“Well?” Miss Jenny said impatiently. The doctor shut the cabinet carefully and washed and dried his hands and carne and stood above them, and with his thumbs hooked in his jacket pockets he became solemnly and unctuously technical, rolling the harsh words upon his tongue with epicurean deliberation.
“It should be removed at once,” he concluded. “It should be removed while in its early stage; that is why I advise an immediate operation.”
“You mean, it might develop into cancer?” Miss Jenny asked.
“No question about it at all, madam. Course of time. Neglect it, and I can promise you nothing; have it out now, and he need never worry about it again.” He looked at old Bayard again with lingering and chill contemplation. “It will be very simple. I’ll remove it as easily as that.” And he made a short gesture with his hand.
“What’s that?” Bayard demanded.
“I say, I can take that growth off so easily you won’t know it, Colonel Sartoris.”
“I’ll be damned if you do!” Bayard rose with one of his characteristic plunging movements.
“Sit down, Bayard,” Miss Jenny ordered. “Nobody’s going to cut on you without your knowing it.—Should it be done right away?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I wouldn’t have that thing on my face overnight. Otherwise, it is only fair to warn you that no doctor can assume responsibility for what might ensue. . . . I could remove it in two minutes,” he added, looking at Bayard’s face again with cold speculation. Then he half turned his head and stood in a listening attitude, and beyond the thin walls a voice in the other room boomed in rich, rolling waves.
“Mawnin’, sister,” it said. “Didn’t I hear Bayard Sartoris cussin’ in here?” The doctor and Miss Jenny held their arrested attitudes; then the door opened and the fattest man in the whole county filled it. He wore a shiny alpaca coat over waistcoat and trousers of baggy black broadcloth; above a plaited shirt the fatty rolls of his dewlap practically hid his low collar and a black string tie. His Roman senator’s head was thatched with a vigorous curling of silvery hair. “What the devil’s the matter with you?” he boomed; then he sidled into the room, filling it completely, dwarfing its occupants and its furnishings.
This was Doctor Lucius Quintus Peabody, eighty-seven years old and weighing three hundred and ten pounds and possessing a digestive tract like a horse. He had practiced medicine in the county when a doctor’s equipment consisted of a saw and a gallon of whisky and a satchel of calomel; he had been John Sartoris’ regimental surgeon, and up to the day of the automobile he would start out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard, to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him, accepting for fee usually a meal of corn pone and coffee, or perhaps a small measure of corn or fruit, or a few flower bulbs or graftings.
When he was young and hasty he had kept a daybook, kept it meticulously until these hypothetical assets totaled $10,000. But that was forty years ago, and since then he hadn’t bothered with a record at all; and now from time to time a countryman enters his shabby office and discharges an obligation, commemorating sometimes the prayer’s entry into the world, incurred by his father or grandfather, which Doctor Peabody himself had long since forgotten about.
Everyone in the county knew him and sent him hams and wild game at Christmas, and it was said that he could spend the balance of his days driving about the county in the buckboard he still used, with never a thought for board and lodging and without the expenditure of a penny for either. He filled the room with his bluff and homely humanity, and as he crossed the floor and patted Miss Jenny’s back with one flail-like hand, the whole building trembled to his tread.
“Mawnin’, Jenny,” he said. “Havin’ Bayard measured for insurance?”
“This damn butcher wants to cut on me,” old Bayard said querulously. “You come on and make ’em let me alone, Loosh.”
“Ten A.M.’s mighty early in the day to start carvin’ white folks,” Dr. Peabody boomed. “Nigger’s different. Chop up a nigger any time after midnight. What’s the matter with him, son?” he asked Dr. Alford.
“I don’t believe it’s anything but a wart,” Miss Jenny said, “but I’m tired of looking at it.”
“It’s no wart,” Dr. Alford corrected stiffly. He recapitulated his diagnosis in technical terms while Dr. Peabody enveloped them all in the rubicund benevolence of his presence.
“Sounds pretty bad, don’t it?” he agreed, and he shook the floor again and pushed Bayard firmly into his chair with one huge hand, and with the other he dragged his face up to the light. Then he dug a pair of iron-bowed spectacles from the pocket of his coat and examined Bayard’s face. “Think it ought to come off, do you?”
