"No. But I'd like some water ice. I'd like some lemon water ice if they could get some."
"All right. Ice-cream would give you a little nourishment; but if you don't feel like it, don't eat it."
"It's too thick. I don't want it."
"All right. Here's a thermometer. Don't eat that." He put out a hand, bringing into view a gold wrist-watch. His fingers closed on her wrist. Virginia, interested, saw that the watch bore an amazing long, thin second-hand which made the whole round of the dial rapidly. Moved to comment on it, the thermometer halted her, so she made a vague circular motion with her finger.
"That's right," he agreed, smiling. "It's supposed to be easier to see. Got it for my birthday."
Her head, crowned by a preposterous black bonnet, was tilted reflectively to the side. She kept pursing her lips, making while she did it, George Bull knew, small decisive clicks with her tongue. She walked right past the path up to the house. George Bull, leaving his car by the roadside, said, "Whoa! Where are you bound, Aunt Myra?"
Stopping short on the gravel along the old lilac hedge, she turned, blinking. "Oh, George! My, you startled me! Well, I've been to see Susie. I just wanted to see for myself how sick she was."
"She'll be all right."
"Maybe, she will, and maybe she won't. I'm not setting myself up against you, George, but I can tell you one thing. I know now what's wrong with that girl, and likely with all these other people."
"You do, do you? Well, I wish I did."
"Now, don't you go laughing at me. When I was stopping with Mr. Cole's sister in New Haven, I learned all I need to about that. They had it in every other house. That little niece of mine, what's her name, had it. It all came just the same way. Now, George, what Susie's got's typhoid fever, sure as you're alive."
"Don't you believe it, Aunt Myra. This is Susie who's sick, not that niece of yours."
"It won't do you any good, telling me not to believe it. I know. It's from drinking dirty water. Back whenever it was the water ran all dirty, I just said to myself: 'Myra, you watch out! ' "
"Just a little mud, Aunt Myra. You can drink all you want of it."
"Well, George, I don't believe you can. They had doctors in New Haven as good as you are, and they said that's what it was. That was in the year 1901. I remember."
"Typhoid fever is a disease caused by a specific organism, bacillus typhosus, Aunt Myra. Doesn't grow on trees. That organism has to be in the water. It can be clear water or muddy water; that hasn't anything to do with it."
"Maybe you're right, George. I don't know anything about all that. But what Susie's got is typhoid fever. I can smell, George. I know what it smells like."
"You can what?"
"A person has a smell, George. It's not a subject I'm going to discuss, but I'd know that smell anywhere."
"Listen, Aunt Myra; you can't have typhoid fever without getting it from someone! Now, nobody around here has had it. In forty years, there hasn't been a single case in this village. Matter of fact, it isn't easy to find a case anywhere nowadays!"
"Don't you go shouting at me, George. People might think you weren't so sure of what you're talking about, getting all excited that way. Now, you can call it anything you've a mind to. What concerns me is that Susie won't be off her bed for six weeks, supposing the Lord spares her; so I'm just going on up the road to see if one of those Baxter girls wants to come in, meanwhile."
"Lot of foolishness!, You wait a couple of days —"
"Now, George, with all these people sick, there's no sense in waiting. Everybody'll be wanting help. You go look in the water for some of those things, if you think they're there."
"You can't see them by just looking in the water, Aunt Myra. You —"
"When, then; what makes anybody think there are any, I'd like to know."
"You'd have to make a microscopic examination for evidence of fecal pollution —"
"Land sakes, then; why don't you take down that microscope you have sitting year in and year out on that closet shelf and use it?"
"It's quite a trick, Aunt Myra. Not much in my line."
"Well, I haven't any time to stand here arguing. If you can't find out yourself, it seems to me you'd better take my word. Now, I'll be back to fix lunch directly."
Grinning a little, he watched her depart. "That's a good one," he thought. "How would I know it was there if I couldn't see it? Why, I'd send my specimens to Torrington and let a lot of girls do it for me."
