“It was a great honour,” said Kildare.
“And now, after I’ve tried you and tested you and hammered you for flaws and tested you with acids and found you the true metal—after all these tests, do you dare to tell me that I’m wrong? Do you have the impertinence to suggest that I’ve taken, not a thoroughbred who loves the hard going, but a cold-blooded, common rascal who prefers to have his beer and beef like a swine at a trough?”
Kildare was silent. A weight he could not support was bending his head. He wanted to shout out suddenly that nothing but Gillespie’s own good was a strong enough force to take him from the old man’s side and their work, but he knew that this would merely be temporising. If it came to talk of such expedients, the clever Gillespie would be much too sharp for him. The break he was determined to make had to be accomplished with a knife-stroke, and the edge he used necessarily must be sharp.
“Around us in this room,” said Gillespie, extending his hands with a certain nobility, as though he were picking up the sorrows of the world and accepting the burden, “there are the elements of a specific cure for which tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people eventually may thank James Kildare and Leonard Gillespie. They may owe their lives to us.”
His voice changed wonderfully as he added: “Jimmy, Jimmy, I know that you’re young, and I know that all youth is tempted. But in the pinches, lean on me, talk to me. I can help you through the hard times.”
Kildare could not lift his head. He could not speak. Gillespie said suddenly: “Then get out and stay out!”
Kildare got out, still dumb as a beast that has been kicked from a place where it is not wanted. Through a blur of pain he saw Mary Lamont looking at him with bewilderment and then with a queer alarm. A moment later the ring of Gillespie summoned her, and she went hastily in to the old man.
He lay far back in his chair with his head sunk on his chest.
He said at once, rather faintly: “Be easy. I’m not going to faint twice in one day. Damned indigestion and nothing else. You understand?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Come over here where I can see you with the light in your face. That’s better. Lamont, you look like a pretty clean piece of goods to me. No lies and deceits in you, are there?”
She was silent. Her troubled eyes dwelt on him with infinitely gentle consideration.
“No lies and deceits even for the sake of that same young doctor for whom you keep your special look? Do you know what your special look is like, Lamont?”
“No, sir,” she said. Then: “Will you lie down, doctor? Your colour is not very—very good.”
“Isn’t it? But I’m well enough, I’m so well that I could chew up tenpenny nails or drink molten lead. That’s how well I am. I think it’s very possible that I may have made a fool of myself about a person who’s important to me. I may have wasted—not time—ah, that doesn’t count!—but life, life, life! I may have wasted that. And to be a fool—to call yourself a fool—is to send yourself living into hell and to burn…Tell me, Lamont—do you love Kildare?”
“I think I do,” she said.
“Are you such a child that you’re not sure?”
“I’m not a child,” she answered. “But I’m not sure.”
“Because the blockhead, the blind man, keeps on treating you like a sister?”
She smiled for Gillespie again with enough pain in her eyes to keep him from pursuing the subject.
“However, if you love him, it means that you know him. He has opened his mind and his heart even without knowing it, if you love him. Tell me, then: Is it possible that our young Kildare, the fellow without fear, the man who hangs on to his purposes like a bulldog—is it possible that our young Kildare is a fellow who would give up the great chance of his life for the sake of money and an easy berth?”
“Give up?” breathed the girl. “Give up this? Give up you? He never could do it! But…”
A memory stopped her.
“But…you’d forgotten what he said or did on a certain day. And when you remember that, you’re not so sure about his blind devotion. Is that correct? Lamont—tell me in a word! Could he do it?”
She did not answer, for the memory of how Kildare had groaned under the rub of privation in the hospital began to grow larger and larger in her mind’s eye. She had the look of one who sees calamity approaching on wings and about to strike.
“He could,” said the old man softly. “He could sell his soul for the damned, damned mess of pottage. That’s what you haven’t the heart to tell me.”
There was enough grief in her to have brought tears to another woman, but she kept looking, dry-eyed, at her new conception of the man she loved. Gillespie, putting an arm around her, drew her close to his wheel-chair. He was about to say something that might act as a small comfort to her, but the words stuck suddenly in his throat so that for a moment the two of them were silent, looking into emptiness and seeing the same image.
Kildare, back in his room, packed the necessary clothes in one suitcase and, when he finished, there was very little left in his closet. If he put together in a heap all his possessions in the world, a single trunk, and a small one at that, would hold them all. A few years from now, if he followed the way that was opening before him, this would not be true. He would have his automobile, his country club for golf and tennis, his fishing tackle and guns, his clothes for all occasions. Instead of a drunken ambulance driver, a bartender, Mary Lamont and the great Gillespie, he would have a thousand acquaintances; he would have a ready smile, a warm handshake, and a fat-faced emptiness of mind.
In a crisis most men soften, but a few turn grim. Kildare was as hard as a rock when he stared out of the hospital, yet an uncontrollable force diverted him to the Gillespie offices before he left. When he found that the internist was in another part of the hospital, he went straight to the inner office which was being used as their laboratory. Mary Lamont was there, tidying up with busy hands. She looked at him with a sudden flash of expectancy.
“Doctor Gillespie is gone, but only for a moment. He’ll be right back,” she said.
“I don’t need to see him,” said Kildare. “And perhaps you can find something to do in the front office?”
“Yes, doctor,” she said. The bright hope had gone from her. Leaving the room, her head was bent to that angle which we hope will hide the tears in our eyes. Kildare was left alone looking out the window at the blue dusk with the rain streaking down through it and rattling softly on the glass like the noise of far-off drums. The metaphor grew in his mind. All the honest men of the world were continually marching to battle, but he was giving up the fight.
He realised that he had come to the laboratory with no definite purpose, but found himself a moment later with a cage of the white mice in his hands. Their bright little eyes twinkled up at him through the shadow. They were most obscure moments of existence, these tiny creatures, but considering the purpose they were serving here, they were to Kildare as important as the stars in the sky. The pain became so great in him that his head pulled back and his eyes closed. All hope of the shining glory was shut away from him for ever.
CHAPTER TEN
CHARLES HERRON had simple beliefs, and not many of them. He was moved by a deep loyalty to his family, his friends, his college, his country. People who have faith in a cause can give themselves to it with a calm deliberation, and Herron, because he did not examine comparative values, fought as hard for his football team as he would have fought for his country. As a lawyer he was worthless unless he trusted in the innocence of his client, but when he had faith in the justice of his cause, his solemn conviction warped judges to his side and was irresistible before a jury. He maintained about his life a wall which excluded the outer world, but those who managed to pass the gate were lords of all they surveyed. A nation composed of men like Herron would be given utterly to the pursuits of peace, but would be an overwhelming force in time of war. His faults were all of the mind and none of the heart. His interests were not many because he took nothing lightly. His touch was somewhat heavy because at times he lacked the ultimate and qualifying grace, a sense of humour. He insisted on putting all of his cards face up on the table, and he could not realise that most men and all women have only a vague interest in the truth. In Athens he would have been considered a blockhead; in Rome he would have been one of the first men of the state.