Man and Wife, Wilkie Collins [best ebook reader android .TXT] 📗

“I am recommending you to keep your temper⁠—nothing more. There are plenty of men who can fly into a passion without doing themselves any particular harm. You are not one of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think the state of your health, Mr. Delamayn, is quite so satisfactory as you may be disposed to consider it yourself.”

Geoffrey turned to his admirers and adherents with a roar of derisive laughter. The admirers and adherents all echoed him together. Arnold and Blanche smiled at each other. Even Sir Patrick looked as if he could hardly credit the evidence of his own ears. There stood the modern Hercules, self-vindicated as a Hercules, before all eyes that looked at him. And there, opposite, stood a man whom he could have killed with one blow of his fist, telling him, in serious earnest, that he was not in perfect health!

“You are a rare fellow!” said Geoffrey, half in jest and half in anger. “What’s the matter with me?”

“I have undertaken to give you, what I believe to be, a necessary caution,” answered the surgeon. “I have not undertaken to tell you what I think is the matter with you. That may be a question for consideration some little time hence. In the meanwhile, I should like to put my impression about you to the test. Have you any objection to answer a question on a matter of no particular importance relating to yourself?”

“Let’s hear the question first.”

“I have noticed something in your behavior while Sir Patrick was speaking. You are as much interested in opposing his views as any of those gentlemen about you. I don’t understand your sitting in silence, and leaving it entirely to the others to put the case on your side⁠—until Sir Patrick said something which happened to irritate you. Had you, all the time before that, no answer ready in your own mind?”

“I had as good answers in my mind as any that have been made here today.”

“And yet you didn’t give them?”

“No; I didn’t give them.”

“Perhaps you felt⁠—though you knew your objections to be good ones⁠—that it was hardly worth while to take the trouble of putting them into words? In short, you let your friends answer for you, rather than make the effort of answering for yourself?”

Geoffrey looked at his medical adviser with a sudden curiosity and a sudden distrust.

“I say,” he asked, “how do you come to know what’s going on in my mind⁠—without my telling you of it?”

“It is my business to find out what is going on in people’s bodies⁠—and to do that it is sometimes necessary for me to find out (if I can) what is going on in their minds. If I have rightly interpreted what was going on in your mind, there is no need for me to press my question. You have answered it already.”

He turned to Sir Patrick next.

“There is a side to this subject,” he said, “which you have not touched on yet. There is a physical objection to the present rage for muscular exercises of all sorts, which is quite as strong, in its way, as the moral objection. You have stated the consequences as they may affect the mind. I can state the consequences as they do affect the body.”

“From your own experience?”

“From my own experience. I can tell you, as a medical man, that a proportion, and not by any means a small one, of the young men who are now putting themselves to violent athletic tests of their strength and endurance, are taking that course to the serious and permanent injury of their own health. The public who attend rowing-matches, footraces, and other exhibitions of that sort, see nothing but the successful results of muscular training. Fathers and mothers at home see the failures. There are households in England⁠—miserable households, to be counted, Sir Patrick, by more than ones and twos⁠—in which there are young men who have to thank the strain laid on their constitutions by the popular physical displays of the present time, for being broken men, and invalided men, for the rest of their lives.”

“Do you hear that?” said Sir Patrick, looking at Geoffrey.

Geoffrey carelessly nodded his head. His irritation had had time to subside; the stolid indifference had got possession of him again. He had resumed his chair⁠—he sat, with outstretched legs, staring stupidly at the pattern on the carpet. “What does it matter to me?” was the sentiment expressed all over him, from head to foot.

The surgeon went on.

“I can see no remedy for this sad state of things,” he said, “as long as the public feeling remains what the public feeling is now. A fine healthy-looking young man, with a superb muscular development, longs (naturally enough) to distinguish himself like others. The training-authorities at his college, or elsewhere, take him in hand (naturally enough again) on the strength of outward appearances. And whether they have been right or wrong in choosing him is more than they can say, until the experiment has been tried, and the mischief has been, in many cases, irretrievably done. How many of them are aware of the important physiological truth, that the muscular power of a man is no fair guarantee of his vital power? How many of them know that we all have (as a great French writer puts it) two lives in us⁠—the surface life of the muscles, and the inner life of the heart, lungs, and brain? Even if they did know this⁠—even with medical men to help them⁠—it would be in the last degree doubtful, in most cases, whether any previous examination would result in any reliable discovery of the vital fitness of the man to undergo the stress of muscular exertion laid on him. Apply to any of my brethren; and they will tell you, as the result of their own professional observation, that I am, in no sense, overstating this serious evil, or exaggerating the deplorable and dangerous consequences to which it leads. I have a patient at