Calling Dr. Kildare ebook

Contents

I. PRIDE OF OUR FATHERS

II. THE HOURS ARE RACING

III. JAMES AUTOMATON, M.D

IV. ANY WOMAN AT ALL

V. SATURDAY'S CHILD

VI. WORKER OF MIRACLES

VII. THE IRISH WILL FIGHT

VIII. TWO WOMEN

IX. LIFE FOR A LIFE

X. INQUISITION

XI. ULTIMATUM AND CHORALE

XII. REDHEAD

XIII. AT HEADQUARTERS

XIV. THREE MEN AND A GIRL

XV. HOME-COMING

XVI. THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE

XVII. ONE STEP NEARER

XVIII. TAKE YOUR HEART OFF YOUR SLEEVE

XIX. BULL IN A BULLET SHOP

XX. CLINICAL NOTE

I. PRIDE OF OUR FATHERS

THE old car of Dr. Stephen Kildare had a flat, high face that had slapped its way through eighty thousand miles of Dartford weather. When it turned onto the Galt driveway it looked as out of place as overalls on Park Avenue. The brakes, ill-set for the last twenty thousand miles, uttered a shuddering groan that stopped the automobile near the front porch.

Dr. Kildare got out not with the stiffness, but with the slowness of seventy years, and reached back inside for his heavy bag. Then he stood straight, for time was adding to his dignity more than it took from his strength. The air of the sharp October night put back his shoulders.

He looked down the hill toward the frosty glitter of Dartford’s electric lights and, turning to the house he paused to notice a cypress-shaped maple which, in the brightness from an unshaded window, burned on the lawn like a golden candleflame.

This beauty, set against the soft blackness of night, lightened his step and his heart as he went up to the front door. When it opened, he had prepared his smile for a servant. He had to alter it a little for young Harry Galt who shook his hand hastily.

“I’m glad you’re here. It seemed rather a long time,” said Harry.

“I had to stop at the druggist’s,” answered the doctor. He looked at Harry’s big neck and shoulders, remembering the druggist’s suggestion that perhaps the world would be just as well off if old Galt passed on and let his son have his day.

Time is ruthless; our children become our masters, he kept thinking. His mind flashed too, in eagle’s flight, to his own son Jimmy–grappling there in New York with some ideal too strong and cruel and beseeching to let him be. Young Doctor Kildare, eh? That made him, the father, old Doctor Kildare for sure. His thin lips smiled gently, fondly...

Harry went up the stairs, half turned by his worry toward old Kildare, and the doctor could not help feeling, again, that in the time of need the doctor is the master of the house. He was not a proud man but he knew that even the humblest servants of science are set apart by knowledge from the rank-and-file. Perhaps he was in the rearmost ranks but he marched in the army that stretches the fine spiderwebbing of thought across the years of the universe, of splitting away from the face of the atom a portion of its mystery.

“Father isn’t doing so well,” Harry was saying. “He can’t eat–or won’t. And the temperature stays there. It won’t let up. He doesn’t know you’re coming; I took it on myself to telephone to you tonight.”

“He’ll raise the devil, then,” said old Kildare, calmly.

“I suppose he will and I’m sorry,” agreed Harry.

“It’s all right,” answered the doctor. “The devils he raises are not very black and he doesn’t half believe in them himself.”

“Can you tell me what it really is?” asked Harry.

“Ten years ago,” said Doctor Kildare, “you can remember that he had a chronic fever, also?”

“I remember.”

“That was a flare-up of an old chronic tuberculous infection,” added the doctor. “We beat it then; we’ll beat it now.”

“Consumption!” said Harry. “And he’s ten years older!”

“He’s the same old oak. There’s no dry rot in him,” stated the doctor. “The stock he comes from can be torn down but it takes a big wind to make it fall. Right now he’ll outfight half the youngsters in the world.”

The stairs no longer creaked underfoot. They were passing along the whispering carpet of the upper hall. They went past the door which Kildare had entered to tend Harry’s scarlet fever. They went by the locked door behind which the wife of Galt had spent a year dying. So they came to the door of John Galt.

“Do you mind going in alone–” Harry asked.

The doctor smiled. It rather pleased him to see that the big young man still feared the wrath of his father. He knocked and went in.

“Hey? Yes? Who are you? What do you want?... I don’t need you, Kildare. Go home and let me sleep,” complained John Galt.

