by Max Brand
* * *
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THERE did not seem to be enough air for breathing, and Kildare's brain made no sense. It kept going around and around like a squirrel in a cage. He could prevent the family from knowing about his disasters for a few hours, but after that the blow would strike them doubly hard. He went up to the roof to see if breathing and thinking might be more possible there, but the fog would not lift from his brain.
After a moment he saw a woman coming toward him, stepping around the chimneys and the ventilators. There was rain-mist in the air so that the glow of New York came straight up from the ground and kept the towers all in a glow. This was the light by which he recognised Mary Lamont.
"I saw you coming up," she said. "Do you mind my following?"
"Look," said Kildare, "a day or two ago I was riding pretty high. I had the hospital by the heels, and all that. I was going to step into Gillespie's boots. You know?"
"I know," she said.
"Now I'm down," said Kildare. "I'm socked in the eye. Gillespie hates my heart. Carew has no use for me. Everybody knows that I've tried to sell out for cash, only I wasn't good enough to get by. And somehow that puts in my mind what I wanted to say to you a couple of days ago. I was going to tell you that if you were a few years older and I were making some money, I'd probably ask you to marry me."
She stepped in close to him. Under her coat he could see the white of her uniform at the throat and there was a dim high light on her cheek and in her eyes.
"You're damned nice," said Kildare. "You're going to be gentle and cherishing and all that before you smack me down."
"Why did you wait till everything went wrong before you talked to me?" asked Mary Lamont.
"I don't know," he answered. "I was a fool, I guess. Would you have thought it meant something a couple of days ago?"
She said: "I'm not very much in your mind. But you're hurt and you want a bit of comfort. Isn't that it?"
"I don't know. You tell me, will you?"
"Are you just going to stand there?" she asked.
He took her in his arms.
"You don't give a damn, but you want to make me happy," said Kildare. "You're rather nice. You're all give and no take."
He put a finger under her chin and pushed back her head a little, slowly. She made no effort to resist the small pressure.
"Tell me to go to the devil. Don't be a nurse. I'm not so sick," said Kildare.
"I think you're terribly sick, Jimmy," she said.
"I'm not," said Kildare, "and don't let me maul you around like this. If this keeps on for another minute, you'll be fitted into my mind so that I never can get you out."
"You'll get me out whenever you want to," she said.
"I wonder if you'd be damned fool enough to say that you'd marry me?"
"I wonder too," she said.
"I've got sixty-seven cents a day."
"I know."
"I can tell you something that you won't believe."
"Can you?"
"Yes. I can tell you that I'm almost happy just now."
"Poor Jimmy!" she said. "I know."
"What do you know?"
"That you're in frightful pain."
He bowed his head until his face was against her hair.
"It's queer, isn't it?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"I mean, it's queer that this should mean such a frightful lot."
"Yes," she said.
"Do you know something?"
"What should I know?"
"That you have a beautiful, soft kind of a voice when it speaks close to me like this. It speaks all the way through me. Laugh, now, will you?"
She laughed.
"Do it again," said Kildare.
She laughed once more.
"You're not so damned beautiful," said Kildare, "but you do everything exactly right. Listen to me."
"Yes?"
"When you came up here, I was sinking for the third time. Now I'm all right. I've had a whiff of oxygen. I know what I've got to do and I'm going to try to do it."
"Ah, I'm glad," she said.
"We're breaking the rules all to hell, aren't we?"
"I suppose so."
"You go down, now. Good night, Mary. Will you go on down now?"
"Yes," she said.
"And don't you break any rules again."
"No."
"I mean, except with me."
"No," she said.
She kept looking back at him as she found her way among the chimneys and the ventilators. Then she disappeared.
* * *
Up in the surgical ward he found Billy and was welcomed by the brightest of smiles. He looked at the chart and spoke to the nurse. The operation had been perfect. Billy, in due time, would walk and run as well as ever.
"You're going to be okay," said Kildare. "But you've had some tough luck."
"I had it coming to me," answered Billy.
"Coming to you?"
"Sure. I've been a tough guy; now I get the rap. I mean...I've always been playing hooky, and pleasing myself, and getting by with a whole lot."
"School isn't so good, eh?"
"Not so good; but it's going to be better now."
"That's the stuff," said Kildare.
"But you know how it seems in the school-room when you're studying and there's no sound except somebody scratching his head or pens scraping on paper maybe. It makes you think about going fishing. You know?"
"Of course I know."
"So I used to go out and get 'Jenny'—that's a boat I made—and paddle down the lagoon and hang out a line. You can always get fish in the lagoon. It's fine and lonely down there, and the old wreck of a boathouse, it looks like a murder. You know?"
"I know," agreed Kildare. "Places like that are the stuff. They give you something to remember. Are you comfortable?"
"I'm fine...and thanks for everything, doc."
"All right," said Kildare.
* * *
Collins had a light car. Kildare went up to their room and asked him for it. The telephone called while he was there. A gentleman from the State Board of Health was expecting Doctor Kildare in the waiting room. It was a Dr. Oliver Vincent.
"Oliver Vincent—Oliver Vincent," said Kildare. "Ever hear of him?"
