Читать книгу Lola - Owen Davis - Страница 5

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From her window, a few hours later, Lola could see her father as he turned in from Eighth Avenue and walked briskly toward the house. With him was a rather short, extremely animated, and perfectly groomed gentleman, whom she at once knew to be Doctor Paul Crossett. Even from that distance she could plainly see that, although she knew him to be a man of her father’s age, he had the look of one much younger.

It would be a bold man who would dare to state that married life and the atmosphere of a home do more to bring about grey hairs and wrinkles than the emptiness of a bachelor’s existence, but in this case, at least, the contrast was startling.

Paul Crossett, quite fifty, had, and looked to have, all the enthusiasms of youth. He was a Frenchman, and to a close observer he was perhaps rather freer in gesticulations than our somewhat stiff New Yorkers, but he was far from being the Frenchman of the comic supplement. Indeed, Paul Crossett was a real citizen of the world, quite as much at home in New York, London or Berlin as he was in Paris. He was one of the best known authorities on nervous disorders in the medical world, besides being a surgeon of international reputation. As he entered the room with her father a moment later, Lola advanced to meet him with a smile, but, to her surprise, at the sight of her he stopped, and a look of deep sorrow, almost of fear, came into his face.

“This is Lola, Paul,” said the Doctor proudly.

In a moment the look on Dr. Crossett’s face changed to one of eager welcome, and he stepped forward and took both of her extended hands in his.

“You are as your mother was,” he said gently, then as he stooped to kiss her saying softly, “My age permits,” she saw a tear on his smooth, almost boyish cheek, and with a woman’s quick intuition she understood and loved him for the love he had had for her mother, whom he had not seen since his early manhood, but whom he had never forgotten, and never could forget.

E. M. KIMBALL AS DOCTOR CROSSET.

In that moment grew up between those two an affection and an understanding that under happier circumstances would have lasted all their lives. In the awful time, now so rapidly approaching, he was to be her truest friend. His love and sympathy was to outlast that of lover and father. He gave to her the place in his heart that her mother had always had, the same blind love and devotion, and it was hers until the end.

“I am glad to know you, Doctor Crossett,” said Lola, a little timidly, as he stepped away from her, now smiling merrily.

“So,” he replied heartily, as he looked around the room curiously. “So! this is one of your famous New York apartments?”

“No, Paul,” said Dr. Barnhelm, rather ruefully, “this is a flat.”

“But what is the difference?”

“About a hundred dollars a month.”

“But surely you are not poor, Martin, you, with your mind?”

“My dear Paul, it takes twenty-four hours a day to make a good living here in New York, and I could not spare the time.”

“I see,” exclaimed Dr. Crossett, as his keen eyes fell upon the complicated electrical apparatus on the table. “You had a better use for it.” He crossed and bent over the affair with deep professional interest.

“So? A high frequency, a most peculiar and most powerful interrupter. Not for the X-ray? No, then for what?”

“I am going to tell you all about it. There is no man in America, and only one other in Europe, who could judge of it as you could judge. It is ten years’ work, Paul; it has meant poverty to both of us, but it is a big thing.”

“Tell me,” said Dr. Crossett eagerly.

“Tell him, father,” interrupted Lola, “while I run to the store. I will only be a few moments, and you won’t miss me. When I come back, Doctor Crossett,” she smiled at him frankly, “I am going to make you explain to me all about it. Father never would.”

She left them, in spite of Dr. Crossett’s offers to accompany her, and as the door closed behind her he stood for a moment looking after her, and from her to a framed picture of her mother that hung on the wall.

“Nine years, Martin,” he laid his slender, powerful hand gently on his old friend’s shoulder; “nine years since you wrote me that her mother——”

They stood together for a moment in silence before the Doctor answered: “Yes, Paul, nine years.”

“I was with you in my heart,” the Frenchman continued, “but, tut—tut—! Come, you have discovered—what?”

As he turned away the bell rang, and with a word of excuse Dr. Barnhelm stepped to the door and admitted John Dorris.

“Lola told me to wait for her here,” said the young man cheerfully. “She wouldn’t let me go with her, to tell the truth; I am taking a little holiday, and I don’t quite know what to do with myself.”

The Doctor turned to his friend, smiling.

