Puslapio vaizdai
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They closed on it like a pair of pliers. He could take hold of your wrist in that way and fairly bruise it. They were n't fingers; they were steel calipers." The cords in the backs of his hands played freely back and forth over the knuckles, and he could expand and contract the width of the hand as if the bones in it were the ribs of a fan. "He was n't altogether born that way," Ward explained. "He had purposely acquired it, like a contortionist, as part of his training."

Ward had known him from boyhood. Both had been born in the New England town of Primpton, Massachusetts, but they came of families separated by such a distance in the social scale that it was not until they arrived in the same class at college that they became intimate. Ward had intended to study law. Hellmuth persuaded him to go into medicine.

"It was like a religious enthusiasm with him," Ward said. "He converted me. There's no other word for it. And that was one of the things that puzzled me about Hellmuth until quite lately-what had given him this fanatical feeling about medicine."

Hellmuth's father owned the textile mills at Primpton, and Hellmuth, as the eldest son, should have succeeded him in the business. The grandfather had been an immigrant weaver who married a Massachusetts girl; the father married one of the New England Hales; there had never been a doctor anywhere in the immediate family.

"You'd have expected Hellmuth to be a parson, if anything," Ward said. "The old people were as devout as Jonathan Edwards. They had a fine old religious feeling against science as atheistic, and he had a fight for it

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He did not respond at once. He sat sunken in his arm-chair, pinching his chin between thumb and forefinger, and looking through me thoughtfully, with one eyebrow higher than the other and his eyes not focused. It gave him a melancholy expression.

He had just heard that Hellmuth, in charge of a field hospital unit, had died from exposure in the Serbian retreat over the mountains of Montenegro, somewhere between Petch and Scutari, in December, 1915. Or, rather, he had just had a confirmation of the cable news of Hellmuth's death, in a letter from his assistant, a Dr. Rogers. It was this letter that had moved Ward to speak of Hellmuth to me.

"Tell you about it?" he said at last. "I don't know how to tell you about it. It's too long a story. It's the story of Hellmuth's whole life."

He thought it over in a sort of mute wonder.

"The Greeks would have called it fate," he said. "And it shows what this thing is sometimes the thing that we call fate." He nodded to himself. "Well," he concluded, "I'll tell you the parts that are more or less significant."

He began to tell me about the time when Hellmuth and he had been interns together at the Old St. Luke's; and his reminiscences, after the manner of such, were concerned more with

riotous doings out of hours than with duties in the hospital. Hellmuth had two enviable qualifications for leadership in their young medical convivialities: he could drink as much beer as a German student, and he played the piano like a rhythmical baboon.

"He'd spent a year abroad," Ward explained, "chiefly in Vienna. He came back with a prejudice against the Germans, due to their operating on charity patients without giving them anesthetics, as far as I could make out, and another prejudice against their music. He called it melodic suicide, tonal pessimism. He would never play anything but dances and rag-time. He said he had taken up the piano to develop his hands. I don't believe that. He had a gift for music, if he had cared to follow it, but he would n't. He would n't surrender to his emotions. He never went to concerts or operas. If an orchestra started anything at all moving, he'd get out."

The gang to which they belonged had found a little Hungarian restaurant where they could get table d'hôte dinners cheap and have the freedom of a good piano. It was the resort of another clique also, a group from the under-world, and among these were two who became involved with Hellmuth.

One was a thin-lipped young crook whom they nicknamed "the Jackdaw" because of his color and his sinister air; and the other was the Jackdaw's "skirt," a silent and adoring child of the streets, so blonde and chalk-faced that they called her "Angel Mary." They did not know the real names of either.

"We 'd noticed them together several times at a table in the back of

the joint," Ward said, "and for some reason Hellmuth took a scunner to the Jackdaw on sight."

He had very sleek and glossy black hair and a bony nose, and a round, unwinking eye that looked at you sidewise like a rooster's. The girl used to sit and wait for him, without eating until he came; and she would give him a searching, frightened glance as he entered, to see what his mood was. If he came in with his hat on the side of his head, swinging his bamboo cane, she brightened as if the sun had risen. They sat and talked over their food, with their heads together, so that you could never hear what they said; and at the end of the meal she paid the check and went out cheerfully, and left him to smoke over his empty plate, pleased with himself.

