The windows of Parker Steel’s consulting-room looked out on the garden
at the back of the house, where Lent lilies were already swinging their
golden heads over borders of crocuses, purple, yellow, and white. The
lower part of the window was screened by a wire gauze blind, and the red
serge curtains were looped back close to the shutters.
However drab and dismal it may be, a physician’s consulting-room has
much of the mystery that shadows the confessional of the priest. The
uninitiated enter with a pleasurable sense of awe. Wisdom seems to
admonish them from her temple of text-books piled up solemnly in the
professional bookcase. There is an air of suave confidence and quiet
reserve about the room. Even the usual Turkey carpet suggests
comfortable sympathy and the touch of the healing hand.
Even as it is unnatural to suspect a priest of the sins he rebukes in
others, so to the lay mind the physician appears as a being above the
diseases that he treats. There is always something illogical in a doctor
needing his own physic. And yet of all men he is the last that can boast
of the bliss of ignorance. He knows the curses that afflict man in the
flesh, how grim and inevitable his own end may be. He is too well aware
of the malignant significance of symptoms, and a month of dyspepsia may
reduce him to a state of morbid and half hypocondriacal
self-introspection. It is told of a great surgeon how he lay awake all
through one night imagining that he had discovered an aneurism of his
aorta. It is dangerous to know too little, but on occasions it may be
desperately unpleasant to know too much.
It was a serious and rather worried figure that moved to and fro in the
lofty room, as the March day drew towards a dreary close. The house was
silent, a depressing silence, suggestive of stagnation and cynical
melancholy. A fitful wind set the tops of the cypress-trees swaying and
jerking in the garden. The only living thing visible from Dr. Steel’s
window was a black cat stalking birds under the shadow of a bank of
laurels.
Parker Steel had taken off his coat and folded it carefully over the
back of a chair. He stood by the window, fumbling at his cuff-links, a
preoccupied frown pinching up the skin of his forehead above the thin,
acquisitive nose. After turning up his shirt-sleeves, he picked up a
pocket-lens from the table and focused the light upon the forefinger of
his right hand.
The hand that held the lense trembled very perceptibly. On the right
forefinger, immediately above the base of the nail, a dull red papule
stood out upon the skin. It was clearly circumscribed in outline, and
hard to the touch. Parker Steel noticed all these details with the
strained air of a man scrutinizing an unpleasant statement of accounts.
Presently he laid the lens down on the flap of the bureau by the window,
and, unbuttoning his waistcoat, passed his left hand under his shirt and
vest. The deft fingers half buried themselves in the hollow of his right
armpit. Parker Steel’s eyes had a peculiar, hard, staring look, the
expression seen in the eyes of the expert whose whole intelligence is
concentrated for the moment in the sense of touch. His lower lip fell
away slightly from his teeth. Sharp lines of strain were visible upon
his forehead.
“Good Lord!”
The words escaped from him involuntarily as he drew his hand out from
under his shirt. The smooth face had grown suddenly haggard and sallow,
and there was a glint of ugly fear in the eyes. Parker Steel stood
staring at his hand, his mouth open, the lips softening as the lips of a
coward soften when his manhood melts before some physical ordeal. The
dapper figure has lost its alertness, its neat and confident symmetry,
and had become the loose and slouching figure of a man suffering from
shock.
Parker Steel roused himself at last, forced back his shoulders, and
walked slowly towards the door. He turned the key in the lock, and stood
listening a moment before picking up a hand-mirror from among the
multifarious books and papers on the table. Returning to the window, he
peered at the reflection of his own face, furtively, as though dreading
what he might discover. The sallow skin was blemishless as yet. Not a
spot or blur showed from the line of the hair to the clean curve of the
well-shaven chin.
In another minute Parker Steel was turning over the leaves of his
journal with impetuous fingers. He worked back page by page, running a
finger down each column of names, stopping ever and again to recollect
and reconsider. It was on a page dated “February 12th” that he
discovered an entry that gave him the final pause.
