Testimony Of Two Men (65 page)

“I’ve got to tell you something, Jon. I can’t accept your offer without telling you first, and perhaps after I’ve told you, you will withdraw it, and I wouldn’t blame you.”

Jonathan smiled. “All right, tell me. It can’t be very important.”

Tom threw back his head so that his thin and contorted neck reared out of its high stiff white collar. He stared at the ceiling and groaned. Then he reached up his hand and covered that straining face and spoke from behind them.

“Jon, weeks before you were arrested—it was accepted that you had been—away, I went to Humphrey Bedloe and spoke to him in private. I swore that if he repeated what I said to anyone, or called me in before witnesses, I’d deny I ever said it, and I’d deny it on the witness stand.

“Jon, I told Humphrey Bedloe that I had seen you, right here in Hambledon, on the day your wife told her uncle that she had had that criminal abortion which caused her death.”

Jon stood as if struck in the center of the room, and slowly his face became terrible.

Tom continued. “Humphrey went to the sheriff and told him but did not give my name. He knew it was his duty. He said only that he had ‘information.’ It was on that little ‘information’ that you were arrested, Jon. It doesn’t seem possible that in this day and age that would happen, without a sworn statement before the proper authorities, and questioning, but it did. This town hates you, Jon. It’s always hated you—that is, the important part of it if not your patients, and even some of them do, also. They wanted to believe the worst of you, Jon. Out of envy, and because you—you have an abrasive way sometimes, and you have no patience with lies and hypocrisies and pretensions, and malice, without which most people could not live a full life. And you let people know what you think, and that’s not forgivable.”

He had dropped his hands heavily to his knees again, and he inclined his head like a man totally undone and broken, but his eyes looked at Jon unflinchingly and with anguish.

“With what I told Dr. Bedloe, and what Martin Eaton did, too, it was enough. Perhaps one without the other wouldn’t have carried weight. My weight carried, Jon, it carried weight.”

“What really did you tell Bedloe?”

“I—well, I said that I had seen you not far from your house, as I was in the neighborhood. I said I had seen you walking along the river bank, deep in thought. You—you had a bag with you, a piece of luggage. And then you walked in the direction of the station. Bedloe didn’t doubt me, Jon. He never had reason to doubt me before and has had no reason to doubt me now. Don’t hold it against him, Jon, that he removed you from the staff of the Friends’ even before you were indicted. It was my doing.”

Jonathan said with soft wonder, “You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.”

He went to the door and unlocked it. Tom said behind him, “Yes. Yes. I’m much worse than that. You canceled the five thousand dollars I borrowed from you, Jon. You called it a ‘gift to medicine,’ and ‘a public duty.’ I tried to think it was only that, Jon; I would not let myself think for a moment that it was the greatest generosity and kindness in the world. I even persuaded myself that you did only what you ought to have done and that in a way I was your benefactor, and not you mine. That’s the way people are, Jon, that’s the way they are, but I don’t think you ever knew that.”

Jonathan’s tall back was to Tom Harper. He put his hand on the doorknob and began to turn it.

Only a few weeks ago, perhaps less, he would have turned it and would have gone out, and that would have been the end of it and there would have been nothing left to do but to make certain that Tom Harper was removed from staff and his patients taken from him. But there had been some dark and still unknown unrooting in the deeper places of his mind lately. He stood at the door and faced Tom Harper again.

“Why?” he said. “Just tell me why. I want to know.”

Tom sighed despairingly. “Jon, my father sold his farm to help put me through medical school, and there was very little left after the mortgage. Your father bought that farm, Jon, about fourteen years ago. It’s yours now. And you’ve always been rich, and that was another thing, and you didn’t have hundreds of cold black nights going through medical school, when you wondered whether you’d make it or not, and you were hungry, and you couldn’t afford to sleep because you had to work outside to make expenses. It wasn’t your fault, Jon, that I went through that, and my father, too, but there it was. That is the way people are. I took your five thousand dollars—that’s the way people are.”

