Читать книгу Ellen Levis - Elsie Singmaster - Страница 3

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On a dismal day in March, four years before Ellen Levis was born or dreamed of, the slight acquaintance of Stephen Lanfair and Edward Levis was quickened by an unpleasant incident into friendship. Both attended the University Medical School in Philadelphia and both were ambitious, but there the resemblance between them ended. Stephen, an underclassman, the only son of a physician, had been started early and well in his career, and was the youngest student; Levis, a Senior, had fended for himself and was almost the oldest. Stephen had an allowance which was not large, but which sufficed for all necessities and some luxuries; Levis had only that which he earned by tutoring, and by acting as substitute instructor, laboratory assistant, and editor of the Students' Quarterly. Their acquaintance began when Stephen, wishing to win a place on the editorial board of the Quarterly, and conferring with Levis, had been invited by him to become a contributor to the next issue.

On the morning of that dismal March day Stephen sat, far from Philadelphia, in the room which had been his father's office in Chestnut Ridge, a coal-mining town above Wilkes-Barre, waiting until it was time for the train which should take him back to the Medical School which he had left to attend his father in his last illness.

He looked drearily and absent-mindedly out into the thick mist which hid all but the immediate neighborhood, a dirty, unpaved street, a stretch of sidewalk made of powdery black culm, and the front of a large dim building, the "company store." He saw not only what the mist revealed, but what it hid, a continuation of the dreary street, running between a black hill and a blacker culm bank, and terminating in a towering breaker, shapeless and hideous in design. There was no color in the landscape; all was a dense black or a soft, woolly gray. The company store had once been painted red, but the red had long ago been overlaid by black.

With him sat the superintendent of the mine, Harry Kinter, a plump, friendly young man with a pendent under lip and easy manners. He slouched, cigarette in hand, in what had been Dr. Lanfair's office chair, looking with dull, kindly eyes at his companion. He was sorry for the distressed youth and was doing his best to comfort him in a practical way.

"Now I can get the old fellow from Hazelton to come up for a couple of years, Stephen. He'll be good for that long, I'm sure, and perhaps longer. But we must have your word to settle here when you're through school; otherwise we'll try to get a permanent man. The advantage to you would be a salary from the beginning, which is what most young fellows don't get. Wouldn't you like the place for the sake of your father? Perhaps the company would be willing to pay you something to help you along if they could have your promise."

Stephen glanced toward the superintendent and then away, unable to command his voice. He was tall and thin and the looseness of his clothing and the length of his hair which he refused to have trimmed by the Chestnut Ridge barber, as well as his expression of fatigue, made him look forlorn. The offer of a position indicated a willingness of the mining company to take doubtful risks, since other lives could hardly be of much importance to one who valued his own so little.

His pale cheeks and swollen eyelids indicated not only the weariness of nights spent in watching, but a copious shedding of tears and also an acute present anxiety. Alas! it might be that he would have no other place to go, that this dreary settlement would be his sole refuge, a gravelike refuge, but a refuge none the less. If, as he anticipated, disgrace awaited him at the University, he might be only too happy to return to this inaccessible spot whither it was not likely that a rumor of his misdeed would ever penetrate, or where, if it did penetrate, it would be vaguely understood and condoned. Physicians willing to bury themselves in Chestnut Ridge were not so easily found that the mining company could afford to be fastidious.

It was not that Chestnut Ridge offered no opportunities to a physician. One could not look casually out of the window at this hour without seeing opportunities, even on a morning when most of the world was hidden from view. Four out of the ten women who stood gossiping in strange tongues before the company store—Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Lithuanian—would need in a short time the attention of a physician. The children tugging at their skirts were under-nourished. It was still too early for the men of the night shift to have had their rest and be on the street, but when they appeared their faces would show the effect of the long hours spent away from the sunlight and of the liquor with which they enlivened their periods of idleness. There was no doubt that Chestnut Ridge needed a physician.

