A Treasury of Doctor Stories

by Fabricant, Noah D. ; Werner, Heinz;

  Burke backed across the room, one hand still around the pearl handle that protruded from the cow-hide holster. He backed across the room and reached for the telephone receiver on the wall. He rang the central office and took the receiver from the hook.

  “Hello, Janie,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Ring up Reverend Edwards for me, will you, right away.”

  Burke leaned against the wall, looking at Effie and Professor Eaton while Janie at the central office was ringing the Reverend Edwards’ number.

  “Just to think that I’m going to marry a traveling herb doctor!” Effie said. “Why! all the girls in town will be so envious of me they won’t speak for a month!”

  “Absolutely,” Professor Eaton said, pulling tight the loosened knot in his tie and adjusting it in the opening of his celluloid collar. “Absolutely. Indian Root Tonic has unlimited powers. It is undoubtedly the medical and scientific marvel of the age. Indian Root Tonic has been known to produce the most astounding results in the annals of medical history.”

  Effie pinned up a strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead and looked proudly upon Professor Eaton.

  The Other Room

  DON MARQUIS

  DR. HARVEY HERBERT was not only an M.D. but a Ph.D. His familiars refetred to him as a “psychological shark”; but the world in general did not permit itself such slangy informality. What the world saw was a man who had attained an unusual position at thirty-eight years of age, who was acknowledged to be solid as well as brilliant, and who was spoken of with enthusiasm by his professional and academic brethren.

  Doctor Herbert specialized as a neurologist, but his private practice was not large, and it was not easy to get him to take a case unless it had some extraordinary feature which piqued his interest. He lectured on psychology in one of the universities and he had written extensively on his subject. He was, among other things, a recognized authority upon criminology. He had devoted a great deal of time to the study of hallucinations.

  Some strange cases came to the attention of Dr. Harvey Herbert, cases involving very fine ethical points, at times; cases in which a matter of conscience often lay concealed under the surface of some mental trouble, just as a bit of broken needle may work itself through the flesh of the body for years causing physical disturbances difficult to diagnose because its presence is unknown. Doctor Herbert was a rather acutely conscientious person himself.

  But with all his exploration of the shadowy caverns of the subcon-scious mind, no case ever came to the attention of Dr. Harvey Herbert that was stranger than the case of . . . Dr. Harvey Herbert.

  It was one day last spring that Doctor Herbert called at the office of his friend Dr. Howard Vokes, after telephoning to make sure that Doctor Vokes had time for a lengthy consultation, and dropped into the big chair in front of Vokes’ desk, a picture of weariness.

  Vokes, a general practitioner and a lifelong comrade, looked at Herbert with keen eyes, noted his fag, and offered him a drink. Doctor Herbert nodded his acceptance.

  “Which one of my patients has been sneaking off to you, Harvey?” said Doctor Vokes. “I don’t think I’ve sent any one lately.”

  “None of them,” said Doctor Herbert. “I’m here to consult with you about—about myself.”

  “Quit drinking,” said Vokes, with a smile, pouring a liberal allowance of whiskey into a glass for the famous psychologist. “Give up smoking,” he went on, pushing his cigarette case towards his friend; “and have your teeth, tonsils, and appendix taken out at once; take a trip to Bermuda, play golf more, raise violets, eat pineapples, and come back in three days and tell me how you feel.”

  But this facetiousness elicited only the feeblest of smiles from his famous friend; Doctor Herbert was twisting his pointed brown beard with his slender fingers, his face and worried eyes averted. Doctor Vokes went on, seriously:

  “Stomach, Harvey? Liver? Kidneys? Something in my line?”

  “I wish it were,” said Herbert, with a sigh. “But I’m afraid it’s—nerves.”

