Bill clapped a thermometer in his mouth and took his pulse. Then he made the routine examination of chest, stomach, throat and the rest. The reflexes were sluggish to the little rubber hammer. Bill sat down beside the bed.
“I’d trade hearts with you any day,” he promised.
“They all say I’ve got a good heart,” agreed the man. “What did you think of Hoover’s speech?”
“I thought you were tired of politics.”
“That’s true, but I got thinking of Hoover while you went over me.”
“About Hoover?”
“About me. What did you find out?”
“We’ll want to make some tests. But you seem pretty sound really.”
“I’m not sound,” the patient snapped. “I’m not sound. I’m a sick man.”
Bill took out a P. E. form and a fountain pen.
“What’s your name?” he began.
“Paul B. Van Schaik.”
“Your nearest relative?”
There was nothing in the case history on which to form any opinion. Mr. Van Schaik had had several children’s diseases. Yesterday morning he was unable to get out of bed and his valet had taken his temperature and found fever.
Bill’s thermometer registered no fever.
“Now we’re going to make just a little prick in your thumb,” he said, preparing glass slides, and when this had been accomplished to the tune of a short, dismal howl from the patient, he added: “We want just a little specimen from your upper arm.”
“You want everything but my tears,” protested the patient.
“We have to investigate all the possibilities,” said Bill sternly, plunging the syringe into the soft upper arm, inspiring more explosive protests from Mr. Van Schaik.
Reflectively Bill replaced his instruments. He had obtained no clue as to what was the matter and he eyed the patient reproachfully. On a chance, he looked for enlarged cervical glands, and asked him if his parents were alive, and took a last look at throat and teeth.
“Eyes normally prominent,” he wrote down, with a feeling of futility. “Pupils round and equal.”
“That’s all for the moment,” he said. “Try and get some rest.”
“Rest!” cried Mr. Van Schaik indignantly. “That’s just the trouble. I haven’t been able to sleep for three days. I feel worse every minute.”
As Bill went out into the hall, George Schoatze was just emerging from the room next door. His eyes were uncertain and there was sweat upon his brow.
“Finished?” Bill asked.
“Why, yes, in a way. Did Doctor Norton set you a job too?”
“Yeah. Kind of puzzling case in here—contradictory symptoms,” he lied.
“Same here,” said George, wiping his brow. “I’d rather have started out on something more clearly defined, like the ones Robinson gave us in class last year—you know, where there were two possibilities and one probability.”
“Unobliging lot of patients,” agreed Bill.
A student nurse approached him.
“You were just in 312,” she said in a low voice. “I better tell you. I unpacked for the patient, and there was one empty bottle of whisky and one half empty. He asked me to pour him a drink, but I didn’t like to do that without asking a doctor.”
“Quite right,” said Bill stiffly, but he wanted to kiss her hand in gratitude.
Dispatching the specimens to the laboratory, the two internes went in search of Doctor Norton, whom they found in his office.
“Through already? What luck, Tulliver?”
“He’s been on a bust and he’s got a hangover,” Bill blurted out. “I haven’t got the laboratory reports yet, but my opinion is that’s all.”
“I agree with you,” said Doctor Norton. “All right, Schoatze; how about the lady in 314?”
“Well, unless it’s too deep for me, there’s nothing the matter with her at all.”
“Right you are,” agreed Doctor Norton. “Nerves—and not even enough of them for the Ward clinic. What’ll we do with them?”
“Throw em out,” said Bill promptly.
“Let them stay,” corrected Doctor Norton. “They can afford it. They come to us for protection they don’t need, so let them pay for a couple of really sick people over in the free wards. We’re not crowded.”
Outside the office, Bill and George fastened eyes.
“Humbling us a little,” said Bill rather resentfully. “Let’s go up to the operating rooms; I want to convince myself all over again that this is a serious profession.” He swore. “I suppose for the next few months we’ll be feeling the bellies of four-flushers and taking the case histories of women who aren’t cases.”
“Never mind,” said George cautiously. “I was just as glad to start with something simple like—like——”
“Like what?”
“Why, like nothing.”
“You’re easily pleased,” Bill commented.
Ascertaining from a bulletin board that Dr. Howard Durfee was at work in No. 4, they took the elevator to the operating rooms. As they slipped on the gowns, caps, and then the masks, Bill realized how quickly he was breathing.
