My own uncle was hung by the neck because of it, you hear?
My son comes to a sanitarium, and a doctor reeks of it!”
“I must ask you to leave.”
“You ASK me!
We ARE leaving!”
“If you could be a little temperate we could tell you the results of the treatment to date.
Naturally, since you feel as you do, we would not want your son as a patient—”
“You dare to use the word temperate to me?”
Dick called to Doctor Ladislau and as he approached, said:
“Will you represent us in saying good-by to the patient and to his family?”
He bowed slightly to Morris and went into his office, and stood rigid for a moment just inside the door.
He watched until they drove away, the gross parents, the bland, degenerate offspring: it was easy to prophesy the family’s swing around Europe, bullying their betters with hard ignorance and hard money.
But what absorbed Dick after the disappearance of the caravan was the question as to what extent he had provoked this.
He drank claret with each meal, took a nightcap, generally in the form of hot rum, and sometimes he tippled with gin in the afternoons—gin was the most difficult to detect on the breath.
He was averaging a half- pint of alcohol a day, too much for his system to burn up.
Dismissing a tendency to justify himself, he sat down at his desk and wrote out, like a prescription, a regime that would cut his liquor in half.
Doctors, chauffeurs, and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor, as could painters, brokers, cavalry leaders; Dick blamed himself only for indiscretion.
But the matter was by no means clarified half an hour later when Franz, revivified by an Alpine fortnight, rolled up the drive, so eager to resume work that he was plunged in it before he reached his office.
Dick met him there.
“How was Mount Everest?”
“We could very well have done Mount Everest the rate we were doing.
We thought of it.
How goes it all?
How is my Kaethe, how is your Nicole?”
“All goes smooth domestically.
But my God, Franz, we had a rotten scene this morning.”
“How? What was it?”
Dick walked around the room while Franz got in touch with his villa by telephone.
After the family exchange was over, Dick said:
“The Morris boy was taken away—there was a row.”
Franz’s buoyant face fell.
“I knew he’d left.
I met Ladislau on the veranda.”
“What did Ladislau say?”
“Just that young Morris had gone—that you’d tell me about it.
What about it?”
“The usual incoherent reasons.”
“He was a devil, that boy.”
“He was a case for anesthesia,” Dick agreed.
“Anyhow, the father had beaten Ladislau into a colonial subject by the time I came along.
What about Ladislau?
Do we keep him?
I say no—he’s not much of a man, he can’t seem to cope with anything.”
Dick hesitated on the verge of the truth, swung away to give himself space within which to recapitulate.
Franz perched on the edge of a desk, still in his linen duster and travelling gloves.
Dick said:
“One of the remarks the boy made to his father was that your distinguished collaborator was a drunkard.
The man is a fanatic, and the descendant seems to have caught traces of vin-du-pays on me.”
Franz sat down, musing on his lower lip.
“You can tell me at length,” he said finally.