More often he entered, dragging his stick, his hat down on his nose; and he sat without looking at her, and spoke to her only out of the side of his mouth, sourly. Then she would eat her meal as quickly as possible, and pay the check and slink away as dejected as a disappointed child.

"We knew a lot of policemen, from our ambulance work," Ward explained. "Hellmuth asked them about the Jackdaw, and found out that he was one of Chick Allen's cadets. Probably a pickpocket and petty con-man, too. The girl was on the streets, helping to support him."

One night they sat at a table directly behind Hellmuth and began their meal quietly, but ended it with a quarrel about a ruby brooch that the Jackdaw wanted to give her and she was afraid to take. Hellmuth was listening; the others were not. And when the crook, in the midst of a hoarse, whispered controversy, sud

denly slapped her face, Hellmuth spun around and struck him an openhanded blow on the side of his head that toppled him off his chair. He sprang up and tried to rush Hellmuth, and Hellmuth knocked him down.

That started a "free for all." There were several of the medical clique in the café, and at first they had all the best of it; but more of Chick Allen's gang kept coming in, with brass knuckles and blackjacks, and the students had to defend themselves with chairs and carafes and anything else they could snatch up. Some one called in the police, and that saved them.

"Hellmuth and I were cornered," Ward said, "behind a table that we had overturned, beating off three or four toughs who were trying to disfigure us. And behind us was the girl. When the police stopped the fight, Hellmuth saw that she had the brooch in her hand—the brooch that she and the Jackdaw had quarreled about. She had caught it up when the table overturned. Hellmuth said, 'Here, don't let them see you with that,' and he snatched it away from her. Then when the cops were lining us up, he held it out to the Jackdaw and said, 'I think this is yours.'

"Of course a plain-clothes man grabbed it at once. He demanded:

""Where did you get that?' and Hellmuth explained.

of the affair. of the affair. The desk sergeant did not hold Hellmuth or me, but he held the girl, and Hellmuth went down to court next day and paid her fine. I knew this at the time, but I did n't know that he took her uptown, got her a place to live, and found work for her to keep her off the streets. And I did n't know that he continued seeing her.

"Chick Allen's gang were looking for us, and we had to keep away from their end of the town. That broke up our parties for a while. I thought that Hellmuth was spending his off hours with a girl named Helen Kane, Dr. Kane's daughter. You remember Kane? He had a fashionable practice -Madison avenue. Helen was a handsome, big girl, athletic. Hellmuth used to ride with her in the park. I thought he was seeing her whenever he went off without me.

"Well, he was n't. He was having some sort of affair with 'Angel Mary.' I did n't suspect it even when she came looking for me, one night at the hospital, in a pouring rain, soaking wet. I was n't there, and she did n't ask for Hellmuth, and she went away without leaving any message. They had had a quarrel, as I learned later, and she was trying to find him. He never said a word.

"Two or three days afterward she came to the dispensary for medicine, and they turned her into the free ward

"The detective took out his hand- with a bad attack of pneumonia. One cuffs.

"I guess this 'll do for you,' he said to the Jackdaw, and arrested him for burglary.

"I forget the details of that part of the business. Some one confessed, and the Jackdaw went up the river for five years. All I remember is our end

of the nurses came to me from her. She did n't mind involving me, but she was game about protecting Hellmuth. "Tell him I'm here,' she said, 'but don't tell any one I know him.'

"I told him, but he did n't say anything. He used to get into the ward to see her without letting any one but

the nurse know. I was with him there at other times, but Angel Mary did n't give either of us away by so much as a look that any one would notice, not even when she was dying. She was a game kid all right.

"I did n't know what had been going on until Hellmuth asked me to see that she was n't buried in Potter's Field, and gave me money for the undertaker. Even then I had to guess the truth from the change that came over him. He began to be queer. He stopped riding in the Park; said the crows there gave him the 'willies.' And then he dropped Helen Kane; said he hated dark women, anyway. And then he quit St. Luke's and went back to Vienna, and I lost track of him for a long time.

