On board the S.S. Launceston there had arrived, an hour before sailing, an American gentleman—a certain Mr. Horace Fletcher, who, having been called home suddenly, had had to take what accommodation he could get on the first available boat. Two days later he had lain unconscious, strapped to the captain's table, whilst the ship's doctor, a young man, himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat performance—under the circumstances a masterpiece.
It was the nearest possible approach to a medical advertisement. Mr. Fletcher was a member of a well-known New York family, and the papers had given the story, with fantastic details as to the ship's doctor's career, a first-page prominence. Mr. Fletcher himself had proved to be both generous and grateful. In assessing the value of his own life at 1,000 pounds, he had argued with good humour and good sense, he had erred on the side of modesty, and Robert Stonehouse, having weighed the argument gravely, had accepted its practical conclusion as just and reasonable. He had taken rooms, thereupon, if not actually in Harley Street, at least under the ramparts, fitted them out with the most modern surgical appliances that his capital allowed, and had sat down to wait. Fortunately he had learnt the art of starving before. He slept in a garret, and the bottom drawer of the handsome mahogany desk in his consulting-room knew the grim secret of his mid-day meals. But in six months the tide had turned. Doctors had remembered him from his hospital days when, if they had not liked him, they had learnt to respect his genius and his courage, and had sent him patients. The patients themselves, oddly enough, took a fancy to this gaunt, very serious young man, who so obviously cared nothing at all about them, but whose interest in their diseases was almost passionate. And within two years the tide had brought him in sight of land.
This was what he had meant by "getting hold of things again and pulling them his way." There was perhaps something rather simple in a theory of life which had necessitated so much suffering on the part of Mr. Fletcher in order that Dr. Stonehouse might take the first long stride in his career. But Cosgrave, listening to Stonehouse's own account of the incident, saw in it only an example of a strange, inexorable truth. What men called "Fate" was the shadow of themselves. They imposed their characters upon events, significant or insignificant, willingly or unwillingly. Beyond that there was no such thing as Fate at all.
They stepped back from the crowd into the shelter of the Piccadilly Tube. They had been walking the streets for an hour, and as much of their lives as they were able to tell one another had been told. Now they were both baffled and tired out. Of what had really happened to them they could say nothing, and their memories, disinterred in a kind of desperate haste ("Do you remember that row with Dickson about my hair, Robert?") had crumbled, after a moment's apparent vitality, into a heap of dust. It was all too utterly dead—too unreal to both of them. The things that had mattered so much, which had seemed so laughable or so tragic, were like the repetition of a story in which they could only force a polite interest. Their laughter, their exclamations, sounded shallow and insincere.
And yet it was borne in upon them that they did still care for one another. They had had no other friendship to compare with this. Strictly speaking, there had been no other friends. There had been acquaintances—people whom you talked to because you worked with them.
Robert Stonehouse had always known his own loneliness. His patients believed in him; his colleagues respected him. Their knowledge of him went no further than the operating theatre where they knew him best. He had reckoned loneliness as an asset. But to feel it, as he felt it now beneath this stilted exchange, was to become aware of a dull, stupid pain. He found himself staring over the heads of the people, and wishing that Cosgrave had never come back. And Cosgrave said gently, as though he had read his thought and had made up his mind to have done with insincerities:
"You're not to bother about me, Robert. It's been jolly, seeing you again and all that, but we'd better let it end here. It always puzzled me—your caring, you know, about a hapless fellow like myself. It's against your real principles. I'm a dead weight. I couldn't give anyone a solitary water-tight reason for my being alive. I think you did it because you'd got your teeth into me by accident and couldn't let go. I don't want you to get your teeth into me again."
"I don't believe," Stonehouse said, with an impatient laugh, "that I ever let go at all."
His attention fixed itself on the illuminated sign that hung from the portico of the Olympic Theatre opposite, and mechanically he began to spell out the flaming letters:
"Gyp Labelle—Gyp Labelle!" At first the name scarcely reached his consciousness, but in some strange way it focused his disquiet. It was as though for a long time past he too had been indefinitely ill, and now at an exasperating touch the poisoned blood rushed to a head of pain. He felt Cosgrave plucking at his sleeve, fretfully like a sick child, raised to a sudden interest.