The Last Adam (26 page)

"Get in," he added, opening the car door. "I think you'd better go home now."

She simply stood still looking back at him, so he bundled her in. Going back, he got his bag, opened it and pulled out a half-pint flask of whisky. Unscrewing the metal cup cap he filled it. "Drink it!" he said to her.

Plainly she was unwilling. She backed away feebly on the seat, and he said: "All right, don't. I'm not going to argue with you."

Regarding the poured whisky a moment, he swallowed it himself, screwed back the cap, snapped the bag shut. Going round to get in at the other side, he saw her struggling with the door handle, intent on getting out. Reaching across, he knocked her hand down.

They were rounding the corner to go along the east side of the green when, with stealth and an unexpected, or accidental, competence, she did get the door open. George Bull roared, grabbing at her; but the cloth he caught tore away in his hand, the door swung wide, and she banged against it, falling.

Veering almost off the road, George Bull drew his brake. Mrs. Talbot lay perhaps ten feet behind. They had been travelling slowly and she demonstrated how little she had been hurt by scrambling now to her feet. Turning, she scurried across the road, over the path, and down past the library. Since she was headed for home, George Bull decided that she-was probably going there. Seeing that any sort of pursuit would only make her more frantic, he sat at the wheel, shaking his sore thumb, watching. Stumbling along the back fence, past woodsheds and antiquated outhouses, she had got as far as the Tuppings'. There she suddenly turned in, darting out of sight! Unexpectedly clear in the Sunday morning stillness, George Bull could hear her beating on the back door.

"Hell and damnation!" he exploded. Stamping on the self-starter, he got the stalled engine started again, swept with a low-geared roar down the back street to the Tuppings' gate.

May, her hair pulled back and knotted behind, was as white as the long hem of nightgown showing below the skimpy bathrobe tied round her. She opened the dôor only a little; but, grasping the edge, George Bull moved it back, out of her paralysed hands, closed it behind him. He could see now the cause of May's horror. Mrs. Talbot, though certainly hurt in no serious way, had taken most of the skin off her cheek-bone and the left side of her forehead. Blood, flowing, reached her chin in wet, scarlet trickles. George Bull almost recoiled himself before the shocking result.

He said: "She's all right. Jumped out of the car, but it's just a little skin off. Found her hiding up in my barn and started to drive her home. Got any hot water? Well, cold will do; in a basin. Bring it here and I'll fix her up. Get some clothes on, will you? I want to take her over to her place and lock her up. We'll try to get Mrs. Darrow from Banning's Bridge. When Verney comes up, we'll see what can be done. It isn't safe to leave her around."

Probably exhausted by her escapade, Mrs. Talbot made now no protest or resistance. "You shouldn't get out of a car until it stops," he said. "But you're all right this time."

Pressed to sit down on a chair by the table, she remained lax, her back rounded in a weak flexion, her hands dropped open on her lap, her bloody face bent forward, chin on breast.

A little water slopped over the edge of the shallow basin as May set it down. "Make some coffee," George Bull said. "We'll try some on her when I get her patched up-—" He glanced at May and added, "Brace up! Nothing to cry about!"

"I'm not," May said.

"What's the trouble? Up all night?"

She nodded. Finding her voice again, she said: "But what am I going to do? I can't take care of him. He can't stay, by himself —"

"I'll look at him in a minute. Go and make that  —"

When she came back with the coffee-pot and a cup, clad now in a grey jersey dress, he was affixing the adhesive tape to hold in place the upper patch on Mrs. Talbot's face. "That's better," he nodded. "Get a couple more cups and we'll all have some. Don't worry, we'll get Joe off your hands."

"I don't want him off my hands. I just want —"

"Huh!" George Bull said. "Unless you can hire two nurses, like the Bannings, I guess you haven't much choice in the matter. Go on; get those cups. I haven't had any breakfast."

As well as one hundred and eleven children, eighty- seven adults, most of whom lived in houses where there was already a case, had each received on Saturday five hundred millions of typhoid bacilli in polyvalent strains sensitized with serum from highly immune horses. Monday, they all took a thousand million more. Wednesday they got a last thousand million.

