Testimony Of Two Men (12 page)

“Oh, that’s too bad,” said Robert, taking up his soup spoon with enthusiasm. “This is very tasty. Do try a sip.”

She ate a very hearty dinner, even more than Robert, and complained and sighed and murmured dolorously all through it. As a thrifty woman she deftly tucked two buttered rolls into her handkerchief for later nibbling. After all, she told herself, she slept badly. And waste was sinful. It had been paid for. It didn’t do to encourage gorging in servants, who were allowed leftovers. “Two dollars for this dinner, Robert? Do they think you are a millionaire?”

”
An odious woman, really,” said Marjorie Ferrier to her son two days later. “So affected. She spent most of tea-time preening and condescending and bragging genteelly and talking in what she doubtlessly considered a very ‘refined’ way. How could such a nice gentlemanly boy like young Robert have such a mother?”

“And how could such a nice mother like you have such odious sons?” Jonathan asked her. “It’s all inheritance from distant ancestors.”

“My sons are not odious,” said Marjorie. “Here, dear, do try this English marmalade. You aren’t eating very well these days. What a wonderful morning! It’s bright and warm again. I think I’ll work in the rose garden. Where are you going now, Jon?”

“Taking young Galahad on the rounds, as usual. I want to be sure—”

“Of what, dear?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters any longer.”

But everything always mattered too much for you, my son, thought Marjorie with a sigh, as her son gave her a brief kiss and left. She clenched her slight hands on her knees and closed her fine hazel eyes. Would there never be an answer to her prayers? How could she live alone here, in this big house, without Jon? All her dreams had come to nothing. There were no grandchildren, there was no happy laughter anywhere. There was no gay coming here any longer, as once there was, when Mavis was alive and Jon was busy. Jon? She thought about it. When had he stopped smiling that quick dark smile of his? A year after he had married Mavis? Two years? Three? He had stopped within six months.

Oh, God, thought Marjorie, if only Mavis had never been born! If only Jon had never seen her! If only she had died at birth! But life, it seemed, was tragically made up of “if onlys.”

“This is a fine new rig you have,” said Jonathan to Robert Morgan. “Good horse, too. When did you buy it?”

“Yesterday.” Robert gave him a sunny smile. “Like it? I do, too. I heard the horse had been sired by one of your own. My mother was upset.”

“Why?”

“The expense. She thought I should hire a buggy for a while, instead of buying one. I don’t think she’s joyful over this town. Besides, Mother is very—well, I suppose you’d call it financially discreet. I told you, you’ll remember, that my father didn’t have much money of his own; he did a lot of charity work; too much, according to Mother. What we have belongs to Mother. Of course, I’m her only heir, but sometimes it makes things difficult.”

“Well, widows have to be providential,” said Jonathan.

“I’m hardly a profligate son,” said Robert. “I worked in drugstores when I wasn’t in school, and mother told all her friends that she didn’t consider it very ‘nice’ but that I was an independent boy and I had
insisted.
The truth is, Mama was always very near with the cash; thought if I didn’t have any, I’d not get entangled with females, or something. I had to have more than the two dollars a week she gave me when I was in college—so I worked. Waited on tables and such. A lot of the fellows looked down on me for that, though their parents didn’t have half the money Mama has. Dear Mama.”

“Where’d you get the money from to buy this outfit, then?”

Robert laughed and proudly held the reins. “I charged it to my mother. She’ll get the bill soon. The funny thing about it is that she never asked me how I bought it, acting on the principle that if she did not ask, there’d be no bill and no unpleasantness.”