But such work would be done by Stephen only under compulsion. Here his father had wasted his life; he had been at the call of every foreigner, had spent day after day at the squalid bedsides of suffering women, waiting upon uncleanness, and had died at the age of fifty of blood poison, contracted in an emergency operation performed hastily and without gloves, to save two lives far less valuable than his own. He had apparently not regretted his course; he had accepted his fate quietly and without complaint and had been anxious only that Stephen should understand exactly about his small inheritance. Afterwards he lay low in his bed, his hands clasped across his breast, repeating the poetry he loved, a little, lean, bearded man, with eager eyes and a heartening smile, wholly unconscious of the loftiness of his own soul.

Presently he became confused and tried to remember a formula which he frequently recited at the bedsides of dying patients, sometimes in English for Protestants, but more often in Latin for Catholics who could not be reached in time by the busy head of a wide parish. It was a formula which for him explained the world, made sacrifice easy, and a solution of all life's difficulties certain.

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," he said faintly and could go no further.

He had looked at his son earnestly and Stephen had prompted him, not without embarrassment. Stephen had been trained in the principles of the Christian faith and he had believed them, but they were now with him wholly a matter of rote; religion was not, he believed, a necessity of his life.

Stephen meant to be not a general practitioner like his father, but a specialist in the diseases of the eye like Professor Mayne of the Medical School, and his ambition aimed not only at such skill as Professor Mayne possessed and such fame as he had won, but also at a similar accumulation of wealth. He did not expect to attain his end without hard labor. He was a diligent student, and he was willing to devote himself night and day to his task.

His hopes of success were not unfounded, and his unusual ability was appreciated not only by himself, but by his teachers. He had won the First Year prize, and Professor Mayne had intimated to him that of all the candidates for the position of interne at the Ophthalmic Hospital he was most likely to be appointed. Such a position as that at Chestnut Ridge should be given to a man like his acquaintance, Levis, who had worked his way through school and who had endured so much hardship that a regular salary would be desirable, even with all the accompanying disadvantages. He might even describe the place to Levis and suggest that he apply for it, or he might mention his name to the superintendent as a possible employee. He pitied men like Levis with all his heart.

But he might need the Chestnut Ridge practice for himself—let him not forget that! He rose and walked up and down the room, still without answering Kinter, who seemed half asleep.

If only he had not imperiled his future by a piece of madness! Having signified his willingness to contribute to the Quarterly, and being immensely pleased and flattered by this opportunity to shine, he was visited by the sterility of mind common to youth which has a creative task set for it. When he was summoned to his father's bedside, his article was not yet begun; indeed, he had not yet selected a subject—and he had expected to make with this contribution an impression upon the whole of the Medical School and the Faculty as well!

During an unoccupied hour when the fatal termination of his father's illness was still in doubt, he had found in an old yellowed medical journal in the drawer of the office desk, an article proposing an ingenious and at the same time unfounded and actually ludicrous theory of the origin of cancer. The magazine was published in England—he did not know how it had come into his father's possession.

The theory seemed to him novel and ingenious, though possibly mistaken; he did not realize that it was ludicrous. In one of those moments of madness which are part of youth, he condensed the article, copied it, and sent it to Levis. The act was like the occasional thefts of children who take pennies in order to buy candy and who repent bitterly and are forever after honest. He was ambitious as children are hungry; the desire for fame was his strongest impulse and he could not let pass even so small an opportunity to shine.

As he sat by his father's bedside, where stupor had at last succeeded paroxysm and the end had become the matter of a day, he realized suddenly what he had done. It may have been that the principles in which he had been trained reasserted their power over him; it may have been that his father's face, which looked in its sunken condition like the face of a tortured saint, recalled him to himself; at any rate, he saw as by a lightning flash the foolishness of his act.

Having realized his mistake, he tried to remedy it. Calling from his window to a passing miner, he sent a telegram to Levis, "Do not publish my article." In a few hours he received word that the magazine had gone to press. Levis had added a sentence at which he groaned aloud, "Article all right."

