Trench had been fishing above Dixon’s mill. Dixon was gone from that
shadowy deep wild of granite and cedar, having left the key of his cabin
for Trench. But, after all, this is not the way to begin. I tell a tale
of the twenty-eighth of June. June—but the proper start is neither Dixon
nor brides nor the odour of roses; the proper start is a leaf of history.
On June 28, 323 B.C., Alexander of Macedon died, having quieted all the
world except Macedon, which is not quiet yet. On June 28, 1389 A.D., the
Serbian nation was crushed by the Turks at Kosovo. On June 28, 1891, the
alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy was renewed. On June 28, 1908,
the late Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had completed his preparations for
annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary. On June 28, 1909, Austria
was trying fifty-three Slavs for high treason. On June 28, 1910, the
newly established Diet of Bosnia-Herzegovina decided that the proffered
constitution did not suit the needs of the people, and adjourned for the
annual day of Serbian sorrow.
It was on June 28, 1911, that Trench went fishing. On that day the German
corvette _Panther_ was setting out for Morocco to test the strength of
the Triple Entente, and King George was opening the Royal Agricultural
Show at Norwich. But on exactly that date, June 28, 1911, the
ladyslippers burst into bloom, opening a still more royal show. This was
on King George’s loyal island of St. Joseph, between Superior and Huron.
Because Trench went fishing on that day, and because of the trivial dear
event that he plucked a ladyslipper, this tale came to be written.
He had whipped the brown stream far into the cedar uplands. At six
o’clock his creel was full of ferns and fish, and it was time to quit.
He felt some regret at leaving so good a stream, and imagined the orange
tails of the survivors all pointing downstream in the deep pools, waving
an insolent farewell. But he corrected that idle fancy. Trout are not
insolent, and trout do not wave farewell.
Being very hungry, he built a tiny fire, broiled a half-pounder, ate the
crisp flesh, and tossed the lacy skeleton away. It fell on a flat rock,
where it looked like a fossil. It was no different from the skeleton of
its millionth ancestor. The generations of trout had pulsed along without
progress or meaning.
As Trench started back towards Encampment, a white-throated sparrow was
asking some sort of heavenly question from the top of a charred tree. He
left a thin, sweet query in the air, as if he suspected that the universe
is a great unfinished adventure. So it struck Trench at first, till he
reflected that it was all a matter of the chemistry of light. The song
was inevitably started by sunshine and inevitably stopped by darkness.
As he stopped to listen, turning a lean cheek away from the level sun,
Trench presumed that the thoughts of any white-throated girl were as
automatic as those of the white-throated sparrow. The young physician—he
was a specialist in the diseases of children—was determined to be
impersonal.
For he had lost his father and mother in 1907, by the sinking of a ship.
The court of inquiry had not been able to fix the blame, and certainly
the ocean was not to blame. Oxygen and hydrogen are what they are, and
not some other thing. They are quite impersonal, and Trench was subduing
his bitter heart to the quality of these lords.
Naturally he had found it hard to think impersonally of his little
mother. The last time he saw her was at Genoa, as she was about to go on
board. She had stood on the pier with a scarf fluttering around her neck
like a bluebird. She had put her arms around his neck, and told him how
proud she was of him. He had kissed her good-bye, not knowing that the
atoms of her lips would presently fade forever from that sweet pattern.
There was a vain search for the bodies, and then Trench went quietly back
to Chicago. In the spring of 1909, when he was appointed instructor at
Lister, he built in Halsted Street, like an immigrant making a new start.
It was in Halsted property that the elder Trench had made his first
money—a part of the quarter million which now fell to his son.
In unobserved ways Trench proceeded to return the income of that
inheritance to the Halsted region. In so doing he was aware of no motive.
He was neither bestowing charity nor returning property. When he put
antitoxin where it could be had within five minutes by any physician in
certain wards, his one concern was to keep the fact out of the newspapers.
Trench had chosen pediatrics deliberately, because children would let him
alone. I do not know whether his brooding should be called abnormal or
not. But it was as uncommon as the death of parents is common. And it is
uncommon that any man, year after year, should keep a rose burning before
his mother’s picture in his bedroom.
