The Glory of the Conquered Part 11

"I think he did, although undoubtedly Miss McCormick will be too modern to say so."

"There was a story I always liked about a Vienna doctor," he continued; he was anxious to guide the stories, for Karl had seemed suddenly to sink within himself. He understood why--he might have foreseen where this would lead. For there were other stories of medical men, stories which fitted a little too closely just now; he was especially sorry he had mentioned Bilroth. "This shows another side of the doctor," he went on, after a minute, "and as you are going to give good as well as bad, this may help out on the good side--there's where you will be short. A woman came to see this doctor regarding her consumptive son. He told her there was nothing he could do for him, adding: 'If you want him to live, you must take him to Italy.' The woman broke down and told him she could not do that, that she had no money. The doctor sat there thinking a moment, and then sent over to the bank and got her a letter of credit covering the amount involved. Another doctor, who happened to be near, asked why he did that. 'You can't possibly support all your needy patients,' he said; 'why did you choose this particular case? Of course,' he added, 'it was very good of you.' 'No,' said the doctor, 'it was not good of me.

There was nothing good about it. But I was guilty of proposing to her something I knew she could not do. After opening up that possibility it was my obligation to see that she could fulfill it. I suggested what I knew to be the impossible; after I suggested it, it was my business to make it possible.' Don't you think that a pretty good sense of justice?"

he asked of Ernestine.

"What might be called an inner squareness," said Georgia, as Ernestine responded only with the fine lights the story had brought to her eyes.

Karl did not seem to have heard the story. Ernestine looked toward him anxiously.

"Now I'm going to tell a story," she said, with a gaiety thrown out for rousing him, "a very fine story;--every one must listen." He looked over at her and smiled at that, listening for her story.

"This man's name can't be printed, because he lives in Chicago and it might embarra.s.s him,"--Karl and Dr. Parkman exchanged glances with a smile. "This is a characteristic story, as it shows a doctor's tyranny.

There was a boy taken ill at a little town near Chicago. The country doctor telephoned up to the boy's father, and the father telephoned the family physician who, from the meagre facts, scented appendicitis. I don't know how he knew it was bad, but I believe a good doctor is a pretty good guesser. At any rate he suspected this was serious, and told the father they would have to go down there at once. The father said there was no Sunday train. 'Then get a special,' said the doctor. 'We'll probably have to bring him up to the hospital to operate, and can't do it in the automobile.' The father protested against the special, saying it would be very expensive and that he did not think it necessary. The doctor said he did think it necessary or he would not have suggested it.

The father demurred still more and the doctor rang off. Then you called up the railroad office, yourself--wasn't that it?" turning to Dr.

Parkman, who grew red and looked genuinely embarra.s.sed. "Oh dear,"--in mock dismay--"now I've mixed it up, haven't I? Well, this doctor--I'm not saying anything about who he is--called up the railroad office and calmly ordered the special. I must not forget to say that the man who did not want to spend the money had an abundance of money to spend. Then he called the boy's father and said, 'Be at the station in twenty minutes.

The special will be waiting. You will have nothing to do but sign the check.'"

"Well," said Mrs. McCormick, when Ernestine stopped as though through, "would the father pay for it, and did the boy have to have an operation, and did he get well?"

"Mother doesn't like this new way of telling a story," said Georgia; "she likes to hear the got-married-and-lived-happily-ever-after part."

"I'm sure no one said anything about getting married in this," said Mrs.

McCormick, serenely.

"But don't you think that a fine doctor story?" Ernestine asked smilingly of Dr. Parkman.

"A very bad story to tell. Miss McCormick's general reader will say--: 'Oh yes, of course, he was just bound to have an operation.'"

"Georgia,"--this was from the man at the head of the table, and there was something in his voice to arrest them all--"if you are in earnest about wanting stories of doctors, why don't you tell some of the big ones? Some of the stories medical men have a right to be proud of?"

"What are they?" she asked, promptly. "Tell me some of them."

Dr. Parkman's eyes were on his plate. He was handling his fork a little nervously.

"If I were going to tell any stories about medical men," Karl went on, and in his quiet voice there was still that compelling note, "it seems to me I should want to say something about the doctors who died game--just a little something about the men who took their medicine and said nothing; men with the nerve to face even their own understanding--cut off, you see, from the refuge of fooling themselves. Ask Dr. Parkman about the surgeons who lost their hands or their lives through infection. Those are the stories he knows that are worth while. He's only giving you the surface of it, Georgia. Tell him you'd like a little of the real thing.

Ask him about the men who died slow deaths, looking a fatal future in the face from a long way off. He mentioned Bilroth just now, telling a funny story about him. There's a better story than that to tell about Bilroth.

You know he was the man who knew so much about the heart; he probably understood the heart better than any other man. And by one of those leering tricks of fate, he had heart disease himself. He watched his own case and made notes on it, that his profession might profit by his destruction. There you have something worth writing about! In his last letter home, he said he had ten days to live--and he missed it by just one; he lived eleven. If you're going to tell any stories about Bilroth, tell that one, Georgia. And then a story or two showing that while many men take chances, it's the doctor who takes them most understandingly.

Why medical science is full of an almost grotesque courage! Don't you begin to see how the doctor's been trifling with you, Georgia?"