“I do,” Dr. Alford answered coldly. “I think it is imperative that it be removed. Unnecessary there. Cancer.”
“Folks got along with cancer a long time befo’ they invented knives,” Dr. Peabody said drily. “Hold still, Bayard.”
And people like you, are one of the reasons, was on the tip of the younger man’s tongue. But he forebore and said instead, “I can remove that growth in two minutes, Colonel Sartoris.”
“Damned if you do,” Bayard rejoined violently, trying to rise. “Get away, Loosh.”
“Sit still,” Dr. Peabody said equably, holding him down while he probed at the wen. “Does it hurt any?”
“No. I never said it did. And I’ll be damned—”
“You’ll probably be damned anyway,” Dr. Peabody told him. “You’d be about as well off dead, anyhow. I don’t know anybody that gets less fun out of living than you do.”
“You told the truth for once,” Miss Jenny agreed. “He’s the oldest person I ever knew in my life.”
“And so,” Dr. Peabody continued blandly, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Let it stay there. Nobody cares what your face looks like. If you were a young fellow, now, out sparkin’ the gals every night—”
“If Dr. Peabody is permitted to interfere with impunity—” Dr. Alford began.
“Will Falls says he can cure it.” Bayard said.
“With that salve of his?” Dr. Peabody asked quickly. “Salve?” Dr. Alford repeated. “Colonel Sartoris, if you permit any quack that comes along to treat that growth with homemade or patent remedies, you’ll be dead in six months. Dr. Peabody even will bear me out,” he added with fine irony.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Peabody replied slowly. “Will has done some curious things with that salve of his.”
“I must protest against this,” Dr. Alford said. “Mrs. Du Pre, I protest against a member of my profession sanctioning, even negatively, such a procedure.”
“Pshaw, boy,” Dr. Peabody answered, “we ain’t goin’ to let Will put his dope on Bayard’s wart. It’s all right for niggers and livestock, but Bayard don’t need it. We’ll just let this thing alone, long as it don’t hurt him.”
“If that growth is not removed immediately, I wash my hands of all responsibility,” Dr. Alford stated. “To neglect it will be as fatal as Mr. Falls’ salve. Mrs. Du Pre, I ask you to witness that this consultation has taken this unethical turn through no fault of mine and over my protest.”
“Pshaw, boy,” Dr. Peabody said again, “this ain’t hardly worth the trouble of cuttin’ out. We’ll save you an arm or a leg as soon as that fool grandson of his turns that automobile over with ’em. Come on with me, Bayard.”
“Mrs. Du Pre—” Dr. Alford essayed.
“Bayard can come back, if he wants to,” Dr. Peabody patted the younger man’s shoulder with his heavy hand. “I’m going to take him to my office and talk to him a while. Jenny can bring him back, if she wants to. Come on, Bayard.” And he led old Bayard from the room. Miss Jenny rose also.
“That Loosh Peabody is as big a fogy as old Will Falls,” she said. “Old people just fret me to death. You wait: I’ll bring him right back here, and we’ll finish this business.” Dr. Alford held the door open for her and she sailed in a stiff, silk-clad rage from the room and followed her nephew across the corridor and through the scarred door with its rusty lock, and into a room resembling a miniature cyclonic devastation mellowed peacefully over with dust ancient and undisturbed.
“You, Loosh Peabody,” Miss Jenny said.
“Sit down, Jenny,” Dr. Peabody told her. “And be quiet. Unfasten your shirt, Bayard.”
“What?” old Bayard said belligerently. The other thrust him into a chair.
“Want to see your chest,” he explained. He crossed to an ancient roll-top desk and rummaged through the dusty litter upon it. There was litter and dust everywhere in the huge room. Its four windows gave upon the square, but the elms and sycamores ranged along the sides of the square shaded these first floor offices, so that light entered them, but tempered, like light beneath water.
In the corners of the ceiling were spider webs thick and heavy as Spanish moss and dingy as old lace, and the once-white walls were an even and unemphatic drab save for a paler rectangle here and there where an outdated calendar had hung and been removed.
Besides the desk, the room contained three or four miscellaneous chairs in various stages of decrepitude, a rusty stove in a sawdust-filled box, and a leather sofa holding mutely amid
