Books: Life at High Tide
V >>
Various >> Life at High Tide
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
"You may as well send those Symphony tickets to somebody," he said,
impatiently, to his wife; "I sha'n't be able to go. Ten to one I shall
be late to dinner, and I doubt if I get home to lunch at all."
His wife, who was patiently holding his gloves and cigar-case, looked
at him with a sweet maternal anxiety as he tumbled together the papers
on the table, but she only said, "Very well." As he turned to take the
gloves and cigar-case, she added, quickly, with a second anxious
glance:
"Do try to get a few minutes' rest somewhere. Any of our friends will
be so glad to give you a cup of tea--or a little music--and it always
rests you so."
The Doctor took the things from her hands; he looked abstractedly at
his wife, then stooped hurriedly and kissed her.
"Don't worry about me; I shall be all right," he said, as he hastened
from the room. It was characteristic of him that he forgot his
clinical thermometer, and was never known to have a prescription-pad
or pencil.
One servant opened the house door for him, and another the carriage
door; the Doctor stepped in quickly, growling out a direction and
ignoring the bows of his retainers. He kept his own for the benefit of
his clients, he was wont cynically to say. He settled himself in the
seat, and before the door was fairly closed had lighted a cigar and
unfurled a medical journal.
As the carriage whirled recklessly down the street and around corners,
several feminine patients looked longingly after, as if virtue went
out from it, and several masculine ones raised their hats, but the
Doctor, his eyes glued to the paper, saw none of them.
Perhaps his most restful moments were these spent in his brougham. It
was almost his only time for reading; he had found, moreover, that
this served to keep his mind fresh from case to case, detaching it
from one train of thought and bringing it with new concentration to
the next. These brief intervals belonged wholly to himself. His home
was never safe from invasion, and little time and less strength
remained to him for domestic joys.
Life had not brought to him all that he was conscious might have been
within its gift. Professionally, indeed, he had reached great heights,
but these only enabled a measure of the territory beyond, and if to
his patients he appeared as a species of demigod, to himself he was
merely a "lucky" physician--his peculiar luck consisting in that sixth
sense which put him so easily into his patients' skins and pierced
through obscure maladies to possible sources. How he knew a great many
things puzzled them, but puzzled him still more. Simply at certain
crises he was aware that mysteries were momentarily revealed to him.
Back of that he possessed, of course, the usual outfit of medical
knowledge, open to any one, but which had never yet made a great
physician since the world with all its aches and pains began. For
_that_ other things were needed: a coloring of the artistic
temperament, a dash of the gambler's, a touch of femininity, as well
as the solid stratum of cool common sense at the bottom of all;
_these_ eked out the modicum of scientific knowledge which is all
mankind has yet wrested from secretive nature. The Doctor sometimes
described himself as a "good guesser." Surgery might be an exact
science; few things in medicine were exact, and what was never exact
was the material upon which medicine must work. The great bulk of his
fraternity went through their studious, conscientious, hard-working,
and not infrequently heroic lives under the contented conviction of
having to deal with two principal facts--disease and medicine--both
accessible through study. To them the imponderable factor of the
patient represented such or such an aggregation of material--muscle,
nerve, blood, brawn, bone, and tissue--which might be counted upon to
respond to such and such a treatment in such and such a manner, with
very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity of
faith. To him, on the contrary, the patient was a factor which could
not be counted on, at all--a force about which he knew virtually
nothing, acting upon a mechanism about which he knew little more, and
capable of interactions, reactions, and counteractions innumerable,
reversing and nullifying all past experience at a moment's notice--an
_unforeseen_ moment always.
He eyed this mystery, accordingly, with respect, lying in wait for
hints from it, and frequently reversing in his turn patiently prepared
plans of action, with a prompt speed impossible to a less supple
mind,--impossible at all, quite often, to any process of conscious
thought. To have these intuitions--that was his touch of femininity;
to risk largely upon them was the gambler in him; his swift
appropriation of the subject's temperament betrayed the artist in his
own; while the hard common sense which drew the rein on all these was
a legitimate inheritance--both national and personal. So was his
manner--not often extremely courteous and quite often extremely rude.
In this latter case his adorers called it "abstracted," while his
enemies qualified it as "ill-bred." But his voice, ordinarily abrupt
and harsh, could pass to exquisite intonations in the sick-room, and
there were moments when to anxious watchers therein, the man seemed
more than a man.
