Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1940)

BY MAX BRAND When Kildare had finished that telephone call, there seemed no breath left in him. He got out on the street but there wasn't enough air for him even there. He went to the hotel where his mother and father were staying. They gave him the calmness of perfect faith and affection. They were the only human beings for whom he never could be wrong. Bland, unseeing eyes they seemed to him. His father talked about Julia Cray. "Gillespie's a great man," said old Kildare, "but there are a few troubles with these hospital diagnosticians. They never get to know their patients well enough. We've put poor Julia Cray on a low salt diet, now. But mark my word, there will be a blasted crisis before long, and then we'll all see by the low blood count that pernicious anemia is what she has. Hang onto those two dollars, Jimmy, because I intend to have the great Gillespie's money on this deal. I'm going to frame that dollar bill and hang it in my office. It'll be more than a diploma to me!" They had dinner in the hotel room. Then Kildare restlessly started to leave. His mother came with him down the hall toward the elevator. "What is it now?" she asked. "I've got to get out in the air," said Kildare. "I can't breathe — I can't get a full breath." "I know," she answered. "That happens when the heart is stopping." "The heart?" he asked. "With grief, Jimmy, or anxiety." He nodded. The elevator opened clanging doors. He waved it on and walked back with her down the hall. She was a dumpy woman with too much chin and fat in the eyelids that made her eyes seem small. Sometimes it seemed that her husband had married a scrub woman. But there was a beauty about her, sometimes, when she spoke. "Suppose that there were two men and a woman you had to think about. The happiness of all three of them, and the sanity of one of them — and the only way to work is to take a chance with life and death?" "How could a woman tell," she answered, "unless she loved all three of them?" "That's true," he said. "A woman couldn't tell." "I've seen your father facing problems like that," she said softly, "and it's the only time in our lives when I've been able to do nothing. He has to go off by himself like a prophet into a wilderness; he has to retire and eat the pain like bread. But when he comes out, he seems to know, just as surely as though God had told him." When he left her, he kept thinking of that phrase: Eating pain; except that it seemed that it was he who was being devoured. When he was down on the street again there still was no air for his breathing. CHAPTER XV GILLESPIE'S line, that night, did not stop until nearly four in the morning. Kildare went into his own inner office, put some material into a medical kit, and passed back through the main office where Gillespie had stretched himself on the couch and seemed sound asleep. His face, his whole body, sagged with exhaustion. Kildare went out of the office. On the fourth floor, he met Mary Lamont. She was on night duty but she kept the freshness and the verve of the day. "Something wrong?" she asked. "I want you right now. I'm going into 412." "To Thornton?" "Yes." "Oh, has Gregory Lane ordered some special treatment for Thornton?" He considered her for a moment but left that remark unanswered. "Come to 412 in a half hour," he said. "I may be needing a nurse with a good pair of hands and no tongue at all." She looked hard at him; he turned and went off down the hall. She kept watch from a vantage point after he disappeared into 412. A moment later the special nurse came out looking decidedly odd. "That young interne — what's his name?" she asked. It was no longer the dizzy blonde who took care of Thornton but a formidable old warhorse. "Doctor Kildare," explained Mary. "He's a nut!" said the special. "He told me to go and have myself a sleep — he'll watch Thornton." "He'll do what he says. Why don't you have the sleep?" asked Mary. "Me? It ain't professional," said the special. "I'm going to be looking into this funny business. I don't like it." "Don't bother Doctor Kildare," Mary warned her 37 "He's Doctor Gillespie's assistant." "That young mug?" cried the special. "That young mug," Mary assured her. "Things are going to the devil around here," said the special and went off down the hall. Mary Lamont, half an hour later, paused at the door of 412 and heard strange noises. She looked in and saw Henry Thornton babbling with an idiot's loose face. Kildare looked up and waved her away. "Come back in half an hour," he directed. "I'll be back." He stared an instant at his immobile patient before he turned to her again. "You look rather chipper, Mary." "I suppose I've had good news," she said. "About what?" "About a marriage." "Yours? Lane?" he asked. "Oh, Jimmy, pretend that it upsets you a little, please!" "Of course it upsets me," he said, but again his glance left her and studied the face of Thornton. "You don't care a rap," she told him. He looked up at her in a silence which, somehow, dissolved her anger utterly. "I'll be seeing you here in about half an hour, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, in a half hour," she said. "Has that special been hanging around?" he asked "No. What did you do to her?" "Sent her away. I don't want her. She's suspicious, Mary; and she may come prying back here again." "Well, what could she find out?" "Enough to break me up into little pieces." "Jimmy! What are you doing