Chapter IV

The Official View

I rose on the following morning still possessed by the determination to make some oportunity during the day to call on Thorndyke and take his advice on the now urgent question as to what I was to do.  I use the word “urgent” advisedly; for the incidents of the preceding evening had left me with the firm conviction that poison was being administered for some purpose to my mysterious patient, and that no time must be lost if his life was to be saved.  Last night he had escaped only by the narrowest margin—­assuming him to be still alive—­and it was only my unexpectedly firm attitude that had compelled Mr. Weiss to agree to restorative measures.

That I should be sent for again I had not the slightest expectation.  If what I so strongly suspected was true, Weiss would call in some other doctor, in the hope of better luck, and it was imperative that he should be stopped before it was too late.  This was my view, but I meant to have Thorndyke’s opinion, and act under his direction, but

  “The best laid plans of mice and men
   Gang aft agley.”

When I came downstairs and took a preliminary glance at the rough memorandum-book, kept by the bottle-boy, or, in his absence, by the housemaid, I stood aghast.  The morning’s entries looked already like a sample page of the Post Office directory.  The new calls alone were more than equal to an ordinary day’s work, and the routine visits remained to be added.  Gloomily wondering whether the Black Death had made a sudden reappearance in England, I hurried to the dining-room and made a hasty breakfast, interrupted at intervals by the apparition of the bottle-boy to announce new messages.

The first two or three visits solved the mystery.  An epidemic of influenza had descended on the neighbourhood, and I was getting not only our own normal work but a certain amount of overflow from other practices.  Further, it appeared that a strike in the building trade had been followed immediately by a widespread failure of health among the bricklayers who were members of a certain benefit club; which accounted for the remarkable suddenness of the outbreak.

Of course, my contemplated visit to Thorndyke was out of the question.  I should have to act on my own responsibility.  But in the hurry and rush and anxiety of the work—­for some of the cases were severe and even critical—­I had no opportunity to consider any course of action, nor time to carry it out.  Even with the aid of a hansom which I chartered, as Stillbury kept no carriage, I had not finished my last visit until near on midnight, and was then so spent with fatigue that I fell asleep over my postponed supper.

As the next day opened with a further increase of work, I sent a telegram to Dr. Stillbury at Hastings, whither he had gone, like a wise man, to recruit after a slight illness.  I asked for authority to engage an assistant, but the reply informed me that Stillbury himself was on his way to town; and to my relief, when I dropped in at the surgery for a cup of tea, I found him rubbing his hands over the open day-book.