  “Consult the eminent neurologist, Dr. Harvey Herbert,” said Vokes. His remark was really a question as to why the specialist had come to a general practitioner to confer upon a case involving his own specialty; and Doctor Herbert understood it so. He shrugged his shoulders and said in a tired voice:

  “I’ve been to Dr. Harvey Herbert. The man doesn’t do me any good.” And then, after a brief pause, “Howard, you’re the oldest friend I have.” He paused again, and resumed, with a smile which made his face very attractive in spite of the ravages of his worry, “And, with the exception of my wife, about the best one, Howard.”

  The two men exchanged that glance of perfect understanding which is so much more eloquent than words. Presently Vokes suggested, “I suppose you’ve been down in the sub-cellar of the human mind again, hunting your ghosts—and one of them has turned on you this time.”

  “Something like that,” admitted Doctor Herbert.

  “You prowl into some queer, dank places,” said Doctor Vokes. “They almost frighten me.”

  “This time,” said Doctor Herbert, “I was frightened. I still am. I saw . . .”

  His voice trailed off into a brooding silence.

  “What did you see?” insisted Dr. Vokes.

  “Myself,” said Dr. Harvey Herbert. He shuddered, took another drink, and presently began.

  I’m hoping that when I’m finished (said Doctor Herbert) you and I may be able to get together and diagnose my case as something physical—but if we can’t, at least I will have told everything to a friend. As a psychologist, I can assure you that there is sometimes great value in a sympathetic father confessor. And now that I’ve said that word, I recognize that I am really coming to you for the assurance of absolution—an assurance that I’ve not been able to give to myself.

  It was about three weeks ago that I got the jolt I’m still staggering from. You remember Aunt Emma Hastings, who lived with us for so many years? Well, it was three weeks ago that Aunt Emma died.

  She was distantly related to both my wife and myself, although Margaret and I are not related to each other. Although we both called her Aunt, she was really a second or third cousin of Margaret’s grand-mother; she was connected, even more remotely, with my mother’s father. We were the only people left in the world who could by any stretch of the imagination be called kinsfolk. So we gave her a home, took care of her.

  I don’t mean that we took care of her financially. She was a great deal better off than I am. I’ve grubbed for knowledge, rather than money, as you know; always giving more time to research than to my practice. We took care of Aunt Emma Hastings physically; and not even our best friends have known what a strain it has been or how Aunt Emma tyrannized over us Entrenched in invalidism, age, sentimentality, the habit of years, she was the very pattern of a petty domestic tyrant. Her death should really be a release and a relief to me; but, for reasons which you will gather, it is anything but that.

  The night she died Margaret and I had planned to go to the theater. We had dined early, and at a couple of minutes after eight O’clock I was waiting in the living room for Margaret, who was putting the finishing touches to her dressing. Getting out to the theater was more of a treat to Margaret and me than you might suspect, for Aunt Emma had grown increasingly querulous if one or the other, or both of us, were not with her. In fact, for some time had we foregone almost all social diversions.

  Margaret came in from her room, her face shining with pleasant anticipation, and I picked up my top-coat and hat. “Ready at last!” she said, gaily.

  But just then Miss Murdock entered. Miss Murdock was Aunt Emma’s own attendant—nurse, companion, and maid all at once. There had been a long succession of these companions. Aunt Emma seldom kept one more than six or eight months, and she had had an astonishing variety. But they were all alike in one thing—they seemed to enjoy the tyranny which Aunt Emma exercised over Margaret and myself and to relish the opportunity to participate in it in a mino
r way. Miss Murdock said, with a prim exterior, but with a certain latent gusto:

  “Mrs. Herbert, Miss Hastings sent me to inquire whether you and Doctor Herbert were going out to-night.”

  “Why, yes,” said Margaret; “we’re just starting. Does Miss Hastings want anything? I’ll go to her if she wishes to speak with me.”

  Miss Murdock became a composite picture of the petty malice of all her predecessors as she announced:

  “Miss Hastings said, in case I found you were going out, that I was to tell you not to do so.”

  “Not to do so!” I exclaimed. I felt a flush of anger, a sudden red rush of it all over me. If my face looked like Margaret’s, I showed what I felt. This was a little too much!

  “That’s what she said,” returned Miss Murdock; and I saw the tip of her tongue run along her lips as if she tasted a creamy satisfaction. “She said, in case you were going out, you must give up your plans and stay at home.”

  With a triumphant glance, Miss Murdock started for the door. But she paused to give us her final thrust. “Since you will be here with Miss Hastings,” she said, “I think I’ll go out myself.” She left.

  Margaret and I sat in silent humiliation for a moment. The anger that had gone all over me seemed to culminate in something that writhed in my head—fluttered and writhed as if a grub were turning to a butterfly all in one instant somewhere among the convolutions of my brain. I rose, with the words forming themselves upon my lips, “Come on, Margaret, let’s get out of here at once—she’s gone too damned far this time!”

  But I did not utter those words. I saw something, suddenly, that made me pause.

  I saw another room, with Margaret and myself sitting in it. Listen carefully, Howard; for just here is the beginning of the train of events that has brought me to you.

  I say I saw another room. I should have said I saw the room that we were in, or part of it. Our own living room, and she and I sitting in it, dressed to go out for the evening, just exactly as we were.

  I saw it as if I were looking into a mirror, only it was dimmer than that, as if a fine gauze were in front of the mirror. No, not so much a gauze as a light mist, a faint fog. A somewhat denser mist, a heavier fog, made a framework around the finer mist—a framework irregularly oval in shape. And through the medium of the fine mist I looked into a room which was the exact replica of the room in which Margaret and I actually were. I looked into it and saw ourselves there.

  Our apartment, as you know, is high up in one of the new buildings on the upper East Side. The east windows of our living room look out over the East River. The apartment, which is large, is one of the corner ones. The north windows of the living room overlook Fifty-seventh Street.

  My first flickering notion, of course, was that I was seeing the actual reflection of our living room in the east windows, as in a mirror. But that comforting thought lasted only the merest fraction of a second.

  For I, Dr. Harvey Herbert, was standing up—and the man who looked just like me in the other room beyond the mist was still sitting down!

  I sat down myself and covered my eyes with my hands. I have been, as you know, a student of the various phenomena loosely listed as hallucinations. I have had a certain amount of success in my attempts to analyze the mental states back of these phenomena. But I had had no previous experience of a personal nature. And I realized, in the moment that I sat there with my hands over my eyes, that it is one thing to attempt to diagnose the condition of a patient, and another thing to give an answer to one’s own problem during the time when it is actively presenting itself. That wriggling grub, about to become a butterfly, was still stirring in my head, trying to flutter his new, feeble wings; and I thought when he went away, as he should in a moment, that would be the end of my aberration.

  Margaret spoke and there was a struggle for kindliness in her voice—a struggle to regain the attitude of forbearance, love and pity, which was usual to her in her relations with Aunt Emma. I knew from her voice that she was not sharing my hallucination with regard to that other room.

  “Aunt Emma isn’t so well to-night, Harvey,” said Margaret, “or I’m sure she would have put her request in some other way.”

  “Yes,” I replied, trying to imitate Margaret’s spirit, trying to conquer the anger that possessed me—and that, no doubt, had brought on my queer vision—“yes, she’s getting pretty old, and we must remember that she’s very fond of us. We’ll have to bear with her.”

  I had hardly finished speaking when I heard another voice—and it was Margaret’s voice, but yet it did not have in it the Margaret I knew. It said:

  “She gets more spiteful every day! She knows her power; and the more childish she becomes the more malevolent delight she takes in playing tyrant!”

  And then a voice answered—a voice that was my voice and yet not the voice of any Harvey Herbert I had ever visualized in the full light of consciousness:

  “Cheer up, Margaret! It can’t last forever; and if the old hell-cat doesn’t change her will before she dies it means fifteen thousand dollars a year for us. That’s worth a little trouble, isn’t it?”

  “A little trouble!” said the voice of the Margaret whom I did not know, with a passionate vibration which I had never heard in the voice of the Margaret I knew. “You’re away, at your office or your lectures, most of the time, but I’m here at home with her day and night. A little trouble! It’s killing me!”

