Elvira gave him a killing glance and motioned loftily to the figure on the bed, then stood with her hands folded together, her expression coldly contemptuous. Robert approached the other side of the bed at Jonathan’s gesture. The two doctors bent over the recumbent man and began to examine him. Elvira disdained them. She went to the casement window and gazed out calmly, as if no one were in this room but herself and her father. Mr. Kitchener and Maude hovered near the doorway, ignored by Elvira.
The emaciated tall man on the bed was not more than fifty, if that, with rough brown hair and a livid face like a skull, but an aristocratic skull, all fine hollows and protuberances, with a high nose and definite planes. His eyes, gray like Elvira’s, and alert and intelligent and extremely conscious of everything, looked up at Jonathan somberly. Then, all at once, he smiled faintly and humorously, and Jonathan liked him at once, as he liked very few men. Elmo Burrows had sardonic thick dark eyebrows, and as Jonathan expertly examined him those eyebrows lifted with a most knowing expression. Then, after a second or two his expression became melancholy and withdrawn and bitterly sorrowful and despairing, and he rolled his head aside on his pillows. He lay totally inert, with no movement of what Elvira had called his “members.”
Jonathan began to frown as his examination continued. He said to Elvira, “Was your father ever in a coma? Did he become unconscious after his first stroke?”
She replied indifferently from the window, from which she was studying the leaves of the tree, “Certainly not. He merely, one morning, could not get out of bed. He told me so. He said it was very difficult for him to move his arms and legs.
I
first thought of arthritis, but he had no pains in his joints and they were not swollen. The next day he said it was even more difficult to move, and so it continued.”
“He did not complain of dizziness, nausea or headaches?”
“No, indeed. We are not subject to those ills caused by dietary indiscretions.”
“He had no stiffness of the neck?”
“No. He had had no cold or catarrh.”
The patient’s limbs were not flaccid nor flattened; they were as round as the legs and arms of any healthy man who was somewhat too thin; they were cool to the touch. Jonathan suddenly gave a bicep a hard tight pinch, and the arm involuntarily jerked away. He subjected the other arm, and the legs, to this treatment and in every case the limb recoiled and a faint protesting sound came from the sick man. His temperature, pulse and respiratory rate were absolutely normal for a bed-bound patient who was not really ill or in danger of his life. His blood pressure was normal. “How old is your father, Miss Burrows?”
“He is not quite forty-nine.”
“Excellent pressure,” said Jonathan to Robert, who was looking perplexed as the examination continued. “A trifle low for his age but excellent. And no signs of recent cardiac infarction or auricular fibrillation. No spasticity. Reflexes a little sluggish but within the range of normal. He seems undernourished—”
“I am cleansing his system with a liquid diet,” Elvira said without turning toward the room. “But he cannot swallow easily, and indicates he does not desire nourishment.” Her voice was dispassionate.
The sick man had lain with his eyes closed, as if not present or not conscious. But now he was looking up at Jonathan with an intensely devastated expression. Jonathan bent over him again. “You can hear me, Mr. Burrows? Good. I see you can move your head a little. Can you speak? No? You can see well? Good. No pain anywhere?”
The gray and sunken eyes became more anguished. “Head? Legs? Arms? Neck? Back? Chest? No? Good. Then, where is the pain?”
Mr. Burrows’ eyes filmed over and he turned aside his head and dropped his eyelids. Jonathan straightened up and looked down at his patient thoughtfully. “No paralysis,” he said to Robert. “No conjugate deviation of the eyes, no lateral signs. Neurological responses within the range of normal. No cerebral symptoms of any kind, not even a mild meningitis, which I first suspected. Aphasia, yes, but I wonder what kind.”
“In short,” said Elvira bitterly, from the window, “you find my father in perfect health! He has had no strokes, yet he cannot rise from his bed and cannot speak!”
“I did not say your father was in perfect health,” said Jonathan. “On the contrary. I should like a consultation with you in another room, if you please, Miss Burrows. Come, Robert. Al and Maude, would you please stay with my patient?”
