Malpractice. Was some unknown former patient, man or woman, about to sue him for malpractice? The procedure, in such a case, was for an attorney to approach a doctor and ask for an out-of-court settlement first, “to save notoriety and money and fees and costs.” Besides, he could not recall a dissatisfied patient or one who had complained.
Jonathan’s uneasy mind tried for ease, and he remembered that he had wanted to be a priest when he had been a boy. His mother had thought it absurd, and he had agreed within a year or two after she had expressed her outright opinion. Now he thought about it. It would have been a life, even in a leper colony or out in darkest Africa with the missions, far more tranquil than the one he had known since boyhood. There would have been no uncertainty but only certitude. No love for Mavis but only love for God. Had he not married Mavis, she would be alive now, probably the curse of some other man’s life—or, ironically, probably that man’s delight. He had loved God in those days, with a deep and almost terrible love, profound in its intensity. He recalled the quietly passionate transports he had experienced, the unquestioning knowledge, the fiery faith, and longing, the instants of ecstasy at Mass at the elevation of the Host, the depthless gratitude at receiving Holy Communion, the inner grieving cry, “Lord, I am not worthy that You come under my roof—” The High Masses, the rolling music, the incense, the unearthly colors on white walls as the sun struck through the stained-glass windows, the majesty of the ritual, the awe, the kneeling, the bowed head— Yes, there had been absolute certitude, beyond doubt, beyond skepticism.
Jonathan had had an encounter when he was seventeen, even before the episode of the hiking trip through the state, when he had come violently face to face with the God he so adored, and all the questions, and his faith had died at once, not dribbling away in a sickening little stream as it had been with Francis Campion. Could one call that faith, indeed, that it should have been murdered outright in one single hour or two? Or had it been only adolescent infatuation with the idea of God, a frequent affliction of adolescence? In every man’s life, he had read in some pious book, there comes one appalling encounter with God—an encounter never to be forgotten —and thereafter a man adores more profoundly to the very death, or he gives only lip service to a lost and beloved memory—such as one gives the dead for whom one no longer sorrows.
Father McGuire had told him that his faith would not have died so abysmally, so abruptly, had it been faith indeed. But the priest was wrong. The irrevocable deaths come to the most vaulting love, the most vehement love, and the most intense faith. It is the lukewarm, contrary to general acceptance, who casually endure in love and faith, and if that love and faith are only coolly milky and faintly heated, they are at least viable, which was more than one could say of the shattered corpse of love and faith, the rotting corpse.
It was only recently that the world had taken on three dimensions again, had rounded out, had become fervent with color and vitality and youth. It had been resurrected with Jenny.
Love was of one piece. It was impossible to love, to know love fully, and then deny any part of it, whether it was love for God or love for a human being. A woman dearer than life, to a man, a beloved woman whom one could trust with one’s life, inevitably brought the grandeur of God within the vision of a man again, and he saw again that the endless universes were charged with His glory. There lay all peace of mind, all invulnerability, all power of spirit, all fortitude—the “Shadow of a Great Rock in a weary land.”
I wish I had it just now, thought Jonathan. But as if in the corner of his eye, he saw the eternal garden of tranquillity again, and this time there was no chasm at the end of it.
“The hell with the Campions and all the rest of them,” he said, aloud.
He thought again of Jeffrey Holliday, and then he wrote out a check for Father McNulty and added a note: “You knew Jeff, I believe, and he is dead now, and so I am enclosing my check for twenty-five dollars as an offering, and hope that you will mention him in your prayers. By the way,
I
have inherited a large old house on Fordham Street, near St. Leo’s, from a former patient, a dear old friend and my teacher, Ann Meadows, and it is yours—for that residence for nuns you are plotting to bring in for your confounded parochial school, if you can raise a bank loan. This is no incitement for you to harass me for further funds.”
The mere writing of that flippant note to a young man of whom he was truly fond, and whom he respected, unaccountably lifted Jonathan’s spirits. Now he would really have to corner Jenny and persuade her into a quick marriage, and then leave Hambledon with her.
