Testimony Of Two Men (10 page)

He was in the best suite the modest hotel could offer. His mother would be pleased. It had a large sitting and dressing room, all clean, fresh, if undistinguished furniture, brown velvet draperies, red Turkey rug, polished windows. He peeped into the bedroom and saw the big brass bed with its brown velvet counterpane and bolster, its good decorated china and sturdy commode, its thick towels and fine linen hand-towels. Not splendid but more than adequate.

“We’ll be happy to welcome Mrs. Morgan, Doctor,” said the hotel manager. “Tell her, in my name, that the hotel services are hers to command!”

And she’ll certainly command them, thought Robert, and was at once ashamed.

“You haven’t found a suitable house yet, Doctor?”

“Not yet. But I have four in mind, and when my mother comes, we’ll choose among them.”

“We’ll be sorry to lose you, Doctor.” The door closed after the manager. Robert returned to his own room. It seemed uncommonly small and bare to him, in the dull dusk of the rainy day. He looked at his watch. His mother would arrive at the station in one hour. He must look for a hack at once; they had a way of being invisible when it rained. He put on his hat—and his gloves—and ran lightly to the elevator. He had remembered to put his white silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and to wear the infernal frock coat and striped trousers which his mother felt to be the only uniform for a doctor. He even took his cane with him. He looked at himself in the elevator mirror as he went creakingly down. He had trimmed his mustache very closely this morning. This would definitely displease dear Mama, who would have preferred him with a full red beard. Proper beard for a doctor.

Only an hour ago Jonathan Ferrier had had him called to the hotel telephone to tell him that he was practically certain that he, Bob Morgan, would be named to the staff of St. Hilda’s. And. very soon, to the staff of the Friends’ Hospital. “A matter of a few days,” said Jonathan. “I thought you should know.”

“It’s very kind of you,” said Robert.

You don’t know how damned and expensively kind it was! thought Jonathan, a little annoyed that the young doctor should take it all so casually. He said, “You’re very lucky.”

Robert was puzzled. He said, “Well, I was always told I was born under a lucky star! Hello?” But Jonathan had hung up the receiver Robert stared at the telephone. These small towns! Central was always disconnecting people. He did not think of that call as he went down the elevator. It had never

Jonathan spent the dingy cool afternoon in his offices, in the long preparation for his departure from Hambledon forever.

His mother had built the premises for him as a gift when he had set up practice ten years ago. Like the house where he had been born, and his father and grandfather before him, it was built of red brick with white and brass trimmings, a single-story structure nearly three acres from the house, with a dark slate roof. It was not that Marjorie overly disliked the thought of her son having his offices in the large house where they lived, for now there were but two in the family, with two servants, and there were many rooms which could have been utilized. But she knew that Jonathan was a “private” person like herself, resenting propinquity which they both considered vulgar and not dignified and a little nonhuman. “The precious thing which distinguishes man from the lower animals,” she would say, “is his love for privacy, for aloneness, his liking for occasional solitude away from his bellowing fellows. It is bestial to huddle, to peer into each other’s pots, to mind another’s business, to interfere ‘lovingly’ in his life.” She had also thought, with distaste and revulsion, of the invasion of her house by troops of patients, even if it were in a separate wing. So, to Jonathan’s gratification, she had built this suite of offices which faced the blank wall of the distant house. There was also a white picket fence between, with a gate that was usually locked. The grounds were beautifully landscaped, however, with softly rolling lawns and shrubs and flower beds and old trees. But many of the older doctors were astonished, for it was still the custom to have one’s offices attached to one’s residence. Only the poorer, and younger, doctors were establishing offices in public buildings and even over shops. When they would become more affluent, they would buy houses and have their offices there.

Jonathan’s offices consisted of a small but well-appointed pharmacy, where he concocted his own remedies and improved on those already available, a comfortable waiting room, a consultation room finely paneled and- furnished and with a gas log fire, a small office for his bookkeeper-typist (the spinster and “advanced” daughter of a minister), a file room, and two examination rooms, also heated by gas. Marjorie had had electricity installed, though she disliked it for her own house, considering it too stark. There was a telephone directly connected with the house, and a public one.

The walls of Jonathan’s consultation room were mostly lined with his medical books and with cabinets for medical journals. It was a handsome room, warm and large and quiet. Here he had spent the eight happiest years of his life. Here he sat today, at his great walnut desk, another gift of his mother, going through the drawers and slowly emptying them. All at once, he was tremendously depressed. He got up and strolled through the suite, restlessly. The minister’s daughter was no longer there; he had discharged her several months ago, for he now rarely practiced and accepted few patients. Everything was silent except for the dripping of the rain and gusts of late spring winds, and the small hiss of the gas fires. The suite already felt deserted and abandoned. Jon paused in the waiting room, which his mother had furnished pleasantly with Mission and rattan furniture and a bright overhead electric chandelier of tasteful proportions. His patients would not gather here any longer; they would be young Bob’s patients very shortly. He went into the room where his bookkeeper had sat; the typewriter was covered, the little desk and chair empty. The lady would return, she had promised, under “the new doctor.” He slowly entered the pharmacy and saw his jars and bottles and boxes of pills and powders and liquid, all bright and shining under the light, and also waiting. Then he went into the examination rooms, so well-equipped with modern tables and white chairs and cabinets full of his precious instruments for minor operations and inspections.

At last he stood in the short hall with the doors and the silence about him. He stood there a long time, thinking. He still had to go over the files of his patients, with special notations for young Bob. The files of people’s lives, with all their ailments and their histories, their fears and their impending condemnations to death! He went into the file room and stared at the rank of green steel files, discreetly locked so that no one had access to them except himself. A man’s life was his own.