As for marriage, the thought of it had dropped from him automatically. He
was straight and alert and masculine, but the faces of dead mothers and
dead children filled his brain. He was nine and twenty, and scornfully
clean. Immigrants poured into Halsted Street and bred there, and Trench
worked hard to save the creatures bred. But he felt no desire to continue
his own line. He saw too many children dying—as in the streets of a
pillaged town.
Dusk gathered as he strode along, and a cricket chirped. He recollected
that the female cricket eats a part of her mate after pairing. The
phenomenon had its parallels in human life, but he must regard it
impersonally.
The wood road dipped downward, and by the edge he noted a gleam of
colour. He knew it for an orchid, a specimen of the showy ladyslipper. He
cut the long stalk of springing leaves and looked at the great blossom.
It seemed a bit of afterglow caught in the woodland. Yet how firmly it
swung out, cunningly backed by four white wings, like bridal ribbons
flaring. Some woman must have made the exquisite thing.
On second thought it was not exquisite. It was a mechanism of six parts.
He saw the upper stamen—tongue-like, but not a tongue. He saw the pollen
masses, and remembered how the first bee would lighten them and make them
change position, so as to admit the second bee to the stigma. It was all
automatic, and should remind him of nothing purposive. Yet inexorably it
reminded him of Chicago. The first bee was like the envoy of the vice
trust, the second was the ordinary libertine.
Against such natural forces he felt himself to be powerless. A vice
commission had recently laid bare the facts, long known to Trench, but he
had no faith that any good would come of it. He must learn to think of
men and women as bees and orchids. He must not blame them. He must think
vileness a matter of instinct, and instinct a matter of chemistry.
It was at this point, when his efforts to be impersonal seemed to be
succeeding, that he was intruded upon by persons. He heard a voice above
him on the slope, and knew it for that of little Mildred, the daughter of
his washerwoman. “If I was dead, Miss Edith, now if I was dead and going
to heaven, I’d want some of them put on me to make me pretty.”
He did not catch what the other voice said in reply, but presently the
cedars parted, and the two persons came into the path above him, with
their hands full of such flowers as he had just tossed away. Mildred ran
to meet him, while the lady stood there in the path. He reached out his
hand to Mildred, but kept looking at the figure above him.
Fine balance, he thought to himself. It had required a great many vain
repetitions of the human biped to produce a girl who could stand like
that. She would make a good mother, and at forty she would be almost as
slender as she was now.
Little Mildred marched him up the slope and introduced him in her own
fashion to Miss Bridgman, who lived in Chicago the same as the doctor,
and why didn’t he know her already?
“The blossoms are just opening,” said Edith Bridgman, “and it really
seemed a pity to take so many.”
“They are exquisite mechanisms,” said Trench, forgetting that he had
decided against the adjective. Then he added, “It would be hard to name a
finer orchid.”
She did not answer at once, but stood looking at him. Then she slowly
said, “They declare the glory of God in the wilderness.”
There was not much talking on the homeward way. At the trill of a notably
insistent cricket, Edith Bridgman remarked that she had always wanted a
cricket on the hearth. Trench said “Well,” and seemed about to discuss
crickets, but ended by merely remarking that he wondered what was the key
of the cricket’s song.
They came out at the brow of the steep hill and stood looking down on
the Straits of St. Mary, where a can buoy was fading and brightening,
like the superficial daily routine of consciousness, on the surface of
the deep swift stream. It was pretty dark now, and Trench saw to it that
a neighbouring farmer took little Mildred home.
Then he himself took the lady home to the Jackson cottage, where he met
her sister, Helena Drummond, and presented her with half his catch.
Helena was the Wife of John the banker. Trench knew the firm of Drummond
and Vevers well enough by hearsay. He knew that both the founders were
Scotch, that it was now in the hands of the second generation, and that
John lived in a comfortable West Side house built by his father. With
Helena was her only child, Robert Ogden, a boy of eight. He learned later
that an older brother of Robert had died.
As Trench was leaving, to cross to the American side, Edith Bridgman
offered him a share of the flowers, and he took a few for Mrs. Jamison,
the old lady who had mothered him during his vacations. Mrs. Jamison was
honoured by every white man and Indian for fifty miles around, for in
her veins ran noble blood of both races. She had taught Trench to call
her Nokomis, the Ojibway word for grandmother. In turn she called him
medicine man, Mushkekeewinini.