“You’re not sleeping. You’re worrying,” said the doctor. He leaned over the bed and looked through the yellow mist of fever into the mind of the sick man.

Age itself is a disease and other illnesses are only complications, “You’re worrying,” said Kildare, “and I’m going to stop that. I won’t have John Galt softening up, fussing about himself.”

“Soften be damned,” said Galt. “I’m going to be in the office tomorrow.”

“We fought that all out ten years ago. Are we going to fight it out again?”

“If I had a doctor worth his salt, I’d never have got down this low,” declared Galt, glowering.

“Maybe not.”

“What have you been giving me, anyway all this time?”

“The usual treatment: nourishing food, milk, ample rest, and Blaud’s Pills.”

“What for? What for? What kind of pill did you say?”

“Ferrous carbonate to increase your hemoglobin. And then there was the tonic, I.Q. and C.”

“Meaning what? How can I understand that infernal jibber- jabber?”

“Iron, quinine, and strychnine, It’s an old friend, that combination.”

“There was a time when people didn’t have so many fool ideas,” said the sick man, “and they seemed to get on pretty well.”

“They got on pretty well, John, but they didn’t get on so long.”

“Can you send me down to my office tomorrow?”

“Of course I can.”

“Good! Good!” The old man picked himself up on his elbows and grinned at Kildare until the gold of his back teeth was showing. “Now you’re talking like a man, and not a confounded doctor. Can you fix me up to go to the office tomorrow, sure enough?”

“I can, and that’ll fix you for a longer trip the next day.”

“A trip where?” snarled Galt.

“To the cemetery,” said the doctor.

Galt let his weight back against the pillows and looked wearily up at the ceiling. “Well, I don’t know...” he said.

“Neither do I. Neither does any man,” declared the doctor. “There still may be in you fifteen years of enough life to give the nervous itch to your men down there in the bank.”

Galt’s lips parted and his mouth remained open for a moment before the words came out slowly. “You think so, Stephen?”

“Unless you bother yourself to death,” said Kildare. “You lie still and keep your eyes closed till I come back.”

The banker closed his eyes; his smile was partly relief, partly the weak sagging of his face. In this interval, the doctor surveyed the room like a general swiftly making sure of his battleground.

All the furniture was of dark, heavy wood; the old floorboards were battered and wide; foolish little wisps of lace bordered the windows and all the shades were down. For a moment he was obsessed by a childish fancy, wondering how the soul, if it slipped from the mortal body, could escape past these walls into eternity.

He had turned to the door when the harsh, dry voice of the banker rattled behind him like dead brush crackling underfoot.

“Why should you be going around comforting other people, Kildare, when you’ve got trouble enough of your own?”

“Trouble? Trouble?” The doctor was startled.

“I said trouble and trouble I mean, When’d you last hear from that son of yours?”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor. “I mean–I heard from him today.”

“I don’t believe it,” snapped old Galt. “The whole town knows that he’s hardly written home since he went to New York.”

“I tell you, I heard from him this very evening,” said the doctor. A pulse beat a rapid finger against the hollow of his throat.

“I don’t believe it,” answered Galt.

“Read that, then, and confound you!” exclaimed Kildare.

He tossed a telegram on the bed. Galt, picking it up, read slowly:

TOO BUSY TO WRITE. ALL GOES WELL. LOVE JIMMY

“Too busy to write?” mocked Galt, dropping the telegram. “And too selfish to stay home and help his father. You’ve spoiled that boy of yours, Stephen. He’ll go to hell in the city. He’s not bright enough to keep the pace those city doctors will set for him. He’s only a country lad and he’ll never be anything else.”

“You’ll wear yourself out, chattering like a magpie,” said Kildare. “Be quiet, now.”

“Ay, ay,” muttered Galt. “A sick horse or an old dog are better than an ailing man because they can’t talk.”

His voice died away as old Kildare went out into the hall where Harry Galt remained anxiously on guard.

“It’s good that you called me,” said Kildare. “I’ll stay with him till he’s quiet and asleep. Where’s the telephone so that I can tell my wife?”

Harry Galt conducted him down the stairs, “It’s not serious?”

“At his age and mine everything is serious,” answered the doctor, but he softened his words with a smile. “He’ll be all right, Harry,” he added.

“That is good,” sighed Harry, “By the way, doctor, how’s Jimmy getting on?”

The doctor paused at the landing which was ornamented by a small window of stained glass in which a knight and a lady bent their Pre-Raphaelite necks askance to look upon the descending stairs.

