CHAPTER III
LOST DAYS AND THE DOCTOR
IT was ridiculous to endeavour to force a side-of-beef through so small a door; but was it a side-of-beef? No, it was a bed. Why not take out a feather? Was it really a feather-bed? Why should a feather-bed wear a print-dress, a white apron, cuffs and a cap? Of course it was a woman. Beresford gazed fixedly at the figure in the doorway. Yes, it was unquestionably a woman; but why was she there, looking down critically at him lying in bed? Did she want him to get up? He closed his eyes wearily. His head felt very strange.
Presently he opened his eyes again. Yes; it certainly was a woman, and she was looking down at him.
"Who are you? Where am I?" he murmured as he gazed vacantly about the room. "What has happened?"
"Hush! you mustn't talk," was the response.
When he looked again there was only a white door with yellow mouldings occupying the space where the woman in the print-dress had stood. She herself had vanished. It was so stupid of her to run away when spoken to—so like a woman, too, to baulk a natural curiosity. What did it all mean? Why had he thought the woman a side-of-beef, then a feather-bed? What was she there for? Why did he appear to be floating about in space? Why did his whole body feel numbed, yet tingling?
Suddenly he remembered the previous day's adventures, the Rain-Girl, the dinner, Pan, and the concertina. He must get up at once, or she might be gone. He must see her again. He struggled into a sitting posture, then fell back suddenly. He had no strength. What did it all mean?
The door opened and the woman in the print-dress reappeared.
"Where's the Rain-Girl?" he demanded before she had time to close the door behind her, "and what's the time?"
"It's eleven o'clock, and you must lie still, or you'll become worse."
The woman's voice was soft and soothing. For some minutes he pondered deeply over the impenetrable mystery of her words. "Worse!" Had he been ill? It was absurd; yet why was he so weak? Eleven o'clock! Where has his shaving-water?
"What is the date?" he suddenly demanded.
"You must be quiet and not talk," was the reply.
"I must know the date," he insisted.
"It's the eighth of May, and you've been ill and must rest. You're very weak." The nurse bent over him and fussed about with the pillows.
"The eighth of May! Where's the Rain-Girl, Pan, the concertina?" he enquired faintly.
"Hush! I shall get into trouble with the doctor if I allow you to talk," she said. "You must sleep now, and we will talk when you are stronger."
"Nature discourages eccentricity, did you know that?" he muttered apathetically, as he closed his eyes.
The nurse regarded him curiously. He did not appear to be delirious; yet what he was saying was Sick-nursing, however, produces its own philosophy, and she settled herself down to read until the doctor should arrive.
A lengthy period of silence was broken by Beresford.
"Would you very much mind putting aside your book and answering a few questions?" he asked in a feeble voice.
With an air of professional resignation, she lowered the book on her lap.
"You really mustn't talk. If you do I shall have to go out of the room. Now you don't want me to get into trouble, do you?" Her tone was that one would adopt to a child.
Beresford lay still, trying to think; but his brain refused his will. The nurse had returned to her book and read steadily on, deliberately disregarding the two or three tentative efforts her patient made to attract her attention. His voice was very faint, and she pretended not to hear. The doctor had said he was not to talk, and she was too good a nurse to allow imagination to modify her instructions.
When the doctor arrived an hour later, he found his patient restless and irritable. Seeing this at a glance, he sat down by the bedside, placed a cool, strong hand upon his head, and began to talk. The effect was instantaneous. Beresford lay quiet, and the drawn lines of irritation upon his face relaxed.
"Had rather a bad time. Pneumonia brought on, or hastened, by that wetting you got. Delirious when they found you the next morning. Then we had to fight for you, and here after seven days you've come around. That was what you wanted to know, eh?"
Beresford smiled his thanks.
"And the Rain-Girl?" he questioned, "the girl who was here and played the concertina. Has she gone?"
The doctor smiled.
"I know, I saw her. Grey eyes and a manner half-demure, half-impertinent, wholly maddening. Yes, I met her on the road."
Beresford smiled appreciatively at the doctor's description.
"You're the best man's doctor I ever met," he said. "Do women like you?"
The doctor threw back his head and laughed loudly, causing the nurse, who had just left the room, to wonder if he were mad.
"I'm supposed to be a woman's doctor," he replied.
"Then you are in for a big success," said Beresford faintly. "Who are you?"
"Look here, you must let me talk. I'm James Tallis, practising at Print as a first step to Wimpole or Harley Streets. The girl went away, so don't worry about her. Such eyes ought to be gouged out by Act of Parliament. They were intolerable. Now I'm off. Don't fidget, don't worry, don't ask the nurse questions, and I'll try and tell you everything in time. I'll run in again to-morrow, and we'll have a longer talk. 'Bye."