“Ah, you bring me the mokesin,” she exclaimed, catching the flowers to
her breast. “But you must take back two and keep them—for the feet of
your first child.” To humour her, Trench put the two in fresh water
every day thereafter, till the blossoms paled. They did not wither, but
remained toughly delicate in texture.
He had met Edith Bridgman the second evening after his own arrival. He
always took his vacation early, to be ready for the stress of summer
work, and there remained only ten days before he must return. During
these he made himself agreeable. Bobbie took to him at once, and together
they visited Indian camps.
He rowed the Chicago women across the river and introduced them to Mrs.
Jamison and Moira and Shane, and thereafter Edith and Helena went over
almost daily. Helena was an ardent suffragist, and the old lady discussed
the subject with an insight which astonished her. Helena did not know
that in her girlhood Nokomis had stepped in and out of great London
houses with as little self-consciousness as if she were in the wigamigs
of her famous grandfather. “You are tired of being squaws, I suppose. It
is a hateful word, and does not exist in the Ojibway language. With us
a woman is equay—just a woman. But with us, too, women have sat in the
councils. My dear, I shall call you council-woman, ‘Gegidoquay.’ And this
girl who brings me sunlight every day I will call ‘Gizhegoquay,’ woman of
the morning.”
On Sunday of that week, Potter, an unsuccessful little man who lived in
an unwholesome little bay, came to report that Mildred was sick, and
wanted to see the doctor and Miss Edith. They ran down in the Jackson
launch, an old-fashioned naphtha affair, and Trench found the child
suffering from injudicious feeding. Mrs. Potter, a tawny, fiercely
maternal young woman, marvelled at the gentleness and swiftness with
which the doctor made his examination, and the way the child clung to
him. Mildred was the one thing in Mrs. Potter’s life. The cabin was
poverty stricken.
On the way back Edith was full of questions about pediatrics, and managed
to learn something of Trench’s surgical work, and the fact that a certain
finger-tip was more useful to him than both eyes.
As they passed the point it blew a gale, and suddenly half the launch
seemed to leap into flame. Something had happened to those open rows of
naphtha jets. The cutoff was aft, and before Trench could move, Edith
had thrust her left hand and arm into the flame. She groped for the
valve that supplied the fuel, and found it and closed it. She had saved
Trench’s surgical finger, and scarred herself for life.
When he had extinguished the remaining fire, Trench turned to the
victim, and she held up her burnt hand. Instantly there rushed upon him
a passionate desire to press it to his lips, and he was surprised at the
degree of self-control he had suddenly to exert.
But the impulse passed, and he stripped off his flannel coat-shirt and
ripped it into bandages. The girl rocked back and forth to ease the
anguish, but she joked as if it were all a merry game. She should never
want to wear a short-sleeved dress again, she said, but she thought
short sleeves becoming to the doctor, who was now poising above her in
the tossing boat like a sea gull. Trench unscrewed the oil cup from the
engine, anointed the wounds gently, and swathed hand and arm. Never had
he done a quicker or neater job, but he would much rather have given his
own hand for amputation. That night in a dream he kissed the injured
hand, and caught her to his breast. He coldly charged up the dream to
physiological profit and loss.
A week later he strapped his suitcase, helped Shane Jamison carry down
his trunk, and went back to make sure that he had forgotten nothing. The
two cypripediums stood in the old bit of lustre ware that Nokomis had
lent him. He was about to toss them out the window when another insane
impulse mastered him, and he hid them in his long pocket-book.
Half an hour later he was standing on the deck of the little mail
steamer. Everybody had come to see him off. Even Mrs. Jamison had got
herself into a canoe, and there she sat with a paddle in her hand,
pretending that her son needed help.
“Good-bye, Nokomis,” called Trench softly, as he leaned over the rail.
“Good-bye, Mushkekeewinini,” she answered tremulously, like the secret
voice of all the woods bidding a lover farewell.
He gazed down at the swart and noble old face, and thought of his little
mother, tossing somewhere with tangle and with shells. Once more he
leaned down and called. “Send for me, dear, if you need me.”
The boat swung away, and he lifted his hat to all the good friends on the
pier. But what lingered in his gaze was something that fluttered from a
right hand—the other being still in a sling. Edith’s handkerchief rippled
in the brilliant northern air, an evanescent patch of light against the
eternal shadow of the woods. So she herself had gleamed across the shadow
of his life. Well, he had not made the mistake of offering her that
shadow to live in.