“You’ll soon have plenty of money of your own, once you’re established here,” said Jonathan. “I’ve shown you my rates; don’t come down on them. They’re a
Utile
higher than average, but then you’re an authentic doctor and not a quack. There’s something else I’ve wanted to talk to you about. When I was a kid, most doctors had only the most elementary medical educations, having merely studied under physicians and gone the rounds with them for two or three years, and reading their medical books. They did a lot of God-awful damage, of course, but a lot of them did a lot of good. They developed, or were born with, a ‘smell.’ They could smell out illnesses on merely entering a room and could make a prompt and accurate diagnosis on the spot. A sort of sixth sense. Every real doctor has that, even in these days of ‘scientific diagnosis,’ but it’s not held in good repute any longer. The more we begin to rely strictly on laboratory findings, the more dull hacks—though out of good medical schools—we’ll find ourselves afflicted with, and any man with well-off parents can aspire to be a physician, whether he’s fit for it or not. Just for the prestige. Potential carpenters and blacksmiths in operating rooms.

“Don’t take the corners too fast with this horse. I had his dam, too, and she had a way of cutting around. Well. I’m not against full laboratory procedures; I do a lot of it, myself. Stops the guesswork. But we can have too much of it; I’ve seen some tragic errors when doctors go by the laboratory and not by common sense and careful, personal diagnoses. Of course the hacks couldn’t practice medicine any other way if we didn’t have laboratories these days, so perhaps many lives are saved. But nothing beats an eye, an ear, and a sense of smell, that sixth sense I’ve been telling you about”

“And you’re afraid I might not have it?”

“We’ll see. Beginning today. Even if you don’t and are careful, and lean heavily on the laboratories, you can’t do much harm. Now, when I was a boy, we knew a physician in a tall silk hat, stock, chains, and the usual frock coat and striped trousers and spats and a gold-headed cane. Almost illiterate. Big bearded bastard with a voice like an organ chord. He’d ‘studied medicine’ under another just like himself. Impressive old fart. And yet, I’ve never met a more acute diagnostician and never a man, even a modern physician, who could cure faster.

“I used to have what they called a ‘chest’ in those days.
I
stank up every classroom with the bag of camphor my mother hung about my neck, and I reeked with asafetida, too. That’s what really made me a good boxer. I had to be. Then there was goose grease, steeping feet in hot water and big doses of castor oil. I was supposed to sweat it out. Well, one winter my chest was worse than usual, and our family doctor had influenza, and we called in Dr. Bogus. He walked into the bedroom where I was coughing my lungs out, sniffed around the room, said ‘Ah,’ came to the bed, looked up my nose and down my throat, and said, ‘Where’s the cat?’

“Now, we always had cats in the house, two or three at least. Love the beasts; still do. My mother was surprised, but I hauled under the bed and brought up my favorite pussy. There’s the villain, or villainess,’ said Dr. Bogus, and picked up pussy and gently threw her out of the room. It seems I was sensitive to cats, but no one had ever suggested it before. I have them still, on the farms, but not in the house. And I still get a ‘chest’ if I go into a house where a pussy is in residence. Everybody laughed at Dr. Bogus, but he was right, you see. And everybody who laughed still called him in emergencies when real doctors were baffled. He had a nose.”

“We can diagnose sensitiveness to animals, or whatever, without having a nose now.”

“True. What are they beginning to call it now? Allergies. They’re still mysterious. Why does one man drop dead if he takes an egg and another can have half a dozen of them for breakfast and feel ‘fine,’ as Teddy Roosevelt calls it Sickening word. No one knows exactly why some proteins can kill some people and not affect others. Allergens, they call them these days. But why? We still don’t know. Dr. Bogus didn’t know either; he’d never heard of allergies to the day he died. But he knew they existed, just as Aristotle knew the nature of an atom even though he’d never known any scientific instruments. And today our scientists are talking about ‘the atom’ as if no one had ever proposed the theory before or written down a hypothesis. Dr. Bogus, I bet could outdo any of your teachers at Johns Hopkins when it came to a diagnosis, even if he could rarely pronounce the name of the disease correctly and didn’t know Latin from Sanskrit He could lay his ear for a second to a man’s chest and look into his eyes and come up with the exact thing that ailed his heart. And his weird concoctions, witch-doctor stuff, really, which he whipped up in his dirty little pharmacy, had almost magic qualities, though I doubt he knew what the hell most of the ingredients honestly were, or how or why they worked.”

