Canal Town

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

  “But Wealthia is here and he’s in South Carolina. What else can you make of it?”

  “That you’re wrong,” she said solemnly. “Oh, Doc, I can’t help it if you hate me for it; I know you’re wrong. Why, look at her now.”

  “I don’t hate you for it, Puss,” he said more gently. “Suppose I told you that she as much as admitted her condition to me? She told Hayne about it, too. He wrote me.”

  “Is that the letter you burned?”

  “Yes. I’ve no right to be telling you these things, Dinty. But I want you to understand. I can have the whole village against me and stand up to it. But I can’t have my own wife against me.”

  “I could never be against you, darling. You know that, don’t you? No matter how wrong and pigheaded you were.”

  “If I’m wrong in this, I’ll never believe in myself again. Now, Dinty, where did you get this precious bit of gossip?”

  She shook her head. “Please don’t ask me, Doc.”

  “I can guess. Has it gone far, do you think?”

  “I—I’m afraid so.”

  “If it reaches Genter Latham there will be hell to pay.”

  “Are you having the Lathams watched still, Doc?”

  “Yes. Dad Hinch reports to me every day.”

  “What for?”

  “To let me know of any preparation for their going away.”

  “Why shouldn’t they go away if they want to?”

  “Try to get it through your mind, Dinty. I’m fighting for my professional honor; for everything in the world that I’ve got. You can see how it will work out. If Kinsey Hayne won’t marry her …”

  “She doesn’t want to marry him,” broke in his wife.

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “No-o-o. Not exactly. She’s been peskily queer about him.”

  “It’s possible that she’s turned against him,” reflected Horace. “Pregnant women sometimes take strange fancies. Whatever the reason, if marriage isn’t in the offing, there is only one recourse left her. If she leaves Palmyra now, it will be to have a criminal operation performed. That I am determined to prevent if I have to follow her to the world’s end.”

  “Horace! You scare me when you look that way.”

  “Nobody is readier to admit it when he’s in the wrong than I am. What did you say, Dinty?”

  “Nothing. I coughed. Can’t I cough if I have to?”

  He glared at her, then continued, “But I’m right on this. And you’re going to be forced to admit it.”

  Saturday morning’s mail was a heavy one. Horace stuffed a medical journal, two newspapers and a half dozen letters beneath the cushions of the gig, and went on about his professional duties. Several cases of special interest so absorbed him that when he reached home, he had quite forgotten everything else. When he came in empty-handed, his wife asked,

  “Didn’t the post come in today?”

  “Eh? Why, yes. Yes, of course it did.”

  “Nothing for us?”

  His brow wrinkled. “I’m sure there was. Now, what did I do with it?”

  “Doc, do you realize how absent-minded you’re growing?”

  “Am I?” He passed his hand across his forehead. “I suppose I am.”

  “You’re brooding. You mustn’t, darling. I can’t bear to have you worried.”

  He shook his shoulders as if disburdening himself. “I remember about the post now. It’s in the gig.”

  “Sit still.” She pushed him back into his chair. “I’ll get it. I’ll fetch you a nice refreshing drink, too. There’s a jar of shrub cooling in the well.”

  She gathered the mail, carefully drew up the bucket, spiced the innocuous shrub with a lacing of elderberry cordial and a handful of mint sprays, and made him drink a tall glassful before she would give him his letters. One of the papers she held up.

  “Dr. and Mrs. Amlie,” she read. “Why, it’s from Kin! How nice!” Her expression clouded as she opened the copy of the Charleston Courier. “Doc, you don’t suppose he’s gotten married?”

  “Probably,” grunted her husband, tossing aside a Literature Lottery solicitation sent him from college.

  “I don’t see anything marked,” she said, running her eye down the columns. A moment later she added disgustedly, “It must be this medical article on the front page. You and your old fevers!”

  She tossed it to him and he dipped into it. “Interesting. Very interesting,” he remarked. “They’ve appointed a committee to investigate the new outbreak of agues along the Santee Canal.”

