The Specimen Case/Lucretia and the Horse-Doctor
IX
Lucretia and the Horse-Doctor
No 4.32 train!" I exclaimed. "Oh, confound the thing! Are you sure?"
If I had not been rather irritated at finding that I had walked two miles in twenty-three minutes along an abnormally dusty road in order to catch a non-existent train on a toy-gauge railway I should certainly have seen the impropriety of putting such a question to the station-master. But the station-master at Lower Roffey was not in the least disposed to be offended. I do not think I ever met a railwayman within three grades of his rank who was less inclined to stand on his dignity. He issued and collected tickets, looked after the passenger luggage, when they had any—and it was by no means the exception, I gathered, for there to be no passengers even—worked the home signals, cleaned and trimmed the oil lamps, saw to the flower-beds, and in addition to doing, in fact, all the general work of the station, delivered the local weekly paper, acted as agent for an American fountain pen, kept poultry and sold ginger-beer.
"It's right," he replied sympathetically. "The 4.32 is a summer train and doesn't run after the end of September: 6.18 is the next now."
"At all events," I retorted, "the 4.32 is down in the time-table that I bought at a shop up in the village, less than an hour ago. It's a pretty nuisance."
The station-master nodded in complete agreement.
"Lukie Marsh ought to have known better," he remarked. "I took the new time-tables there last week myself. It was Lukie that served you, of course; not her sister Jane?"
Still smarting under the discomfort of my unnecessary exertion, I intimated that I was, unhappily, a stranger to the personalities of both Lukie and her sister Jane.
"That is so, of course," assented the station-master cheerfully. "Still, you may take it from me that it would be Lukie. Jane would have had more sense. Not but what Lukie has her wits about her in general, but ever since she consulted that horse-doctor that came to Crossgate last autumn she has been absent-minded at times."
"I suppose consulting a horse-doctor was the first symptom of it?" I suggested with covert sarcasm.
"No; it wasn't that. He wasn't really a horse-doctor either, you must understand. That was only what old Doctor Page over at Crossgate called him.
"'The man has the methods and the knowledge of a common horse-doctor,' he said in a rage whenever the subject came up; 'and those who go to see him are asses.'
"Of course that was because he was nettled at the business the other was doing. However, the word got about and no one used it oftener than Hankins—that was the fellow's name—himself.
"'I'm not a doctor,' he said every night at the beginning of his talk; 'I'm Hankins the Medicine Man, known also in every important town in Great Britain and Ireland as Hankins the Make-You-Well. In Crossgate, however, I am called the Horse-Doctor. Now, my friends, would you rather be made well by a horse-doctor or kept ill by Doctor Donkey?'
"That was all he said about it; nothing personal, you see, but it went down wonderfully well among the chaps who stood round.
"I must say he went to work in what seemed to me a more reasonable way than Doctor Page did. Page, who was generally ill with gout or asthma himself, tried to make out to you that you were pretty well all right when you went to see him and discouraged you from going on. Hankins claimed to be the only sound man in Crossgate, and offered to prove scientifically that everyone else had something wrong and getting worse inside him and sapping his vitality, even though he might know nothing of it. Every night he gave a lecture in the market-place opposite the Goat and people came miles to hear him. He had a platform and life-sized pictures of your body in colour with the different inward parts to flap backwards and forwards on hinges, so that he seemed to take you in on one side of yourself and bring you out on the other, telling you all about the various diseases, unbeknown to ordinary professional doctors, that you met with on the way. Then he went through the symptoms of different fatal ailments and showed you what you looked like inside when you'd got them. Before he'd done, pretty nearly everyone felt that they had most of the things he described and he did a first-rate business in remedies. Whether it was his medicines—as he claimed—or not I don't know, but he certainly had a wonderful frame. He'd stand on his platform and bellow like a bull for five minutes at a time to show what really healthy lungs were like. I've heard him from this station, three miles away, on a still evening. I've seen him jump off his platform and leap over it twelve or fifteen times backwards and forwards without stopping for breath.
"'There's a heart toughened with Hankins’s Vital Elixir,' he'd say. 'I was a puny thriftless wisp of a boy, and look at me now. There isn't a man, woman or child over the age of fourteen standing round who couldn't do the same at this moment if his or her heart was properly nourished."
"If you went up to the platform then, he'd tell you what was the matter with you for nothing, charging only for the medicine; but during the day he had a room at Whittle's, the barber, where it was a shilling for consultations. That was how Lukie Marsh came to see him."