The affinity between physician and artist is one of the most curious
and suggestive. Every one will recall the famous surgeon-etcher, and
the distinguished specialist in nerves and novels. The Doctor's
artistic passion was for music. Unfortunately, it was not materially
portable, like a writing-pad, and there would have been something
unseemly in the spectacle of a physician fiddling in his carriage, so
he nursed this love in seclusion. His violin was his one indulgence,
and when he permitted himself to dream, it was of a life with music in
it. Sometimes he wished his wife were musical; more often he
congratulated himself that she was not. He was sincerely attached to
her, owing--and, what was more significant, realizing that he
owed--her much besides the promising twins; most of all, perhaps, that
she consented to be his wife on his own terms. But she was distinctly
not musical.
The Doctor laid down his paper and took up his mail, and a
disagreeable expression came into his face. It was one of the pleasant
features of his professional career that his brother physicians
occasionally vented their jealousy of him upon one of their joint
patients--stabbing him, so to speak, through _their_ lungs or
heart, wherein he was most vulnerable. Just as he expected! They had
deliberately neglected his prescriptions, after calling him a
winter-journey north to deliver them, and as deliberately allowed the
victim to die according to their treatment rather than permit him to
live according to the Doctor's.
The look upon his face was ugly to behold; he flung open the door with
unnecessary violence before the carriage had stopped, and his foot was
on the pavement before the footman could descend. Then he braced his
rheumatic shoulders for the four steep flights of stairs; he could not
justly complain of the number, since he himself had sent the patient
there to be high and dry and quiet. On the way up he had one of his
nameless seizures of intuition, and in the dark upper hall his hand
fell sharply away from the knocker and his face set whitely. There had
been just one chance in a hundred that his presence was necessary;
before the door opened he knew this had been the hundredth chance.
The ghastly woman's face which met him added nothing to that
certitude, yet he winced before it in every nerve.
"You have come too late," she articulated only.
"_No_!" thundered the Doctor. He put her aside like a piece of
furniture and strode into the darkened room beyond.
It was more than an hour later when he emerged. The woman stood
exactly where he had left her. It was another, tall and young, who
turned from the window and looked at him with eyes that hurt. But he
did not wince this time.
"It's all right!" he said, cheerfully. His voice quite sang with
sweetness. He came and stood a moment by the window, breathing hard.
His face was gray, but his eyes smiled, and there was something boyish
in his aspect. He looked from one woman to the other sunnily.
"Bless me--you ought never to let yourselves go like that! He'll pull
through all right."
The younger woman continued to look at him silently, but the elder,
with a long quivering sigh, fainted.
"Best thing she could possibly do," said the Doctor, his fingers on
her pulse. "Get her to bed as soon as you can,--and have these
prescriptions sent out. I'll come back later. He'll sleep hours now."
He ran down-stairs, consulting his visiting-list as he ran, and jumped
into the brougham, calling an address as he pulled the door to with a
slam. This time, however, he did not take out his papers, but sat with
an unlighted cigar between his lips, gazing intently at nothing.
In the course of the next few hours he looked over an assortment of
ailing babies, soothed as many distracted mothers, ordered to a gay
watering-place one young girl whom he was obliged to treat for chronic
headache--chronic heartache not being professionally recognizable,--
administered the pathetically limited alleviations of his art to a
failing cancer-patient (she happened to be a rich woman, going with
the fortitude of the poor down the road to the great Darkness), and so,
looking in on various pneumonias and fevers, broken souls and bruised
bodies, by the way, brought up at last at the hospital to see how
yesterday's operation was going on. It was going on in so very mixed
a manner that he telephoned he should not return to lunch--prophesying
long after the event.
It was turning dusk when he started on his second round of visits
homeward, stopping on the outskirts to rebandage, in one of the
tenements, a child's broken arm. He had not returned his footman's
salutation that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all
day this visit to the footman's child. In one manner or another that
inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past
three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich
patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment--the lack of anything
to do--had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do
anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia--the registered protest
of the dying soul. It was a case which took more out of the Doctor
than all his day's practice put together; he always came from it in a
misery of doubts.
