"Exactly, my boy Tommy, you have the correct idea. Yet we do not know it by the test."
"I begin to see what he's driving at, Jack. He knows he can't write because it's a known fact, but he doesn't know it by the scientifically known test known to him—and that's agraphia. If it isn't, it's near enough. Now, he knows he can talk because we all know he can, but no one knows it at present because he can't—and that's aphemia. Do I get you, Professor?"
"Yes, as you say, you get me. The motor area has suffered a concussion; perhaps a slight hemorrhage, perhaps not. It may pass in a few days, or longer. We will keep him quiet, with ice bags to the head and blood pressure low, and see what we shall see. A hundred years ago they would have bled him and made him well. But we shall see!"
"If he'd got well a hundred years ago by being bled, why not now?" I asked.
"He'd be too old now," Tommy whispered; but the professor, not hearing this, looked at me as though I had committed an unpardonable breach of etiquette, and again witheringly replied:
"We have more advanced methods."
Having thus been put in my place, he ordered his patient taken aboard the Whim and ran ahead to superintend the construction of a bed. Scientists are a curious lot, Tommy says, but I doubt if there is another like the professor. I hope not, for the sake of the sciences. But let that pass. In half an hour the big black was resting easily in the midst of paraphernalia especially designed, and Bilkins had been assigned the place as nurse.
I fancied, when this latter suggestion came up, that our old servant might not readily take to it. With twenty years of his life spent as major domo and general valet in my father's household, a sudden transformation into trained nurse for a dusky African must, peradventure, have been a shock.
But in this I was mistaken. The last forty hours of common peril, of a central interest, had lifted Bilkins from that pettiness usually burdensome in servants of his type. He was, as a matter of fact, cheerfully alert to take the job, accepting it with the same enthusiasm that Gates, and later the mate, had straddled the bowsprit. So I realized that Bilkins had doffed the uniform of servitude to put on one that fit a man. True, indeed, there is no such potent melting-pot as common peril! It had been the same in France—banker, lawyer, merchant, beggar-man, thief, perhaps—all one. Common peril, common necessity!—O thou molders of men!
When everything had been arranged, and a sailor put at our ice machine to supply packs for the wounded man's head, Tommy, the professor and I climbed back aboard the Orchid, this time to give her a thorough search. We held to the hope that there might be a note, or little clue, from the girl whose extremity had once led her to send the other message. Monsieur thought this most probable, and our hopes ran high.