by Max Brand
"I thought it would be worse than this, though," said Kildare. "I mean, about two o'clock it looked to me as though the party were going smash."
"Well, would that have been such a great disaster?" he asked.
"No, not to you, of course," said Kildare. He reached into his memory of certain cases and found phrases ready-made at his hand. "You don't know anything about the emptiness that spins like a wheel, do you?"
"Emptiness—spins?" she repeated. She sat up and looked at him.
"I don't want to talk about it. It's horrible," said Kildare. "But I mean—the darkness whistling—I'm not making any sense, am I?"
"I don't mind listening," she told him.
"You'd mind if I told you more about it, though," went on Kildare. "The room you've been living in all day, happily enough—you've never had that room turn into a coffin when the night comes, have you?" A sudden movement of her head told him that he had caught her full attention at last, but she was silent. He leaned back and put a hand over his face. In this way he covered his smile of triumph, but also he felt like a sneak-thief. He said: "The right sort of people go to bed at a decent time, and they never stir until the daylight comes. But there are other people who'd rather have a hangman fit a noose around their neck than be alone at night.—Do you mind me talking?"
When she spoke to him now, there was a softening of her voice that gave a new quality to the whole night.
"Does it help you to talk about it?" she asked. "I'm glad to listen."
"May I?" asked Kildare with a pretended eagerness. "Sometimes talking about it—if only one can find the right person—makes the whole business seem as childish as Mother Goose. It is childish, isn't it?"
"Fear of the dark?" she asked.
"You don't know anything about it," declared Kildare, rousing himself to a greater fervour. "I can tell the people who never have any trouble about the night. They have clean, clear eyes like yours. They've never gone to sleep and dreamed that they were buried alive. They've never had a dream like that. Shall I tell you what it's like?"
"Yes—tell me," she said. He could feel her tension. It was like having a fish on a line.
"There are twenty different kinds," said Kildare. "One of them is like this: You're lying down on a smooth green lawn stretched out under a tree that makes a sort of a green heaven over you. The blue of the sky filters down through the branches till you know that you're asleep. It's the sort of a sleep that children have, perfect unconsciousness and a sense of being carried along toward happiness. There's a bit of a wind blowing, and after a while it drifts over the grass a ripple of sand, a harmless little ripple of sand. It rolls up; it breaks and barely tickles your skin. Another ripple comes with the wind. The sand fits cool and snug under your cheek. More ripples build the sand higher and higher around your face...You can't move, you know. The sleep has bound you down like cold irons. You can't stir, and the sand is up to your lips now. If you dare to open your mouth, it will pour down your throat. It reaches your nostrils. All at once—my God, you're breathing the sand into your lungs! All the clean air with life in it is gone from the world!"
"Don't go on! Stop!" whispered Nancy.
He pretended not to hear, continuing as though horribly entranced. "Then you wake up. The darkness is like the sand. It stifles your lungs. A scream builds up high in your throat. You snap on the light and you see your own room there about you—your clothes on a chair perhaps, and your book on the table and everything as familiar as a painting. That's it. It's only a painting. It's all dead, and you're dead with it and in it. You'll never get outside that frame into the living world where the air can be breathed. If you're lucky, maybe you don't scream, but you jump out of the bed and run to the window. You fall on your knees and lean out in the night. You tell yourself that it's only a dream. But the horror won't leave, and your heart is going crazy. You gasp and bite at the air. There's no taste of life in it. The whole world is darkness or else a few little funeral lights along the street to show you it's a city of the dead with nothing but the black of the night to breathe..."
"I can't stand it!" cried Nancy.
He got out a handkerchief and dragged it across his forehead. He scrubbed the wet from his face, up and down, as one poor devil always had done in the hospital.
"I shouldn't have talked about it," said Kildare huskily. "It's like a ghost story, and it'll give you the horrors. Only—I want you to understand what it means—to some of us—to be alone at night and to fall asleep in the dark and wake up throttled by the blackness. Are you going to forgive me for telling you all this?"
"Forgive you?" said the girl. "Don't you see? That's what sleep means to me!"
He had expected to be triumphant if he caught her in his trap, but all that he felt was a stroke of profound pity.
"D'you mean that you have been that way?" he said, as though surprised.
"Why else was I herding around with swine tonight? Johnny, if you look at me I know that you can see the horror in my eyes. I can feel them like shadows of apes here in the corners of my brain."
He looked straight into the staring of her eyes. She needed comforting, like a child, but that could not be his role. He had to diagnose before he could cure.
"I know," said Kildare.
"Is there the same feeling in you, Johnny?"
"It's exactly the same," he said.
"Then I'm not going crazy? It can't be insanity if two of us have the same imaginings?"
"Of course it can't," said Kildare.
"Sometimes even having people in the room doesn't help, does it?" she went on.
"Not a bit."
"They're like ghosts, not flesh and blood. There's a dreadful graveyard sense of darkness and decay and horrible death..."
Her voice had not grown louder, but her face looked like screaming. Kildare put an arm around her. She pushed at him with her hands.
