'Not so much the twitching as the jaundiced colour. It looks bad to me.'
'Damn it,' began Teal explosively.
'Acid,' pronounced Kennedy, engulfing crumpets. 'That's generally the beginning of the trouble. Too much acid swilling around the lining of your stomach, and where are you ? In next to no time you're a walking mass of gastric ulcers. You know what happens when a gastric ulcer eats into a blood vessel ?'
'You bleed to death ?' asked Peters interestedly.
'Like a shot,' said Kennedy, apparently unaware of the fact that Teal was starting to simmer and splutter like a pan full of hot grease. 'It's even worse when the ulcer makes a whacking great hole in the wall of the stomach and your dinner falls through into the abdominal cavity....'
Mr Teal clung to his chair and wished that he had been born deaf.
It was no consolation at all to him to recall that it had actually been the Saint himself who had started the fashion of making familiar and even disgusting comments on the shape and dimensions of the stomach under discussion, a fashion which Mr Teal's own colleagues, to their eternal disgrace, had been surprisingly quick to adopt. And now that it had been revealed that his recent irritability had been caused by acute indigestion, the joke would take a new lease of life. It is a curious but undeniable fact that a man may have a headache or a toothache or an earache and receive nothing but sympathy from those about him; but let his stomach ache and all he can expect is facetiousness of the most callous and offensive kind. Mr Teal's stomach was a magnificently well-developed organ, measuring more inches from east to west than he cared to calculate and he was perhaps excessively sensitive about it; but in its present condition the most faintly flippant reference to it was exquisite torment.
He stood up.
'Will you excuse me, sir?' he said, with as much dignity as he could muster. 'I've got a job to do this evening.'
'Don't forget to buy some Miracle Tea on your way home,' was Kennedy's farewell.
Mr Teal walked up Victoria Street in the direction of his modest lodgings. He had no job to do at all; but it would have been physically impossible for him to have stomached another minute of the conversation he had left behind him. He walked, because he had not far to go, and the exercise helped to distract his thoughts from the feeling that his intestines were being gnawed by a colony of hungry rats. Not that the distraction was by any means complete: the rats continued their remorseless depredations. But he was able to give them only half his attention instead of the whole of it. In the circumstances it was perhaps natural that the broadcast which had been added to his current griefs should remain vaguely present in the background of his mind. The address given had been in Victoria Street. And therefore it was perhaps not such a wild coincidence after all that he should presently have found himself gazing at a large showcard in the window of a chemist's shop which he must have been passing practically every day for the last two months.
INDIGESTION?
Try
Mr Teal was not even averagely gullible; but a man in his state of mind is not fully responsible for his actions. The tribulations of the last few weeks had reduced him to a state of desperation in which he would have tried a dose of prussic acid if it had been recommended with sufficient promises of alleviating his distress.
With a furtive glance around him, as if he was afraid of being caught in a disreputable act, he entered the shop and approached the counter, behind which stood a shifty-eyed young man in a soiled white coat.
'A packet of Miracle Tea,' said Mr Teal, lowering his voice to a mumble, although the shop was empty, as though he had been asking for some unmentionable merchandise.
He planked down a half-crown with unconvincing defiance.
