The jury joined in the laughter that swept the courtroom. Dr. Farnsworth sighed with relief. Miss Kennedy no longer was in danger.
He was in a half-doze when Midge ushered in Larry and the girl. Dr. Farnsworth sat up hurriedly. His hands extended toward Miss Kennedy. She sank her head in his lap while a gripping hysteria brought alternate tears and laughter. Larry shook her roughly. “Come, Del, snap out of it. You promised no scenes.”
Delaine kissed the wrinkled hands fervently. “I shall never forget your kindness.”
“Your testimony stopped them cold, Chief,” said Larry admiringly. “The D.A. didn’t know whether he was coming or going.”
“I feel that way myself, Larry.” He motioned to Midge. “Some tea, please, and I’m sure they’ll like your cookies, Midge.” He sat up in his chair and pointed to the writing table. “I’ve just one more letter to dash off, Larry. Suppose you tell me what happened after I left the court-room.”
Dr. Wayne began the recital with gestures. First he was the D.A. Then he was Pawlston. Midge spread the tea things just where the jury box should have been. They all chuckled.
Larry reached into the tray for a cup and passed it to Dr. Farnsworth. Below him on the table were the letters. “Haven’t you paid your dues, Chief?”
“A different picture, Larry. I’m resigning from the State and County Medical Societies.”
Larry stared at the letters. “And the A.M.A.? Why Chief, you can’t—”
“I’m unworthy, Larry. I feel soiled. I can’t help it if that’s my sense of ethics.”
“But this is your life, Chief! The courtroom is your other surgery. You can’t fold up like that. Forget what I said about your testimony today, Chief. It was Pawlston who convinced the jury that Delaine’s confession was obtained by duress.”
Dr. Farnsworth smiled wanly. He pointed to the pit of his stomach. “The seat of our emotions, Larry, is here in the viscera. And that’s where I feel low. If Justice has been led away, I have no basin as Pilate had. But enough of that. Let’s not be dispirited. No pall of gloom for this happy occasion. Midge, have Robert open a bottle of Pinet Noir. We must have a toast to these young people.” He looked over his reading glasses toward Miss Kennedy. “And before we become exuberant, young lady, let’s remember that you haven’t a job any more.”
Larry held up the girl’s chin and planted a kiss on her lips. “She won’t need one, Chief. As soon as we bundle sister Carol off to New York, Delaine and I are going to rhumba down the aisle.”
Midge sniffed. “You don’t dance in church, you heathen.” She gathered up the tea dishes. Dr. Farnsworth was in a thoughtful mood. “I had some plans for her, Larry.”
“Plans?” Delaine was curious. Dr. Farnsworth smiled her way. “Your application at the Hospital mentioned several years at the Conservatory of Music. I thought, perhaps, you might care to . . . return to the piano. The concert stage? Larry and I could underwrite the program.”
Delaine fought the tears that seemed to come so easily now. “Oh, you’re so generous, Dr. Farnsworth.”
“Not at all, my dear. Purely selfish of me. I love the piano. It’s an old Italian proverb that he who plays the piano keeps sane. That’s my piano over there in the corner. Won’t you play for us now?”
Larry added his coaxing. “Yes, Del, please do.”
“If you wish.” She stepped to the far end of the room and adjusted the bench. “I may be somewhat rusty. You’ll be indulgent, I hope.”
Dr. Farnsworth settled himself back in the easy chair. The river was quiet down there tonight. The sea-gulls were circling the harbor for their twilight whirl before nesting for the night. It had been a hectic day and now this repose was delightfully welcome. The music was flooding the room.
Ravel, eh? A real craftsman and not a sentimentalist as Dr. Farnsworth was. He recalled a visit he had made to Montfort l’Amaury, outside of Paris, while on a tour through Europe. He had found Ravel polite but inwardly cold.
Dr. Farnsworth’s reverie continued. This girl’s technique was flaw-less. H’m. The Concerto For One Hand. Difficult and intricate fingering even for two hands. And that night when Miss Kennedy soothed the child in the Hospital . . . H’m, wasn’t all this odd? He lifted his creaking limbs from the chair and quietly approached Miss Kennedy. Larry’s eyes followed him.
Dr. Farnsworth stood over the piano. He watched her left hand weaving up and down, from treble to bass and from bass to treble. Her right hand rested motionless on the keyboard. Could it be that . . .? He reached over and fastened both hands on her right shoulder. The music ended in her scream. “Stop, Dr. Farnsworth! You’re hurting my arm.”
Larry sprang forward. “What is it, Chief? You’re trembling.”
“I should have known, Larry! What a dullard I am.” Miss Kennedy was sobbing softly. “Do you remember, Larry,” Dr. Farnsworth continued, “that night when she quieted the little girl? I’ve told you about it so often. Not until I returned home did I learn what she had been playing on that tiny hospital piano. It was Richard Strauss’s symphonic study, Panathenaenzug.”
“I still don’t know what you’re driving at, Chief.”