  “I don’t believe that’s it, at all,” declared Dinty. “What does Kinsey Hayne care about the shakes? And why should he address it to me? I’ll warrant there’s something else. Let me look again when you’re through.”

  He returned the weekly to her and lost himself in the pages of the Medical Repository. His reading was interrupted by a choking sound. He looked up. Dinty’s face was pale and convulsed. Tears coursed down her cheeks. The hand holding the journal shook so that the paper rattled.

  “Oh, Doc! Oh, Doc!” she gasped.

  He jumped up, ran to her, caught her in his arms. “What is it, darling?”

  “Kin. He’s dead. It’s in the paper.”

  She could scarcely control her hand to point to a small paragraph without caption, on an inner page. He read it.

  As we go to press we learn of the tragic death of Kinsey Hayne, Esq. of Beaulieu Plantation, Beaufort County. Mr. Hayne was hunting wild turkey when his fowling-piece was accidently discharged. Death was instantaneous. A wide circle of friends will mourn this highly esteemed young gentleman, scion of our state’s proudest old aristocracy …

  He let the paper fall. Dinty was moaning, “Oh, poor Kin! Poor Wealthy!” Her eyes widened; her jaw dropped. “Doc! It was in his handwriting. How could he send us the paper when he is dead?”

  “Are you sure it was his?”

  Both examined the cover. There was no room for doubt. Horace’s face became stern. His logical mind had reached the solution.

  “It was no accident, Dinty,” he said slowly. “It was suicide.”

  “How do you know? Why should he?”

  “I suspected that he had it in mind, from his last letter. He must have laid his plans to kill himself and left directions that the next issue of the Courier, which he knew would report his death, should be mailed to us. With the directions, he wrote out the address. His agent pasted the address on the paper and mailed it. It’s perfectly clear.”

  “Yes, so far. But, Doc, why should he kill himself?”

  “You don’t know what those old plantation families are, my dear. To marry a pregnant girl and bring her home would have meant ostracism for both of them. He couldn’t face it. Wealthia had kept it from him as long as she dared. When she gave up hope finally and faced her condition, she wrote him, probably begging him to come back and marry her. This is his answer, poor devil!”

  Dinty’s lower lip, still tremulous, nevertheless protruded in the familiar aspect of obstinacy. “I don’t believe it and I won’t believe it. Nothing shall persuade me but what Kin Hayne was brave and true and honorable.”

  “And you still don’t believe that Wealthia is pregnant?”

  At this Dinty broke completely. “Oh, poor Wealthy!” she wailed. “What’s to become of her?”

  “God knows!”

  “Darling, you’ve got to save her.”

  “How?”

  “There’s a way. You know there’s a way.”

  “Not for me.”

  “How can you be so hard!”

  “Would you rather have me a criminal?”

  “Yes,” said Dinty defiantly.

  “Women have no moral sense.” He regarded her with a sort of awe.

  “What good will it do you to let her be disgraced? What good will it do anybody?”

  He sat down heavily, leaned his elbows on the table, and put his head in his hands. “The old, old argument,” said he wearily.

  “I suppos
e you want her to kill herself now.”

  He was silent.

  “If she does, you’ll hate yourself forever.”

  Still silent.

  “And I’ll hate you,” she whispered.

  He lifted his head and stared at her. She ran to him, sobbing. “I won’t. I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t. But, oh, darling, give her a chance!”

  “What kind of chance?”

  “Let her go away. She can find someone, do something. I know she can.”

  “I’m beginning to think that you know too much.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything, yourself. Only give her a chance,” she pleaded.

  “And if she dies, taking that chance?”

  “That would be better than the other.”

  “Have you thought that, if she has the operation and comes back here, clear, I shall be made to look a criminal fool in the eyes of Genter Latham? It’s ruin for both of us, my girl.”

  “I’ve considered that, too,” said Dinty. “You must get a signed paper from Wealthia admitting the truth. That will fix Mr. Latham.”

