“You’d like to see our place,” she said. “I’ll call one of the doctors.”
She pressed a button, and presently in came a man whom she addressed as Doctor Peters. He was preposterously like a doctor, too, tall, grave, black-bearded, with a quite charming manner. He willingly led Lionel about, through the four rooms which constituted the “Institute.” There was the “laboratory” where one learned to compound the “antidotes”; there were two class-rooms, on the walls of which were blackboards and charts, and there was a snug little carpeted room which was the “office of the Dean and Examining Room.” There were pamphlets from which the pupils studied, but they were not to be removed from the premises. Upon completing the course, the student was given the “Twenty Famous Key-Prescriptions,” by means of which every ill could be remedied.
Poor Lionel was impressed. He stealthily scrutinised the students already engaged in the course; they were well-dressed, quiet fellows, six in all. Doctor Peters gave him information regarding them. Two of them had been hospital nurses, one was a qualified M. D., one a dentist, the other two former “business men.” “A good class of men,” the doctor said, “we don’t encourage any others.”
It was all so neat, so bright, so open to inspection. And Doctor Peters had nothing of the charlatan in looks or manners. He was courteous and very restrained; he did not in any way extol the facilities of the Institute to Lionel; he treated him as an intelligent layman anxious to be informed. If he wished to avail himself of these extraordinary advantages, very well. He could see for himself what was offered.
There was in Lionel’s mind nothing inquisitive, nothing critical. His rules of conduct had been supplied to him by persons of authority—persons not unlike Doctor Peters. He began to feel that there might be something in this thing, after all.
II
And he never quite lost that idea. Indeed, he developed a faith in Tonico-Therapy which no one—not even Minnie or Doctor Peters, suspected. He studied the course diligently, trying his utmost to understand and assimilate the farrago of nonsense in the pamphlets. He was too ignorant of physiology and chemistry to detect some of the grossest blunders, and he really fancied he was mastering a sort of profession.
At the end of the ten weeks he received a diploma and a great deal of congratulation and good advice from the “Dean,” a white-haired old reprobate with a perpetual grin; and went home to Minnie, a full-fledged “Professor of Tonico-Therapy.” The “Dean” had suggested that he use “Professor” instead of “Doctor.”
Minnie was wild with delight; she considered their fortune made. She had had a sign printed for him “Lionel Naylor—Professor of Tonico-Therapy,” and it was displayed prominently in the sitting-room window. She also insisted upon an advertisement in one of the local papers, an advertisement modelled upon others she had read and no doubt admired, and which shocked Lionel, yet to which he could offer no reasonable objection. “If doctors have not helped you,” it ran, “why not try the Newer Way—Tonico-Therapy? Professor Lionel Naylor will see clients between 10 and 12 and between 3 and 5. Also by appointment.”
It would be difficult to find words for Lionel’s terror and distress. He showed nothing of it, except that he was quite unable to eat, but he sat, professionally concealed within the house, sick with dread at the idea of a patient’s coming. Minnie had arranged the room to look as office-like as she could; she had put a big table in the centre of it, with a big chair for the professor and other chairs ranged about the walls; there was a book-case containing second-hand medical books—imposing though not at all consistent with the theory Lionel was to maintain; even books on surgery, which was so bitterly denounced in the Tonico-Therapy pamphlets under the name of “going under the knife.”