If the college officials detected his plagiarism, it would mean the end of all his hopes. Professor Mayne would no longer distinguish him by his commendation and friendly attentions; he would have no chance of becoming an interne at the Ophthalmic Hospital and thus of pursuing immediately his longed-for work; he would have to accept the position at Chestnut Ridge and bid good-bye to his proud hopes.

It might be that he would have to suffer actual punishment. The prize, which was to add a hundred dollars to his income, might be taken from him and public mention might be made of his disgrace. It would not be greatly to be wondered at if the Faculty chose to assume that all his carefully wrought papers, all his well-prepared examinations, were accompanied by a similar dishonesty.

In the midst of his distress, he realized that the superintendent had waited a long time for an answer.

"I'll have to think it over, Harry. It's time for me to start now."

Kinter rose lazily and lifted Stephen's satchel.

"You let me hear from you in the course of the next few weeks; and in the meantime we'll engage the old man for a year at least. You won't find it so dreadfully dull here, believe me. It's possible to get down to Wilkes-Barre on the evening train and back in the caboose of the freight; gives you a nice long evening. I know some girls and I'll introduce you to them. They have dances once in a while. You'll get accustomed to it. I have. I guess diseases are pretty much the same as mines, alike everywhere."

In the train Stephen sat close to the window, a forbidding shoulder turned toward a possibly loquacious seat-mate. His very heart was sick, but he fancied that it was his body, made so by the motion of the car. Usually he enjoyed the ride, first through the region of breakers and culm banks which took on a weird picturesqueness on a bright day, then along the upper reaches of the Susquehanna and the narrow defile through which the Lehigh passes at Mauch Chunk, and into the farm lands farther down. He liked also to note the changing speech, the foreign tongues in his own neighborhood, the broad Pennsylvania German at Allentown, the less accented speech near Philadelphia. But to-day nothing engaged his attention but his own misery.

On the news-stand in the station in Philadelphia he saw the Students' Quarterly. He was tempted at first to pass quickly by and thus put off for a while the final realization of his shame, but he bought a copy and walked through the station to a bench so placed that he could turn his back to all the world. When he sat down he found that he was holding his breath, though suspense was not exactly his condition of mind, since suspense implied some hope, and he believed that there was none for Stephen Lanfair.

Then his lips parted and his eyes dilated and a deadly paleness spread over a countenance already white. The day of miracles was not past; God did not mean him to be destroyed.

He found the article, "A New Theory," and his name "Stephen Lanfair." He found under his name a note: "This article is not original, but is an abstract of a mistaken and amusing but ingenious treatise by John Dalling, a famous London physician. It was first published in England in 1837." The note, a reader would have said, was placed there by the contributor himself.

Saint Elizabeth, finding in the fifteenth century the loaves in her apron turned to roses in answer to her prayer, may have been surprised. Stephen Lanfair, finding a similar benison in the nineteenth, was stupefied.

When the machinery of his brain began to operate, he tried to fathom the mystery. He had not written the note himself, that was certain—some good angel in the guise of a critic had saved him, and the only person through whose hands the manuscript had passed was Edward Levis.

Having crossed the city he knew not how, he found Levis in his poor room. He was as thin as Lanfair and looked, with his black beard, twenty years older. He took off a pair of large spectacles and bade his guest sit down. Stephen remembered having heard that he had been a foundling, brought up at Girard College.

He did not answer Levis's greeting, he simply held out the magazine.

"Did you put that note in, Levis?"

Levis flushed. His nature was one of intense reserve and he anticipated and deplored the unpleasantness of a confession. He believed that he understood the boyish rashness which was to blame for Lanfair's mistake, and he had added the note for his sake as well as for the sake of the magazine.

"I saw you had forgotten it," said he lightly.

"Did you know the real author?"

"Yes. I saw this article alluded to humorously long ago in Thurber's textbook and I looked it up. The old magazine is on file here."

"It is commonly known, then?"

"Yes, I should say so, as a sort of absurdity. You see, of course, that it is an absurdity."

