“Then you should take some pains to understand them,” observed Dr. Gurnet. “Not to understand the language of an enemy is the first step toward defeat. Why, it is even necessary sometimes to understand one’s friends.”
Winn said that he had a friend he understood perfectly; his name was Lionel Drummond.
“I know him through and through,” he explained; “that’s why I trust him.” Dr. Gurnet looked interested, but not convinced.
“Ah,” he said, “personally I shouldn’t trust any man till he was dead. You know where you are then, you know. Before that one prophesies. By the by, are you married?” Dr. Gurnet did not raise his eyes at this question, but before Winn’s leaden “Yes” had answered him he had written on the case paper, “Unhappy domestic life.”
“And — er — your wife’s not here with you?” Dr. Gurnet suavely continued. Winn thought himself non-committal when he confined himself to saying:
“No; she’s in England with my boy.” He was as non-committal for Dr. Gurnet as if he had been a wild elephant. He admitted Peter with a change of voice, and asked eagerly if things with lungs were hereditary or catching?
“Not at present in your case,” Dr. Gurnet informed him. “By the by, you’ll get better, you know. You’re a little too old to cure, but you’ll patch up.”
“What does that mean?” Winn demanded. “Shall I be a broken-winded, cats’-meat hack?”
Dr. Gurnet shook his head.
“You can go back to your regiment,” he said, “and do anything you like bar pig-sticking and polo in a year’s time. That is to say, if you do as you are told for that year and will have the kindness to remember that, if you do not, I am not responsible, nor shall I be in any great degree inconsolable. I am here like a sign-post; my part of the business is to point the road. I really don’t care if you follow it or not; but I should be desolated, of course, if you followed it and didn’t arrive. This, however, has not yet occurred to me.