But even as he reasoned, he wished that she were there beside him on the
deck, that he might throw about her an arm which would neither press her
nor release her till he had kissed all that refinement of feature. He
walked forward and stood in the bow. The fresh breeze smote him in the
face like a restorative, and he vowed that he would never set foot in
Drummond’s house, where she lived, an orphan like himself.
He thought to end it so. But Trench was the slave of memory, the memory
to which many a child owed its life. During that winter he never saw her,
and yet the thing was happening to him. The infection was in every vein.
His unwilling blood was perfumed with her. The dream he had suffered at
Encampment began to recur. Once more the launch would spring aflame, and
once more she would hold up her burnt hand, like a child, to be kissed.
He would catch her to his breast—when instantly the boat would disappear
and they would drift side by side on a black ocean—where steamers called
to each other wistfully. She seemed a patch of phosphorescence, and he
another, impotent phosphorescence of reason on an ocean of instinct.
The parting request which he had made to Mrs. Jamison was earnestly
meant and seriously taken. In the dead of winter he was not surprised to
receive a wire from Miss Moira: “Mother has pneumonia. We must not be
selfish, but she wants you to know.” Trench had a cold, but he caught the
first train to Sault Ste. Marie, was met next day by Shane Jamison with
a sleigh, and sped twenty miles down the frozen straits under a lowering
sky. Late in the afternoon, far ahead of them, something crossed the ice
like a sinister thought. “Timber wolf,” said Shane.
He frowned as his gaze followed it. “Last night,” he said, “I heard a
knocking at the back door, and opened, and there was no one there. That
is what I heard the night before my father died. It was his call.”
After warming his hands, Trench went up to the patient’s room, and found
the windows admitting plenty of fresh air. Mrs. Jamison was propped on
pillows, breathing rapidly, and coughing a little. The massive, prophetic
old face lighted up.
“I knew you would come, and the tribes in Chicago must spare you, because
I have something to say to you for their good.”
Trench kissed her, regardless of the risk, and made his examination.
The red count and white count were satisfactory, and there was some
temperature, a fact at which he was rather pleased than otherwise. The
heart was not so good.
“Have you any hopes that I am going to get well? I know that what you say
will be the truth.”
“Yes, Nokomis. Good hopes.”
“I would like to live another year,” she said, “for two reasons. I want
to eat huckleberries again. I want to eat meenin and milk, but mostly I
want to see you married. You brought your Gizhegoquay to see me.”
“Not mine, Nokomis,—and I am afraid that talking will tire you.”
“I have eyes, my son, and I looked into yours. I still have eyes, and
down the years there are children waiting for the right parents.”
Trench was silent.
“Ah,” she said, “I feel better, now that I have told you. I feel well
enough to die. I am a foolish old Indian, who needs to die and learn
something. I want to know why Gizhe Manido had to let his son die on the
cross. I want to know why it was necessary to kill so many children when
my grandfather drove the Sioux out of this country. In my heart there
is a birch bark scroll with many questions to ask in heaven. I’ll find
my husband, and my two little boys, and we’ll go to get our answers.
There’ll be some sort of place where He will answer—not one by one, for
there are millions in the class, all hearts together. There are millions
in the class, but only One to answer. He’ll stand there in a seamless
robe with light and a smile.”
Trench seemed to choke as he listened. Strange world of the
imagination—illusions exhaled by the human brain so soon to be resolved
into silence and the winds—why should it exist at all? And why should it
tear so at his heart strings? He could not say, but he must try to think
these matters out, in physiological terms.
He rose now, and insisted that she must sleep. He administered the
heart stimulant, sent Miss Moira to bed, and settled Shane on the couch
downstairs in the living room.
The birch snapped in the fireplace, and he remembered the Ojibway
tradition that when the hearth burns bright, the spirits of the children
who have died are laughing there. But the wind howled outside, and a
snowstorm was in progress. It must have been eleven o’clock when there
came a knocking. He heard Shane spring to his feet and go to open the
door, for Shane had no fear of ghosts, although he heartily believed in
them.
