He put the thermometer in Bill’s mouth and felt for the pulse, but Bill mumbled, “I’ll shake my ode pulse,” and pulled his hand away. After two minutes George deftly extracted the thermometer and walked with it to the window, an act of treachery that brought Bill’s legs out of bed.
“I want to read that thermometer!” he cried. “Now, you look here! I want to know what’s on that thermometer!”
George shook it down quickly and put it in its case.
“That isn’t the way we do things here.” he said.
“Oh, isn’t it? Well, then, I’ll go somewhere where they’ve got some sense.”
George prepared a syringe and two small plates of glass.
Bill groaned. “Do you think for a moment I’m going to let you do that? I taught you everything you know about blood chemistry. By God, I used to do your lessons for you, and you come here to make some clumsy stab into my arm!”
Perspiring fluently, as was his wont under strain, George rang for a nurse, with the hope that a female presence would have a calming effect on Bill. But it was not the right female.
“Another nitwit!” Bill cried as she came in. “Do you think I’m going to lie here and stand more of this nonsense? Why doesn’t somebody take care of me? Why doesn’t somebody do something? Where’s Doctor Norton?”
“He’ll be here this afternoon.”
“This afternoon! I’ll probably be dead by this afternoon. Why isn’t he here this morning? Off on some social bat and I lie here surrounded by morons who’ve lost their heads and don’t know what to do about it. What are you writing there—that my ’tongue protrudes in mid-line without tremor’? Give me my slippers and bathrobe. I’m going to report you two as specimens for the nerve clinic.”
They pressed him down in bed, whence he looked up at George with infinite reproach.
“You, that I explained a whole book of toxicology to, you’re presuming to diagnose me. Well, then, do it! What have I got? Why is my stomach burning up? Is it appendicitis? What’s the white count?”
“How can I find out the white count when——”
With a sigh of infinite despair at the stupidity of mankind, Bill relaxed, exhausted.
Doctor Norton arrived at two o’clock. His presence should have been reassuring, but by this time the patient was too far gone in nervous tension.
“Look here, Bill,” he said sternly. “What’s all this about not letting George look into your mouth?”
“Because he deliberately gagged me with that stick,” Bill cried. “When I get out of this I’m going to stick a plank down that ugly trap of his.”
“Now, that’ll do. Do you know little Miss Cary has been crying? She says she’s going to give up nursing. She says she’s never been so disillusioned in her life.”
“The same with me. Tell her I’m going to give it up too. After this, I’m going to kill people instead of curing them. Now when I need it nobody has even tried to cure me.”
An hour later Doctor Norton stood up.
“Well, Bill, we’re going to take you at your word and tell you what’s what. I’m laying my cards on the table when I say we don’t know what’s the matter with you. We’ve just got the X-rays from this morning, and it’s pretty certain it’s not the gall bladder. There’s a possibility of acute food poisoning or mesenteric thrombosis, or it may be something we haven’t thought of yet. Give us a chance, Bill.”
With an effort and with the help of a sedative, Bill got himself in comparative control; only to go to pieces again in the morning, when George Schoatze arrived to give him a hypodermoclysis.
“But I can’t stand it,” he raged. “I never could stand being pricked, and you have as much right with a needle as a year-old baby with a machine gun.”
“Doctor Norton has ordered that you get nothing by mouth.”
“Then give it intravenously.”
“This is best.”
“What I’ll do to you when I get well! I’ll inject stuff into you until you’re as big as a barrel! I will! I’ll hire somebody to hold you down!”
Forty-eight hours later, Doctor Norton and Doctor Schoatze had a conference in the former’s office.
“So there we are,” George was saying gloomily. “He just flatly refuses to submit to the operation.”
“H’m.” Doctor Norton considered. “That’s bad.”
“There’s certainly danger of a perforation.”
“And you say that his chief objection——”
“—that it was my diaghosis. He says I remembered the word ’volvulus’ from some lecture and I’m trying to wish it on him.” George added uncomfortably: “He always was domineering, but I never saw anything like this. Today he claims it’s acute pancreatitis, but he doesn’t have any convincing reasons.”
“Does he know I agree with your opinion?”
“He doesn’t seem to believe in anybody” said George uncomfortably. “He keeps fretting about his father; he keeps thinking he could help him if he was alive.”
