On their way home the two women discussed the doctor eagerly.
"I must have seen Dr. Renault somewhere," Isabelle said, "or rather what he
might have been once. He's a person!"
"That is it,--he is a person,--not just a doctor or a clever surgeon."
"Has he other regular patients besides the children, the surgical cases?"
"He started with those alone. But latterly, they tell me, he has become
more interested in the nervous ward,--what he calls the 'dotty'
ward,--where there are chiefly convalescent children or incurable nervous
diseases of children. It is wonderful what he does with them. The power he
has over them is like the power of the old saints who worked miracles,--a
religious power,--or the pure force of the will, if you prefer."
After her evening with Renault, Isabelle felt that Margaret's description
might not be too fervid.
Towards morning Isabelle woke, and in the sudden clarity of the silent hour
thoughts flowed through her with wonderful vividness. She saw Renault's
face and manner, his sharp eyes, his air of dictation, arrogant and at the
same time kindly,--yes, there was a power in the man! As Margaret had put
it,--a religious power. The word set loose numberless thoughts, distasteful
ones, dead ones. She saw the respectable Presbyterian caravansary in St.
Louis where the family worshipped,--sermons, creeds, dogmas,--the little
stone chapel at Grafton where she had been confirmed, and her attempt to
believe herself moved by some spiritual force, expressed in the formulas
that the old clergyman had taught her. Then the phrases rose in her mind.
It might have done her good once,--people found it helpful,--women
especially in their hours of trial. She disliked the idea of leaning for
help on something which in her hours of vigor she rejected. A refuge, an
explanation,--no, it was not possible! The story of the atonement, the
rewards, the mystical attempt to explain the tragedy of life, its sorrow
and pain,--no, it was childish! So the word "religious" had something in it
repellent, sickly, and self-deceptive.... Suddenly the words stood out
sharply in her mind,--"What we need is a new religion!" A new
religion,--where had she heard that? ... Another flash in her brooding
consciousness and there came the face of the doctor, the face of the man
who had talked to her one Sunday afternoon at the house where there had
been music. She remembered that she wished the music would not interrupt
their conversation. Yes, he was bidding her good-by, at the steps, his hat
raised in his hand, and he had said with that same whimsical smile, "What
we need is a new religion!" It was an odd thing to say in the New York
street, after an entirely delightful Sunday afternoon of music. Now the
face was older, more tense, yet with added calm. Had he found his religion?
And with a wistful desire to know what it was, the religion that made
Renault live as he did, Isabelle dropped once more to sleep.
* * * * *
When Isabelle presented herself at the doctor's house the next morning, as
he had suggested, the little black-haired nurse met her and made Renault's
excuses. The doctor was occupied, but would try to join her later.
Meanwhile would she like to look over the operating room and the surgical
ward? The young doctor who had been afflicted with pavementitis--a large,
florid, blond young man--showed her through the operating room, explaining
to her the many devices, the endless well-thought-out detail, from the
plumbing to the special electric lighting.
"It's absolutely perfect, Mrs. Lane!" he summed up, and when Isabelle
smiled at his enthusiasm, he grew red of face and stuttered in his effort
to make her comprehend all that his superlative meant. "I know what I am
saying. I have been all over Europe and this country. Every surgeon who
comes here says the same thing. You can't even _imagine_ anything that
might be better. There isn't much in the world where you can't imagine a
something better, an improvement. There's almost always a better to be had
if you could get it. But here, no! ... Porowitz, the great Vienna
orthopaedic surgeon, was here last winter, and he told me there wasn't a
hospital in the whole world where the chances for recovery, taking it all
round, were as large as up here in Grosvenor Flat, Vermont. Think of it!
And there is no hospital that keeps a record where the percentage of
successful operations is as high as ours.... That's enough to say, I
guess," he concluded solemnly, wiping his brow.
In the surgical ward the wasted, white faces of the sick children disturbed
Isabelle. It all seemed neat, quiet, pleasant. But the physical dislike of
suffering, cultivated by the refinement of a highly individualistic age,
made her shudder. So much there was that was wrong in life to be made
right,--partly right, never wholly right.... It seemed useless, almost
sentimentalism, to attempt this patching of diseased humanity....
In the convalescent ward, Margaret was sitting beside a cot reading to her
boy.
"He'll be home in a few days now!" she said in answer to Isabelle's glance.
"Some day he will be a great football player."
The child colored at the reference to his ailment.
"I can walk now," he said, "a little."
