Page 587 - the-idiot

my hand.
‘I think you dropped this,’ I remarked, as quietly and dri-
ly as I could. (I thought it best to treat him so.) For some
while he stood before me in downright terror, and seemed
unable to understand. He then suddenly grabbed at his side-
pocket, opened his mouth in alarm, and beat his forehead
with his hand.
‘My God!’ he cried, ‘where did you find it? How?’ I ex-
plained in as few words as I could, and as drily as possible,
how I had seen it and picked it up; how I had run after him,
and called out to him, and how I had followed him upstairs
and groped my way to his door.
‘Gracious Heaven!’ he cried, ‘all our papers are in it! My
dear sir, you little know what you have done for us. I should
have been lost—lost!’
‘I had taken hold of the door-handle meanwhile, intend-
ing to leave the room without reply; but I was panting with
my run upstairs, and my exhaustion came to a climax in a
violent fit of coughing, so bad that I could hardly stand.
‘I saw how the man dashed about the room to find me an
empty chair, how he kicked the rags off a chair which was
covered up by them, brought it to me, and helped me to sit
down; but my cough went on for another three minutes or
so. When I came to myself he was sitting by me on another
chair, which he had also cleared of the rubbish by throwing
it all over the floor, and was watching me intently.
‘I’m afraid you are ill?’ he remarked, in the tone which
doctors use when they address a patient. ‘I am myself a
medical man’ (he did not say ‘doctor’), with which words

The Idiot