to Thornton?" "I want a nurse with a head and two hands and no damned tongue at all," said Kildare. She backed out of the room, fighting herself to keep from exclamations. H.ALF an hour later still, she found Henry Thornton stretched in coma, his hands thrown up above As Dr. Kildare bent over the patient, Nurse Lamont feared she was shut into a room with two madmen instead of one his head. Beside the bed Kildare crouched on a chair like a poisoner at the place of crime. He turned to Mary a white face, greasy with sweat. "What is it, Jimmy?" she asked. "Please, please tell me!" He said nothing. She went to the foot of the bed and looked at the chart. There was no indication that special medication had been given. Whatever Kildare had done, he had left no indication of it. That could mean any sort of trouble, if the head of the institution chose to be particular. But she was afraid to ask questions. Kildare kept looking up at her without speaking He had given one hand to the grip of Thornton and the clutch of the sick man was fixed rigidly on it. His other hand took the pulse. "Is he in a fit?" said Mary Lamont. "He's minus the brain of Homo sapiens," said Kildare. She waited for words that would make sense. "You've dreamed yourself back to childhood in your sleep, haven't you?" asked Kildare. "Thornton is doing more than that. He's dreamed himself back to the infancy of the race. The muscles he's using now are the ones that an ape needs when it's climbing trees." She stared at the clutching hands of Thornton. "Jimmy," she whispered, "do you know what you're doing do him?" Kildare said: "Don't ask questions. Keep looking in. I may need you." That was about five o'clock. Obediently sheforced her feet out of the room. Every half hour she returned. It was like taking a silent part in a murder. Each time she looked at Thornton, she knew that the sick man was a long step nearer death, and still Kildare crouched there with his stethoscope and a flashlight, watching, lifting an eyelid of Thornton now and then and flashing the light upon it. She could not recognize the thing Kildare had become. More than once she heard, from 412, noises that seemed to come from the throat of a beast. A horrible memory came back out of her childhood of ghostly tales, of werewolves, of men turned by night into monstrous creatures. The memory became an obsession. She had other work to do, of course. The Blair General Hospital knew how to get plenty from its nurses. But still she felt that at any moment one of those subdued, gurgling moans from 412 would turn into a screech of animal rage or fear. Yet no one else seemed to guess. There was the same simpering, the same babbling among the other nurses. Then the thing came, all the more frightful because she had been half expecting it, like a blow falling on a tensed body. If the door of the sick room was closed, the scream knifed through it with a daggerpoint. Nurses are as tough-minded as any people in the world, but the five in the flooroffice turned white and stared at one another with a dreadful surmise. It was not one scream but a series of them. She did not need to hunt for the source of the outcry. She went straight to 412 and found the door ajar and the yell coming out of it. She shut the door hastily behind her as she went in. The mouth of Thornton was open, awry, and he screamed on every outgoing breath. Kildare was giving an injection. As he pulled the hypodermic away, he gave the nurse a quick look over his shoulder that made her flesh creep. She had never known what it meant to be afraid of a man but she was afraid now. There was a firm rap at the door. "Keep them out!" commanded Kildare. Mary Lamont went to the door and found Miss Simmons, the head nurse of the floor. "I must go in there," said Miss Simmons, firmly. "The doctor wants to be left alone, Miss Simmons," she said. "Wants to be left alone? What doctor, please?" "Doctor Kildare." "The interne?" "Yes, Miss Simmons." "Has he authority from Doctor Lane to take charge of this patient?" "Yes, Miss Simmons." "Ah, he has?" "Yes, Miss Simmons." "Very well," said the head nurse, but she turnec slowly away, her eyes lingering on the guilty fac< of Mary Lamont. T HE screaming had died away, but still the giri wanted nothing so much as to be away from that room. She had to fight hard to make herself turn and look at the bed. The one lamp threw the shadow of Kildare in caricature, like a stain of soot, across the white of the bedspread and over the hands of Thornton, but the face of the patient was visible. It was fallen in complete relaxation. "Take his temperature," said Kildare. He put a tongue depressor between the teeth oJ Thornton as though he feared the thermometer might be bitten in two. The nurse slipped the thermometer under the tongue. "Hold his lips together," said Kildare, and shone his light again into one of Thornton's eyes. She pressed the lips shut. Foam kept breaking out in small bubbles. The mouth was cold; the lips were bluish. It was like handling wet clay. She waited two minutes and drew out the thermometer. "I'll get another thermometer," she said. "This one is no good." "The thermometer is all right," he answered. "What does it say?" "It can't be right — and the man still alive," she said. "It only says eighty-five, Doctor!" That was all he was to her, now. He wasn't Kildare. He was a sort of predatory beast drawing the life out of this helpless man. "Eighty-five?" repeated Kildare. ^^^*W%4>^*^^