A Treasury of Doctor Stories Read online

  The little boy felt the injustice of this. “I don’t want to take a bath,” he cried.

  “You’re dirty,” Millie told him. “You ought to be ashamed to go to bed as dirty as you are; and Charles ought to be ashamed to let you. Now, you come right along into the bathroom and Millie will give you a nice bath.”

  “I had a bath this morning,” Johnnie insisted bitterly. “I’m not going to take a bath now.”

  Millie’s tone was soothing, yet there was in it at the same time something acidly venomous.

  “Come right along,” she retorted. “There’s no use fussing. You’ve got to have a bath the way Millie says.”

  Johnnie still resisting, she undertook to compel him; but the result was such an outcry that Charles heard and came swiftly upstairs, and there followed a bitter altercation between the two servants, Johnnie clinging to Charles for protection, Millie reduced to a state of blind and incoherent frenzy.

  But there was no way she could carry her point, since Charles was quite obviously the physical master of the situation. She surrendered because she had to surrender; but the episode remained in her mind and accentuated the developing enmity between her and Charles to such a point that the least incident was sufficient to set them into open wrangling. Millie, out of necessity, ate in the kitchen with Charles and Laura, and it is not to be wondered at that under the circumstances she had no relish for her meals, and her digestion suffered.

  Yet still she tried desperately to control herself, to avoid giving further offence to her mistress in any way. But the very desperation of her efforts in this direction led her into error. Millie’s greatest virtue had always been that she gave her babies perfect care; but now, once and then again, she was guilty of negligence even toward Joan. The first occasion followed a night when she had worked late upon the dress for Joan’s birthday party, and her resultant weariness made her oversleep the hour for the morning bottle. The baby awoke and cried, and Millie did not even hear till Mrs. Jones came to her door. Millie’s bitter self-reproach translated itself into anger against her mistress. She said sharply:

  “You don’t have to come after me. I heard her. She’s all right to cry a little while. I’ll get to her in a minute. You can’t expect me to keep on the run all the time.”

  Mrs. Jones hesitated, as though to control her voice, but she only said:

  “You had better take her up now, Millie. I don’t want her to cry when it isn’t necessary,” and turned away.

  The final incident occurred one afternoon when she was about to take Joan out for a ride in her perambulator. Joan was by this time more and more vigorous and active, and when Millie put her in the baby carriage she did not buckle the safety strap sufficiently tight. She went back into the house to get her own hat and coat and while she was gone Joan, wriggling this way and that, managed to twist herself till she was hanging half out of the carriage and forthwith began to scream with fright and despair.

  As luck would have it, Charles heard her and ran out from the kitchen in time to avoid any serious result from the mishap. But Millie also had heard Joan crying and was only a second behind Charles; and the fact that he had interfered seemed to her so bitter a wrong that she upbraided him violently.

  “Take your hands off my baby,” she cried in a shrill and exasperated voice. “I won’t have you touching her. I won’t have you bothering her.”

  Charles said sternly, “It’s lucky I did touch her. She’d have bumped her head. You ought to take more care the way you buckle her in.”

  “I don’t need any man to tell me how to take care of babies,” Millie screamed at him. “You get back into your kitchen, you scullery maid.”

  Charles laughed shortly. “Hard names never hurt anybody,” he retorted. “If they did, I could think up one or two myself.”

  But the fact that he stood his ground, as though passing judgment upon the manner in which she now bestowed Joan in the perambulator, whetted Millie’s anger to a pitch near delirium; and when Mrs. Jones, attracted by the sound of the nurse’s shrill and frenzied voice, came to the door, Millie was in a perfect paroxysm of fury.

  The result of this culminating incident was her dismissal.

  “If you can’t control yourself,” Mrs. Jones said in a tone of finality, “I can’t let you be about Joan any longer. I’m sorry, Millie, but you will have to go. I’ll have a taxi come for you at three this afternoon.”

