Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 1

OU are suffering," said the doctor, quietly, "from a disease for which no cure has ever been known."

The doctor snapped together the arms of his stethoscope, much as a lawyer might have snapped his glasses at the close of a hard-fought trial, turned to his desk, and began to lay the instrument deliberately in its case. His specialty was diseases of the nervous system, and his whole office had the luxurious, airy sparseness which such a specialty would have implied. It appeared more like an architect's office than a physician's.

Arnold Bellsmith, standing before him with coat and waistcoat in disarray watched him with a sudden grip at his heart, which, however, was purely a physical reaction to the mere sound of the doctor's words. Although this was his first professional consultation with Dr. MacVickar, Bellsmith had known him casually for some years and he did not, after his first convulsive start, take the physician's verdict at its face-value. A tentative, nervous smile crossed his lips.

"Well," he asked, with a weak attempt at forced humor, "just—just how long do you give me to live?"

The Scotch doctor turned abruptly with the almost brutal gruffness which even polished practitioners sometimes seem called on to use.

"What did you say?" he demanded.

The nervous smile wavered again over Bellsmith's lips, but this time with less assurance.

"I asked," he faltered, "how long you gave me to live."

The doctor surveyed him from head to toe, as if that glance alone were sufficient to give him his answer.

"How long do I give you to live?" he repeated.

With agonizing deliberateness he placed a rubber band around the stethoscope case and slipped under it a note of some kind for. his office nurse: then, with a twinkle in his eye, he looked back at Bellsmith.

"About eighty years," he replied. "Unless," he added as an afterthought, "unless you blow out your own brains some rainy night, over there in that old house of yours, or unless you get to brooding so hard that you think you've slipped over the edge and your misguided friends cart you off to some sanatorium."

Bellsmith smiled again, but this time in pure ruefulness. He began to button his waistcoat with prim, exact gestures, pulling it down with a tug as he fastened each button.

"Doctor, I almost believed you," he said. "You spoke so sharply you startled me."

"Did I?" replied the doctor, non-committally.

He seated himself at his desk, took up a fountain-pen, and, drawing toward him the card which the nurse had handed him as Bellsmith entered, wrote a brief line or two in careful letters, as square as print.

"How old did you say you were?"

"Thirty-five," replied Bellsmith, as if there were something to be ashamed of in that age.

The doctor carefully wrote down the figures, then studied the card with narrowed eyes, as if he were making a steel-engraving. Having apparently formed his opinion, he suddenly threw down his pen and looked back at Bellsmith with an amiable smile which seemed preparatory to dismissal. "Mr. Bellsmith," he announced, with a brisk change of tone, "organically there is not one single thing the matter with you. Of course you need . Men of your type usually do, but, outside of that, any insurance company would jump at you as a risk."

Bellsmith absently strung his fine gold watch-chain through a top buttonhole of his waistcoat, mechanically felt of his pockets, and settled his coat at the back of the collar. As he stood there slightly stooped and feeling somewhat like a school-boy, he was aware of a ridiculous sense of disappointment. He had not really expected that this long-advised, long-deferred visit to the nerve specialist would develop anything he did not already know, but it seemed a gross anticlimax to be told that in so many words.

"Then," he began, rather shamefaced, "the incurable disease from which I am suffering is nothing but pure imagination?"

"Oh, not at all! not at all!" protested the doctor, firmly. "It is real enough, but its cure is outside the province of pathology. Sit down."

With really pathetic eagerness Bellsmith sank into a big leather chair for, in spite of what the doctor had said, he still felt no relief from the ominous and oppressive dread which had been hanging over his mind for months and which had caused him, in desperation, to make this appointment. He really did feel that he would gain a distinct relief if he could only talk his case out with some one as briskly competent, some one as crisply sure of himself, as Dr. MacVickar. Probably Dr. MacVickar, for his part, realized fully this longing to talk, in fact had provided for it, as he leaned back sociably in his desk-chair and prepared to let the flood come.

Bellsmith's fingers wandered aimlessly over his knees, and his eyes began searching the adjacent furniture.

"What are you looking for?" asked the doctor. "A cigarette!"

"I hadn't thought of it," answered Bellsmith, but his expression belied him. He looked around quizzically at the ultra-modernity of the office. "I suppose that it wouldn't do to smoke here!"

"Wait a minute," ordered the doctor. He rose briskly, opened a door, and called to the nurse, who sat at a telephone-desk in the tiny hallway. He asked a question or two, she showed him a pad of appointments, and Dr. MacVickar turned back to Bellsmith:

"Would you mind waiting a moment put here? Leave your coat and hat where they are."

As Bellsmith stepped into the passage, the door of the waiting-room was opened by the nurse, and a young woman, quietly dressed, with a demure, preoccupied expression, was ushered into the hall. For a moment Bellsmith and she were brought face to face, and the girl's expression suddenly lightened into a smile, but, before Bellsmith could do more than stare at her, amazed, the smile was checked and the girl looked away, embarrassed and apparently a good bit angered at herself. In the darkened hallway standing without his hat and coat, she had mistaken him for the doctor.

Bellsmith stepped aside and allowed her to pass, but, in that brief, embarrassed moment, he had caught and retained a strangely vivid impression of her. He had a feeling, not that he knew her, but that he ought to know her, such a sensation as he might have had on suddenly coming face to face with a person whom he had frequently heard described but whom he had never actually met.

And, at that, was he sure that he had not met this young woman somewhere—somebody's sister, somebody's cousin? She was obviously a girl of the type with which he was most familiar, in fact the only type with which he was really familiar, yet there had been about her an instant suggestion of something different from the average girl in the City of Leicester, something professional possibly, something, again, which Bellsmith knew that he recognized but which he could not exactly identify.

In the meantime Dr. MacVickar had appeared at the door of his consultation-room and the girl had passed in. Bellsmith heard a brief, hearty greeting and a reply. He heard the doctor say, "Well, and how are you feeling to-day?" and then the door closed behind them.

Bellsmith turned to the nurse, feeling, vaguely, that, under the circumstances, she might feel it her duty to amuse him, but the nurse was already seated at her little telephone-desk and, with a great show of business, had begun to write rapidly on one of the doctor's endless catalogue-cards. Bellsmith sat down on the oak settle by the entrance door and watched her idly.

"What innumerable ways," he pondered, "the human race has of keeping busy!"