The Invisible Victory

15

'Jim-!'

I was just quitting the hospital under the bridge leading to the 'House of Lords'. I spun round.

'David!'

'What the hell are you doing back here, boy?'

'Taking tea with Sir Almroth Wright.'

'What? With the Holy Ghost himself? My word, you're doing well.'

'I'm on the dole.'

'Go on! Pull the other one.'

'What are you doing here?'

'I'm doing my clinical. I'm one of the students. Didn't I tell you I was going to Mary's, when I went down from Cambridge? I've been here a year.'

'Did you get that First in your Part Two?'

David Mellors modestly nodded away this achievement. 'What have you been up to? More work on the staining of bacteria?'

'I've had a year in Germany.'

'You never let on you were going. Which university?'

'I worked in a brewery.'

'Oh, lovely! How do I get a job like that?' He was small, dark, wiry, lively, as Welsh as a leek. He looked at his wristwatch. 'Listen, boy. I've got a five o'clock lecture. The Fountains across the road opens at six. I'll meet you in the public bar. Can you waste an hour?'

An hour seemed of little consequence when I had wasted the past six months. I idled the time away by going to Paddington Station and watching the trains.

David Mellors and I had been friendly at Trinity, thrown together by both of us being 'scholarship boys'. Thackeray's Pendennis was still up at Cambridge then. Most of the undergraduates at Trinity were from the great public schools, many were there simply to amuse themselves. They were swells who never spared their polished contempt for students with the wrong sort of clothes or wrong sort of accent or who worked too hard or had too many brains. I had spent vacations cycling with David round the Welsh valleys, where his father kept a chemist's shop and was immeasurably better off than mine. We lost touch since I quit Cambridge for Wuppertal during the Christmas vacation of 1932. The young live too immediately to recognize friendship as a precious plant worth careful cultivation.

I arrived at the Fountains Abbey as the landlord was shooting back the bolts. I sat at a small round table with half a pint of mild ale, and there being no sign of David pulled out the journal which Fleming had pressed on me. It was Issue No 10, dated June 1929, an abstruse publication which appeared every two months and which I had never before opened.

Inside was a list of its editors. I recognized only two names. J C Drummond was a biochemist like myself, a sprightly, well-liked gourmet, professor at University College in Bloomsbury. W H Florey I remembered as an Australian at Cambridge, lecturer in pathology and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, next door to Trinity. During my final year, Dr Florey had left to become Professor at Sheffield, and every high table chorused amazed tut-tuts.

The index of papers seemed pretty uninteresting. _Tetanus…Myxomatosis of Rabbits_…The last of all had the title, _On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium._ I had never seen Fleming's paper on the fruits of my mistake. I found it covered thirteen pages, bolstered with tables and photographs.

It told me little that I had not already heard from Sir Edward Tiplady. I noticed that twenty-five unknown St Mary's nurses, who are claimed to be the prettiest in London, had involuntarily helped the research when laid up with influenza. Their throat swabs had been cultivated on agar jelly with and without penicillin added. On the ordinary jelly, the streptococcus and pneumonococcus germs which flourish even in healthy throats grew profusely. With the penicillin, no nurse's germs grew at all. There was a photograph of the original Petri dish, which Fleming had shown Sir Edward. It made me recall something which Fleming said at the time-that he was studying the pigment which coloured colonies of staphylococcus germs, which showed best if the germs were grown at room temperature instead of inside an incubator. So that particular Petri dish happened to have been left open on the laboratory bench for the penicillium mould to drop on it. As Sir Edward had mentioned, the mould juice had been squeezed from a skein of chances.

Fleming ended by mentioning that its lack of irritant or poisonous effect might recommend penicillin as a surgical dressing, or for an injection round an infection. There was still no sign of David Mellors. I rolled up the journal and stuck it back in my pocket, carefully retaining half an inch in the bottom of my glass to defy the landlord.

The pub was filling as David burst in, pile of notebooks under his arm, stethoscope coiling from the jacket of his unkempt blue suit. 'I had a practical to finish. What'll you have?'

'Half of mild.'

'Halves?' he said contemptuously. 'Pints tonight, boy. What in the world were you seeing the Holy Ghost for?' he demanded, as he reappeared with the beer.

'I was trying to get a job. I'm on the dole, honestly.'

David took a long draught. 'Any luck?'

'Not the smell of an oil-rag. Like a fool I introduced the subject of chemotherapy. That did for me.'

'Oh, chemotherapy! Wright always calls it "pharmacotherapy", anyway. Pompous sod, isn't he? Where are you living?'

'Same place. My parents still work at the Tipladys'.'

'Sir Edward did pretty well for himself, spotting that subphrenic abscess in the old geezer.' He was referring to His Majesty's illness. 'It shouldn't have cracked anyone's brains open. _Pus somewhere, pus nowhere else, pus under the diaphragm,_ that's the hoariest of surgical tags. Perhaps Lord Dawson and the assembled pundits thought themselves above such aids to memory.'

'Where are you living?'

'I'm in clover, boy. With Archie Fry.'

'In London? I thought he strode over his broad acres in the country?'

'Oh, Archie's quite a man about Town, in his own peculiar way. A flat in Belgravia, doncherknow.' David tipped up the end of his nose with his forefinger. 'Very palatial, even a Jeeves.'

'What's he want to share with you for?' I asked bluntly.

'It's his socialist ideals. You know what Archie's like. It's his father's flat, but he's got the run of it, an enormous place he thinks he should fill with families of unemployed from the East End. I salve his conscience, I'm cleaner and I'm probably less trouble when I come home drunk.'

