The secret dipsomaniac or druggard could not deceive this man's keen scrutiny, or escape his unerring diagnosis. When, beaten, they admitted the fact, Saxham said to them as to the others:
"You say you cannot conquer the craving. I myself once thought so. Your moral power can be restored, even as was mine. In your case the habit is barely as ingrained as in the case I quote to you. I drank alcohol to excess for a period of five years."
Some of the sufferers--elderly women and mild-mannered old gentlemen--were horrified. Others thought such candour brutal--but attractively so. Yet others responded to the sympathy masked by the stern, impassive face, and the blunt, brusque manner.
"At any rate the man's no humbug!" such and such an one would stutter. "And seems to have any amount of Will. Think I shall put myself in his hands for a bit." Adding with a rueful twinkle: "He knows how the dog bites, if anyone does!"
He did, and those hands of his were strong, prompt and unfaltering. Since the grip of human sympathy had fastened on the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, and drawn him up out of the depths into sunlight and free air, and set his feet once more on the firm ground, how many of his fellow-sufferers had Saxham not hauled reeking and squelching out of the abysmal sludge, whose secrets shall only be revealed upon the Last Day.
Yet Saxham realised that the grand majority of these twentieth-century men and women really wanted little more of the physician and surgeon than the thirteenth-century patient desired of the apothecary or the leech. A patient hearing given to their category of evils--a little hocus-pocus, and a nostrum or so.
We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men of the Dark Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt and toe of frog, the salted earthworms, and the _Pulvis Bezoardicus Magistralis_ or _Pulvis Sanctus_, dissolved in the liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious conjunction of their ruling planets with the Moon--have but given place to extract of the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries of the guinea-pig, the spinal cord and brain of rabbits and mice and other small mammalia, with--instead of broth of vipers, liquor distilled from the parotid secretion of the tropical toad; identical with the reptile administered in boluses to Pagan patients by the Greek Hippocrates. With other remedies hideously akin to the hell-brews that whipped the sated desires of Tiberius and Nero.... Such as the pastelloids frequently prescribed by bland-mannered, frock-coated, twentieth-century physicians--professing Christians who pay West-End pew-rents, and deplore the abnormal drop in the birth-rate--for the spurring of the sense of debilitated Hedonists.
Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We have harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia's silver chariot. In Surgery the Short Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get on, at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to existence. Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human machine, alive and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be detected and photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The electro-magnet automatically carried out the removal of such fragments, provided only that they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has even weighed the Soul.
Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate--consider.... This quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham's breast and in yours and mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator--this Ego for whose eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man, weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.
The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders, when the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable air; when the last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in ponderability shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling matter. Will the result proportionate with the moribund's sixteenth of an ounce?
It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social upheaval upon a vaster scale than historian ever recorded or visionary ever dreamed; a cataclysmic cleansing, a purging as by fire; the regeneration of the human race, the reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the Divine Ideal, could never be brought about. Unconsciously he sought for the decadent world some such ordeal as he himself had passed through. You looked at him and saw the scars of suffering. The soil of his nature had been rent by volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst of fierce abysmal fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the frowning steeps, the jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle clouds; the pure springs gathered and ran; the valleys became fruitful and the plains carpeted themselves with flowers.
A miracle had been wrought for Saxham the Man, and he saw the need of one for the World, and said in his heart that, though holy men might pray, it would not, could not, ever be vouchsafed. And all the while the miracle was ripening, the Day was coming, the Great Awakening was at hand.
*CHAPTER XXI*
*MARGOT LOOKS IN*
It drew on to the luncheon hour. The last patient a very young, very little, very pretty married woman, was summoned by the neat maid from the waiting-room, in a remote corner of which a husband of military type and ordinarily cheerful countenance, remained, maintaining with obvious effort a fictitious interest in the pages of a remote issue of _Punch_.
The dainty little lady bore a name well known to Saxham. The fact that a title was attached to it did not interest him, nor had it shortened her term of waiting by a second of the clock. But her youth smote him with a sense of pity as she took the chair upon his left hand facing the window, and without overmuch embarrassment made clear her case.
She was going to have a baby. Franky, her husband, earnestly desired the kiddie for family reasons, yet its advent was unwelcome to him, in that it must inevitably involve physical pain and mental anxiety for the little lady, Franky's wife.
The little lady had been frightfully downed by the prospect. She rather cottoned to kiddies, she explained, than otherwise. It was the bother of having them that didn't appeal. It put everything in the cart as regarded the Autumn Season. Besides--there were family reasons on her side, why the prospect should not be too rosy. She stated the reasons, and Saxham's listening face grew grave. He realised the danger of a Preconceived Idea.
He said nothing. Margot went on talking. Her beautiful deer-eyes were alternately wistful and coaxing. They entreated sympathy. They begged for gentleness. They grew brilliant with enthusiasm as she explained that after a lot of chinning, she and Franky had hit upon a perfectly ripping plan.
A friend, recently encountered in Paris, had thrown a ray of hope upon the doubtful prospect. No doubt Dr. Saxham was in sympathy with the pioneers of the New Crusade against Unnecessary Pain.... Of course, Dr. Saxham knew all about the wonderful experiments of German gynaewhatdoyoucall'ems. The right term was frightfully crack-jaw. Perhaps Dr. Saxham knew what was meant?
Saxham reassured the little lady.
"You refer of course to the experiments of Professors von Wolfenbuchel of Vienna, and Krauss of the Berlin _Fraueenklinik_, resulting in the method of treatment now known throughout the Continent as 'Purple Dreams.' Wolfenbuchel and Krauss have published a pamphlet on the subject. Perhaps you have read the pamphlet?"
"Yes--I've read it. A wonderful book that has been translated into every language. A German officer, friend of a friend I met in Paris, told her about it. His sister had tried the treatment, and found it A1. So I bought a French translation of the book in Paris, and an English one at a shop in the Haymarket. It's bound in rose-coloured vellum stamped with a rising sun in gold. 'Weep No More, Mothers!' it's called. Isn't that a charming title? And the subject is: 'Pangless Childbirth, Produced through Purple Dreams.'"
In a sweet, coaxing voice that trembled a little, she began to tell the Doctor about the wonderful results obtained by hypodermics of Krauss and Wolfenbuechel's marvellous combination of drugs. And Saxham hearkened with stern patience, while the table-clock ticked and the luncheon hour drew near, and Franky chewed the cud of suspense in the Doctor's waiting-room.
Thousands of peasant women, and others of the lower middle-class in Germany had become mothers under the Purple Dreams treatment. Maternity Hospitals in Paris, Brussels, and New York had adopted the method after controversy and hesitation. It had triumphed over every doubt. An American woman whose brother's wife had had a "Purple Dreams" baby at the Berlin Institute had told the little narrator only yesterday how quite too wonderful was the discovery of the enlightened Krauss and the gifted Wolfenbuchel. Everything was made easy. When your ordeal drew near you simply went to the place, and signed your name in a book, and put yourself in the hands of skilled persons. You felt no pain--not a twinge. Only the prick and throb of the hypodermic needle-syringe, and most people were used to the _pique_ nowadays--administering the first subcutaneous injections of the wonderful new drug.... Under its mild sedative influence you dozed off to sleep presently. And when you woke up--there was the baby--beautifully dressed, and lying on a lace pillow in the arms of a smartly dressed, fresh-cheeked nurse.