trap if you like, though I think the word is a damaging one for you. I have seen the Baron, and he at once stated that he washed his hands of the whole affair.’
‘But if his only motive is money, things are just as they were a week ago. He can still make his money.’
‘You only expose your ignorance of the man you were so ready to abuse—a man of unsullied reputation, by-the-bye. Money is not his only motive.’
‘What other motive has he?’
‘Pride.’
‘Him?’
‘Yes, sir; pride. When a man of that magnitude steps off his pedestal and comes down to a suburban house to offer his services to a private individual, he expects to be treated at least with consideration. He is accustomed to dealing with Empires,
Governments, National Banks; not with obscure gentlemen in Hampstead villas. What happened? The Prince fell asleep, and you gave the Baron a blunt rebuff.’
‘It’s not my business to keep Prince Dwala awake.’
‘It’s not your business to settle his affairs while he’s asleep. You made an enemy of Baron Blumenstrauss.’
‘The Baron’s enmity to me is of no importance.’
‘Quite true; of no importance. But you made him the Prince’s enemy —an enemy of the estate. He began negotiating against us at once, floating companies over our head. He is omnipotent, and you turned him against the Prince. His pride was hurt.’
‘Surely he can swallow his pride!’
‘No doubt; but not at the same figure. He offers only 400,000l. a year.’
‘Well, what do you mean to do?’
‘I have accepted his offer.’
‘Ha!... I hope you made a good thing out of it?’
They both rose to their feet.
‘In what way, Mr. Cato?’
‘There was, I suppose, some commission attached to the negotiation?’
‘No, sir; there was no commission. Baron Blumenstrauss knew me better than to offer me any such thing.’
It was perfectly true. It would have been inapt. There were other ways in which the Baron could discharge his debt of gratitude to a young man with a great future.
‘Where is the Prince?’ said Huxtable.
‘What do you want with him?’
‘I am going to take him into London.’
‘His house isn’t ready.’
‘Yes, it is. Will you make out your bill?’
‘What bill?’
‘For the expenses of his keep.’
‘He has been my guest, I tell you.’
‘As you please. Where is he now?’
‘He has gone for a walk with his governess.’
‘I will wait for him.’
This imperturbable young man sat quietly down in an armchair and cracked his thumb-joints. Mr. Cato looked at him with silent wonder, and left the room. He envied the Huxtable his nerves: his own were in a tumult; he could not have stayed with him a moment longer.
M Dwala, all unconscious, was standing on Parliament Hill, with Miss Briscoe’s tall figure at his side. It must have been some unwitting prescience which took them there that day.
London lay at their feet: London, which Dwala had never seen; London, where his life would lie from this day forth. Not the formless, endless, straight-ruled London seen by the man in the street; not a pervading, uniform, roaring, inevitable presence: but London apart; in the distance; without sound; without smell; set to a foreground of sun-beaten grass and a gambolling wind from the fields and seas; a thing with a shape; a whole; bounded, surrounded, grim and grimy, sprawling down the dishonoured valley; murky, random, ridged and toothed, like the débris of Ladoga’s ice, piled in the Neva by December Dwala laughed.
It was a joke of a magnitude fitted to his monstrous mind. ‘Man is the laughing animal:’ he had proved himself human. Behold, he had worshipped Man and his inventions; he had come forth to see the sublimest invention of all; he had travelled over half the world for it; everywhere they spoke of it with awe. And now he had seen it. It was London.
The hill shook with his laughter. All the birds and beasts in the big city heard it and made answer—cheeping, squeaking, mewing, barking, whinnying, and braying together; forgetful, for the moment, of their long debates on the habits of mankind, their tedious tales of human sagacity, their fruitless altercations as to whether men had instinct or were guided only by reason.
The commotion escaped Miss Briscoe’s notice: she heard only one deep guttural laugh beside her, and looking up, beheld a grave impassive face.
