I
The doctor's waiting-room smelt strongly of antiseptics. That was
Patricia's predominating thought as she wandered aimlessly about the
apartment. She fingered its dusty furniture. She remembered afterward
the steel-engraving of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, with General Lee
explaining some evidently important matter to those attentive and
unhumanly stiff politicians; and she remembered, too, how in depicting
one statesman, who unavoidably sat with his back to the spectator, the
artist had exceeded anatomical possibilities in order to obtain a
recognizable full-faced portrait. Yet at the time this picture had not
roused her conscious attention.
She went presently to the long table austerely decorated with two rows
of magazines, each partly covered by its neighbor, just as shingles are
placed. The arrangement irritated her unreasonably. She wanted to
disarrange these dog-eared pamphlets, to throw them on the floor, to
destroy them. She wondered how many other miserable people had tried to
read these hateful books while they waited in this abominable room.
She started when the door of the consultation-room opened. The doctor
was patting the silk glove of a harassed-looking woman in black as he
escorted her to the outer door, and was assuring her that everything was
going very well indeed, and that she was not to worry, and so on.
And presently he spoke with Patricia, for a long while, quite levelly,
of matters which it is not suitable to record. Discreet man that he was,
Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia
should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke
concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although
obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his
opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment
at the time of little Roger's birth.
She was dividedly conscious of a desire to laugh and of the notion that
she must remain outwardly serious, because though this horrible
Pemberton man was talking abject nonsense, she would presently be having
him as a dinner-guest.
But what if he were not talking nonsense? The possibility, considered,
roused a sensation of falling through infinity.
"Yes, yes," Patricia civilly assented. "These young doctors have taken
this out of me, and that out of me, as you might take the works out of a
watch. And it has done no good; and they were mistaken in their first
diagnoses, because what they took for true osteomalacia was only----
Would you mind telling me again? Oh, yes; I had only a
pseudo-osteomalacic rhachitic pelvis, to begin with. To think of
anybody's being mistaken about a simple little trouble like that! And I
suppose I was just born with it, like my mother and all those other
luckless women with Musgrave blood in them?"
"Fehling and Schliephake at least consider this variety of pelvic
anomaly to be congenital in the majority of cases. But, without going
into the question of heredity at all, I think it only, fair to tell you,
Mrs. Musgrave----" And Pemberton went on talking.
Neither of the two showed any emotion.
The doctor went on talking. Patricia did not listen. The man was
talking, she comprehended, but to her his words seemed blurred and
indistinguishable. "Like a talking-machine when it isn't wound up
enough," she decided.
Subconsciously Patricia was thinking, "You have two big beads of
perspiration on your nose, and if I were to allude to the fact you would
very probably die of embarrassment."
Aloud Patricia said: "You mean, then, that, to cap it all, a functional
disorder of my heart has become organic, so that I would inevitably die
under another operation? or even at a sudden shock? And that particular
operation is now the solitary chance of saving my life! The dilemma is
neat, isn't it? How God must laugh at the jokes He contrives," said
Patricia. "I wish that I could laugh. And I will. I don't care whether
you think me a reprobate or not, Dr. Pemberton, I want a good stiff
drink of whiskey--the Musgrave size."
He gave it to her.