This would presumably arrest the spread by infection from new sources; but on Wednesday there were thirty-nine unquestioned cases and six or seven highly likely ones. Tuesday afternoon, which was ominously early in the course of the disease, Ralph Kimball died.

The solitary state policeman seen by George Bull astride his motor-cycle in front of Weems' garage on Sunday morning, had been reinforced. Above and below New Winton, US6W was half-closed with a barrier where motor traffic was requested to proceed straight through. In New Winton the state of siege and emergency had reached a high point on Monday. This sickness, not respecting person or position, in prostrating forty people had picked several in simple ways indispensable to ordinary life. Worst hit was the railroad. It was noon Monday before the Chief Train Dispatcher understood that at New Winton there was no one in the railroad's employ able to get out of bed. Signals were consequently not placed. Early trains, milk coming down, mail coming up, halted, put out flag-men and torpedoes, finally telephoned the Danbury yards for enlightenment. The resulting tie-up took half the day to straighten out. A head-on collision and a dozen derailed cars could hardly have done more.

Monday, Helen Upjohn came down with typhoid. Since Geraldine was sick already, and those two were the ones experienced in handling the post office work, even on its much-belated arrival the mail remained in the bags. Walter Bates was a long while in resuming his titular office of Postmaster, for he was engaged, as First Selectman, in interviewing Jethro Evarts.

Jethro, though he had not lived in the house since his wife died, refused to allow it to be used. Remote, almost impregnable in his complete deafness and partial blindness, his refusal had at first been absolute; then, conditioned by a demand for rent. At that point Doctor Bull, who had come with Walter Bates, departed. He went and broke in the door, started Grant Williams and Harry Weems and Howard Upjohn working on the furnace. Mr. Bates stayed to reason, finally convincing Jethro's sister, with whom Jethro lived. While the old man watched her suspiciously, not able to hear what she was saying, she told Walter, all right, to use it anyway; and there was no need to pay Jethro anything. She would see that he didn't get out, so he would never know about it. When Jethro pushed his pad over for her to write down what it was, she scribbled
Nothing that concerns you.

Arriving triumphant with this irregular permission, Mr. Bates found the house wide open, Mrs. Foster and Mrs. Baxter on their knees scrubbing floors, all the furniture jammed in one room, and three nurses from the Torrington hospital making up a variety of cots. In the cellar Howard could be heard banging and hammering around the furnace; Harry Weems and Grant were unloading a Ford truck on the lawn; from another truck Eben Quimby was uproariously dumping a load of coal down a chute. Parked in the overgrown drive was Doctor Verney's shining car.

Seeing that the key entrusted to him was not really needed, Mr. Bates decided not to bother them. He still had all the mail to sort.

Tuesday, nineteen patients had been moved in. One was Helen Webster and May stayed on the switchboard until half-past ten that night. At six the next morning, Doris, coming to relieve her sister, found Clara so sick that it was necessary to telephone her father to come down and bring her home—she couldn't possibly drive the car back to Truro. Until the telephone company could arrange for relief, May and Doris would work on twelve-hour shifts. Wednesday morning, the Reverend Doctor Wyck, who had intended to bury Ralph Kimball that afternoon—Howard didn't consider, it prudent to embalm him, so they had to be prompt about it—took to his bed. At the Evarts' house, Doctor Verney, stopping a moment on his way to the Bannings', was joined in anxious conference with Doctor Bull over Larry Ward, sunk in what gave every sign of being a fatal coma. His case had chosen to complicate itself with pleurisy. .

Just before noon, Henry Harris, leaning against the door jamb of the post office, was reading his way patiently through the
New York Times
,
in no hurry to reach the editorials. The news was done with, the rectangles of advertising grew bigger, but sometimes space enough was left for a column or so of something, and Henry Harris scanned whatever it was.

On page eleven he was rewarded. The word, New Winton, in nine-point surprised him. This smallest possible headline topped an inch and a quarter paragraph inserted at the bottom of the second, almost filled column of a minor political story.
Typhoid at New Winton Traced to Water.

