Here his chair turned into the gravel path leading to the inn door, and Scanlon followed it. The cramped-looking man with the crutch and the walking stick was stamping up and down.
“The blood,” declared the cramped-looking man, “is the most important thing in the body. It is meant to carry vigour to all our outlying parts; but, sir, it carries other things at times—other things not so desirable.”
A tall man with a saffron complexion and a pair of thick blue spectacles sat in a cane chair; his clothes hung about him as if he had shrunken a half-hundredweight in a short time; his long hands, as yellow as his face, were clasped before him.
“I will not try to belittle the function of the blood,” said he in a husky voice. “It would be foolish in me to do so. But you exaggerate it, sir. And why? Your joints are solidifying through deposits of lime; this is carried to the joints by the blood, and therefore you give undue importance to that fluid.”
“Undue importance!” The cramped man paused in his stumping and seemed astounded. “Undue! But, my good sir, how can that be? It is life itself.”
The yellow-faced man jeered at this.
“Fiddlesticks!” said he. “Fiddlesticks, Mr. Hirst. Since the time Harvey discovered its circulation, sentimentalists have overpraised this corpuscle-carrying agent. They have given it credit which it in no way deserves. In much the same way poets and novelists have misrepresented the heart. To them, this is the seat of affection—of every noble impulse—where, as a matter of fact, it is nothing more than a pump.”
The cramped-looking man cast a look of complaint at every one on the porch; then he was about to put it into words, but the yellow man stopped him.
“You spoke of the blood as ‘carrying vigour,’” said the latter. “‘Carrying,’ mind you. And that’s all it does—carry. It remains for other and more important things to make and introduce both that vigour of which you speak and that lack of vigour. The liver, now; take that! There’s a piece of machinery for you. There’s an organ which means something.”
The cramped man seemed amused. He cackled and hammered with his cane upon the floor.