The Last Adam (20 page)

Brooding on the possible malice of fate so serving her, she had concluded that nothing could be more like life or her luck. You could see in it the dreary pattern of too many remembered anticipations which had somehow come to nothing. In fact, the whole plan had been perilous from the start. Like the first idea of going to Paris, motoring to Santa Fé had an ecstatic desirability which at once jeopardized it, made it inherently improbable. Frowning a little, she could even recall thinking, in feverish extravagance, that probably there was a God. Knowing that she regarded Him as a lot of nonsense, God was always on the alert to pay her sauciness with the inspired punishments of a loving kindness which did not care if she were really injured, and never made any mistake about what could hurt and disappoint her most.

She drew a breath, not wanting even now to tempt Heaven with too scornful a rejection of that possibility, and lifted her head enough to see that the morning was once more clear, the sunlight still warm on the trees. Shifting her head again, something arrested her. She came up sharply on one elbow, staring with a jolt of alarm at her pillow. How it could have got there was a mystery for the moment sinister and appalling, but the stain was undoubtedly blood. Revulsion was eased then by relief. Asleep, she must have suffered a slight nose bleed. Bringing her hand to her face she could feel blood dried on her nostril and lip.

"God, what a lousy mess!" she said. She threw back the covers and sat up, indignant.

The violence of the motion made her giddy, so she sat a moment, recovering her balance. Finally, standing up, impatient, she made for the bathroom door. Almost there, she was forced to realize in new, dismayed anger that she wasn't completely over her illness. An abrupt tightening cramp stabbed her bowels, a wave of sickness rushed up from them, landing with a painful impact inside her skull. The echo of it jarred, lingering, in her ears.

The handle resisted her. She tugged harder, half in support, trying to make her wrist turn. Something gave suddenly, but it was only the surface of the knob sliding on her palm, now lubricated disgustingly with sweat. Frustrated, she stood an instant trying to master the cramping nausea. Sweat was all over her now, and at once she was aware of cold, like a breeze on her. Down her back, under her arms, across her breast, the skin crawled, quailing from this strong draught. She put a bare foot out uncertainly, interrupting her partial stagger, held the sliding door knob and braced her other hand on the jamb while her body seemed suddenly porous, like weak white ice frozen full of air.

She must get back to bed, and she found herself phrasing it through the hard chatter of her teeth:
But I would rather go to bed
—the word bed was seized by a paroxysmal multiplication, a leaning tower of many million paper-thin but hard sounds soaring past view or reach. Shaken too violently to stand, her legs melted, her icy hands astoundingly failed. She went down on her side, in the weak relief of this surrender anticipating, even as immediately she felt, the cruel remote pain of bone banged on wood. The smooth floor held her face, turned sideways.

Opening, the door seemed only to have been waiting for this. But it was the other door, she realized. The bathroom door had not relented. "Take that damn knob down —" she managed to say. "You can't get in —"

Seeing that it was her mother, Virginia made at once an effort to get up. She would never convince anyone that she was all right and able to go; even what she said was crazy. Shutting her eyes, she forced an order into the words: "I meant, the door, not the knob —"

Picked up, she could feel her own lightness, and it amazed her; she weighed nothing. She could have floated on the ringing air. "Virginia, darling——"

"Leave me alone," she whispered automatically. "I just slipped —"

The bed mounted and met her shoulders and numb buttocks and light legs with a soft, intolerable jar.

"Oh, my God, my head —" she moaned. "Mother, my head aches —"

She got her chill wet hands to her forehead, palms grinding her eyebrows. She rolled her face into the pillow. In this hammer of pain she could hear another voice—it was Mary—crying: "Oh, the poor lamb! There, now—you go on, ma'am. There, Miss Ginny —"

"Hello," Virginia murmured, perplexed by the positiveness with which she could recognize Doctor Verney by his hands, by touch and a distinctive washed smell. His grave, oval face and intent brown eyes moved, smiling. "Hello, Ginny. What have you been up to?"

"I just sort of fainted, I guess —" But fainting, she saw at once, did not in the least describe it. "Have I been asleep?"

"I guess you have. How do you feel?"

 "I'm all right. My head hurt so damn much; but not now."

"Well, we'll fix you up in a hurry. Let's see the tongue. Now, wide open. That's it. All right."

"Am I going to be well? I mean, Monday. Am I—"

"I don't know why not! Only you mustn't keep getting out of bed. A little fever can weaken you a lot. Know that now, don't you?"

"I had a nose bleed."

"That's a nuisance; but at least it doesn't hurt much, does it? You stay in bed to-day and to-morrow. Saturday you ought to be all right. What would you like to eat?"

"Nothing."

"How about some ice-cream?"

"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 diarrhœa, 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.