‘There is St. Paul’s: do you see, Prince? How grand it looks, watching over the great city like a shepherd over his flock. “Toil on, toil on, my children,” it seems to say: “I am here in the midst of you, the Church, the Temple builded of the lowly Carpenter, with my message of strength for the faint-hearted, consolation for the afflicted, peace for all when the day’s task is done. Toil on, that the great work may be accomplished at last.”’
‘Work? Ah, you may well say work,’ said a voice from the bench beside them.
An old man was sitting there; a handsome old man, with a strong, bony face. His knobbed hands rested on the top of a walking-stick, his chin on his hands. He wore the unmistakable maroon jacket and black shovel-hat of the workhouse; corduroys clothed his lean and hollow thighs.
‘Bless you, there’s work for everyone as wants to work. See that chimney down there, that biggun? That’s Boffin’s, where I was. Three and fifty years I worked at Boffin’s.’
‘Was it a happy life?’ asked Miss Briscoe.
‘Happy? Bless you, the times I’ve had there when I was a youngster. Always up to larks. There’s three of my grandsons there now.’
Miss Briscoe admired his furrowed, placid face. ‘Take this,’ she whispered.
The old man looked coldly at a shilling.
‘No, thanky ... but if the gentleman has some tabacca on him, I could do with a bit.’
As they neared the bottom of the hill, Mr. Cato came hurrying towards them. There were tears in his eyes, and wet hollows in his cheeks.
‘Well, Dwala my boy, I’ve brought you news. You’re going into London to-night, to your new home.’
Dwala put up his face to the sky and laughed again.
XVI
D was a social success, an object of multiple affection. His large grave ways, his modesty, his kindliness, made him personally beloved. He was, of course, always a ‘native’; there was no escaping that. But to be tolerated, if you are tolerated everywhere, is social greatness.
One thing he lacked, they said—the sense of humour. The tiny shock that makes a human joke was too slight for his large senses. But humour, after all, is a rather bourgeois quality.
He was adopted from the beginning, pushed, trumpeted, imposed, by that powerful paper the ‘Flywheel.’ He had captivated Captain Howland-Bowser, its correspondent, at the first encounter. The ‘Flywheel,’ descending after a century, from its Olympian heights, into the arena of popular favour—by gradual stages, beginning with the great American ‘pill competition’—had put itself on a level with the rest by adding a column of ‘Beau Monde Intime’ to its daily issue. The thing was done on the old Olympian scale. The column was not entrusted to a chattering magpie-newswoman, or to a broken-winged baronet, as is the way with lesser sheets; but to an eagle of the heights—the famous Captain Howland-Bowser, our modern Petronius, the Grand Old Man of Pall Mall; the Buck from Bath, as envious youngsters called him; the well-known author of ‘Furbelows’ and the ‘Gourmet’s Calendar.’
The fateful evening is recorded in his ‘Memoirs of a Man about Town,’ that farrago of entertaining scandal, which proved a mine of wealth to his sorrowing wife and family, to whom he bequeathed the manuscript when he died, as a consolation for a somewhat neglectful attitude in life:
‘It was at Lady L——’s that I first met Prince D——, that “swart monarch” whose brilliant career, with its astonishing dénouement, made so much stir in 19—. I remember that evening well. We had
supper at the Blackguards; homards à la Cayenne with crème de crevettes, cailles Frédérique, salade Howland-Bowser, &c., &c. Tom Warboys was there, gallant Tom; Harry Clarke, of Sandown fame; Lord F—— (Mrs. W——’s Lord F——); R——, the artist; poor H——, who shot himself afterwards; and a few others. W-rb-ck W-m-ss came in later, and delighted the company with some of his wellknown anecdotes. We formed a brilliant little group in the dear old club—Adolphe was in his zenith then. The Prince was in great form, saying little, but enjoying all the fun with a grave relish which was all his own R—— was the only blemish in the galaxy; il faisait tache, as the volatile Gaul would say. H—— was getting hold of him at the time to choose some pictures for the Prince’s “’umble ’ut” in Park Lane. R—— raised a general laugh at his own expense when I pressed him for an estimate of Grisetti’s “Passive Resistance,” the gem of our little collection. The knowingest men in London were agreed that it was not only one of the wittiest pictures of the year, but the girl the man was kissing was the most alluring young female ever clapped on canvas. R—— valued it at twenty pounds—the price of the frame! We roared. It had cost a cool two thousand, and was worth at least five hundred more. So much for experts! He was very chapfallen the rest of the evening.
