Grand Canary by A. J. Cronin Read Free Book Online Page A

though he had never loved his mother – a precocious contempt of women.
    When Harvey was twelve years old, William Leith died of a pulmonary haemorrhage. It was a staggering blow. Harvey had loved his father and lived with him in close companionship.
    He fell now to the care of his aunt – a nagging and impoverished spinster who, accepting him of necessity, regarded him thereafter solely as an incubus. But young Harvey had his ambition. His own brilliance and a dogged pertinacity of purpose sent him through the rest of his schooling, then, with three scholarships, to the provincial medical college. He had seen his father fail for lack of opportunity in a career purely academic; and he felt instinctively that medicine would give him surer chance of success. Besides, biology was his bent. At Birmingham he was regarded as the most distinguished student of his time. But after his graduation, which gave him every prize that could be won, he had refused an appointment to the City Hospital and abruptly taken himself to London. He had no aspirations towards a successful practice. No craving for a consultant’s chair, no ambition to acquire a fortune in exchange for bedside condolences. His inspiration lay deeper, his ideal stood higher. He had that unique incentive which few men through the centuries have possessed – the genuine passion for original research.
    He had no money, nor did he desire it, except for the bare necessities of life. He took rooms in Westminster and set to work. His struggles in London were severe, his privations many. But he gritted his teeth, tightened his belt, built everything upon his ideal. He discovered the prejudice which bogs the feet of genius, especially when that genius is sponsored by a provincial school of small repute. Yet rebuffs served merely to harden his purpose; he lived like a monk, he fought like a soldier. He obtained a minor hospital appointment in a nearer suburb; then, after three years’ grilling work, he was given the post of clinical pathologist at the Victoria Hospital. A small and unimportant hospital, perhaps; old, too, and conservative in its methods; yet actually this marked the most important step in his career. That night he went home to his rooms in Vincent Street and stared at the portrait of Pasteur upon his desk – Pasteur whom alone he admitted to be great; then he smiled his rare, unusual smile. He felt the power surge up within him to conquer.
    He had swung inevitably into the field of serum therapeutics. And he had a theory, based upon a long series of agglutination experiments, a vivid advance upon the work of Koch and Wright, which he felt would revolutionise the entire principle of scientific treatment.
    It was immense, his idea, magnificent – bearing not merely upon one particular disease, but bigger, much bigger, embracing in its ramifications the whole wide field of preventative and curative inoculation. He burned with this conviction. Singling a specific point of attack, he chose the condition of cerebro-spinal fever; partly because of the mortality of the disease, partly because of the comparative failure of all previous sera.
    So at the Victoria he began. For six months he worked intensely upon his serum, the routine work of his appointment accomplished through the day, this special work at night. His health began to suffer, but he exhibited no gratitude when advised by his friend Ismay to shorten his laboratory hours. Instead, he lengthened them, driven by that burning zeal within him. Nervous, irritable, and overstrung, he still felt himself approaching definitely towards success. Moreover, a seasonal outcropping of sporadic meningitis occurred about this time, and the mere consideration of the existing treatment in all its pre-Adamite ineffectuality – the phrase was his! – goaded him to further effort.
    Late one night he completed his last conclusive tests against controls. Over and over again he checked his results.