“Each of us, Doctor Crossett, as we grow older accumulate troubles. Will you let me present my worst, Mr. John Dorris?”

“I am pleased,” said the Frenchman, bowing, “but shall I confess that I do not understand?”

“I am going to marry Lola,” said John frankly, as he stepped forward and offered his hand.

“Ah! Now I do understand,” responded Dr. Crossett. “Then Dr. Barnhelm has my sympathy, and you my approval. You have at least, good taste.”

“Thank you, Doctor—am I in the way?” inquired John, turning to Dr. Barnhelm.

“Not at all. I was about to explain my pet hobby; as you will often have to hear about it, it might be a good thing if you were to listen now. I will spare you the technical description, John; you would not understand, and you, Paul, are of course familiar with this apparatus. This, then, is an instrument by which, if I am right, and I am convinced that there is no doubt of that, I can restore life to a person who has been dead for many hours.”

“Doctor!” cried John, horrified and anxious; and he turned to Dr. Crossett, expecting him to share in his belief that long hours of brooding over his experiments had turned the old man’s brain, but, to his intense surprise, he read nothing but eager interest in the Frenchman’s face, as the latter bent over the instrument and inquired earnestly: “Many hours, Martin?”

“Five,” replied Dr. Barnhelm; “perhaps six, possibly seven!”

“That has not been claimed before?”

“I can do it.”

“You can restore the dead to life?” demanded John with such disbelief and distress in his voice that Dr. Crossett turned to him with a kindly smile and said gently, “You need not look at your future father-in-law in horror, my dear young friend. He is not mad. I have studied these things, as perhaps you know. In Paris I have seen the experiment tried. I have seen the heart action cease and later be resumed. I have seen muscular activity stimulated and the patient, whom I myself had pronounced dead, rise and walk unaided from the operating room. But”—he stopped and for a moment eyed his old friend keenly—“but only has this been done in my peculiar case, and never more than five minutes after the last flutter of the pulse!”

“My theory is right,” replied Dr. Barnhelm with deep conviction. “My instrument is right! As yet I have been unable to demonstrate it upon a human being for want of a subject, but I have succeeded always with the lower animals.”

“You claim what, Martin?” continued Dr. Crossett. “That you can restore the heart action to those who die, of what?”

The Doctor smiled slightly as he replied:

“Death is what? When the heart ceases to beat! Life is what? When it beats on, untroubled. I can take the body of a man whose pulse has not fluttered in hours, and I can bring the beating of his heart back! I can bring him back to life!”

He looked almost in triumph into the earnest, sympathetic face of his friend, then turned to John, but his smile left him at what he saw in the young man’s eyes.

“Don’t say that, Doctor,” begged John, earnestly. “I can’t believe that it is true, and if it is, it is horrible!”

“I do not claim to give life,” explained the older man gently, “only to restore it. For how long depends upon the nature of the disease of which the patient dies. Old age must always have its victims. I cannot check decay, nor cancer, nor tuberculosis. There are many cases where, if I were to bring my patient back to life, it would be but to die again, but there are many, many times when I can, and will, restore life to those who die by accident, by drowning, by heart failure, by shock!”

“It is sacrilege!” cried John in horror. “Suppose that a man dies, and his body is brought to you. Do you claim that you will give him back his life?”

“I do,” answered the Doctor firmly.

“What of his soul?”

“John,” exclaimed the doctor, startled and offended by the question.

“When a man dies,” continued John earnestly, “more than the throbbing of his pulse leaves him. The thing we call a soul, whatever it may be, wherever it may be, goes out with his life, out of his body to a life everlasting. In God’s name, how dare you talk of bringing that empty shell back into the living world?”

“I have lived for over twenty years in the dissecting room,” remarked Dr. Crossett, with rather a contemptuous smile. “I know the human body. They differ very little, each organ has its place, all is complete—I have not found a soul.”

“We do not think alike there, Paul,” said Dr. Barnhelm gravely. “There is something, a soul, an intelligence, call it what you will, but it is not tangible, and it is divine! I mean no sacrilege. Why, this theory of mine, the truth of which I am prepared to prove, has been my prayer, and now it has been granted. It is for the good of humanity.”