Beresford stretched out his hand, which Tallis took, at the same time feeling his pulse.
"Don't give me drugs, just talk when you can," he said weakly. "Of course you're only a dream-doctor. If not you're mad." With that he lay back, tired with the effort of talking, and the doctor with another laugh left the room, whispered a few words to the nurse in the corridor, and whisked out of the hotel.
Was there ever such a crazy, topsy-turvy world? Beresford's mind was a chaos of absurdities. He had flown from the commonplace, and landed in a veritable Gehenna of interest. Within thirty hours of setting out, a modern Don Quixote, plus a temperament, he had encountered more incidents, pleasant and unpleasant, than most men have any right to expect in a decade. It was absurd, ridiculous, insane to overload a man's stomach with adventure in this way. It was like giving beef-steak pudding to some poor devil with gastritis. Perhaps after all he would be forced to return to London in search of quiet. The country was evidently packed with adventures too monstrously anti-climatic for him. And he fell asleep as a protest against the obvious mismanagement of his affairs by fate.
On the morrow the doctor came again, chatted for a quarter of an hour, then, like a breeze on a hot summer's day, departed. The nurse was negative: she was uncongenial, uncompanionable, uneverything.
On the second day the proprietor came to see the patient. He was a little man with a round figure and a round smile. He entered the room as if it had been a death-chamber, approached the bed on tip-toe, and smiled nervously. As a landlord he was all that could be desired. He would meet his guests at the door and welcome them as a good host should. He would enquire after their comfort, and in the mornings ask if they had slept well. He would gossip with them cheerfully if they showed themselves inclined for talk, and he personally superintended the kitchen, having once been a chef. In short, he strove to combine all that was most attractive in modern comfort with the best traditions of the old coaching days.
In a sick-room, however, the landlord of "The Two Dragons" was out of place. Rich in tact and amiability, he was bankrupt in all else. He spoke in a hushed whisper, sat on the extreme edge of his chair, and coughed nervously from time to time, raising the tips of his fingers to his lips. He was smiling, he was bland; but Beresford was thankful when he rose to go, promising to come in on the morrow.
The Rain-Girl continued to monopolise Beresford's thoughts. What had become of her? Where was she now? Should he ever see her again? To all these questions there was no answer, at least no answer that satisfied him.
During those dreary days of convalescence he chafed under the "dire compulsion of infertile days." Outside were the trees, the birds, the sunlight, with an occasional sudden rush of rain, followed by the maddening scent of moist earth. He fumed and fretted at the restraint put upon him, not only by the doctor; but by his own physical weakness. He longed for the open road once more.
The monotony of it all, of being a hotel-invalid; it was intolerable. The events of the day, what were they? Breakfast, the arrival of the morning paper, a visit of ceremony from the landlord, lunch, the doctor and tea—and, finally, dinner. Sometimes the doctor would spend an hour with him in the evening.
The nurse was an infliction. In herself she was sufficient to discourage any one from falling ill. She had neither conversation nor ideas, she whistled as she moved about the room, or else she talked incessantly, now that her patient was convalescent. Sometimes she appeared to talk and whistle at the same time, so swift were the alternations.
The landlord—a man rich in that which made a good landlord but in nothing else—exhausted his ideas within the space of five minutes. With great regularity he entered the sick-room each morning at eleven, at eleven-five he would take his departure, more genial, more amiable, and more obviously good-hearted than ever. The doctor was the most welcome visitor of all; but he was a busy man.
"If the microbes of this neighbourhood were only sociable," he would say, "I might spend more time with you. As it is they're wanderers to a germ, and get as far as possible from each other before descending upon my patients. The result is that I am kept rushing from place to place with phial and lancet, sedative and purge, all because of the nomadic habits of these precious bacilli."
These unprofessional visits from the doctor Beresford looked forward to as intellectual oases in the desert of his own thoughts. He had endeavoured to emulate Xavier Le Maistre; but he had to confess to himself that Voyages Autour de ma Chambre were impossible to him, so there remained only the doctor.
One evening towards the end of the month they sat charting beside the bedroom fire, Beresford wrapped in a heavy dressing-gown borrowed from the landlord. They had been talking of the war and the social upheaval that was following it.
