"Then what do you call the sounds you've just heard?" I said in
complete exasperation.
"Gut rumble," she said. "Now go along like a nice intern and find me a
passel of surgeons and let's have at this tumor, cancer, bubble-gum or
what have you. I want out of here, fast as I can mend."
* * * * *
There was no reason to keep the female news-correspondent in bed, but
she wouldn't stir. She was confident that Phillipe Sansome's findings
would convince us. Three days passed with no word from Paris. Then, on
the fourth day, her medical history arrived in the briefcase of the
famous surgeon himself.
"I flew," he apologized, "but it took two days to detach myself.
Delighted to meet you, Dr. Foley. Your cable mentioned a Miss Sara
Caffey, maternity patient. Is it _possible_?"
He was large for a Frenchman, and his gauntness was compounded by an
obvious lack of sleep. His black eyes bore into mine as if to drag out
what appeared to me to be a fairly mundane admission.
"We call her that," I said shrugging. "And as to her condition, you
may examine her yourself."
"_Sacre bleu!_" His eyes rolled up like bloodshot cue-balls. "She
left us at her own insistence. Aside from ethics, we must not disturb
her by my reappearance. But I have a favor to ask. A giant mountain of
a fantastic favor. Now that I have found her again, I must not lose
her, certainly not, until--"
He grabbed pen and paper and moved his chair to my desk. He wrote
briefly. "_Voila!_ These simple adjustments in her metabolism--diet,
and just a few so petite injections. And may I remain here in the
behind-ground, incognito? I will help with other work--at no cost, of
course. I will be an orderly, if you will. But I must remain in touch.
Close touch."
I was a bit nonplussed. A man of Sansome's reputation! It was like a
United States Senator pleading for the opportunity to scrub out the
men's room at the House of Representatives. Just the same, I wouldn't
be stampeded or overawed. Several provocative explanations for the
French doctor's concern came to mind.... Was he the repudiated father
of Sara's unborn child? Or was he a practitioner of artificial
insemination, with a rather unfortunate error to his credit?
"Your request is unusual," I said cautiously, "but not entirely
unreasonable. In order to justify it, I am sure you will be willing to
explain your interest in this case, will you not, Doctor?"
* * * * *
He frowned, "I suppose I must. But you will believe little of it. My
own staff agreed with my diagnosis, but they violently rejected my
theory. Wait until they hear _your_ diagnosis, doctor!" He unzipped
his briefcase. "She probably protests that she has a malignant tumor,
not a baby," he remarked as he laid thick sheafs of paper on my desk.
"You are so very right," I said.
"Madamoiselle is magnificent," he observed, running slender, wrinkled
hands through his sparse gray hair. "But her obstinacy will not avail
against evolution. No more than we doctors' monumental ignorance."
"Evolution? Explain, please."
"Here is the case history." He drummed on it with his short-clipped
nails. "In it, you will find that Caffey came to us three months ago
with her body cavity in the grasp of a small octopus of a soft form
carcinoma. The pain reached from pelvis to chest."
"Incredible!" I exclaimed.
Sansome spread his hand on the record sheets. "Facts are never
incredible," he reminded me gently. "What follows, however, will tax
your credulity, and I beg of you to allow me to impose an outrageous
concept whose only virtue appears to be its demonstrated validity."
"Proceed."
"In forty years of slicing away tumerous growths, I had become morbid
at the dreadful incidence of recurrence and the obscene mortality
rate. In spite of all our techniques, these cancers have increased
with the persistence of Nature herself.
"In a fit of prolonged depression brought on by a foolishly strenuous
research of histories, my mind stumbled into a stupid preoccupation
with a few isolated cases of exogenic pregnancy. One which fascinated
me was the young 17-year-old boy from whose lung a surgeon removed a
live three-month foetus. Somehow the obvious explanation refused to
satisfy me. It was, of course, concluded that the foetus was an
undeveloped twin to the boy himself.
"This _could_ be so; but on what facts was this assumption based?
None. Only the absence of any other theory justified the concept. The
surgeon had expected to find a hard carcinoma.
"And it came to me suddenly that _he had found his cancer_!
"My interpolation was this: Mankind is suffering an evolutionary
change in his reproductive procedure. The high incidence of various
tumors evidences Nature's experiments in developing a asexual
reproduction."
* * * * *
Sansome's statement so flabbergasted me that I looked at him for signs
of facetiousness or irrationality. His extreme fatigue was
evident--but his calmness and clarity of self-expression in a foreign
language indicated no mental confusion. A hoax of such magnitude was
outside the realm of possibility for a surgeon of his distinction.