“Yes, so it is,” said Jonathan. “I always had a low opinion of humanity and now you’ve dropped it down another thousand or so fathoms, Harper. I was ten years—more—behind you in age. I didn’t know when my father acquired the farms he left me. You have no accusations to throw at anyone, Harper. My father bought that farm because it was offered for sale through a county agent. He neither knew nor cared why it was being sold. Why should he have? If it had not been your father’s farm, it would have been another. My father liked land. I knew nothing about it. My father was the only one who wanted to buy that farm and he paid the money asked. He wasn’t guilty of ‘exploitation’ or deliberate cruelty. But that’s what you thought, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what I made myself think, Jon. I must have been insane all those years. Thelma thinks you are the most wonderful man in the world, and sometimes I’d say to her, ‘Sweetheart, if you only knew!’ “

“Well, it was a nice boost to your ego! It put you on the level with Jonathan Ferrier or even made you his superior. The funny thing is that I never considered you ‘below’ me, Harper, and I never considered you inferior! To me, always, you were a fine doctor and surgeon, far above the average. We were at least equals. I was proud to help you—because

you were a member of a profession which seems to me to be the most important in the world.

“Now that I’ve seen some specimens lately, I’m not convinced. And you’ve helped, Harper, you’ve helped.”

“I know, Jon, I know. Say anything you want to me. It isn’t half what I deserve.”

The sick man bowed his head on his chest. Jonathan looked at him with the greatest hate and bitterness and thought: He wants me to feel sorry for him, to pat his shoulder, to laugh heartily and say it’s nothing, and the farm arrangements will go on!

Then another thought came to him. Tom Harper had had no compulsion but one of conscience to tell him what he had done. He had had only to keep silence—and accept. Yet, in this desperate business he had deliberately risked what could have been the answer to his catastrophic situation. He had sacrificed himself, his wife and children in order to feel honorable again and in order to right an injustice.

Jonathan slowly came back into the room. “Why did you tell me, anyway?”

“I had to—after your offer. Do you think for a moment I could have accepted it, even for Thelma and my children, knowing what I had done to you out of envy and malice and resentment, when none of it was your fault at all and you had given nothing to me but kindness?”

“I see,” said Jonathan, and frowned at the floor.

“Men don’t reason with their minds,” said Tom Harper. “They reason with their guts, their emotions. That’s why the world is what it is. I took your friendship and all that went with it, but because you are rich and I was and am poor, I think I hated you, Jon, while, at the same time, I liked and respected you and was your friend. Complicated, isn’t it?”

“Not very,” said Jonathan. “We’re a pretty ambiguous race, and all at once I’m beginning, halfway, to believe in the dogma of original sin.”

It was absurd, but a fraction of an old prayer he had learned as a child came to him, as if spoken aloud: “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

A lovely sentiment but unrealistic and, in a way, snide. If

you don’t forgive an appalling crime against you, and one which might have caused your death if it had been successful, then you won’t be forgiven your tiny venial sins, either. Mad idea, thought Jonathan with harsh amusement. Justice, in a

rational world, should always be measure for measure. The old boys were more sensible: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If I remember rightly, you are now supposed to forgive the sons of bitches the worst offenses against you and not only forgive them but ask that they be forgiven, too. That was doubtless all right for Christ, but men are not God. No wonder there were practically no Christians in the world. The whole thing was against reason and logic and, above all, against human nature.

Jonathan said with hard contempt to Tom Harper, “All right, get off your knees, I’ve absolved you and you can leave the Confessional. Let’s go and talk to Thelma. And if you tell her one word of what you’ve told me, you’ll regret it the rest of your life. You’re not going to burden Thelma with your crime so that you can wallow in her forgiveness, too, and perhaps even get her to pity you, for Christ’s sake!”

