A Treasury of Doctor Stories Read online

  A Treasury of Doctor Stories by The World’s great Authors

  Copyright 1946 by Frederick Fell, Inc.

  Second Printings

  LORD MOUNTDRAGO from THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE copyright 1939 by Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc.; THE WITCH DOCTOR OF ROSY RIDGE copyright 1939 by Curtis Publishing Company, from AUTHOR’S CHOICE copyright 1944 by MacKinlay Kantor; INDIAN CAMP from IN OUR TIME copyright 1925, 1930 by Charles Scribner’S Sons; A DAY’S WAIT from THE FIFTH COLUMN AND THE FIRST FORTY-NINE copyright 1938 by Ernest Hemingway; ZONE OF QUIET from THE LOVE NEST AND OTHER STORIES copyright 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons; WHO LIVED AND DIED BELIEVING copyright 1943 by Nancy Hale; A MOVIE SCENARIO from A GUIDE FOR THE BEDEVILLED copyright 1944 by Charles Scribner’s Sons; THE OPERATION from THE THIBAULTS copyright 1939 by The Viking Press, Inc.; MISSIS FLINDERS from TIME THE PRESENT copyright 1935 by Tess Slesinger; FATHER IS FIRM WITH HIS AILMENTS from LIFE WITH FATHER copyright 1933 by Clarence Day; MARTHA’s VACATION copyright 1937 by The Guild’s Committee for Federal Writers’ Publications, Inc.; THE ENEMY copyright 1942 by Pearl S. Buck; SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW from AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE copyright 1932 by Conrad Aiken; DOC MELLHORN AND THE PEARLY GATES copyright 1938 by Stephen Vincent Benet; THE NURSE copyright 1926 by Harper and Brothers; THREE VETERANS copyright 1935 by The F. R. Publishing Corporation; FAMILY IN THE WIND copyright 1932 by Curtis Publishing Company.

  Designed by Stefan Salter. Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff, New York, N. Y.Jacket Design by George Salter.

  FOR

  PHOEBE FABRICANT

  AND

  BETH WERNER

  Acknowledgments

  For arrangements made with authors, publishers, and authors’ agents, the following acknowledgments are gratefully made:

  “Lord Mountdrago” by W. Somerset Maugham. From THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE by W. Somerset Maugham. Copyright 1939 by Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc.

  “The Witch Doctor of Rosy Ridge” by MacKinlay Kantor. Copyright 1939 by Curtis Publishing Company; reprinted by permission of Coward-McCann, from AUTHOR’s CHOICE by MacKinlay Kantor. Copyright 1944 by MacKinlay Kantor.

  “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway. From IN OUR TIME by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright 1925, 1930, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  “A Day’s Wait” by Ernest Hemingway. From THE FIFTH COLUMN AND THE FIRST FORTY-NINE by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright 1938 by Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  “Zone of Quiet” by Ring W. Lardner. From THE LOVE NEST AND OTHER STORIES by Ring W. Lardner. Copyright 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  “Who Lived and Died Believing” by Nancy Hale. Copyright 1943 by Nancy Hale, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  “A Movie Scenario” by Ben Hecht. From A GUIDE FOR THE BEDEVILLED by Ben Hecht. Copyright 1944 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  “The Operation” by Roger Martin Du Gard. From THE THIBAULTS by Roger Martin Du Gard. Copyright 1939 by The Viking Press, Inc. By permission of The Viking Press, Inc., New York.

  “Birth” by A. J. Cronin. From THE CITADEL by A. J Cronin. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Company.

  “The Medicine Man” by Erskine Caldwell. Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc.

  “Missis Flinders” by Tess Slesinger. From TIME THE PRESENT. Copyright 1935 by Tess Slesinger and published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  “Father Is Firm With His Ailments.” Reprinted from LIFE WITH FATHER by Clarence Day, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1933 by Clarence Day.

  “Martha’s Vacation” by Vardis Fisher. Copyright 1937 by The Guild’s Committee for Federal Writers’ Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Vardis Fisher.

  “The Enemy” by Pearl S. Buck. Copyright 1942 by Pearl S. Buck. Published by arrangement with the author’s agent, David Lloyd, 49 East 34th Street, New York 16, New York.

