“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.