“And do elsewhere as he has done here,” Ruth said.
“That risk we must take. We shall find out where he goes and shall warn his neighbours. Wherever he goes, this will follow him.”
Mary moved. “That is all very well. But how about Abe? If he is to be told, it would have been better to tell him in the first place.”
“Exactly,” the doctor said. “Who proposed to keep it from him?”
“I did not propose to bring an action behind his back.”
“I wanted to see the man punished,” Ruth cried in despair.
“And to punish him you were willing to expose your husband to danger!”
“My husband's place is by my side!”
Mary raised her hands in angry protest.
The doctor cleared his throat. “Mary, I do not like to act against your wish. But I agree with Ruth. If her action, ill-advised as it was, has cleared the air for the recognition that Abe must be told, then I am glad it was taken. Abe will hear of it in any case: the question is merely from whom.”
“Not from me.”
“Very well. There is Ruth. She is the only person in the world who has both the right and the duty to tell him. Abe will not act on impulse. I know what I should do; I think I know what he will do. But no matter what is to be done, it is for him to do it. To deprive him of the possibility to act for himself is to deprive him of his birthright. Besides, as you say, it cannot be done.”
“Then,” Mary said, “I wash my hands of the whole affair.”
“Just a moment, Mary. I do not wish to go against your wishes; but I cannot act against my own judgment. Let me put a case. Suppose we had children; suppose I knew that a child of ours had run up against such a thing; and suppose I kept it from you, and you found out.”
Mary stared at her husband. It had been the most cruel disappointment of her life when, twenty-five years ago, he had told her that she must never have children. Since that day the
fact had not been touched on between them except in a painful silence. By mentioning it now, he placed the whole case on a different plane. She had thought him only mildly interested. This argument undeceived her.
She
had made the mistake which strangers often made about him: she had under-estimated his emotional involvement, intense to a degree of passion. He was voicing a protest against the violation of a fundamental right: the right of every human being to determine his own course of action. She thought she knew Abe; she thought she knew exactly what he would do. She felt sorry for him; more than she could express. But if her husband thought that Abe, no matter what might be the consequence, would have wanted to know; if he thought Abe would consider himself deprived of his very freedom unless he were told, then, indeed, there was no way but to tell him. “I hope you are right,” she said. “What do you suppose?”
The doctor smiled at her from where he sat, his right foot drawn up on his left knee. “I advise to withdraw the charge.”
“The charge has been withdrawn.”
“Good. Then I shall without delay run down in the car and fetch Abe home. What do you say, Ruth?”
“I think so,” Ruth said with an immense relief in her voice.
ABE
W
hen Abe, in the field, was told that his brother-in-law was waiting for him at the gate of Rogers's yard, the mood of the last day spent in his own meadow still persisted. He had resigned himself; he would rebuild life on a smaller scale. There was peace ahead; rest after a feverish life. Ruth, too, would be willing to give and to takeâ¦.
He crossed the field and yard and went to the highway. “Anything wrong?” he asked when he saw the doctor behind the wheel of his car.
“Ruth wants you, Abe.”
“All right. I'll be back in a minute. I must wash.”
A quarter of an hour later they were gliding north along the highway, in silence.
“Abe,” said the doctor after a while, “I want to tell you something.”
Abe looked up, still half withdrawn.
“I want to tell you why I gave up my practice.”
