No More Learning

--Shadow Houses.

This tale may be explained by those who know how souls are made, and
where the bounds of the Possible are put down. I have lived long enough
in this country to know that it is best to know nothing, and can only
write the story as it happened.

Dumoise was our Civil Surgeon at Meridki, and we called him "Dormouse,"
because he was a round little, sleepy little man. He was a good
Doctor and never quarrelled with any one, not even with our Deputy
Commissioner, who had the manners of a bargee and the tact of a horse.
He married a girl as round and as sleepy-looking as himself. She was
a Miss Hillardyce, daughter of "Squash" Hillardyce of the Berars, who
married his Chief's daughter by mistake. But that is another story.

A honeymoon in India is seldom more than a week long; but there is
nothing to hinder a couple from extending it over two or three years.
This is a delightful country for married folk who are wrapped up in one
another. They can live absolutely alone and without interruption--just
as the Dormice did. These two little people retired from the world after
their marriage, and were very happy. They were forced, of course,
to give occasional dinners, but they made no friends hereby, and the
Station went its own way and forgot them; only saying, occasionally,
that Dormouse was the best of good fellows, though dull. A Civil Surgeon
who never quarrels is a rarity, appreciated as such.

Few people can afford to play Robinson Crusoe anywhere--least of all
in India, where we are few in the land, and very much dependent on each
other's kind offices.
Dumoise was wrong in shutting himself from the
world for a year, and he discovered his mistake when an epidemic of
typhoid broke out in the Station in the heart of the cold weather, and
his wife went down. He was a shy little man, and five days were wasted
before he realized that Mrs. Dumoise was burning with something worse
than simple fever, and three days more passed before he ventured to call
on Mrs. Shute, the Engineer's wife, and timidly speak about his trouble.
Nearly every household in India knows that Doctors are very helpless
in typhoid. The battle must be fought out between Death and the Nurses,
minute by minute and degree by degree. Mrs. Shute almost boxed Dumoise's
ears for what she called his "criminal delay," and went off at once to
look after the poor girl. We had seven cases of typhoid in the Station
that winter and, as the average of death is about one in every five
cases, we felt certain that we should have to lose somebody. But all did
their best. The women sat up nursing the women, and the men turned
to and tended the bachelors who were down, and we wrestled with those
typhoid cases for fifty-six days, and brought them through the Valley of
the Shadow in triumph. But, just when we thought all was over, and were
going to give a dance to celebrate the victory, little Mrs. Dumoise
got a relapse and died in a week and the Station went to the funeral.
Dumoise broke down utterly at the brink of the grave, and had to be
taken away.

After the death, Dumoise crept into his own house and refused to be
comforted. He did his duties perfectly, but we all felt that he should
go on leave, and the other men of his own Service told him so.