"Just barely," said Coffins. "He's the chairman of the State Board of Health. Is he down there?"
"He is," said Kildare, "and I can guess what he wants to know about."
"Don't let him rattle you," said Collins. "The reporters and the police have been on the phone every two minutes for the last hour. I've been in a room-mate's hell, brother. Shall I go along and give you a hand?"
"Stay here and pray," said Kildare, and went down to the office.
The great Dr. Oliver Vincent sat in the adjoining room. He was as small as a child, and from a distance his face was that of a child too; but at close range he looked all of his sixty-five years. He had an unpleasant dimple in one cheek, and he seemed always to be smiling, which was an illusion as definitely and heartbreakingly untrue as a mirage in the desert.
Dr. Oliver Vincent, whose feet barely reached the floor, turned briskly toward Kildare and made the borrowed desk his own domain.
"Doctor Kildare?" he said. "You are the Doctor Kildare I'm waiting for?"
"Yes," said Kildare.
"I presume you have not the slightest idea why I am here, young man?"
"I have a very good idea," said Kildare. "You want to ask me if I knew that a certain Archbold was not a licensed physician when I took a patient to him, thereby giving aid and assistance and recognition to a quack."
"Well? Well?" demanded Oliver Vincent.
"There's nothing to say," said Kildare. "I've done all of that."
"Ha?" cried Oliver Vincent. "And have you the foggiest notion what that may mean to you, sir?"
"I've a perfect idea that it may bar me from practice in this state."
"You are very calm about this!
"
"I've been preparing myself for the firing squad," said Kildare.
"Young man," said the chairman of the State Board of Health, "I presume that you know the authority attached to my position in this state?"
"I know perfectly," answered Kildare. "You can and you will scuttle me like an old boat."
"Your entire attitude," said Oliver Vincent, "is not one to conciliate a good opinion. And the case itself is of such importance that I took advantage of my nearness to this hospital in order to run in and see you. You are at perfect liberty, of course, to refrain from answering until you are examined by a more complete authority."
"I wouldn't dream of it," said Kildare. "My goose is already cooked, so why should I give a damn how it is sliced and served?"
"Sir? Sir?" exclaimed Oliver Vincent.
"I mean what I say. I spoke English," said Kildare. "You ought to be able to understand me."
"Can I trust my ears?" shouted Oliver Vincent.
"Suppose I try complete frankness?" suggested Kildare. "Mr. Vincent, I don't give a damn what you do with me and my medical future. You haven't guns big enough to shoot the bullets that are already in me."
Mr. Oliver Vincent considered, rose from his place and walked silently from the room.
Kildare took the car he had borrowed from Tom Collins and drove down into the country. The wind that whirred around his windshield went past him like the song of the vanished years. He felt, to use a simile considerably more poetic than any that went through his scientific young mind, like a leaf detached from its twig, still afloat in the air, but about to rejoin the soil of its origin. Life seemed to him a process of decline. Decay was the universal order.
However, he was almost incurably young and far too inconsistent, therefore, to have pleased a romantic poet; and when the moon rose, all glistening bronze like an Homeric shield, he almost forgot that he was a doomed creature. The hope of glory and fame that he had lost, and the great memory of Gillespie, went completely from him. He remembered only Mary Lamont on the roof of the hospital.
He had acquired through excess of pain a peculiar insouciance that denied all the old values and looked for new ones. Still in that humour, he reached the old Messenger place and rang the bell patiently until Nora appeared in an overcoat in place of a dressing-gown. She remained within the shadow, only half seen, but even half of Nora was more than enough.
"Ah," she said, growling like a bulldog. "It's you!"
"I wanted to know if you've seen her or heard the faintest word from her?" said Kildare.
"If I'd seen her, would I be standing here blathering?" demanded Nora, and slammed the door in his face. He drove into the village. They remembered him there. When he stopped his car, twenty people suddenly materialised at the corner.
"There's the real doctor," they said. "How's that Billy doing, doctor?"
"He's going to have two good legs," said Kildare. "Where can I find Archbold?"
"Maybe he's taken wings," someone said. "He's not wanted here any longer—the rascal! But nobody seen him leave his place."
Kildare went up to the office. He knocked at the Archbold door. He kept at it during ten minutes, at intervals. Presently a key turned and the door opened a mere crack.
"Friends?" said Kildare, when the long nose of Archbold appeared.
The door opened. Mr. Archbold waved the way into the room. He had a candle in it, shaded by a large book set up on end so that no ray would reach the window directly and betray him to the street. Mr. Archbold had induced in himself a spirit of high good humour.
"Enter, doctor. Enter, enter!" he said. "Here you will at least find the water of life. May I pour you a drink of it?"
He balanced himself unsteadily, his feet far apart, and proffered a bottle of rye and a glass.
"Good!" said Kildare. "The water of life is what I need."
He took the drink, waited for the great Archbold to pour one for himself, and then toasted him silently.
"I came down to ask you a question," said Kildare. "But maybe this is a better way of talking."
"Undoubtedly," said Archbold. He rubbed his hands together to get the warmth of the drink thoroughly through his system. "But what is the question?"