  Millie cried all that day, not silently, but with wild and explosive sounds, the tears streaming from her eyes. She at first accepted her dismissal without argument, but when Mrs. Jones insisted upon bathing Joan herself, and told Millie to go to her room and pack her things, the old woman for the first time fully realized that sentence had been passed upon her. Her agony of spirit was like that of a man condemned to death; and when Joan Was asleep—for even now Millie would not do anything calculated to disturb the routine of the baby’s life—the nurse went to Mrs. Jones’s room and sought to bring about a change in the other’s decision. Her abject grief, the craven pleadings to which in the end she was at last driven, worked upon her mistress intolerably; and there was a moment when one of these women was almost as unhappy as the other. But although she perceived how much of a tragedy this was to Millie, Mrs. Jones had made her decision and was strong enough to hold to it.

  “I’ve only kept you so long,” she said, “because you’ve been so good to Joan. You’re a good nurse, Millie, but you’re a most uncomfortable person to have around. If you would learn to be civil and to attend to your own affairs, you’d avoid so much trouble. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll have to let you go.”

  Millie left the house in mid-afternoon. As her belongings were being packed into the taxicab which Mrs. Jones had summoned, she wept unbearably, and Mrs. Jones could not refrain from asking:

  “Where do you plan to go, Millie?”

  Millie said desperately, “I’ll go somewhere. I don’t know where.”

  “Shall I send you to a hotel till you can get another place?” Mrs. Jones suggested, and Millie shook her head.

  “No,” she replied. And she named a woman whom she knew and said, “I’ll go to her house for a day or two.”

  When she said good-bye to Joan she tried to control herself. She had dried her eyes and she fought to achieve the smile and the soothing and agreeable tone which she always used to the baby. Mrs. Jones had Joan in her sitting room on the second floor, and Millie went in there, and Joan saw her enter and lifted both arms in an appeal to be taken up from the floor. Millie picked her up, pouring out upon her that meaningless flood of words which Joan always found so delightful, while Mrs. Jones watched the two unhappily.

  After a moment Millie said:

  “I’ll not be here for her birthday party.”

  “You might like to come in that afternoon,” Mrs. Jones suggested; but Millie shook her head, and the tears burst from her eyes.

  “I left a dress for her on my bed,” she explained. “I’ve been making it the last month.”

  “She shall wear it,” Mrs. Jones assured her, unable to feel anything but pity for the little old woman, and fighting for strength to maintain her decision that Millie must go.

  Joan was pounding at Millie’s face with her small hands, and Millie for a moment forgot Mrs. Jones, turning her attention to the baby again “Good-bye,” she said. Joan wrinkled her nose and screamed with delight, and as she slapped Millie’s cheeks the tears splashed under her hands. “I’m sorry I’m going, Joan,” Millie told the baby. And Joan crowed, and Millie turned to Mrs. Jones and said:

  “Take her.”

  Mrs. Jones held out her arms to the baby, but Joan had played that game before, and she knew what was expected of her. She laughed gleefully, threw her arms around Millie’s neck, and snuggled her face into the nurse’s shoulder; and Millie gave a little gasping cry and turned abruptly and set Joan down upon the floor and fled from the room. Only in the doorway she paused for a moment to turn and look back and to say over and over:


  “I’m so sorry, Joan. I’m so sorry. Millie’s so sorry. Good-bye, Joan. Good-bye.”

  She stood there a moment longer, drenched in tears; and Joan, sobered by this spectacle, stared at her in perplexity and waved a small hand in a doubtful way.

  “Yes, yes,” Millie gasped. “Yes, Joan! Bye-bye!”

  So she waved an answering hand; then turned and fled, blind and stumbling, toward where the taxi waited at the door.

  A waiting room is a fearful place. Millie had had some experience of waiting rooms and she dreaded them. She had been sitting in this particular waiting room at the employment agency for three days; a little woman, thin and taut, and just now curiously tremulous. Her eyes, inflamed and weary, looked blankly straight before her. And sometimes, for no apparent reason, they became suffused with tears; not merely misted with moisture, but drowned in a swimming, drenching floor which flowed over her lids and down her dry cheeks until she remembered to wipe away these evidences of the grief which racked her.