“I don’t like it,” replied John nervously. “You know best, I suppose, and I am going to try to take your word for it, but I don’t like it. If you don’t mind, I’ll go and meet Lola. It may be all right, I suppose it is, if you say so, but it gives me the fidgets.”

He left the room as he spoke, and as he closed the door and started down the stairs he heard them laughing together.

“He is not a physician,” said Dr. Crossett as soon as John was out of hearing.

“No,” replied Dr. Barnhelm. “He is a bank clerk.”

“Bank clerk! La! Then why try to make him understand? Come, tell me all about this,” and he looked critically at the apparatus before him.

“It is the theory,” began the Doctor, “of a tremendously interrupted electrical current applied to the heart. The high frequency in itself is not new.”

“No,” agreed Dr. Crossett. “Romanoff, Thailer, Woodstock, eh?”

“Yes, but the application is new, and also I have here a Mercury Turbine Interrupter of my own invention. I can get over thirty thousand more interruptions a second than were ever before obtained. With it I have never once failed. It was the great high frequency by which I won my battle. It is ready now to show to the world.”

“Ah! Your theory—it is pretty.”

“It is true.”

“Then,” exclaimed Dr. Crossett, “there need be no more of this.” He looked contemptuously around the shabby room and out through the window at the noisy, squalid neighborhood.

“To live as New York lives! It is not civilization. It is like the cave man, to live in a hole in a cliff. Bah! To sit on an ugly chair, and to look at nothing, out of dirty windows!”

“New York,” laughed Dr. Barnhelm, “is the great market place of the world. You can buy anything here, even beautiful surroundings.”

“Then you, Martin, shall buy them. This,” he touched the electrical apparatus almost tenderly, “will bring fame and wealth. Happiness you had before.”

“It has been selfish of me in a way, Paul,” began the Doctor, as though trying to find excuses to satisfy his own conscience, “but Lola has not minded. She is as Helen was. If she is surrounded by love and tenderness, she is content. She does not ask fortune for many of her favors.”

“She does not need them, Martin.”

As Dr. Crossett spoke, from below, through the open window, came the harsh clang of an ambulance bell, and these two surgeons both stopped and listened, their professional instinct unconsciously aroused.

“There is a sound, Martin,” he continued, “that is understood in every country in the world.”

“The ambulance stopped here at this house,” said Dr. Barnhelm, with a trace of nervousness, and he stepped to the window and looked out. “There is a crowd collecting. I wonder——”

DOCTOR BARNHELM PERFECTS HIS MACHINE FOR RESTORING ANIMATION.

The door burst open, and John Dorris entered the room; as they saw his face, they knew at once that the news he brought was bad news, and both being brave men, they turned calmly and steadily to meet it.

“Doctor,” he panted hoarsely, “Lola—Lola!”

“Well, John?”

It was the father who spoke, and his cool, even tone did much to steady the boy.

“She,” he continued brokenly, “she—they—they are bringing her! There was an accident, she—she——” He stopped as Dick Fenway entered, so pale and wild, that Dr. Crossett, to whom he was a stranger, stepped forward, as though to offer to support him, but stopped suddenly as Fenway cried out: “I did it! It was my fault! As she crossed the Avenue I turned my car, thinking she would stop, but she hated me, and she wouldn’t stop, and—and—I killed her.”

There was silence for a moment in the room, broken only by Fenway’s sobs and by a low moan of anguish from the father. Then came a sound of stumbling footsteps, slowly, very slowly advancing up the stairs. The sound of men carrying a heavy burden.

“My friend! Be brave!” and Paul Crossett put his arm about his old friend’s shoulders. “We will fight for her life, you and I together, as life is not often fought for.”

The footsteps had grown nearer, in the room there was silence as the four men waited, in the court-yard below a street organ began to play, and the foolish, empty tune burned itself forever into their memories as they stood there.

The footsteps hesitated for a moment on the landing below, then began again, nearer, louder now, and suddenly a big, red-faced policeman stood in the doorway.

“Here?” he inquired, in that queer, impersonal voice that speaks of long acquaintance with the tragedies of life.

“Yes,” replied John, hoarsely, “here.”

An ambulance surgeon entered in response to the officer’s nod, and following him came another policeman and a white-coated driver; between them on a stretcher they bore a covered form, very quiet, so quiet that not even a movement stirred the blanket that covered it.