‘However, revenons à notre mouton, as the gay Parisians said, when the siege was raised and bottines sauce souris went out of fashion. It was at the supper-table that Prince D—— revealed that extraordinary delicacy of perception which first opened your humble servant’s eyes to what a pitch refinement can go. His manners, bythe-bye, were unimpeachable: stately, and yet affable. Non imperitus loquor. But the amazing thing was his palate. There are delicate palates in London—though many who pose as “men of culture” have little or none—but the delicacy of Prince D——’s was what I should call “superhuman,” if subsequent events had not proved that this extraordinary gift had, by some topsy-turvy chance, fallen to the lot of one who, I suppose, after all, we must now acknowledge “subhuman.”
‘I had just brought to what I thought, and still think, perfection, a mixed claret, on which I had been at work a long time. The waiter
had his orders. “Fiat experimentum,” said I, and three bottles, unmarked, were brought. Every one at table was given a liqueur glass of each to taste. The company mumbled and mouthed them, and each one gave a different opinion—all wrong. The poor “gamboge-slinger” admitted at once that he didn’t know port from burgundy: I had suspected as much.
‘“Well, Prince,” said I, “what’s your opinion?” To my astonishment I saw that he hadn’t touched a drop. He sat quite still, leaning back in his chair; his nostrils quivered a little. Suddenly he put out one of his long fingers—his hands were enormous—and touched what I shall call, for short, “Glass A.”
‘“That is a good wine,” he said, “the same as we had at home night before last.” He turned to poor H——.
‘“Château Mauville,” said H——.
‘“And that,” he said, touching Glass B, “is thin and sour; it smells of leather. And that,” he said, touching Glass C, “is a mixture of the two, and very good it is.” Saying which, he drank it off and licked his lips.
‘“Gentlemen!” cried I, jumping up; “this is the most extraordinary thing I ever heard. Without tasting a drop, the Prince has guessed exactly right. It’s Château Mauville, which I have mixed—a sudden inspiration which came to me one morning in my bath—with an inferior Spanish claret, tinged with that odd smack of the wine-skin, which I thought would fit in with the rather tea-rosy taste of the Mauville.”
‘You can imagine the excitement which this event produced in that coterie of viveurs. From that moment his success in London was assured. The story got about, in a distorted form of course, as these things will. I was obliged to give the correct version of it in the “Flywheel” a few days later.
‘It was I that introduced him to Lord X——, who had been complaining for years that there wasn’t a man in town fit to drink his Madeira. Trench by trench the citadel of public opinion was stormed and taken. How well I remember,’ &c., &c.
XVII
P D succeeded by other qualities than those attributed to him. His wealth raised him to a high tableland, where others also dwelt; it was not his fine palate which raised him higher, nor was it his manners. His manners, in point of fact, were not perfect; his manner perhaps, but not his manners. The finest manners were not to be learnt in the school of Warbeck Wemyss, as he quickly perceived; that was only a preparation, a phase. Captain HowlandBowser, who believed his own success to be due to that schooling, was mistaken; he underrated himself: his success was greatly due to his fine presence, but still more to the fact that his intelligence stood head and shoulders higher than that of most of those with whom he was thrown into contact; and he had confirmed his pre-eminence by his literary fame.
Prince Dwala’s popularity was chiefly due to the zeal, the zest, the frenzy, with which he threw himself into the distractions and pursuits of the best society. He missed nothing: he was everywhere; wakeful, watchful, interested. He was a dancing man, a dining man, a club man, a racing man, an automobilist, a first-nighter. His dark head, groomed to a millimetre, his big figure, tailored to perfection, formed a necessary feature of every gathering.