  Horace gave in. “It’s wrong, wrong, wrong. But I can’t stand out against you.”

  Dinty hugged him. “Bless your heart, darling! I’d have died if you had refused me.”

  “It’s for you to tell Wealthia about Kinsey.”

  Dinty shrank. “Don’t you think she knows?”

  “I doubt it. Kinsey had the paper sent to us so that we could break it to her.”

  “I’ll do anything you want,” said Dinty, “now that you’re so good. Shall I go there now?”

  “Yes. And bring her back here with you. Don’t say anything about the—the other matter. I’ll attend to that.”

  The two girls came to his office by the back paths in the first darkness. Wealthia displayed a frozen immobility. To Horace’s expressions of sympathy on the death of her lover she returned a dull acknowledgment. Upon a silent signal from her husband, Dinty left the two together. Horace said, “Wealthia, if for any reason you wish to leave town, I shall make no objections and ask no questions.”

  “Why should I leave town?” she returned defiantly.

  “I think there is no need of my answering that question,” said he with dignity. “At the same time, I am bound to warn you that there is grave danger in the course which you are contemplating.”

  “I am not contemplating anything.”

  “Then you intend going through with your pregnancy here?”

  At the word, she winced. A faint touch of color stained the pallid face. “I am not pregnant. I swear it.”

  “Stand up,” he commanded. As she hesitated, he repeated more sharply, “Stand up.”

  The confidence of professional authority brought her to her feet.

  “Lift your arms.”

  Again she obeyed.

  He said, “Have you been taking drugs?”

  “No.”

  “There may have been some arrestation. It has that appearance. The phenomenon is not without precedent. But there can be no reasonable doubt of your condition.” More gently, he added, “As long as poor Kinsey was alive, you could still hope for honorable marriage.”

  Still in the same deadened accents she said, “There has never been anything of that kind between Kinsey Hayne and me. I swear it.”

  He ignored the denial. “What are you going to do?” he inquired.

  “Nothing.” With sudden savagery, she added, “You’re the one that must leave town, Horace Amlie. And in disgrace. Good evening to you.”

  Dinty, waiting, heard the outer door close. Wealthia had left. But Horace did not emerge. She went in. He sat, sprawled in his chair, his face upturned.

  “What did she say?” she demanded eagerly.

  “Nothing.”

  Dinty stamped her foot. “Horace Amlie! Tell me.”

  “Very good. If you will have it, she as good as notified me that the Lathams are going to drive me out of town.”

  Dinty’s soft mouth set to an uncompromisingly grim level. “She’s siding with her father?”

  “What would you expect?”

  She said steadily, “Wealthy is my best friend. But you are my husband and my love. I’m never going to speak to her again.”

  The anger died out of his face. He shook his head. “No, Dinty. I don’t want that. She’s going to need you. You can’t quit her that way in her need.”

  “Now you’re being a noble Christian,” retorted Dinty, her lips taking a disdainful quirk. “Well, I’m not noble. And I’m not that Christian.”

  “Neither am I, altogether,” he returned and, as she gazed at him questioningly, added, “It’s partly a matter of policy. I don’t ask you to spy on Wealthia, but if you stay on friendly terms with her, you may pick up something that will be useful to me.”

  “How can I stay on friendly terms with her when she hates you?” said Dinty hotly.

  “She doesn’t. Poor child—she isn’t herself. Try to keep that in mind, Puss. No pregnant woman is quite normal. And consider what poor Wealthia has on her mind.”

  Once more she ventured to express the doubt that still gnawed her. “Doc, are you certain, live-or-die sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then I believe it. When is she going away?”

  His face changed. “She isn’t going.”

  “Doc! Not going? What else can she do? What does it all mean?”

  “God knows,” he answered dully. “God only knows.”

  – 10 –

  No other reputation is so vulnerable as a physician’s. A whisper, a rumor, an unfounded hint may compromise the confidence of his community. Horace now understood well enough that a campaign, informulate as yet, but none the less malign, was under way. While there was no way of tracing the innuendoes, he knew pretty well what was being said of him.

