No More Learning

Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right, have, even within my
memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but none the less today, if you
belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep,
all houses are open to you, and our small world is very, very kind and
helpful.

Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumaon some fifteen years ago.
He meant to stay two nights, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever,
and for six weeks disorganized Polder's establishment, stopped Polder's
work, and nearly died in Polder's bedroom. Polder behaves as though he
had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly
sends the little Ricketts a box of presents and toys. It is the same
everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you
their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and the women who blacken
your character and misunderstand your wife's amusements, will work
themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into serious
trouble.

Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his regular practice,
a hospital on his private account--an arrangement of loose boxes for
Incurables, his friend called it--but it was really a sort of fitting-up
shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather
in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed
quantity, and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime
and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as
the metaphors in this sentence.

Heatherlegh is the dearest doctor that ever was, and his invariable
prescription to all his patients is, "lie low, go slow, and keep cool. "
He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this
world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay, who died under
his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak
authoritatively, and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack
in Pansay's head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and
pressed him to death. "Pansay went off the handle," says Heatherlegh,
"after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have
behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith-Wessington.
My notion is that
the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he
took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & 0. flirtation. He
certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the
engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about
ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight, and
killed him poor devil. Write him off to the System--one man to take the
work of two and a half men. "

I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pansay sometimes when
Heatherlegh was called out to patients, and I happened to be within
claim. The man would make me most unhappy by describing in a low, even
voice, the procession that was always passing at the bottom of his bed.
He had a sick man's command of language.

When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair
from beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his
mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy
till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.

He was in a high fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder
Magazine diction he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterward
he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was
urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a
deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden.