“Don’t!” cried Stephen. “Don’t, I can’t bear it! I see, I see, but stop there for God’s sake !”
“Go talk to him, one of you,” said the teacher.
A gentle, bearded man came over to Stephen’s left side.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You have every right to know. They’ve been talking nonsense to you where you live. This is so simple. Now look . . .”
Now Stephen heard the men at the other end whispering and laughing together as pleasantly as if they had just got up from a good stag dinner. So he took his hands away from his eyes and looked back at the blackboard.
“There,” said the teacher. “There’s the kappa root. Now divide it by the differential . . .”
“The differential of beta!” said Stephen and his voice echoed over the skies where the ceiling of the room had been, but then he put his face in his hands and sobbed a long time because the joy overwhelmed him.
“Now,” said the bearded man beside him. “It will be good for you to face it.”
So Stephen looked up and saw the final equation glowing in a new color across the sky where the blackboard had been and he understood quietly.
“So X equals . . .” he said.
“Yes,” said the teacher. “So it was silly for you to think I was God.”
And there it was, still, gigantic, written in light, the last equation. The men all gathered behind Stephen to look at it; the talk and the laughter drew down, the silence was infinite.
When he had fallen back through the spheres and stopped in dark confinement, Stephen could still see the letters: then they moved, turned upside down and faded. He opened his eyes.
“It’s gone,” he said.
A laugh rang out.
“Yup, gone forever!”
Then a thin familiar voice.
“Oh, doctor, he’s coming out.”
Stephen closed his eyes trying, trying to go back. It was no good. He could feel the thin face over him, bending close.
“Better, Stephen? Oh, say it’s better.”
“Yes,” said Stephen. “I love you, Megs.”
The Surgeon and the Nun
PAUL HORGAN
HERE you are. I haven’t thought of this for thirty years. I don’t know what called it to mind. I’ll tell you anyway.
When I was a young doctor just out of interneship I left Chicago to come West, oh, for several reasons. I’d worked hard and they were afraid my lungs might be a little weakened, and then besides, I’ve always been independent, and wanted to get out on my own, and I’d seen enough of the society doctors back there. Anyway, I came on, and heard of a new section of country in New Mexico, opening up, down toward Texas, and thinks I, I’ll just go and see about it. The hottest day I ever spent, yes, and the next night, and the next day, too, as you’ll see.
The rairoad spur had been pushing down South through the Pecos Valley, a few miles a week, and it was in July that I got on the train and bought a ticket for Eddy, the town I was thinking about trying.
The track was completed all the way, by then, but they had a lot of repairing to do all the time, and no train schedule was maintained, because we’d move, and crawl, and then stop; baking; with nothing but dust to breathe, white dust like filtered sunlight; outside the car window was naked land—with freckles, I remember thinking: spotty bushes and gravel. Above, a blue sky like hot metal. The heat swam on the ground.
You couldn’t sleep or read or think.
There was nobody to talk to in the car.
Two seats across the aisle from me was a Sister of Mercy, sitting there in her black robes, skirts and sleeves, and heavy starch, and I wondered at the time, How on earth can she stand it? The car was an oven. She sat there looking out the window, calm and strengthened by her philosophy. It seemed to me she had expressive hands; I recalled the sisters in the hospital in Chicago, and how they had learned to say so much and do so much with their skilled hands. When my traveling nun picked up a newspaper and fanned herself slowly, it was more as if she did it in grace than to get cool.
She was in her early thirties, I thought, plump, placid and full of a wise delicacy and yes, independence, with something of the unearthly knowingness in her steady gaze that I used to see in the Art Institute—those portraits of ladies of the fifteenth century, who look at you side-ways, with their eyebrows up.
She wore glasses, very bright, with gold bars to them.
Well, the train stopped again.
I thought I couldn’t stand it. When we moved, there was at least a stir of air, hot and dusty, but at that, we felt as if we were getting some place, even though slowly. We stopped, and the cars creaked in the heat, and I felt thick in the head. I put my face out the window and saw that we had been delayed by a work gang up ahead. They were Mexican laborers. Aside from them, and their brown crawlings up and down the little road-bed embankment, there was nothing, no movement, no life, no comfort, for miles. A few railroad sheds painted dusty red stood by the trackside.
I sat for ten minutes; nothing happened. I couldn’t even hear the sounds of work, ringing pickaxes or whatnot; I felt indignant. This was no way to maintain a public conveyance!
It was around one O’clock in the afternoon.
Mind you, this was 1905, it isn’t a wilderness any more out here. Oh, it was then. Every time I looked out at the white horizon my heart sank, I can tell you. Why had I ever left Chicago?
Then I wondered where the Sister was traveling to.
It was strange how comforting she was, all of a sudden. I had a flicker of literary amusement out of the Chaucerian flavor of her presence—a nun, traveling, alone, bringing her world with her no matter where she might be, or in what circumstance; sober, secure, indifferent to anything but the green branches of her soul; benign about the blistering heat and the maddening delay; and withal, an object of some archaic beauty, in her medieval habit, her sidelong eyes, her plump and frondy little hands. I almost spoke to her several times, in that long wait of the train; but she was so classic in her repose that I finally decided not to. I got up instead and went down to the platform of the car, which was floury with dust all over its iron door and coupling chains, and jumped down to the ground.
How immense the sky was, and the sandy plains that shuddered with the heat for miles and miles! And how small and oddly desirable the train looked!
It was all silent until I began to hear the noises that framed that mid-summer midday silence . . . bugs droning, the engine breathing up ahead, a whining hum in the telegraph wires strung along by the track, and then from the laborers a kind of subdued chorus.
I went to see what they were all huddled about each other for.
There wasn’t a tree for fifty miles in any direction.
In the heat-reflecting shade of one of the grape red sheds the men were standing around and looking at one of their number who was lying on the ground with his back up on the lowest boards.
The men were mostly little, brown as horses, sweating and smelling like leather, and in charge of them was a big American I saw squatting down by the recumbent Mexican.
“Come on, come on,” he was saying, when I came up.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
The foreman looked up at me. He had his straw hat off, and his fore-head and brows were shad-belly white where the sunburn hadn’t reached. The rest of his face was apple colored, and shiny. He had little eyes, squinted, and the skin around them was white, too. His lips were chapped and burnt powdery white.
“Says he’s sick.”
The Mexicans nodded and murmured.
“Well, I’m a doctor, maybe I can tell.”
The foreman snorted.
“They all do it. Nothin’ matter with him. He’s just play-actin’. Come on, Pancho, you get, by God, t’hell up, now!”
He shoved his huge dusty shoe against the little Mexican’s side. The Mexican drooled a weak cry. The other laborers made operatic noises in chorus. They were clearly afraid of the forema
n.
“Now hold on,” I said to him. “Let me look him over, anyway.”
I got down on the prickly ground.
It took a minute or less to find out. The little cramped up Mexican had an acute attack of appendicitis, and he was hot and sick and when I touched his side, he wept like a dog and clattered on his tongue with-out words.
“This man is just about ready to pop off,” I told the foreman. “He’s got acute appendicitis. He’ll die unless he can be operated on.”
The heat; the shimmering land; something to do; all changed me into feeling cool and serious, quite suddenly.
“I can perform an emergency operation, somehow, though it may be too late. Anyway, it can’t do more’n kill him, and he’ll die if I don’t operate, that’s sure!”
“Oh, no. Oh-ho, no, you don’t,” said the foreman, standing up and drawling. He was obviously a hind, full of some secret foremanship, some plainsman’s charm against the evil eye, or whatever he regarded civilization as. “I ain’t got no authority for anythin’ like that on my section gang! And ennyhow, they all take on like that when they’re tarred of workin’!”
Oh, it was the same old thing.
All my life I’ve got my back up over something no more my business than the man in the moon, but seems to me when it’s a matter of right and wrong, or good and bad, or the like, thinks I, there’s no choice but to go to work and fight.
That blasted foreman infuriated me. And I can swear when I have to. Well, I set to and gave him such a dressing down as you never heard.
I called him everything I ever heard and then I made up some more pretty ones for good measure.
I told him I’d have him up before the nearest district territorial judge for criminal negligence. I told him I was a personal friend of John J. Summerdown, the president of the new railroad, and I’d, by God, have his job so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him. I told him that anybody’d stand by and let a man die instead of taking every chance there was to save him, I said was lower’n—Anyway, you can’t go through medical school without picking up a few fancy words.
He cocked his elbows and fists at me a couple of times. But when I’m right, I know I’m right, and that’s all you need to handle a peasant like that.
He got scared, and we both wiped the sweat off our brows at the same minute, the same gesture, and glared at each other, and I wondered if I looked as hot and messy and ignorant as he did, and I laughed.
The Mexicans were curious and asking questions and clawing at him. I turned around, like a nervous old maid, or a scared child, to see if the train was still there.
It had become a symbol of safety to me, the only way out of that yellow, yellow plain streaming with sunlight. Yes, it was still there, dusty black, and dusty white where the light rested.
The foreman talked to the men . . . there must have been about three dozen of them.
He may have been a fool but he was a crafty one.
He was talking in Mexican and telling them what I wanted to do to Pancho, their brother and friend. He pantomimed surgery—knife in fist and slash and finger-scissors and then grab at belly, and then tongue out, and eyes rolled out of sight, and slump, and dead man: all this very intently, like a child doing a child’s powerful ritual of play.
“Oh, yo, yo, yo,” went all the Mexicans, and shook their fists at me, and showed their white teeth in rage. No sir, there’d be no cutting on Pancho!
“You see?” said the foreman, “I told ‘em what I had to do, and they won’t have it.”
I am no actor, and certainly no orator, but I turned to those poor peons and tried to show them as best I could how the only way to save Pancho, lying there like a baked peanut, was to operate right now.
The foreman kept up a musical kind of antiphony to my arguments.
You know? It was something like the old lyric struggle between good and evil—enlightenment and superstition.
There we were, miles from everything, on that plain where the heat went up from the fried ground in sheets; nothing but a rickety line of tracks to keep us in the world, so to speak; and a struggle going on over the theory of life or death, as exemplified in the person of a perfectly anonymous wretch who’d eaten too many beans once too often!
I’d be damned if I’d quit.
I went back to the train and had more on my mind now than chivalry and Chaucer and Clouet.
She was still sitting there in her heavy starch and her yards and yards of black serge.
Her face was pink with the heat and her glasses a little moist. But she was like a calm and shady lake in that blistering wilderness, and her hands rested like ferns on the itchy plush of the seat which gave off a miniature dust storm of stifling scent whenever anything moved on it.
I could hear the argument and mutual reinforcement in cries and threats going on and gathering force out there in the little mob. It was like the manifest sound of some part of the day, the heat, the desert life, which being disturbed now filled the quavering air with protest.
When I stopped in the aisle beside her, she looked up sideways. Of course, she didn’t mean it to, but it looked sly and humorous, and her glasses flashed.
“Excuse me, Sister,” I said. “Have you ever had any hospital experience?”
“Is some one ill?”
Her voice was oddly doleful, but not because she was; no, it had the faintest trace of a German tone, and her words an echo of German accent, that soft, trolling, ach-Gott-in-Himmel charm that used to be the language of the old Germany, a comfortable sweetness that is gone now.
“There’s a Mexican laborer out there who’s doubled up with appendicitis. I am a surgeon, by the way.”
“Yes, for a long time I was dietitian at Mount Mercy Hospital, that’s in Clefeland?”