“Strauss composed it for Paul Witgenstein, the Viennese pianist who lost an arm in the War. And just now, while we listened, she was playing Ravel’s concerto for one hand. Here, Larry, feel her dekoideus. The muscle is partially paralyzed. Look at the clavicle—how awkwardly it is set.”
Larry’s fingers ran up and down the girl’s arm. “The deltoid and the triceps are certainly weak. What is it, Delaine? What have you been hiding from us?” Her sobbing continued.
Dr. Farnsworth raised her to her feet. “Lift your right arm, Miss Kennedy. Up—up—this high.”
“I can’t, Dr. Farnsworth, I can’t.”
Tenderly his arm went about her waist and he led her to the divan. “Now, let’s have the story, my dear.”
Midge handed her a table napkin and she dried her eyes. “I had to forego the concert stage,” she spoke haltingly, “when I was thrown from my horse. That’s the story. Simple, isn’t it? I had to find some income. And . . . well, I had always loved chemistry.”
“You loved Carol, too.” A radiance had come over Dr. Farnsworth. “You loved her so much you were willing to die for her.” He hugged her warmly. “My dear, you have no idea how happy this moment is. And say, Midge, where’s Robert with that wine? I must drink to St. Augustine. I thought he had let me down. But now it’s all so clear.” He tapped the little black book on the table. “Quid est enim fides, nisi credere quod non vides.”
“There he goes again,” said Midge, “with more of thim fancy words.”
“Meaning what, Chief?”
“The Homilies on Saint John. Augustine asks what is faith save to believe what you do not see.”
The Bedchamber Mystery
C. S. FORESTER
NOW THAT a hundred years have passed one of the scandals in my family can be told. It is very doubtful if in 1843 Miss Forester (she was Eulalie, but being the eldest daughter unmarried, she of course was Miss Forester) and Miss Emily Forester and Miss Eunice Forester ever foresaw the world of 1943 to which their story would be told; in fact it is inconceivable that they could have believed that there ever would be a world in which their story could be told blatantly in public print. At that time it was the sort of thing that could only be hinted at in whispers during confidential moments in feminine drawing rooms; but it was whispered about enough to reach in the end the ears of my grand-father, who was their nephew, and my grandfather told it to me.
In 1843 Miss Forester and Miss Emily and Miss Eunice Forester were already maiden ladies of a certain age. The old-fashioned Georgian house in which they lived kept itself modestly retired, just like its inhabitants, from what there was of bustle and excitement in the High Street of the market town. The ladies indeed led a retired life; they went to church a little, they visited those of the sick whom it was decent and proper for maiden ladies to visit, they read the m
ore colorless of the novels in the circulating library, and sometimes they entertained other ladies at tea.
And once a week they entertained a man. It might almost be said that they went from week to week looking forward to those evenings. Dr. Acheson was (not one of the old ladies would have been heartless enough to say “fortunately,” but each of them felt it) a widower, and several years older even than my great-great-aunt Eulalie. Moreover, he was a keen whist player and a brilliant one, but in no way keener or more brilliant than were Eulalie, Emily, and Eunice. For years now the three nice old ladies had looked forward to their weekly evening of whist—all the ritual of setting out the green table, the two hours of silent cut-and-thrust play, and the final twenty minutes of conversation with Dr. Acheson as he drank a glass of old Madeira before bidding them good night.
The late Mrs. Acheson had passed to her Maker somewhere about 1830, so that it was for thirteen years they had played their weekly game of whist before the terrible thing happened. To this day we do not know whether it happened to Eulalie or Emily or Eunice, but it happened to one of them. The three of them had retired for the night, each to her separate room, and had progressed far toward the final stage of getting into bed. They were not dried-up old spinsters; on the contrary, they were women of weight and substance, with the buxom contours even married women might have been proud of. It was her weight which was the undoing of one of them, Eulalie, Emily or Eunice.
Through the quiet house that bedtime there sounded the crash of china and a cry of pain, and two of the sisters—which two we do not know—hurried in their dressing gowns to the bedroom of the third—her identity, is uncertain—to find her bleeding profusely from severe cuts in the lower part of the back. The jagged china fragments had inflicted severe wounds, and, most unfortunately, just in those parts where the injured sister could not attend to them herself. Under the urgings of the other two she fought down her modesty sufficiently to let them attempt to deal with them, but the bleeding was profuse, and the blood of the Foresters streamed from the prone figure face down-ward on the bed in terrifying quantity.
“We shall have to send for the doctor,” said one of the ministering sisters; it was a shocking thing to contemplate.
“Oh, but we cannot!” said the other ministering sister.
“We must,” said the first.
“How terrible!” said the second.
And with that the injured sister twisted her neck and joined in the conversation. “I will not have the doctor,” she said. “I would die of shame.”
“Think of the disgrace of it!” said the second sister. “We might even have to explain to him how it happened!”
“But she’s bleeding to death,” protested the first sister.
“I’d rather die!” said the injured one, and then, as a fresh appalling thought struck her, she twisted her neck even further. “I could never face him again. And what would happen to our whist?”