The dusk was becoming the dark when he set his foot wearily on the
carriage step once more, and with his hand on the carriage door paused
suddenly. He was sick of sickness, mortally tired of mortality! For
the first time in the whole day he hesitated; an odd, irresolute look
came into his face; he pulled out his watch, glanced, and changing his
first-given address for another, threw himself back on the cushions
with closed eyes. He did not open them again until the carriage,
rolling through many streets, came to a halt under some quiet trees,
before an apartment-house. There were yellow daffodils between white
curtains--very white and high up. As he stepped out, the Doctor
glanced involuntarily towards them, and a half-breath of relief
escaped him, instantly quenched in a nervous frown and jump as his arm
was seized by a firm gloved hand.
"Doctor,--this is really _providential_! You are the very person
I wished to see!"
It was the younger of two heavily upholstered and matronly ladies who
spoke, in a voice of many underscorings. The Doctor, who had removed
his hat with a purely mechanical motion, knew himself a prey,
identified his captor, and eyed her with restrained bitterness.
"Doctor,--it is about my Elsie;--she hasn't a particle of color, and
she complains of feeling languid all the time--"
"No wonder!--What do you expect?"--it was the Doctor's harshest tone.
"She is loaded up with flesh,--she doesn't exercise,--you stuff her.
Send her out with her hoop,--make her drink water,--stop stuffing her.
What she, wants is thinning out."
"_Elsie_!--Why, Doctor, the child eats _nothing_,--I have to
tempt her all the time;--and when she goes out she complains of feeling
tired."
"Let her complain,--and let her get tired;--it will do her good. Don't
feed her in betweentimes,--and when you do feed her, give her
meat--something that will make red blood,--not slops, nor sweets, nor
dough. There's nothing in the world the matter with her." He lifted
his hat and strode on up the stairs.
Maternity, grieved and outraged, stared after him, speechless, then
turned for sympathy in the nearest feminine eye.
"Really, dear,--I think that was almost _vulgar_,--as well as
unkind," murmured the other mother at her side.
"_Vulgar_! _Unkind_! Well, it is the last time he will have
the opportunity to insult me! The idea! _Elsie_!--But it's not
the first time I have thought of changing physicians!" (This was
true,--but she never did; the solid Elsie was her only one.) "And such
desperate haste;--he must have a _most critical_ case!" She cast
an indignant glance at the building, as if to make it an accessory to
the fact, and turning a kindling and interrogative glance upon her
companion, encountered one of profound and scintillating significance.
For a moment they contemplated their discovery breathlessly in each
other's eyes.
"Did you ever!" exclaimed number one at last. "Oh, of course I had
heard things,--but I will do myself the justice to say I _never_
believed a word of it before! _This_, of course, makes it plain
enough;--this explains _all_!"
The two--good women, but wounded withal--coruscated subtle knowledge
all down the street.
Meantime the Doctor climbed the stairs. He was perfectly conscious
that he had been, in fact, both unkind and rude, even though his mood
did not incline him to take measure of the extent of his delinquency.
He knew equally that he should presently have to write a note of
apology--and that it would not do an atom of good, _Tant pis_. He
rang at the door of the daffodil-room, and it was opened by the tall
girl whose eyes had hurt him that morning. They did not hurt him now,
but enveloped him with a keen and soft regard that left no question
unanswered. In another moment she had put out a firm hand and drawn
him over the threshold in its clasp.
"Don't speak,--don't try to say a word! There!" She had taken from him
his hat and gloves and pushed forward a low chair in front of the
fire, all in one capable movement. "What is it? Tea? Coffee? A glass
of wine?"
"_Music_!" answered the Doctor, raising two haggard eyes, with
the exhausted air of an animal taking shelter.
The girl turned away her own and walked towards the piano, stopping on
the way, however, to push forward a little table set forth with a
steaming tea-urn and cups, matches and a tray, and to lift to its
farther edge a bowl of heavy-scented violets. Her every motion was
full of ministry, as devoid of fuss.