“Jon,” said Tom, “I swear this to you, and you know I am dying: I would never have let you be convicted. It was in my mind—I must have been crazy—that your arrest would pull you down a notch, as they say, and make you less haughty and proud and arrogant. You weren’t those things, I know. I just thought you were. Because, God help me, in your position, that’s just what I’d be and so would ten thousand other men.”

“Shut up,” said Jonathan. “I don’t know who’s forgiven you. I haven’t. I’m going to do what I suggested but not for you, Harper. If it were you alone, you could rot along with your disease, and I’d never give you another thought. But why should your innocent wife and children suffer?” His dark face had flushed with rage and his eyes sparkled.

“You know what this is going to do to me the rest of my life, Jon? It’s going to make me do penance, and perhaps sometime you can be superhuman enough to forgive me.”

“Did you hear what Jon Ferrier did to that unfortunate Tom Harper—his best friend, or almost that—the other day? He forced him to resign his hospital privileges just because Tom took a little morphine occasionally, for heaven’s sake!” This was said by Jonathan’s colleagues and “friends,” with head-shakings and compassionate duckings. “But, then, Jon was always a vindictive man. I’ll never forget the time he refused to testify in behalf of Jim Spaulding, in court, when

poor Jim was sued for malpractice by that worthless laborer who had the wrong infected arm taken off. Almost ruined Jim. Jon stood right up there in court and said that Jim should have every damned cent taken away from him in damages—and Jim one of the finest surgeons in the country, and who was that laborer with the foreign name, anyway? Well, that’s Jon for you. Glad he’ll soon be getting out of this town.”

Later it was rumored that Jonathan had given Tom Harper a job as a hired hand on one of his farms, and the resentful hatred and envy of Hambledon against Jonathan became more vociferous than ever. Senator Campion was particularly vocal. He marked the incident down in his little black record book and smiled with satisfaction.

When Jonathan came into his offices six days later, he was gratified, for Robert Morgan’s sake, to find every chair taken in the waiting room, Robert busy in the examination room, and even a few standees in the hall outside. He went into the office and Robert came in and said, “We have a rush. Was it always like this?”

“Yes. Nice, isn’t it? The news that you are not married and that you are handsome and rich must have gotten around, for I see quite a number of well-dressed mamas out there, all, no doubt, equipped with marriageable daughters, and there are two or three young ladies, too.” Jonathan removed his hat and wiped his ridged forehead. “Four o’clock, and the evening rush hasn’t begun.”

Robert picked up a typed card from the polished desk.

“Now, here’s a young lady who interests me. A Mrs. Edna Beamish. Beautiful, and apparently with money. She insists on seeing only you. Hints she has something quite extraordinary wrong with her.”

“Never heard of her.” Jonathan took the card and read the address. “Kensington Terraces. That’s one of the few places in this town which can really be called an apartment house —unpleasant things, harbingers of the bright new future when men will be living in anthills. But this, so far, is a nice and very expensive group of flats—why do they call them ‘apartments’? Flats. I’ve been in one. Lavish, surrounded by gardens. Hum. Edna Beamish. Twenty-two years old. Any idea what is wrong with her?”

“No. She looks very well to me, naturally good color, very pretty and stylish. And with a gay eye. I’ve told her you are taking no new patients, but she says she has heard so much about you and will see no one else. Take a look at her, anyway. She probably has a fat purse,” and Robert grinned. “She’s worth looking at, and from her manner I gather she wouldn’t object too much if I invited her out for a decorous evening.”

Jonathan went into the waiting room. “Mrs. Beamish?” he asked of the crowd. A lissome young lady rose, dressed in a simple but obviously costly lavender silk dress, which sheathed her figure tightly and dropped in a mass of rustling ruffles to the floor. She wore a broad silk lavender hat to match, with pink roses, and her hands were gloved in white and she carried a beruffled parasol the color of her hat and dress, or gown would more properly describe it, thought Jonathan. She had a very attractive bosom, indeed, on which reposed a long string of amethysts set in gold, and the same gems enhanced her ears.