That was an aspect of the case which until then had occurred to neither of the other sisters, and it was enough to make them blench. But they were of stern stuff. Just as we do not know which was the injured one, we do not know which one thought of a way out of the difficulty, and we shall never know. We know that it was Miss Eulalie, as befitted her rank as eldest sister, who called to Deborah, the maid, to go and fetch Dr. Acheson at once, but that does not mean to say that it was not Miss Eulalie who was the injured sister—injured or not, Miss Eulalie was quite capable of calling to Deborah and telling her what to do.
As she was bid, Deborah went and fetched Dr. Acheson and conducted him to Miss Eunice’s bedroom, but of course the fact that it was Miss Eunice’s bedroom is really no indication that it was Miss Eunice who was in there. Dr. Acheson had no means of knowing; all he saw was a recumbent form covered by a sheet. In the center of the sheet a round hole a foot in diameter had been cut, and through the hole the seat of the injury was visible.
Dr. Acheson needed no explanations. He took his needles and his thread from his little black bag and he set to work and sewed up the worst of the cuts and attended to the minor ones. Finally he straightened up and eased his aching back.
“I shall have to take those stitches out,” he explained to the still and silent figure which had borne the stitching stoically without a murmur. “I shall come next Wednesday and do that.”
Until next Wednesday the three Misses Forester kept to their rooms. Not one of them was seen in the streets of the market town, and when on Wednesday Dr. Acheson knocked at the door Deborah conducted him once more to Miss Eunice’s bedroom. There was the recumbent form, and there was the sheet with the hole in it. Dr. Acheson took out the stitches.
“It has healed very nicely,” said Dr. Acheson. “I don’t think any further attention from me will be necessary.”
The figure under the sheet said nothing, nor did Dr. Acheson expect it. He gave some concluding advice and went his way. He was glad later to receive a note penned in Miss Forester’s Italian hand:
DEAR DR. ACHESON,
We will all be delighted if you will come to whist this week as usual.
When Dr. Acheson arrived he found that the “as usual” applied only to his coming, for there was a slight but subtle change in the furnishings of the drawing room. The stiff, high-backed chairs on which the three Misses Forester sat bore, each of them, a thick and comfortable cushion upon the seat. There was no knowing which of the sisters needed it.
A Day’s Wait
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
HE CAME into the room to shut the windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill. He was shivering, his face was white, and he walked slowly as though it ached to move.
“What’s the matter, Schatz?”
“I’ve got a headache.”
“You better go back to bed.”
“No. I’m all right.”
“You go to bed. I’ll see you when I’m dressed.”
But when I came downstairs he was dressed, sitting by the fire, looking a very sick and miserable boy of nine years. When I put my hand on his forehead I knew he had a fever.
“You go up to bed,” I said, “you’re sick.”
“I’m all right,” he said.
When the doctor came he took the boy’s temperature.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“One hundred and two.”
Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different colored capsules with instructions for giving them. One was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition. The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained. He seemed to know all about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees. This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.
Back in the room I wrote the boy’s temperature down and made a note of the time to give the various capsules.
“Do you want me to read to you?”
“All right. If you want to,” said the boy. His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in the bed and seemed very detached from what was going on.
I read aloud from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates; but I could see he was not following what I was reading.
“How do you feel, Schatz?” I asked him.
“Just the same, so far,” he said.
I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it ta be time to give another capsule. It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely.
“Why don’t you try to go to sleep? I’ll wake you up for the medicine.”
“I’d rather stay awake.”
After a while he said to me, “You don’t have to stay in here with me, Papa, if it bothers you.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“No, I mean you don’t have to stay if it’s going to bother you.”
I thought perhaps he was a little lightheaded and after giving him the prescribed capsules at eleven O’clock I went out for a while.
It was a bright, cold day, the ground covered with a sleet that had frozen so that it seemed as if all the bare trees, the bushes, the cut brush and all the grass and the bare ground had been varnished with ice. I took the young Irish setter for a little walk up the road and along a frozen creek, but it was difficult to stand or walk on the glassy surface and the red dog slipped and slithered and I fell twice, hard, once dropping my gun and having it slide away over the ice.
We flushed a covey of quail under a high clay bank with overhanging brush and I killed two as they went out of sight over the top of the bank. Some of the covey lit in trees, but most of them scattered into brush piles and it was necessary to jump on the ice-coated mounds of brush several times before they would flush. Coming out while you were poised unsteadily on the icy, springy brush they made difficult shooting and I killed two, missed five, and started back pleased to have found a covey close to the house and happy there were so many left to find on another day.
At the house they said the boy had refused to let any one come into the room.
“You can’t come in,” he said. “You mustn’t get what I have.”
I went up to him and found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still, as he had stared, at the foot of the bed.
I took his temperature.
“What is it?”
“Something like a hundred,” I said. It was one hundred and two and four tenths.
“It was a hundred and two,” he said.
“Who said so?”
“The doctor.”
“Your temperature is all right,” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about.” “I don’t worry,” he said, “but I can’t keep from thinking.”
“Don’t think,” I said. “Just take it easy.”
“I’m taking it easy,” he said and looked straight ahead. He was evidendy holding tight onto himself about something.
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 51