The Place Called Dagon by Herbert Gorman

Doctor Humphrey Lathrop was so huge that it was difficult for him to move about even with the aid of the two gnarled canes that flanked either side of his gargantuan reinforced chair, a throne that creaked ominously as his shifting bulk, a bulk that seemed to roll slowly like cooling lava, swayed forward in wheezing conversation. He sat like an enormous and kindly jellyfish, his stomach resting on his great round thighs and straining fiercely against the bulging vest spangled with fobs and seals, his triple chins trembling beneath his wrinkled face, his broad flat feet encased in comfortable slippers that suggested a pair of medium-sized Gladstone bags. His black velvet smoking jacket, odorous with a villainous tobacco, spread over him like a voluminous cape. The polished baldness of his round cranium was thrust into a skullcap that fitted as snugly as a skin. On the back of his neck the rolls of fat rippled as he stretched a plump arm out and lifted the tiny green teacup in a massive hand. He wheezed softly as he moved, a pleasant sibilant sound that chimed with the remonstrative creaking of his overloaded chair. Dreeme, perched opposite him on the end of his chair, observed the ancient friend of his father with an approving and respectful eye. He saw the moon-face and sagging jowls tanned by many suns and eaten by an intricate network of wrinkles (which Lathrop called "my map to eternity") and the large blue intelligent eyes gazing out of the gold circles of precariously balanced spectacles, and experienced, as always, a curious sense of inferiority and complete trust in the wisdom of the old doctor. Humphrey Lathrop was more than an ancient friend. He was a monument of probity and wisdom, a great quivering idol from whose lips issued counsel and the finalities of an achieved experience. He was a Muhammad transformed into a mountain. For fifty years he had been the solitary medical adviser to Marlborough and it had only been after his bulk had reached such proportions as to render it impossible for him to get about or climb in or out of his rusty old buggy that he had turned over a meager and thankless practice to the son of his boyhood friend. He had done so with misgiving and regret for he distrusted the vagaries of the young in the profession which he had honored for half a century. He was old-fashioned, deucedly so, believing that a doctor's prime concoction was common-sense mixed with a little peppermint. It had been enough for him to supply the simplest of remedies to the ailing and he possessed an undying suspicion of what he denominated as "applied book-learning" in so far as the practical treatment of sickness was concerned. He pointed out time and again that there were no rare diseases in Marlborough. Children were born in the usual way and men and women died as they had always died. Between these two important dates were the ailments of the young, mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles. After that there were accidents, cuts and bruises and broken limbs, and then such major ailments as typhoid fever, chronic stomach trouble (which, so far as Doctor Lathrop was concerned, included stomach, kidneys, and liver), and pneumonia. He scoffed at appendicitis, calling it "an aristocratic bellyache. " In spite of his limitations as a doctor, and, perhaps, because of the wiry health of his patients he had been accounted an unusually successful practitioner. The thunderous approach of his great flat feet and thumping canes were the immediate prophecies of relief. What impressed Dreeme most strongly about him was the excellence and keenness of his mind when taken apart from his dogged attitude toward medicine. Though he might be a narrow-minded old fogey of a doctor, he was, as a thinking man on general topics and life in general, farsighted, deliberative in judgment, ratiocinative, and exceedingly shrewd. He mixed a certain amount of imagination with his observations and limited it with a complacent fatalism that was less abrupt than dimly wistful. Therefore, whenever Dreeme was perplexed he visited Lathrop, finding in him a genial fount of encouragement and pertinent comment. At this moment he was fumbling toward an utterance of the problem weighing upon his puzzled mind and the old doctor, fully aware of the purpose of the visit, studied him with some amusement, his blue eyes twinkling behind the gold spectacles.

"I was called out to the Westcott farm last night," said Dreeme finally, pushing his cup from the edge of the little table.