“I don’t know your face—where do you come from?” Maude asked him.
“I was at Alresworth with a travelling company as a kind of a sort of a shadowy understudy of a sub-super, but I knocked up Sunday and was left behind. Nobody missed me. I can’t act any more than a dead egg,” said the patient, candidly—“ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine; is that enough? But that don’t matter in the profession. Hullo, were you in the cricket-team at Queens? Nice game, cricket. I always shone in it myself.”
He disengaged himself, and walked across to study the photographed groups on the wall.
“Come back, please; I have not done with you,” said the doctor. “What’s your name?”
“Oh, I don’t know—John Smith, I guess. Last time I played cricket was near the English cemetery at Iquique. Jolly ground it was, too. There’s never a drop of rain from year’s end to year’s end, so the turf isn’t too good; but we had thousand-foot precipices on three sides of the ground, and what could you ask more? We played till Saunders made a boundary hit, and then we hadn’t a rope long enough to fetch up the ball. Next time Saunders went up there was after Yellow Jack had done with him. My hat! it was hot enough for kingdom come. The very abomination of desolation; red hills, and never a blade of grass, except the thread of green where the water comes down from the snows.”
“Well, John Smith,” said the doctor, “I can’t do much for you; your constitution’s rotten. You had better stop talking, take this medicine, and go to the infirmary, if it’s true that you have no home. A motor ’bus passes here at seven, and goes to Alresworth.”
The patient made a grimace. “More land of counterpane for me, I suppose. Passes here at seven, does it? I shall certainly be ’bus-sick; but, after all, tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Take my tip, Æsculapius, and don’t you drop your cricket. Good-night.”
It was only half-past six. Maude felt an impulse to recall the picturesque stoic and bid him wait in the surgery until the omnibus passed; but honesty is a rare quality, and the stranger, by pleasing him, inspired him with mistrust. An observant man, he noticed that John Smith spoke French like a Frenchman: a Parisian could have detected the difference, for his accent was that of Guernsey: but Maude had learned modern languages at a public school. In brief, the rain was inaudible in the surgery; the stranger was a questionable character; and Maude did not ask him in.
John Smith went out whistling; his frame was lean and gaunt and loose-jointed, but he walked with a fine swing. The surgery was the last house of the village. Some hundred yards further on the railway embankment spanned the road, and a lane turning up just beyond it led to the station. John Smith, sauntering along in the increasing rain, found shelter beneath the arch and stayed there. The wind blew up from the south straight through the tunnel, and the scene circumscribed by the arc of masonry was wild and beautiful. Across the black sky raced a froth of fleecy clouds, through which a half-moon shone, girt by a pallid zone of blue and bronze. The wild streamers were so unearthly pale, the heaven so solemnly dark, that only by the moon’s presence could sky be told from cloud. Gray hills, crowned with dark soft masses of woodland, folded down to a valley deep in mist, where a cluster of golden lights burned like a constellation magnified by rain; while up to his very feet the streaming road was turned to a sheet of glory by a common street-lamp.
John Smith immediately brought out a penny pencil and a penny exercise-book and began to write. Valiantly disregarding the inequalities of the brick-work, he rested the paper against the wall. He had thought of some elegant words and phrases for describing the evening sky, and wanted to fix them fast on paper before they escaped from his volatile memory. Actor he had been by chance, artist he was by nature; an artist in words, he professed himself gravely; a lover of apt phrase and finely balanced sentence; one of that happy confraternity whose goal in a strange room is always the bookcase. He had as many interests as ideas, but this reigned paramount.