“Well, I can’t,” said the doctor. “I’m not a professional interpreter, but I don’t see that it much matters whether you’re able to talk to him or not. Give him his food. He’ll understand the meaning of a cup of tea when it’s offered him, whatever language he’s accustomed to speak. That’s all you need care about. As a matter of fact, he’ll be just as well off without having you and the nurse and the matron sitting on the end of his bed and gossiping with him all day long.”
“What’s troubling me,” said the master, “is that I’ve no way of finding out what religion he is.”
“I don’t see,” said the doctor, “that his religion matters in the least to us. He’s not going to die.”
“I know that. But I have to enter his religion in the book. It’s the rule that the religion of every inmate of the house or the hospital must be entered, and I’ll get into trouble after if I don’t do it.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “there’s no use asking me about it. I can’t talk to him any better than you can, and there isn’t any way of telling by the feel of a man’s leg whether he’s a Catholic or a Protestant.”
“That may be,” said the master, who disliked this sort of flippant materialism, “but if I was to enter him down as a Catholic, and it turned out after that he was a Protestant, there’d be a row I’d never hear the end of; and if I was to have him down as a Protestant, and him being a Catholic all the time, there’d be a worse row.”
Dr. Whitty was a good-natured man, and was always ready to help anyone who was in a difficulty. He felt for the master of the workhouse. He also had a natural taste for solving difficult problems, and the question of the sailor’s religion attracted him.
“Tell me this, now,” he said. “Had he any kind of a Prayer Book or a religious emblem of any sort on him when you were taking the clothes off him?”
“Not one. I looked myself, and the nurse went through his pockets after. Barring a lump of ship’s tobacco and an old knife, there wasn’t a thing on him.”
“That’s not much use to us,” said the doctor. “I never heard of a religion yet that forbid the use of tobacco or objected to people carrying penknifes. If you’d found a bottle of whiskey on him, now, it might have helped us. We’d have known then that he wasn’t a Mohammedan.”