A Treasury of Doctor Stories Read online

  “He is so dirty,” she murmured in distress.

  “Yes, he had better be washed,” Sadao agreed. “If you fetch hot water I will wash him.”

  “I cannot bear for you to touch him,” she said. “We shall have to tell the servants he, is here. I will tell Yumi now. She can leave the children for a few minutes and she can wash him.”

  Sadao considered a moment. “Let it be so,” he agreed. “You tell Yumi and I will tell the others.”

  But the utter pallor of the man’s unconscious face moved him first to stoop and feel his pulse. It was faint but it was there. He put his hand against the man’s cold breast. The heart too was yet alive.

  “He will die unless he is operated on,” Sadao said, considering. “The question is whether he will not die anyway.”

  Hana cried out in fear. “Don’t try to save him! What if he should live?”

  “What if he should die?” Sadao replied. He stood gazing down on the motionless man. This man must have extraordinary vitality or he would have been dead by now. But then he was very young—perhaps not yet twenty-five.

  “You mean die from the operation?” Hana asked.

  “Yes,” Sadao said.

  Hana considered this doubtfully, and when she did not answer Sarao turned away. “At any rate something must be done with him,” he said, “and first he must be washed.” He went quickly out of the room and Hana came behind him. She did not wish to be left alone with the white man. He was the first she had seen since she left America and now he seemed to have nothing to do with those whom she had known there. Here he was her enemy, a menace, living or dead.

  She turned to the nursery and called, “Yumi!”

  But the children heard her voice and she had to go in for a moment and smile at them and play with the baby boy, now nearly three months old.

  Over the baby’s soft black hair she motioned with her mouth, “Yumi—come with me!”

  “I will put the baby to bed,” Yumi replied. “He is ready.”

  She went with Yumi into the bedroom next to the nursery and stood with the boy in her arms while Yumi spread the sleeping quilts on the floor and laid the baby between them.

  Then Hana led the way quickly and softly to the kitchen. The two servants were frightened at what their master had just told them. The old gardener who was also a house servant pulled the few hairs on his upper lip.

  “The master ought not to heal the wound of this white man,” he said bluntly to Hana. “The white man ought to die. First he was shot. Then the sea caught him and wounded him with her rocks. If the master heals what the gun did and what the sea did they will take revenge on us.”

  “I will tell him what you say,” Hana replied courteously. But she herself was also frightened, although she was not superstitious as the old man was. Could it ever be well to help an enemy? Nevertheless she told Yumi to fetch the hot water and bring it to the room where the white man was.

  She went ahead and slid back the partitions. Sadao was not yet there. Yumi, following, put down her wooden bucket. Then she went over to the white man. When she saw him her thick lips folded themselves into stubbornness. “I have never washed a white man,” she said, “and I will not wash so dirty a one now.”

  Hana cried at her severely, “You will do what your master commands you!”

  “My master ought not to command me to wash the enemy,” Yumi said stubbornly.

  There was so fierce a look of resistance upon Yumi’s round dull face that Hana felt unreasonably afraid. After all, if the servants should report something that was not as it happened?

  “Very well,” she said with dignity. “You understand we only want to bring him to his senses so that we can turn him over as a prisoner?”

  “I will have nothing to do with it,” Yumi said. “I am a poor person and it is not my business.”

  “Then please,” Hana said gently, “return to your own work.”

  At once Yumi left the room. But this left Hana with the white man alone. She might have been too afraid to stay had not her anger at Yumi’s stubbornness now sustained her.

  “Stupid Yumi,” she muttered fiercely. “Is this anything but a man? And a wounded, helpless man!”

  In the conviction of her own superiority she bent impulsively and untied the knotted rags that kept the white man covered. When she had his breast bare she dipped the small clean towel that Yumi had brought into the steaming hot water and washed his face carefully. The man’s skin, though rough with exposure, was of a fine texture and must have been very blond when he was a child.

  While she was thinking these thoughts, though not really liking the man better now that he was no longer a child, she kept on washing him until his upper body was quite clean. But she dared not turn him over. Where was Sadao? Now her anger was ebbing and she was anxious again and she rose, wiping her hands on the wrung towel. Then lest the man be chilled she put the quilt over him.

  “Sadao!” she called softly.

  He had been about to come in when she called. His hand had been on the door and now he opened it. She saw that he had brought his surgeon’s emergency bag and that he wore his surgeon’s coat.

  “You have decided to operate!” she cried.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. He turned his back to her and unfolded a sterilized towel upon the floor of the takonoma alcove, and put his instruments out upon it.

  “Fetch towels,” he said.

  She went obediently, but how anxious now, to the linen shelves and took out the towels. There ought also to be old pieces of matting so that the blood would not ruin the fine floor covering. She went out to the back veranda where the gardener kept strips of matting with which to protect delicate shrubs on cold nights and took an armful of them.

  But when she went back into the room she saw this was useless. The blood had already soaked through the packing in the man’s wound and had ruined the mat under him.

