"But you are young!" It was a protest, almost vehement. She remembered the doctor's warning that the real battle would begin when the patient recovered consciousness. "You have all the world before you."
"Rather behind me;" and he spoke no more that morning.
Throughout the afternoon, while the doctor was giving her the first lesson out of his profound knowledge of life, her interest would break away continually, despite her honest efforts to pin it down to the facts so patiently elucidated for her. Recurrently she heard: "I don't know; I really don't know." It was curiously like the intermittent murmur of the surf, those weird Sundays, when her father paused for breath to launch additional damnation for those who disobeyed the Word. "I don't know; I really don't know."
Her ear caught much of the lesson, and many things she stored away; but often what she heard was sound without sense. Still, her face never betrayed this distraction. And what was singular she did not recount to the doctor that morning's adventure. Why? If she had put the query to herself, she could not have answered it. It was in no sense confessional; it was a state of mind in the patient the doctor had already anticipated. Yet she held her tongue.
As for the doctor, he found a pleasure in this service that would have puzzled him had he paused to analyse it. There was scant social life on the Sha-mien aside from masculine foregatherings, little that interested him. He took his social pleasures once a year in Hong-Kong, after Easter. He saw, without any particular regret, that this year he would have to forego the junket; but there would be ample compensation in the study of these queer youngsters. Besides, by the time they were off his hands, old McClintock would be dropping in to have his liver renovated.
All at once he recollected the fact that McClintock's copra plantation was down that way, somewhere in the South Seas; had an island of his own. Perhaps he had heard of this Enschede. Mac—the old gossip—knew about everything going on in that part of the world; and if Enschede was anything up to the picture the girl had drawn, McClintock would have heard of him, naturally. He might solve the riddle. All of which proves that the doctor also had his moments of distraction, with this difference: he was not distracted from his subject matter.
"So endeth the first lesson," he said. "Suppose we go and have tea?
I'd like to take you to a teahouse I know, but we'll go to the
Victoria instead. I must practise what I preach."
"I should be unafraid to go anywhere with you."
"Lord, that's just the lesson I've been expounding! It isn't a question of fear; it's one of propriety."
"I'll never understand."