Not to be Taken Read Free

quiet Rona spoke in something like consternation. ‘You can’t get Glen? I’ll go up at once. He’s in bed?’
    ‘Yes. Douglas is with him. I don’t know whether Angela ought…?’
    ‘Keep Angela out of this,’ said Rona briefly.
    She hurried up the stairs, and I met her on the landing, but with no more than a quick nod she passed into the bedroom. I followed her.
    ‘Well, John,’ she said, ‘this is a bad business. I’d as soon expect the heavens to fall as to see you ill in bed. Tell me what’s happened.’
    Somewhat sheepishly John told her. He was looking rather better now, and his voice was stronger. To get him into bed had obviously been the right thing.
    Rona listened, her lips compressed. Then she felt his pulse. Frances was sent for a thermometer from Angela’s room, and Rona carried out what seemed to me a thoroughly professional though rapid examination.
    ‘Humph!’ was all she said when it was finished.
    John looked at her still more sheepishly. ‘I don’t know whether you could get me anything to relieve the pain, Rona. It comes in spasms, and it’s – well, it’s pretty bad.’
    Rona nodded. ‘It’s more than biliousness, John. I think you must have eaten something that’s poisoned you. Glen –’ She broke off and seemed to be thinking hard, the toe of one shoe tapping on the floor. ‘No we can’t get Glen. I’m going to wash out your stomach myself.’
    John began to protest in a half-hearted sort of way, but Rona, having made up her mind, was out of the room at once. I could not help feeling relieved at the way she had taken things in hand. There was but one doctor within a dozen miles, and as it was now surgery time, the probability was that he would not be able to come within the next hour.
    John exchanged a rueful glance with me, and I wandered idly out into the passage.
    Rona was telephoning below, in her usual calm yet somehow compelling way, and I could hear her explaining to the maid at the other end exactly what she wanted. Rona did all her brother’s dispensing, so that she knew the position of each jar in the surgery.
    ‘Listen carefully, Alice. I want you to find some things out of the surgery for me and bring them over here at once. It’s urgent, you understand.’ I heard her detailing the stomach pump, and drugs such as bismuth, morphia tablets, magnesii oxidum and ferri hydroxidum (which I hoped the maid understood), and making the other write each item down on the pad beside the telephone.
    Mitzi Bergmann appeared as Rona was hanging up the receiver, and asked if there was anything she could do.
    ‘You can,’ Rona replied briskly. ‘Fill every hot-water bottle in the house, and bring them to me. And you, Frances,’ she added, catching sight of my wife, ‘ask Angela where the brandy’s kept, and bring me the bottle.’
    I intercepted her before she reached the head of the stairs, out of earshot from John’s room.
    ‘You’re going to give him morphia?’ I asked in a low voice.
    ‘Just a small injection, to relieve the pain. Angela has a hypodermic syringe.’
    ‘It’s all right?’ I asked doubtfully. ‘I mean, you’re not a qualified practitioner, Rona.’
    She looked at me with an impatience unusual to her.
    ‘Damn qualifications. I can administer a shot of morphia as well as any qualified doctor.’
    ‘You think it’s serious, then?’
    She looked at me again, rather queerly. ‘I don’t know. But it might be, my friend. Damnably serious.’
    4
     
    Perhaps (I thought) women have a tendency to exaggerate. Certainly Rona has a very slight tendency at times toward the dramatically impressive. At any rate her brother, when at last he arrived over an hour later, took a very much less serious view.
    Rona had certainly given poor John a strenuous time. She had dosed him with a compound from her bottles, given him the promised shot of morphia, then plied the stomach pump on him (during which process I preferred to leave the bedroom), and finally