I felt his despair, the despair of doubt, as he said this,
and in his eyes blazed suddenly all the suppressed depths
of suffering and emotion that he usually kept hidden.
Such a flood of sympathy for the old man rose in me that
I did not know what to say. Of drugs and their power
I knew nothing. I stood and stared in silence, but his
voice and manner made me realize one thing: that here
was an awful battle, a struggle between human courage,
will and endurance, on the one hand, and some tremendous
power on the other--a struggle to the death. The word
"morphine" seemed to me some sort of demon.
He sat down in his armchair, lit his pipe, pulled up the operating chair for me to lie on beside him, and then told me very quietly why he took it. Already his face looked different, as the morphine circulated through the blood, and he smiled and wore a genial happy air of benevolence that made him at once a different man.
"I shall have peace now for several hours," he said, "but I don't take morphine for pleasure. I take it because it is the only way to keep myself alive and to keep my wife and child from starving. If I can gradually wean myself from it I shall live for years. If not, and I cannot make the dose less and less, it will kill me very soon. I am old, you see."
He told me very simply, but very graphically, speaking in German as he loved to do, that three years ago he had enjoyed a good and lucrative practice. But he had embarked upon some experiments in his leg--I never understood exactly what and did not dare to ask--and to observe these properly he was obliged to use the knife without taking any anæsthetic. His wife stood beside him and staunched the blood, but the pain and shock proved more than he was equal to, being an old man, and a collapse followed. All his patients left him, for he could not attend to them, and in order to be in a fit condition to see even chance callers he had to inject morphine. Thus the habit began, and before he knew where he was the thing had him by the throat. He was a man of great
natural strength of will and he began to stop it, but the