  His heterodoxy of method and open contempt for old-school practices was attacked on all sides. Doubtless Old Murch was influential in this. According to that authority, the young harebrain had let Gammer Needham die of a dropsy rather than bleed the excess out of her. Parson Messenger of the Baptist church would have succumbed to a bloody flux when Dr. Amlie dogmatically refused to abate the evil with further purges, had not Dr. Murchison taken over the case and cured it by the classic treatment of calomel, more calomel, and still more calomel, fortified with squills and tartar emetic. To be sure, the parson had not left his bed since. Nevertheless he was indubitably alive. Dr. Amlie advocated wholesale throat-slitting for swollen tonsils (this being an echo of the fight for Dinty’s life); what mother would be so reckless as to put her child at the mercy of such barbaric practice? His mosquito and fly fiddle-faddle was the laughing stock of older and wiser medicos: had not a leading New York journal published an editorial ridiculing “this addled, western upstart who had ‘foisted such absurdities upon a helpless community’?”

  Nor was his personal character immune. He was the chosen attendant of the malodorous Settlement. Who could know what secret malpractices he performed there for such money as stank in the nostrils of the righteous? Then, too, there was that scandalous private consultation room of his, to which lady patients were taken alone and compelled to disrobe, on the specious pretext of diagnosis. What devilment went on there? One story had it that he had attempted to abuse his professional privilege with the beautiful Wealthia Latham and that, when she rejected his dishonorable advances, he made foul accusations against her. Araminta Amlie, it was pointed out, sided with her friend against her husband. Were not the two girls constantly seen together?

  “My daughter is too proud to complain,” Dorcas Jerrold confided to her intimates, “but if all were known …” It ended in a maternal sigh.

  “Genter Latham threatened to shoot him,” Mrs. Levering whispered into the nearest ear at the sewing bee, thereby insuring a general circulation. “Watch him slink when they meet on the public thoroughfare.”

  The watchers were disappointed. Slinking was not in Horace Amlie’s
character. In fact, he was beginning to bear himself defiantly, which was the next worst thing.

  The first overt move against him was when the village trustees voted away Special Constable Amlie’s badge. That marked the revocation of official effort to keep Palmyra clean.

  “All right,” said Horace to his wife, through thinned lips. “Let ’em rot. Wait till the August rains fall. See what they’ll make of the fevers then.”

  The rains fell in profusion. Muck-heaps and garbage piles gave forth their effluvia. Flies swarmed. Mosquitoes bred and bit. By one of those phenomena which still confound medical science, the village escaped the natural penalty of its negligence. It was an exceptionally healthy fall. Dr. Horace Amlie and his theory were thoroughly discredited.

  “Never mind, my darling,” said loyal Dinty. “They’ll be dying like flies next spring. I hope they do,” she added viciously.

  “Where will we be next spring?” muttered her husband.

  “Is it as bad as that?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “I’m losing patients every week.”

  This was partly the fault of his prickly pride. One of his earliest clients, Jim Cronkhite of the locks, sent him a note asking him to visit his daughter who had broken out in a rash. And would he mind coming under cover of dark?

  “Why should I?” demanded Horace, meeting him across from Stone-Front Sarcey’s.

  “Sshh!” cautioned the canal man nervously. “Come over here.” He led the way into a vacant lot.

  “Well?” said Horace.

  “My lock’s a political holding,” explained the keeper.

  “What of that?”

  “Mr. Latham got me the place.”

  “I see. Understand this, Jim. I make my visits openly or not at all.”

  “That’s no way to keep your friends,” returned the politician. “I’ll call in Old Murch.”

  A more hurtful blow was a late evening call from Jed Parris, who hauled up his trouser-leg to exhibit a tetter on the knee.

  “These aren’t my office hours,” said Horace suspiciously.

  “I know it, Doc. I couldn’t get around earlier.”

  “You were in town all afternoon.”