Nor did he hold himself aloof from the more serious pursuits of the wealthy: he was at every meeting, big or small, that had to do with missionary work, temperance, philanthropy; he visited the Geographical Society, the Antiquaries, the Christian Scientists, and the lady with the crystal globe in Hanover Square.
He was up early, walking through the slums, or having his correspondence read to him. Tired rings grew round the Huxtable’s eyes; the Prince was as fresh as paint. He was studying ‘the Human Question.’
We will not follow him through all the details of his social life: the limbo of frocks and lights, the lovely people, the unlovely, the endless flickering of vivid talk, the millions of ideas, all different in outline but uniform in impulse, like the ripples on the Atlantic swell. We come at once to the great day when he met Lady Wyse.
Strange that such a meeting should have marked the day for him as great. Not strange that it should be so for you and me: for us it has inner meanings, implications of success; it marks the grandeur of our flight; it has high possibilities. Who knows but we may catch the fancy of the lovely creature, be admitted freely to her familiar fellowship; penetrate thereby to the very innermost arcana of the Social Mystery?
But for him—a monster of the forest, an elemental being—that happiness should date from his first meeting with a woman whom we must call after all frail, the fine flower of all that is most artificial and decadent in England: that was strange. But so it was.
He had studied; he had seen; he knew the human question to the bottom. But what to make of it? Was this all? Discontentment gnawed him. He suffered a deprivation, as once in the forest, when he lacked Man. Now he had had Man, to the full; he was sated. What more?
Lady Wyse understood his want, and helped him to supply it. He must reduce himself, limit his range to the human scale; he must put off his elemental largeness and himself be Man; be less—an Englishman, a Londoner.
XVIII
L L ’ evening was crowded. ‘This is quite an intellectual party to-day,’ she said, shaking hands with Dwala and Huxtable, and leading them down the avenue which opened of its own accord in the forest of men and women. ‘Such a number of literary people. How do you do, Mr. MacAllister? It’s an age since we’ve seen you; and this is your wife, isn’t it? To be sure. Let me introduce you to Prince Dwala.... That was Sandy MacAllister, the author of “The Auld Licht that Failit”—all about those dear primitive Ayrshire people; everybody’s so interested nowadays in their fidelity and simplicity and religiousness and all that. The Kirkyard School, they call it. It’s a pity his wife’s so Scotch. Lord Glendover is here....’
‘Cabinet Ministers, Oho!’ said Huxtable.
‘And Lady Violet Huggins, and the Duke of Dover, and Sir Peter Parchmin, the great biologist, and Sir Benet Smyth, and both the Miss Dillwaters. And who else do you think I’ve “bagged,” Mr Huxtable?’
‘I can’t guess.’
‘Lady Wyse!’
‘Really? I congratulate you.’
‘Isn’t it splendid? She’s been so rude.’
‘Next thing I hear you’ll be having....’
‘S’sh.... General Wapshot, that fierce little man over there, came with her; we didn’t ask him, but he always goes wherever she goes. And isn’t it dreadful, Prince, I asked Wyndham to get Mr. Barlow to come —the new poet, you know; and it turns out that he’s a pro-Boer too, and insists upon reciting his own poems? There he is at this very moment.’
In their course down the room they were passing the door of a smaller apartment, given over for the evening to a set entertainment. They could see a rumpled young man waving his arms in there; they caught a whiff of him as they went by.
‘Theirs not to do or die! Theirs but to question why!’ he was saying.
‘I don’t know what Mr. Disturnal will think; that’s him, there’—she indicated a muscular ruffian with a square blue jaw, priest or prizefighter, one would have guessed, who was leaning against the doorpost listening over his shoulder with a sardonic smile.