"It seems he took his holidays in the Balkans while he was over there, and he learned to speak some of the languages, Serbian at least. That 's why he volunteered for service with the Serbian Relief-that and his feeling about the Germans. Well-"

Ward paused and cleared his throat as if he were going on at once, and then fell silent, leaning forward in his chair and looking at his feet. I supposed that he had suddenly become aware that he was rambling in his narrative and getting nowhere, and it had the effect of a flash of thought transference when he looked up at me to ask:

did n't even suspect that there was any significance in them at all until just before he sailed for England to volunteer for work in the Balkans. He came to Washington to see the British embassy and he dropped in to call on me."

Here Ward drifted off into another long digression. It seems that when he left St. Luke's he went into general practice, and became dissatisfied with his inability to cure anything but the simple germ diseases, and caught at a new theory of the effect of the internal glands on the body as the cause of much ill health, and made himself a sort of specialist in the functions of these glands and these glands and their disorders. Then he found that the glands were affected by emotions to such a degree that in many cases he was merely treating, in the glands, the symptoms of a disturbance in the patient's mind, and this took him into the field of mind-cure and psychology. By the time that Hellmuth returned from his surgical studies abroad Ward had lost his faith in the knife as anything but a pruning-hook, and Hellmuth had arrived where he would open a patient as inevitably as a watch-repairer opens a watch. He perfected a new technic of sacral suspension, and brought the operation for appendicitis to the point of being as safe as pulling a tooth, and performed prodigies of skill in cutting diseased areas from essential organs

"Did you notice the significance of without stopping the watch. To Ward

all that?"

"Of all what?"

"Of all those incidents? The Jackdaw, the blonde Angel Mary, the crows that gave him the 'willies'?"

I shook my head, finding it empty.
He smiled.

he was merely treating symptoms by removing the results of disorders which he did nothing to cure. They did not exactly quarrel about it. Ward was practising in Washington, and Hellmuth in New York, and they were both too busy to write controversial

“I did n't either at the time. I letters; they exchanged monographs

on their pet subjects and agreed to differ in a silence that was not friendly. So, when Hellmuth came to Washington in the spring of 1915, and telephoned from his hotel to Ward, Ward accepted his invitation to dinner with natural misgivings.

"We had a whale of a fight," Ward said. "He'd been the big frog in his surgical puddle for fifteen years, and he looked on me as a disciple who had gone astray. It took me till midnight to make him feel that he was n't divine intelligence instructing an insect. Nobody had dared to argue with him for ten years, probably. We had a gory time."

The upshot of it was that Hellmuth came to see him on the following day, in his office.

"He had a challenge for me," Ward said. "He wanted to know why the sight of the purple grackle in Lafayette Park that morning had given him such a depression that instead of going on to the British embassy, he turned back to his hotel and went to bed. If there was anything in my theories about emotions and their origins, where did this emotion come from?"

In reply Ward started to "dig," as he put it. When had Hellmuth first felt this depression at the sight of a black bird?

He had always felt it. For years, if he saw a crow on his way to an operation, he could n't help but feel that it meant bad luck.

Yes? And before that?

Well, he remembered meeting a girl at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and having a fit of the blues when he saw a painting of some battle-scene in which vultures or some other black birds were settling on the dead.

was Helen Kane," Ward said, "and I did n't remind him that he had given up riding in the park because the crows gave him the 'willies.' And I did n't recall to him that he had dropped her because he disliked 'dark women,' and that he had hated 'the Jackdaw' on sight and got himself into that mess with 'Angel Mary' as a result, and all the rest of it. I was afraid that he 'd blow up and accuse me of being crazy on my own dope. I said:

""This thing probably traces back to your early childhood. Do you remember any crows or blackbirds at home?'

"He replied that there were always crows in the pines on one side of the house, and they always depressed him.

""The house was a gloomy old hole, anyway,' he said. 'I was always glad when my holidays were over and I could get back to school. There was too much prayer and Puritanism at home.""

Ward asked:

"Had it any other depressing associations? Had anybody died there -any one that you were very fond of?"

"Yes," Hellmuth said, "a cousin, when I was about seven; a little girl, an orphan. My parents had all but adopted her."

"Was she dark or fair?" Ward asked.

And

"She had long, yellow curls," Hellmuth said. "I remember that. And I remember that when she took sick they would n't let me into the room to see her even for a moment. when they were all asleep one night I. sneaked down-stairs and got into bed with her." He laughed contemptuously. "I remember the row they raised when they found us asleep to

“I did n't ask him whether this girl gether in the morning."

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