The Patient in Room 18 · Chapter 1 (2/3)

“You are right though, Dr. Letheny.” Dr. Balman, who had apparently been engaged in digesting his dinner, spoke so suddenly that I jumped. He lounged toward the window and stood with his hands in his pockets looking down at St. Ann’s lights.

“You are right,” he repeated. “If I had one-half the money that is thrown away down there the experiment that failed for me this afternoon might have succeeded.” The bitterness in his voice was so grim that I think we all felt a little startled and uncomfortable. All, that is, except Corole, whose feelings are not easily accessible and who was manipulating the coffee machine over by the lamp. Its light brought the flat, gold waves of her hair into relief.

“Here is the coffee,” she said huskily. “As coffee should be: black as night, hot as hell, and sweet as love.” She offered the tiny cup to Gainsay.

Well, the rest of us had heard her say that before and Gainsay did not appear to hear her now. I could see that she was hesitating on the verge of repetition, but she was too wise for that.

“Can’t you stop needless expenditure?” asked Gainsay.

“Stop it?” Dr. Letheny laughed acidly. “Stop it when the hospital is privately endowed and the board of directors a bunch of ignorant, conceited asses! Look at this matter of radium. Nothing must do but that we buy a whole gram of radium. They had heard of radium. Other hospitals had it. Radium we must have and radium we bought. But try to talk to them of research, of discovering a new remedy for an old need, of the necessity for laboratories, for equipment, for study. You might as well try to stop the thunder storm that is coming as to ask them to see anything that is not squarely in front of their fat stomachs.”

“But radium,” said Gainsay mildly, “is a good thing for a hospital to have, isn’t it? I thought it a great discovery.”

“Of course, of course!” broke in Dr. Balman. “But we don’t need that much. Half a gram, a fourth of it⁠—even a sixth of it would have served our purpose. But no! We must spend sixty-five thousand dollars for one tiny gram of radium. Sixty-five thousand dollars! And to my plea for half of that⁠—only half of that money⁠—they laughed. Laughed at study! At research! At laboratories and equipment! And called me a visionary. God! A visionary!”

It must have been that the increasing sultriness of the night and the tension of the approaching storm made us all a little nervous and easily stirred. A curious hush followed Franz Balman’s outbreak, during which I became aware of the heavy breathing of Dr. Hajek near me. I stirred impatiently and moved away. I had never either liked or disliked Fred Hajek, but that night I felt suddenly a sharp distaste for him. The atmosphere in the room seemed unbearably heavy and I shivered a little despite the heat and wondered if my dinner was not going to agree with me.

Gainsay got up, moved to get an ash tray, and sat down again in another chair. I noted that the move brought him nearer Maida, whose fine white profile was visible in the shadow near the window. She did not smoke⁠—not, I believe, from any fastidious prejudice, but merely from distaste⁠—and her hands, delicate yet strong, lay passively on the carved arms of the chair. She was the kind of person whose silences seem thoughtful and neither flat nor detached; a most companionable person to have around.

Corole noted the move, too, for she took my seat next to Hajek and murmured something under her breath to him.

“Are you both experimenting in the same field?” asked Gainsay, his ordinary, easy tone making my disquiet seem uncalled-for and silly.

“No,” said Dr. Letheny shortly.

“No,” said Dr. Balman. He turned abruptly away from the window and sat down at the shadowy end of the davenport; his shirt front thrust itself up in an ungainly hump but he did not appear to care.

“Well,” said Corole, “if I were a millionaire I should give you both the money to work to your heart’s content.”

“Indeed.” Dr. Letheny spoke so satirically that I feared an outburst from our hostess, whose temper was never of the best.

But she surprised me.

“No!” she retracted with disarming frankness. From habit Corole could lie like a trooper, but when she was inclined toward truth-telling she was quite candidly honest. “No,” she went on, “if I had a million dollars I should spend it⁠—oh, how I should spend it! Silks and furs and jewels and servants and cars and cities and⁠—”

“By that time it would be gone,” observed Dr. Letheny drily.

“Maybe,” Corole laughed huskily. “But how gloriously gone.”

“I suppose,” began Fred Hajek, with a little of the awkwardness that assails one who has remained silent a long time while others of the group are talking, “I suppose that idea is a sort of unacknowledged fairy dream hidden in everyone’s mind.”

“Of course.” Dr. Letheny’s voice grated to my ears. “Everybody wants money. Usually for reasons such as Corole has so charmingly admitted.”

“Not always,” disagreed Gainsay. “You and⁠—er⁠—Dr. Balman have just agreed that you both needed it for research.”