As they put their burden down gently on the worn old couch the young surgeon turned to Dr. Barnhelm, who stepped forward.

“It is no use, sir. You can’t do anything. It was the heart, I think. She was not crushed, but she died instantly. Can any of you give me the facts for my report?”

Maria had entered the adjoining room, attracted by the unusual sounds, and heard what he said, and as she heard she cried out pitifully. The sound seemed to add the finishing touch to the strain they were under, and they turned sharply.

“Go, Maria!” said the Doctor, coldly. “Answer any questions this gentleman asks of you. Compose yourself, please, and go.”

The girl turned without a word, and followed by the surgeon went out into the hall, the driver and one of the policemen joining them, while the other crossed and touched Dick Fenway on the arm.

“You’ll have to come with me, sir,” he said quietly.

Fenway for a moment looked at him bewildered, then stooped and picking up the hat he had dropped on the floor, slowly walked to the door. At the door he stopped and looked back at the covered figure on the couch, shuddered and went out, the officer following.

John closed the door softly behind them and turned back to where the two men stood, Paul Crossett’s hand on the father’s shoulder.

“Can’t—can’t you do anything,” he questioned, “anything at all?”

“Wait!” The word came like a command, sharply, from Dr. Barnhelm’s lips. “Paul! You know what I am going to do?”

Dr. Crossett nodded slightly. The meaning of it came suddenly to John, and he cried out in protest, “Doctor!”

“You see her there! Dead!” The father spoke slowly, calmly. “Well, I can bring her back! She is my daughter.” He turned quietly to John, but with a look in his eyes that few men would have dared oppose.

“Shall I let her die? I—who can save her?”

“No,” the young man spoke humbly, “no. I—I love her too.”

“Go—wait outside. Go—now!” and John went with just one look at the still form on the couch.

“I am ready, Martin,” said Dr. Crossett, when they were alone, and he threw off his coat and stepping to the table starting to connect the batteries and adjust his instrument with the practical hand of an expert. For just one moment the father faltered.

“It is only a theory, Paul. It may fail.”

“We are here,” replied his friend steadily, “to make that theory fact. You must direct me. Call the interruptions as you want them.”

The doctor crossed to the couch, and drawing aside the blanket stood looking down at Lola. In that moment all that this child of his meant to him came into his mind, and the thought gave him strength. The fear and grief died, and in their place came firmness, confidence. He knelt and deftly unfastened her dress and bared her girlish breast, then crossing to the table took in each hand a glass electrode connected by long wires to the powerful machine, and slowly returned to where his daughter lay.

“Now, Paul!”

A touch of Dr. Crossett’s practised hand and the great machine came to life. Back and forth in the coil violet sparks jumped, flashing, sparkling. From the electrodes in his strong hands a million tiny specks of light sprang angrily, and when for a moment he held them close together these specks became a solid bar of violet light, almost a flame. The noise was deafening, the solid crash of the leaping current, as Dr. Crossett gradually moved his index up to its full strength, rang through the little room and echoed back from the walls, the vibrations so close that to any but a practiced ear they sounded like one steady roar.

Once again he paused beside the couch, and an electrode in each hand, the violet light dancing all about him, he raised his eyes in a short prayer. “God help me,” he said, his voice half buried in the riot of sound. “Don’t hold my pride against me. I ask it, not as the inventor, but as the father.”

He did not speak again, nor did the friend who stood watchfully beside the spluttering, crashing machine. Three times he held the electrodes to her body, one over her heart, one against her back, but there was no movement, no sign of life. The leaping sparks seemed to pass through her tender frame, but she lay there still, with that awful stillness of the dead. The man, working over her, the father no longer, but the physician, the inventor, did not hesitate. Again and again she was enfolded in the bright beams of violet light. Again and again he held the leaping current to her heart, and at last, when, for what seemed to be the hundredth time he drew back and looked at her, his whole body suddenly stiffened, a hoarse cry burst from him, and he fell crashing to the floor.

Dr. Crossett shut off the current and sprang to him. He had fainted, and turning from him to Lola, Paul Crossett saw what the father had seen. A soft color slowly stealing back into that white face and a slow, steady rising and falling of her breast as her heart began again to beat.