It would be girls, probably. Some little wench, as likely as not called Doctor What-is-it! It certainly seemed that women had a natural aptitude for bacteriology—or maybe one naturally evolved. If you watched one of them so much as flaming a platinum loop to fish in a test tube you got the point. They were effortlessly adept at the delicate scratching of culture surfaces, the casual quick trick of heat fixation without spoiling the smear or cracking the slide. Slight shoulders hunched in a familiar minute absorption; the clean narrow fingers faintly scarred, in patient practised movement; absorbed faces with a light gleam of sweat— men did it, not often so neatly, as a meticulous, irksome means to some experimental end; but these young women knew how to treat it as an end in itself. The implanted tradition of fine needlework had found an unforeseen outlet.
In his office, Doctor Bull set down his bag.
"Typhoid!" he thought. "That would be quite a show! Certainly make all the castor-oil I've dished out not such a good, idea!
He searched slowly along the line of books until he found the faded letters: W. Budd—Typhoid Fever, its mode of spreading and prevention. London. 1873. That was a great book in the old days; probably still was. Of course, treatment kept changing. It wasn't so long ago that Johns Hopkins, giving out the gospel, was starving patients as near death as not on the milk diet. Last he'd heard, they were yipping for forty-five hundred calories. Of course, they might have changed their minds again by now.
George Bull couldn't, personally, recall ever treating a typhoid case. Probably they'd been shown a few on the trips to the Detroit hospital when he was at school, and you certainly heard plenty about the theory of it, but as for the real thing — He flipped open the pages of Budd at random and read: . . . exhibited in turn all the most characteristic marks of the disorder . . . spontaneous and obstinate diarrhoea, tympanitis, dry tongue, low delirium, and other typhoid symptoms, together with (towards the end of the second week) the now well-known eruption of rose-coloured spots. —
Well! The disease didn't change; it was only the doctors. To have one of those smart young women would be kind of a help. He guessed they used the colon bacillus for an indicator of polluted water. Whether you could see it without staining and a lot of special tricks, he certainly didn't know. Probably not; and how would he recognize it if he did see it? The answer was, he wouldn't. "No sense bothering," he said aloud.
From the top shelf in the closet he dragged down the case. Age and dust had darkened the varnished surfaces: he soiled his hands as he pushed back the catch. He brought out the microscope and set it on his desk.
"Humph!" he said, half amused, for he could remember buying it at a state medical convention fully twenty-five years ago. He and a physician from Waterbury had spent a jovial afternoon in a saloon, and somehow it all ended in getting the microscope. His companion had noticed it in a pawn shop window. It bore the name of famous German makers; at the time it had been the very last word, and nothing was wrong with it but a first objective missing from the nose-piece. That, according to his companion, could either be replaced at small cost by writing to the makers, or not bothered about. In bacteriological research it was of no great value anyway. George Bull grinned, for he supposed that he must have represented himself as anxious to do such work; or perhaps, even, as already deeply and learnedly engaged in it.
Dipping a swab of cotton in alcohol, George Bull wiped the eye-piece and cleaned the stage. The illuminating mirror was badly clouded. The rack and pinion of the coarse adjustment seemed to have stuck,
but finally he made it turn. Not wanting to use his right thumb, the graduated screw head of the fine adjustment resisted him even longer. Taking a handkerchief, he cleaned the condenser and the two objectives. With one eye closed, the other squinting in, he could see that plenty of dust remained. Particles of it, four hundred and forty times enlarged, littered the stage between the reflected enormous branches of his own bent eyelashes.
"Hell!" he said aloud. "This isn't getting me anywhere!"
He straightened up. He took the book that he had laid down, and leaning back began to read again. There was one thing about it, he reflected, there wasn't one of them who couldn't be displaying prodromal symptoms. Shutting the book once more, he reached for his bag, snapped it open. Arising, he began to gather together what he needed. "Maybe one hunch is as good as another," he said.
Jerking his car to a halt in front of the Kimball house, he walked up the path. It was Miss Kimball who opened the door, and he said: "I want to see your father. I'll go right up."
Disconcerted, she stammered: "Oh, well, I think he's asleep. Wouldn't later —"
"I'll wake him up." —
He brushed past her, leaving her staring, outraged, as he mounted the stairs. In the upper hall he pushed open the door of the sick room.
