The Second Generation Part 25

Arthur flushed, flashed, clenched his fists; but the planer was between him and Waugh, and that gave Waugh's tremendous shoulders and fists a chance to produce a subduing visual impression. A man, even a young man, who is nervous on the subject of his dignity, will, no matter how brave and physically competent, shrink from avoidable encounter that means doubtful battle. And dignity was a grave matter with young Ranger in those days.

"Don't hoist your dander up at me," said Waugh. "Get it up agin'

yourself. Bud, next time he soldiers on you, send him to me."

"All right, sir," replied Bud, with a soothing grin. And when Waugh was gone, he said to Arthur, "Don't mind him. Just keep pegging along, and you'll learn all right."

Bud's was the tone a teacher uses to encourage a defective child. It stung Arthur more fiercely than had Waugh's. It flashed on him that the men--well, they certainly hadn't been looking up to him as he had been fondly imagining. He went at his work resolutely, but blunderingly; he spoiled a plank and all but clogged the machine. His temper got clean away from him, and he shook with a rage hard to restrain from venting itself against the inanimate objects whose possessing devils he could hear jeering at him through the roar of the machinery.

"Steady! Steady!" warned good-natured Rollins. "You'll drop a hand under that knife."

The words had just reached Arthur when he gave a sharp cry. With a cut as clean as the edge that made it, off came the little finger of his left hand, and he was staring at it as it lay upon the bed of the planer, twitching, seeming to breathe as its blood pulsed out, while the blood spurted from his maimed hand. In an instant Lorry Tague had the machine still.

"A bucket of clean water," he yelled to the man at the next planer.

He grabbed dazed Arthur's hand, and pressed hard with his powerful thumb and forefinger upon the edges of the wound.

"A doctor!" he shouted at the men crowding round.

Arthur did not realize what had happened until he found himself forced to his knees, his hand submerged in the ice-cold water, Lorry still holding shut the severed veins and arteries.

"Another bucket of water, you, Bill," cried Lorry.

When it came he had Bill Johnstone throw the severed finger into it. Bud Rollins, who had jumped through the window into the street in a dash for a physician, saw Doctor Schulze's buggy just turning out of High Street.

He gave chase, had Schulze beside Arthur within two minutes. More water, both hot and cold, was brought, and a cleared work bench; with swift, sure fingers the doctor cleaned the stump, cleaned the severed finger, joined and sewed them, bandaged the hand.

"Now, I'll take you home," he said. "I guess you've distinguished yourself enough for the day."

Arthur followed him, silent and meek as a humbled dog. As they were driving along Schulze misread a mournful look which Arthur cast at his bandaged hand. "It's nothing--nothing at all," he said gruffly. "In a week or less you could be back at work." The accompanying sardonic grin said plain as print, "But this dainty dandy is done with work."

Weak and done though Arthur was, some blood came into his pale face and he bit his lip with anger.

Schulze saw these signs.

"Several men are _killed_ every year in those works--and not through their carelessness, either," he went on in a milder, friendlier tone.

"And forty or fifty are maimed--not like that little pin scratch of yours, my dear Mr. Ranger, but hands lost, legs lost--accidents that make cripples for life. That means tragedy--not the wolf at the door, but with his snout right in the platter."

"I've seen that," said Arthur. "But I never thought much about it--until now."

"Naturally," commented Schulze, with sarcasm. Then he added philosophically, "And it's just as well not to bother about it. Mankind found this world a h.e.l.l, and is trying to make it over into a heaven. And a h.e.l.l it still is, even more of a h.e.l.l than at first, and it'll be still more of a h.e.l.l--for these machines and these slave-driving capitalists with their luxury-crazy families are worse than wars and aristocrats.

They make the men work, and the women and the children--make 'em all work as the Pharaohs never sweated the wretches they set at building the pyramids. The nearer the structure gets toward completion, the worse the driving and the madder the haste. Some day the world'll be worth living in--probably just about the time it's going to drop into the sun.

Meanwhile, it's a h.e.l.l of a place. We're a race of slaves, toiling for the benefit of the race of G.o.ds that'll some day be born into a habitable world and live happily ever afterwards. Science will give them happiness--and immortality, if they lose the taste for the adventure into the Beyond."

Arthur's brain heard clearly enough to remember afterwards; but Schulze's voice seemed to be coming through a thick wall. When they reached the Ranger house, Schulze had to lift him from the buggy and support his weight and guide his staggering steps. Out ran Mrs. Ranger, with _the_ terror in her eyes.

"Don't lose your head, ma'am," said Schulze. "It's only a cut finger. The young fool forgot he was steering a machine, and had a sharp but slight reminder."