Softly whistling, he went into his examination rooms, clean and empty and white. There, in the left corner of the second room was one of his big shining cabinets. It was filled with’ instruments, including the most complex for operations. These had been the gift of his father on the occasion of his entering medical school, and each fine steel instrument was engraved with his name in a flowing script. In those days every surgeon had his own personal instruments, engraved like these, which he carried with him, but since then the majority of hospitals supplied their own for surgeons, a progress toward asepsis in the operating room. Now these glittering instruments, for which his father had proudly paid a considerable fortune—they had silver handles, many of them, and silver sheaths—were unnecessary, including the large Morocco leather bag in which they had originally been carried. Jonathan had used them but four times in his surgical practice. They were anachronistic. He had often thought of sending them to some poor priest-physician-surgeon, and now was the time to think of donating the whole expensive outfit to the missions.
As they were so costly, Jonathan kept the key to this cabinet among his other keys. He stood before the cabinet and stared at the brave and shining array. That instrument for opening the skull: Its form had not been changed for thousands of years and was almost a replica of the instrument the ancient Egyptians had used. Fine old boys, the ancient practitioners. Modern medicine had hardly improved on them. They had had a high forceps of a sort for difficult births. These had been reinvented again only a few years ago. Christianity had done marvels in raising the moral stature of men, for helping to abolish slavery, for lifting degradation from women, for showing concern for children, for advancing education to the lowest common denominator—a debatable thing at the best—but it had certainly knocked hell out of the legacy of ancient medicine. It had debased the physician, for centuries, to a mere midwife, or a bloodletter, or a brewer of herbs and nostrums—-a scurvy and starving servant fit only for contempt. The art of medicine had been relegated perilously close to the practice of witchcraft or, at the worst, considered as a survival of “Paganism.” “Good” Christians did not become ill unless they were also “sinners,” and the worse the illness the worse the sinner. You’d have thought, Jonathan reflected now, that the Black Death would have thrown that into the garbage pail, but it did not—until almost within recent memory. We probably owe the fact that there are any human beings left at all to the skill of the “perfidious” Jewish physicians throughout the centuries, who religiously and with loving kindness had disastrously decided to keep humanity alive. For that they had been repaid with hatred, and that was probably a just fate, at that.
What was that from Genesis: “For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Yes, and William Hazlitt, in the same context of thought, had said, “There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, ungrateful animal than the public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.” True. It was that “public” which had condemned him, Jonathan Ferrier, before he had even been arrested or convicted, and had shown not only extreme disappointment when he was acquitted but in resentment was now driving him from his native town. He still did not know why. It had been hinted to him, time after time, by those who cared for him, that perhaps a little diplomacy was needed by him, a little tact, a little evasion, a little creaming-over of obvious ineptitude and stupidity, “in the name of Christian charity.” But that “Christian charity” would have cost the lives of many helpless patients at the hands of diploma-mill hacks or it would have permitted some outrageous social wrongs.
For Jonathan Ferrier was the organizer for, and the sponsor for, the Hambledon Association for the Abolition of Child Labor. He had cared for many little children who had been wounded and smashed in the local mills and yards. He had come to them when they had been weltering, dead, in their own blood. He had not used “loving” language to the mill owners, nor creamy words to soothe their sensibilities, nor had he exercised “Christian charity.” He had only called them the Assassins of the Innocents. He had spent a large part of his own money to establish other associations throughout the state and had hounded Senators and Congressmen and Governors, and had put huge advertisements in many great newspapers. The associations had grown enormously, and it was predicted that within a short time child labor would be illegal. Needless to say, Jonathan was not loved by those whom he had so deeply offended in their purses—and their morals.
When he had been younger, he had honestly believed that a good cause carried its own good strength with it, that a righteous idea could never be suppressed but must be ultimately victorious. He was not so certain about that now—but unfortunately he still had remnants fluttering about in his
mind, and that kept his tongue abrasive, his manner openly contemptuous when among hypocrites, and his temper finely honed.
He came to himself in his examination room, before his glass cabinet of instruments.