  “The Scarlet Plague” by Jack London. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Charmian K. London.

  “The Other Room” by Don Marquis. Reprinted with special permission of Miss Bernice Marquis and Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc.

  “Speaking of Operations” by Irvin S. Cobb. By permission of Mrs. Laura Baker Cobb.

  “The Country Doctor” by Ivan Beede. By permission of the author.

  “The Surgeon and the Nun” by Paul Horgan. First published in Harper’s Bazaar and later published by Harper & Brothers in a volume entitled FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE. By permission of Paul Horgan.

  “The Bedchamber Mystery” by C. S. Forester. Reprinted by arrangement with the author’s agent, Harold Matson, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York.

  “A Negro Doctor In the South” by Walter White. First published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in FIRE IN THE FLINT. By permission of the author.

  “Dr. Mahony” by Henry Handel Richardson. Reprinted by permission from THE FORTUNES OF RICHARD MAHONY by Henry Handel Richardson, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York.

  “The Last Equation” by Roger Burlingame. Reprinted by arrangement with the author’s agent, Ann Watkins, Inc., 77 Park Ave., New York.

  “She Walks in Beauty” by Martha Foley. Reprinted by arrangement with the author’s agent, Ann Watkins, Inc., 77 Park Ave., New York.

  “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken. From AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright, 1932, by Conrad Aiken.

  “Doc Mellhorn and the Pearly Gates” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Copyright, 1938, by Stephen Vincent Benet. From THE SELECTED WORKS OF STEPHEN VINCENT BENET, published by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.

  “Morton” by Louise Field Cooper. Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc.

  “Allergies and the Man-Eating Carp” by Howard Vincent O’Brien. From MEMOIRS OF A GUINEA PIG, 1942, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Death Of a Bachelor” by Arthur Schnitzler. From LITTLE NOVELS by Arthur Schnitzler, published by Simon & Schuster. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York.

  “The Testimony of Doctor Farnsworth” by Francis Leo Golden. Reprinted from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine by permission of the publishers.

  “The Nurse” by Ben Ames Williams. Copyright 1926 by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Three Veterans” by Leane Zugsmith. Permission The New Yorker. Copyright, 1935, The F. R. Publishing Corporation.

  “Family In the Wind” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Copyright 1932 by Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Contents

  STEPHEN VINCENT BENET • Doc Mellhorn and the Pearly Gates

  BEN AMES WILLIAMS • The Nurse

  PEARL BUCK • The Enemy

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM • Lord Mountdrago

  RING W. LARDNER • Zone of Quiet

  BEN HECHT • A Movie Scenario

  MARTHA FOLEY • She Walks in Beauty

  ANTON CHEKHOV • A Work of Art

  NANCY HALE • Who Lived and Died Believing

  HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON • Dr. Mahony

  CONRAD AIKEN • Silent Snow, Secret Snow

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY • Indian Camp

  TESS SLESINGER • Missis Flinders

  IVAN TURGENIEV • The District Doctor

  MACKINLAY KANTOR • The Witch Doctor of Rosy Ridge

  CLARENCE DAY • Father is Firm With His Ailments

  ARTHUR SCHNITZLER • The Death of a Bachelor

  WALTER WHITE • A Negro Doctor in the South

  VARDIS FISHER • Martha’s Vacation

  JACK LONDON • The Scarlet Plague
>
  IRVIN S. COBB • “Speaking of Operations—”

  A. J. CRONIN • Birth

  ROGER MARTIN DU GARD • The Operation

  HOWARD VINCENT O’BRIEN • Allergies and the Man-Eating Carp

  IVAN BEEBE • The Country Doctor

  LOUISE FIELD COOPER • Morton

  ERSKINE CALDWELL • The Medicine Man

  DON MARQUIS • The Other Room

  ROGER BURLINGAME • The Last Equation

  PAUL HORGAN • The Surgeon and the Nun

  LEANE ZUGSMITH • The Three Veterans

  FRANCIS LEO GOLDEN • The Testimony of Dr. Farnsworth

  C. S. FORESTER • The Bedchamber Mystery

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY • A Day’s Wait

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD • Family in the Wind

  Introduction

  IT HAS been said that an anthology is largely a scissors and paste job. The editors of A TREASURY OF DOCTOR STORIES have not found the anthological life SO simple. Compiling A TREASURY OF DOCTOR STORIES has been an arduous but not unpleasant task. First of all, it involved a major sleuthing project to locate sources of literary materia medica. Then, it meant plodding through masses of extraneous material in order to unearth stories pertinent to the medical scene. Finally came the difficulties of proper selection.

