The Last Adam (21 page)

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 harder 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."

"That's good reasoning," admitted Doctor Verney. "But after all, it doesn't show anything about the water. Unless there have been cases in the vicinity I really can't believe — Well, I have a lot of respect for the opinion of a man of your experience; you probably know more about real, practical medicine than most of us young fellows will ever learn —"

"I wouldn't be surprised," agreed Doctor Bull. He could see the small disconcerted blink of Doctor Verney's eyes, and laughed. "You mustn't think I don't appreciate your sentiment," he said. "It just so happens that, barring bone-setting, a few surgical tricks, and some push and pull obstetrics for women too soft to turn the corner, I've found out there's no such thing as practical medicine. Glad to hand on the torch."

"Oh, it seems to me we do some good —"

"Well, if you're not interested in my aunt's idea, I can go to Torrington."

"No, no. I'd be glad to try it. There's a perfectly good ten per cent, bile solution out in the lab right now. We'll fix it up and incubate it. We could get some agar plate smears to-morrow and see if we have anything."

He pressed a button on his desk. When the door opened, he said, "Oh, Miss Stanley, I want to do a blood culture. We'll use that bile solution. I think there's plenty left. Put two hundred cubic centimetres in an Erlenmeyer flask. Add ten of this specimen of Doctor Bull's and shoot it in the incubator."

"Yes, Doctor Verney."

She went on past the desk to the closed door beyond the one open into the consulting-room. George Bull got a glimpse of sinks, shelves, and a long table crowded with bottles and tube racks. "I was born thirty years too soon," he observed. The door closed after Miss Stanley and he added: "You must find it quite a strain keeping chaste around here."

"Oh, no," Doctor Verney protested. "She's a nice girl, Bull. Comes from, a fine family."

"Uh, huh. Well, much obliged."

"I'll let you know to-morrow."

All Friday morning the cold west wind came bitter across the hills, poured hard and furious down the valley from North Truro. Off the worn bare earth of the playground beside the New Winton School, whirls of dust lifted and drove away. On high, this pale, gritty haze trailed over the cemetery and rolled repeatedly past St. Matthias's church before dispersing.

May Tupping wrapped her old coat tight against the vicious edge of the gale. She bent into it as she came across the green at noon, her face turned aside, her eyes half closed, stung to exasperation by that roaring, senseless violence. Every few minutes bleakly covered by the journeying clouds, the sun was brilliant, but without comfort. The bare trees groaned in their crotches; a shutter banged; a sheet of newspaper had glued itself, flapping, about the legs of the soldier on the monument.

In the telephone office, Doris had a good fire. May struggled into this unstirred warmth, her cheeks whipped to colour, her eyes watering from the last hard assault of the wind down the small, sunless veranda.

"Hello," said Doris, yawning.

"Oh, that's the most awful wind! And after it was so nice —"

"That freak weather couldn't last long. How's Joe's cold?"

"He feels pretty bad to-day."

"That's tough. Well, I'll be getting on. Oh, say, listen! The damnedest thing happened. About an hour ago, Mrs. Talbot called up, and when I asked her for a number, she said she didn't want any number. She just wanted to know if anybody was here. She said she was kind of scared, because there was a man out on the road who kept looking at her. Honestly, May, she sounded goofy. Then, another thing she said was, I shouldn't tell Doc Bull because if he knew about it he was going to come down and kill her. After that she tried to ring up twice more, but I'd heard all I wanted to. I just, disconnected. She hasn't paid her bill for two months, I know, so we're supposed to refuse her service Saturday, anyway."

"I know," said May. "She hasn't any money. I don't know what on earth is going to happen to her. I suppose they'll have to send her somewhere."

"Well, I should think they would. But, anyway, I wouldn't bother about her line if I were you. It'll just give you the creeps, May. I'm not fooling."

Sitting alone before the switchboard, May reflected that the worst part of Mrs. Talbot's trouble was how little any of it was Mrs. Talbot's fault. Her husband was dead. So was her son and her daughter. The same amazing clean sweep had been made of her relatives. Fifteen or twenty years ago there had been quantities of Millers up on Cold Hill, and almost as many Darrows. Now she was the only Miller left. Of her father's sister's children there was none left— Jed Darrow's widow and son couldn't help even if they wanted to. Bill Talbot had two brothers. Both of them had been in the Navy, and both of them were taken, dead, from a submarine which had lain three weeks, fatally injured, in the mud off New London. Mrs. Talbot was perhaps forty, and certainly looked nearer sixty. She hadn't any money, and no means of getting any. Plainly she was a sick woman; she might even, as Doris suggested, be really crazy. When you got a case like that, you could see what a help it was to be able to believe all partial evil, universal good, or to feel sure that God was punishing Mrs. Talbot for offences so cunning that He alone saw them. Your reason might revolt at it, but at least it would give the speculative mind some peace. A possible security was implied. A little plan, which would make it impossible for such a torrent of disasters to touch you, was indicated—
I have been young and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.