The two young men followed the energetic Elvira out into the hall. Then she stood there with a look of cold defiance. “Will this not do, for what little you are able to tell me out of your medical ignorance?”
Jonathan reached for the nearest doorknob and Elvira said sharply, “That is my room, if you please—Doctor.”
“Don’t be alarmed,” said Jonathan. “I’ve been in more ladies’ bedrooms, invited and uninvited, than I can remember, both as a physician and as—shall we say visitor?”
“It is not necessary to be lewd,” said Miss Burrows very clearly, “though I am not one of your namby-pamby misses, but a modern woman of the twentieth century, frank and candid—”
“And I bet you know all the words, too,” said Jonathan, with an air of great admiration. “Well, if we’re not to invade your vestal chamber, where shall we go?”
Elvira looked as if she had a very pertinent suggestion she would like to offer, then merely pressed her lips together and marched down the hall and pushed open a distant door. With an imperative gesture she motioned them inside. There was
a
streak of high color on each of her prominent cheekbones. “And,” said Jonathan, “I bet you know all the euphemisms of the words. If not, I’d be glad to instruct you, my dear young lady, at your convenience. Alone.”
“I am sure you would!” said Elvira, and her eyes became wintry lightning. “Pray, will you enter this room, Doctor, which was once my dear, dead mother’s little sitting room?”
Robert had thought Jonathan’s remarks hardly pardonable, but he had not been able to help smiling under his golden-red mustache. She was really a very spotless young lady, with pretensions of modernism, and it was fortunate that she had not really understood Jonathan’s naughty insinuations. There was no one quite so pure as a lady who affected to be emancipated and free of inhibitions. The real trollop was usually very dainty in her speech and pretended to be insulted at the slightest jocular remark, and was very retiring and lip-licking in the presence of strange men. Elvira, on the contrary, was
a
veritable grenadier.
They went into a very stuffy and musty little room, overpoweringly redolent of camphor and lavender flowers and hot heavy draperies and mothballs and heated rugs and cumbersome furniture. The mirrors over the dresser and the dressing table had been sheeted, and the few pictures had been turned to the brown-painted wall. A small window looked out on branches of trees and nothing else. It was a most unpleasant room and Jonathan decided to stand, whereas Elvira sat down as straight as a ruler on a small armless rocker covered with horsehair.
“I will ask you
a
few serious questions, Miss Elvira,” said Jonathan, and now he looked forbidding. (This expression of his had always been highly successful with neurotic or hysterical or intractable ladies before, and had the effect of quieting and subduing them. But Elvira merely gave him
a
cool smile of scorn and waited.)
“I wish you to be frank—as all young ladies of this age are,” he added.
She inclined her head.
“First of all: When did your mother die?”
Elvira, for the first time, seemed a little taken aback. “My mother? What has my dear, dead mother got to do with Papa’s illness?”
“Miss Elvira, I am asking the questions. You don’t want your father to die, do you? He is certainly on the steady way to death. If you care about him, please don’t waste my time.”
The girl had become ghastly in color, and her eyes were flickering with fear. But she had fine control of herself. “I don’t believe he is dying, not in the least. However, I will answer your questions as briefly as I can. Mama died eleven months ago, in New York, in our small town house. Quite unexpected. She had seemed in good health, though at her age—forty-two, anything could have been possible. Elderly people— They are subject to many afflictions. I suppose you agree, Doctor? Indeed. She had had a good dinner—I had cooked it myself, our cook having her twice-monthly evening off—and as I am partial to health foods, I can assure you it was a very wholesome dinner.”
“I am sure it was,” said Jonathan. “What was it, by the way?”
“Whole browned rice with crushed nuts and chopped spinach, broiled in a little butter. Formed into chops.”
Jonathan visibly winced. Elvira’s color was returning, and she had the elevated appearance of a fervent fanatic. “We began with a light broth, bean-stock lightly flavored with nutmeg and thyme.”