  I took down my hands and opened my eyes. The other room was still there. The Harvey Herbert in it, and the Margaret in it, were on their feet now and were facing each other with a bitterness of face and tone that, surely, my wife and I had never permitted ourselves in any of our rare outbursts of irritation.

  The room was still there, but it was not where I had first seen it. I had looked towards the east wall of our real room, where the windows were that overlooked the East River. Now I was looking towards the north wall, where the windows were that overlooked Fifty-seventh Street. I turned and looked towards the west wall which had neither door nor window in it. The other room was there, too. I stepped to the middle of the real room and looked at the south wall, which had two doors in it and no window. The other room was there. I looked above me, and I looked up into it. I looked at the floor, and I stood upon the verge of it, opening below me. And the two figures were in it, the figures of Margaret and of me, walking and talking independently of us.

  Let me tell you just what it looked like again, Howard, so that you can realize something of the effect I got, no matter how I turned my head. A thin, fine mist, and around it, framing it, a denser, heavier mist. Beyond the thin, fine mist, the other room. The opening in the thin, fine mist, framed by the denser, heavier fog, an oval in shape. I walked towards the oval entrance, towards the other room. It receded before me. It kept about ten feet ahead of me. When I turned it was still the same distance ahead of me. I went to one of the windows in the east wall and looked out. The other room was out there in the night, overhanging the water front!

  I came back and sat down by Margaret. She was brooding.

  “Did you see anything peculiar?” I asked her. She moved her head with a brief negative gesture, without looking at me.

  “Or hear anything?” I asked.

  “Why, no,” she said. I was sure she had neither seen nor heard. But she looked at me with a glance that was strained and puzzled, as if she had almost heard and seen something, if you follow me.

  The two people in the other room looked out at Margaret and me with a faint satirical smile upon their faces. I tried to ignore them, thinking maybe they would go away if I could get my mind off of them. No matter how much this interested me as a student, at the same time it was distinctly uncomfortable. I said to Margaret:

  “What are you thinking of?”

  “I was thinking, what a poor lonely old soul Aunt Emma is, Harvey.” And as if in answer to this, the man in the other room turned to the woman in there and spoke:

  “Damn her! She’ll live t
o be a hundred and ten!”

  I made a gesture of repudiation—this creature, this vision, this person, whoever or whatever he was—did not speak for me, although he had somehow seized upon my appearance and my voice. I told myself passionately that I had never thought of Aunt Emma like that! And the man peered out at me with an immense, disconcerting knowingness.

  I knew that Aunt Emma had come into the room before I saw her. I knew it by the actions of the people in the other room. They leaned forward eagerly, and there was a tense, rapid interchange of low voices:

  “You see,” said the man, “she stumbles!”

  “She totters,” said the woman; “she’s getting weaker!”

  Aunt Emma had, indeed, stumbled on the edge of a rug just within the door. Margaret and I ran to her and supported her to a chair and settled her in it. And as we did so, those other voices kept on:

  “She’s not really much weaker. She’ll live forever!”

  “Perhaps—the mean kind always do!”

  Margaret, leaning over Aunt Emma in her big chair, said solicitously : “Shan’t I get you a wrap, Aunt Emma?”

  Aunt Emma lifted her petulant and sneering face and broke out in her high-pitched, feeble voice:

  “You’re mighty anxious about a wrap, Margaret! But you were thinking of going out and leaving me practically alone—with nobody but Miss Murdock!”

  “But, Aunt Emma,” I began, reasonably, “Miss Murdock is employed to—”

  “Don’t excuse yourself, Harvey!” she interrupted. “Can’t I see you were going out? Can’t I see your evening clothes?”

  I could tell by the look Margaret gave me that she was schooling herself to gentleness—as she always did. I tried to imitate her.

  Margaret said, “Aunt Emma, we’re going to stay with you the rest of the evening—aren’t we, Harvey? We’ll go change to something else.”