“He’s already done even more than I hoped,” declared the doctor, examining mind and conscience to make sure that he did not exaggerate. “There’s no greater medical mind in this country than Leonard Gillespie, the internist–that means diagnostician, Harry–and he’s chosen my boy to assist him. For twenty-five years Gillespie has been looking for someone who could be the heir to his knowledge; for twenty-five years he couldn’t find his man; and now he has selected Jimmy.”

“That’s great for Jimmy. Now that he has a hold on a good chance, he’ll hang on. There’s plenty of bulldog in him.”

“Yes,” agreed the father, slowly, smiling at certain memories a bit ruefully. “There’s plenty of bulldog in Jimmy.”

“Which means that perhaps he’ll not be spending much time out here in Dartford, and Beatrice...”

“Don’t bog down,” the doctor urged. “Is there something between you and Beatrice?”

“No, but there might be.”

“Never stand in the shadow of another man if you can push him out of your way,” said old Kildare.

“You mean that all is fair in–”

“Put it another way,” the doctor interrupted. “Say that no matter how hard we try we’ll rarely get more than we deserve, so the wise fellows keep on trying.”

“I only wanted to know,” said Harry Galt, eagerly, “just what she means to him.” The doctor paused at the bottom of the stairs. At last he answered: “I can’t tell you what anything means to Jimmy except that he’s fighting now with all his might to gain everything that Gillespie has to give. He’s fighting like a football player with his head down. Sometimes I think he might make a little more yardage if he kept his head up. But I don’t know. Neither does anyone else. Jimmy’s not like the rest of us.”

“No,” agreed Harry Galt, partly comforted and partly in doubt, “he never was like the rest of us.”

That was what Beatrice thought too, coming through the dark of the night toward a lighted window in the Kildare cottage. Frost had purified the air, leaving the stars as bright as ghostly day and making the stones, slippery underfoot. The face and voice of every life in the village seemed to Beatrice Raymond a weight gathered in her heart; she knew each house, each unpainted lean- to, and she felt that she could identify every door in Dartford by the sound of its slamming.

At the Kildare house she knocked twice and without waiting went into the hall. The ghost of the Kildare supper lingered there. To the left the door opened on what had been the parlor until the Kildares, for the sake of their returning son, turned it into the office which he never had used.

Beyond the doorway she saw Martha Kildare with a lap full of sewing near the desk at which Jimmy never had sat; and on the walls she saw his framed school diplomas, like four steps which he had taken before he leaped into the great world of New York and was gone from her.

“Come in, Beatrice, my dear,” said the doctor’s wife, looking up with those wrinkling eyes and that large, determined jaw from which Jimmy had taken his character if not his features. “I thought you’d be at the dance.”

“Harry couldn’t go. Mr. Galt is worse,” said Beatrice. “Then I saw the light over here.”

“There’s always something for my hands to work at,” answered Martha Kildare. “I thought I’d wait up for Stephen and give him some hot coffee when he came home.”

“Are you sitting up just for that?”

“Well, you know, it’s what we do for our men that keeps us loving them. I’m sorry you missed the dance. If Harry doesn’t ask you, what about the other boys?”

“They understand about Jimmy,” said the girl.

“But Harry doesn’t? Is that it?”

“He knows. That’s why he always acts as though he were a second-hand man.”

“You like that young Harry Galt,” said Mrs. Kildare, with decision. “I think Jimmy had better come back here and attend to things.”

“He won’t come back unless he’s called.”

“And you won’t call him?”

“I wish I had a job in a factory,” cried Beatrice. “I wish I were so busy all day long that I could fall in bed at night and go to sleep without time for thinking.”

“Yes, it’s the thinking that makes all the trouble,” agreed Martha Kildare. “Has he written to you?”

“No.”

“Not a single time?”

“No.”

“All these weeks, and not a word!” exclaimed Mrs. Kildare. “He’s a selfish boy!”

“No. He’s not selfish. He’s not forgetting us but he thinks that nothing matters except the great moments. Well, a girl’s life isn’t made of great moments, is it? We’re not always about to die, or something, are we?”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Kildare. “But, Beatrice, my dear, how can you know him so well?”

“Because he’s hurt me so much,” said Beatrice. “And then I have a guilty knowledge, too.”

“Guilty?”

