FACTORY-MADE OPTIMISM
The usual congested conditions existed in Dr. Parkman's waiting room when
Georgia arrived a little after five. An attendant who knew her, and who
had great respect for any girl Dr. Parkman would see on non-professional
business, took her into the inner of inners, where, comfortably
installed, sat Professor Hastings.
"Glad to have you join me," he said; "I feel like an imposter, getting in
ahead of these people."
"Oh, I'm used to side doors," laughed Georgia.
They chatted about how it had begun to rain, how easy it was for it to
rain in Chicago, and in a few minutes the doctor came in.
He nodded to them, almost staggered to a chair, sank into it, and leaning
back, said nothing at all.
"Why, doctor," gasped Georgia, after a minute, "can't you _take_
something? Why you're simply all in!"
He roused up then. "I am--a--little fagged. Fearful day!"
"Well, for heaven's sake get up and take off that wet coat!
Here,"--rising to help him--"I've always heard that doctors had
absolutely no sense. Sitting around in a wet coat!"
"I wonder," he said, after another minute of resting, "why any man ever
takes it into his head he wants to be a doctor?"
"And all day long," she laughed, "I've been wondering why any girl ever
takes it into her head she wants to be a newspaper reporter."
"Speaking of the pleasant features of my business," she went on, "I may
as well spring this first as last. Here am I, a more or less sensible
young woman, come to ask you, a man whose time is worth--well, let's say
a thousand dollars a second--what you intend doing about those hospital
interns getting drunk last night!"
"My dear Miss Georgia,"--brushing out his hand in a characteristic way
which seemed to be sweeping things aside--"go back to your paper and say
that for all I care every intern in Chicago may get drunk every night in
the week."
"_Bully_ story!"
"And furthermore, every paper in Chicago may go to the devil, and every
hospital may go trailing along for company. Oh Lord--I'm tired."
He looked it. It seemed to Georgia she had never understood what
tiredness meant before.
"Such a hard day?" Professor Hastings asked.
"Oh--just one of the days when everything goes wrong. Rotten
business--anyway. Eternally patching things up. I'd like to be a--well, a
bridge builder for awhile, and see how it felt to get good stuff to start
with."
"And now, to round out your day pleasantly," laughed Professor Hastings,
"I've come to tell you about a boy out there at the university who is in
very bad need of patching up."
"What about him?" and it was interesting to see that some of the
tiredness seemed to fall from him as he straightened up to listen.
Georgia rose to go, but he told her to stay, he might feel more in the
mood for drunken interns by and by.
He arranged with Professor Hastings about the student; and it was when
the older man was about to leave that he asked, a little hesitatingly,
about Dr. Hubers. "I have been away all summer," he told the doctor, "and
have not seen him yet."
Georgia was watching Dr. Parkman. His face just then told many things.
"You will find him--quite natural," he answered, in a constrained voice.
"One hardly sees how that can be possible," said the professor sadly.
"Oh, his pleasantness and naturalness will not deceive you much. Your
eyes can take in a few things, and then his voice--gives him away a
little. But he won't have anything to say about--the change."
He shook his head. "I'm afraid that's so much the worse."
"Perhaps, but--"
"Karl never was one to get much satisfaction out of telling his
troubles," Georgia finished for him.
"Hastings," said the doctor, jerkily, and he seemed almost like one
speaking against his will--"what do you make out of it? Don't you think
it--pretty wasteful?"
"Yes--wasteful!" he went on, in response to the inquiring look. "I mean
just that. There are a lot of people," he spoke passionately now, "who
seem to think there is some sort of great design in the world. What in
heaven's name would they say about this? Do you see anything high and
fine and harmonious about it?"
That last with a sneer, and he stopped with an ugly laugh. "They make me
tired--those people who have so much to say about the world being so
right and lovely. They might travel with me on my rounds for a day or
two. One day would finish a good deal of this factory-made optimism."
"Does Dr. Hubers feel--as you do?" Hastings asked, not quite concealing
the anxiety in the question.
"How in God's name could he feel any other way?--though it's hard making
him out,"--turning to Georgia, who nodded understandingly. "Just when
he's ready to let himself go he'll pull himself together and say it's so
nice to have plenty of time for reading, that Ernestine has been reading
a lot of great things to him this summer, and he believes now he is
really going to begin to get an education. But does _that_ make you feel
any better about it? God!--I was out there the other day, and when I saw
the grey hairs in his head, the lines this summer has put in his face,
when I saw he was digging his finger nails down into his hands to keep
himself together while he talked to me about turning his cancer work over
to some other man--I tell you it went just a little beyond my power to
endure, and I turned in then and there and expressed my opinion of a God
who would permit such things to happen! And then what did he do? Got a
little white around the lips for a minute, looked for just a second as
though he were going to turn in with me, and then he smiled a little and
said in a quiet, rather humorous way that made me feel about ten years
old: 'Oh, leave God out of it, Parkman. I don't think he had much of a
hand in this piece of work. If you must damn something, damn my own
carelessness.'"
"He said that? He can see it like that?"--there was no mistaking the
approval in Professor Hastings' eager voice.
"Huh!"--the doctor was feeling too deeply to be conscious of the rudeness
in the scoff. "So you figure it out like that--do you? And you get
some satisfaction out of that way of looking at it? The scheme of things
is very fine, but he must pay the penalty of his own oversight,
weakness--carelessness--whatever you choose to call it. Well, I don't
think I care much about a system that fixes its penalties in that
particular way. When I see men every day who violate every natural law
and don't pay any heavier penalty than an inconvenience, when I see
useless pieces of flesh and bone slapping nature in the face and not
getting more than a mild little slap in return, and then when I see the
biggest, most useful man I have ever known paying as a penalty his life's
work--oh Lord--that's rot! I have some hymn singing ancestors myself, and
they left me a tendency to want to believe in something or other, so I
had fine notions about the economy of nature--poetry of science. But this
makes rather a joke of that, too--don't you think?" He paused, and
Georgia could see the hot beating in his temples and his throat. And then
he added, with a quiet more unanswerable than the passion had been: "So
the beautiful thing about having no gods at all is that you're so fixed
you have no gods to lose."
The telephone rang then, and there was a sharp fire of questions ending
with, "Yes--I'll see her before nine to-night." He hung up the receiver
and sat there a minute in deep thought, seeming to concentrate his whole
being upon this patient now commanding him. And then he turned to
Hastings with something about the boy out at the university, telling him
at the last not to worry about the financial end of it, that he liked to
do things for students who amounted to something.
Professor Hastings was smiling a little as he walked down the corridor.
He wondered why Dr. Parkman cared anything about slaving for so senseless
and unsatisfying a world.
He loved the doctor for his inconsistencies.