LITMIR.BIZ

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      He opened the door of one of the house-surgeon’s rooms.

      A youngish looking man, with a straw-coloured beard, was seated before the fire, with a cigarette between his lips.

      He rose to greet Thénard, was introduced to Adams, and, drawing an old couch a bit from the wall, he bade his guests be seated.

      The armchair he retained himself. One of the legs was loose, and he was the only man in the Beaujon who had the art of sitting on it without smashing it. This he explained whilst offering cigarettes.

      Thénard, like many another French professor, unofficially was quite one with the students. He would snatch a moment from his work to smoke a cigarette with them; he would sometimes look in at their little parties. I have seen him at a birthday party where the cakes and ale, to say nothing of the cigarettes and the unpawned banjo, were the direct products of a pawned microscope. I have seen him, I say, at a party like this, drinking a health to the microscope as the giver of all the good things on the table—he, the great Thénard, with an income of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, and a reputation solid as the four massive text-books that stood to his name.

      “Duthil,” said Thénard, “I have secured, I believe, a man for our friend Berselius.” He indicated Adams with a half laugh, and Dr. Duthil, turning in his chair, regarded anew the colossus from the States. The great, large-hewn, cast-iron visaged Adams, beside whom Thénard looked like a shrivelled monkey and Duthil like a big baby with a beard.

      “Good,” said Duthil.

      “A better man than Bauchardy,” said Thénard.

      “Much,” replied Duthil.

      “Who, then, was Bauchardy?” asked Adams, amused rather by the way in which the two others were discussing him.

      “Bauchardy?” said Duthil. “Why, he was the last man Berselius killed.”

      “Silence,” said Thénard, then turning to Adams, “Berselius is a perfectly straight man. On these hunting expeditions of his he invariably takes a doctor with him; he is not a man who fears death in the least, but he has had bitter experience of being without medical assistance, so he takes a doctor. He pays well and is entirely to be trusted to do the right thing, as far as money goes. On that side the contract is all right. But there is another side—the character of Berselius. A man, to be the companion of Captain Berselius, needs to be big and strong in body and mind, or he would be crushed by the hand of Captain Berselius. Yes, he is a terrible man in a way—un homme affreux—a man of the tiger type—and he is going to the country of the big baboons, where there is the freedom of action that the soul of such a man desires——”

      “In fact,” said Adams, “he is a villain, this Captain Berselius?”

      “Oh, no,” said Thénard, “not in the least. Be quiet, Duthil, you do not know the man as I do. I have studied him; he is a Primitive——”

      “An Apache,” said Duthil. “Come, dear master, confess that from the moment you heard that this Berselius was intent on another expedition, you determined to throw a foreigner into the breach. ‘No more French doctors, if possible,’ said you. Is not that so?”

      Thénard laughed the laugh of cynical confession, buttoning his overcoat at the same time and preparing to go.

      “Well, there may be something in what you say, Duthil. However, there the offer is—a sound one financially. Yes. I must say I dread that two thousand francs a month will prove a fatal attraction, and, if Mr. Adams does not go, some weaker man will. Well, I must be off.”

      “One moment,” said Adams. “Will you give me this man’s address? I don’t say I will take the post, but I might at least go and see him.”

      “Certainly,” replied Thénard, and taking one of his own cards from his pocket, he scribbled on the back of it—

      CAPTAIN ARMAND BERSELIUS

      14 AVENUE MALAKOFF

      Then he went off to a consultation at the Hotel Bristol on a Balkan prince, whose malady, hitherto expressed by evil living, had suddenly taken an acute and terrible turn and Adams found himself alone with Dr. Duthil.

      “That is Thénard all over,” said Duthil. “He is the high priest of modernism. He and all the rest of the neurologists have divided up devilment into provinces, and labelled each province with names all ending in enia or itis. Berselius is a Primitive, it seems; this Balkan prince is—I don’t know what they call him—sure to be something Latin, which does not interfere in the least with the fact that he ought to be boiled alive in an antiseptic solution. Have another cigarette.”

      “Do you know anything special against Captain Berselius?” asked Adams, taking the cigarette.

      “I have never even seen the man,” replied Duthil, “but from what I have heard, he is a regular buccaneer of the old type, who values human life not one hair. Bauchardy, that last doctor he took with him, was a friend of mine. Perhaps that is why I feel vicious about the man, for he killed Bauchardy as sure as I didn’t.”

      “Killed him?”

      “Yes; with hardship and overwork.”

      “Overwork?”

      “Mon Dieu, yes. Dragged him through swamps after his infernal monkeys and tigers, and Bauchardy died in the hospital at Marseilles of spinal meningitis, brought on by the hardships of the expedition—died as mad as Berselius himself.”

      “As mad as Berselius?”

      “Yes; this infernal Berselius seemed to have infected him with his own hunting fever, and Bauchardy—mon Dieu, you should have seen him during his illness, shooting imaginary elephants, and calling for Berselius.”

      “What I want to get at is this,” said Adams. “Was Bauchardy driven into these swamps you speak of, and made to hunt against his will—treated cruelly, in fact—or did Berselius take his own share of the hardships?”

      “His own share! Why, from what I can understand, he did all the hunting. A man of iron with the ferocity of a tiger—a very devil, who made others follow him as poor Bauchardy did, to his death——”

      “Well,” said Adams, “this man interests me somehow, and I intend to have a look at him.”

      “The pay is good,” said Duthil, “but I have warned you fully, if Thénard hasn’t. Good evening.”

      The Rue Dijon, where Adams lived, was a good way from the Beaujon. He made his way there on foot, studying the proposition as he went.

      The sporting nature of the proposal coming from the sedate Thénard rather tickled him.

      “He wants to pit me against this Berselius,” said Adams to himself, “same as if we were dogs. That’s the long and short of it. Yes, I can understand his meaning in part; he’s afraid if Berselius engages some week-kneed individual, he’ll give the weak-kneed individual more than he can take. He wants to stick a six-foot Yankee in the breach, instead of a five-foot froggie, all absinthe and cigarette ends. Well, he was frank, at all events. Hum, I don’t like the proposition—and yet there’s something—there’s something—there’s something about it I do like. Then there’s the two thousand francs a month, and not a penny out of pocket, and there’s the Congo, and the guggly-wuggly alligators, and the great big hairy apes, and the feel of a gun in one’s hand again. Oh, my!”

      “All the same, it’s funny,” he went on, as he drew near the Boulevard St. Michel. “When Thénard spoke of Berselius there was something more than absence of friendship in his tone. Can old man Thénard have a down on this Berselius and does he in his heart of hearts imagine that by allotting P. Quincy Adams to the post of physician extraordinary to the expedition, he will get even with the Captain? My friend, remember that hymn the English Salvationists were yelling last Sunday outside the American Presbyterian

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