The Doctor's Story

Dr. P—is such a rare traveler to London that when we both got into the same carriage twice within ten days, I asked him why. I then let him explain without interruption.

"Last week," he said, "I was invited to a doctors' meeting at the R-Hospital. In one of the wards a patient, an old man got up shakily from his bed and moved towards me. I could see that he hadn't long to live, but he came up to me and placed his right foot close to mine on the floor."

'"Frank!' I cried. He couldn't answer, as I knew, but he tried to smile, all the time pressing his foot against mine."

"My thoughts raced back more than thirty years—to the dark days of 1941, when I was a student in London. The scene was an air-raid shelter, in which I and about a hundred other people slept every night. Among them were a Mrs. West and her son Frank, who lived nearby."

"Sharing wartime problems, we shelter-dwellers got to know each other very well. Frank West interested me because he wasn't normal. He had never been normal, not even at birth. His mother told me he was 37 then, but he had less of a mind than a baby has. His 'speech' consisted of simple sounds—sounds of pleasure or anger—and no more. Sometimes he tried to smile but never succeeded. Mrs. West, then about 75, was a strong, capable woman, as she had to be of course, because Frank depended on her entirely. He needed all the attention of a baby."

"One night a policeman came into our shelter and spoke to Mrs. West. The news he gave her was that her house had been 'flattened', he said, 'by a heavy gun.' That wasn't quite true, because the Wests went on living there for quite some time. But they certainly lost nearly everything they owned."

"When that sort of thing happened, the rest of us helped the unlucky ones. So before we separated that morning, I stood beside Frank and measured my right foot against his. They were about the same size. That night, then, I took a spare pair of shoes to the shelter for Frank. But as soon as he saw me he came running—and placed his right foot against mine."

"After that, his greeting to me was always the same. It was the same last week, though he hadn't seen me for thirty-odd years. Now he is dead—rather sooner than I expected. He's being buried today. That's why I'm going to London again."