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In The Same Boat
by
‘Tell me the symptoms, and I’ll draw my own inferences, Johnnie.’
‘Symptoms! The girl was rank poisoned with Najdolene. Ramping, stamping possession. Gad, I thought she’d have the chandelier down.’
‘Mine came unstuck too, and he has the physique of a bull,’ said Gilbert. ‘What delusions had yours?’
‘Faces–faces with mildew on them. In any other walk of life we’d call it the Horrors. She told me, of course, she took the drugs to mask the faces. Post hoc, propter hoc again. All liars!’
‘What’s that?’ said the senior K.C. quickly. ‘Sounds professional.’
‘Go away! Not for you, Sandy.’ Sir John turned a shoulder against him and walked with Gilbert in the chill evening.
To Conroy in his chambers came, one week later, this letter:
DEAR MR. CONROY–If your plan of a night’s trip on the 17th
still holds good, and you have no particular destination in
view, you could do me a kindness. A Miss Henschil, in whom I
am interested, goes down to the West by the 10.8 from
Waterloo (Number 3 platform) on that night. She is not
exactly an invalid, but, like so many of us, a little shaken
in her nerves. Her maid, of course, accompanies her, but if I
knew you were in the same train it would be an additional
source of strength. Will you please write and let me know
whether the 10.8 from Waterloo, Number 3 platform, on the
17th, suits you, and I will meet you there? Don’t forget my
caution, and keep up the tonic.–Yours sincerely,
L. RUTHERFORD GILBERT.
‘He knows I’m scarcely fit to look after myself,’ was Conroy’s thought. ‘And he wants me to look after a woman!’
Yet, at the end of half an hour’s irresolution, he accepted.
Now Conroy’s trouble, which had lasted for years, was this:
On a certain night, while he lay between sleep and wake, he would be overtaken by a long shuddering sigh, which he learned to know was the sign that his brain had once more conceived its horror, and in time–in due time–would bring it forth.
Drugs could so well veil that horror that it shuffled along no worse than as a freezing dream in a procession of disorderly dreams; but over the return of the event drugs had no control. Once that sigh had passed his lips the thing was inevitable, and through the days granted before its rebirth he walked in torment. For the first two years he had striven to fend it off by distractions, but neither exercise nor drink availed. Then he had come to the tabloids of the excellent M. Najdol. These guarantee, on the label, ‘Refreshing and absolutely natural sleep to the soul-weary.’ They are carried in a case with a spring which presses one scented tabloid to the end of the tube, whence it can be lipped off in stroking the moustache or adjusting the veil.
Three years of M. Najdol’s preparations do not fit a man for many careers. His friends, who knew he did not drink, assumed that Conroy had strained his heart through valiant outdoor exercises, and Conroy had with some care invented an imaginary doctor, symptoms, and regimen, which he discussed with them and with his mother in Hereford. She maintained that he would grow out of it, and recommended nux vomica.
When at last Conroy faced a real doctor, it was, he hoped, to be saved from suicide by a strait-waistcoat. Yet Dr. Gilbert had but given him more drugs–a tonic, for instance, that would couple railway carnages–and had advised a night in the train. Not alone the horrors of a railway journey (for which a man who dare keep no servant must e’en pack, label, and address his own bag), but the necessity for holding himself in hand before a stranger ‘a little shaken in her nerves.’
He spent a long forenoon packing, because when he assembled and counted things his mind slid off to the hours that remained of the day before his night, and he found himself counting minutes aloud. At such times the injustice of his fate would drive him to revolts which no servant should witness, but on this evening Dr. Gilbert’s tonic held him fairly calm while he put up his patent razors.