It might involve, so my old friend Godfrey Symes
told me, certain tissues and would be found to be inoperable, but he
hoped this would not be the case, and that it would be possible to
remove it: removal gave the only chance of recovery. It was fortunate
that the patient had been sent for examination in an early stage, for
thus the chances of success were much greater than if the growth had
been one of long standing. Parkes was not, however, in a fit state to
stand the operation at once; a recuperative week or ten days in bed was
advisable. In these circumstances Symes recommended that he should not
be told at once what lay in front of him. “I can see that he is a nervous fellow,” he said, “and to lie in bed
thinking of what he has got to face will probably undo all the good
that lying in bed will bring to him. You don’t get used to the idea of
being cut open; the more you think about it, the more intolerable it
becomes. If that sort of adventure faced me, I should infinitely prefer
not to be told about it until they came to give me the anæsthetic. Naturally, he will have to consent to the operation, but I shouldn’t
tell him anything about it till the day before. He’s not married, I
think, is he?”

“No: he’s alone in the world,” said I. “He’s been with me twenty years.”

“Yes, I remember Parkes almost as long as I remember you. But that’s
all I can recommend. Of course, if the pain became severe, it might be
better to operate sooner, but at present he suffers hardly at all, and
he sleeps well, so the nurse tells me.”

“And there’s nothing else that you can try for it?” I asked. “I’ll try anything you like, but it will be perfectly useless. I’ll
let him have any quack nostrum you and he wish, as long as it doesn’t
injure his health, or make you put off the operation. There are X-rays
and ultra-violet rays, and violet leaves and radium; there are fresh
cures for cancer discovered every day, and what’s the result? They
only make people put off the operation till it’s no longer possible to
operate. Naturally, I will welcome any further opinion you want.”

Now Godfrey Symes is easily the first authority on this subject, and
has a far higher percentage of cures to his credit than anyone else. “No, I don’t want any fresh opinion,” said I. “Very well, I’ll have him carefully watched. By the way, can’t you stop
in town and dine with me? There are one or two people coming, and among
them a perfectly mad spiritualist who has more messages from the other
world than I ever get on my telephone. Trunk-calls, eh? I wonder where
the exchange is. Do come! You like cranks, I know!”

“I can’t, I’m afraid,” said I. “I’ve a couple of guests coming to stay
with me to-day down in the country. They are both cranks: one’s a
medium.”

He laughed. “Well, I can only offer you one crank, and you’ve got two,” he said. “I
must get back to the wards. I’ll write to you in about a week’s time
or so, unless there’s any urgency which I don’t foresee, and I should
suggest your coming up to tell Parkes. Good-bye.”

I caught my train at Charing Cross with about three seconds to spare,
and we slid clanking out over the bridge through the cold, dense air. Snow had been falling intermittently since morning, and when we got
out of the grime and fog of London, it was lying thickly on field
and hedgerow, retarding by its reflection of such light as lingered
the oncoming of darkness, and giving to the landscape an aloof and
lonely austerity. All day I had felt that drowsiness which accompanies
snowfall, and sometimes, half losing myself in a doze, my mind crept,
like a thing crawling about in the dark, over what Godfrey Symes had
told me. For all these years Parkes, as much friend as servant, had
given me his faithfulness and devotion, and now, in return for that,
all that apparently I could do was to tell him of his plight. It was
clear, from what the surgeon had said, that he expected a serious
disclosure, and I knew from the experience of two friends of mine who
had been in his condition what might be expected of this “exploratory
operation.” Exactly similar had been these cases; there was clear
evidence of an internal growth possibly not malignant, and in each case
the same dismal sequence had followed. The growth had been removed, and
within a couple of months there had been a recrudescence of it. Indeed,
surgery had proved no more than a pruning-knife, which had stimulated
that which the surgeon had hoped to extirpate into swifter activity. And that apparently was the best chance that Symes held out: the rest
of the treatments were but rubbish or quackery....

My mind crawled away towards another subject: probably the two visitors
whom I expected, Charles Hope and the medium whom he was bringing with
him, were in the same train as I, and I ran over in my mind all that
he had told me of Mrs. Forrest. It was certainly an odd story he had
brought me two days before. Mrs. Forrest was a medium of considerable
reputation in psychical circles, and had produced some very
extraordinary book-tests which, by all accounts, seemed inexplicable,
except on a spiritualistic hypothesis, and no imputation of trickery
had, at any rate as yet, come near her. When in trance, she spoke and
wrote, as is invariably the case with mediums, under the direction
of a certain “control”--that is to say, a spiritual and discarnate
intelligence which for the time was in possession of her. But lately
there had been signs that a fresh control had inspired her, the nature
of whom, his name, and his identity was at present unknown. And then
came the following queer incident. Last week only when in trance, and apparently under the direction
of this new control, she began describing in considerable detail a
certain house where the control said that he had work to do. At first
the description aroused no association in Charles Hope’s mind, but as
it went on, it suddenly struck him that Mrs. Forrest was speaking of
my house in Tilling. She gave its general features, its position in a
small town on a hill, its walled-in garden, and then went on to speak
with great minuteness of a rather peculiar feature in the house. She
described a big room built out in the garden a few yards away from
the house itself at right-angles to its front, and approached by half
a dozen stone steps. There was a railing, so she said, on each side
of them, and into the railing were twisted, like snake coils, the
stems of a tree which bore pale mauve flowers. This was all a correct
description of my garden room and the wistaria which writhes in and out
of the railings which line the steps. She then went on to speak of the
interior of the room. At one end was a fireplace, at the other a big
bow-window looking out on to the street and the front of the house, and
there were two other windows opposite each other, in one of which was a
table, while the other, looking out on to the garden, was shadowed by
the tree that twisted itself about the railings.