"How're you feeling, Ralph?" he asked. "We'll have a little light in here." He went and pulled up the drawn shade. "This isn't going to bother you any." He set his bag on the table. From it he produced an iodine bottle, some swabs and a syringe which he held up and shook. The door moved now and he saw Miss Kimball.
Still affronted, she said with a thin dignity: "Would you be kind enough to tell me what you are planning to do?"
"I will. I want to make a blood test. Come on, Ralph. Brace up."
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he shoved back the loose sleeve of the night-shirt. Unscrewing the cap of the iodine bottle, he pressed a swab over the mouth daubed a wide smear on the pallid blue line of the median basilic vein below the elbow joint.
"There's an alcohol burner," he said to Miss Kimball "and here's a match. Take the cap off and light it No, bring it here where I can reach it! Now you'd better look the other way or get out. One or the other Don't go keeling over as soon as you see blood."
He tightened the tourniquet which he had been adjusting, waited while the veins engorged, flamed the needle and jabbed it through the iodine-painted skin. "All right, Ralph," he said, "that didn't hurt you any —"
Glancing at the graduations in the glass, he pinched it off at fifteen cubic centimetres, freeing the needle. "That's it." He took the stained swab, smearing the arm again. "I'll be in to-morrow," he told Miss Kimball. "We may be getting somewhere. How we'll like it when we get there, I don't know. Pull that shade down again if the light bothers him."
Stirring on the bed, Ralph Kimball said hoarsely: "Feeling kind of bum, George. None of that stuff you gave me seems to do much good —"
"Well, that's the way with most of the stuff we give," George Bull answered. "Sometimes it helps; usually it doesn't."
To Miss Kimball, still looking at him with stiff distaste, he said: "Be pretty careful about washing your hands when you've been in here —" He considered her cheerfully and added, "Be a good idea to see that you sterilize the bed-pans and contents before disposing. Lysol's as good as anything else."
The pin at the low "V" of the ironed-down collar George Bull recognized as St. Luke's. She looked up from the desk, showing him, under the cap and rumpled reddish hair, large brown faintly oblique eyes in a demure short face. George Bull thought: "I could use that!" He said: "I'm Doctor Bull, from New Winton. I want to see Doctor Verney on an urgent matter."
"Yes, Doctor Bull —" Her voice had the automatic, submissive respect for physicians learned in the exact discipline of her hospital. "Doctor Verney is at luncheon; but I'll tell him at once." She arose, adding: "Won't you sit down?"
He stood, however, watching a moment the trim departing shift of her narrow shoulders, the precise desirable stir of her small buttocks under the immaculate uniform. "Ho, hum!" he grunted, and looked out of the reception-room window.
Over the long lawns, down the four leisurely spaced rows of great elms, flat on the narrow asphalt surface of the road known as Stockade Street—humbler Sansbury called it Millionaire's Row—sunlight fell pale and chill from a sky becoming overcast. There was an air of well-to-do, but not rich or fashionable, respectability in the bad architecture of the ample houses. The clumping of shrubbery, the generous spacing of the trees—each flagged sidewalk was forty feet from the edges of the asphalt road—seemed more suburban than rural. All was vaguely old-fashioned, the work of prosperous years in the nineties when Sansbury had been a quiet, informal summer resort for a few New York families who joined with the modestly moneyed best local people in friendly community.
Presently deaths and changed tastes had ended it. To present-day eyes Sansbury was left the poorer, for several fine old houses had been replaced by bad, bigger ones. Stockade Street lost actual continuity with its long past. It gained only an immense boulder to which was fastened a bronze plate marking the site of the seventeenth-century block-house, and an atrocious memorial library constructed of cobble-stones.
Across the street, towards the end, George Bull could just see the slate roofs, the dank red brick breaking out in eruptions of heavy woodwork—objectless bay windows, a small tower, graceless oversized verandas— of what had once been the Ross place. It was hard to believe, but he could remember making long drives down in a buggy, entertaining seriously the idea of marrying Maud Ross—or, he guessed he ought to say, marrying the First National Bank of Sansbury.