To this Stephen made no answer. He would have proved himself a fool, then, as well as a knave!

"Do you think many persons beside yourself would have recognized it?"

"I think it likely, and of course one would have been enough. It was all right for you to send it in, though; it has roused a great deal of interest; it shows we have a sense of humor. I was very sorry to hear that you lost your father, Lanfair."

Stephen would have liked to lay his head on Levis's shoulder; instead he laid it on Levis's desk.

"I didn't mean to add a note," said he in a thick voice. "I meant to pass it off as my own. I have been a dishonest fool."

Levis stirred uneasily.

"We all have to learn lessons."

Stephen was crying like a child.

"Don't, my dear fellow," said Levis.

Stephen lifted his head.

"I promise you that never in my life will I do anything of this kind again. It's nearly killed me. If my father had known—I don't know what he would have felt or done or said. He would have been heart-broken. When I'm tempted to do anything wrong, anything of any kind, I'll think of you. I promise you faithfully!"

Levis smiled.

"Promise yourself, Lanfair!"

Stephen remembered at the end of the week to write his decision to Kinter. He would not need, thank God, to go to Chestnut Ridge and fix his eyes for the rest of his life upon the dirty street and the dismal breaker and the ignorant, unclean women who were so often and so direly in need of waiting upon! He thought of his father with an almost intolerable tenderness of heart. His father had suffered everything, cold and weariness and loneliness and hunger of mind, separation from all that was interesting and profitable, and finally martyrdom itself in a ghastly form. His father was a saint; he would always remember him and love him, but he would not need to follow exactly in his footsteps. He would have a career of which his father would have been unspeakably proud; he would establish principles by which the whole race of eye specialists would be governed; he would have an immensely wide influence, and it would all be his father's doing.

He told Levis about the position, feeling a little ashamed, and was relieved when Levis explained that he had agreed to take a country practice in Lancaster County.

He was given the next day new reason to expect success. Professor Mayne summoned him to his desk at the end of his last class and congratulated him upon his answers in a recent examination. Mayne was as large in body as he was in estate and his manner expressed his opulence. He had a full round voice, he used long words deliberately and with perfect correctness, and spoke with an old-fashioned rhythm, which accented now important, now unimportant words, as though he obeyed some queer quantitative law. He seemed to be health of body and mind incarnate, but an inherited susceptibility to mental disorder had forbidden his continuing his race. Life, he believed, was on the whole hideous if one stopped to consider it; but clever men did not contemplate it, they simply secured for themselves all the pleasures of the eye and the mind and the body that it was possible to get without transgressing the laws of health and common sense.

Sitting at his desk, dressed in broadcloth, he looked pleasantly at his pupil. Stephen's appearance had improved; his hair had been trimmed after a homely bang-like fashion then prevailing, sleep had refreshed him, and only the black band on his sleeve distinguished him as one afflicted. His eyelids were no longer swollen and his eyes had resumed a natural brilliancy which drew attention away from his somewhat attenuated features.

"I was interested in your contribution to the Quarterly, Lanfair. Where did you discover that antediluvian absurdity?"

"In an old magazine of my father's." Stephen could not suppress the tears which burned his eyes. His relief from anxiety softened his heart and the least expression of sympathy made him almost hysterical. "He had evidently kept it because it was a curiosity. He was a great reader. I didn't know that attention had been called to it in Thurber's textbook until Levis told me."

"We cannot be reminded of a good joke too often. I had forgotten it entirely. Continue your general reading; it will eventually prove profitable to you, no matter what department of medicine you select."

Then, remembering that Lanfair's father had just died, Professor Mayne invited him to dinner. His niece was to go with him to the theater and they would dine at six o'clock at the New Windham Hotel. His carriage was outside the building. Lanfair might just as well accompany him now. Stephen followed down the hall, his heart thumping.