“A selfish reason, though,” replied Dr. Letheny. “We get the same pleasurable reaction out of study and science that Corole does out of clothes and jewels and⁠—cream in general. Miss Keate, over there,” he nodded toward me, “gets the same kick out of hard work and a smooth-running hospital routine. Only her⁠—demands⁠—are not so expensive.”

His tone irritated me. It may be true that I am considered something of a martinet, especially among the student nurses, but somebody has to see to things.

“Nonsense,” I spoke sharply. “I want money just as much as anybody.”

I suppose my words rang sincere, for Dr. Letheny sat up.

“What is your repressed desire, Sarah Keate?” he demanded with just the shade of amusement in his voice that always riled me. “Come on, out with it! Do you long for the gay night life? Or have you secret urges to become a front-page sensation?”

And I must say that, in the light of what was to occur, it was remarkable that he said just that.

“She might make a splendid aviatrix,” said Jim Gainsay, smiling into the dusk.

After that I was not going to tell them that above all things I longed to travel and that everybody knows travel costs money. I said curtly:

“Everybody wants money.”

“How about you, Maida?” broke in Corole rather maliciously.

Maida is, as a rule, almost too perfect at the art of concealing her emotions. It may have been that the semidarkness of the room concealed an intended air of frivolousness, or it may have been that the threat of the approaching storm plucked at her nerves and pierced her habitual armour of reserve. At any rate her answer was unexpected.

“Money!” she said. “Money! I think I would give my very soul for money!”

Of course, I knew she didn’t mean that. But Dr. Letheny shot her a glance that fairly pierced the dusk, Corole laughed a little metallic ripple, and Jim Gainsay turned straightway around in his chair to face Maida’s shadowed eyes.

“I haven’t any money,” he said directly and quite as if Maida had asked him a question, though I think the others were too preoccupied to observe this. “I haven’t any money at all.”

“And are you happy without it, Jim?” asked Corole, her warm voice caressing.

“Well⁠ ⁠…” Jim Gainsay paused. “I was, until lately.”

He was still speaking to Maida. I believe Dr. Letheny understood that somewhat singular fact, also, for he spoke so quietly that there was a suggestion of deliberate restraint about his words.

“And what do you intend to do in the face of this sudden realization?”

“Make some money,” replied Jim Gainsay simply.

Dr. Letheny laughed⁠—not pleasantly.

“But my dear fellow, is it so simple as that?”

“It should not be difficult.” Gainsay did not appear to be disturbed by the perceptible edge of irony in Dr. Letheny’s questions.

“Owing to the fact that several billions of people over the face of the earth are engaged in profitless efforts in that direction, will you tell us just how you propose to accomplish it with such expedition?”

“Certainly not. If I can manage to lay my hands on⁠—say⁠—fifty thousand I can make⁠—oh, as much money as I want. I can do it. And I will.” He was grave and yet quite casual. A mere matter of information for Maida. If she wanted money he would see that she got it and that was that! It seemed so clear to me that I felt something very like embarrassment, though neither Maida nor Jim Gainsay seemed disturbed.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” mused Dr. Letheny softly. “That is quite a lot of money. Many a man has failed for its⁠—inaccessibility.”

“I’ll get it all right,” said Jim Gainsay.

“And when you get it what are you going to do with it? How are you going to make it grow into as much money as you want?”

“Contracting.” There was an undercurrent in the short reply that warned Dr. Letheny off.

Corole laughed again.

“Funny!” she said. “Every single one of us has confessed to a fervent desire for money. That is, all but Franz and Dr. Hajek. And we all know that Franz would give his very eyes⁠—no, he needs them for experiment⁠—ten years of his life, then, for money to carry on those same precious experiments.”

“It is a good thing we are all law-abiding citizens,” I remarked drily.

“I think I shall be on the safe side, though, and lock up my jewels tonight!” said Corole.

“Don’t be a fool,” observed Dr. Letheny.

Corole’s topaz eyes caught a glint of angry green light.

“Why, really, Louis, being what one can’t help is better, at any rate, than longing for what one can’t get.”

Her somewhat stupid reply did not, to my mind, warrant its effect. Dr. Letheny moved suddenly upright in his chair, his thin lips drawn tight over his teeth.

“Until later, dear cousin.” The words had a sharp edge of fury. “Until later. We have guests at present.”

I could only suppose that the stifling atmosphere had disturbed Dr. Letheny’s always hair-trigger nerves. Otherwise he had not been so needlessly vulgar. He was a brilliant man with a cutting tongue, but gossip had whispered that what Corole lacked in the way of brains she more than made up for in feline cunning of attack. This was the first time, however, that I had heard the two ill-assorted housemates come to open and bad-mannered warfare.

Dr. Hajek relieved the strained silence that naturally followed the little contretemps.