Nokomis was resting quietly, and Trench slipped downstairs. He saw the
muffled form of little Potter, standing in snowshoes. Under his arm he
carried a second pair, and in his hand a lantern.
Mildred was very sick. She had been taken down a week ago with a chill,
followed by a fever. She coughed all the time. Potter had heard that
the doctor had been sent for, and he knew he had no right to take him
away from Mrs. Jamison, but last night Mildred was out of her head, and
to-night she couldn’t seem to get her breath. It was awful outside, and
probably the doctor had never used snowshoes, but would he come?
Of course he would come. But as he thrust his hypodermic case into his
waistcoat pocket, Trench realised that he was taking chances. It would be
necessary to charge both Shane and Miss Moira with directions as to what
to do in case of a collapse. So Shane aroused his sister, who was alert
on the instant.
Trench put on a pair of Shane’s boots, to which Potter bound the
snowshoes by deerskin thongs. He wrapped himself warmly and set out into
the night. The wind seemed to tear his breath from him, even as pneumonia
was tearing hers from Mildred.
They took to the frozen straits and kept to them. They hugged the shore,
being guided by the roar of the wind in the trees, for the lantern was of
no assistance. Trench fell repeatedly, and had to be helped to his feet.
But after four miles of this sort of work they got to the bay and saw the
dim light from the log cabin.
They struggled in. Instantly Mrs. Potter was down on her knees, slashing
the thongs that bound the doctor’s feet. But at one glance he saw!
Mildred was going fast.
“Calm yourself, Mrs. Potter—” and Trench had her hand in his and his arm
about her shoulders. “Potter, open that window.”
“It’s nailed down, doctor.”
“Open it.”
Potter seized a hammer, drew out two nails, and shoved the window up. The
storm roared in, but it did not reach Mildred, who was on the other side
of a red-hot stove.
Trench lifted the child and her wraps, and stood beside the window. Even
as he did so, the final wave of purple swept upward on the little face.
There was a last heave of the failing jaw, and Trench turned away from
the mother to hide it.
For the next half-hour, Trench had his hands full. The mother was as
maniac as any woman who was ever put in a strait-jacket, but he managed
at last to get a shot into her arm. As for Potter, he suddenly seemed a
paralytic.
Trench put Mildred back in the two chairs which, lengthened by boards and
lashed together by tarred string, had served for her bed. He closed the
sweet eyes. He propped the jaw in place till the lips smiled, as if she
were thinking of ladyslippers. Then he sat down beside her, holding a
little hand as it grew cold.
Mrs. Potter, partly relaxed, lay on the bed moaning. By and by she
struggled to a sitting posture, started to leave the bed, and reeling,
sat down on the edge of it.
“This is what comes of loving your neighbour as yourself. If I hadn’t let
that old Injun have you, I’d have my baby now.”
“No, Mrs. Potter. It was too late some hours ago.”
“It wouldn’t have been if Fred had left the word last night. He went
over to the Jamisons’ and knocked on the door, and then he got scared and
skinned away for fear of doing what he hadn’t no right to do. I’d let all
the Injuns in the world die for Mildred’s sake.”
“We can’t tell, Mrs. Potter. We can’t say I could have saved her.”
“Then what made you open the window?”
“Fresh cold air is the best remedy for pneumonia. I ought to have told
you that last summer.”
“They wan’t no call to tell me then. I’m a poor ignorant fool of a woman,
what didn’t deserve to have no child. There don’t nobody deserve to have
children. Just you remember that.” She blindly struck the edge of the
bed, time and again, with clenched fingers.
“I shall remember it,” said Trench, and Potter looked up and shivered.
Trench relinquished the little hand, laying it across the breast. He
turned his chair, and spoke again.
“You’ve had her, Mrs. Potter. Nothing can take that from you.”
The woman wailed, but checked herself. “It’s true. My life wasn’t nothing
till she come. But God knew that. He knew that! No, he didn’t know it—for
there ain’t no God.” She stared at the black window as if a fearful
annunciation had been made to her from out the night.
“Mrs. Jamison would make you feel differently. You have been generous to
her. She would say that God will not forget that, and will give Mildred
back to you.”
“I don’t see what Mrs. Jamison has to do with us. Here’s me and you and
Fred, and there lies Mildred. You tell me there’s a God, if you dare!