"You get that jitter out of you, he said.
"It'll never go; it'll never leave me," said Nancy Messenger. "It's going to throttle me some night; it's going to drive me out the window into the street; it's going to kill me, Johnny."
"It can't do that now," said Kildare. "We've found one another. We can put up a fight together because we understand."
"Could I call you when things get bad?"
"Day or night."
"And you won't mind?"
"Mind? I'll be going through the same thing probably."
"If we've got each other, Johnny, we can fight off the horrors, can't we?...Poor Johnny, poor boy! What was it that started the dreadfulness in you? But I mustn't ask."
"Why not?" he demanded, trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice, for he saw that he was on the verge of making the great discovery. "I'll tell you all about what started it in me."
She shook her head violently, her eyes closed to keep out the very thought.
"No, we'll never ask questions," she insisted. "Then there'll never have to be any horrible answering."
He saw that it would be foolish to keep on; but there was a silent groan in his throat when he realised how close he had come to the secret.
"Look—over there to the right!"
"I see them—those black clouds, you mean?" she said. She held close to Kildare as though she hardly dared to face a moment in the world without him.
"Of course they're black because the sun is rising behind them, Nancy. The day's beginning, and we can put this one night behind us."
Her head dropped back against his shoulder.
"You'll stay with me, Johnny, will you?"
"Yes," he promised.
"You won't let them take you away from New York?"
"I'm going to stay here where I can find you when things go black for me."
"You'll stay with me, Johnny, till the end? Promise me, promise me! It won't be long. I'm going to finish it all; but promise me to stay till the end?"
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
KILDARE wakened from a dream of sinful d
elay and mountainous defeat. His eyes refused to recognise the big four-poster in which he lay. He felt for an instant as though some reshuffling of time had dealt him into a far-off country. The tall figure in the doorway with the white, close-clipped beard and moustache was a perfect part of the illusion of the past for an instant, then he was sitting up and saying good morning to Paul Messenger.
"Go back to sleep," said Messenger, smiling. "Doctor Carew has been on the telephone with me from the hospital to say that a certain Gillespie has been asking for you; and I've told Carew that you're not to be disturbed. I've only looked in on you to tell you that everything is all right. Go back to sleep and get your rest."
The sleep which was stagnating his brain gradually cleared away. From the speech of Paul Messenger he retained one singular phrase: "a certain Gillespie."
"Have you never heard of Dr. Leonard Gillespie?" he asked, bewildered.
"No," said Messenger, "but I've seen Nancy, and I've heard enough from her to realise that the Chanlers were right and that you are the man for this work. She speaks of you with real affection, Kildare. She talks almost as though you were a brother."
He came toward the bed, smiling. "I began to think that no one in the world ever could win her confidence. Herron failed; I failed; but you have the special talent. You're already inside her mind, and I know that you'll get at the root of everything that's wrong."
The comprehension of Kildare fumbled at these words and made nothing of them. There was only one prime consideration: Gillespie was calling for him, and he was not at hand.
"Will you tell me the time, please?" he asked.
"It's only ten; you've hardly begun to sleep," answered Messenger.
Kildare stumbled out of the bed and stood up in blue pyjamas much too large for him.
"I should have been there at least an hour ago!" he exclaimed.
"My dear fellow, forget the hospital," said Messenger. "I'll make everything perfectly all right for you there."
"Nobody can make things all right for me there. Gillespie—but you haven't even heard of him?"
"One of Carew's subordinates?" asked Messenger only mildly interested.
"Subordinate?" echoed Kildare. "If you piled ten Carews and ten hospitals one on top of the other you wouldn't have what Gillespie means. And he'll raise the devil with me for being off duty."
He tossed off the pyjamas and started reaching for his clothes.
"I don't understand this," said Messenger. "No matter what the hospital may be, it performs certain services for certain considerations. I'll give them such considerations in return for your time that everyone will be happy. Let me do the worrying about that, please!"
Kildare was jamming himself into his clothes. He panted out the words: "Can't you understand? Gillespie—but you've never heard of him?"
Messenger said, a little sternly because he felt that too much time was being given to a mere detail: "Whatever Doctor Gillespie may be, he is a man who serves society and receives compensation for his services. That is axiomatic in the life of every man except saints, and saints are a little out of date, aren't they?"
As he thought of how completely all axioms were worthless in a definition of Gillespie, Kildare made a gesture of surrender. He said: "Gillespie never took a penny in his life. He'd rather give the world one specific cure than have a whole mountain of gold."
Kildare was sitting down now rapidly lacing his shoes. Messenger had lost some of his surety.
"I almost take it that you'd walk out of this case if Gillespie whistled you back," he suggested.
Kildare, whipping on a necktie and knotting it, answered: "He's the master, and I'm the apprentice. Of course I come when he whistles."
"Do I take it that you look forward with pleasant expectation to a penniless life like his?" asked Messenger.
"If I could steal a quarter of what he knows, what would money mean?" demanded Kildare, astonished in his turn.