He paused, but no one felt the impulse to speak. His eyes were hidden by the dark gla.s.ses he was wearing because of that cold, or whatever it was, in his eyes, but his face told the story of an alert mind, a heart responsive to the things of which he spoke. Then he went on and talked a little, quietly enough, but with a pa.s.sionateness, a high note of understanding, of the men who had had the nerve--eyes open--to face the things fate handed them. It was as if he were looking back over the whole sweep of the world and picking from many times and many places the men whose souls had not flinched to the death. And at the last he said, smiling--the kind of smile one meets with a tear--"Let's have a little toast." He raised his gla.s.s of claret and for a minute looked at it in silence. And then he said slowly, his very quiet voice and that little smile tempering the words:

"Here's to all those fellows who went down without the banners or the trumpets!--To the boys who took the starch out of their own tragedies!--To those first cla.s.s sports who made no fuss about their own funerals! Here's to the Great Unwhimpering!"

Dr. Parkman choked a little over his wine, the tightening in Ernestine's throat made it hard for her with hers, Georgia's cheeks were burning with enthusiasm for the story she saw now she could write, and even Mrs.

McCormick had no questions as to just what men had died that way. Then it was Karl himself who abruptly turned the conversation to the more shallow channels of dinner talk.

After that he was not unlike a man who had had a little too much champagne. He startled them with the nimbleness of his wit, the light play of his fancy. It was as though he had a new vocabulary, a lighter one than was commonly his. There was a sort of delicate frolicsomeness in his thought.

For a reason unknown to her, it troubled Ernestine. She looked from Karl to Dr. Parkman, but the doctor had that impenetrable look of his. What was the matter with him? He had talked so freely during the early part of the dinner, and now he seemed to have dropped out of it entirely. She caught him looking at Karl once; the keen, narrow gaze of physician to patient. Then she saw, distinctly, that his face darkened, and after that, when he smiled at the things which were being tossed back and forth between Karl and Georgia, it was what she called to herself a "made-up smile"; and once or twice when Karl said something especially funny, she was quite sure she saw Dr. Parkman wince.

A lump rose in Ernestine's throat; Karl seemed to have slipped away from her. This was a mood to which she could not respond and it seemed he did not expect her to. Almost all of his talk was directed to Georgia, who, with her quick wit and inherent high spirits, was enjoying the pace he set her. It seemed to resolve itself into a duel of quick, easy play of thought and words between those two. But the things they said did not make Ernestine laugh. She smiled, as Dr. Parkman did, a "made-up" smile.

She had always enjoyed Karl's humour immensely, but now, though she had never seen him as brilliant, something about him pulled at her heart. She could not restrain a resentfulness at Georgia for encouraging him. For she could not get away from the feeling that all of this was not grounded on the thing which was Karl himself. It was like nothing in the world so much as the breeziness of a mind which had let itself go. She was glad when at last she could rise from the table.

In the library it was as though he were holding on to Georgia, determined not to let her out of the mood into which he had brought her. The things of which he talked were things having no bearing whatever upon himself.

If she had not been there, had simply heard of the things said, she would not have recognised Karl at all. For the first time since they had known one another, Ernestine felt left out,--alone.

Mrs. McCormick said that they must go, but Karl protested. "We're having such a good time," he said, "don't think of going."

But Georgia had an engagement. She insisted at last that they must go.

Dr. Parkman had remained too, although Ernestine was satisfied he was not enjoying things.

"Why, what in the world have you done to Karl?" laughed Georgia, pinning on her hat. "I haven't had such good fun for months. I had no idea he was such a gem of a dinner man."

"I do not think Karl is very well," said Ernestine, a little coolly.

"_Well_? Why, bless you, I never saw him in such exuberant mood."

"Didn't they make the words fly?" laughed Mrs. McCormick. "My dear, you and the doctor and I were quite left behind."

"It seemed that way," said Ernestine, trying to keep her chin from quivering.

When she returned to the library, Dr. Parkman and Karl were evidently just closing a discussion for Karl was saying, heatedly: "Now just let me manage things in my own way!"

The doctor seemed reluctant to leave. Ernestine was alone with him for a minute in the hall, and she was sure he started to say something once and then changed it to something else. But when he did leave, it was with merely the conventional goodbye.

She walked slowly back to the library. Karl was sitting in the Morris chair, his elbow upon one arm of it, his hand to his forehead. His whole bearing had changed; it was as though he had let down. Again it seemed as though in the last hour he had been intoxicated, and this the depression to follow that kind of exuberance. But he looked up as he heard her, and smiled a little, a wan, tired smile. She was beside him in an instant.

"You seemed so happy this afternoon, dear," she said, stroking his hair, "and now you seem so tired. Aren't you well, Karl?" she asked, a little timidly.

His face then mirrored a dissatisfaction, a sort of resentment.

"I talked like a fool this afternoon!" he said gruffly.

"Why, no, dear, only--not quite like yourself."

"Well, the fact of the matter is"--this after a minute's thought--"I have a frightful headache. I suppose it comes from this trouble with my eyes.

I thought I wasn't going to be able to keep up, and in my efforts to do it, I"--he paused and then laughed rather harshly--"overdid it."

He seemed anxious for her reply to that.

"I knew it was something like that," she said simply. Then, after a minute: "Is there anything I can do for the head?"

He told her no, but that he believed he would turn the chair around with his back to the light.

"And I won't talk, dear," he said gently; "I'll just rest a little."

She helped him with the chair and for a minute sat there on a low seat beside him.