‘But, of course, you know all our celebrities already, Prince. He’s the most coming man on the Conservative side, they say; a staunch upholder of the Church, with all the makings of a really great statesman. It was he who saved us only last week over the second reading of that dreadful Prayer Book Amendment Act, by borrowing a pole-cat in Seven Dials just in the nick of time, and hiding it in the Lobby, so that the supporters of the measure couldn’t get in to vote. What a pity Julia isn’t here! I’m sure he’s looking out for her. She’s just gone into the rest-cure; quite worn out, poor thing. We live at a terribly high pressure, Prince; people take life so seriously now. Oh, there’s the dear Duke singing one of his delicious songs.’ They were passing the door again on the return journey, and the ping-pang of a banjo came frolicking out on the air with a fat voice lumbering huskily in pursuit:
‘Oh, I always get tight
On a Saturday night, And sober up on Sun-day,’
sang the Duke. Laughter followed with the confused thunder of an attempted chorus. Mr. Disturnal had shifted his other shoulder to the door-post and was looking in, with open mouth and delighted eye.
‘Isn’t it amusing?’ said Lady Lillico. ‘That tall man with the white moustache over there is Captain Howland-Bowser, quite a literary
light. You know him? He married one of the Devonshire joneses; the Barley Castle joneses, you know, with a small j.’
Pendred passed at this moment, with a hungry lady of middle years hanging on his arm; he slapped the Prince familiarly on the shoulder as he went by. The awkwardness of their first encounter had been quite lived down by now.
‘Oh, please introduce me!’ begged the lady.
‘What, to the Prince?’ said Pendred. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t like him.’
‘I should love him.’
‘He has a most repulsive face.’
‘I love a repulsive face.’
‘He drinks like a fish.’
‘I love a man who drinks. Oh, Mr Lillico, we mustn’t be too censorious about the conduct of great people; they are exposed to innumerable temptations of which we know nothing.’
This was the famous Miss Dillwater, whose métier in life was loyalty —loyalty to every kind of Royal personage, but more particularly to the unfortunate. From her earliest childhood her dreams had been wholly concerned with kings and queens; in the daytime she thought over the clever answers she would make to monarchs whom she found sitting incognito in parks, and pictured herself kneeling in floods of tears when summoned to the palace the next morning. She had pursued Don Carlos from hotel to hotel for years; and only deserted his cause at last to follow King Milan into exile. Every spring she returned to London to lay a wreath on the grave of Mary Queen of Scots, and to conspire with other dangerous people for the restoration of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, our rightful monarch, to the throne of England. Tears coursed down her cheeks when Pendred introduced her, and it was a considerable embarrassment to the Prince when she seized his hairy hand and pressed it fervently to her lips. She followed him about the rest of the evening, with a melancholy smile on her wan face.
‘Oh, Mr Lillico,’ she said, in an aside to Pendred; ‘I can never thank you enough. He’s wonderful. That great jaw! those big teeth! those long arms! that brow! He reminds me of one of Charlotte Brontë’s heroes. I do love a man!’
The Prince was one of the magnetic centres of the gathering; the particles regrouped themselves as he moved about from place to place. There was one moment when he was comparatively deserted; everyone was crowding round a lady in black; angry cries issued from the group. Lady Lillico hurried up to him.
‘Pray come over here, Prince, and listen to what Miss Dillwater’s sister is saying. She is about to reveal the great secret about Guy de Maupassant and Marie Bashkirtseff. She’s a great literary authority, you know. I’ve not read anything by either of them myself as yet, but I’m deeply interested. We are all Bashkirtseffites or Maupassantists now.’
But unfortunately, they were too late for the secret; they came in only for the broken crumbs of it.
‘I was Marie’s greatest friend,’ Miss Sophie was saying; ‘and you may depend upon it, what I tell you is true. That is the reason why they never married. I am a delicate-minded woman, and nothing should have dragged this secret from me if I had not felt the overwhelming importance of it to literature.’
‘The charge is false!’ bellowed a furious voice.
‘The thing will have to be looked into.’
‘Well, whatever anyone says,’ cried a stout woman, ‘I never have read this Bashkirtseff lady’s diary, and I never will.’
‘And, pray, why not, Madam?’ snorted back an elderly gentleman. ‘Maupassant is a fraud! After what I have heard to-night, I disown him. His books ought never to have been published.’
‘Hear, hear! And with him goes Zola, and all the rest of them. What do you think, Lord Glendover?’
‘Oh, me? I never can see what people want with all these foreign fellers. John Bull’s good enough for me.’
