Once a week, varying the routine, he spent a whole day in Sandmouth. He had several patients in that rising watering place — Calderbury folk who, retired and rich, lengthened their lives by means of sea air, half-yearly dividends, and (he always hoped) the confidence they reposed in his own regular visits. He was inclined to smile at his confidence (since there were so many excellent doctors in Sandmouth); nevertheless, he enjoyed his day trips to the sea. He took few definite holidays, and if he did, he and Jessica and Gerald went away for a fortnight, which was much longer than he cared to be idle. But the Sandmouth excursions were pleasantly enforced by his work; he did not add that he liked them all the more because he made them by himself. They happened on Fridays, as a rule, and began by a morning cup of tea in the surgery long before anyone else in the house was astir; then came the walk to the station up the hill, through the Cathedral Close, and down the hill the other side. He liked that walk. It was a different life that one saw before seven in the morning — an hour at which all good deans and archdeacons were asleep, but at which in wintertime the lights were burning in innumerable little houses, workmen were washing over kitchen sinks, and their wives frizzling bacon and poking fires that had been banked down the night before. The working-class population of Calderbury was larger than a visitor might have suspected; indeed, within a few hundred yards of the Cathedral, in houses picturesquely ivy-clad, were conditions of overcrowding as deplorable as any in the more notorious slums of the big cities. David knew this. Presumably the Cathedral authorities knew it also, since they owned the property.

One summer morning he caught, as usual, the seven-five — an absurdly early train, but there was no other till afternoon, and in those days travelers were at the mercy of the railway schedule. (To-day the buses leave for Sandmouth every hour from Calderbury Market Square, and do the journey, without change, in seventy minutes.) But the doctor did not mind the two and a half hours of starts and stops, of chuff-chuffing through the dappled countryside, with the tang of sea in the air for the last twenty miles. It gave him a chance to read the paper and a detective novel, to talk to some casually met stranger, to smoke his pipe, and (as a last resort) to do nothing at all but sit back and think. That girl of Mrs. Pembar’s — was it a blood dyscrasia or just an abnormal sensitivity? And old Doubleday’s self-styled “rheumatics,” which was really osteo-arthritis and would kill him in the end, what was to be done — was there anything that could be done? For that matter his own son … Mysterious flesh and bones and juices — so sweet for pleasure, so sour for pain; prison of man and empire to microbe; but beyond all that, as in Gerald, the dark alchemy of the mind that no brain surgery could explore. It was a problem that always beguiled him, and one to which, had he been granted time and the chance to specialize, he would have devoted himself. But his approach to it was, for those days, eccentric; he believed that mind was more than physical brain, and different from it in character — something that neither the surgeon’s knife nor the analyst’s reagents could reveal. He felt that it was, in a sense, pure God-stuff, and that the treatment of mental disease must leave the sphere of physical things and become spiritual, even mystic. The staff at Midchester County Asylum, of which he was on the Board and which he visited regularly, chaffed him about this and called him “the Witch Doctor,” and he chaffed them back by saying that it was a title he would gladly accept, and would they please appoint him officially?