On board the S.S. Launceston there had arrived, an hour before sailing, an American gentleman—­a certain Mr. Horace Fletcher, who, having been called home suddenly, had had to take what accommodation he could get on the first available boat.  Two days later he had lain unconscious, strapped to the captain’s table, whilst the ship’s doctor, a young man, himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis.  There had been no facilities.  The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift.  The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher’s chance of seeing land again.  Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat performance—­under the circumstances a masterpiece.

It was the nearest possible approach to a medical advertisement.  Mr. Fletcher was a member of a well-known New York family, and the papers had given the story, with fantastic details as to the ship’s doctor’s career, a first-page prominence.  Mr. Fletcher himself had proved to be both generous and grateful.  In assessing the value of his own life at 1,000 pounds, he had argued with good humour and good sense, he had erred on the side of modesty, and Robert Stonehouse, having weighed the argument gravely, had accepted its practical conclusion as just and reasonable.  He had taken rooms, thereupon, if not actually in Harley Street, at least under the ramparts, fitted them out with the most modern surgical appliances that his capital allowed, and had sat down to wait.  Fortunately he had learnt the art of starving before.  He slept in a garret, and the bottom drawer of the handsome mahogany desk in his consulting-room knew the grim secret of his mid-day meals.  But in six months the tide had turned.  Doctors had remembered him from his hospital days when, if they had not liked him, they had learnt to respect his genius and his courage, and had sent him patients.  The patients themselves, oddly enough, took a fancy to this gaunt, very serious young man, who so obviously cared nothing at all about them, but whose interest in their diseases was almost passionate.  And within two years the tide had brought him in sight of land.

This was what he had meant by “getting hold of things again and pulling them his way.”  There was perhaps something rather simple in a theory of life which had necessitated so much suffering on the part of Mr. Fletcher in order that Dr. Stonehouse might take the first long stride in his career.  But Cosgrave, listening to Stonehouse’s own account of the incident, saw in it only an example of a strange, inexorable truth.  What men called “Fate” was the shadow of themselves.  They imposed their characters upon events, significant or insignificant, willingly or unwillingly.  Beyond that there was no such thing as Fate at all.