  On the third day she found herself replying in a dull voice to the questions put to her by a woman who introduced herself by a name which Millie scarcely heard. She was not interested in the names of her mistresses; she had so many of them. This woman’s name might have been Brown or Jones. It happened to be Mrs. Smith.

  Mrs. Smith asked question upon question, but Millie asked only one.

  “Is the baby a boy or a girl?”

  “A little girl,” Mrs. Smith replied. And Millie’s ravaged face seemed to lighten faintly at the word.

  “I like little girls best,” she confessed.

  They arranged for Millie to come next morning; and Millie was for the rest of that day a little more cheerful. Her aching grief found anodyne in the prospect of having another baby to love.

  The Enemy

  PERAL BUCK

  DR. SADAO HOKI’s house was built on a spot of the Japanese coast where as a little boy he had often played. The low square stone house was set upon rocks well above a narrow beach that was outlined with bent pines. As a boy Sadao had climbed the pines, supporting himself on his bare feet, as he had seen men do in the South Seas when they climbed for coconuts. His father had taken him often to the islands of those seas, and never had he failed to say to the little grave boy at his side, “Those islands yonder, they are the steppingstones to the future for Japan.”

  “Where shall we step from them?” Sadao had asked seriously.

  “Who knows?” his father had answered. “Who can limit our future? It depends on what we make it.”

  Sadao had taken this into his mind as he did everything his father said, his father who never joked or played with him but who spent infinite pains upon him who was his only son. Sadao knew that his education was his father’s chief concern. For this reason he had been sent at twenty-two to America to learn all that could be learned of surgery and medicine. He had come back at thirty, and before his father died he had seen Sadao become famous not only as a surgeon but as a scientist. Because he was now perfecting a discovery which would render wounds entirely clean he had not been sent abroad with the troops. Also, he knew, there was some slight danger that the old General might need an operation for a condition for which he was now being treated medically, and for this possibility Sadao was being kept in Japan.

  Clouds were rising from the ocean now. The unexpected warmth of the past few days had at night drawn heavy fog from the cold waves. Sadao watched mists hide outlines of a little island near the shore and then come creeping up the beach below the house, wreathing around the pines. In a few minutes fog would be wrapped about the house too. Then he would go into the room where Hana, his wife, would be waiting for him with the two children.

  But at this moment the door opened and she looked out, a dark blue woolen haori over her kimono. She came to him affectionately and put her arm through his as he stood, smiled and said nothing. He had met Hana in America, but he had waited to fall in love with her until he was sure she was Japanese. His father would never have received her unless she had been pure in her race. He wondered often whom he would have married if he had not met Hana, and by what luck he had found her in the most casual way, by chance literally, at an American professor’s house. The professor and his wife had been kind people anxious to do something for their few foreign students, and the students, though bored, had accepted this kindness. Sadao had often told Hana how nearly he had not gone to Professor Harley’s house that night—the rooms were so small, the food so bad, the professor’s wife so voluble. But he had gone and there he had found Hana, a new student, and had felt he would love her if it were at all possible.

  Now he felt her hand on his arm and was aware of the pleasure it gave him, even though they had been married years enough to have the two children. For they had not married heedlessly in America. They had finished their work at school and had come home to Japan, and when his father had seen her the marriage had been arranged in the old Japanese way, although Sadao and Hana had talked everything over beforehand. They were perfectly happy. She laid her cheek against his arm.

  It was at this moment that both of them saw something black come out of the mists. It was a man. He was flung up out of the ocean—flung, it seems, to his feet by a breaker. He staggered a few steps, his body outlined against the mist, his arms above his head. Then the curled mists hid him again.

  “Who is that?” Hana cried. She dropped Sadao’s arm and they both leaned over the railing of the veranda. Now they saw him again. The man was on his hands and knees crawling. Then they saw him fall on his face and lie there.