Again there was a silence before the doctor went on:
“One night, twenty-four years ago, I was called out of
bed by a message summoning me to the house of a farmer whom I knew slightly. I was called in as a consultant; a doctor from St. Cecile was in charge. When I arrived, after a drive of fifteen miles, I found a competent nurse in the house. Everything was ready for an emergency operation. I met my colleague in the parlour; and he told me about the course of the illness without giving me his own diagnosis. It was he who had called me in, not the patient's wife. At the bedside, I made my own diagnosis with the greatest care. When I returned to my colleague, I found we were in complete agreement. An immediate operation seemed to offer the only chance of life. But there was one trouble. The condition of the respiratory organs contra-indicated an ether anaesthesia. It was a serious case. If our diagnosis was correctâand we did not doubt itâdelay spelt danger. On the other hand, so long as there was a ghost of a chance of recovery without the operation, it was our duty to wait and to get an anaesthetic other than ether. The chances of the patient's living through an ether anaesthesia were one in ten. No other anaesthetic was available; we were many hours from the nearest source of supply; it was before the day of the car; and it was winter. My colleague had been prepared to proceed even before I arrived. That I came in time was a tremendous relief to him. We weighed every possibility; we decided not to wait and reported accordingly to the patient's wife, not disguising the fact that the operation might be fatal. She placed her husband in our hands. As soon as the incision was made, the man died under the anaesthetic. My colleague, bent over the body while the nurse and I tried artificial respiration, looked up at me, ghastly white. A glance showed me that our diagnosis had been mistaken. If we had waited, the man would have lived.”
Abe sat and pondered, resenting the fact that this tale should be intruded on his mood. “Why,” he asked, “do you tell me that now?”
“Abe,” said the doctor, “I never trusted myself again. My colleague had a more robust conscience. He is in practice to-day. I sold out.”
“That I understand. But why tell me to-day?”
“Nobody knows except that colleague, Mary, and you. I tell you because it might be well for you to know before you go home. It has ruined my career and darkened my life. I was a young man then and have been an old man since. A human life was given into my hands, and I took it. Of that fact I cannot dispose. Not even to-day does it avail me that I acted according to the best of my knowledge; not that probably any other consultant would have made the same mistake. We never see all the facts of a case. The greatest in my profession might have erred. Few, perhaps, leave this life without having to look back on similar errors. But all that is beside the point. We act and blunder. We can never tell. Perhaps this knowledge may help to sustain you.”
Abe sat silent, huge, disturbed. “Sustain me in what?” The doctor shrugged a shoulder and raised a hand from the wheel.
Again there was silence. The prairie to both sides of the highway was as flat as in Spalding District; but it was densely settled; and every farmstead was sheltered by wind-breaks and drained by shallow ditches. To the east, the bush fringe of the river closed the horizon.
In the north, the grain elevators of Somerville rose up; and in twenty minutes they turned west in the centre of the town.
“Any one sick?” Abe asked as the car sped into the open country again which here looked less cared for, even the road being rougher.
“It isn't that.”
Abe half turned to his companion. “Well, tell me, what is it?”
“Ruth wants you. Be patient.”
They were nearing Morley when Abe's groping thought hit on the school-house in his district. That district was claiming him. He would have to obey the callâ¦.
The car passed Morley School. “Ruth is with Mary,” the doctor said. “We shall pick her up.”
At the house Ruth came down the steps as the car came to a stop. Abe noticed every detail: the faded mauve hat, too small and too glossy, the dress of black, flowered voile, too tight over the hips. In times past he would have been touched by distaste at her sight; to-day he saw that this woman, human like himself, was stirred to her depth; and he noticed her immense relief at his return. He nodded to Mary who stood on the stoop and, in answer, raised her brows.
At the stable, Ruth and the doctor remained in their seats while Abe fetched the horse. It was four o'clock. While they waited, the whistle of the afternoon train which was late shrilled over the prairie from the east. When the buggy was ready, Ruth alighted; and the doctor, with a brief nod, backed his car away.
Abe turned into Main Street. To their left, the train was slowing down for the stop at the station, two hundred yards ahead. The ordinarily deserted platform burst into momentary life. Bags were thrown from the mail car; cream cans clattered from the van. A few passengers alighted as the buggy passed in the rear of the buildings.
Abe happened to look at Ruth. Her face held the same expression of a veiled reticence which he had seen in the doctor and Mary.
Then several things happened at once.
From the group of people who had alighted and were now passing out, one figure detached itself at a run. Abe was on the point of pulling the pony to a stop; but Ruth reached for the whip in its socket and brought it down on the horse's back. People stopped, laughing.
