“Most certainly, old chap,” I responded.
“Even though you incur a great responsibility?”
“What is the responsibility?”
“A very grave one. To take charge of this extensive practice while I go down to Bristol and see my people. I haven’t been homesick a week.”
“Why, of course,” I responded. “I’ll look after things with pleasure.”
“Thanks. You’re a brick. I won’t be away for more than a week. You won’t find it very laborious. There’s a couple of kids with the croup round in Angel Road, a bedridden old girl in Bridge Road, and a man in Beadon Road who seems to have a perpetual stomach-ache. That’s about all.”
I smiled. He had not attempted to diagnose the stomach-ache, I supposed. He was, indeed, a careless fellow.
“Of course you’ll pocket all the fees,” he added, with a touch of grim humour. “They’re not very heavy—bobs and half-crowns—but they may keep you in tobacco till I come back.”
And thus I became the locum tenens of the not too extensive practice of Robert Raymond, surgeon, for he departed for Paddington on the following evening, and I entered upon my somewhat lonely duties.
The first couple of days passed without incident. I visited the two children with the croup, looked in upon the bedridden relict of a bibulous furniture-dealer, and examined the stomach with the perpetual pain. The latter proved a much more serious case than I had supposed, and from the first I saw that the poor fellow was suffering from an incurable disease. My visits only took an hour, and the rest of the day I spent in the little den upstairs, smoking furiously and reading.