“Well, you see what I think I ought to do.”
“So, you should operate?”
“It’s the only thing’d save him, and maybe that’ll be too late.”
“Should we take him in the train and take care of him so? And operate when we reach town?”
Yes, you must see how placid she was, how instantly dedicated to the needs of the present, at the same time. She at once talked of what “we” had to do. She owned responsibility for everything that came into her life. I was young then, and I’m an old man now, but I still get the same kind of pride in doctors and those in holy orders when they’re faced with something that has to be done for somebody else. The human value, mind you.
“I don’t think they’ll let us touch him. They’re all Mexicans, and scared to death of surgery. You should’ve heard them out there a minute ago.”
“Yess, I hear them now.”
“What I think we’d better do is get to work right here. The poor wretch wouldn’t last the ride to Eddy, God knows how long the train’d take.”
“But where, doctor!”
“Well, maybe one of those sheds.”
“So, and the train would wait?”
“Oh! I don’t know. I can find out.”
I went and asked the conductor up in the next car. He said no, the train wouldn’t wait, provided they ever got a chance to go.
“We’d have to take a chance on the train,” I told Sister. “Also, those men out there are not very nice about it. Maybe if you came out?”
At that she did hesitate a little; just a moment; probably the fraction it takes a celibate lady to adjust her apprehensions over the things she has heard about men, all of them, the very authors of sin, ancestors of misery, and custodians of the forbidden fruit.
“It would have been more convenient,” I said, “if I’d never got off the train. That groaning little animal would die, and when the train went, we’d be on it; but we cannot play innocent now. The Mexican means nothing to me. Life is not that personal to a doctor. But if there’s a chance to save it, you have to do it, I suppose.”
Her response to this was splendid. She flushed and gave me a terrific look, full of rebuke and annoyance at my flippancy. She g
athered her great serge folds up in handfuls and went down the car walking angrily. I followed her and together we went over to the shed. The sunlight made her weep a little and blink.
The men were by now sweating with righteous fury. Their fascinating language clattered and threatened. Pancho was an unpleasant sight, sick and uncontrolled. The heat was unnerving. They saw me first and made a chorus. Then they saw Sister and shut up in awe, and pulled their greasy hats off.
She knelt down by Pancho and examined him superficially and the flow of her figure, the fine robes kneeling in the dust full of ants, was like some vision to the Mexicans, in all the familiar terms of their Church. To me, it gave one of my infrequent glimpses into the nature of religious feeling.
She got up.
She turned to the foreman, and crossed her palms together. She was majestic and ageless, like any true authority.
“Doctor sayss there must be an operation on this man. He is very sick. I am ready to help.”
“W’, lady,” said the foreman, “you just try an’ cut on that Messican and see what happens!”
He ducked his head toward the laborers to explain this.
She turned to the men. Calmly, she fumbled for her long rosary at her discipline and held up the large crucifix that hung at its end. The men murmured and crossed themselves.
“Tell them what you have to do,” she said to me coldly. She was still angry at the way I’d spoken in the train.
“All right, foreman, translate for me. Sister is going to assist me at an appendectomy. We’ll move the man into the larger shed over there. I’d be afraid to take him to town, there isn’t time. No: listen, this is better. What I will do: we could move him into the train, and operate while the train was standing still, and then let the train go ahead after the operation is over. That way, we’d get him to town for proper care!”
The foreman translated and pantomimed.
A threatening cry went up.
“They say you can’t take Pancho off and cut on ’im on the train. They want him here.”
Everybody looked at Pancho. He was like a little monkey with eyes screwed shut and leaking tears.
The little corpus of man never loses its mystery, even to a doctor, I suppose. What it is, we are; what we are, must serve it; in anyone. My professor of surgery used to say, “Hold back your pity till after the operation. You’ll work better, and then the patient will be flattered to have it, and it might show up in the bill.”
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 47