Henry Harris began to smile, warming,
New Winton, Conn., March 11th. An outbreak of typhoid fever in the village of New Winton, Litchfield County, was being investigated by the State Department of Health and local cases of the disease and one death had been reported. The investigation, officials said, had disclosed that all patients had drunk water from the local reservoir, made turbid by recent rains.

"Short and sweet," he thought; unreasonably delighted by the empty, perfunctory sentences; the figures no longer current; the mean obscurity of place. Aloud, he said, "That'll teach us, I guess!"

Chuckling, he hesitated a moment, for really to appreciate it one had to see the whole page, the rambling political hand-out, the fluently-sketched group, of pert, slight girls with their long legs and flaring panties enriched by Puerto Rican needlework for $2.97; but, after all, who would appreciate it but himself? With his finger-nail he detached the small oblong of print, turned and went into the post office. Borrowing a thumb tack from the lower corner of an official notice, he pinned his story in the centre of the worn board.

Leaving the Evarts' house on Friday afternoon, George Bull felt a weariness not very familiar to him. To be tired and sleepy, comfortably ready to lie down and repair the great expenditures of an energy great too, outlasting at any time or task most other men's, was his ordinary sensation. Now, in a profound sad wakefulness, he did not want to sleep so much as to sit still, not to be bothered. The constant coming and going in the bright lights and bare rooms of this improvised, uncomfortable hospital; the repeated consideration of this case or that (each one febrile, dishevelled; most of them entering or well into a typical helpless stupor) exasperated him with the impossibility of doing anything quickly. He was fitted for sudden prodigies of strength; not for standing still, bearing the little world on his back. This thing could go on forever. Larry Ward had not been dead four hours when they were putting Lester Dunn into the bed thus given them.

His right thumb, which had almost stopped bothering for something. His left arm ached to the bone in outward sign of the immense inner disturbance caused by those two and a half billion injected bacilli. That invasion, he supposed, might account for his state of mind. The whole system, which could neither explain nor be explained to, felt a mechanical panic of revulsion, not knowing what next. On his mind weighed the simple physical foreboding of resources heavily taxed and reserves depleted.

He sat a few minutes in his car without troubling to start the engine. The late afternoon, windless, showed a low, long pile-up of thick clouds, bright with the sunset hidden behind the hills. These towering coloured mounds reflected down a strong, falsely-warm glow over the whole valley. Around the green, the shapes of houses, most of them white, a few with yellow windows, stood lucid and distinct between the trees. The surface of US6W, for the moment entirely empty, took on a faint lemon colour; the dead whiteness of the Congregational church was relieved; it looked soft as chalk up the deserted green. New Winton, wrapped in this wan radiance, did not rest him. He thought: "By God, I'm getting old, and this is all I've ever had!"

George Bull turned the ignition key, pushed in his gears. Holding the clutch, he began to coast gradually down the slope of the drive. Let in, his engine resisted a moment, braking him, but he had enough momentum to force it over and the cylinders fired. Drawing along the green, he saw the sign before the telephone exchange light up. He remembered that he wanted to see May Tupping. He pulled the car a little off the road and leaving the engine running went slowly up the path.

May was alone. An open book, which she had been holding up to the switchboard light, she laid on her lap, turning her head. "I've just had a call for you, Doctor Bull," she said. "Mrs. Vogel —"

"I wanted to see you a moment," he answered. In his own mind, his news lost all importance. To the weary mind what difference did it make? In few enough years it was all the same. He said, "It's hard to understand some of these things, but there's a febrile condition we call subsultus tendinum—amounts to a sort of picking at the bed-clothes. Often it's not a good sign by any means; but in Joe's case, I don't think it's a bad one. He seems to have as mild a case as anyone over there."

She looked at him, the book closed now, in alert, frightened attention. "No, no," Doctor Bull said. "No cause to act up. Can't you even see what it means? Doctor Verney agrees with me that it's remarkable; but such things are always happening. Probably, getting up a resistance, the body gets up a surplus. Whatever's been wrong with Joe's spine must have got something good for it. The nervous reaction seems to be reestablished in his arms. It works on all the tests Verney could think up. Of course, he's got next to no muscles left in his arms, but when he gets well, they'll pick up. Thought it might cheer you to know the probabilities."