“Legislator.”
“Do you use any alcohol?”
The senator raised himself on one arm and thundered, “See here, young man; I’m not going to be heckled! As long as the Eighteenth Amendment--” He subsided.
“Do you use any alcohol?” Bill asked again patiently.
“Why, yes.”
“How much?”
“A few drinks every day. I don’t count them. Say, if you look in my suitcase you’ll find an X-ray of my lungs, taken a few years ago.”
Bill found it and stared at it with a sudden feeling that everything was getting a little crazy.
“This is an X-ray of a woman’s stomach,” he said.
“Oh--well, it must have got mixed up,” said the senator. “It must be my wife’s.”
Bill went into the bathroom to wash his thermometer. When he came back he took the senator’s pulse, and was puzzled to find himself regarded in a curious way.
“What’s the idea?” the senator demanded. “Are you the patient or am I?” He jerked his hand angrily away from Bill. “Your hand’s like ice. And you’ve put the thermometer in your own mouth.”
Only then did Bill realize how sick he was. He pressed the nurse’s bell and staggered back to a chair with wave after wave of pain chasing across his abdomen.
III
He awoke with a sense that he had been in bed for many hours. There was fever bumping in his brain, a pervasive weakness in his body, and what had wakened him was a new series of pains in his stomach. Across the room in an armchair sat Dr. George Schoatze, and on his knee was the familiar case-history pad.
“What the hell,” Bill said weakly. “What the hell’s the matter with me? What happened?”
“You’re all right,” said George. “You just lie quiet.”
Bill tried to sit upright, but found he was too weak.
“Lie quiet!” he repeated incredulously. “What do you think I am--some dumb patient? I asked you what’s the matter with me?”
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to find out. Say, what is your exact age?”
“My age!” Bill cried. “A hundred and ten in the shade! My name’s Al Capone and I’m an old hophead. Stick that on your God damn paper and mail it to Santa Claus. I asked you what’s the matter with me.”
“And I say that’s what we’re trying to find out,” said George, staunch, but a little nervous. “Now, you take it easy.”
“Take it easy!” cried Bill. “When I’m burning up with fever and a half-wit interne sits there and asks me how many fillings I’ve got in my teeth! You take my temperature, and take it right away!”
“All right--all right,” said George conciliatingly. “I was just going to.”
He put the thermometer in Bill’s mouth and felt for the pulse, but Bill mumbled, “I’ll shake my ode pulse,” and pulled his hand away. After two minutes George deftly extracted the thermometer and walked with it to the window, an act of treachery that brought Bill’s legs out of bed.
“I want to read that thermometer!” he cried. “Now, you look here! I want to know what’s on that thermometer!”
George shook it down quickly and put it in its case.
“That isn’t the way we do things here,” he said.
“Oh, isn’t it? Well, then, I’ll go somewhere where they’ve got some sense.”
George prepared a syringe and two small plates of glass.
Bill groaned. “Do you think for a moment I’m going to let you do that? I taught you everything you know about blood chemistry. By God, I used to do your lessons for you, and you come here to make some clumsy stab into my arm!”
Perspiring fluently, as was his wont under strain, George rang for a nurse, with the hope that a female presence would have a calming effect on Bill. But it was not the right female.
“Another nitwit!” Bill cried as she came in. “Do you think I’m going to lie here and stand more of this nonsense? Why doesn’t somebody do something? Where’s Doctor Norton?”
“He’ll be here this afternoon.”
“This afternoon! I’ll probably be dead by this afternoon. Why isn’t he here this morning? Off on some social bat and I lie here surrounded by morons who’ve lost their heads and don’t know what to do about it. What are you writing there--that my ‘tongue protrudes in mid-line without tremor’? Give me my slippers and bathrobe. I’m going to report you two as specimens for the nerve clinic.”
They pressed him down in bed, whence he looked up at George with infinite reproach.