  “A fisherman perhaps,” Sadao said, “washed from his boat.” He ran quickly down the steps, and behind him Hana came, her wide sleeves flying. A mile or two away on either side there was fishing villages, but here was only the bare and lonely coast, dangerous with rocks. The surf beyond the beach was spiked with rocks. Somehow the man had managed to come through them—he must be badly torn.

  They saw when they came toward him that indeed it was so. The sand on one side of him had already a stain of red soaking through.

  “He is wounded,” Sadao exclaimed. He made haste to the man, who lay motionless, his face in the sand. An old cap stuck to his head soaked with sea water. He was in wet rags of garments. Sadao stooped, Hana at his side, and turned the man’s head. They saw the face.

  “A white man!” Hana whispered.

  “Yes, it was a white man. The wet cap fell away and there was his wet yellow hair, long, as though for many weeks it had not been cut, and upon his young and tortured face was a rough, yellow beard. He was unconscious and knew nothing that they did to him.

  Now Sadao remembered the wound, and with his expert fingers he began to search for it. Blood flowed freshly at his touch. On the right side of his lower back Sadao saw that a gun wound had been reopened. The flesh was blackened with powder. Sometime, not many days ago, the man had been shot and had not been tended. It was bad chance that the rock had struck the wound.

  “Oh, how he is bleeding!” Hana whispered again in a solemn voice. The mists screened them now completely, and at this time of day no one came by. The fishermen had gone home and even the chance beachcombers would have considered the day at an end.

  “What shall we do with this man?” Sadao muttered. But his trained hands seemed of their own will to be doing what they could to stanch the fearful bleeding. He packed the wound with the sea moss that strewed the beach. The man moaned with pain in his stupor but he did not awaken.

  “The best thing that we could do would be to put him back in the sea,” Sadao said, answering himself.

  Now that the bleeding was stopped for the moment he stood up and dusted the sand from his hands.

  “Yes, undoubtedly that would be best,” Sana said steadily. But she continued to stare down at the motionless man.

  “If we sheltered a white man in our house we should be arrested and if we turned him over as a prisoner, he would certainly die,” Sadao said.

  �
��The kindest thing would be to put him back into the sea,” Hana said. But neither of them moved. They were staring with a curious repulsion upon the inert figure.

  “What is he?” Hana whispered.

  “There is something about him that looks American,” Sadao said. He took up the battered cap. Yes, there, almost gone, was the faint lettering. “A sailor,” he said, “from an American warship.” He spelled it out: “U. S. Navy.” The man was a prisoner of war!

  “He has escaped,” Hana cried softly, “and that is why he is wounded.” “In the back,” Sadao agreed.

  They hesitated, looking at each other. Then Hana said with resolution:

  “Come, are we able to put him back into the sea?”

  “If I am able, are you?” Sadao asked.

  “No,” Hana said. “But if you can do it alone . . .”

  Sadao hesitated again. “The strange thing is,” he said, “that if the man were whole I could turn him over to the police without difficulty. I care nothing for him. He is my enemy. All Americans are my enemy. And he is only a common fellow. You see how foolish his face is. But since he is wounded . . .”

  “You also cannot throw him back to the sea,” Hana said. “Then there is only one thing to do. We must carry him into the house.”

  “But the servants?” Sadao inquired.

  “We must simply tell them that we intend to give him to the police—as indeed we must, Sadao. We must think of the children and your position. It would endanger all of us if we did not give this man over as a prisoner of war.”

  “Certainly,” Sadao agreed. “I would not think of doing anything else.”

  Thus agreed, together they lifted the man. He was very light, like a fowl that has been half starved for a long time until it is only feathers and skeleton. So, his arms hanging, they carried him up the steps and into the side door of the house. This door opened into a passage and down the passage they carried the man toward an empty bedroom. It had been the bedroom of Sadao’s father and since his death it had not been used. They laid the man on the deeply matted floor. Everything here had been Japanese to please the old man, who would never in his own home sit on a chair or sleep in a foreign bed. Hana went to the wall cupboards and slid back a door and took out a soft quilt. She hesitated. The quilt was covered with flowered silk and the lining was pure white silk.