“If there is a copy of that will, Thorndyke,” he said, “we shall get it. I think you agree with me, reverend senior?”
“I have already said,” was the reply, “that I put my trust in Berkeley. And now let us dismiss professional topics. This is our hostelry.”
He pushed open an unpretentious glazed door, and we followed him into the restaurant, whereof the atmosphere was pervaded by an appetizing meatiness mingled with less agreeable suggestions of the destructive distillation of fat.
It was some two hours later when I wished my friends adieu under the golden-leaved plane trees of King’s Bench Walk.
“I won’t ask you to come in now,” said Thorndyke, “as we have some consultations this afternoon. But come in and see us soon; don’t wait for that copy of the will.”
“No,” said Jervis. “Drop in in the evening when your work is done; unless, of course, there is more attractive society elsewhere. Oh, you needn’t turn that color, my dear child; we have all been young once; there is even a tradition that Thorndyke was young some time back in the pre-dynastic period.”
“Don’t take any notice of him, Berkeley,” said Thorndyke. “The eggshell is sticking to his head still. He’ll know better when he is my age.”
“Methuselah!” exclaimed Jervis. “I hope I shan’t have to wait as long as that!”
Thorndyke smiled benevolently at his irrepressible junior, and, shaking my hand cordially, turned into the entry.
From the Temple I wended northward, to the adjacent College of Surgeons, where I spent a couple of profitable hours examining the “pickles” and refreshing my memory on the subjects of pathology and anatomy; marveling afresh (as every practical anatomist must marvel) at the incredibly perfect technique of the dissections, and inwardly paying tribute to the founder of the collection. At length the warning of the clock, combined with an increasing craving for tea, drove me forth and bore me toward the scene of my not very strenuous labors. My mind was still occupied with the contents of the cases and the great glass jars, so that I found myself at the corner of Fetter Lane without a very clear idea of how I had got there. But at that point I was aroused from my reflections rather abruptly by a raucous voice in my ear.
“ ’Orrible discovery at Sidcup!”
I turned wrathfully—for a London street-boy’s yell, let off at point-blank range, is, in effect, like the smack of an open hand—but the inscription on the staring yellow poster that was held up for my inspection changed my anger to curiosity.
“Horrible discovery in a watercress-bed!”
Now, let prigs deny it if they will, but there is something very attractive in a “horrible discovery.” It hints at tragedy, at mystery, at romance. It promises to bring into our gray and commonplace life that element of the dramatic which is the salt that our existence is savored withal. “In a watercress-bed,” too! The rusticity of the background seemed to emphasize the horror of the discovery, whatever it might be.
I bought a copy of the paper, and, tucking it under my arm, hurried on to the surgery, promising myself a mental feast of watercress; but as I opened the door I found myself confronted by a corpulent woman of piebald and pimply aspect who saluted me with a deep groan. It was the lady from the coal shop in Fleur-de-Lys Court.
“Good evening, Mrs. Jablett,” I said briskly; “not come about yourself, I hope.”
“Yes, I have,” she answered, rising and following me gloomily into the consulting-room; and then, when I had seated her in the patient’s chair and myself at the writing table, she continued: “It’s my inside, you know, doctor.”
The statement lacked anatomical precision and merely excluded the domain of the skin specialist. I accordingly waited for enlightenment and speculated on the watercress-beds, while Mrs. Jablett regarded me expectantly with a dim and watery eye.
“Ah!” I said at length; “it’s your—your inside, is it, Mrs. Jablett?”
“Yus. And my ’ead,” she added, with a voluminous sigh that filled the apartment with odorous reminiscences of “unsweetened.”
“Your head aches, does it?”
“Somethink chronic!” said Mrs. Jablett. “Feels as if it was a-opening and a-shutting, a-opening and a-shutting, and when I sit down I feel as if I should bust.”
This picturesque description of her sensations—not wholly inconsistent with her figure—gave the clue to Mrs. Jablett’s sufferings. Resisting a frivolous impulse to reassure her as to the elasticity of the human integument, I considered her case in exhaustive detail, coasting delicately round the subject of “unsweetened” and finally sent her away, revived in spirits and grasping a bottle of Mist. Sodae cum Bismutho from Barnard’s big stock-jar. Then I went back to investigate the Horrible Discovery; but before I could open the paper, another patient arrived (Impetigo contagiosa, this time, affecting the “wide and arched-front sublime” of a juvenile Fetter Laner), and then yet another, and so on through the evening until at last I forgot the watercress-beds altogether. It was only when I had purified myself from the evening consultations with hot water and a nailbrush and was about to sit down to a frugal supper, that I remembered the newspaper and fetched it from the drawer of the consulting-room table, where it had been hastily thrust out of sight. I folded it into a convenient form, and, standing it upright against the water-jug, read the report at my ease as I supped.
There was plenty of it. Evidently the reporter had regarded it as a “scoop,” and the editor had backed him up with ample space and hair-raising headlines.
Horrible Discovery in a Watercress-bed at Sidcup!
A startling discovery was made yesterday afternoon in the