“You, that I explained a whole book of toxicology to, you’re presuming to diagnose me. Well, then, do it! What have I got? Why is my stomach burning up? Is it appendicitis? What’s the white count?”
“How can I find out the white count when--”
With a sigh of infinite despair at the stupidity of mankind, Bill relaxed, exhausted.
Doctor Norton arrived at two o’clock. His presence should have been reassuring, but by this time the patient was too far gone in nervous tension.
“Look here, Bill,” he said sternly. “What’s all this about not letting George look into your mouth?”
“Because he deliberately gagged me with that stick,” Bill cried. “When I get out of this I’m going to stick a plank down that ugly trap of his.”
“Now, that’ll do. Do you know little Miss Cary has been crying? She says she’s going to give up nursing. She says she’s never been so disillusioned in her life.”
“The same with me. Tell her I’m going to give it up too. After this, I’m going to kill people instead of curing them. Now when I need it nobody has even tried to cure me.”
An hour later Doctor Norton stood up.
“Well, Bill, we’re going to take you at your word and tell you what’s what. I’m laying my cards on the table when I say we don’t know what’s the matter with you. We’ve just got the X-rays from this morning, and it’s pretty certain it’s not the gall bladder. There’s a possibility of acute food poisoning or mesenteric thrombosis, or it may be something we haven’t thought of yet. Give us a chance, Bill.”
With an effort and with the help of a sedative, Bill got himself in comparative control; only to go to pieces again in the morning, when George Schoatze arrived to give him a hypodermoclysis.
“But I can’t stand it,” he raged. “I never could stand being pricked, and you have as much right with a needle as a year-old baby with a machine gun.”
“Doctor Norton has ordered that you get nothing by mouth.”
“Then give it intravenously.”
“This is best.”
“What I’ll do to you when I get well! I’ll inject stuff into you until you’re as big as a barrel! I will! I’ll hire somebody to hold you down!”
Forty-eight hours later, Doctor Norton and Doctor Schoatze had a conference in the former’s office.
“So there we are,” George was saying gloomily. “He just flatly refuses to submit to the operation.”
“H’m.” Doctor Norton considered. “That’ bad.”
“There’s certainly danger of a perforation.”
“And you say that his chief objection--”
“--that it was my diagnosis. He says I remembered the word ‘volvulus’ from some lecture and I’m trying to wish it on him.” George added uncomfortably: “He always was domineering, but I never saw anything like this. Today he claims it’s acute pancreatitis, but he doesn’t have any convincing reasons.”
“Does he know I agree with your opinion?”
“He doesn’t seem to believe in anybody,” said George uncomfortably. “He keeps fretting about his father; he keeps thinking he could help him if he was alive.”
“I wish that there was someone outside the hospital he had some faith in,” Norton said. An idea came to him: “I wonder--” He picked up the telephone and said to the operator: “I wish you’d locate Miss Singleton, Doctor Durfee’s anaesthetist. And when she’s free, ask her to come and see me.”
Bill opened his
eyes wearily when Thea came into his room at eight that night.
“Oh, it’s you,” he murmured.
She sat on the side of his bed and put her hand on his arm.
“H’lo, Bill,” she said.
“H’lo.”
Suddenly he turned in bed and put both arms around her arm. Her free hand touched his hair.
“You’ve been bad,” she said.
“I can’t help it.”
She sat with him silently for half an hour; then she changed her position so that her arm was under his head. Stooping over him, she kissed him on the brow. He said:
“Being close to you is the first rest I’ve had in four days.”
After a while she said: “Three months ago Doctor Durfee did an operation for volvulus and it was entirely successful.”
“But it isn’t volvulus!” he cried. “Volvulus is when a loop of the intestine gets twisted on itself. It’s a crazy idea of Schoatze’s! He wants to make a trick diagnosis and get a lot of credit.”
“Doctor Norton agrees with him. You must give in, Bill. I’ll be right beside you, as close as I am now.”
