“I want you to see a patient. I want five minutes of your time,” said Kildare.
Old Gillespie banged the top of a mouse cage with the flat of his hand, and the mice began to weave a white pattern on the floor of the cage as they raced around it in terror.
“You don’t want my time; you want my brain!” he shouted. “And you can’t have it!”
“He’s a twelve-year-old boy,” said Kildare steadily.
“I don’t give a damn if he’s the prince of Siam or the emperor of Cochin-China!” cried Gillespie. “I won’t see him.”
“His mother’s a washwoman,” said Kildare.
“Let her keep to her tubs and her suds then.”
“And she’s making the boy a gentleman.”
“We don’t want gentlemen; we want hard men who can take a chisel edge.”
“They call it pernicious anaemia—the other doctors—and they’re wrong.”
“I don’t give a damn about anaemia and other doctors and their errors; a lot of ignorant fools. I’m going on with this experiment and nothing else. You hear me?…”
“They call it anaemia, and they’re wrong,” repeated Kildare.
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. Here’s the case history and the laboratory reports.”
“I’m not interested,” said Gillespie, snatching the papers. “I’ll have nothing to do with it…Why don’t you think it’s anaemia?”
“The blood picture showed no macrocytes,” said Kildare.
“Then why the devil are you wasting my time?” demanded Gillespie. “Why don’t you get him in here where I can lay eyes and hands on him?”
Kildare hurried back to the other room. With a handkerchief he rubbed the wet from his forehead as he beckoned to the boy. “Doctor Gillespie will see you,” he said. This new accession of hope was too much for Mrs. Casey. She sank into a chair and stared at the floor. Mary Lamont hurried toward her as Kildare ushered the boy into the presence of Gillespie, who was glowering at the laboratory reports.
Without lifting his head he snapped: “Palpable spleen, Doctor Kildare?”
“Yes, sir,” said Kildare.
“Make a fragility test?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“The fragility test isn’t one of the regular routine.”
“That’s one of the damnations of the world—routine, routine, routine. People want to live by instinct, not by brains. Is the human race going to become a lot of damned insects? Use the mind more and routine less. Have a fragility test made at once.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kildare.
“Young man,” continued the internist, lifting his head and gathering the shag of his brows together, “do you ever have pains here—up on your left side?”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy.
“You didn’t tell me that,” said Kildare.
“I only have them now and then,” declared young Casey.
“When you have those pains, your skin is turning yellow, eh?” asked Gillespie.
“Yes, sir,” agreed the boy.
“It’s the dilating spleen,” stated Gillespie. “I think this boy has haemolytic icterus, Jimmy. Have them get the spleen out of him and he’ll be as fit as a fiddle again.” He pointed a sudden finger at the Casey boy. “You hear me? You’re going to be as right as a trivet inside two weeks. Get out of my sight and tell your mother the news…Stay here, Jimmy!”
“Thank you, sir…thank you, Doctor Kildare,” the boy was saying as he left the room. He hurried his thanks in his eagerness to bring the great news to his mother; Kildare closed the door slowly after him.
“Are you going to break your fool heart because you missed one case in two hundred?” asked Gillespie, already at work on some Petri dishes that contained a reddish agar.
“No, sir,” said Kildare.
“You are, though. Or why do you stand there with that dumb look on your face like a wet hen?”
Kildare looked from the white hair of Gillespie, as wild as a windstorm, to the purple-blue beneath his wrinkled eyes. “I’ll never learn half what you know,” he said. “I’ll get used to seeing that. But what I see right now is that you’re burning yourself up with this experiment.”
“That’s a lie and a loud one,” answered Gillespie, dragging a loop of wire over the agar and commencing to transfer the colony of bacteria to three other dishes. “I never felt better in my life.”
“Why does your hand shake then?” asked Kildare.
“None of your damned business. Leave me alone…till I need you, Jimmy. Will you?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Kildare, and went unwillingly from the room.
CHAPTER TWO
HOURS later, and every hour like the weighty length of a day, Kildare was saying: “Next, please!” when Mary Lamont answered: “That’s the end of the line for today.”
He shook his head at her impatiently. “There are twenty more people out there!” he declared.
“I’ve sent them away,” she said.
“You sent them away?” exclaimed Kildare.
“I had orders from Doctor Gillespie.”
“But a Gillespie day never stops—it’s from noon to noon,” protested Kildare.
“He won’t let you keep those hours,” said the girl. “He gave me express orders that the line is not to keep pressing in at you day and night.”
Kildare dropped into a chair, unbuttoned his white jacket at the throat, and wiped away perspiration from around his eyes. Hospitals are always too hot. He merely said: “I suppose he’s right. He’s always right. I’d be a fool to try to imitate him. He goes in seven-league boots, and I’m only a measuring worm…I suppose he wants me in the laboratory.”
“No. You’re to take some time off,” said Mary Lamont, watching his face. It was a familiar page to her now.
“Time off?” he repeated. “That’s right. Light work for the young horse. I’m damned tired of being young, aren’t you?”
She turned hastily to pick up a fallen report and hide her smile. Kildare was plucking off the long white coat in which he worked. He always managed to get it as wrinkled and stained as a butcher’s apron before the day’s end.
“Little Michael Casey would be happy if you’d drop in to see him,” she suggested. “The operation was perfect; and he’s already two-thirds well. He’s asking for you.”
“Tell him to save his wind; or let him thank Gillespie. But I’m glad he’s doing well. Give them hope, and they’re all giants. You notice that? Perhaps Gillespie will give him a word.”
“He wouldn’t know how to talk to Doctor Gillespie; but they all know how to talk to you,” she pointed out. “No matter how rough you are, they don’t mind.” She waited for an answer, curiously.
“I’m one of them, and they know it,” he said.
“But they’re out of the slums, and you’re out of the country.”
“I’m born poor, and I’ll die poor. They see that, and it’s what matters.”
“Some day you may be a consultant at a thousand dollars a case,” she suggested.
“May I?” He smiled at this impossible future.
“Well, anyway, money can’t buy the big things. It can’t buy happiness and things like that.”
“It can keep them all in damned bright repair, though.”
“You’re feeling down.”
“Haven’t I reasons for being down?”
“Of course you haven’t. There’s not a man—there’s hardly a man in the world who has your chance.”
“Good!” said Kildare, smiling wearily at her. “Go on and be all lighted up. It’s easy on my eyes.”
“You’re not really unhappy. You’re only blue. And that will go away like a cold in the head. What could you complain of?”