Sorry Doctor

AMOK--Stefan Zweig--Viking ($1.50).

Narrator of this sad story was a doctor who ran amuck. Resident in a native village in the Dutch East Indies, he was lonely, bored till one day in walked a beautiful Englishwoman, a rich trader's wife. She was in trouble: her husband, who had been away five months, was about to return; she was going to have a baby by another man; she wanted the doctor to perform an illegal operation while there was time. She offered him a fortune to do it. The doctor did not like her manner : she was supercilious, but she fired his blood. He refused the money and made her an uncertain proposal. The lady gave him one look, walked out.

No sooner had she gone than the doctor began to feel guilty, was soon beside himself with remorse, aggravated by fever. He pursued her to the city, dogged her footsteps, offered his services imploringly. At last he was summoned. She had gone to the Chinese quarter, to a filthy old harridan who had nearly killed her, was now at death's door. All the doctor could do was hold the door open politely. But after she was dead he made out a false certificate of the cause of death, so that her husband would never know. Then he left his job, went back to Europe. On the same boat traveled the lady's husband, with her body in a lead coffin. The doctor feared that her husband, his suspicions aroused, might order an autopsy. So he took big steps to prevent it.

The Author. Stefan Zweig, of Salzburg, Austria, is no kin to Arnold Zweig of Berlin, author of The Case of Sergeant Grischa. Well and comfortably educated, he wandered the world, might have continued indefinitely had it not been for the War, which turned him to writing and made him a European bestseller. Manhattan theatre-goers know his adaptation of Ben Jonson's Volpone. Other U. S.-translated books: Conflicts, Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Joseph Fouche.

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