Читать книгу Magnificent Obsession - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 4

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Seeing that to-morrow was Christmas, and this was Saturday well past the luncheon hour, by the time Pyle had tardily joined them in the superintendent's office each of the eight, having abandoned whatever manifestation of dignified omniscience constituted his bedside manner, was snappishly impatient to have done with this unpleasant business and be off.

When at length he breezed in, not very convincingly attempting the conciliatory smirk of the belated, Pyle found them glum and fidgety—Carter savagely reducing to shavings what remained of a pencil, Aldrich rattling the pages of his engagement book, McDermott meticulously pecking at diminutive bits of lint on his coat sleeve, Watson ostentatiously shaking his watch at his ear, Gram drumming an exasperating tattoo on Nancy Ashford's desk, and the others pacing about like hungry panthers.

"Well," said Pyle, seating them with a sweeping gesture, "you all know what we're here for."

"Ab-so-lute-ly," drawled Jennings. "The old boy must be warned."

"At once!" snapped Gram.

"I'll say!" muttered McDermott.

"And you, Pyle, are the proper person to do it!" Anticipating a tempestuous rejoinder, Jennings hastened to defend himself against the impending din by noisily pounding out his pipe on the rim of Mrs. Ashford's steel waste basket, a performance she watched with sour interest.

"Where do you get that 'old boy' stuff, Jennings?" demanded Pyle, projecting a fierce, myopic glare at his pestiferous crony. "He's not much older than you are."

Watson tilted his chair back on its hind legs, cautiously turned his red head in the direction of Carter, seated next him, and slowly closed one eye. This was going to be good.

"Doctor Hudson was forty-six last May," quietly volunteered the superintendent, without looking up.

"You ought to know," conceded Jennings drily.

She met his rough insinuation with level, unacknowledging eyes.

"May twenty-fifth," she added.

"Thanks so much. That point's settled, then. But, all the same, he wasn't a day under a hundred and forty-six when he slumped out of his operating room, this morning, haggard and shaky."

"It's getting spread about too," complained Carter.

"Take it up with him, Doctor Pyle," wheedled McDermott. "Tell him we all think he needs a vacation—a long one!"

Pyle snorted contemptuously and aimed a bushy eye-brow at him.

"Humph! That's good! 'Tell him we all think,' eh? It's a mighty careless, offhand damn that Hudson would give for what we all think! Did you ever..." He pointed a bony finger at the perspiring McDermott, "...did you ever feel moved to offer a few comradely suggestions to Dr. Wayne Hudson, relative to the better management of his personal affairs?"

McDermott rosily hadn't, and Pyle's dry voice crackled again.

"As I thought! That explains how, with so little display of emotion, you can advise somebody else to do it. You see, my son,"—he dropped his tone of raillery and became sincere—"we're dealing here with an odd number. Nobody quite like him in the whole world...full of funny crotchets. In a psychiatric clinic—which this hospital is going to be, shortly, with the entire staff in strait-jackets—some of Hudson's charming little idiosyncrasies would be brutally referred to as clean-cut psychoses!"

The silence in Mrs. Ashford's office was tense. Pyle's regard for the chief was known to be but little short of idolatry. What, indeed, was he preparing to say? Did he actually believe that Hudson was off the rails?

"Now, don't misunderstand!" he went on quickly, sensing their amazement. "Hudson's entitled to all his whimsies. So far as I'm concerned, he has earned the right to his flock of phantoms. He is a genius, and whosoever loveth a genius is out of luck with his devotion except he beareth all things, endureth all things, suffereth long and is kind."

"Not like sounding brass," interpolated Jennings piously.

"Apropos of brass," growled Pyle, "but—no matter...We all know that the chief is the most important figure in the field of brain surgery on this continent. But he did not come to that distinction by accident. He has toiled like a slave in a mill. His specialty is guaranteed to make a man moody; counts himself lucky if he can hold down his mortality to fifty per cent. What kind of a mentality would you have"—shifting his attention to Jennings, who grinned, amiably—"if you lost half your cases? They'd soon have you trussed in a big tub of hot water, feeding you through the nose with a syringe!"

"You spoke of the chief's psychoses," interrupted McDermott, approaching the dangerous word hesitatingly. "Do you mean that—literally?"

Pyle pursed his lips and nodded slowly.

"Yes—literally! One of his notions—by far the most alarming of his legion, in so far as the present dilemma is affected—has to do with his curious attitude toward fear. He mustn't be afraid of anything. He must live above fear—that is his phrase. You would think, to hear his prattle, that he was a wealthy and neurotic old lady trying to graduate from Theosophy into Bahaism..."

"What's Bahaism?" inquired Jennings, with pretended naïveté.

"Hudson believes," continued Pyle, disdainful of the annoyance, "that if a man harbours any sort of fear, no matter how benign and apparently harmless, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost. For years, he has been so consistently living above fear—fear of slumping, fear of the natural penalties of overwork, fear of the neural drain of insomnia...Haven't you heard him discoursing on the delights of reading in bed to three o'clock?...fear of that little aneurism he knows he's got—that he has driven himself at full gallop with spurs on his boots and burrs under his saddle, caroling about his freedom, until he's ready to drop. But whoever cautions him will be warmly damned for his impertinence."