"Ordinarily," answered Kildare, "I don't think you do much harm. Maybe the world should have more faith-healers. But not for broken legs."
"Exactly," said Archbold. He was so pleased that he gave himself an immediate encore of rye. "If I had men of understanding around me, doctor, I would be able to take an assured place in this vale of tears, but as a matter of fact I'm a little tired of this damned town. I've been here two years and a half and I know their minds, so-called. I'm ready to move on. I have everything packed and no matter how watchful they wish to be, I'm sure that at about three or four they'll fold their tents and steal away. Then I can be off. They took it very hard, their little discovery of today. But I don't hate you because you revealed me, doctor. No malice in me whatever."
"Thank you," said Kildare. "After all, I knew that you couldn't do the girl any harm."
"Of course not," said Archbold, laughing. "No harm and no good. Who can do any good for a malignant tumour of the brain?"
Kildare took a deep breath. He had at last the information he wanted.
"I wonder what convinced her that she had that?" he asked.
"Ah, the nurse told me enough about that," explained Archbold. "Imagine her own mother dying of the same disease. And the house filled with doctors and nurses for years until the girl came to hate the whole medical profession. You see?"
"I begin to," said Kildare.
"And once, before the end, the child heard her mother's voice—babbling—making no sense—you understand? The mind of the poor woman had given way, I suppose. So the horror was born in Nancy. Very affecting, I'm sure. When her headaches began she inquired and learned the nature of her mother's illness. Of course the headaches seemed proof that she had the same thing. And the other day when she told that fat-brained Irish nurse about her symptoms, of course Nora jumped to the conclusion that the end was upon her. The fool told the girl a few of the details about the mother's death. Clear and simple, the whole thing, isn't it?"
"Perfectly," said Kildare.
He got down to the street and the car quickly.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BUT when he was in the car, for all his haste he realised that he had no destination. Probably he already was too late and somewhere within the round of the hills Nancy lay dead. He took the first road, then another right, another left, and saw the lights of a village rising before him like a patch of ragged stars. The town he drove into was the same that he had left. He had driven in a blind circle.
He saw before him now the corner at which Billy had been injured, and at the sight of it his mind went forward to the picture of the lad stretched on the floor of Archbold's office with Nancy sitting beside him. There had been such beauty in her then that he always would remember her, he knew, as she had been in that moment. He could remember every word that had passed between her and Billy about the old boathouse to which no one came throughout the year, a forgotten place lost in the woods beside a lagoon. Remembering that, a new light of hope flashed on in his brain. He pulled up the car at the kerb and asked a bystander the way to the old boathouse.
"Old boathouse? There's the boathouse down at the pier. That's the only one I know about," said the man on the corner.
"Down by a lagoon, lost in the woods—the old boathouse. Doesn't anyone remember it?" asked Kildare, anxiously scanning the faces as a group gathered on the pavement.
A farmer with a red face that glistened with whisky and his weekly shave now answered: "Ain't that the place over there beyond the end of the Brighton Road? Sure it is. You'll miss it if you don't look sharp. Right down there—where the Road makes a right turn and an old lane runs on..."
Kildare found the Brighton Road and then the old lane at the turn.
Before he knew it,
he was driving through a thick forest that shut out the light of the moon and left him in a dense winter blackness. The air turned cold and damp. Through the woods he came out upon a curving lake, silver under the moon, that blocked all forward progress unless he took, to the side, a narrow way that wound through the slums of tree roots and obscurity. Kildare put on the brakes and stared vaguely before him at a little boat, leaning crazily to one side, which swung at the end of an improvised pier. It was veering with the wind. Something like a reflection from the moon-brightened water was visible on her side, aft. Now it appeared clearly to his eyes, painted in ragged letters big enough to suit a craft of ten times her tonnage. The word it spelled was "JENNY."
He remembered Billy then, though in fact Billy had said that his home-made boat was moored in front of the boathouse. That was why he looked about with more care and saw it at last. The roof was so fallen in ragged patches that it gave an upper outline like a portion of the woods; but now that he looked more closely, he could see the dark blink of the windows. When he tried to start, a rear wheel bit into the sand, hollowed a place for itself, and refused to climb out of the hole it had excavated.
Kildare got out of the car and set about looking for a fragment of wood with which he could clear the earth away and give the wheel a start. He was well at work when a chill came upon him from behind. He looked with fixed eyes over the bright face of the water, then jerked his head around and saw the figure moving straight toward him from the ruin of the boathouse. It came on with a hesitant step, both hands stretched forward, the head held high and the face tilted upward so that the moon shone full on the face of Nancy Messenger. As he watched, she came behind a ragged stump of a pine tree. She walked straight on like a creature without sight. Horror took him by the throat. It seemed as though the wretched little tree possessed life, malevolence, and will of its own to move and to strike. The girl walked full into it and the blow struck her to her knees.
He could not stir, but Nancy, gathering herself patiently, rose again. With her outstretched hands she found a way around the tree and came on toward the water. He could tell then why her eyes, helplessly wide, were fixed upon the moon. There was no sight in them. He had to try once or twice before her name would come past his lips.