  “Oh, the mat!” she cried.

  “Yes, it is ruined,” Sadao replied, as though he did not care. “Help me to turn him,” he commanded her.

  She obeyed him without a word, and he began to wash the man’s back carefully.

  “Yumi would not wash him,” she said.

  “Did you wash him, then?” Sadao asked, not stopping for a moment his swift concise movements.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He did not seem to hear her. But she was used to his absorption when he was at work. She wondered for a moment if it mattered to him what was the body upon which he worked so long as it was for the work he did so excellently.

  “You will have to give the anesthetic if he needs it,” he said.

  “I?” she repeated blankly. “But never have I!”

  “It is easy enough,” he said impatiently.

  He was taking out the packing now and the blood began to flow more quickly. He peered into the wound with the bright surgeon’s light fastened on his forehead. “The bullet is still there,” he said with cool interest. “Now I wonder how deep this rock wound is. If it is not too deep it may be that I can get the bullet. But the bleeding is not superficial. He has lost much blood.”

  At this moment Hana choked. He looked up and saw her face the color of sulphur.

  “Don’t faint,” he said sharply. He did not put down his exploring instrument. “If I stop now the man will surely die.” She clapped her hands to her mouth and leaped up and ran out of the room. Outside in the garden he heard her retching. But he went on with his work.

  “It will be better for her to empty her stomach,” he thought. He had forgotten that of course she had never seen an operation. But her distress and his inability to go to her at once made him impatient and irritable with this man who lay like dead under his knife.

  “This man,” he thought, “there is no reason under heaven why he should live.”

  Unconsciously this thought made him ruthless and he proceeded swiftly. In his dream the man moaned, but Sadao paid no heed except to mutter at him.

  “G
roan,” he muttered, “groan if you like. I am not doing this for my own pleasure. In fact, I do not know why I am doing it.”

  The door opened and there was Hana again. She had not stopped even to smooth back her hair.

  “Where is the anesthetic?” she asked in a clear voice.

  Sadao motioned with his chin. “It is as well that you came back,” he said. “This fellow is beginning to stir.”

  She had the bottle and some cotton in her hand.

  “But how shall I do it?” she asked.

  “Simply saturate the cotton and hold it near his nostrils,” Sadao replied without delaying for one moment the intricate detail of his work. “When he breathes badly move it away a little.”

  She crouched close to the sleeping face of the young American. It was a piteously thin face, she thought, and the lips were twisted. The man was suffering whether he knew it or not. Watching him, she wondered if the stories they heard sometimes of the sufferings of prisoners were true. They came like flickers of rumor, told by word of mouth and always that wherever the Japanese armies went the people received them gladly, with cries of joy at their liberation. But sometimes she remembered such men as General Takima, who at home beat his wife cruelly, though no one mentioned it now that he had fought so victorious a battle in Manchuria. If a man like that could be so cruel to a woman in his power, would he not be cruel to one like this for instance?

  She hoped anxiously that this young man had not been tortured. It was at this moment that she observed deep red scars on his neck, just under the ear. “Those scars,” she murmured, lifting her eyes to Sadao.

  But he did not answer. At this moment he felt the tip of his instrument strike against something hard, dangerously near the kidney. All thought left him. He felt only the purest pleasure. He probed with his fingers, delicately, familiar with every atom of this human body. His old American professor of anatomy had seen to that knowledge. “Ignorance of the human body is the surgeon’s cardinal sin, sirs!” he had thundered at his classes year after year. “To operate without as complete knowledge of the body as if you had made it—anything less than that is murder.”

  “It is not quite at the kidney, my friend,” Sadao murmured. It was his habit to murmur to the patient when he forgot himself in an operation. “My friend,” he always called his patients and so now he did, forgetting that this was his enemy.

  Then quickly, with the cleanest and most precise of incisions, the bullet was out. The man quivered but he was still unconscious. Nevertheless he muttered a few English words.

  “Guts,” he muttered, choking. “They got . . . my guts . . .”

  “Sadao!” Hana cried sharply.

  “Hush,” Sadao said.

  The man sank again into silence so profound that Sadao took up his wrist, hating the touch of it. Yes, there was still a pulse so faint, so feeble, but enough, if he wanted the man to live, to give hope.

  “But certainly I do not want this man to live,” he thought.

  “No more anesthetic,” he told Hana.

  He turned as swiftly as though he had never paused and from his medicines he chose a small vial and from it filled a hypodermic and thrust it into the patient’s left arm. Then, putting down the needle, he took the man’s wrist again. The pulse under his fingers fluttered once or twice and then grew stronger.

  “This man will live in spite of all,” he said to Hana and sighed.

  The young man woke, so weak, his blue eyes so terrified when he perceived where he was, that Hana felt compelled to apology. She served him herself, for none of the servants would enter the room.

  When she came in the first time she saw him summon his small strength to be prepared for some fearful thing.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she begged him softly.

  “How come . . . you speak English?” he gasped.

  “I was a long time in America,” she replied.