Then he noticed a little gap on one shelf. He bent closer. Some instrument was missing. He tested the door; it was locked. But someone had taken an instrument from the cabinet. He went into the other examination room, frowning, wondering if Robert Morgan could have done this, and then he searched the other room, also. It was foolish to suspect Robert. He had high instincts of privacy, and besides, he did not need these particular instruments. The other examination room had a host of ordinary ones for office procedure, though not for major surgery? Jonathan frowned. When was the last time he had opened this cabinet? A year? Two years? Once a year he carefully dusted the instruments himself, because of their value and their association. Had he done that last year? He could not remember.
He stood and frowned and considered, looking at the empty space. Someone had tried to move slender instruments together to conceal the spot, but its impression was on the original white satin which Adrian had insisted be laid on the glass shelves. A narrow long depression. Now. what was it? Jonathan slowly turned over in his mind all the instruments, counting them, thinking of them. Then he knew. It was a curette.
Why would anyone want a curette, and who had taken it? It was a sharp and chancy instrument, and had to be used with the utmost care or a womb could be perforated when the products of a spontaneous abortion or a miscarriage had to be removed. Special training was needed for the use of a curette. Only in cases with threatened sepsis did a man use it, or if there was danger of a hemorrhage.
Jonathan minutely examined the depression where the curette had lain and saw that it was faintly peppered with dust. So, the instrument had been gone a considerable time, and not lately. He went out to Miss Forster and said, “Has anyone unauthorized been in my offices when I wasn’t present, or Dr. Morgan absent?”
“Why, no, I’d never permit that, Doctor! I believe I know my duties! Of course, there was that veiled lady who claimed to be a friend—”
“No, no, dear. I should think several months ago, at least.”
“Never!” said Miss Forster, with emphasis. “Why, is something missing, Doctor? After all, there are prowlers—”
“Who had my key, of course, and took only one instrument, and then carefully relocked my cabinet and restored my key.”
Miss Forster seemed ready to cry, so Jonathan patted her shoulder, told her it was probably a mistake, his mistake, and went out for his horse and his ride to his farm.
A gray heat haze hung over the cities of the valley. No rain had fallen for nearly three weeks and the river was low and tributary streams were dry in their beds, with boulders roundly blazing in the sun. Lawns browned in town, but on the mountainsides, where springs and deep brooks still spurted, the grass was green and flowers burned. There was a tense and breathless expectancy in the absolutely immobile air, as if before a conflagration, but in spite of the constant prophesies of rain and thunder, nothing stirred and trees prematurely dried and filled gutters with crisp brown heaps. A sick languor overcame nearly everyone, and children, afflicted with what mothers called “second-summer complaint,” became ill and an unprecedented number of them died.
“We tell them, over and over,” said Robert with exhaustion, to Jonathan Ferrier, “to boil the milk and the water they feed their infants, to keep all butter and perishable food on ice, and they smile at us knowingly and talk of ‘summer cholera’ or ‘summer complaint,’ even while their children sicken and die or dehydrate themselves with vomiting and diarrhea. We still have diarrhea as the chief cause of death among young children, and even older ones,
but we
can
‘t
make people take precautions.”
“Just as Lister and Pasteur and Semmelweis struggled against public apathy and stupidity for too long,” said Jonathan. “I’ve been advocating for years that tubercular cattle
be
destroyed, and I am called ‘the enemy of the poor farmer,’ wishing to deprive him of his precious herds just for a ‘fad.’ I’ve tried to get the Board of Health to prohibit the sale of all milk that isn’t pasteurized and to demand universal pasteurization, and I’m just a ‘new-fangled faddist.’ I’ve even been reprimanded by that congregation of imbeciles, the State Medical Society, which tried to revoke my license less than a year ago. If there is one rule this idiot world insists upon it is ‘Never disturb people.’ Never cause them concern; never bring political mountebankery or malfeasance to their attention; never kick a popular hero in his buttocks; never ask them to do something for the good of their community; never demand that they practice some sort of hygiene; never hint that their country needs a long hard look, especially at Washington. Never preach disaster. Never tell the truth. That’s the way to a serene life.”