Who should come in on the second day but old Captain Whitehall? I was in the back room, trying how many slices I could make out of a pound of potted beef, when he rang my bell, and I only just shut my mouth in time to prevent my heart jumping out.
How that bell clanged through the empty house! I saw who it was, however, when I went into the hall; for the middle panels of my door are of glazed glass, so that I can always study a silhouette of my visitors before coming to closer quarters.
I was not quite sure yet whether I loathed the man or liked him. He was the most extraordinary mixture of charity and drunkenness, lechery and self-sacrifice that I had ever come across. But he brought into the house with him a whiff of cheeriness and hope for which I could not but be grateful. He had a large brown paper parcel under his arm, which he unwrapped upon my table, displaying a great brown jar. This he carried over and deposited on the centre of my mantel-piece.
“You will permit me, Dr. Munro, sir, to place this trifle in your room. It’s lava, sir; lava from Vesuvius, and made in Naples. By ——, you may think its empty, Dr. Munro, sir, but it is full of my best wishes; and when you’ve got the best practice in this town you may point to that vase and tell how it came from a skipper of an armed transport, who backed you from the start.”
I tell you, Bertie, the tears started to my eyes, and I could hardly gulp out a word or two of thanks. What a crisscross of qualities in one human soul! It was not the deed or the words; but it was the almost womanly look in the eyes of this broken, drink-sodden old Bohemian—the sympathy and the craving for sympathy which I read there. Only for an instant though, for he hardened again into his usual reckless and half defiant manner.
“There’s another thing, sir. I’ve been thinking for some time back of having a medical opinion on myself. I’d be glad to put myself under your hands, if you would take a survey of me.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Dr. Munro, sir,” said he, “I am a walking museum. You could fit what ISN’T the matter with me on to the back of a —— visiting card. If there’s any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It’s not every one that can say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living on red pepper and brandy. If you can only set the —— little germs sneezing they’ll soon leave you alone. That’s my theory about cholera, and you should make a note of it, Dr. Munro, sir, for I was shipmates with fifty dead men when I was commanding the armed transport Hegira in the Black Sea, and I know —— well what I am talking about.”
I fill in Whitehall’s oaths with blanks because I feel how hopeless it is to reproduce their energy and variety. I was amazed when he stripped, for his whole body was covered with a perfect panorama of tattooings, with a big blue Venus right over his heart.
“You may knock,” said he, when I began to percuss his chest, “but I am —— sure there’s no one at home. They’ve all gone visiting one another. Sir John Hutton had a try some years ago. ‘Why, dammy, man, where’s your liver?’ said he. ‘Seems to me that some one has stirred you up with a porridge stick,’ said he. ‘Nothing is in its right place.’ ‘Except my heart, Sir John,’ said I. ‘Aye, by ——, that will never lose its moorings while it has a flap left.’”