“I wish that there was someone outside the hospital he had some faith in,” Norton said. An idea came to him: “I wonder—” He picked up the telephone and said to the operator: “I wish you’d locate Miss Singleton, Doctor Durfee’s anaesthetist. And when she’s free, ask her to come and see me.”
Bill opened his eyes wearily when Thea came into his room at eight that night.
“Oh, it’s you,” he murmured.
She sat on the side of his bed and put her hand on his arm.
“H’lo, Bill,” she said.
“H’lo.”
Suddenly he turned in bed and put both his arms around her arm. Her free hand touched his hair.
“You’ve been bad.” she said.
“I can’t help it.”
She sat with him silently for half an hour; then she changed her position so that her arm was under his head. Stooping over him, she kissed him on the brow. He said:
“Being close to you is the first rest I’ve had in four days.”
After a while she said: “Three months ago Doctor Durfee did an operation for volvulus and it was entirely successful.”
“But it isn’t volvulus!” he cried. “Volvulus is when a loop of the intestine gets twisted on itself. It’s a crazy idea of Schoatze’s! He wants to make a trick diagnosis and get a lot of credit.”
“Doctor Norton agrees with him. You must give in, Bill. I’ll be right beside you, as close as I am now.”
Her soft voice was a sedative; he felt his resistance growing weaker; two long tears rolled from his eyes. “I feel so helpless,” he admitted. “How do I know whether George Schoatze has any sense?”
“That’s just childish,” she answered gently. “You’ll profit more by submitting to this than Doctor Schoatze will from his lucky guess.”
He clung to her suddenly. “Afterward, will you be my girl?”
She laughed. “The selfishness! The bargainer! You wouldn’t be very cheerful company if you went around with a twisted intestine.”
He was silent for a moment. “Yesterday I made my will,” he said. “I divided what I have between an old aunt and you.”
She put her face against his. “You’ll make me weep, and it really isn’t that serious at all.”
“All right then.” His white, pinched face relaxed. “Get it over with.”
Bill was wheeled upstairs an hour later. Once the matter was decided, all nervousness left him, and he remembered how the hands of Doctor Durfee had given him such a sense of surety last July, and remembered who would be at his head watching over him. His last thought as the gas began was a sudden jealousy that Thea and Howard Durfee would be awake and near each other while he was asleep…
… When he awoke he was being wheeled down a corridor to his room. Doctor Norton and Doctor Schoatze, seeming very cheerful, were by his side.
“H’lo, hello,” cried Bill in a daze. “Say, what did they finally discover about Senator Billings?”
“It was only a common cold, Bill,” said Doctor Norton. “They’ve shipped him back west—by dirigible, helicopter and freight elevator.”
“Oh,” said Bill; and then, after a moment, “I feel terrible.”
“You’re not terrible,” Doctor Norton assured him. “You’ll be up on deck in a week. George here is certainly a swell guesser.”
“It was a beautiful operation,” said George modestly. “That loop would have perforated in another six hours.”
“Good anaesthesia job, too,” said Doctor Norton, winking at George. “Like a lullaby.”
Thea slipped in to see Bill next morning, when he was rested and the soreness was eased and he felt weak but himself again. She sat beside him on the bed.
“I made an awful fool of myself,” he confessed.
“A lot of doctors do when they get sick the first time. They go neurotic.”
“I guess everybody’s off me.”
“Not at all. You’ll be in for some kidding probably. Some bright young one wrote this for the Coccidian Club show.” She read from a scrap of paper:
“Interne Tulliver, chloroformed:
Had dreams above his station;
He woke up thinking he’d performed
His own li’l’ operation.”
“I guess I can stand it,” said Bill. “I can stand anything when you’re around; I’m so in love with you. But I suppose after this you’ll always see me as about high-school age.”
“If you’d had your first sickness at forty you’d have acted the same way.”
“I hear your friend Durfee did a brilliant job, as usual,” he said resentfully.
“Yes,” she agreed; after a minute she added: “He wants to break his engagement and marry me on my own terms.”
His heart stopped beating. “And what did you say?”
“I said No.”
Life resumed itself again.
“Come closer,” he whispered. “Where’s your hand? Will you, anyhow, go swimming with me every night all the rest of September?”
“Every other night.”
“Every night.”
“Well, every hot night,” she compromised.
Thea stood up.
He saw her eyes fix momentarily on some distant spot,
