Jonathan sat up. “Jeff Holliday? I didn’t know he was even in town!”
His face became darkly bright. “When did he get back?”
“Two days ago. He said he tried to reach you but couldn’t Are you his doctor?”
“No. His mother is a fierce hysteric and likes old Louis Hedler, and he was always a boy who listened to Mama. We went to school together. He was one of the few friends I ever had. Old Jeff Holliday! Wonderful. Fine engineer, went to South America for the past six years, don’t know why. But full of ‘advancing our technical knowledge.’ An undeclared hero. Or perhaps just in flight from Mama, who hates me as a ‘bad influence.’ What seems to be the trouble with him?”
Robert frowned. “Frankly, I’m puzzled. He has darkish coppery patches on his skin, face, backs of hands, trunk. Roundish. Low fever. Says he gets them with a fever. I didn’t try to intrude,” said Robert quickly. “But as he was asking for you, he was told that I—was taking your place. I went down to see him. Just as a possible friend, and to tell you.
But, as you say, Hedler is his doctor. I looked him over, anyway, just in curiosity.”
“Good,” said Jonathan. “A doctor who loses his curiosity is a dead doctor, even if he tries to continue his practice. Does he seem sick?”
“Well, not very. Just those reddish patches he gets when he has a fever. After the fever goes, the patches fade away. There’s just one thing I don’t understand. He showed me the sites of old patches—they are thickened and a little nodular but not painful. Now he has a fresh outbreak of patches and that low fever.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“About a year. He forgot about the first attack and didn’t make much of the second. Had no medical opinion in those South American countries. Thought his trouble was fungus. Was told in New York it was. Some fungus extant in hot damp countries. They gave him an ointment in New York, a fungicide. He was in New York for two weeks, consulting with his firm. When he arrived in Hambledon. he had a fresh —rash. Rash is all I can call it. I can’t recall seeing anything before like this—defined, symmetrical patches, some as big as a quarter. Probably some semitropical disease.”
“Is he in isolation?”
“No.”
“Dear old Louis!” said Jonathan. “He wouldn’t recognize a case of smallpox if he saw it. Not that I think this is smallpox. Let’s go down and see Jeff.” He stood up.
“His mother is with him,” said Robert.
Jonathan studied the younger doctor with amusement. “I see you’ve encountered Mrs. Holliday.”
“Yes.” Robert paused. “She is putting sulphur compresses on him. She’s quite a manager, isn’t she?”
“Very rich, too. Big benefactress of St. Hilda’s. Inherited a lot of money from her unfortunate husband. If she wanted boiled onion compresses here, the nurses would be running with hot onion stew and flannels, and old Louis would-be beaming and saying, ‘Yes, indeed, Elsie, yes, indeed, very efficacious.’ Let’s intrude.”
“Should we?” asked Robert.
“We should indeed. At least, I will.”
They went down to the third floor and to a large and lavish room. The patient, a man Jonathan’s age, was sitting comfortably in a chair near the window, while his mother temporarily was desisting from the compresses and sitting opposite.
He was a handsome young man, with the broad and vigorous face of an outdoorsman, short and pugnacious of nose, generous of mouth, and lively of gray eye. His thick blond hair curled in damp ringlets over his big head. On seeing Jonathan, he shouted with pleasure. “Jon! You damned old hound, you! Couldn’t get you, though I tried. Jon, it’s good to see you again!” He held out his bronze hand to Jonathan and stood up. He was apparently bursting with health and vitality, and there was no illness apparent in him except for peculiar roundish and coppery patches on his cheeks and hands and throat, and his partially exposed chest.
The two young men embraced each other awkwardly, with blows on shoulder and arm, and obscenities. They shouted incoherently, in insulting terms, while the prim thin woman nearby, in her early fifties, averted her head and showed the tense white cheek of the born hysteric, and the trembling lower lip. Her hair was gray and untidy under a harsh black straw hat, and she wore the grim black clothing of one who will not defer to weather.
Jonathan, his arm about his exuberant friend, looked down at her. “How are you, Mrs. Holliday?” he asked.