He brushed his fingers through his hair and brought it into rough order. Without a glance at a mirror to check details he was ready to go. For an instant they stared at one another across a distance immeasurably great. Messenger, stricken by the new idea, said suddenly: "If I can't buy help from you people, can I beg it? That seems the only thing to do!"
"I'll tell you what I know, what I guess, and what I advise you to do," said Kildare, pulling a thick wad of money from his pocket. "By the way, here's what's left of what you gave me last night."
"Damn the money," snapped Messenger. "In your world, it seems that damning is all that money's good for. Keep the change, will you? What I gave you was nothing."
"Interns can't accept pay," answered Kildare a little impatiently.
The reluctant hand of Messenger accepted the bills.
Kildare went on: "Nancy is the victim of an acute hysteria that takes its form in fear of the night and of being alone. That's what I know definitely. There is something in her mind so horrible that she can't think or speak about it. That's all I know. My guess is that the source of her fear is not in you or Herron. She leaves the house to avoid loneliness. Her dread, I think, is of something in the future. What I advise is that you get the finest psychiatrist and let him work out the problem. In the meantime, let her have her way in everything and be as patient as you can."
"Kildare, if you knew Nancy better you would understand that she'll never submit to a doctor's care."
"It's a difficulty," agreed Kildare. "But a psychiatrist could be introduced as a friend in the house, as I was."
"He would be someone of name and established reputation. If Nancy didn't recognise him, one of her friends would be sure to. Great scientists are not great actors. Besides, the touch of a middle-aged practitioner would be too heavy and clumsy, probably. She's built a wall that shuts out the rest of the world. By the grace of God and your own devices you've managed to get inside that wall. I'm afraid that nobody else on earth can do that, and now you tell me that you're leaving us in the lurch!"
Kildare thought back to the staring eyes of Nancy. He had to take a great breath to maintain his resolute purpose.
"I'm sorry about her," he said, "but I can't stay." The face of Messenger glistened with a fine perspiration. He kept a hard hold on himself.
"Let me ask another question," he said. "Kildare, don't you feel that with a bit of time you might be able to get at the root of her trouble?"
"I feel that I might, with luck."
"And don't you feel that there's need for haste?"
Kildare was silent.
"I mean," went on Messenger, "won't you agree that in her present state of mind she easily might become desparate?"
"Yes," said Kildare reluctantly.
"And if she becomes desperate, she would be capable of almost any action?"
"Yes," said Kildare.
A silence grew up in the room like a field of high electric tension.
At last Kildare said: "Doctor Gillespie is working now at an experiment that may save thousands of lives. He needs me. I can't imagine anything in the world that would induce him to let me go."
"Nevertheless," said Messenger, "I'll see what can be done to provide the inducement."
He went out of the room with Kildare and down the stairs beside him. When they came to the front door, they shook hands.
"I know part of the hard thoughts you're thinking," said Kildare. "And if it weren't that I'm bound to Gillespie, I'd give anything I know to help Nancy. She means a lot to me."
"I believe you," said Messenger solemnly. "I have no hard thoughts. Every man has his own conception of his duty to others and to himself, but I feel that I shall have you back here on her case before another day has come round."
Out on the street Kildare found a gusty wind and rain that iced the pavement, but it seemed pleasant weather compared with the unhappiness which he had left behind him. From the corner he looked back at the succession of dignified façades standing shoulder to shoulder with insuperable dignity, each as like
the other as so many tall brothers. He turned from them hastily, for the thought of Nancy Messenger came suddenly like a sweet ghost and let the cold of the morning breathe into him.
* * *
CHAPTER NINE
WHEN he got to the hospital, he raced to his room and hurried into whites. The brazen voice of the loudspeaker was roaring, before he had laced his shoes: "Calling Doctor Kildare; report at Doctor Carew's office. Calling Doctor Kildare; report at Doctor Carew's office. Calling Doctor Kildare..."
He was out in the corridor with the third repetition still resounding in the room behind him and went at once to the head of the hospital. Carew, biting off the end of a cigar, recognised him with a grunt and a nod as though he were a very distasteful sight. The superintendent, instead of addressing Kildare, preferred to give his attention to the grey mist beyond the windows through which the towers of Manhattan were lifting to an unhappy height.
"I've just had two or three million dollars on the telephone," he said, letting the smoke issue with his speaking breath and so curl up into his grim face. "Two or three million hospital dollars; enough to bring this old institution to life; enough to put hundreds of new beds into the service of the poor...I suppose you know what I'm talking about?"
"Mr. Messenger?" suggested Kildare.
"Well," said Carew, "I don't expect the future of the hospital to mean much to you, but I wonder if you've thought clearly of all this from your own personal angle? You know that a doctor with clients like the Messengers is bound to get all that money can buy?"
"I'm not thinking of that," said Kildare, "but if Doctor Gillespie could be persuaded to let me go for a short time, I think I could help Nancy Messenger."
"Bah!" said Carew. "He can't be persuaded. I wouldn't be fool enough to try persuasion. But you could make yourself a free agent, young Doctor Kildare."