We hardly seemed to have reached the point of the story yet, but the station-master gave me the distinct impression of trying to make me believe that this was all.
"The fact is," he apologised as he met my inquiring eye, "I have only just remembered that Lukie was dead set against it getting about. I suppose the only two people who knew all the ins and outs of it besides Lukie were her sister Jane and myself. I'm a sort of half-cousin of theirs. Then I send paragraphs of anything of interest that happens here up to the local paper, and as a police case came out of this, Lukie was anxious to know what was going to be printed about it and told me everything."
"Nothing of discredit to the lady, I am sure," I remarked encouragingly.
"You're right," he agreed warmly. "It was an experience that many people would boast of, and now that it's a year ago and Lukie’s banns are up, I don't suppose that she'd mind a stranger knowing."
"Perhaps you'll have a bottle of ginger-beer with me?" I suggested.
"Thanks, I don't mind if I do," said the station-master. "It's middling dry talking in this weather."
He produced the various articles from the booking-office, opened the bottles and filled the glasses with the most businesslike expertness and then continued the narrative of Miss Marsh's remarkable experience.
"The thing Lukie was most afraid of was that it might make trouble with William Hill's people if they heard that she had been to consult the horse-doctor. The Hills, especially William's mother, were strict herbalists and regarded all other forms of medicine as sinful and poisonous. Lukie and William had been more or less engaged for seventeen years, and, as she said to me, she could not afford at her age to throw all that time away and begin again.
"Doubtless it would have been better if she had thought of that at the beginning and not gone, but she was always one for gaiety and things had been pretty quiet at Roffey last year. It was wet for the Flower Show and the black missionary man who was to lecture on 'Savage Africa' couldn't find the place and never came. Everyone was talking about this Hankins; so one day Lukie persuaded Jane to go with her to Crossgate, picking a time when the fewest people who might know her were likely to be about.
"Of course she didn't go for mere curiosity. For some time back she'd had a notion that something that oughtn't to be there was growing somewhere down her throat. She couldn't see it, and couldn't feel it, and it didn't exactly hurt, but the idea worried her whenever she remembered it. As she said, it might be only fancy, but it was a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
"Jane stayed outside in the market-place because from what she'd heard she thought that the sight of Hankins's life-sized pictures would make her feel queer; and besides they weren't quite sure but what he would charge double if both of them went in.
"Hankins listened to what Lukie had to say and then tried most of his machines on her. Finally he strapped a round looking-glass on to his forehead, stood her by the window, and shot the sunlight into her throat.
"'I don't see any growth so far,' he said, when he had done all that he could with that, 'but as you think that there is something, there most likely is, because there can’t be an effect without a cause, and it is contrary to nature to think of anything that doesn’t exist. Fortunately I have with me a means of testing even further.' With that he got out a little electric light, no bigger than a plum-stone hardly, that was worked by a pocket battery. 'Now,' he said, 'I am going to press your tongue down with a spoon-handle, throw the light well into the pharynx, and then we shall see as far as there is anything to be seen.'
"Lukie thought half a minute and then made a move towards the door.
"'I should not think of allowing it,' she said.
"That took back the horse-doctor considerably. 'It won't hurt you the least bit,' he said.
"'I am not afraid of that. And I daresay that the town ladies you are accustomed to, do not mind being seen in the way you speak of, but in the country we are more particular. Good-afternoon.'
"'Hold hard a minute,' said Hankins, who was well-meaning enough; 'perhaps I didn't pick my words quite as I might. Haven't you any discreet lady friend whom you could have here with you?"
"'There's my sister Jane waiting out in the pig-market. She's older than me and sees mostly to the shop, but I couldn't say whether she's discreet or not,' replied Lukie.
"'Jane will do A1,' said Hankins. 'Call her up.'
"They got Jane up and Lukie allowed him to get to work again. But it seemed as though something was bound to go wrong at every turn. Just when he had fixed his light in position Lukie screwed up her face and began to wave her hands frantically. The light had tickled her nose and she felt that she was going to sneeze whatever happened. Hankins, not in the least guessing what she meant, simply stood and stared at her. Then Lukie shut her mouth with a snap, sneezed, gave a gulp, turned pale, and said, 'What was that?'
"Hankins pulled up the ends of his wires. 'My Sunday hat!' he exclaimed, 'the blamed thing has come unhitched. You've swallowed the bulb, Miss.' So she had.