Archie Fry was my third friend at Trinity. Where other undergraduates afforded us disdain, Archie treated David and I to patronizing equality. He was a self-made socialist from Eton, like George Orwell. But where cadaverous, tuberculous Orwell took the world as his punch-bag to be pounded with muscular prose, Archie was delightfully inept at everything he grappled-writing, publishing, politics or the quest for martyrdom in love or war. He volunteered as a matter of course for Spain in 1936 and for the Guards in 1939 but succeeded in escaping harm from either.

Since I began writing this story, Archie has dropped dead on holiday at St Tropez. Age brings no pleasures, only compensations, of which the cosiest is reading the obituaries of your contemporaries over breakfast. As expected, _The Times_ strewed his grave with ornate wreaths of poisoned ivy. But Archie was essentially a _nice man,_ that highest of sparing, tight-lipped English compliments. And his death brings me now only the feeling of a friend who has left by an earlier train. It also finally struck off that unrusting shackle which binds two men who have shared the bed of the same woman.

'Drink up! I need another pint,' urged David. He was the cleverest student I had ever known, and his bucolic bounce no affectation.

'It's my turn.'

'You're on the dole.'

'I refuse to accept charity,' I said, only half humorously.

'Why not? I accept it from Archie. Look at this tie.' He held it out. 'It's his, pure silk from Jermyn Street. I think I've got his socks on as well.'

'You don't mind sponging on him?'

'It's not sponging, boy, it's socialism. He's a socialist of the pure-minded sort, which is a mug's game. Down where I come from we're all socialists, but on the receiving end. That's different.'

After the next pint-or perhaps the one after, or the one after that-David suggested, 'Why don't you batch with Archie, too? You can't go on living in the servants' hall for ever.'

'I haven't the nerve to ask him. Besides, my parents would miss me.'

'Let them. It's got to come sooner or later. What have you got in common with them? They might have found you on the doorstep. If it isn't you, I'll be sleeping among the dregs of a Mile End doss house. Archie's conscience has been troubling him a lot lately, though I'd put it down to dyspepsia and the wind.' He spotted the journal in my pocket, and frowned as he pulled it out. 'What are you doing with this rag? Even real qualified doctors can't understand it. Not the ones at Mary's, at any rate.'

I turned to Fleming's paper, and told him my part of the story. When I finished he said, 'Yes, I've heard of penicillin. But I didn't know what it was. It's the lysozyme tale all over again, isn't it? You must have seen that famous cartoon in the Mary's Gazette?'_

Everybody had seen it at Mary's. It depicted a line of schoolboys being birched at a penny a time by some amiable sadist, over jars labelled 'Tear Antiseptic'. One winter's day in 1922, the Niobe of sinuses had mothered a scientific infant, when a drip from Fleming's nose fell on a Petri dish and dissolved the germs growing there-exactly like penicillin. 'Lysozyme,' Sir Almroth had christened the mysterious substance. Fleming found it in tears, which he evoked from his colleagues by squirting lemons into their eyes, until to everyone's relief he discovered it also in pikes' eggs. Fleming suggested that lysozyme might be used against human infections, but medical London in 1922 was not particularly interested. Medical London was becoming wary of the fine scientific horses with flowing philosophical manes which pranced in Sir Almroth Wright's stables. I heard later that Fleming had given a couple of lectures on the idea, but doubtless these were as usual incomprehensible.

'When I worked as a lab boy, Flem had lost all interest in lysozyme,' I told David. 'That was a big fault of his, according to everyone in the Department. He was far more interested in performing an elegant experiment than in the result which the experiment was supposed to produce.'

'Still, Flem's had some jammy luck. First a blob of snot, then a blob of mould. They just happened to drop on a Petri dish growing bacteria at exactly the right time.'

'Surely there's no talent in the world as useful as a talent for luck?' I snatched back the journal, flicking it over to the last page of Fleming's paper. 'That mould! It didn't bloody drop from Heaven. I can tell you exactly where it came from.

At the end of the paper, Fleming gave the usual courteous thanks to his colleagues. 'That's the fellow!' I exclaimed. 'The Irishman with the French name, Mr la Touche. He was a mycologist. Which means that he did nothing from morning to night except handle moulds of various sorts. Now I come to think of it, that penicillium mould couldn't possibly have floated through the windows of Flem's little lab up in the turret. For the simple reason that Flem never opened them. The noise from the traffic in Praed Street was terrible, and anyway he had enough germs in test-tubes on the window-sills to kill the entire British Army. Flem wouldn't have been the most popular man in Paddington if they'd dropped on the top deck of a passing omnibus.'

David drained his glass, disappointingly unimpressed.

'I remember when I worked there in 1928,' I went on, 'la Touche used to grow specimens of moulds in big open dishes for Dr Freeman to make vaccines and inject his hay-fever patients-like immunization against typhoid. And la Touche's lab was immediately below Flem's! Why, it was a fungus factory. The staircase outside must have had more moulds floating in it than any area in London. Flem's mould didn't originate from the hand of God, but from the bedroom slippers of some wheezy asthmatic or rheumy-eyed hay-fever sufferer. Do you suppose Flem would be interested if I told him?'

'I shouldn't think so. It would only indicate that he was working in filthy conditions.'

In the end, I agreed to move in with David. 'I'm prepared to pay Archie ten bob a week,' I told him.

'At Archie's you don't pay, you borrow. Let's go down the road and get some fish and chips. I'll stand treat.'

I still have the journal signed by Fleming. If I sent it along to Sotheby's auction rooms I should get a substantial sum for it. You can still see the grease mark of our fish and chips.