She slowly and reluctantly turned her head to him and her cold light eyes studied him with contemptuous disfavor. “Very well, Doctor,” she answered. Then she added, “Dr. Hedler is my son’s physician and had him brought here last night. It’s all nonsense, of course, but Dr. Hedler is so—conscientious. Unlike many other doctors I could name.”
“Good,” said Jonathan. Jefferson Holliday colored at the affront to his friend, but Jonathan squeezed his arm. “Probably nothing but one of those damned semitropical diseases, anyway.”
“Disease?” Mrs. Holliday’s voice became shrill and full of offense. “My son has no disease! What a thing to say.” She agitatedly pulled at the gloves in her lap, black kid ones. “Nothing but a scruff. That’s what I told Louis.
I
told him that, I kept telling him that—”
“No doubt,” said Jonathan.
“Sulphur compresses, hot,” said Mrs. Holliday. “Sulphur ointment.” She looked up at her son. “I really think you should ask for discharge, Jefferson.”
“I intend to.” The young man beamed at Jonathan. “Sit down. Yes, I’ve met Dr. Morgan. He was kind enough to stop in to see me.” He exuded buoyant well-being and immense cheerfulness. “I’m on six months’ leave, Jon. You’d never guess! I’m going to be married.”
“No!” said Jonathan. “What brings on that sad news?”
“Oh, now,” said Jefferson, laughing. “The daughter of the head of my concern. You’d never guess. An anthropologist, by God! Mad about it. She was with me for some time down in South America. Those Inca ruins, you know. Studying the natives for signs of the old Incas. Thinks she has a clue. Lovely girl.”
“I bet,” said Jonathan, thinking of a hardy, striding woman in short skirts and boots, and with a loud harsh voice.
“You’re wrong,” said Jefferson. He reached to a nearby table—covered with vases of flowers—and took a small framed photograph from it, and held it out to Jonathan. Jonathan saw the picture of a gentle young girl with dark hair, a serious smiling face, soft lips and extraordinarily lovely wide eyes. Her white shirtwaist was open at the neck and showed a throat unusually delicate and slender, with a thin link of pearls about it. “Elizabeth Cochrane,” said Jefferson with pride. “She has a quirk. She believes in reincarnation. She thinks she was an Inca princess once.”
“That’s a change,” said Jonathan, studying the photograph. “Usually they think they were Cleopatra or at least Queen Elizabeth.” The photograph impressed him. There was a vulnerable look to the girl, which uneasily reminded him of someone, but who that one was he could not immediately remember. “A nice girl,” he said.
“Marvelous,” said Jefferson, looking fondly at the photograph even when he had put it down. “After we are married, we’ll give up all that exploring—at least after a year or so. My work is finished in South America. We’ve done as much as we can, but now it is up to the people, themselves. I haven’t much hope. They lack American bustle and determination. What we value as enterprise they think is ridiculous.”
“Sensible,” said Jonathan. He was looking at the reddish patches on his friend’s skin. “When did you get that affliction?”
“A year ago.”
“Dr. Hedler is his doctor!” said Mrs. Holliday in a shrill voice and she moved spasmodically on her straight chair as if about to go into a fit. The hot room, in spite of the large opened windows, stank with the odor of sulphur ointment.
“Mama,” said Jefferson.
“I don’t care!” cried Mrs. Holliday. “I don’t want him saying things—things—”
“Mama,” said Jefferson.
“Never mind,” said Jonathan. “I’m just curious. Mind if
I
look at it? Just academically, not as a physician.”
Mrs. Holliday sprang to her feet like a wild young girl and plunged her thin black-clad body out of the room in a rush. “There she goes, after old Louis,” said her son in a rueful tone. “Can she cause you trouble, Jon?”
“Not more than I already have,” said Jonathan. “Bob, come over here. We’ll look at this together.”
The two doctors bent over the indulgently smiling patient and carefully examined the blotches. One of them was noticeably thickened, and there was a nodule in it. Jonathan pressed. Jefferson winced. “Hurt? How old is this patch?”
“It’s a new one, in the place of the old, which disappeared.”
Jonathan felt around the nodule and pressed the flesh. “Hurt?”
“No.” The young man frowned. “In fact, I don’t feel anything there.”
Jonathan lifted the eyelids of Jefferson Holliday, stared at the membranes. He examined the nose and throat tissues. His normally darkish-pale face became sallow and tight. He shook his head. He glanced at Robert Morgan. “Well?” he asked.
