ten mile walk, I dropped into sleep again. And when I awoke to get up I found myself ravenous for breakfast and concentrated on the case of Wildzap â not on Lukswaas. After all I am well practiced at putting things out of my mind.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
The alienistâs house was a small, neat, yellow painted box behind a white fence, in a side road off Fort Street between the town and the houses of the rich. A discreet and private place. Comings and goings could be observed by no neighbour, since opposite, on the hillside, was one of Victoriaâs typical outcroppings of rock and twisted arbutus, impossible to build on or make a garden on. Anyone turning into the street could be taking a way through to the other streets further North. Yet few people would in fact do so. It was not a thoroughfare. During my visit, not a single person passed by, so far as I could tell. There was no sound of voices from the street, or of creaking cart wheels.
I was standing in the alienistâs consulting room: a typical small square farmhouse room, with fireplace and two windows, pink curtains hooked back, and a layer of opaque muslin âdrapesâ. I had informed myself that this had been the house of a homesteader who had taken to drink until his wife had forced him to return to England. McCrory had bought it, taking out a mortgage from a Jew whom I would interview later.
On the walls were framed certificates with gothic lettering and gold seals â a licentiate and doctorate in medicine from the University of Virginia, made out to Richard McCrory. Perhaps this âYankeeâ was in fact a Southerner disgusted by the Confederate loss who had come all the way North and West. There was also a large chart of the human skeleton, and another of the musculature, with all parts labelled although they were of neutral sex â those parts were not depicted. Rather pretentious, I thought. A doctor should not need such charts. They must be there to make an impression. Like the porcelain head on a special marble topped stand, with the contour mapping of phrenology: bumps of righteousness, hope, generosity and so on. There was a desk and table oddly bare of papers except for a few journals in two neat stacks: The Phrenologist, and The Zooist â a journal I had head of. I glanced through one. It was on Mesmerism, put out by the Edinburgh surgeon Eliotson who was well known as the inventor of the stethoscope.
A high bookshelf was crammed full. Herbalist manuals, medical texts, works of Mesmer in French and Latin (these looked in mint condition and I suspected they had never been read), a book on Mesmerism by Eliotson, more copies of The Zooist, Herbert Spencerâs huge Principles of Psychology which I had looked at some years before in Oxford and found unreadable. Galton on heredity. Millâs longwinded book on the rights of women. On the lighter side there were books of travels among the Indians, Eskimo, Australian aboriginals, Maori, Annamese, Javans. A shelf of novels: Dickens, Thackeray, Washington Irving, and many romances of a female kind â odd, since the alienist had no wife â by Mrs Hemans, Aphra Benn, and others whose names were new to me but whose contents, as I rifled through a few, were approximately the same: large eyed heroines pursued by heavy-breathing, fascinating sheiks, rajahs, princes and diplomats. There were of course the inevitable, for an American â even a Southerner â Emerson and Thoreau. Emersonâs turgid verse was the only poetry on the shelves. My eye took in a miscellany of religious texts of the evangelistic sort. Finally, on the bottom shelf, on their sides, there were atlases and marine charts of Vancouver Island, Washington Territory, and the British Columbia coast. I looked through these briefly for annotations or pencil marks, but there were none.
I glanced around the room again. McCroryâs Chinese servant, who had let me in, dressed exotically in a
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
The alienistâs house was a small, neat, yellow painted box behind a white fence, in a side road off Fort Street between the town and the houses of the rich. A discreet and private place. Comings and goings could be observed by no neighbour, since opposite, on the hillside, was one of Victoriaâs typical outcroppings of rock and twisted arbutus, impossible to build on or make a garden on. Anyone turning into the street could be taking a way through to the other streets further North. Yet few people would in fact do so. It was not a thoroughfare. During my visit, not a single person passed by, so far as I could tell. There was no sound of voices from the street, or of creaking cart wheels.
I was standing in the alienistâs consulting room: a typical small square farmhouse room, with fireplace and two windows, pink curtains hooked back, and a layer of opaque muslin âdrapesâ. I had informed myself that this had been the house of a homesteader who had taken to drink until his wife had forced him to return to England. McCrory had bought it, taking out a mortgage from a Jew whom I would interview later.
On the walls were framed certificates with gothic lettering and gold seals â a licentiate and doctorate in medicine from the University of Virginia, made out to Richard McCrory. Perhaps this âYankeeâ was in fact a Southerner disgusted by the Confederate loss who had come all the way North and West. There was also a large chart of the human skeleton, and another of the musculature, with all parts labelled although they were of neutral sex â those parts were not depicted. Rather pretentious, I thought. A doctor should not need such charts. They must be there to make an impression. Like the porcelain head on a special marble topped stand, with the contour mapping of phrenology: bumps of righteousness, hope, generosity and so on. There was a desk and table oddly bare of papers except for a few journals in two neat stacks: The Phrenologist, and The Zooist â a journal I had head of. I glanced through one. It was on Mesmerism, put out by the Edinburgh surgeon Eliotson who was well known as the inventor of the stethoscope.
A high bookshelf was crammed full. Herbalist manuals, medical texts, works of Mesmer in French and Latin (these looked in mint condition and I suspected they had never been read), a book on Mesmerism by Eliotson, more copies of The Zooist, Herbert Spencerâs huge Principles of Psychology which I had looked at some years before in Oxford and found unreadable. Galton on heredity. Millâs longwinded book on the rights of women. On the lighter side there were books of travels among the Indians, Eskimo, Australian aboriginals, Maori, Annamese, Javans. A shelf of novels: Dickens, Thackeray, Washington Irving, and many romances of a female kind â odd, since the alienist had no wife â by Mrs Hemans, Aphra Benn, and others whose names were new to me but whose contents, as I rifled through a few, were approximately the same: large eyed heroines pursued by heavy-breathing, fascinating sheiks, rajahs, princes and diplomats. There were of course the inevitable, for an American â even a Southerner â Emerson and Thoreau. Emersonâs turgid verse was the only poetry on the shelves. My eye took in a miscellany of religious texts of the evangelistic sort. Finally, on the bottom shelf, on their sides, there were atlases and marine charts of Vancouver Island, Washington Territory, and the British Columbia coast. I looked through these briefly for annotations or pencil marks, but there were none.
I glanced around the room again. McCroryâs Chinese servant, who had let me in, dressed exotically in a
Similar Books