Beatrice sat down at Jimmy Kildare’s unused desk and put her chin on her fist. “He never really wanted me,” she said. “He was just used to me and thought I might be nice to have around; but I did the proposing. I’m going to tell him so. I’m going to give him his freedom back. This very night I’ll write to him!”

She sprang up and hurried to the door.

“Beatrice!” said Mrs. Kildare.

“Yes?” asked the girl, turning and seeing the old woman through the mist of grief.

“Well, I won’t argue,” said Mrs. Kildare. “You’re too sweet and good to deserve unhappiness; but I couldn’t help thinking, just now, how ugly sorrow is in the old, and how lovely it is in the young.”

II. THE HOURS ARE RACING

THE blue of hemotoxylin stained the nuclear elements of the cells and showed them as a dark mass; the strong orange of eosin appeared in the fibrous tissue like strands of a heavy spiderwebbing that had been wind-tossed into confusion.

It was a slide of lobar pneumonia that Doctor James Kildare was studying under the microscope and this was that early inflammatory stage of engorgement, when the small capillary vessels are dilated with blood and, also, there was free blood in the alveolae, whose cell-lining was destroyed.

The little grapelike clusters which should have been free to hold life-giving air were filled instead, with red and white corpuscles. In this case a whole lobe had been involved. He remembered the particular patient; the suffused face and the feverish, mindless eyes of the dying man looked in upon him for an instant, like something seen through the window of a speeding train.

He picked up the next slide. He had to hurry.

There were twenty more to examine and the night was flowing rapidly away. Every day went too quickly. Each morning he told himself that Gillespie was one step closer to death. Each morning he opened his mind to take in more of those great drafts of wisdom which the old diagnostician offered to him; and every night he felt, as weariness climbed upward from his numb body to his brain, that time had rushed by him like a river, leaving very little in his grasp.

That was why he worked now at five in the morning, staggered by fatigue but still eager. When exhaustion began to eat into the marrow of his mind he told himself that when the year ended with Gillespie’s death he himself would lie down to sleep as with the dead.

Whole oceans of blue, chilly oblivion were what he needed. With that promise of rest far off, like a cloudy loom of land from the sea, he set his teeth and freshened his nerve again for the work of the instant.

For him, the whole great building seemed asleep. Save for this one room, the Dupont General Hospital did not exist.

An opening door let into the room a strong current of air that flicked up the leaves of Osier’s Medicine and set trembling the pages of the latest volume on the heart by Sir Thomas Lewis. Kildare put down a protecting hand and turned with a scowl from the microscope.

The big ambulance-driver, Weyman, was bringing in a huge rye sandwich and a bottle of milk with a glass over the top of it. Regardless of the wind that blew around him into the little office, troubling the leaves of the open books and fluttering a hundred sheafs of notes, Weyman stood in the doorway considering the doctor with a thoughtful eye.

Weyman was large, heavy of bone and thick of shoulder, with small eyes and not much head above them, and a round, solid face running to jaw and jowls. He seemed made to withstand shocks but he had the punch-drunk look of one who has had too many of them.

He grinned askance at Kildare. “Hi, doc,” he said. “This is a hell of an idea.”

Compunction came upon Kildare slowly like a tardy conscience to a very busy thief. “I’m sorry, Weyman. I don’t want to bother you like this.” Kildare rubbed the heel of his wrist across his forehead to get some of the numbness out. He looked at the food and milk. “I’m sorry that you’re always troubling about me,” he said.

“Yeah?” queried Weyman. “And I’m sorry for you, brother. Where’s the train you wanta catch? All night, every night. It don’t make sense.”

He pulled the top from the milk bottle with a jerk, so that it made a brief smacking sound, and poured the glass full.

Kildare looked at the food and drink without interest. His stomach closed up tight at the idea of eating. He lit a cigarette and held out the package to Weyman. “The trouble is that there isn’t any time,” he explained.

“No time for what?” asked Weyman. His eyes were pondering, gloomy. “You gunna leave the hospital?”

Kildare’s staggering brain rallied slowly to the question. “No. No,” he answered. “There’s no time limit on me. It’s Gillespie who has only a few months to...”

He saw at the last moment where the sentence had led him and bit off the final word; but his startled eyes were completing his meaning even for Weyman. The driver extended a long right arm, thick with muscle and famous in the history of saloon brawls through the whole breadth and length of Hell’s Kitchen. He pointed at Kildare.

“You mean that Gillespie’s got his time limit?”

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