You tell me I’m going to hold that baby in my arms again, and maybe I’ll
believe it.”
Trench was silent.
“Shut the window, Fred. I’m cold, and the doctor is coughing.”
“You’ve got to trust something, Mrs. Potter.”
“I can’t trust things no more. Look at that white thing.”
“If I were you, I would trust in God.”
“You ain’t me. You don’t trust Him, and I don’t trust you. But you are a
good man to come here this awful night. I guess I can stand it without
comfort. I got to stand it. You and Fred sit over there awhile. Talk to
him if you can. He don’t know whether he’s foot or horseback.”
Trench moved over by Potter, but they could not talk. Mrs. Potter went
about her work calmly. She knew what to do. She had helped lay out folks
before.
It was only when she brought out a little white dress that she broke down
again. “My God, my God! I was hoping she’d be baptised in this. I made
it out of a dress that girl of yours gave me. May she never see her baby
lying like that.”
Even at that moment Trench had a temperature, but the blood retreated
from his face. She came nearer and looked at him.
“So that’s where it hurts,” she said.
Then she turned to her husband.—“I tell you one thing. I ain’t going to
have another child. And I ain’t never going to church again.” She threw
herself on the bed, weeping with hard raucous intakes of breath.
Trench tried to brush the whole scene out of his mind. He had another
patient, and he must get back to her. But how? Potter was obviously
incapable of making the trip again, and if a man fell with snowshoes on,
he would need help.
At last Mrs. Potter recovered herself and finished her work in silence.
The two men sat on into the grey dawn, and the woman lay down and slept.
Then came a shout, and Trench stepped to the window. He saw Shane Jamison
standing on snowshoes in the edge of the reeds. Trench went out to him
bareheaded.
Mrs. Jamison had had a sinking spell, and if the doctor could come, he
was wanted. Trench returned for his things, silently shook hands with
Potter, promised to be back when they buried the child, and departed.
One disaster was destined to follow another. When Trench reached Mrs.
Jamison’s side, she was dead. Miss Moira sat by the bed, tearless, her
proud face set to endure the inevitable.
In two snowbound woodsheds, two men fashioned coffins, the one for his
aged mother, the other for his little daughter.
A few neighbours were able to make their way to the Jamison home when the
mistress of it was laid to rest. The wind sorrowed in the pines, as it
sorrowed a million years ago, before the days of sorrow. Miss Moira stood
bareheaded, straight and tall, and read the service without faltering.
Trench was one of the bearers, and he too stood uncovered in the frosty
air and afterwards helped Shane fill the grave.
On the following day he stood with Potter and Mrs. Potter beside the
grave in the pasture. Mrs. Potter was burying her child without bell or
book. The tiny scratch which had been made in the surface of the earth
seemed like a chasm, august and forbidding. When the two men had let the
coffin down, and both stood trembling in the cold, neither daring to
throw the first shovelful, Mrs. Potter turned to Trench, and beneath her
tawny hair her face was white as the one now hidden.
“Can’t you say nothing?”
Trench could no more have spoken than he could have raised the child
from the dead. He fell to coughing painfully. But with numb fingers he
took something from his pocket-book, and knelt, and dropped his two dead
flowers on Mildred’s breast.
Mrs. Potter bent and put a hand beneath his shoulder, and he seemed to
need that help as he rose. “I understand,” she said. “You are giving her
all you got, and giving up all you got.”
And then Trench went back to the desolate Jamison house and had
pneumonia. It was a swift and bitter business. Getting a doctor was out
of the question, but Moira and Shane stood by as best they knew how. What
they found hardest to endure was his delirium, when he kept calling on
names they had never heard before.
“Jaffer, Jaffer, can’t you see it? Is there nobody about me? Tell Becker
to come, before it gets to the door.”
“I’m here,” said Shane. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stop that white hearse! Stop it! It’s there! By God, it’s there.”
There was a week of this sort of thing, and then Trench knew where he
was. He was up north, and Nokomis was dead, and Mildred was dead, and
soon there would be silence for him too.
But he did not die. He got well in about the usual time and returned to
Chicago. Only—his mind had taken on a permanent set.
