When they were drinking their coffee after dinner on Wednesday night she said, “Dan, why don’t you take a holiday? You could easily manage a week in the Margaree. You haven’t had a rod in your hands in years.”
He looked annoyed. “Of course not.”
“Why not, Dan? This is a wonderful chance. Collie McCuen could take over your work for a week and in the fall you could take his for a week and let him go hunting.”
“No,” he said, “I can’t go off like that now.”
She knew there was no point in pressing further at the moment, so she got up from the table and went out to water her roses. As she stood with the hose in her hand watching the geometric pattern of shadows lengthening over the gravel drive, she wondered why the place where they lived no longer meant anything to her husband. It was entirely his creation. He had selected this site on the verge of the intervale above the brook. He had planned and helped to build the house himself and had lived alone in it the year they were engaged. He had cut the undergrowth out of the wood, torn up the saplings and burned out their roots and now the grove of birches and pines was like a small park. When they were married he had given her the whole place as a gift.
Margaret shut off the hose and bent over the rose bushes one by one, examining the newest shoots for aphids. Then she strolled to the edge of the bank and looked down the slope of the intervale to the brook. She loved the brook’s curve as it came out of the grove for the run through the intervale and she loved the sound it made.
Still puzzling over Dan’s present state of mind, she remembered with something like surprise that he had not always been like this. He had always been intense, but when she had first known him he had laughed a great deal. She asked herself if the change was her own fault. Self-analysis was not easy for Margaret and it generally made her uncomfortable. Her mother had taught her that sensible people get rid of their troubles by laughing at them. Now her common sense told her that the situation between Dan and herself needed more than a joke and a smile. She told herself that she was thirty-five years old, not unintelligent, and married to one of the ablest men in Nova Scotia. Why had her marriage turned out like this? Was Daniel now resenting her as a person in the way he had always resented her family? Once his acid comments about her mother had made her smile. Later on they had annoyed her, and her refusal to accept them had finally forced him to keep his thoughts on her family to himself. But in the last month Margaret had begun to wonder how much she herself resembled her mother in Daniel’s eyes. She thought of the murderous weight of overwork and responsibility he endured as a matter of course and she realized that no member of her own family could have tolerated a quarter of it without feeling abused.
Tonight she felt painfully useless. Her own world was too neat, too small and secure. His was the world of the sick and frightened. She had grown up comfortably without worry or struggle. Daniel had struggled from the day he was born. Her mother had reared her with the notion that there was a smooth-edged solution for everything. But how many times had she lain in bed hearing Daniel’s feet pacing the floor and known there was no solution for him at all? How many times had she lain beside him, hearing him think aloud in the medical terms she could not understand, helpless to aid him as he tried to grope through darkness to the unknown, sure of nothing except that time was running out on his patient? Not once had he reminded her that a human life depended on his ability to think clearly. To say that a life was at stake would have seemed to him both sentimental and unprofessional. She was proud of him because she knew he saved people who would have died under other doctors, but had she ever understood, had she ever felt even a fraction of the price he paid?
She turned to the house, saw that the light had come on in his study, and supposed he was back at his Homer again. Why did he do it? What was Homer to him? Why didn’t he take a holiday and go home to the Margaree, instead of trying desperately to overcome this academic giant of his own contriving?
Then the thought came to her that perhaps he didn’t want to go because the Margaree was a home no longer. She remembered the look on his face when he had taken her, only six years ago, to see the old farm. There was no one left within a mile of the place. A fence he had once built himself now ran into a grove of young spruce. The house was a ghost house, unoccupied, with rattling shingles and broken panes. His father’s gravestone was overgrown with young spruce and it had astonished Margaret to find it there alone on the top of the mountain instead of in the churchyard in the valley. She remembered a large, granite boulder at the head of the property, also surrounded by spruce. “I used to be able to sit here,” he had said, “and look down on the whole valley. Now you can’t see anything except trees.” And she had imagined how that valley must have seemed to a boy of sixteen who had never been any place else. She recalled now the sweep of the noble stream between the hills with the islets of white stones in the channel and how the moon had looked climbing the sky over the opposite mountain. She heard again, with a shudder at the beauty of it, the evening in the Margaree when they had heard wild distant music in the sky and Daniel had pointed up the hill to a cottage so small it was only a white dot and said it was old Angus Fraser piping as he walked back and forth before his door. No wonder, she thought now, growing up with those wild, solemn, Bible-reading Highlanders all around him, looking out at the glory of an innocent world, Daniel had been unable to prevent a need growing in him until now that need was higher than a mountain.
When Margaret went into the house it was already deep twilight and the cirrus clouds had lost their color. Quietly she entered his study. His back was towards the door, but she knew he heard her, for his head lifted slightly. She slipped her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek against his hair.
“Let’s harness the mare and go for a drive,” she said.
She felt tenderness and even some of his deeply controlled passion in the impulsive movement with which he seized her hand and pressed it to his cheek.
“I’m not much to live with, am I?”
“If you only thought a tenth as much of yourself as others do, you’d never say things like that. Let’s drive to the cliffs by Dr. Dougald’s? It’s still early.”