“My father told me about men like that,” said Robert with doubt. “Me, I’m the real laboratory diagnostician.”

But Jonathan did not laugh. He said, “That’s not enough. I expect more from you than that. That’s why I picked you over the others.”

“Thanks,” said Robert.

“The others,” said Jonathan, “were strictly scientific chaps. That’s not enough. We’re going to St. Hilda’s first. There’re a couple of cases or so, that I want you to diagnose.”

“By my sixth sense?”

“By your sixth sense. You strike me as a real doctor; I don’t want to be disappointed. Take Leonardo da Vinci. He designed submarines and was laughed at for centuries. But now we not only know, because of him, that they are possible, but we are beginning to design them, too. He designed flying-machines, and now we have men working on such things, and, frankly, I’m afraid of them. The faster we get into communication with our fellows, the faster we’ll learn to hate them. The sentimental used to carol that the telephone, by making instant communication possible, would clear up all misunderstandings and foster a spirit of brotherly love. Instead of that it has become an instrument of invasion; anyone can invade your house if you have a telephone, and most of the time it’s a lot of nonsense. And a lot of the time you resent the caller and start to hate his guts. Science is going to make the new world a pretty threatening place.”

“Antiprogress, I see.”

“Don’t laugh so smugly, boy. The more weapons you give a man, the more dangerous he becomes, and science is just on the threshold of supplying mankind with really big weapons. Most of them impersonal. When men fought hand-to-hand in battle, it gave them some respect for life, even if they killed in the name of whatever. But a rifle and a cannon— they are only instruments of destruction and you never see the man you murdered, so how can you respect his manhood? Watch that corner. It’s pretty busy.”

The streets simmered with the warm June sun and the lawns danced with the shadows of the great old trees. Children were racing to school, swinging their books on straps, little boys in knickerbockers, little girls in bright summer cottons and with ribbons in their hair. Small towns, thought Robert, masterfully handling the reins, have a lot to commend them. There’s a certain close quality about them, a sense of nearness. He said, “I don’t think that isolating oneself is the best way to get along with others.”

“But it’s a lot safer,” said Jonathan. “Besides, who wants their affection? That’s cheap and common, as my mother would call it. Give me respect anytime. An island is better than an anthill. One of these days well run out of islands, of any kind, and you’ll see the heartiest massacres of whole populations. If you live long enough, and pray you don’t. Man just can’t stand too much of his fellowman.”

“You’re making me melancholy.”

“Melancholy was highly esteemed by the Greeks. Don’t underestimate it. Did you ever see a fool who was depressed, really depressed? No. Melancholy, and all the other mental ills, seem the prerogative of the intelligent. You’ve got to know the world to conclude you can’t stand it.”

Robert hesitated. “May I ask you a personal question? Thanks. Were you such a misanthrope before your—your— trouble?”

“You mean before I was on trial for killing my wife and child? Well, don’t use euphemisms. Yes, I think I was always a misanthrope to some extent. If you aren’t one yet, I advise you to cultivate misanthropy. Then nobody will catch you flat-footed, no one will cheat you, no one will stick a knife in your back. You’ll always be looking for such things and you’ll never be disappointed. But you’ll be forewarned, and that’s a blessed thing.”

School bells were ringing, and churches were chiming nine o’clock; distant dogs barked lazily. A water wagon was roaming slowly along the streets, wetting down the gutters and making little black rivers among the cobblestones. A scent of moistened dust rose in the air pleasantly, and from somewhere came the passionately sweet scent of a linden tree. And always, over it all, the fragrance of garden roses, hot with life under the sun. So peaceful, thought Robert.

“The thing we have to learn, all of us now, is that peace is on the way out as a condition of existence,” said Jonathan. “How do I know? I get the London
Times.
Parliament is expressing its ‘distress’ that Germany is crowding the British out of what they call their ‘traditional markets.’”

“So?”