Schulze was heavily down on the "interesting-invalid" habit. He held that the world's supply of sympathy was so small that there wasn't enough to provide encouragement for those working hard and well; that those who fell into the traps of illness set in folly by themselves should get, at most, toleration in the misfortunes in which others were compelled to share. "The world discourages strength and encourages weakness," he used to declaim. "That injustice and cruelty must be reversed!"

"Doctor Schulze is right," Arthur was saying to his mother, with an attempt at a smile. But he was glad of the softness and ease of the big divan in the back parlor, of the sense of hovering and protecting love he got from his mother's and Adelaide's anxious faces. Sorer than the really trifling wound was the deep cut into his vanity. How his fellow-workmen were pitying him!--a poor blockhead of a bungler who had thus brought to a pitiful climax his failure to learn a simple trade. And how the whole town would talk and laugh! "Hiram Ranger, he begat a fool!"

Schulze, with proper equipment, redressed and rebandaged the wound, and left, after cautioning the young man not to move the sick arm. "You'll be all right to strum the guitar and sport a diamond ring in a fortnight at the outside," said he. At the door he lectured Adelaide: "For G.o.d's sake, Miss Ranger, don't let his mother coddle him. He's got the makings of a man like his father--not as big, perhaps, but still a lot of a man.

Give him a chance! Give him a chance! If this had happened in a football game or a fox-hunt, n.o.body would have thought anything of it. But just because it was done at useful work, you've got yourself all fixed to make a fearful to-do."

How absurdly does practice limp along, far behind firm-striding theory!

Schulze came twice that day, looked in twice the next day, and fussed like a disturbed setting-hen when his patient forestalled the next day's visit by appearing at his office for treatment. "I want to see if I can't heal that cut without a scar," was his explanation--but it was a mere excuse.

When Arthur called on the fifth day, Schulze's elder daughter, Madelene, opened the door. "Will you please tell the doctor," said he, "that the workman who cut his finger at the cooperage wishes to see him?"

Madelene's dark gray eyes twinkled. She was a tall and, so he thought, rather severe-looking young woman; her jet black hair was simply, yet not without a suspicion of coquetry, drawn back over her ears from a central part--or what would have been a part had her hair been less thick. She was studying medicine under her father. It was the first time he had seen her, it so happened, since she was in knee dresses at public school. As he looked he thought: "A splendid advertis.e.m.e.nt for the old man's business." Just why she seemed so much healthier than even the healthiest, he found it hard to understand. She was neither robust nor radiant. Perhaps it was the singular clearness of her dead-white skin and of the whites of her eyes; again it might have been the deep crimson of her lips and of the inside of her mouth--a wide mouth with two perfect rows of small, strong teeth of the kind that go with intense vitality.

"Just wait here," said she, in a businesslike tone, as she indicated the reception room.

"You don't remember me?" said Arthur, to detain her.

"No, I don't _remember_ you," replied Madelene. "But I know who you are."

"Who I _was_," thought Arthur, his fall never far from the foreground of his mind. "You used to be very serious, and always perfect in your lessons," he continued aloud, "and--most superior."

Madelene laughed. "I was a silly little prig," said she. Then, not without a subtle hint of sarcasm, "But I suppose we all go through that period--some of us in childhood, others further along."

Arthur smiled, with embarra.s.sment. So he had the reputation of being a prig.

Madelene was in the doorway. "Father will be free--presently," said she.

"He has another patient with him. If you don't care to wait, perhaps I can look after the cut. Father said it was a trifle."

Arthur slipped his arm out of the sling.

"In here," said Madelene, opening the door of a small room to the left of her father's consultation room.

Arthur entered. "This is your office?" he asked, looking round curiously, admiringly. It certainly was an interesting room, as the habitat of an interesting personality is bound to be.

"Yes," she replied. "Sit here, please."

Arthur seated himself in the chair by the window and rested his arm on the table. He thought he had never seen fingers so long as hers, or so graceful. Evidently she had inherited from her father that sure, firm touch which is perhaps the highest talent of the surgeon. "It seems such an--an--such a _hard_ profession for a woman," said he, to induce those fascinating lips of hers to move.

"It isn't soft," she replied. "But then father hasn't brought us up soft."

This was discouraging, but Arthur tried again. "You like it?"

"I love it," said she, and now her eyes were a delight. "It makes me hate to go to bed at night, and eager to get up in the morning. And that means really living, doesn't it?"

"A man like me must seem to you a petty sort of creature."

"Oh, I haven't any professional haughtiness," was her laughing reply.

"One kind of work seems to me just as good as another. It's the spirit of the workman that makes the only differences."

"That's it," said Arthur, with a humility which he thought genuine and which was perhaps not wholly false. "I don't seem to be able to give my heart to my work."

"I fancy you'll give it _attention_ hereafter," suggested Madelene. She had dressed the almost healed finger and was dexterously rebandaging it.