“I see, I see,” said Jonathan with haste. “That’s quite enough, please. I see that the meal could not have disturbed your mother had she been in superb health. She was, I assume?”
“I am not sure that I care for your tone of voice, Doctor,” said Elvira, who was a very keen young lady. “Nor for your insinuations that my mother could only survive health foods in the event that her health was superb. I will let it pass, considering that these remarks came from a prejudiced mind. My mother said she had enjoyed the food very much, and
I
was pleased, as I had been trying for a long time to get her to eat more sensibly. She preferred rich food and corpses—”
“Corpses!” exclaimed Jonathan with a slightly overdone air of revulsion.
“You know very well what I mean, Doctor. The innocent corpses of innocent beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our lusts.”
Jonathan opened his mouth to say a very indelicate thing, then thought better of it. “Quite right,” he said instead.
“Go
on, please.”
“I am sure,” said Elvira, her voice becoming more inflected and clear every instant, “that you really aren’t interested in poor Mama’s diet. At any rate, she woke at midnight, calling me, saying she had acute indigestion. Very severe. She claimed she felt as if she had been poisoned.”
“No doubt she had,” said Jonathan but almost inaudibly.
“What did you say, Doctor? No matter, it really isn’t very important, though I suppose it was impolite. You are a very rude, uncouth man, if you will pardon my candor.
“I gave Mama my usual remedies, ginger in hot water, hot soda water, hot tea with a little cream of tartar. They are usually quite enough. Mama had had these attacks before and always came out of them splendidly under my care. But she continued to complain. She asked me for a doctor. To soothe her mind—though, of course, I have no trust in doctors—I telephoned one. It took me quite a time, through Central, to find one near our house, and so it was an hour or more before he arrived.”
She suddenly squeezed her white eyelids together hard, and her inflexible mouth trembled very slightly. Then she opened her eyes again. “When he arrived, he said that Mama had had a heart attack and that she was dying. I don’t know what he gave her, but it must have been something murderously drastic. She died half an hour later. I always held him responsible. Had he not been there, Mama would be alive now and with us.”
Jonathan was a little sorry for this obdurate girl. “And how did your father take her death?”
“I did not tell him until the morning. He had been very fatigued for over a week and needed his rest. I sat with Mama from the time she died until I knew that Papa had descended to the dining room and had been given his breakfast by Cook, and that he was quietly reading his newspaper before leaving for the university. That was about eight o’clock.”
“And you had stayed alone with your dead mother all that night?”
“Yes.” For the first time the young voice was not so crisp. Elvira bent her head for a moment. “When I told Papa, he said nothing. Nothing at all. He just sat there in his chair, looking at the last of the coffee in his cup. Then he quietly folded his newspaper and went up to Mama’s room and closed the door behind him—forgetting he had a daughter at all—and he did not come out until the undertaker arrived. I was so relieved to see him. He hadn’t shed a single tear, while my own face and eyes were swollen. He looked quite calm, almost his usual self. He spoke to me calmly, too, and patted my head. He kept saying, ‘It’s all right, Elvira. It’s quite all right.’ He was a tower of strength to me. He and I—we had been like parents to Mama—”
“Had your parents been fond of each other?”
“Oh, very. Mama was a little too young for her advanced age. She was never very serious, though she had had a good education and she had a superior mind. She and Papa were always having their private little jokes together. Papa is a very sober man, but Mama could make him laugh like a boy. There was hardly a night, no matter the weather, but what they went alone on walks together, and they would go far up into the country—even as far as Central Park—in our carriage, alone, for Sunday drives, and sometimes they would take a lunch with them. They would come back laughing like children, sunburned and grass-stained and sleepy, and very happy.”
For the first time she was faltering, and her throat kept forming little spasms as she struggled with her grief. She looked not at Jonathan now, but at the floor, and she was crushing a plain linen handkerchief in her long and pretty and competent hands.