Kitabı oku: «Трое в лодке, не считая собаки / Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)», sayfa 2

I went to my doctor. He is an old friend of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me.” So he said:

“Well, what’s the matter with you?”

I said:

“I will not take up your time with telling you what is the matter with me. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”

Then he examined me, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.

I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s¹², and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.

I read the prescription. It said:

“1 lb.¹³ beefsteak, with 1 pt. ¹⁴ bitter beer every 6 hours.

1 ten-mile walk every morning.

1 bed at 11 sharp every night.”

I followed the directions, with the happy result – my life was saved, and is still going on.

But going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being ‘a general disinclination to work of any kind¹⁵’.

What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell¹⁶. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. My family did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they thought it was laziness.

“Are you still sleeping,” they would say, “get up and do something for your living, can’t you?” – not knowing, of course, that I was ill.

We sat there for half-an-hour, describing to each other our maladies. I explained to George and William Harris how I felt when I got up in the morning, and William Harris told us how he felt when he went to bed; and George told us how he felt in the night.

Suddenly, Mrs. Poppets¹⁷ knocked at the door to know if we were ready for supper. We smiled sadly, and decided to eat a little.

I seemed took no interest in my my food an unusual thing for me – and didn’t want any usual thing for me – and I didn’t want any cheese.

We refilled our glasses, lit our pipes, and resumed the discussion upon our state of health.

“What we want is rest,” said Harris.

“Rest and a complete change,” said George. “The overstrain upon our brains has produced a general depression. Changes and absence of the necessity for thought will restore the mental equilibrium.”