The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

It lay perfectly motionless, midway on the side of the bed, where the curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met.  Nothing more was visible.  The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.

He stood looking at it unable to stir, unable to call out; feeling nothing, knowing nothing, every faculty he possessed gathered up and lost in the one seeing faculty.  How long that first panic held him he never could tell afterwards.  It might have been only for a moment; it might have been for many minutes together.  How he got to the bed—whether he ran to it headlong, or whether he approached it slowly—how he wrought himself up to unclose the curtains and look in, he never has remembered, and never will remember to his dying day.  It is enough that he did go to the bed, and that he did look inside the curtains.

The man had moved.  One of his arms was outside the clothes; his face was turned a little on the pillow; his eyelids were wide open.  Changed as to position, and as to one of the features, the face was, otherwise, fearfully and wonderfully unaltered.  The dead paleness and the dead quiet were on it still

One glance showed Arthur this—one glance, before he flew breathlessly to the door, and alarmed the house.

The man whom the landlord called ‘Ben,’ was the first to appear on the stairs.  In three words, Arthur told him what had happened, and sent him for the nearest doctor.

I, who tell you this story, was then staying with a medical friend of mine, in practice at Doncaster, taking care of his patients for him, during his absence in London; and I, for the time being, was the nearest doctor.  They had sent for me from the Inn, when the stranger was taken ill in the afternoon; but I was not at home, and medical assistance was sought for elsewhere.  When the man from The Two Robins rang the night-bell, I was just thinking of going to bed.  Naturally enough, I did not believe a word of his story about ‘a dead man who had come to life again.’  However, I put on my hat, armed myself with one or two bottles of restorative medicine, and ran to the Inn, expecting to find nothing more remarkable, when I got there, than a patient in a fit.

My surprise at finding that the man had spoken the literal truth was almost, if not quite, equalled by my astonishment at finding myself face to face with Arthur Holliday as soon as I entered the bedroom.  It was no time then for giving or seeking explanations.  We just shook hands amazedly; and then I ordered everybody but Arthur out of the room, and hurried to the man on the bed.

The kitchen fire had not been long out.  There was plenty of hot water in the boiler, and plenty of flannel to be had.  With these, with my medicines, and with such help as Arthur could render under my direction, I dragged the man, literally, out of the jaws of death.  In less than an hour from the time when I had been called in, he was alive and talking in the bed on which he had been laid out to wait for the Coroner’s inquest.

You will naturally ask me, what had been the matter with him; and I might treat you, in reply, to a long theory, plentifully sprinkled with, what the children call, hard words.  I prefer telling you that, in this case, cause and effect could not be satisfactorily joined together by any theory whatever.  There are mysteries in life, and the condition of it, which human science has not fathomed yet; and I candidly confess to you, that, in bringing that man back to existence, I was, morally speaking, groping haphazard in the dark.  I know (from the testimony of the doctor who attended him in the afternoon) that the vital machinery, so far as its action is appreciable by our senses, had, in this case, unquestionably stopped; and I am equally certain (seeing that I recovered him) that the vital principle was not extinct.  When I add, that he had suffered from a long and complicated illness, and that his whole nervous system was utterly deranged, I have told you all I really know of the physical condition of my dead-alive patient at The Two Robins Inn.

When he ‘came to,’ as the phrase goes, he was a startling object to look at, with his colourless face, his sunken cheeks, his wild black eyes, and his long black hair.  The first question he asked me about himself, when he could speak, made me suspect that I had been called in to a man in my own profession.  I mentioned to him my surmise; and he told me that I was right.

He said he had come last from Paris, where he had been attached to a hospital.  That he had lately returned to England, on his way to Edinburgh, to continue his studies; that he had been taken ill on the journey; and that he had stopped to rest and recover himself at Doncaster.  He did not add a word about his name, or who he was: and, of course, I did not question him on the subject.  All I inquired, when he ceased speaking, was what branch of the profession he intended to follow.