IT

CHAPTER XVI

THE LATCH KEY

T had always been Mrs. Sergison's wish that Rudd should be a doctor. Mr. Sergison proposed a walk of life that did not require so expensive a preparation, nor, with reason, did he consider Rudd likely to make a good doctor, for at that time he was often absentminded and gave no signs that he would ever be a capable swift hand in emergencies. None the less, Mrs. Sergison having had her way, less through strength of will than a contribution from her own income to his allowance, Rudd was entered as a student at St. Stephen's Hospital in London.

Mr. Sergison took no further interest. in the matter, except that at his club he now and then remarked that he had decided that his boy should be a medical man. "A noble profession," he would say. "A fine thing, healing one's fellow-creatures," he would say. "The great fight with pain and disease, don't you know."

As for Rudd, he had no great hopes from medicine, but so long as the principles of the pharmacopoeia had to be acquired in London he was ready enough. London was the place.

The next step was to find Rudd's lodgings, and here Uncle Ben came on the scene. Mrs. Sergison would have liked Rudd to live with her brother, who had an odd room or two in his ramshackle upper-part in Westminster, but Uncle Ben was firm against it.

"No," he said, "relations shouldn't live together." Much better too that Rudd should be wholly on his own. And let him rough it a bit and have to scheme to make both ends meet. The smaller the allowance, the more the fun. Enough money when one was young was a great mistake; there should be management and denials. No dinner one day, for example, in order to enjoy a double one the next. No lunch, in order to buy a book or a print.

Rudd agreed heartily with the first part of this statement; for his one idea was to be on his own. From what he knew of London he wanted to live either in the Temple or Staple Inn.

"Of course you do," said Uncle Ben, who was entertaining his sister and nephew to lunch before the great hunt began. "So does everybody in your position. But it can't be done-not on two pounds a week for everything."

A nice boarding-house was Mrs. Sergison's idea, but Uncle Ben here came to Rudd's rescue.

"No," he said. "That's no good for him. In the first place, there aren't any nice boarding-houses, and in the second place, London will be no use to the boy if he is having his meals at regular hours with a lot of people. He's not that sort. No, we must find a bed

sitting-room, with breakfast inclusive, at a reasonable rate, not too far from the hospital."

"I know of such a nice family who would make Rudd one of themselves at Turnham Green," said Mrs. Sergison.

"Then forget it," said Uncle Ben. "We don't want Turnham Green. We want to be within half an hour's walk of the hospital, or ten minutes by bus, in London proper, or improper, and we don't want to be one of any family, except the great human family. That's it, isn't it, Rudd?"

"Yes," said Rudd. "But are you sure Staple Inn's too dear?"

"Certain. That can come later when you have made a little extra by your pen or your father raises your allowance. Now for the 'Britannia.'

"What's that?" asked Mrs. Sergison.

"A public-house," said Uncle Ben. "It is somewhere round there that we will look first."

"Must we?" Mrs. Sergison asked. "I don't like Rudd to be so near a public-house."

"That's all right," said Uncle Ben. "In London all the omnibus centres are called after public-houses. It's a wicked city, you know. Come along now and begin."

With the assistance of a four-wheeler by the hour, they made a thorough search of such likely-looking houses as had "Apartments" over the door-likely in Uncle Ben's view being unlikely in Mrs. Sergison's, and likely in hers being unlikely in his, for, as he was

quickly able to demonstrate, very clean doorsteps and muslin curtains mean nothing.

"That's no real test," he said. "The test is inside. There are several better things to go by than that. There's the smell of the house; there's the servant who opens the door; there's the landlady; and if you have the chance of seeing them, there are the other occupants."

The application of these touchstones eliminated house after house. This landlady was too grasping, that too weary and overworked; this too slatternly, that too self-righteous and prim; this one drank and that one looked as if she might. "Although that's not necessarily an objection," Uncle Ben explained. "The best landlady I ever had-generous, good-tempered, uncomplaining and a fine cook-was always a little bit fuddled, bless her old heart! And on occasions-when the event called for it-tight as a lord." "My dear Ben," said Mrs. Sergison, "I do wish you wouldn't be so lenient."

"You have to be-in London," said Uncle Ben. "Otherwise you couldn't get on at all. Cupboards so packed with skeletons that if you didn't disregard them life wouldn't be worth living."

"I don't like it for Rudd," said his mother.

"Then why make him a doctor?" Uncle Ben asked. "Doctors meet human nature at its weakest and most off its guard. You can't keep doctors in cotton wool."

Mrs. Sergison sighed. "I suppose not," she said.

In the end a bed-sitting-room on a top floor was found in Mornington Crescent, at the corner of which George Cruikshank (as a tablet said) lived and died and in one of the houses of which, as Uncle Ben remembered, Tennyson left the MS. of "In Memoriam." "It's a beautiful room," said the landlady. "You can see Primrose Hill from it.”

"The point is," said Uncle Ben, "what can you see in it? I should like to see a chest of drawers that would hold something, for example, and curtains that would keep out the light."

"You're a noticing one," said the landlady. “If you'll pay a month's rent in advance I'll do just what you want and more too."

And so after a hundred questions from Mrs. Sergison as to airing of sheets and so forth, and a little beating down by Uncle Ben, whom the landlady would much rather have had as a lodger than the rather gloomy looking youth who was with him, the room was secured at the inclusive price of sixteen shillings a week, breakfast included, and coal sixpence per scuttle extra.

This settled, they re-entered the four-wheeler to take Mrs. Sergison to the train and fetch Rudd's luggage from the cloak-room.

All the way there his hand was in his pocket, his fingers tightly clasped round his first latch key.

"Well, my boy, you're launched on the sea of London and life," said Uncle Ben as he was leaving them on their way to the station. "You're coming