The room was low, broad, and large, and full of books, flowers, low
seats, and leaping firelight. A grand-piano, piled with music,
dominated the whole. The girl seated herself before it and began to
play, with the beautiful, powerful touch of control. After the first
bars, the Doctor's head sank back upon the cushions of the chair and
the Doctor's hand stole mechanically to the matches. He smoked and she
played--quiet, large music, tranquilly filling the room: Bach fugues,
German Lieder, fragments of weird northern harmonies, fragments of
Beethoven and Schubert, the Largo of Handel,--and all the time she
played she looked at the man who lay back in the chair, half turned
from her, the cigar drooping from his fingers. There was no sound in
the room but the music and light leaping of little flames in the
fireplace,--no motion but theirs and the pulsing fingers on the keys.
The girl played on and on, till the fire began to die, and with a
sudden sigh the Doctor held up his hand. Then she rose at once, and
going forward, stood as simply at the side of the fireplace opposite
him. She was not beautiful, but, oh, she was beautiful with health and
calm vigor.
The Doctor let his eyes rest on her.
"If you knew," he said, with a little, half-apologetic laugh.
In her turn she held up one of her long hands.
"But I do;--you forget I was there all the morning. And you pulled him
through. As for the rest--" She stooped suddenly and began to pile
together the logs; the Doctor watched her, noting with a trained and
sensitive eye the muscular ease and grace of the supple arms and
shoulders--like music. "Of course"--she spoke lightly--"they will kill
you some day, among them; but--it's worth while, isn't it?--and there
isn't much else that is, is there?" Still kneeling, she turned and
looked straight up at him. "Do you know what it was like this
morning--before you came?"
The Doctor shook his head.
She hesitated a moment, smiling a little. "'Lord, _if Thou hadst
been here_, our brother had not died!'" she quoted.
The Doctor got up quickly from his chair. He knocked the ash from his
cigar and laid it down on the tray. "Well," he said, lightly, "I must
be off." He squared his shoulders and held out his hand; its grip upon
her own trembled very slightly, but he smiled sunnily. "I'll come back
for some more music some day."
"Do," the girl said. She had risen and was smiling too.
The Doctor looked about the room wistfully. "Jolly place,--I don't get
up very often, do I?"
"Not very."
They smiled at each other again, then the girl, turning abruptly away,
walked to the window and came back with a double handful of yellow
flowers.
"Will you carry these to your wife? They are the first of the year."
She held the door open for him, and from the little landing watched
him down the stairs. At their turn he glanced up for a moment, holding
his hat raised silently. She waved him a mute acknowledgment, then
going into the room again, closed the door.
The firelight still leaped languidly on the hearth, and on the
half-smoked cigar and pile of ashes in the tray. The girl stood a
moment looking at these things and the chair, then walked quietly to
the piano and sat down before it. But she did not play again.
Meantime the Doctor, an erect and urgent presence in the dusk, had
driven through dim streets and climbed again the four flights of the
morning, to find the hush of heaven fallen on the house.
"I knew _you_ could save him!" said the pale mother only, lifting
blind eyes of worship from the couch.
The Doctor laughed, poured her out with his own hands a
sleeping-draught, and sat patiently beside her till she slept, then
stole away, leaving injunctions with the nurse, established in his
absence, to telephone if there came a crisis--"even," after a moment's
hesitation, "in the night."
"Home!"--he gave the order briefly. There were black circles beneath
his eyes, making him look thinner than when he left the house that
morning; he had no distinct reminiscence of lunch, and he was very
tired; but his shoulders no longer ached, his headache was gone, and
his hands were perfectly steady.
Odd bits of music hummed perversely through his head, mixing
themselves up with all things and rippling the air about him into
their own large waves, bearing now and then upon them, like the
insistent iteration of an oratorio chorus, fantastic fragments--"If
Thou hadst been here!--If Thou hadst been here!" His fingers ached
towards the responsive strings, and pulling out his watch, he made a
hasty calculation. There should be good fifteen minutes, he
decided--toilet allowed for--and he hurried the coachman again and
leaned forward, looking with bright, eager eyes into the night, and
humming to himself.
One liveried servant opened the house door, another the carriage door,
and a third relieved him of his hat and coat. Out of the warmth and
brightness his wife advanced to meet him, a child in either hand,
their long curls brushed and tied with bright ribbons. Her face was
filled with tender solicitude.
"You must be worn out;--what a long day you have made! Would you like
the dinner sent in at once, or would you rather wait? Children, don't
hang so on papa; he must be dreadfully tired. Oh, and there's a man
been waiting over an hour; he simply _wouldn't go_; but you'll
let him come back to-morrow?--you won't try to see any one else
tonight?"