“I hear that you used the radium today.” He had a peculiarly inflectionless manner of speech that made him seem heavy and dull.

“Yes.” Dr. Letheny rose and pulled the curtain still farther from the window. “Torrid night, isn’t it? Yes, we are trying it for old Mr. Jackson.” He paused. “I don’t know that it will do any good,” he added callously. “But we may as well try it. By the way, Miss Keate, I shall be in shortly after midnight to see how the patient is getting on. You might leave the south door unlocked for me. Let me see⁠—he is in Room 18, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“So you are going to Russia on another bridge project, Jim?” Dr. Letheny was again master of himself.

“What⁠—oh, yes! Yes.” Jim Gainsay started a little as if Dr. Letheny had recalled him to a forgotten fact.

“Will it be a long stay?”

“Why, yes, probably. It should take about two or three years. It will be an interesting job. The preliminaries are rather sketchy, but it looks as though there might be some problems involved.”

He spoke in an oddly detached way, as if he were not much interested in the subject, and it was not surprising that the conversation flattened out again. Presently Corole suggested bridge and even made up a table, but Dr. Balman definitely refused to play and Jim Gainsay, being engaged in watching Maida’s eyelashes, did not appear to hear Corole’s suggestion that he make a fourth, so Dr. Letheny made a reluctant partner for me against Corole and Dr. Hajek. However, we played only a few desultory hands until Maida and Gainsay drifted over to the window and fell into a low-voiced conversation, when Dr. Letheny, who had been darting quick glances in that direction, trumped my ace, flung down his cards, said it was too rotten hot to play and, paying no attention to Corole’s protests, went to the piano.

Dr. Letheny was a discriminative musician of far more than amateur skill, and the great, jarring, Moscow bells of the “C Sharp Minor Prelude” presently surged over the room. I am a practical, matter-of-fact woman and I have never been able to account for the strange disquietude that crept over me as I listened. It was the strangest thing in a strange and unreal evening. The couple at the window turned and moved closer together. Corole’s flat eyes caught the light like a cat’s. Dr. Balman stared at nothing from the shadows and worried his beard. Only Dr. Hajek was unmoved by that passionate sweep of sound.

All at once the room was intolerable to me. I twisted about in my chair and fought down a childish desire to run from its heat and breathlessness. And then the keys under Dr. Letheny’s white fingers slipped into the higher notes of the second movement and a hot, fetid breath of air from the hushed night billowed the curtain a little and touched my hot face and heightened the nightmare that had taken possession of me.

By the time the climax had carried us all along with it in its torrent, and the Doctor had sat, in the hush that followed the last note, for a long moment before he turned to us again⁠—by that time little beads of perspiration shone all along the backs of my hands and my heart was pumping as if I had been running a race.

I rose.

“I must go,” I said, my voice breaking harshly into the silence. “I must go. It is nearly twelve.”

“Yes,” said Maida. “Yes. We must go.”

Somehow we got away. I remember being vaguely surprised when Jim Gainsay merely took Maida’s hand for a conventional instant, although I’m sure I don’t know what I had expected.

Maida and I walked slowly, feeling our way through the great, black velvet curtain that was the night. The hospital was now darkened and the path twisted unexpectedly. The air was as heavy with the presage of storm, there under the trees, as it had been in Corole’s lamp-lit house. The sky was thick and black with not the glimmer of a star showing through. The katydids and crickets were all hushed as if waiting. The path was hot under our thin-soled slippers, the alfalfa sickeningly sweet in its warm breath, the shadows of the thickets were dense and not a leaf stirred. I know that orchard and those clusters of trees and elderberries and sumac as well as I know the twists and turns of the old hospital corridors, and never until that night did I catch my breath when my hand brushed against a leaf, or take a long sigh of relief when we emerged from those suddenly unfriendly thickets into the silence of the long, night-lighted corridor of the south wing.

Up in the everyday surroundings of the nurses’ dormitory I still failed to shake off the sense of the unreal that had come over me. Together we changed into our crisp, white uniforms. I remember we talked of silly, inconsequential things⁠—such as the sogginess of the bread pudding we had had for lunch, and the new cuff links that Maida was inserting into her cuffs. They were small squares of lapis-lazuli edged in engraved white gold. Lovely though they were, they yet contrived to be simple and dignified at the same time.

“I like lapis,” said Maida without much interest. “I like things that are real.” She was adjusting her proud, white cap as she spoke. In spite of the businesslike white linen that became her so well, she was still the flushed and vivid Maida of the blue and crystal-frosted dinner gown, whose eyes had grown starry under Jim Gainsay’s regard. I sighed as I pinned on my own cap. I had always felt that if love came to Maida it would be swift and compelling.