weaker, and then parted, softly without effort. Not very lucid, I’m afraid, but it was just like that. It had been burning a couple of months, you see.”
He turned away and hunted among the letters and papers which littered his writing-table till he found an envelope with a coronet on it. He chuckled to himself as he took it up.
“Commend me to Lady Madingley,” he said, “for a brazen impudence in comparison with which brass is softer than putty. She wrote to me yesterday, asking me if I would finish the portrait I had begun of her last year, and let her have it at my own price.
“Then I think you have had a lucky escape,” remarked Merwick. “I suppose you didn’t even answer her.”
“Oh, yes, I did: why not? I said the price would be two thousand pounds, and I was ready to go on at once. She has agreed, and sent me a cheque for a thousand this evening.”
Merwick stared at him in blank astonishment. “Are you mad?” he asked.
“I hope not, though one can never be sure about little points like that. Even doctors like you don’t know exactly what constitutes madness.”
Merwick got up.
“But is it possible that you don’t see what a terrible risk you run?” he asked. “To see her again, to be with her like that, having to look at her—I saw her this afternoon, by the way, hardly human—may not that so easily revive again all that you felt before? It is too dangerous: much too dangerous.”
Dick shook his head.
“There is not the slightest risk,” he said; “everything within me is utterly and absolutely indifferent to her. I don’t even hate her: if I hated her there might be a possibility of my again loving her. As it is, the thought of her does not arouse in me any emotion of any kind. And really such stupendous calmness deserves to be rewarded. I respect colossal things like that.”
He finished his whisky as he spoke, and instantly poured himself out another glass.
“That’s the fourth,” said his friend.
“Is it? I never count. It shows a sordid attention to uninteresting detail. Funnily enough, too, alcohol does not have the smallest effect on me now.”
“Why drink then?”
“Because if I give it up this entrancing vividness of colour and clarity of outline is a little diminished.
“Can’t be good for you,” said the doctor.
Dick laughed.
“My dear fellow, look at me carefully,” he said, “and then if you can conscientiously declare that I show any signs of indulging in stimulants, I’ll give them up altogether.”
Certainly it would have been hard to find a point in which Dick did not present the appearance of perfect health. He had paused, and stood still a moment, his glass in one hand, the whisky-bottle in the other, black against the front of his shirt, and not a tremor of unsteadiness was there. His face of wholesome sun-burnt hue was neither puffy nor emaciated, but firm of flesh and of a wonderful clearness of skin. Clear too was his eye, with eyelids neither baggy nor puckered; he looked indeed a model of condition, hard and fit, as if he was in training for some athletic event. Lithe and active too was his figure, his movements were quick and precise, and even Merwick, with his doctor’s eye trained to detect any symptom, however slight, in which the drinker must betray himself, was bound to confess that no such was here present. His appearance contradicted it authoritatively, so also did his manner; he met the eye of the man he was talking to without sideway glances; he showed no signs, however small, of any disorder of the nerves. Yet Dick was altogether an abnormal fellow; the history he had just been recounting was abnormal, those weeks of depression, followed by the sudden snap in his brain which had apparently removed, as a wet cloth removes a stain, all the memory of his love and of the cruel bitterness that resulted from it. Abnormal too was his sudden leap into high artistic achievement from a past of very mediocre performance. Why should there then not be a similar abnormality here?
“Yes, I confess you show no sign of taking excessive stimulant,” said Merwick, “but if I attended you professionally—ah, I’m not touting—I should make you give up all stimulant, and go to bed for a month.”
“Why in the name of goodness?” asked Dick.
“Because, theoretically, it must be the best thing you could do. You had a shock, how severe, the misery of those weeks of depression tells you. Well, common sense says, ‘Go slow after a shock; recoup.’ Instead of which you go very fast indeed and produce. I grant it seems to suit you; you also became suddenly capable of feats which—oh, it’s sheer nonsense, man.”
“What’s sheer nonsense?”
“You are. Professionally, I detest you, because you appear to be an exception to a theory that I am sure must be right. Therefore I have got to explain you away, and at present I can’t.”
“What’s the theory?” asked Dick.
“Well, the treatment of shock first of all. And secondly, that in order to do good work, one ought to eat and drink very little and sleep a lot. How long do you sleep, by the way?”
Dick considered.
“Oh, I go to bed about three usually,” he said; “I suppose I sleep for about four hours.”
“And live on whisky, and eat like a Strasburg goose, and are prepared to run a race tomorrow.”
“Go away, or at least I will. Perhaps you’ll break down, though. That would satisfy me.
“But even if you don’t, it still remains quite interesting.”
Merwick found it more than quite interesting in fact, and when he got home that night he searched in his shelves for a certain dusky volume in which he turned up a chapter called “Shock.” The book was a treatise on obscure diseases and abnormal conditions of the nervous system. He had often read it before, for in his profession he was a special student of the rare and curious. And the following paragraph which had interested him much before, interested him more than ever this evening.
“The nervous system also can act in a way that must always even to the most advanced student be totally unexpected. Cases are known, and well-authenticated ones, when a paralytic person has jumped out of bed on the cry of ‘Fire.’ Cases too are known when a great shock, which produces depression so profound as to amount to lethargy, is followed by abnormal activity, and the calling into use of powers which were previously unknown to exist, or at any rate existed in a quite ordinary degree. Such a hyper-sensitised state, especially since the desire for sleep or rest is very often much diminished, demands much stimulant in the way of food and alcohol. It would appear also that the patient suffering from this rare form of the after-consequences of shock has sooner or later some sudden and complete break-down. It is impossible, however, to conjecture what form this will take. The digestion, however, may become suddenly atrophied, delirium tremens may, without warning, supervene, or he may go completely off his head…”
But the weeks passed on, the July suns made London reel in a haze of heat, and yet Alingham remained busy, brilliant, and altogether exceptional. Merwick, unknown to him, was watching him closely, and at present was completely puzzled. He held Dick to his word that if he could detect the slightest sign of over-indulgence in stimulant, he would cut it off altogether, but