"It was all so strange coming back here," said Beresford, "a lot of the fellows remarked upon it. Somehow or other we didn't seem to belong—we didn't seem to fit in, you know. When I came back on leave I noticed it particularly. I would go to a restaurant, hear the talk and laughter, listen to the music; yet twenty-four hours previously I—oh! it was all wrong, and is wrong, and will continue to be wrong," he broke off irritably.
"I know," said Tallis quietly.
"You were out there?" queried Beresford.
"For more than a couple of years, one part of the time at an advanced dressing-station."
"So you know," said Beresford with interest.
Tallis nodded, puffing methodically at his pipe.
"The strange thing is that some knew what was the matter with them, others were just like animals who were ill and couldn't understand it. You've seen a dog look up at you as if enquiring why it can't enjoy things as it used to?"
Tallis nodded again.
"Well, that's what some of the men reminded me of," continued Beresford, "especially those who had come back from leave. God!" he exclaimed, "it was an unequal distribution of the world's responsibilities."
For some time they smoked in silence. Presently the doctor bent towards the grate and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"Talking of responsibilities," he said casually, "reminds me of my own. What's the next move after convalescence?"
"The next move?"
"You'd better try Folkestone."
"Folkestone!" cried Beresford, "I'll be damned if I do. I'd sooner go to—to"
"Well, it'll probably be a choice between the two. I'd try Folkestone first, however, if I were you," he added drily. "It'll brace you up."
"But it's going back again" He paused and regarded the doctor comically. "You see," he continued, "I've cut adrift from all that sort of thing. I escaped from London, and now you want to send me to a seaside-town—abomination of abominations. I won't go. I'll see the whole idiotic Faculty damned first. I've been free, and I won't go back to the collar. I know you think I'm a fool," he concluded moodily.
"No, merely an idealist," said Tallis, puffing imperturbably at his pipe.
"Where's the difference?" growled Beresford, petulantly.
"There is none," was the quiet reply. "What'll happen when your money's exhausted?" was the next question. Beresford had already told Tallis of what had led up to his adventure. "I take it that your means, like other things, have their limitations. What'll you do when the money's gone?"
"Oh, anything, everything. If fate sends me pneumonia on the first day of my adventure, on the last she'll probably send me"
"A great desire for life," interrupted the doctor calmly.
Beresford sat up suddenly. "Good Lord!" he burst out. "How horrible! What a fiendish idea."
"Nature has an odd way of paying off old scores. She's a mistress of irony."
"And you appear to be a master of a peculiarly devilish kind of abominable suggestion," said Beresford irritably. "I thought you a dream-doctor at first—you're a nightmare-doctor! Do you think that Nature is a coquette, who appears to discourage a man in order to strengthen his ardour?"
After some hesitation the doctor replied:
"No: she's logical and even-tempered. There's nothing wayward about her: she represents abstract justice. Treat her well and she'll treat you well; abuse her and she's implacable. My professional experience tells me that if she ever deviates from the strict path of justice, it's on the side of clemency."
"Damn your professional experience," snapped Beresford, then he laughed.
"But what are you going to do?" persisted Tallis.
"You're as bad as Aunt Caroline. She always wants to plan a destiny as if it were a dinner."
"But that does not answer my question."
"It doesn't," agreed Beresford, "because there's no answer. When the time comes I shall decide."
They smoked on in silence, and Tallis did not again refer to the subject. The conversation, however, remained in Beresford's mind for several days. The conspiracy against him seemed widespread. Why had there always been this curious strain in him, a sort of unrest, an undefined expectancy? Was he in reality mad? Was he, indeed, pursuing a shadow? In any case he would prove it for himself. He was not to be deterred by this ridiculous, level-headed sawbones with his sententious babble about Nature, justice and clemency. It was true he had been unlucky enough to get pneumonia. Other men had done the same without the circumstance being contorted into an absurd theory that the whole forces of the universe were being directed against them.
Then there was the Rain-Girl. Why had he been so detestably unlucky as to fall ill on the night of meeting her? She was a unique creature, and those eyes! She had charm too, there was something Pagan about her, and her wonderful gurgling laugh; but she had said he was all wrong, and she certainly had nothing in common with Aunt Caroline.
Each day his determination to see the girl grew stronger. She had cast a spell over him. She had fascinated him. She cared for the things that he cared for. He must see her again. He would see her again—but how? At this juncture he generally lay back in his chair, or bed, and gave up the problem until he were stronger and better able to grapple with it.
Once there had come over him an unreasoning anger at her heartlessness. Knowing that a fellow-guest at the hotel was ill, even if only with a chill, a strictly humanitarian woman would have been touched by pity; but were women humanitarian? Had she heard he was ill? In a novel she would have stayed, nursed him back to health, and he would have married her.