Her soft voice was a sedative; he felt his resistance growing weaker; two long tears rolled from his eyes. “I feel so helpless,” he admitted. “How do I know whether George Schoatze has any sense?”
“That’s just childish,” she answered gently. “You’ll profit more by submitting to this than Doctor Schoatze will from his lucky guess.”
He clung to her suddenly. “Afterward, will you be my girl?”
She laughed. “The selfishness! The bargainer! You wouldn’t be very cheerful company if you went around with a twisted intestine.”
He was silent for a moment. “Yesterday I made my will,” he said. “I divided what I have between an old aunt and you.”
She put her face against his. “You’ll make me weep, and it really isn’t that serious at all.”
“All right then.” His white, pinched face relaxed. “Get it over with.”
Bill was wheeled upstairs an hour later. Once the matter was decided, all nervousness left him, and he remembered how the hands of Doctor Durfee had given him such a sense of surety last July, and remembered who would be at his head watching over him. He last thought as the gas began was sudden jealousy that Thea and Howard Durfee would be awake and near each other while he was asleep . . .
. . . When he awoke he was being wheeled down a corridor to his room. Doctor Norton and Doctor Schoatze, seeming very cheerful, were by his side.
“H’lo, hello,” cried Bill in a daze. “Say, what did they finally discover about Senator Billings?”
“It was only a common cold, Bill,” said Doctor Norton. “They’ve shipped him back west--by dirigible, helicopter and freight elevator.”
“Oh,” said Bill; and then, after a moment, “I feel terrible.”
“You’re not terrible,” Doctor Norton assured him. “You’ll be up on deck in a week. George here is certainly a swell guesser.”
“It was a beautiful operation,” said George modestly. “That loop would have perforated in another six hours.”
“Good anaesthesia job, too,” said Doctor Norton, winking at George. “Like a lullaby.”
Thea slipped in to see Bill next morning, when he was rested and the soreness was eased and he felt weak but himself again. She sat beside him on the bed.
“I made an awful fool of myself,” he confessed.
“A lot of doctors do when they get sick the first time. They go neurotic.”
“I guess everybody’s off me.”
“Not at all. You’ll be in for some kidding probably. Some bright young one wrote this for the Coccidian Club show.” She read from a scrap of paper:
“Interne Tulliver, chloroformed,
Had dreams above his station;
He woke up thinking he’d performed
His own li’l operation.”
“I guess I can stand it,” said Bill. “I can stand anything when you’re around; I’m so in love with you. But I suppose after this you’ll always see me as about high-school age.”
“If you’d had your first sickness at forty you’d have acted the same way.”
“I hear your friend Durfee did a brilliant job, as usual,” he said resentfully.
“Yes,” she agreed; after a minute she added: “He wants to break his engagement and marry me on my own terms.”
His heart stopped beating. “And what did you say?”
“I said No.”
Life resumed itself again.
“Come closer,” he whispered. “Where’s your hand? Will you, anyhow, go swimming with me every night all the rest of September?”
“Every other night.”
“Every night.”
“Well, every hot night,” she compromised.
Thea stood up.
He saw her eyes fix momentarily on some distant spot, linger there for a moment as if she were drawing support from it; then she leaned over him and kissed his hungry lips good-by, and faded back into her own mystery, into those woods where she hunted, with an old suffering and with a memory he could not share.
But what was valuable in it she had distilled; she knew how to pass it along so that it would not disappear. For the moment Bill had had more than his share, and reluctantly he relinquished her.
“This has been my biggest case so far,” he thought sleepily.
The verse to the Coccidian Club song passed through his mind, and the chorus echoed on, singing him into deep sleep:
Bumtiddy, bum-bum,
Tiddy-bum-bum.
Three thousand years ago,
Three thousand years ago.
