Campbell went away for a couple of months' holiday some years ago.
He came back after a week; he said he couldn't stand the racket, and the sight of so many people in the streets scared him.'
It was a strange world into which Ashenden found himself thrown when, his health gradually improving, he was able to mix with his fellow patients.
One morning Dr Lennox told him he could thenceforward lunch in the dining-room.
This was a large, low room, with great window space; the windows were always wide open and on fine days the sun streamed in.
There seemed to be a great many people and it took him some time to sort them out.
They were of all kinds, young, middle-aged and old.
There were some, like McLeod and Campbell, who had been at the sanatorium for years and expected to die there.
Others had only been there for a few months.
There was one middle-aged spinster called Miss Atkin who had been coming every winter for a long time and in the summer went to stay with friends and relations.
She had nothing much the matter with her any more, and might just as well have stayed away altogether, but she liked the life.
Her long residence had given her a sort of position, she was honorary librarian and hand in glove with the matron.
She was always ready to gossip with you, hut you were soon warned that everything you said was passed on.
It was useful to Dr Lennox to know that his patients were getting on well together and were happy, that they did nothing imprudent and followed his instructions.
Little escaped Miss Atkin's sharp eyes, and from her it went to the matron and so to Dr Lennox.
Because she had been coming for so many years, she sat at the same table as McLeod and Campbell, together with an old general who had been put there on account of his rank.
The table was in no way different from any other, and it was not more advantageously placed, but because the oldest residents sat there it was looked upon as the most desirable place to sit, and several elderly women were bitterly resentful because Miss Atkin, who went away for four or five months every summer, should be given a place there while they who spent the whole year in the sanatorium sat at other tables.
There was an old Indian civilian who had been at the sanatorium longer than anyone but McLeod and Campbell; he was a man who in his day had ruled a province, and he was waiting irascibly for either McLeod or Campbell to die so that he might take his place at the first table.
Ashenden made the acquaintance of Campbell.
He was a long, big-boned fellow with a bald head, so thin that you wondered how his limbs held together; and when he sat crumpled in an armchair he gave you the uncanny impression of a mannikin in a puppet-show.
He was brusque, touchy and bad-tempered.
The first thing he asked Ashenden was:
'Are you fond of music?'
'Yes.'
'No one here cares a damn for it.
I play the violin.
But if you like it, come to my room one day and I'll play to you.'
'Don't you go,' said McLeod, who heard him.
'It's torture.'
'How can you be so rude?' cried Miss Atkin.
'Mr Campbell plays very nicely.'
'There's no one in this beastly place that knows one note from another,' said Campbell.
With a derisive chuckle McLeod walked off.
Miss Atkin tried to smooth things down.
'You mustn't mind what Mr McLeod said.'
'Oh, I don't.
I'll get back on him all right.'
He played the same tune over and over again all that afternoon. McLeod banged on the floor, but Campbell went on.
He sent a message by a maid to say that he had a headache and would Mr Campbell mind not playing; Campbell replied that he had a perfect right to play and if Mr McLeod didn't like it he could lump it.
When next they met high words passed.
Ashenden was put on a table with the pretty Miss Bishop, with Templeton, and with a London man, an accountant, called Henry Chester.
He was a stocky, broad-shouldered, wiry little fellow, and the last person you would ever have thought would be attacked by TB.
It had come upon him as a sudden and unexpected blow.
He was a perfectly ordinary man, somewhere between thirty and forty, married, with two children.
He lived in a decent suburb.
He went up to the city every morning and read the morning paper; he came down from the city every evening and read the evening paper.
He had no interests except his business and his family.
He liked his work; he made enough money to live in comfort, he put by a reasonable sum every year, he played golf on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday, he went every August for a three weeks' holiday to the same place on the east coast; his children would grow up and marry, then he would turn his business over to his son and retire with his wife to a little house in the country where he could potter about till death claimed him at a ripe old age.
He asked nothing more from life than that, and it was a life that thousands upon thousands of his fellow-men lived with satisfaction.
He was the average citizen.