  After much reading, rereading and elimination, A TREASURY OF DOCTOR STORIES took form. Here are stories and experiences which reflect the moods, sentiments and behavior of men, women and children under the duress of varying stages of illness. Here, too, are stories of doctors and nurses living their personal as well as their professional lives. Here are stories whimsical and robust, serious and gay.

  One element these stories have in common is the uniform excellence of their literary craftsmanship. The authors have not been interested primarily in the medical scene but in a tale well told. It is interesting to note that without relaxing their literary standards these stories maintain a real medical interest. As a matter of fact, only a few of the authors have had formal medical education. A number of the stories have been accorded literary recognition for their outstanding merit.

  The medical scene is so far-flung in all of its ramifications that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to define what material an anthology covering it should include. An encyclopedic anthology, one dealing with all human ailments and depicting physicians in all their aspects, would be theoretically ideal—but, in fact, profoundly boring.

  A TREASURY OF DOCTOR STORIES is by no means all-inclusive and, we hope, by no means boring.

  Noah D. Fabricant • Heinz Werner

  A Treasury of Doctor Stories by The World’s great Authors

  Doc Mellhorn and the Pearly gates

  STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT

  DOC MELLHORN had never expected to go anywhere at all when he died. So, when he found himself on the road again, it surprised him. But perhaps I’d better explain a little about Doc Mellhorn first. He was seventy-odd when he left our town; but when he came, he was as young as Bates or Filsinger or any of the boys at the hospital. Only there wasn’t any hospital when he came. He came with a young man’s beard and a brand-new bag and a lot of newfangled ideas about medicine that we didn’t take to much. And he left, forty-odd years later, with a first-class county health record and a lot of people alive that wouldn’t have been alive if he hadn’t been there. Yes, a country doctor. And nobody ever called him a man in white or a death grappler that I know of, though they did think of giving him a degree at Pewauket College once. But then the board met again and decided they needed a new gymnasium, so they gave the degree to J. Prentiss Parmalee instead.

  They say he was a thin young man when he first came, a thin young man with an Eastern accent who’d wanted to study in Vienna. But most of us remember him chunky and solid, with white hair and a little bald spot that always got burned bright red in the first hot weather. He had about four card tricks that he’d do for you, if you were a youngster—they were always the same ones—and now and then, if he felt like it, he’d take a silver half dollar out of the back of your neck. And that worked as well with the youngsters who were going to build rocket ships as it had with the youngsters who were going to be railway engineers. It always worked. I guess it was Doc Mellhorn more than the trick.

  But there wasn’t anything unusual about him, except maybe the card tricks. Or, anyway, he didn’t think so He was just a good doctor and he knew us inside out. I’ve heard people call him a pig-head, obstinate old mule—that was in the fight about the water supply. And I’ve heard a weepy old lady call him a saint. I took the tale to him once, and he looked at me over his glasses and said, “Well, I’ve always respected a mule. Got ten times the sense of a—horse.” Then he took a silver half dollar out of my ear.

  Well, how do you describe a man like that? You don’t—you call him up at three in the morning. And when he sends in his bill, you think it’s a little steep.

  All the same, when it came to it, there were people who drove a hundred and fifty miles to the funeral. And the Masons came down from Bluff City, and the Poles came from across the tracks, with a wreath the size of a house, and you saw cars in town that you didn’t often see there. But it was after the funeral that the queer things began for Doc Mellhorn.

  The last thing he remembered, he’d been lying in bed, feeling pretty sick, on the whole, but glad for the rest. And now he was driving his Model T down a long straight road between rolling, misty prairies that seemed to go from nowhere to nowhere.