The little horse broke into a trot and, at a second blow from the whip, into a gallop.
The man who had started to run was still following them, shouting. Abe, whose attention was claimed by the horse, did not understand all he said, but he caught a few words about “getting even with the whole Spalding outfit.” He had not recognized the man.
Then came Ruth's voice. “Don't stop. I must talk to you first.”
The whip coming down a third time, the horse took the turn to the north at a gallop, with the buggy running precariously on two wheels.
For several minutes Abe did not speak. When he did, his voice held a note of weary patience. “Was that McCrae at the station?”
“Yes.”
“You mustn't get so upset about thingsâ¦. Is Frances alone?”
Ruth's heart pounded. “Take me home first. Then I shall tell you.”
Abe nodded; a deep, trench-like frown settled on his brow.
They came to the second mile-crossing with the bridge over the so-called first ditch. Beyond, to the right, John Elliot was crossing his yard, swinging his long arms, his bullet head bent to one side. As he heard the rumble of the buggy on the
culvert, he stopped and turned. Seeing Abe, he broke into a sort of gallop to intercept him.
To the left, an old woman, working on a flower bed close to the road, in front of Hilmer's shack, rested from her labours, leaning on the handle of her hoe, her wide, ragged skirt hanging unevenly about her broomstick legs. She stared at the two, the man in the buggy, straight and stern, and the other by his side, one hand on a wheel.
“I've been wanting to see you, Spalding,” Elliot said. “Things can't go on the way they're going down there at the school. Drinking and dancing all night and every night. And worse things. It's got to be stopped. We have to have someone else on the board. We're all agreed that you are the man. But I've promised, if you refuse, I'll run myself.”
Abe nodded. Then, to the other's amazement, he said slowly, “I suppose I'll have to go on that board.”
“All right. I am with you. And so is every decent settler.”
As Abe moved on, Mrs. Grappentin shouted after him; but as she spoke in German, he did not understand. “Ah now!” she called. “Is the great lord stepping down from his shining height? Now he's got a whore in the family like other common folk?” And she broke into a cackling laugh, waving her hand after the buggy in the greeting of fellowship. Grappentin, her sponging husband who had come back since his stepson was working for wages again, stepped into the open door and joined in her villainous laugh, spitting tobacco juice into a bed of blooming asters.
A shudder ran down Abe's spine at the sound; and Ruth paled. The voice, unintelligible though it was, sounded like the voice of the prairie which lay swooning under the afternoon sun.
They passed Dave Topp's place, a one-roomed shed resembling a granary. He lived very quietly now and played his violin of an evening in front of his door. Next, Henry Topp's yard, unchanged in all these years. Of the three brothers, only Slim succeeded in making his place look like a farm; but people said that, at the rate at which he spent money, he would never “make his place a go,” to say nothing of paying his debt to the Government. His new white house presented a striking contrast to Horanski's establishment across the road with its low, dark buildings in keeping with the soil. Yet Horanski was said to be making money.
Old man Blaine's cottage followed next, to the right and just south of the school which had become the abode of iniquity. A curtain moved in the window; and behind the pane trembled a leonine head. Man passes, they say; his work remains. Does it? It seemed vain in the face of the composure of this prairie. This was the district: farmsteads to east, west, south, and north: and that district was calling for Abe. Dare he decline to take hold?
Nicoll's wind-break across the corner was mature now, too; and when the buggy turned the corner, Abe almost felt compassionate eyes peering after him. At the gate, he caught a glimpse of a stout, towering female in the shade, no doubt muttering in her pathetic way, “There goes the fallen hero! The shame and pity of it!” In days long past Abe had laughed at her dramatic ways.
And on, past Dick Nicoll's, for another two miles, to his own place which, for a while, would stand as a monument to man's endeavour. South of the ditch, the meadow stretched away, mamillated with haystacks.