head, soothing nerves stretched taut by eighteen holes of golf played in a blistering sun.
My friend Jules de Grandin's satisfaction with himself was most annoying. He had ceased playing at the second hole, found a wicker rocket on the clubhouse porch and devoted the entire afternoon to devastation of gin swizzles.
"Tiens," he chuckled, "you are droll, my friend, you English and Americans. You work like Turks and Tartars at your professional vocations, then rest by doing manual labor in the sun. Not I, by blue; I have the self-respect!"
He leant back on the cushions, turning up his forehead to the cooling rain and hummed a snatch of tune:
"La vie est vaine,
Un peu d'amour"
With a strident screech of brakes I brought the roadster to a stop in time to keep from running down the man who stood before us in the headlights' glare, arm raised imperatively. "Good heavens, man," I rasped, "d'ye want to be run over? You almost"
"You're a doctor?" he demanded in a sharp, thin voice, pointing to the Medical Society’s green cross and gold caduceus on my radiator.
"Yes, but"
"Please come at once, sir. It's the master, Doctor Pavlovitch. I–I think he's very ill, sir."
The ethics of the medical profession take no account of work-worn nerves, and with a sigh I headed toward the tall gate in the roadside hedge the fellow pointed out. "What seems to be the matter with the doctor?" I inquired as our guide hopped nimbly on die running-board after swinging back the driveway gate.
"I–I don't know, sir," he replied. "Some kind o' stroke, I think. Th' telephone went out of order just at dinner-time–lightning musta hit th' line when th' storm was blowin' up–an' took th' station wagon to th' village for some things th' grocer hadn't sent. When I got back every think was dark an' I couldn't seem to make th' lights work, but they flashed on all sudden-like, an' there was Doctor Pavlovitch a-layin' in th' middle o' th' floor, with everythink all messed up in th' study, an' I couldn't seem to rouse him; so I tried to get th' village on th' phone, but it still won't work, and when I tried to start th' station wagon up I found that somethink had gone wrong with it; so I starts to walk down to th' village, an' just then you come down th' road, an' I seen th' little green cross on your car, so"
"I'll have that darn thing taken off tomorrow," I assured myself; then, aloud, to stop the servant's endless chatter: "All right, we'll do everything we can, but we haven't any medicines or instruments; so maybe we shall have to send you for supplies."
"Yes, sir," he replied respectfully, and to my relief lapsed into momentary silence.
The big house Doctor Michail Pavlovitch had purchased two years previously and in which he lived in churlish solitude, attended only by his English houseman, sat back on a deep lawn thick set with huge old trees, fenced against the highway by an eight-foot privet hedge and surrounded on the three remaining sides by tall brick walls topped with broken bottles set in mortar. As we circled up the driveway I could feel the eery atmosphere that hovered round the place. It was, I think, the lights which struck me queerly, or, to be more accurate, the absence of familiar lights in a place we knew to be inhabited. Blinds were drawn down tightly, with forbidding secrecy, at