  It didn’t seem funny to him to be driving the Model T again. That was the car he’d learned on, and he kept to it till his family made him change. And it didn’t seem funny to him not to be sick any more. He hadn’t had much time to be sick in his life—the patients usually attended to that. He looked around for his bag, first thing, but it was there on the seat beside him. It was the old bag, not the presentation one they’d given him at the hospital, but that was all right too. It meant he was out on a call and, if he couldn’t quite recollect at the moment just where the call was, it was certain to come to him. He’d wakened up often enough in his buggy, in the old days, and found the horse was taking him home, without his doing much about it. A doctor gets used to things like that.

  All the same, when he’d driven and driven for some time without raising so much as a traffic light, just the same rolling prairies on either hand, he began to get a little suspicious. He thought, for a while, of stopping the car and getting out, just to take a look around, but he’d always hated to lose time on a call. Then he noticed something else. He was driving without his glasses. And yet he hadn’t driven without his glasses in fifteen years.

  “H’m,” said Doc Mellhorn. “I’m crazy as a June bug. Or else—Well, it might be so, I suppose.”

  But this time he did stop the car. He opened his bag and looked inside it, but everything seemed to be in order. He opened his wallet and looked at that, but there were his own initials, half rubbed away, and he recognized them. He took his pulse, but it felt perfectly steady.

  “H’m,” said Doc Mellhorn. “Well.”

  Then, just to prove that everything was perfectly normal, he took a silver half dollar out of the steering wheel of the car.

  “Never did it smoother,” said Doc Mellhorn. “Well, all the same, if this is the new highway, it’s longer than I remember it.”

  But just then a motorcycle came roaring down the road and stopped with a flourish, the way motor cops do.

  “Any trouble?” said the motor cop. Doc Mellhorn couldn’t see his face for his goggles, but the goggles looked normal.

  “I am a physician,” said Doc Mellhorn, as he’d said a thousand times before to all sorts of people, “on my way to an urgent case.” He passed his hand across his forehead. “Is this the right road?” he said.

  “Straight ahead to the traffic light,” said the cop. “They’re expecting you, Doctor Mellhorn. Shall I give you an escort?”

  “No; thanks all the same,” said Doc Mellhohn, and th
e motor cop roared away. The Model T ground as Doc Mellhorn gassed her. “Well, they’ve got a new breed of traffic cop,” said Doc Mellhorn, “or else—”

  But when he got to the light, it was just like any light at a crossroads. He waited till it changed and the officer waved him on. There seemed to be a good deal of traffic going the other way, but he didn’t get a chance to notice it much, because Lizzie bucked a little, as she usually did when you kept her waiting. Still, the sight of traffic relieved him, though he hadn’t passed anybody on his own road yet.

  Pretty soon he noticed the look of the country had changed. It was parkway now and very nicely landscaped. There was dogwood in bloom on the little hills, white and pink against the green; though, as Doc Mellhorn remembered it, it had been August when he left his house. And every now and then there’d be a nice little white-painted sign that said TO THE GATES.

  “H’m,” said Doc Mellhorn. “New State Parkway, I guess. Well, they’ve fixed it up pretty. But I wonder where they got the dogwood. Haven’t seen it bloom like that since I was East.”

  Then he drove along in a sort of dream for a while, for the dogwood reminded him of the days when he was a young man in an Eastern college. He remembered the look of that college and the girls who’d come to dances, the girls who wore white gloves and had rolls of hair. They were pretty girls, too, and he wondered what had become of them. “Had babies, I guess,” thought Doc Mellhorn. “Or some of them, anyway.” But he liked to think of them as the way they had been when they were just pretty, and excited at being at a dance.

  He remembered other things too—the hacked desks in the lecture rooms, and the trees on the campus, and the first pipe he’d ever broken in, and a fellow called Paisley Grew that he hadn’t thought of in years—a raw-boned fellow with a gift for tall stories and playing the jew’s-harp.

  “Ought to have looked up Paisley,” he said. “Yes, I ought. Didn’t amount to a hill of beans, I guess, but I always liked him. I wonder if he still plays the jew’s-harp. Pshaw, I know he’s been dead twenty years.”