The first time I saw Mr Smith to speak to was one evening in the bar of the White Hart. I happened to be there chatting with Mrs Cook, the landlady, when he stepped in to have a glass of ale. Mrs Cook, having the great natural and social advantages of being fat, jolly, a widow, and a landlady, was, of course, always on friendly terms with everybody, and Mr Smith chatted away with her as I had never heard of his doing with any one else. She could clearly make bold to introduce me, and did so accordingly, and the New Doctor and I then and there struck up an acquaintance. I used to be considered to have some little conversational powers, before I got stuck in the mud in this hole; and I flatter myself that I rather amused the New Doctor with some details of the place and the people, for he laughed, and had a second glass of ale, and asked me to take something; and the young lady in the bar sniggered and giggled, and Mrs Cook kept on lifting up her hands, and shaking her fat with laughing, and exclaiming, “Oh, fie, sir! now that is really too bad!” I may as well mention here that Mr Smith was a young man of dark complexion and gentlemanly manner, with a well-trimmed beard and mustache, who spoke like a man of education, and dressed like a gentleman—rather rare things in the village of Mudford. And, apropos to this, it was remarked that he always dressed in precisely the same way; there was never the slightest variety in his costume—always the same suit of black, the same black necktie, and the same scrupulously clean linen and glossy hat. Altogether, I was pleased with the New Doctor: there was certainly nothing brutal nor sensual in his appearance, and he did not look at all like a man who would——. But I must not anticipate.
I do not know how, or whence, or when the rumour first took its rise, but not long after Mr Smith’s arrival it began to be whispered about that there was something very queer, to say the least, about him. The mysterious manner of his arrival probably first gave rise to this rumour, and afterwards there were many things to increase the impression it had made. As I have said, Mr Smith at first rarely came out; and he never seemed to try or wish to get a patient. Indeed, when those two wild scamps, young Bones and young Skinner, going home late as usual, knocked him up about one o’clock in the morning, and said that he must go at once to Mr Cheeks of Little Pigton, some four miles off across the moors, who was very ill, he told them very blandly and courteously that he had no horse, and was just going to bed, and that they had better call Mr Green or Mr Higgins. I must say, I think that Green and Higgins need not have been so bitter against him, nor have called him “quack” so often as they did, especially as Green never passed the Hall in his life, and only got through the college by the skin of his teeth; and what Higgins’s qualifications are, except impudence, I believe nobody ever knew. As a matter of course, they are at daggers-drawn between themselves, as medical men in small towns always are, and say all sorts of disparaging things of each other,—for which nobody can blame them, as there is truth on both sides—but they certainly had no right to speak of Mr Smith as they did; at all events, at first, before those matters which I am about to relate were openly talked of.
One of the first things that people began to remark about the New Doctor was, that scarcely anybody was admitted to his house; and never, under any circumstances, unless he was there himself to receive them. Directly inside the front door of the house was a lobby, and on the right-hand side as you entered was a small room, and on the left hand side another; the former being fitted up as a surgery, and the latter as a sitting-room: into one of these rooms all visitors who entered the house at all were ushered; and the very first thing Mr Smith did after his arrival was to get a carpenter to put up a strong thick door in the middle of the lobby, directly beyond the entrance to these rooms, so as to cut them off entirely from the remainder of the building. The next step was just as strange: he had the masons, and built up the wall around the garden and courtlage at the back of the house at least two feet higher, in places where it was not already sufficiently lofty, so that no one, without climbing to the top of the wall, could possibly overlook the garden and back of the house. The gate which stood at the entrance to the back door, too, was always kept locked, and was furnished with a bell, so that anybody having business with the old servant or housekeeper that he had brought with him had to ring and be reconnoitred before being admitted. Strange precautions these of our New Doctor, and, you may be sure, not made the less of among the busy tongues of Mudford.
Another very remarkable thing about him was his most extraordinary absence of mind, or forgetfulness, or whatever it may have been. He would be quite friendly with people to-day—and he could be very agreeable if he chose—and to-morrow he would pass them in the street as if he had never seen them before. To be sure, he said he was near-sighted—and I ought to have mentioned that he always wore spectacles—but people can’t be expected to believe all they are told in this world; and it was known that he could see a long way off when he liked: and, besides, a defect of vision would not, at all events, account for defects in hearing, speaking, and thinking. You might tell him a thing to-day, and to-morrow he would appear to have forgotten all about it: you would have to tell it all over again, and then, very likely, his comments on it were totally different from what they had been on the previous day. And, strangest inconsistency of all, the next day again, perhaps, he would maintain his first opinion, as if he had never departed from it! When people made remarks to him about this, he would say with a laugh, “Ah, you must pardon me. I do forget strangely sometimes, but I am so very absent!” He was certainly the strangest man! “Nil erat unquam sic impar sibi.”
An instance of this strange absence of mind, or whatever it was, occurred with regard to myself, directly after making his acquaintance, as before related. On the following day I met him full butt in the street, and he would actually have passed on without taking the slightest notice of me, if I had not stopped him and held him by the button-hole.
“Mr Smith!” I exclaimed, “you have not forgotten me already, surely!”
“Why—a—really,” he said, looking puzzled; “excuse me, pray; my memory is so bad. Where had I the pleasure of meeting you?”
“Why, last evening,” I replied, “at the White Hart. Don’t you recollect? We had a glass together.”
“Ah, to be sure,” said he, “in the smoking-room, was it not? Really, I beg your pardon.”
“No, sir,” said I, with some indignation, “it was not in the smoking-room. We were in the bar, and Mrs Cook was present.”