The Doctor hesitated a moment, letting all the warmth and brightness
sink into him, while his hands played with the soft hair of his little
son and daughter. He smiled at his wife, a bright, tired smile.
"Robin," he said, "run down to the carriage; there are some posies
there for mamma--from Miss Graham, Louise,--you see I did get a
moment's rest."
"Yes," said his wife. She continued to gaze compassionately at the
tired man. After a moment she repeated gently, "And the dinner,
dear--?"
"No,--don't wait for me; I'll not be long. Have it brought in at once,
and--send the man into the office, please."
He stooped and kissed the children, and turning away, went into his
office and closed the door behind him.
A WORKING BASIS
BY ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH
Why she married him her friends wondered at the time. Those she made
later wondered more. Before long she caught herself wondering. Yes,
she had seen it beforehand, more or less. But she had seen other
things as well: he had developed unevenly, unexpectedly, if logically.
There had been common tastes--which grew obsolete or secondary. As the
momentum of what she believed and hoped of him ran down with them
both, he crystallized into the man he was, and no doubt virtually had
always been.
It was bad enough to have to ask for money, but to have it counted out
to you, to be questioned about it like a child, was worse.
"I don't understand," she said in the first months of their marriage.
"Are you afraid I won't be judicious, responsible? Mightn't you try
before judging?"
"Judicious? Responsible?" He pinched her cheek. (Judith was five feet
nine and sweetly sober of mien.) "There are no feminines or
diminutives of those words, my dear."
She stepped back. "But with more freedom I could manage better, Sam."
"Manage?"--jocularly. "That _is_ your long suit, isn't it? You
feel equal to managing all of us? Could even give me pointers on the
business, eh?"
"Why not?" she asked, quietly.
Sam, feet apart, hands in pockets, looked her over with the smile one
has for a dignified kitten. "I won't trouble you, my dear. I manage
this family." With his pleasantries a lower note struck--and jangled.
"But that isn't the point. I want--"
"Really? You always do. Don't bother to tell me what. If you got this
you'd be wanting something else, so what's the use of the expense
merely to change the object?" He chuckled at her baffled silence.
"I can't answer when you're like that. But--but, Sam! It isn't fair!"
Still she supposed that relevant.
However, money was not the chief thing. He could manage. Let it go.
Having properly impressed her, nothing made Sam feel larger than to
bring her a set of pearl-handled knives,--when she had wanted a dollar
for kitchen tins. His extravagances were not always generosities.
Once, after she had turned her winter-before-last suit and patched new
seats into the boy's flannel drawers, because "times were hard," he
bought a brace of blooded hunting-dogs.
Next day she opened an account at a department store.
With the promptness of the first of the month and the sureness of
death, the bill came. Sam had expressed himself unchecked before she
turned in the doorway. "If you will go over it," she said, with all
her rehearsal unable, after all, to imitate his nonchalance, "you will
find nothing unnecessary. I think there is nothing there for the
dogs."
But her cannon-ball affected him no more than a leaf an elephant; he
did not know he was hit. It was always so.
In his cool way, however, Sam had all the cumulative jealousy of the
primitive male for his long primacy. Some weeks later, when Judith
ordered an overcoat for Sam junior sent home on approval, she found
the store had been instructed to give her no credit.
She got out, with burning face and heart, without the article. Her
first impulse was to shrink from a blow.
But at table that night she recounted her experience: "The very
courteous gentleman who informed me of your predicament happened to be
a cousin of Mr. Banks, of Head and Banks. (They supply your grain, I
believe?) Mrs. Howe (isn't it R. E. Howe who is president of the
Newcomb Club?) was at my elbow. The salesgirl has Sam junior's
Sunday-school class. Doubtless it will interest them all to know you
are in such straits you can't clothe your children."
Ah? She had touched his vulnerable point? Instantly she was swept by
compunction, by impulses to make amends, to him, to their love. Their
love! That delicate wild thing she kept in a warm, moist, sheltered
place, and forbore to look at for yellowing leaves.
Like the battle of Blenheim, it was a famous victory, but what good
came of it at last? The overcoat came home, to be sure, with cap and
shoes besides. But she was too gallant to press her advantage.
Besides, she still looked for him to take a hint.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12