He saw HER before he saw anything else in the room, except the bright vermilion spot of the operation itself, breaking the universal whiteness of the scene. There was a sway of eyes toward the two internes as they came into the gallery, and Bill picked out her eyes, darker than ever in contrast with the snowy cap and mask, as she sat working the gas machine at the patient’s invisible head. The room was small. The platform on which they stood was raised about four feet, and by leaning out on a glass screen like a windshield, they brought their eyes to within two yards of the surgeon’s busy hands.
“It’s a neat appendix—not a cut in the muscle,” George whispered. “That guy can play lacrosse tomorrow.”
Doctor Durfee, busy with catgut, heard him.
“Not this patient,” he said. “Too many adhesions.”
His hands, trying the catgut, were sure and firm, the fine hands of a pianist, the tough hands of a pitcher combined. Bill thought how insecure, precariously involved, the patient would seem to a layman, and yet how safe he was with those sure hands in an atmosphere so made safe from time itself. Time had stopped at the door of the operating room, too profane to enter here.
Thea Singleton guarded the door of the patient’s consciousness, a hand on a pulse, another turning the wheels of the gas machine, as if they were the stops on a silent organ. There were others in attendance—an assisting surgeon, a nurse who passed instruments, a nurse who made liaison between the table and the supplies—but Bill was absorbed in what subtle relationship there was between Howard Durfee and Thea Singleton; he felt a wild jealousy toward the mask with the brilliant, agile hands.
“I’m going,” he said to George.
He saw her that afternoon, and again it was in the shadow of the great stone Christ in the entrance hall. She was in street clothes, and she looked slick and fresh and tantalizingly excitable.
“Of course. You’re the man the night of the Coccidian show. And now you’re an interne. Wasn’t it you who came into Room 4 this morning?”
“Yes. How did it go?”
“Fine. It was Doctor Durfee.”
“Yes,” he said with emphasis. “I know it was Doctor Durfee.”
He met her by accident or contrivance half a dozen times in the next fortnight, before he judged he could ask her for a date.
“Why, I suppose so.” She seemed a little surprised. “Let’s see. How about next week—either Tuesday or Wednesday?”
“How about tonight?”
“Oh, not possibly.”
When he called Tuesday at the little apartment she shared with a woman musician from the Peabody Institute, he said:
“What would you like to do? See a picture?”
“No,” she answered emphatically. “If I knew you better I’d say let’s drive about a thousand miles into the country and go swimming in some quarry.” She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not one of those very impulsive internes, are you, that just sweep poor nurses off their feet?”
“On the contrary, I’m scared to death of you,” Bill admitted.
It was a hot night, but the white roads were cool. They found out a little about each other: She was the daughter of an Army officer and had grown up in the Philippines, and in the black-and-silver water of the abandoned quarry she surprised him with such diving as he had never seen a girl do. It was ghostly inside of the black shadow that ringed the glaring moonlight, and their voices echoed loud when they called to each other.
Afterward, with their heads wet and their bodies stung alive, they sat for awhile, unwilling to start back. Suddenly—she smiled, and then looked at him without speaking, her lips just barely parted. There was the starlight set upon the brilliant darkness; and there were her pale cool cheeks, and Bill let himself be lost in love for her, as he had so wanted to do.
“We must go,” she said presently.
“Not yet.”
“Oh, yet—very yet—exceedingly yet.”
“Because,” he said after a moment, “you’re Doctor Durfee’s girl?”
“Yes,” she admitted after a moment, “I suppose I’m Doctor Durfee’s girl.”
“Why are you?” he cried.
“Are you in love with me?”
“I suppose I am. Are you in love with Durfee?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not in love with anybody. I’m just—his girl.”
So the evening that had been at first ecstatic was finally unsatisfactory. This feeling deepened when he found that for his date he had to thank the fact that Durfee was out of town for a few days.
With August and the departure of more doctors on vacation, he found himself very busy. During four years he had dreamed of such work as he was doing, and now it was all disturbed by the ubiquity of “Durfee’s girl.” In vain he searched among the girls in the city, on those Sundays when he could go into the city, for some who would soften the hurt of his unreciprocated emotion. But the city seemed empty of girls, and in