THE FIEND
On June 3, 1895, on a country road near Stillwater, Minnesota, Mrs. Crenshaw Engels and her seven year old son, Mark, were waylaid and murdered by a fiend, under circumstances so atrocious that, fortunately, it is not necessary to set them down here.
Crenshaw Engels, the husband and father, was a photographer in Stillwater. He was a great reader and considered “a little unsafe,” for he had spoken his mind frankly about the railroad-agrarian struggles of the time--but no one denied that he was a devoted family man, and the catastrophe visited upon him hung over the little town for many weeks. There was a move to lynch the perpetrator of the horror, for Minnesota did not permit the capital punishment it deserved, but the instigators were foiled by the big stone penitentiary close at hand.
The cloud hung over Engel’s home so that folks went there only in moods of penitence, of fear or guilt, hoping that they would be visited in turn should their lives ever chance to trek under a black sky. The photography studio suffered also: the routine of being posed, the necessary silences and pauses in the process, permitted the clients too much time to regard the prematurely aged face of Crenshaw Engels, and high school students, newly married couples, mothers of new babies, were always glad to escape from the place into the open air. So Crenshaw’s business fell off and he went through a time of hardship--finally liquidating the lease, the apparatus and the good will, and wearing out the money obtained. He sold his house for a little more than its two mortgages, went to board and took a position clerking in Radamacher’s Department Store.
In the sight of his neighbors he had become a man ruined by adversity, a man manqué, a man emptied. But in the last opinion they were wrong--he was empty of all save one thing. His memory was long as a Jew’s, and though his heart was in the grave he was sane as when his wife and son had started on their last walk that summer morning. At the first trial he lost control and got at the Fiend, seizing him by the necktie--and then had been dragged off with the Fiend’s tie in such a knot that the man was nearly garotted.
At the second trial Crenshaw cried aloud once. Afterwards he went to all the members of the state legislature in the county and handed them a bill he had written himself for the introduction of capital punishment in the state--the bill to be retroactive on criminals condemned to life imprisonment. The bill fell throug
h; it was on the day Crenshaw heard this that he got inside the penitentiary by a ruse and was only apprehended in time to be prevented from shooting the Fiend in his cell.
Crenshaw was given a suspended sentence and for some months it was assumed that the agony was fading gradually from his mind. In fact when he presented himself to the warden in another rôle a year after the crime, the official was sympathetic to his statement that he had had a change of heart and felt he could only emerge from the valley of shadow by forgiveness, that he wanted to help the Fiend, show him the True Path by means of good books and appeals to his buried better nature. So, after being carefully searched, Crenshaw was permitted to sit for half an hour in the corridor outside the Fiend’s cell.
But had the warden suspected the truth he would not have permitted the visit--for, far from forgiving, Crenshaw’s plan was to wreak upon the Fiend a mental revenge to replace the physical one of which he was subducted.
When he faced the Fiend, Crenshaw felt his scalp tingle. From behind the bars a roly-poly man, who somehow made his convict’s uniform resemble a business suit, a man with thick brown-rimmed glasses and the trim air of an insurance salesman, looked at him uncertainly. Feeling faint Crenshaw sat down in the chair that had been brought for him.
“The air around you stinks!” he cried suddenly. “This whole corridor, this whole prison.”
“I suppose it does,” admitted the Fiend, “I noticed it too.”
“You’ll have time to notice it,” Crenshaw muttered. “All your life you’ll pace up and down stinking in that little cell, with everything getting blacker and blacker. And after that there’ll be hell waiting for you. For all eternity you’ll be shut in a little space, but in hell it’ll be so small that you can’t stand up or stretch out.”
“Will it now?” asked the Fiend concerned.
“It will!” said Crenshaw. “You’ll be alone with your own vile thoughts in that little space, forever and ever and ever. You’ll itch with corruption so that you can never sleep, and you’ll always be thirsty, with water just out of reach.”
“Will I now?” repeated the Fiend, even more concerned. “I remember once--”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 233