Pyle had temporarily run down, and discussion became general. Carter risked suggesting that if the necessary interview with the chief required a gift for impertinence, why not deputize Jennings? Aldrich said it was no time for kidding. McDermott again nominated Pyle. Gram shouted, "Of course!" They pushed back their chairs. Pyle brought both big hands down on his knees with a resounding slap, rose with a groan, and sourly promised he'd have a go at it.

"Attaboy!" commended Jennings paternally. "Watson will do your stitches, afterwards. He has been getting some uncommonly nice cosmetic values, lately, with his scars; eh, Watty?"

The disorder incident to adjournment spared Watson the chagrin of listening to the threatened report of Jennings' eavesdropping, an hour earlier, on the dulcet cooing of a recently discharged patient, back to tender her gratitude. Emboldened by his rescue, he dispassionately told Jennings to go to hell, much to the latter's faunlike satisfaction, and the staff evaporated.

"Let's go and eat," said Pyle.

As they turned the corner in the corridor, Jennings slipped his hand under Pyle's elbow and muttered, "You know damned well what ails the chief, and so do I. It's the girl!"

"Joyce, you mean?"

"Who else?" Jennings buttoned his overcoat collar high about his throat and thrust his shoulder against the big front door and an eighty-mile gale. "Certainly, I mean Joyce. She's running wild, and he's worrying his heart out and his head off!"

"Maybe so," Pyle picked his footing carefully on the snowy steps. "But I don't believe it's very good cricket for us to analyze his family affairs."

"Nonsense! We're quite past the time for indulging in any knightly restraints. Hudson's in danger of shooting his reputation to bits. Incidentally, it will give the whole clinic a black eye when the news spreads. If the chief is off his feed because he's fretting about his girl, then it's high time we talked candidly about her. She's a silly little ass, if you ask my opinion!"

"Well, you won't be asked for your opinion. And it's no good coming at it in that mood. She may be, as you say, a silly little ass; but she's Hudson's deity!"

Jennings motioned him to climb into the coupé and fumbled in his pockets for his keys.

"She wasn't behaving much like a deity—unless Bacchus, perhaps—the last time I saw her."

"Where was that?"

"At the Tuileries, about a month ago, with a party of eight or ten noisy roisterers, in the general custody of that good-for-nothing young Merrick—you know, old Nick Merrick's carousing grandson. Believe me, they were well oiled."

"Did you—did she recognize you?"

"Oh, quite so! Came fluttering over to our table to speak to me!"

"Humph! She must have been pickled! I thought she was getting on, all right, at a girls' school in Washington...Didn't know she was home."

Jennings warmed his engine noisily, and threw in the clutch.

"Maybe she was sacked."

Pyle made some hopeless noises deep in his throat.

"Too bad about old Merrick...Salt of the earth; finest of the fine. He's had more than his share of trouble. Did you ever know Clif?"

"No. He was dead. But I've heard of him. A bum, wasn't he?"

"That describes him; and this orphan of his seems to be headed in the same direction."

"Orphan? I thought this boy's mother was living—Paris or somewhere."

"Oh yes, she's living; but the boy's an orphan, for all that. Born an orphan!" Pyle briefly reviewed the Merrick saga.

"Perhaps," suggested Jennings, as they rolled into the club garage, "you might have a chat with old Merrick, if he's such a good sort, and tell him his whelp is a contaminating influence to our girl."

"Pfff!" Pyle led the way to the elevator.

"Well, if that proposal's no good, why don't you go manfully to the young lady herself and inform her that she's driving her eminent parent crazy? Put it up to her as a matter of good sportsmanship."

"No," objected Pyle, hooking his glasses athwart his nose to inspect the menu, "she would only air her indignation to her father. And he likes people to mind their own business—as you've discovered on two or three occasions. He keeps his own counsel like a clam, and doesn't thank anybody for crashing into his affairs, no matter how benevolent may be the motive...It would be quite useless, anyway. Joyce can't help the way she's made. She is a biological throwback to her maternal grandfather. You never knew him. He was just putting the finishing touches to his career as a periodical sot when I arrived in this town, fresh from school. Cummings was the best all 'round surgeon and the hardest all 'round drinker in the state of Michigan for twenty years; one of these three-days-soused and three-weeks-sober drunkards. This girl evidently carries an over-plus of the old chap's chromosomes."

"You mean she is a dipsomaniac?"

"Well—that's a nasty word. Let's just say she's erratic. Ever since she was a little tot, she has been a storm centre. Sweetest thing in the world when she wants to be. And then all hell breaks loose and Hudson has to plead with the teachers to take her back. Oh, she's given him an exciting life; no doubt of that! And lately it's booze!"

"Hudson knows about that part of it, of course!"

"I presume so. How could he help it? She makes no secret of it. At all events, she's no hypocrite."

Jennings sighed.

"Rather unfortunate she has this one embarrassing virtue; isn't it? But, that being the case, I dare say she'll have to go to the devil at her own speed. We must persuade Hudson, however, to clear out and take a long leave of absence. He can take her along. Lay it on with a heavy hand, Pyle. Be utterly ruthless! Tell him it affects us all. That ought to fetch him. I never knew anybody quite so sensitive to the welfare of other people. Save that card for the last trick: tell him if he doesn't clear out, for a while, he will do up the rest of us!"