Dr. Renault was at the other end of the ward sitting beside a girl of
twelve, with one arm about her thin back, talking to her. The child's face
was stained with half-dried tears. Presently the doctor took the child up
and carried her to the window, and continued to talk to her, pointing out
of the window. After a time he joined Isabelle, saying:--
"I was kept from meeting you when you came by that little girl over there.
She is, by the way, one of our most interesting cases. Came here for hip
disease. She is an orphan,--nothing known about her parents,--probably
alcoholic from the mental symptoms. She has hysteria and undeveloped
suicidal mania."
"What can you do for her?"
"What we can with medicine and surgery, and where that fails--we try other
means."
Isabelle was eager to know what were those "other means," but the doctor
was not a man to be questioned. Presently as he sauntered through the room
he volunteered:--
"I have been talking to her,--telling her how the hills are made.... You
see we have to clean out their minds as well as their bodies, get rid so
far as we can of the muddy deposit, both the images associated with their
environment--that is done by bringing them up here--and also what might be
called inherited thought processes. Give 'em a sort of spiritual purge, in
other words," he said with a smile. "Then we can build up, feed their minds
something fresh. Sarah Stern there is an obstinate case,--she has a deep
deposit of ancestral gloom."
"But you can't overcome the temperament, the inherited nature!"
Renault waved his hand impatiently.
"You've been told that since you were born. We have all grown up in that
belief,--it is the curse of the day! ... It can't be done altogether--yet.
Sarah may revert and cut her throat when she leaves here.... But the vital
work for medicine to-day is to see just how much can be done to change
temperament,--inherited nature, as you call it. In other words, to put new
forces to work in diseased brains. Perhaps some day we can do it all,--who
knows?"
"Plant new souls in place of the old!"
Renault nodded gravely.
"That's the true medicine--the root medicine,--to take an imperfect
organism and develop it, mould it to the perfected idea. Life is
plastic,--human beings are plastic,--that is one important thing to
remember!"
"But you are a surgeon?"
Renault's lips quivered with one of his ironical smiles.
"I was a surgeon, just as I was a materialist. When I was young, I was
caught by the lure of so-called science, and became a surgeon, because it
was precise, definite,--and I am something of a dab at it now--ask the boys
here! ... But surgery is artisan work. Younger hands will always beat you.
Pallegrew in there is as good as I am now. There is nothing creative in
surgery; it is on the order of mending shoes. One needs to get beyond
that.... And here is where we get beyond patching.... Don't think we are
just cranks here. We do what we can with the accepted tools,--the knife and
the pill. But we try to go farther--a little way."
They descended to the basement of the main house where the more active
children were playing games.
"We have to teach some of them the primitive instincts,--the play instinct,
for example,--and we have a workroom, where we try to teach them the
absorbing excitement of work.... I am thinking of starting a school next.
Don't you want to try a hand at a new sort of education?"
So, pausing now and then to joke with a child or speak to an assistant,
Renault took Isabelle over his "shop" once more, explaining casually his
purposes. As a whole, it developed before her eyes that here was a
laboratory of the human being, a place where by different processes the
diseased, the twisted, the maimed, the inhibited, the incomplete were
analyzed and reconstructed. As they emerged on the broad platform where
they had stood the night before, Isabelle asked:--
"Why is it you work only with children?"
"Because I started with the little beggars.... And they are more plastic,
too. But some day the same sort of thing will be done with adults. For we
are all plastic.... Good-day!" and he walked away rapidly in the direction
of his office.
Isabelle returned to the village in a strange excitement of impressions and
thoughts. She felt as if she had been taken up out of the world that she
had lived in and suddenly introduced to a planet which was motived by
totally other ideas than those of the world she knew. Here was a life
laboratory, a place for making over human character as well as tissue. And
in bravado, as it were, the mere refuse of human material was chosen to be
made anew, with happiness, effectiveness, health! She realized that a
satisfactory understanding of it would come slowly; but walking here in the
winter sunshine along the village street, she had that sensation of
strangeness which the child has on coming from the lighted playhouse into
the street.... The set vision that tormented her within--that, too, might
it not be erased?
About the post-office people were gathered gossiping and laughing, waiting
for the noon mail to be distributed. Country-women in fur coats drove up in
dingy cutters to do their Saturday shopping. The wood-sleds went jogging
past towards the valley. School children were recklessly sliding down the
cross street into the main road. Sol Short was coming over from his shop to
get his paper... Here the old world was moving along its wonted grooves in
this backwater community. But over it all like the color swimming over the
hills was SOMETHING more,--some aspect of life unseen! And faintly, very
dimly, Isabelle began to realize that she had never really been
alive,--these thirty years and more.
"We are all plastic," she murmured, and looked away to the hills.