Attention was distracted at this point by a new interest which had arisen on the outskirts of the group. Sir Peter Parchmin, the great savant, the petticoat pet—he had made a fortune in fashionable medical practice, but was forgiven it on his retirement, at fifty, in virtue of his new claims as a researcher in biology—was wriggling faint protests at the violence of a throng of ladies who were propelling him, with the help of a tall octogenarian buffoon, towards the centre of the public.
‘What’s up?’
‘Parchmin’s going to tell us the latest news about the Missing Link,’ said the big buffoon.
‘Oh, a story about the Missing Link!’ exclaimed Lady Lillico. ‘This is most exciting. Sit down everybody, and let us hear it. I adore scientific things.’
‘Oh, what is the Missing Link?’ said a young lady. ‘I’ve so often heard of it, and wondered what it is.’
‘Well, ladies,’ said the Biologist, taking the centre, and reconciling himself very readily to the situation. He fondled and smoothed his periods with undulating gestures of the long sleek freckled hands.
‘You’ve all of you heard, no doubt, of Darwin?’
‘Oh, yes,’ everybody chorussed.
‘What, Sir Julius Darwin, who bought Upton Holes?’
‘No, no, Lord Glendover,’ explained Lady Lillico, ‘one of the Shropshire Darwins—a very well-known scientist.’
‘Ah!’ said Lord Glendover, sinking back and losing all interest.
‘Well, when he traced the relationship between Man and the ... er, Anthropoids....’
‘Oh, please don’t use technical terms, Sir Peter!’ cried Lady Lillico. ‘We’re none of us specialists here.’
‘Well, let us say the manlike apes ... when he had traced the relationship, there was still one place left empty in the ... er ... so to speak, in the genealogical tree.’ The Biologist emitted this with a
grin. ‘No remains have ever been found of the hypothetical animal from which man and the apes are descended: and this link, which is still lacking to the completeness of the series, has therefore been called the Missing Link.’
A very young soldier, with a handkerchief sticking out of his sleeve, leaned forward at this point, blushing deeply:
‘Then do I understand you, sir, that we are not actually descended from monkeys?’
‘No, not actually descended.’
‘How very curious!’
‘Fancy! This is something quite new.’
‘They certainly ought not to have attacked Genesis till they were more sure of their ground.’
‘How amusing of them to call it the Missing Link!’
‘Sort o’ pun, eh?’
‘But what’s the story, Sir Peter?’
‘I’m coming to that.... Now, we may roughly put the date of the Missing Link from which we are descended at about three hundred million years ago.’
An ‘Oh!’ of disappointment ran round the ladies. The representative of the ‘Flywheel’ gave a ‘Humph!’ and walked off, to look at himself in the glass.
‘But wait a moment,’ said the Biologist. ‘Though improbable, it is not impossible that the species from which, by differentiation, arose men on the one hand and apes on the other, should have continued its existence, undifferentiated, at the same time. And the rumour is that there is at least one specimen of the race still alive; and, what is more, that he was lately in the possession of an American, and on the eve of being shipped to England for exhibition.’
‘What an extraordinary thing!’
‘It’s too fascinating!’
‘Like those Babylonian hieroglyphics at the British Museum.’
‘Yes; or radium.’
‘Or that rhinoceros in Fleet Street.’
‘But how old he must be!’
‘It is said that he escaped to the forest,’ continued the Biologist; ‘and his keeper lost all trace of him. We mean to raise a fund for an expedition to find him.’
‘What’s the good of him?’ asked a surly man—one of the Bashkirtseffites—abruptly.
‘The good, sir? It would be the most important thing in Science for centuries!’
‘What good will it do the community, I should like to know? Will it increase our output, or raise the standard of comfort, or do anything for Civilisation?’
‘Ha! now we’re getting into Politics,’ said Lord Glendover, rising, and thereby giving an impulse which disintegrated Sir Peter’s audience. Howland-Bowser detached Prince Dwala from the group as it broke up, and drew him aside, with an air of important confidence.
