David’s practice was one of the best in Calderbury, but that was not so very good, and there was nothing sensational about it — thousands of small-town doctors followed a similar routine. The brass plate said “Physician and Surgeon,” and of these functions the latter consisted of emergency work and operations on his own patients at their homes or in the local hospital. In those days there was less specialization and more all-round versatility; David could clip off an appendix or chisel a mastoid with as much confidence as he would invade territory now held by the dentist and the chiropodist. He was, indeed, an excellent surgeon and there was a sense, difficult for the laymen not to misinterpret, in which he enjoyed a morning at the operating table. Physicking was the more arduous, since it entailed a daily tour of Calderbury’s narrow streets, the climbing of innumerable dark and steep stairways, and — every evening except Sunday — a two-hour session in the surgery. You did not, unless you belonged to Cathedral society, make a special appointment to see the little doctor. If you were well enough you came, you waited, and you were seen. And if, unfortunately, you weren’t well enough, then a familiar phenomenon turned the corner of the street — the little doctor on a very shabby bicycle, with his bag strapped to a carrier over the rear mudguard. The streets of Calderbury were mostly steep and cobbled, and he rode along them with a degree of peril well orchestrated by experience. He always said that he couldn’t afford to motor, and when it was suggested that he could, he fell back on a second line of defense by saying that cycling gave him hard exercise and that otherwise he would have none. But the truth was probably that he disliked changes and found it hard to make up his mind for them. So he went on cycling throughout the year, in rain and cold wind, and fog; and one day in 1910, after a crash into the back of a farm cart on Lissington Hill, it was wondered amongst Calderbury citizens whether he would buy a car at last. But no; he bought another bicycle. And he had, by the way, a peculiar style of mounting and dismounting: he would wheel the machine a few paces, stare at it intensely for a second or two, and then, with an extraordinary upward and sideways leap, launch himself on to the saddle by means of a projecting “step” on the back axle. I never saw another cyclist do anything like it, and I do not know whether the little doctor was ever taught it in those far-off nineties when people were taught cycling, or whether he invented it himself.

He was well liked in Calderbury. He did not waste much time in spoken sympathy, or even seem to worry much if his patients died, though he was sometimes inclined to boast if they didn’t die — as when, for instance, in an epidemic that killed scores of other doctors’ patients, all of his recovered. He spoke of it as if it were some unique athletic feat of his own that deserved a trophy. But this boasting was only juvenile and superficial. Actually he was no more appalled by death than by life — he had seen it too often, and knew from what agonies it could bring release. He had, quite unsentimentally, a sense of human fellowship that passed beyond tearful bedside faces to the sublime muteness of suffering — contact compared with which mere personal grief was exhibitionism. And there was something more, a sense of the sheer awfulness of physical existence that gave him sympathy with every whimpering child, yet also, remotely, with the ills he had to combat, so that he could muse upon the progress of a disease as he might upon the quickening of spring in his own back garden.