To describe him as he was in 1912 or 1913 is not easy. He had no
philosophy—to have one would have seemed to him like stopping to
dramatise one’s self. He was busier than ever, and self-effacing. To call
him a materialist or a pessimist would only raise a dust through which
the core of his activity would be invisible. But he dealt as little as
possible with “persons.” To him babies were now water of Lake Michigan,
thickened with colloids, enclosed for a while in membranes, and returned
to the lake.
Meantime nearly two billion other human beings were pursuing their hopes
and fears. On June 28, 1912, the English women who wanted votes began to
smash windows at London, while Lord Morley was carefully explaining the
theory of democracy at Manchester. On the same day the Democrats were
taking their first ballot—preferring Mr. Clark to Mr. Wilson. On the same
day certain Turkish troops mutinied, a fact which pleased the Balkan
states, who were about to enter upon war with Turkey. On June 28, 1913,
Bulgaria, not content with the Turkish territory allotted her, began war
on Servia. The Triple Alliance was due to lapse on that date, but the
Turkish defeat led to its renewal.
On June 28, 1914,—but we anticipate. All the rest that we have to record
comes before or on that date.
I
The names which Trench had uttered in his delirium were those of medical
students who lived in his house. The first floor of it was occupied by
a drug-store, and the second by his own quarters, but the third he had
divided into six little suites, of two rooms each. He had intended them
for Halsted Street boys, but he found that foreign students had trouble
in getting rooms, and he threw open his doors to them.
Of the five students who were living in his house in 1913, two cooked for
him, and served as office attendants. These were Chatterjee of Calcutta
and Wu of Hong Kong.
It was late in August when Trench’s cool impersonal way of regarding
things was suddenly put to a severe test.
Chatterjee had just gone on office duty. The first man gave his name
as Ischl. Chat reported the name to the doctor, who had on his desk a
delicate piece of apparatus, which he was repairing.
“Ask him if he owns a clothing factory.”
Chat vanished and returned. “He says yes.”
“Then I say no. Show him out.”
Presently Chat admitted Arschiak, an Armenian painter, whose wife had
been killed in the massacres of 1909, but who had escaped to America
with his infant son. Trench had seen the child through an attack of
infantile paralysis and saved him from being a cripple. Arschiak now
unwrapped a package and set a little canvas on the desk, against the
piece of apparatus. It was a sketch of the point below Encampment, as he
had guessed it from a photograph he had seen in Trench’s library. It
was painted in open sunlight, and was really a remarkable little tour de
force.
“For me? Why, man, this is worth twice my services!”
“One artist to another, monsieur, with love and homage. You have a Della
Robbia above your desk. Pray have the poor Arschiak on it—about here.”
After Arschiak had gone, Trench gazed at the little treasure and
remembered that day in the launch. How incredibly clear and bright it had
been. The mountain on St. Joe had seemed as near as a reformer’s ideal.
It was the height of rudeness never to have called on the girl who had
given her beauty to save his hand.
Here Chat entered and closed the door behind him. “The other man has not
gone, doctor.”
“Let him in, Chat.”
Ischl entered, burly-boned and dewlapped, and started to seat his great
frame.
“Stand up,” said Trench sharply, as he went on adjusting a tiny screw.
“So you are Ischl. Isn’t it possible to insult you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m damned if I do.”
“Well, I mean that you’re a bloodsucker and a dirty dog.” Here Trench set
his apparatus carefully aside and stood up. “Now I’ve told you what I
think of you, and you needn’t spare the furniture.”
“I come here to get help for a little girl. I ain’t come here to fight.”
“Well, you can go away again, and go quick. I’ve done enough for you.
I’ve patched up a scabby little son of yours that you never saw. Get out!”
Ischl stood irresolute. Then he sat down. “I think probably you can knock
me out,” he said, “but I’m too heavy to throw out, and I’ll kill that
brown man if you call him.”
Trench took up the telephone and asked the nearest police station for an
officer. Then he lifted the apparatus again, and finished adjusting the
tiny screw.
Ischl did not take the hint.
“It ain’t my fault if my women go wrong.”
“I don’t say it is.”
“I suppose you think I should worry about them.”
“I don’t say so.”
“Then what in hell—I suppose you mean it ain’t your fault if my Elsie is
sick.”
“Quite so.” Trench released a cylinder that began to turn silently.
“I ain’t sparin’ no expense,” continued Ischl doggedly. “I’ve got the
best man I know. His name is Ernst, and he ain’t so young as he was.”