Maud had been a blankly plain, perhaps a little pop-eyed girl, with her mass of hair bundled up off a neck tightly protected by shirtwaist collars. Despite the material soundness of the scheme, it hadn't been possible to act very enthusiastic about her. Maud would certainly be pretty cold mutton, and though he finally forced himself to make a proposal, it was rejected. He could remember Maud unreally saying that she had never guessed that his sentiments were of That Sort. She would long ago have felt bound to tell him that she was not Free; she had an Understanding with Another. This absurd untruth merely added to the constraints of the situation. George's listlessness had been, perhaps by a very narrow margin, too marked. Frigidly aghast at her own doubtless uncertain idea of human copulation, she would have to be pressed to the ordeal harder than George could make himself press her. The decision had, in all likelihood, been a hard and unhappy one; for certainly, her fabrications properly discounted, it looked as though he must be her man, or she'd have no man at all—the suddenly recalled measures of that old tune went through his mind with a ghostly gay sweetness. He turned about to see the nurse coming back, her short face sweetly sensual, her pert flanks shifting. "To bed! To bed!" he thought, his appetite willingly tickled again. "Doctor Verney will be right out, Doctor Bull. Won't you wait in his office?"
On the walls here, visible from the armchair in which he seated himself, were three framed diplomas in cumbersome Latin—Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Vienna— George Bull guessed that the Vienna one was nothing much—six months fooling around with psycho-analysis or something. "Huh!" he thought, "all the fixings!" Doctor Verney came now through the door at the end. "Glad to see you, Doctor. Something up?" He went and closed the door to the reception-room. "Have a cigar."
"All right." George Bull took it from the held-out mahogany case. "Nothing wrong with them, is there?" Doctor Verney laughed. "Not that I know of. I generally stick to cigarettes during the day. I like a cigar after dinner." He sat down behind the massive polished desk. "All right, shoot!"
"Well," first of all, tell me something about the Banning girl's case. Just what do you make of it?" Doctor Verney, he saw, was embarrassed. He picked up a paper-weight, balanced it, set it down. Then he picked it up again. "Why, Doctor, I really don't make much of it. The patient's general condition is a little below par, and any trifling infection hits her h
arder than some people. It's grippe, or influenza—loose term, but what else can you say? Temperature about one hundred and two; rather slow pulse. Headache. Coated tongue. Bowels are loose with a certain amount of griping. No appetite. We've got her in bed and I think if she stays quiet there for a few days she'll be perfectly well."
"Uh, huh, Now, I have eleven cases a good deal like that. Some of them seem sicker than others; a few have additional symptoms. They've all come on since Monday. I'm not satisfied with the diagnosis. Are you?"
"Yes, on the whole, I am. What's your theory?" Doctor Bull bent and opened his bag on the floor beside him. "Want to try an experiment?" he asked, looking up. "I have a sample of blood here. Drew it in a syringe with a little citrate solution. I guess you have the facilities to see if you can grow anything from it. I'd be interested."
"We could do it, all right. But what are you looking for?"
"Bacillus typhosus. In view of the Banning girl, I thought you might like to find out."
Doctor Verney set down the paper-weight with an uncontrolled bump. "Have you any reason to suspect such a thing?"
"Well, I don't know that I have any you'd admit, Verney. Your style isn't mine; I'm just an old horse doctor, you know. I have to work on hunches. In this case, I don't mind telling you that I first thought of it when my aunt told me it was typhoid. I've been thinking about it a lot since, and damned if I don't pretty well believe the old lady's right."
Doctor Verney relaxed a little. "It's a hard diagnosis for a layman, Bull." He smiled, recovering the paper-weight.
"Most doctors have some trouble with the early stages, too, I guess. Not much to choose. Sure you couldn't be fooled?"
"I don't mean to imply that. Short of rose spots, I could very easily miss it. It simply looks like a long shot to me—unless you can lay your finger on a probable source of infection. Can you?"
"Well, I can use my head. Most things are out. There's no general distribution of milk. There hasn't been anything like a church supper. No flies. The cases are all in town, which means that there aren't any among people who have their own water supply."
The Last Adam Page 16