Was it? In less than a few months his, Jonathan’s, was no longer his own. It belonged to no one at all, even himself. He was already an exile. Very shortly, this beloved place would be rented by another and he would be forgotten. He would be—where? He shrugged. He did not know. His mother was not aware that he had been considering never practicing again but going abroad to live in quiet and solitude, perhaps in Cornwall, perhaps in Chartres, perhaps in serried and lonely Spain, perhaps in Berlin. There was no place for him in the world he had known; he was not only exiled, but he was self-exiled. He had never had an enormous affection for his fellowman, for he felt that overt affection was an insult to others and a condescension. He did not believe in “warmth,” which was something you extended only to a beloved dog or cat, or, in private, to a wife or a husband or a dear child. But he had compassion for all that lived, especially infants, young mothers and the fearful old. Pain and suffering had been abhorrent to him. He found nothing “noble” in agony, nothing to be offered up for the sake of others, nothing in the way of “reparation,” as the clergy said. (On this, too, he had parted company with the Church.) To him pain was an insult to humanity; it should not be countenanced; it was a waste of time, which could be employed in the stern business of being a man. True, pain was inseparable from living, but it should be pain and striving of the spirit, as man struggled toward manhood. Physical pain reduced man to an animal, and Jonathan had fought such pain with grim intensity and disgust, and had usually conquered it. Older doctors had sometimes sneered at him as the “pill-roller.” They had considered a certain amount of pain as “salubrious,” or a promoter of “humility,” though they were careful not to permit a great deal in their own lives or in the lives of members of the family. They distrusted even the new Aspirin, and were annoyed that it could be bought without prescription. But Jon gave it out in full boxes, for a pittance. “What’s heroic about a toothache or the pains of rheumatism?” he would say. “Those hypocrites! They don’t mind swallowing morphine at the slightest ache they have themselves!” He knew that many physicians were already addicted, and he was outraged that they were permitted in operating rooms. He was working with the American Medical Association on the dangers of drug addiction, though many of his colleagues still angrily insisted that morphine was “harmless.”

A young priest had said to him, “Pain is God’s punishment on our fallen race, since the sin of our First Parents.”

“And you don’t believe in a whiff of ether or chloroform for a woman in childbirth, to relieve her insufferable pangs? Did you ever see a difficult birth, Father? Or a breach presentation? Now, honestly, would you advise operations without anesthetics?”

“Well, no, Jon. Of course I wouldn’t. Do you think I’m a Fundamentalist screecher? But woman was condemned to suffer in labor—”

“Maybe ordinary labor. I don’t believe in much interference then, except during the last ten minutes or so; it could be dangerous to both mother and child. If you carry your thought on logically, doctors would be outlawed, as they were for the first few hundred years of Christianity, or regarded with contempt as mere vets, and sacrilegious, in the Middle Ages. Even in Britain to this day a doctor is a mere ‘Mister.’ When Our Lord cured the suffering, He did say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you.’ But that was in a different context and for a different reason. Surely you know that? We don’t believe, any longer, that his ‘sin’ is the cause of a child being born crippled or blind or defective or diseased. Or cancer a ‘judgment’ on the anguished, many of them good people who had rarely sinned in their lives. Remember how, in medieval times, a man or even a child who became sick was regarded as a criminal, suffering the condemnation of a supposedly merciful God? Sometimes he was stoned to death. Yes! You know that, Father. What an offense to God that must have been!”

“Yes, Jon, I know. But your ferocious war on pain—which is exemplary—does seem a personal battle to you, a personal insult—”

“That’s because I believe in the dignity of man.”

He no longer believed in it. He no longer cared what happened to his fellows, because of what they had inflicted on him, because of the derision and hatred even those he had so tirelessly helped had heaped on him. If it had all come from only a few who had not known him at all, even by reputation, he could have forgiven. But it had come from his friends and his own patients, who had eagerly desired—yes, they had
desired!
—to believe the very worst of him. Many still so desired; many were still disappointed.

I was puerile, he thought, staring at the files with rage and bitterness. I expected that some men at least were human. I expected that some had a sense of justice. I actually believed in friendship! What an utter, stupid, disgusting fool I was! No man has a friend. We hate each other instinctively; we love to destroy each other. What other explanation is there for wars, for all the obscene injustice we administer to each other, in full and radiant malice? Nothing delights a man more than causing pain to his brother. Even a rat has better instincts toward his kind.

When he caught himself in occasional acts of kindness, even now, he despised himself. He had vowed, months ago, that never would he lift a hand to help another again. He thought of young Dr. Morgan. Now, why in hell had he bribed and blackmailed to get him appointed to the staffs of those hospitals? Jonathan struck the files angrily with the palm of his hand, in revulsion against himself. He thought of the pain recorded there, and the hopeless hope and despair, and he said aloud, “Good.” He had cut his palm a little on the steel and he looked at the drops of blood with anger.

The young priest had said, “You must not desert humanity, Jon.”

He had replied, “But humanity first deserted me. I don’t care about their pain any longer, Father.”

“That is a sin against God. He made you a physician.”

“That’s why I’m resigning!” He had grinned. But he was resigning because he had lost his compassion—he hoped.

“If man’s sinfulness affected all priests that way, Jon, after listening in Confessionals, there would be no clergy.”

“I am no priest, Father.”

“All physicians, the real ones, are priests, Jon. Once only priests were physicians. You remember that?”