  She saw that he wanted to reply to that but he could not, and so she knelt and fed him gently from the porcelain spoon. He ate unwillingly, but still he ate.

  “Now you will soon be strong,” she said, not liking him and yet moved to comfort him.

  He did not answer.

  When Sadao came in the third day after the operation he found the young man sitting up, his face bloodless with the effort.

  “Lie down,” Sadao cried. “Do you want to die?”

  He forced the man down gently and strongly and examined the wound. “You may kill yourself if you do this sort of thing,” he scolded.

  “What are you going to do with me?” the boy muttered. He looked just now barely seventeen. “Are you going to hand me over?”

  For a moment Sadao did not answer. He finished his examination and then pulled the silk quilt over the man.

  “I do not know myself what I shall do with you,” he said. “I ought of course to give you to the police. You are a prisoner of war—no, do not tell me anything.” He put up his hand as he saw the young man about to speak. “Do not even tell me your name unless I ask it.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, and then the young man closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall.

  “Okay,” he whispered, his mouth a bitter line.

  Outside the door Hana was waiting for Sadao. He saw at once that she was in trouble.

  “Sadao, Yumi tells me the servants feel they cannot stay if we hide this man here any more,” she said. “She tells me that they are saying that you and I were so long in America that we have forgotten to think of our own country first. They think we like Americans.”

  “It is not true,” Sadao said harshly, “Americans are our enemies. But I have been trained not to let a man die if I can help it.”

  “The servants cannot understand that,” she said anxiously.

  “No,” he agreed.

  Neither seemed able to say more, and somehow the household dragged on. The servants grew daily more watchful. Their courtesy was as careful as ever, but their eyes were cold upon the pair to whom they were hired.

  “It is clear what our master ought to do,” the old gardener said one morning. He had worked with flowers all his life, and had been a specialist too in moss. For Sadao’s father he had made one of the finest moss gardens in Japan, sweeping the bright green carpet constantly so that not a leaf or a pine needle marred the velvet of its surface. “My master’s son knows very well what he ought to do,” he now said, pinching a bud from a bush as he spoke. “When the man was so near death why did he not let him bleed?”

  “That young master is so proud of his skill to save life that he saves any life,” the cook said contemptuously. She split a fowl’s neck skillfully and held the fluttering bird and let its blood flow into the roots of a wistaria vine. Blood is the best of fertilizers, and the old gardener would not let her waste a drop of it.

  “It is the children of whom we must think,” Yumi said sadly. “What will be their fate if their father is condemned as a traitor?”

  They did not try to hide what they said from the ears of Hana as she stood arranging the day’s flowers in the veranda near by, and she knew they spoke on purpose that she might hear. That they were right she knew too in most of her being. But there was another part of her which she herself could not understand. It was not sentimental liking of the prisoner. She had come to think of him as a prisoner. She had not liked him even yesterday when he had said in his impulsive way, “Anyway, let me tell you that my name is Tom.” She had only bowed her little distant bow. She saw hurt in his eyes but she did not wish to assuage it. Indeed, he was a great trouble in this house.

  As for Sadao, every day he examined the wound carefully. The last stitches had been pulled out this morning, and the young man would in a fortnight be nearly as well as ever. Sadao went back to his office and carefully typed a letter to the chief of police reporting the whole matter. “On the twenty-first day of February an escaped prisoner was washed up on the shore in front of my house.” So far he typed and then he opened a secret drawer of hi
s desk and put the unfinished report into it.

  On the seventh day after that two things happened. In the morning the servants left together, their belongings tied in large square cotton kerchiefs. When Hana got up in the morning nothing was done, the house not cleaned and the food not prepared, and she knew what it meant. She was dismayed and even terrified, but her pride as a mistress would not allow her to show it. Instead she inclined her head gracefully when they appeared before her in the kitchen, and she paid them off and thanked them for all that they had done for her. They were crying, but she did not cry. The cook and the gardener had served Sadao since he was a little boy in his father’s house, and Yumi cried because of the children. She was so grieving that after she had gone she ran back to Hana.

  “If the baby misses me too much tonight send for me. I am going to my own house and you know where it is.”

  “Thank you,” Hana said, smiling. But she told herself she would not send for Yumi however the baby cried.

  She made the breakfast and Sadao helped with the children. Neither of them spoke of the servants beyond the fact that they were gone. But after Hana had taken morning food to the prisoner she came back to Sadao.

  “Why is it we cannot see clearly what we ought to do?” she asked him. “Even the servants see more clearly than we do. Why are we different from other Japanese?”

  Sadao did not answer. But a little later he went into the room where the prisoner was and said brusquely, “Today you may get up on your feet. I want you to stay up only five minutes at a time. Tomorrow you may may try it twice as long. It would be well that you get back your strength quickly as possible.”

  He saw the flicker of terror on the young face that was still very pale.

  “Okay,” the boy murmured. Evidently he was determined to say more. “I feel I ought to thank you, Doctor, for having saved my life.”