The Secrets of Dr. Taverner Read Free

it. I have never been able to put it into words before, but you have hit the nail on the head."
     
    I saw that my colleague's perspicuity had given him great confidence.
     
    "I should like you to come down to my nursing home for a time and be under my personal observation," said Taverner.
     
    "I should like to very much, but I think there is something further you ought to know before I do so. This thing has begun to affect my character. At first it seemed something outside myself, but now I am responding to it, almost helping, and trying to find out ways of gratifying it without getting myself into trouble. That is why I went for the hens when I came down to the Wynters' house. I was afraid I should lose my self-control and go for Beryl. I did in the end, as it happened, so it was not much use. In fact I think it did more harm than good, for I seemed to get into I much closer touch with `It' after I had yielded to the impulse. I know that the best thing I could do would be to do away with myself, but I daren't. I feel that after I am dead I should have to meet--whatever it is--face to face."
     
    "You need not be afraid to come down to the nursing home," said Taverner. "We will look after you."
     
    After he had gone Taverner said to me: "Have you ever heard of vampires, Rhodes?"
     
    "Yes, rather," I said. "I used to read myself to sleep with. Dracula once when I had a spell of insomnia."
     
    "That," nodding his head in the direction of the departing man, "is a singularly good specimen."
     
    "Do you mean to say you are going to take a revolting case like that down to Hindhead?"
     
    "Not revolting, Rhodes, a soul in a dungeon. The soul may not be very savoury, but it is a fellow creature. Let it out and it will soon clean itself."
     
    I often used to marvel at the wonderful tolerance and compassion Taverner had for erring humanity.
     
    "The more you see of human nature," he said to me once, "the less you feel inclined to condemn it, for you realize how hard it has struggled. No one does wrong because he likes it, but because it is the lesser of the two evils."
     
    III A couple of days later I was called out of the nursing home office to receive a new patient. It was Craigie. He had got as far as the doormat, and there he had stuck. He seemed so thoroughly ashamed of himself that I had not the heart to administer the judicious bullying which is usual under such circumstances.
     
    "I feel as if I were driving a baulking horse," he said. "I want to come in, but I can't."
     
    I called Taverner and the sight of him seemed to relieve our patient.
     
    "Ah," he said, "you give me confidence. I feel that I can defy `It,'" and he squared his shoulders and crossed the threshold. Once inside, a weight seemed lifted from his mind, and he settled down quite happily to the routine of the place. Beryl Wynter used to walk over almost every afternoon, unknown to her family, and cheer him up; in fact he seemed on the high road to recovery.
     
    One morning I was strolling round the grounds with the head gardener, planning certain small improvements, when he made a remark to me which I had reason to remember later.
     
    "You would think all the German prisoners should have been returned by now, wouldn't you, sir? But they haven't. I passed one the other night in the lane outside the back door. I never thought that I should see their filthy field-grey again."
     
    I sympathized with his antipathy; he had been a prisoner in their hands, and the memory was not one to fade.
     
    I thought no more of his remark, but a few days later I was reminded of it when one of our patients came to me and said:
     
    "Dr. Rhodes, I think you are exceedingly unpatriotic to employ German prisoners in the garden when so many discharged soldiers cannot get work."
     
    I assured her that we did not do so, no German being likely to survive a day's work under the superintendence of our ex-prisoner head gardener.
     
    "But I distinctly saw the man going round