This line of reasoning invariably ended in his laughing at his own folly in expecting an acquaintance to act as if she were an intimate friend, and wanting real life to approach the romantic standard of the novelist. That had been the trouble all along. He had asked too much of life.
She was so wonderful, that Rain-Girl. She was a tramp; yet carried with her a soft, feminine frock and had once played the concertina with which to woo the great god Pan! How astonished Olympus must have been at the sight. Why did he want to see her again? Why did life seem somehow to revolve round her? Why, above all, oh! why, a thousand times why, did her face keep presenting itself to his waking vision? In dreams she was paramount, that was understandable, but
"When a man has a few hundred pounds between himself and the Great Adventure, it's better for him not to think about a girl."
"On the contrary, my dear fellow, it's just the moment when he should begin to think seriously about her."
Beresford had unconsciously uttered his thoughts aloud, as he stood at the window, watching the sun through the pine-wood opposite, and Tallis entering unheard, had answered him.
"Now it's you who are the idealist," smiled Beresford.
"If a doctor has an eye for anything but a microbe, he'll recognise that love is a great healer. Don't look for health in a phial or a retort; but in an affinity."
"Drewitt says that an affinity is like a hair-shirt; it enables you to realise the soul through the medium of the senses."
"That's a very poor epigram. Some day you'll discover it for yourself." Tallis drew his pipe from his pocket and proceeded to fill it from Beresford's pouch that lay on the table.
"I suppose," remarked Beresford presently, "that there's nothing, no law, convention or unrepealed statute in the Defense of the Realm Act by which you can insist on my going to Folkestone."
Tallis shook his head and proceeded to light his pipe.
"Then I shall go to London," announced Beresford with decision.
Tallis puffed vigorously at his pipe; but made no comment.
"I said I shall go to London," repeated Beresford.
"You did."
"Then why the devil can't you say something about it?"
"There's nothing to be said," was the smiling retort. "May I ask why you have come to this decision?"
"I'm sick of the country. It's—it's so infernally monotonous," he added somewhat lamely.
Tallis nodded his head comprehendingly.
"Why on earth can't you say something?" snapped Beresford. "You know you think I'm an ass, why on earth can't you tell me so?"
"You might let me know your address when you get settled," said Tallis, ignoring his patient's petulance. "I'd like to keep in touch with you."
"I shall stay at the Ritz-Carlton," announced Beresford, covertly watching Tallis to see the effect of the announcement upon him.
"The Ritz-Carlton," repeated Tallis, without any show of surprise. "I believe they do you rather well there," he remarked quietly. "I suppose she's going to stay there."
"She! Who?" Beresford started up and looked across at Tallis in astonishment.
"The girl with the eyes."
Beresford laughed. "It's no good trying to keep anything from you," he cried. "She's going to stay there, and I must see her again. What has happened I don't know; but she seems to have changed the whole universe for me. How it's all going to end, God only knows," he added gloomily. "All I know is that I must see her again. The thing is when can I start?"
For a few minutes Tallis smoked in silence, obviously thinking deeply, at last he spoke.
"I think perhaps you're right, Beresford. It will have to be London. It would be no use your going to Folkestone in the flesh, if you were in London in the spirit. I think a week or ten days might see you fit to travel, provided you take care."
"Oh! I shall be ready before then, now that whistling-jackass has gone."
"The whistling-jackass?" queried the doctor quickly.
"The nurse. How you can expect any one to get well with that girl about the place, I can't conceive. She did nothing but whistle and talk."
"Did she?" It was obvious that Tallis was making a mental note of the nurse's weakness. "Yes," he continued, "in ten days, or a fortnight at the outside, you'll be fit to travel, provided you take care."
"And what exactly does taking care imply? Does it mean a hot-water bottle and a chest-protector, goloshes and Jaeger underwear?" demanded Beresford irritably.
"You will be weak and easily fatigued. Don't overtire or over-excite yourself, be careful of your diet, keep off spirits and take a good red wine, and generally go slow for a little time," said Tallis professionally.
"But I won't go to Folkestone." There was the note of a rebellious child in Beresford's voice.
"So I understand," said Tallis. "By the way, I shall be running up to town in July, and I'll look you up."
"I wish you would," said Beresford heartily. "I don't want to lose sight of you either. You're such a comic sort of devil, although why you should conceive the diabolical idea of dragging me back resisting to this world I can't conceive. You're just as bad as that colonial Tommy, who risked his own life, and jolly nearly lost it too, merely that I might be involved in the further trouble and expense of living."