"Not for thirty-five years, sir," said this latest specimen to me just now, rubbing his hands with counting-house pride.
"God help you," I replied, which took him aback a little, and was not, I admit, a tactful welcome to a prospective two guineas. But then, you see, he had fetched me back from a dusk-dream.
"Does that mean you can't?" he inquired a little acidly. And really I should not have been quite so abrupt with him, for his confession gave me the right cue to his treatment. A holiday, in fact, was all that he needed, though I doubted his ability to use one. So I assumed my heaviest manner, as one must when it is to be unaccompanied by an expensive prescription.
"If you don't take one," I proceeded to tell him, "though you will probably survive with the aid of iron, arsenic, and an occasional Seidlitz powder, you will become eventually like those sorrowful civil servants that may be met at almost any time in Somerset House or the General Post Office. They have been pensioned for months, but there they are, unable to inter themselves decently among the mashies and geraniums of Wimbledon and Weybridge, haunting their former desks, poor forlorn creatures, whose one bond of life has been severed—a torture to themselves and their successors."
While I was taking breath after this rather impressive harangue, he stared at me gloomily.
"It has always," he said, "been my one great desire to die in harness."
After congratulating him on the possession of so modest, if somewhat cheerless, an ambition, I asked him why he had come to see me. A physician, to a man with such a goal, seemed, on the face of it, something of a superfluity. But I learned that there was a wife at home, poor soul. And it was her doctor, he said, who had recommended this visit.
"And I may tell you," he added, "that your opinion coincides with theirs." He handed me his two guineas. "Where shall I go?" he asked.
By now of course I could see that my advice was going to be useless; but there was no better alternative.