"How he satisfied them I don't fully know, but it was more than an hour before they were composed enough to go home. Whatever he thought, Hankins made out that there was no danger, and he added, handsomely enough as it seemed certain that Lukie had bitten through the wire, that he had no intention of charging for the lamp.
"'It's no use looking on the dark side of things,' said Lukie when they got back; so she made a hearty meal off tinned salmon, to which she was very partial, and then, feeling pretty tired what with one thing and another, went early to bed.
"That night Moses Andrews, a sort of low-down thief from the lime-quarries over at Shapley, broke into the house, thinking to make a good haul. The Marshes were supposed to have some money put away; and the place being old and ramshackle it wasn't difficult even for Mo to get in, though for that matter he was really more fitted to be a tramp than a burglar. He went through the till in the shop and all the drawers in the lower part of the house without finding much, and then he made his way upstairs. His idea was to wake one of the sisters quietly, hold a hatchet over her head, and frighten her into telling him where the money was hid. As it happened he chanced on Lukie's room.
"When Lukie woke and opened her eyes to see a man in a black mask standing over her with the wood-chopper she didn't wait to hear what he had to say. She opened her mouth, and the next minute there would have been a screech that would have woke all Roffey if she had got it out. But the instant she opened her mouth there was no need for Lukie to yell: it was Mo Andrews who did that, and dropping his sack and tools he lit out in a beeline for home, the worst scared burglar that ever picked a lock. He went through the bedroom window without stopping to think of opening it, and dropping on to a moderately soft bed of cabbages he tore down the garden, howling manfully as he went.
"I don't understand much about electricity myself, but it's tolerably clear now what had happened. Hankins's little bulb had got wedged up somewhere out of harm's way, and the vinegar and other things that Lukie had eaten acted as a sort of acid and started it working at full pressure. Lukie herself got an idea that the light was accumulating inwardly as long as she was asleep, and that when she opened her mouth it leapt out like a gas explosion, but I put that down to a woman's fancy. However it may be, there is no doubt that coming suddenly in the dark the sight would have a goodish effect on a mean-spirited sort of creature like that.
"As for Andrews, he was only beginning his adventures. Half-way down the garden was a clump of bush fruit trees, gooseberries and logans and so on. Being troubled with sparrows and finches, Jane had bought a length of tarred netting early in the season and stretched it over all the trees to save the fruit. Into the middle of this net shot Andrews with enough move on him to carry clean through an ordinary hedge. A man armed with a double-barrelled duck-gun couldn't have stopped him at that moment, but the net did. It held good and firm and the more he plunged and reared the more he wrapped himself up in it. What he did with his ramping was to pull up a gooseberry bush that was in the net behind him and to jerk it forward so that it sprang on to his shoulders and lapped its branches round his neck. Then everything that he'd ever heard as a boy about the Devil and Hell and the 'net spread to catch sinners' came back to him—and owing to his parents having been Particular Revivalists and regular at chapel, it ran mostly on fire and brimstone and claws and such-like.
"'He's got me!' they heard him wail in a despairing sort of way, and then he seems to have fainted dead off.
"By this time a good many people were beginning to come round. Jane hearing an uproar ran into Lukie's room with a light. Lukie was sitting up in bed and apparently on the point of going off into hysterics. Jane, whose remedies were simple but practical, seized her by the arm and thumped her several times soundly on the back. Lukie coughed twice, put her hand up to her mouth, and produced Hankins's lamp, none the worse for its travels. That ended her chief trouble.
"Misgivings about what Mo Andrews might say when he was brought up began to worry her a little when she thought of it the next day. Being a sensitive woman, besides the disagreeableness with William Hill's people she disliked the idea of the low jokes that would be sure to be made about having electric lights and such matters. As it happened, she had nothing to fear. It took three men upwards of half-an-hour with scissors and pocket-knives to get Mo clear of the net and he came out of it a changed man. By the time he appeared before the Court he had got religion solid.
"'Well, Andrews,' said the magistrate, who had seen him there before. 'What have you to say in answer to the charge?'
"'Nothing,' replied Mo calmly. 'All that business is past and done with. I stand here a sinner, but on the solid rock at last. Can you say the same, friend? Is all well with you?'
"'Remanded for the state of the prisoner's mind to be inquired into,' said the magistrate; and that was the last that Lukie had to do with it."
West Kensington, 1909.