His heart beat still more rapidly when he was seated opposite to Mayne and next to his niece in the hotel dining-room. The girl, Hilda Fell, was a little creature in exquisite clothes who looked up from under a pair of brows which almost met and which gave to her face a willful and imperious expression. She was very young and light as thistledown and was already spoiled by wealth and idleness. The men whom she had known hitherto were familiar with her type, but Stephen was not; he thought of her as a charming princess, and when her bright eyes met his, he looked back into them smiling, and not recognizing the intense and somewhat unwholesome curiosity about life which animated them. He had frequently heard of her as an orphan with a large estate of which a great stone house on the river front in Harrisburg near the governor's mansion was only a small part. She was an object of interest to the students who knew her by sight and who discussed endlessly her wealth and her fashionable clothes and admired her free manners. There was a current rumor that she smoked cigarettes, a habit then almost unknown among women.

Professor Mayne teased her and she answered saucily. He deplored his own ill fortune, and still more that of this little creature in whom the taint of insanity was darker than in himself. He believed that his sister, Hilda's mother, would have developed, if she had lived, a serious melancholia ending possibly in suicide for which the family history furnished abundant precedent. He was convinced of the present soundness of Hilda's mind, but with him and Hilda the family must end.

He looked at her and young Lanfair earnestly. Lanfair was ambitious; he would improve and develop, and to him certain matters could be explained. Before they parted he had invited Stephen to his house.

Stephen went from the hotel table to Levis's room. He asked merely to sit there with his book before the fire, which was the only means of heating here where living was cheap. He was like a child who finds assuagement for hurt in the silent company of an older person.

Levis smiled and went on with his work. It was not often that students sought him out merely for the pleasure of his company and he was touched by this youthful devotion.

Nor was it often, at least during his occupancy, that a girl's figure and a pair of dark eyes were visualized against the background of the old mantelpiece. Levis himself did not give one hour's thought in a year to women; he believed that he was growing too old for love-making and that hardship had made him immune to love. Certainly there was no profit in thinking of a state of matrimony into which one was too poor to enter!

Stephen contrasted his fearful anticipations with what had actually occurred. He had expected to be by this time disgraced and despairing. Instead he was at peace. He had been more honored than he had dreamed of being, and now a new and wilder possibility dazzled him.

His thoughts recurred to his father, and he dwelt with gratitude upon the self-sacrificing care which had always been his. If his father had been willing to provide less generously for his education, to stint his pocket-money, or to leave a smaller inheritance, he might have had a larger library with which to make Chestnut Ridge tolerable and an occasional journey for diversion or improvement. He might even—Stephen flushed a little as this notion came into his mind—he might even have contracted a second marriage, his first having ended tragically with Stephen's birth.

Stephen avoided thinking of the piety which was after all his father's distinguishing characteristic, even though he was aware that his father would rather have bequeathed to him faith than money, and that his effort to recite the Creed was not a last reassurance to himself as it had seemed, but a final reminder of the faith without which he believed his son would perish. Stephen saw him clearly as he lay in his bed and heard his voice reciting the treasured verses which he had memorized in dreary journeys over the bleak hills. The lines which he repeated most often acknowledged with what was to his son a ghastly frankness his dire plight:

"In the hour of death, after this life's whim,

When the heart beats low, and the eyes grow dim,

And pain has exhausted every limb—

The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him."

He resisted not only this memory, but others, a tiny, dismal schoolhouse, half filled by a little flock of mourning women and children bereft of husbands and fathers by a cruel death; he saw weeping eyes and sad faces in which apathy had followed tears. He hated all sorrow and trouble and he connected religion with them. Religion was for the old, the dying, the afflicted, the needy, and he was none of these.

He looked from time to time gratefully at Levis bending over his books. Whatever good fortune should be his, Levis should share. Levis had saved his honor, had saved him from pitfalls for the rest of his life. He would never, never forget him.

For the most part, however, he thought of himself, of his excellent marks, of his grasp of the subjects which he studied, of admirable Professor Mayne, and especially of Professor Mayne's niece. He had, he was sure, the ordering of his life in his hands; he could make it what he chose.