“I can’t diagnose it,” said young Robert. “I never saw such a skin disease before. Did you?”
But Jonathan did not answer. A look of sickness settled about his mouth. Then he took out his pocketknife and gently and carefully scraped the surface of one patch, and noticed that the patient showed no signs of pain. He held out the blade to Robert. “Go to the laboratory, stain this, and look at it,” he said. To Robert’s surprise his hand was trembling a little. “The stain for tubercles.”
“My God!” exclaimed Jefferson with great alarm, and pulled away to look up at the face of his friend. “You don’t think I have tuberculosis of the skin, do you, for God’s sake! Listen, I don’t have a cough. I’m as hearty as a horse.”
“No,” said Jonathan, “I don’t think you have tuberculosis of the skin.” I wish, he thought, that was all you had, Jeff, I wish to God.
“Or cancer?” asked the patient, trying to smile.
“No. What gave you that idea?” Jonathan sat down and stared at the floor. “Under what conditions did you live in South America?”
“Conditions? Oh, sometimes crude and primitive. Most of the time. We had a camp, where Elizabeth and the others stayed except for occasional explorations. But I had to go often into the interiors, among the natives. Sometimes I slept in their huts, during the rains. Sometimes in the jungles with what cover we could cut. Machetes. Why? Do you think I have a parasite of some kind?”
“Maybe,” said Jonathan. “Did you see anyone else with this kind of skin disfigurement?”
The young man frowned. “Yes, I did. Two or three. A child. A woman. An old man. In fact, I stayed in their hut during the rains for several weeks, before we could get out and back to the river. Why? Do I have something contagious?”
“Perhaps,” said Jonathan. “Mildly so.”
“My God! Elizabeth!” said Jefferson. His bronzed face paled. “Do I have something I could give her?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. You aren’t married to her yet.”
Now the young man darkly colored. “If you think I’ve picked up a venereal disease, it’s possible, between you and . me. My God, I can’t stand the idea! The woman in the hut —she was young and wasn’t blotched then. After all, Jon, I’m a man—What’s that arsenic thing they are using?”
“You’re thinking of syphilis,” said Jonathan. “I don’t think you have it, though it’s always been endemic among Indians. That’s where the white man picked it up in the first place. Let’s not worry until we know.”
“What did you do to me with your pocketknife?”
“Took a sample of your skin cells.”
A thick hard silence fell in the room. Jefferson was pale again. He kept glancing with dubious fear at his friend. He remembered the old stories of Jonathan Ferrier. A fanatic. Always looking for the worst. Everything complicated, nothing simple. One of those new scientists, finding trouble in the mildest things.
“Microscope?” said the young engineer, trying to control a strange tremor along his nerves. “Will it show anything?”
“I hope not.” said Jonathan. He looked at the photograph of Elizabeth Cochrane again, and was again sickened.
The broad door swung open and Mrs. Holliday returned with white and vindictive triumph, bursting into the room before Louis Hedler. “Now!” she exclaimed. “Well stop all this nonsense!” She breathed loudly and victoriously and went to her son and put her hand on his shoulder. Dr. Hedler smiled widely and mechanically at Jonathan and said, “We’re happy about Hortense, Jon. We owe it all to you, of course, and the skilled care she is getting. I talked with old Humphrey this morning— Well, never mind. We’re all grateful, Jon, believe me. Never mind. What is this Elsie is telling me? Usurping my patient?” He continued to glow indulgently.
“No,” said Jonathan. “No usurpation. Just curiosity.”
“Curiosity!” said Mrs. Holliday. “Asking my son questions! It’s unethical!”
Dr. Hedler put his hand tenderly on her visibly shaking arm. “Now, Elsie. Let’s be calm. John is a very talented— yes, indeed—talented, physician, and Jeff is his friend, after all, and doctors do get curious, you know. Nothing wrong, my dear, nothing wrong. In fact, I’m pleased. Always like a new opinion.” He glowed upon Jonathan, though his big, froglike brown eyes showed suspicion and caution. “Well, what do you think? Nothing serious, of course. One of those nasty semitropical fungi. Isn’t it? Some of the patches are already fading. What do you think?”