To her surprise he pushed back his chair. “All right, but I don’t want to see Dr. Dougald tonight. Let’s go to your mother’s instead. I haven’t seen any of them for two months.”
Margaret, too surprised by this suggestion to know what to say, went upstairs to put on her hat and a light coat while Daniel went outside to harness the mare. She came downstairs, passed through the surgery and had already closed the door behind her before she saw that a small, wiry little man was standing on the gravel of the drive talking to her husband. It was too dark to see his face, but his posture and manner of gesturing told her it must be Louis Camire. She waited by the door. When Daniel started towards her, then brushed past and went into the surgery, she knew it was another emergency. She sighed as she watched him bend over the leather bag he always left packed, snap it open and hastily check its contents. He was wholly the doctor again and almost unaware of her existence, and in this kind of situation Margaret knew her role.
“I’ve got to go out on a case.” His back was turned. “Will you call Miss MacKay right away and tell her to have the OR prepared for me? It’s probably an appendectomy.”
From the undertones in his voice she thought the case must be more serious than a simple appendix, but she never asked questions at moments like these. She stood aside as he rushed past her with the bag in his hand. Camire had lighted the carriage lamps, and as Margaret stood in the surgery door she saw the two pools of light move away into the darkness. Then she closed the door and telephoned the hospital.
Twenty-One
WHEN did the boy get sick?” Ainslie snapped at Camire as they drove out to the main road.
“Yesterday ’e was not feeling good and today ’e felt terrible. But it was after dinner the pain got bad.”
“Why wasn’t I notified before?
”
“Docteur, poor people ’ave not got the telephone.”
Ainslie looked at the Frenchman’s profile. “You’ve got two good legs. You should have come for me at once.”
He cracked the whip and the mare reached the main road. He sat in tense silence while she trotted hard down the hill and braced for the pull on the opposite side. The miners’ row looked, as usual at this hour, like the flank of a ship that had run aground with all her lights burning. The mare hauled hard towards the center of the row, and when she reached the MacNeil house, Ainslie jumped out with his bag in his hand, calling to Camire to hold the mare’s head. He opened the door of the house without knocking and encountered a woman in the hall he remembered as Mrs. MacDonald.
“Is he upstairs?”
“Oh, Doctor, we are afraid for him. All day he has been vomiting.”
Ainslie brushed past her and mounted the stairs. Since all these houses were identical, he knew where to go. He found Mollie sitting by the side of Alan’s bed looking unnaturally calm. The boy’s face was flushed and his cheeks were stained with tears.
Ainslie crossed the room and put his hand on Alan’s forehead. The boy looked up at him and smiled, and as though in answer to a challenge, Ainslie smiled back. “Well, you’re warmer tonight than you were in the fog at Louisburg, aren’t you?”
When he turned to open his bag he heard Mollie whisper to Alan that everything was all right now the doctor was here. He slipped a thermometer into Alan’s mouth, drew down the covers and examined the boy’s right side, pressing gently and stopping when he saw the wince. He replaced the covers and took the pulse, removed the thermometer, registered in his mind the information it gave him and added it to the whole. When he snapped his bag shut again he nodded to Mollie and went into the outer hall. She followed him and Ainslie closed the bedroom door.
“I’m afraid it’s an acute appendicitis,” he said quietly.
“That is what Mr. Camire said.”
“You’d have done better to consult me sooner. Has Alan had a pain in his side before?”
“Last winter he talked about it sometimes.”
“Why didn’t you call me then?”
“I thought it was only a stitch.”
“And the vomiting–has he done that often?”
“Sometimes, Doctor, but I did not want to be bothering you if it was only something he ate.”
Seeing the anguish in her eyes, Ainslie suppressed a rebuke. “All right,” he said, “I’ll get Mrs. MacDonald to help you. Wrap him warmly in several blankets and I’ll drive him into the hospital myself. There’s no time to waste.”
She grew pale and her breathing came so quickly he could see she was swallowing air. “Are you going to cut him open, Doctor?”
It was a question he had heard many times before. As often as possible he answered it with a calculated laugh to brush away the layman’s primitive fear of the unknown, but this time he had no laughter to spare. He found himself tensing his muscles as he had done years ago before his first operation, and he recognized the similarity of the reflex, without taking time to inspect its implications.
She clutched his wrist with a strength that surprised him. “Please, Doctor! He is so frightened. Would you speak to him? He thinks you are so wonderful. If you tell him everything is fine he will believe it. It does not matter if everything is fine or not, I don’t want him to be afraid.”
All ages of women were in her face and the boy was every sick child Ainslie had ever seen. For a moment he felt dizzy. Mollie’s face, the spirit of love emerging through her fear, shook him, but years of meeting emergencies had provided him with reflexes which he obeyed with certainty. He turned and walked down the stairs with calm steps. When he reached the open air the dizzy feeling left him and in its wake was a gnawing sense of his own unworthiness.
In front of the house he saw Camire holding the mare’s head.
“Was I not right, Docteur?” Camire said.
“Yes, you were right. Stay here with the mare. I want to be ready to get under way as quickly as possible. I only hope it doesn’t rupture before we reach the hospital.”