“If Ernst can’t cure your child, nobody can.”
“Ernst sent me to you. I’ve got a letter for you.”
“Take the letter back and tell him that he adds insult to injury. He
introduced me to the world, and now he introduces me to you. You’re
rotten to the core.”
Ischl clenched his fists, but suddenly relaxed them. “I may as well own
the corn. Elsie got her trouble from me.”
At this point the telephone on the desk rang, and the doctor lifted the
receiver—“Yes,” he said.
Ischl heard a light crackle, as of a woman’s voice, to which the doctor
presently responded. “Yes. I was thinking only a few minutes ago that it
was inexcusable.”
Again the faint crackle. “The little boy? I am very sorry to hear it. I
shall be glad to consult with Rowland. Ask him if eleven o’clock will do.”
“My God!” broke in Ischl with a roar, “you can’t be there.”
Again the faint crackle, and this time the doctor turned to Ischl.
“Is this case surgical?”
Ischl held out the note, and Trench read it, and it was profane. Ernst
had not been called soon enough. Had he seen the case earlier, it would
have yielded to treatment. As matters stood, the child was likely to lose
an arm.
Trench turned again to the transmitter. “Yes, it is surgical, and I will
attend to it. I’m glad Girling is the next man on the list. Good-bye.”
Trench glanced once more at the note. “Mr. Ischl, I wouldn’t lift a
finger to save your life. But a lady heard you and pleaded for you. Do
you still want me to see your daughter?”
Ischl gulped hard, drew out a checkbook, and wrote a check for a thousand
dollars. Trench took it and tore it up.
Ischl protested fiercely. “I’m going to pay you.”
“You haven’t money enough, Mr. Ischl.” Trench touched a button. Chat
instantly appeared, and was told to send the officer back.
“Look here, Doc,” said Ischl, “I know there’s girls named Elsie in my
shop. You visit my shop. If there’s anything you want done, say so. I’ll
do it, if it puts me out of business.”
Trench turned upon him—at the sheer poetry of the man’s first sentence.
“You are speaking before a witness. Mr. Chatterjee will not forget your
words.”
“Mr. What’s-’is-name can damn well remember them, then.”
“Very good, Mr. Ischl. I will visit your shop to-morrow.”
In the best room at the Children’s Hospital, Elsie was lying with her
right arm and hand immobilised. She was not pretty, for her forehead was
square and her face flat. She was weak and restless. Part of the night
she had been in a stupor.
The nurse was mildly busy about the room. Beside the bed sat the
white-haired Ernst, famous in his generation.
“Elsie, my boy has come to see you. This is Dr. Trench.”
“Is he really your boy?” The voice was very little and very hoarse.
“No, but then you aren’t Isabel’s mother.”
“Yes, I am. Give me Isabel.”
Trench lifted the doll and put it close to Elsie’s heart. Then he pushed
the doll gently aside and bent down to listen. Elsie put up her good hand
and fingered his hair. It was not very soft, and it twisted a little at
the top of his forehead.
“Can you make me well again, doctor’s boy?”
“Of course. You do ask such funny questions in the morning.”
“Oh, I wish it was evening. I want to go to sleep.”
“Didn’t my little girl sleep well last night?”—It was no voice Ischl had
heard. It reminded him of a woman dead these three years—dead of a broken
heart.
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t wish it was night.”
“Why don’t you take a nap, sweetheart?”
“I can’t take a nap. Oh, I wish I could take a nap. If you would take me
up in your arms, maybe I could go to sleep.”
“I will,” he said, and knelt beside the bed, and seemed to gather her in
his arms. In five minutes she was asleep. In ten she had sunk into the
stupor again, and later, in that condition, took the anæsthetic without
knowing it.
Ischl went into the corridor. He walked up and down, that big assemblance
of a man, tears streaming from his eyes. He saw Trench come out, saw him
give some directions to an interne, saw him disappear into the robing
room. Then, like many another father, he went into a waiting room—and
waited.
An hour had passed when he saw something white wheeled through the
corridor. He was quite sure that Elsie was dead, and put his head down
heavily in his hands. Hardly had he done so when he felt a kind touch on
his arm, and Trench was saying,
“Here, here, this won’t do. She’s going to be all right now for years,
and maybe always.”