‘If you go to the refreshment room,’ he said, ‘don’t touch the champagne that’s open. Ask the head waiter—the old man with the Newgate fringe; if you mention my name, he’ll know. It’s the ... ah ... ha....’
While he was speaking two figures emerged vividly from the mass, coming towards and past them. Eyes darkened over shoulders looking after them. The straight blue figure of a smooth slender woman, diffusing a soft air of beauty and disdain; and half at her side, half behind her, the Biologist, sly and satisfied, hair and flesh of an even tawny hue, the neck bent forward, equally ready to pounce on a victim or suffer a yoke, balancing his body to a Lyceum stride, clasping an elbow with a hand behind his back, bountifully pouring forth minted words and looking through rims of gold into the woman’s
face, as it were round the corner of a door, like some mediæval statesman playing bo-peep with a baby king.
Lady Lillico was pursuing with tired and frightened eyes.
Howland-Bowser cleared his throat and shifted his weight on to one gracefully-curving leg. Lady Lillico had caught them in their passage.
‘Oh, Lady Wyse,’ she said, with a downward inflection of fear, as if she had stepped in a hole, ‘may I introduce Prince Dwala? Prince Dwala: Lady Wyse.’
The blue lady’s eyes traversed Howland-Bowser in the region of the tropics with purely impersonal contempt; he outlined a disclamatory bow, and fingered his tie. The eyes reached Dwala and came to anchor.
‘Oh, you’re the Black Prince,’ said Lady Wyse; ‘the Wild Man from Borneo that everybody talks about?’
Lady Lillico quailed, and vanished through the floor. HowlandBowser looked round the room, chin up, and walked off with the air of an archdeacon at a school-treat.
‘How delightful!’ pursued the insolent lady slowly. ‘Of course you’re a Mahommedan, and carry little fetishes about with you, and all that.’
Her eyes were directed vaguely at his shirt-studs. Looking down from above he saw only the lids of them, long-lashed and iris-edged, convexed by the eye-balls, like two delicate blue-veined eggs. She raised them at last, and he looked into them.
It was like looking out to sea.
She looked into his: and it was as if a broad sheet of water had passed swiftly through the forest of her mind, and all the withering thickets, touched by the magic flood, had reared their heads, put forth green leaves, blossomed, and filled with joy-drunk birds, singing full-throated contempt and hatred of mankind. The energy to hate, seared with the long drought of loneliness, was quickened and renewed by this vision of a kindred spirit.
For she too was a monster Not a monster created, like Dwala, at one wave of the wand by Nature in the woods; but hewn from the living rock by a thousand hands of men, slowly chipped and chiselled and polished and refined till it reached perfection. Every meanness, every flattery that touched her had gone to her moulding; till now she was finished, blow-hardened, unmalleable; the multiplied strokes slid off without a trace.
Her position was known to all; there was no secret about it. The great blow that had severed the rough shape from the mass was struck, as it were, before the face of all the world. They might have taken her and tumbled her down the mountain side, to roll ingloriously into the engulfing sea. Instead of that they had set her on a pedestal, carved her with their infamous tools, fawned round her, swinging Lilliputian censers, seeking favour, and singing praise.
She was a monster, and no one knew it. And now at last she had met an equal mind: her eyes met other eyes that saw the world as she saw it—whole and naked at a glance. There was no question of love between them; they met in frozen altitudes far above the world where such things were. They were two comets laughing their way through space together.
All the Biologist saw was an augur-smile upon their lips.
‘Come along,’ said Lady Wyse, slipping her white glove through Prince Dwala’s arm. ‘Let’s get somewhere where we can talk.’
‘Then what becomes of me?’ grinned the insinuating savant.
‘Oh, you?’ said the lady. ‘You can go to the devil!’
Captain Howland-Bowser looked enviously after them as they left the room.
‘Your Borneo Prince has made no end of a conquest, Baron,’ he said, finding Blumenstrauss—whom he hated, by-the-bye—at his elbow. ‘H’m! H’m!’
‘Aha, my dear Bowser, wid nine hunderd tousand pount a year one can do anysing.’