He returned to the house, climbed the stairs again and saw that Mrs. MacDonald was about to lift the blanket-bundled Alan from the bed.
“I’ll do that,” he said. He bent forward, placed his hands carefully under Alan’s back and thighs and lifted him. “Tell Mrs. MacNeil to hurry along,” he said to the woman. “I want her to go with us.”
With Alan in his arms, bearing him downstairs with scrupulous care to avoid any sharp movements, Ainslie was once more totally the doctor. He stood holding the child while Mollie climbed into the carriage. Instructing Camire how to help him, he transferred the weight of the boy from his arms to Mollie’s knees. Camire held Alan’s head while Ainslie went around to the other side of the carriage and took his place in the driver’s seat. Alan’s head then rested on his thigh and Camire tucked the blankets closely about the boy’s body.
“Good!” Ainslie said, “Good!”
He picked up the reins and set the horse in motion. When they rounded the corner he cracked his whip loudly, and the trained mare, knowing the whip crack came only when there was need, began to trot and make the wheels hum in the dust. They passed the long wire fence of the colliery property with Alan silently watching the bulge of the doctor’s elbow, and high above them a skyful of stars.
To go into the dark, Ainslie was thinking, to go into the dark and share the patient’s fear. Had he heard those words from some other doctor or were they his own? To become everybody–father, mother, child and old man–to become everyone in order to be a doctor. Osler with his drooping mustache on hands and knees woofing like a bear in order to give a child the curiosity which turned into the germ of a will to live. Was it sentimental? His hand dropped to Alan’s forehead and rested there, feeling the high temperature and sensing through the heated skin the boy’s fear, sensing it and knowing that while the pain was the boy’s, the fear had probably come from the mother.
“How is it now?” he asked.
Alan was trying not to whimper. When he answered he said, “It’s worse.”
“That’s good,” Ainslie said. “That’s a good sign.” He held the mare steady and watched the road. “Alan, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen so you won’t be surprised. You have a useless little thing inside of you called an appendix and I’m going to take it out. It’s been hurting you and making you sick, but in a few weeks you’ll be telling all your friends about it and they’ll be wishing they’d had an operation, too.”
Ainslie looked at the nearest landmark and calculated they would be at MacDonald’s Corner within another twelve minutes.
“This is what will happen when we reach the hospital,” he went on. “You’ll be carried up to a big shiny room with a high table in the middle of it, and there’ll be doctors and nurses waiting for you. One of the doctors is Dr. Grant. He’s the one who will put you to sleep so you won’t feel the pain any more. When he tells you to breathe deeply, you’ll open your mouth and breathe as hard as you can. Open your mouth as wide as a codfish if you feel like it. You’ll hate the smell of the stu?, but it won’t hurt you. Just at the moment when you’re thinking how much you hate it, you’ll drop off to sleep. And you’ll like Dr. Grant. He has the reddest hair you ever saw in your life.”
After a while Alan said, “As red as Red Willie MacIsaac?”
“Compared to Dr. Grant’s, Red Willie’s hair is as dark as mine. Dr. Grant’s hair is red enough to set the woods on fire.”
A moment later Alan said, “How long will I be asleep?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were asleep all night, just as if you were in bed at home. And you’re going to have wonderful dreams. When I had my appendix out, I dreamed I was at the circus on a merry-go-round full of pipers.”
Alan’s voice brightened. “Did you have yours out
too?”
“Indeed I did. What’s more, I’ve got it pickled in a bottle in my surgery right now.”
There was almost a laugh in the boy’s voice. “Can I have mine in a bottle, too?”
“You wouldn’t think much of it. It’s an ugly little thing.”
“I want it in a bottle so I can put the bottle on the fence and throw stones at it.”
“Well, we’ll ask Miss MacKay to save it for you, then.”
The wheels hummed as the mare kept up her pace. They crossed the bridge and drove up the half-empty main street, turned through MacDonald’s Corner, and then they left most of the lights behind as the mare slowed for the pull up the hill.
Ainslie glanced down again and saw Alan’s face staring up at the stars. “They’re fine tonight, aren’t they.”
Alan nodded.
“When I was seventeen I went to sea for five months all one summer and fall. One night I crawled forward on the bowsprit and lay on my back the way you’re lying now. The bark had all her sails spread and it was like flying through the air chased by a pack of clouds. There was phosphorus in the water and every time the sprit lifted I could see the waves of the ship’s passage blazing away from her sides like fire. Each time the sprit dipped, I could look up–just like you’re doing–and see Orion swinging in and out of the gap between the jib and the fore-topmast staysail.” He pointed up. “Do you see that cluster of very bright stars? That’s Orion. Orion was a great hunter.”
“But a star isn’t a man.”
“No, but that cluster looks like a hunter with belt and sword, so the old people named it after a great Greek hunter called Orion.”
“Greek,” said Alan, “like Mr. Petropolis that sells the bananas?”
Ainslie laughed. “Petropolis? He’s just a little fellow, but Orion was a giant.”
“Was he stronger than Giant MacAskill?”
Each Man's Son Page 18
