CHAPTER XXI
A few days after the doctor's secret had been laid bare I received a brief, curt letter from McCloy to say he could not keep my place open for ever; how soon was I coming back? Six weeks had passed already. The doctor convinced me I was not yet in a condition to face ten hours' hard reporting a day. I answered McCloy as best I could, thanking him, and telling the facts. Dr. Huebner also wrote him a line.
I was distressed and anxious, none the less, and that evening I was certainly not at my best. I gave the old man but little help. His method of using me was simple: if I could manage to interest him, by talk, by music, by books, by anything at all, it enabled him to postpone the hour of injection. Each time we tried to make this interval longer; each time, he told me, he took a smaller quantity.
On this particular evening, hungry and depressed as I was, I failed to be "interesting," and no forced attempt could make me so. My own condition, in any case, was pretty low; my friend's dejection and excessive irritability proved the last straw. We disagreed, we hurt each other's feelings a little, I relapsed into silence finally, the gloom was dreadful. My own troubles just then were uppermost in my mind. If I lost my job, I kept thinking, what on earth would happen to me? . . .
The old man presently, and long before his time, got up in silence and went to the glass cabinet where now the Majendie bottle stood. He no longer kept it in his workshop out of sight. His face was black as thunder. Conscience pricked me; I roused myself, saying something by way of trying to prevent, whereupon he turned and said savagely: "Do you want to see me die? Or lose my reason?"