“Mrs. Rattan, 10 Ford Street. Partus, 5 A.M.”
* * * * *
A foot-note had been added at the bottom of the page, a foot-note whose
details were significant to the point of proof.
Parker Steel threw the book upon the table.
“Good Lord!”
He looked round him like a man who has taken poison unwittingly, and
whose brain refuses to act under the paralyzing pressure of fear. He,
Parker Steel, a—! Physician and egoist that he was, he could not bring
himself to think the word, to brand himself with the poor fools who
crowd the hospitals of great cities. The very vision, a hundred visions
such as he had seen in the dingy “out-patient rooms” of old, made the
instinct of cleanliness in him sicken and recoil. For Parker Steel had
much of the delicate niceness of a cat. This sense of unutterable
pollution struck at his vanity and his self-respect.
He moved close to the window, and stood staring over the wire blind into
the garden.
Was it not possible that he might be mistaken? He could consult an
expert. And yet in the inmost corners of his heart he knew that the
truth was merciless towards him.
What then?
The question threw him into a more desperate dilemma. He remembered his
wife.
Again, his profession? He would have to abandon it for one year, perhaps
for two. And Parker Steel knew that success in professional life is
largely a matter of personality. Withdraw that individual power, and the
whole structure, like the city of an Eastern fable, may melt abruptly
into mist.
Baffled and irritated, a man with no great moral hold on the deeper
truths of life, he moved aimlessly about the room, holding his right
hand a little from him like one with bleeding fingers, who fears the
blood may stain his clothes. The leather-padded consulting-chair stood
empty before the table. Parker Steel dropped into it by the casual
chance of habit, and sat staring dully at the patterning of the paper on
the wall.
It was the ordeal of an egoist unlightened by a signal sense of
self-abnegation or of public duty. Mercenary motives and professional
ambition prompted a compromise at any hazard. The temptation to
procrastinate is ever with us, and the man of the polite world is the
most ingenious of sophists. For more than half an hour Parker Steel sat
silent and almost motionless in his chair. When he at last left it, it
was with the air of a man to whom sanity, the sanity of the self-centred
ego, had returned after the hideous doubt and discord of a dream.
The wisest course was for him to temporize, seeing that it was possible
that he might be mistaken.
He recognized no immediate need for trusting any one with mere
suspicions.
Was he not a physician, and therefore wise as to all precautions?
As for his wife? That was a problem that might have to be considered.
The sound of the front door closing roused him to the needs of the
impending present. He noticed to his surprise that it was growing dark,
and that the room was full of deepening shadows.
“Is Dr. Steel in, Symons?”
It was his wife’s voice, and Parker Steel slipped into his coat and
unlocked the door.
“Tea nearly ready, dear?”
“Parker, are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Any one with you?”
“No. I will be with you in a minute.”
He groped for a box of matches on the mantel-shelf and lit the gas.
Turning, he was startled by the reflection of his own white face staring
at him mistrustfully from the mirror over the fire. It was as though
Parker Steel shirked the glance of his own eyes. He had a sense of
unflattering discomfort and deceit as he walked to a glass-fronted
cabinet fitted with drawers that stood in one corner of the room.
They were in the middle of tea when Betty Steel glanced at her husband’s
hand.
“Have you hurt yourself, Parker?”
“I?”
“Yes. Ah, the bathotic chilblain, of course! Has it broken?”
Her husband felt afraid behind his mask of casual indifference.
“I must have rasped the skin and got some dirt into the place,” he said.
“A mere nothing. I have just put on this finger-stall. So you have heard
that the De la Mottes are leaving, eh? They were not much good in the
town, so far as the practice was concerned?”
Parker Steel’s reply to his wife’s question had flashed a suggestive
gleam across his mind. Very probably it was too late for him to defend
her against himself. And even if his fears proved true, he could swear
absolute ignorance as to the presence of the disease. No guilt attached
to him. He was merely striving to neutralize the effects of a damnable
and undeserved misfortune.