The man was simply following a blind alley of reasoning, set off by
his life-long frustration of battling cancer.
I mustered my patience and drew him out, hoping he would find a
contradiction in his own theory.
"This is a rather staggering notion, Dr. Sansome," I said. "Have you
been able to support it with--additional evidence?"
"Until Miss Caffey," he said, "frankly, no. Not the kind of evidence
that is acceptable. But the theory has much to defend it. In your own
Journal of the A. M. A., May 7, 1932, Dr. Maud Slye published the
first solid evidence that predisposition to so-called malignant tumor
is hereditary. Is this not a better characteristic of a true mutation,
rather than of a disease?"
"Perhaps," I said. "But how does Mother Nature justify the
desirability of a change from our present rather successful bisexual
system? And isn't she being rather cruel in her methods? Think of the
millions she has made suffer in her experiments."
"Mother Nature," Sansome pronounced positively, "is neither kind nor
cruel. She is manifestly indifferent to all but the goal of survival
of the species. Our civilization has set out to thwart her with
increasingly more effective methods of birth-control. In the light of
survival, Nature is most justified in trying to bring millions of
frustrated, childless humans to parenthood.
* * * * *
"Meanwhile," he said, riffling the case history of Sara Caffey, "let
us examine the evidence at hand. Our patient arrived in Paris
positively cancerous. After confirming the diagnosis, I proposed an
unprecedented treatment based on my theory. We know several body
conditions which promote the rapid development of carcinoma, such as
excess alkalinity and high blood sugar content and so forth. Instead
of trying to reduce these and fight the tumor, I reversed the
treatment and aided Miss Caffey's body to support and encourage its
growth to what I predicted would be a new maturity.
"And what happened?" He threw up his hands. "In two months, the
tendrils of the octopus withdrew into the central body of the tumor.
The tendency to spread in search for attenuated nourishment was
reversed with the treatment. This alone was an accomplishment, for it
would have made the growth operable in a short time.
"Unfortunately, word of my unorthodox prescription reached a jealous
colleague, and he set off such a quarrel at the Institute that Miss
Caffey packed up and left with the generous misconception that she was
saving me from embarrassment. I had no opportunity to assure her that
the Cancer Institute would decide ultimately in my favor--which it
shall when I return with a photostat of a certain birth certificate."
He smiled for the first time, and his charm was so powerful that I
sincerely wanted to believe in him. I could see no use in denying him
his request, for his prescriptions were of an innocuous nature for a
normally pregnant woman such as Sara Caffey. I trusted that a normal
birth of a typical baby would finally dissuade him.
I extended my hand again. "You are most welcome to stay with us,
doctor," I told him. "The treatment you desire is within reason, and I
admire your tenacity with your theory. I hope you will forgive me,
however, if I say that I find your premises rather tenuous. I feel
that we will witness a very normal birth, and ultimately Miss Caffey
will find it to her peace of mind to confess a secret marriage, or, at
most--an alliance of which she may be pathologically ashamed at the
moment."
Sansome grasped my hand with enthusiasm. "_Bien! Tres bien!_" he
exclaimed. "This is more generous even than I expected. Certainly I do
not expect a scientist of your station to swallow my theory at a gulp,
Dr. Foley. I will admit that my persistence depends more than it
should on intuition. But we shall see. I am grateful to you." And he
kissed me firmly on each cheek.
* * * * *
A study of Sansome's carefully prepared case history on Sara Caffey
did disturb me a little. I ordered a thorough reexamination, and was
left with some puzzling conclusions at the apparent absence of
tumorous growth, malignant or otherwise.
Sara was enduring most of the classic symptoms of typical pregnancy,
and was enjoying Dr. Sansome's treatment hugely. She guzzled the
alkaline-producing fruit juices, fortified with carefully rationed
dribbles of gin. She nibbled contentedly at the sweets which the
Frenchman supplied anonymously. And she raised merry hell because we
refused to operate.
After two weeks, she threatened to leave. I was paged over the P. A.
and got to her room in time to catch her trying to zip up her skirt.
She looked at me impatiently, and then back to her abdomen. "Damned
thing's getting out of hand."
She had on an expensive tweed suit, and the smart, powder-blue
cashmere coat I helped her into made her look her role of
distinguished world traveler, syndicated columnist and woman of parts.
She hunched her shoulders forward slightly, so the loose folds of the
coat concealed her protruding middle.
"Thanks," she said casually. "I'll write you a check and be on my
way."
"Dr. Sansome will be disappointed," I said casually.
"You heard from him?" she asked with interest.