Testimony Of Two Men (91 page)

He became aware, and through the mirror again, that Dr. Brinkerman was giving him even more curious glances, satisfied, hating, gloating, and his instinct for danger was alerted. But, what was the danger? What damage could Brinkerman do him? He looked at the thick red neck, a neck as muscular and almost as heavy as a bull’s, and at the meaty, soapy hands. He had no doubt that Brinkerman would enjoy murdering him, and he returned the compliment. Still, he wondered. When he had encountered Brinkerman infrequently in the corridors, they had exchanged cold nods and nothing more. This new wild violence was inexplicable.

“I want you to know, Brinkerman,” said Jonathan, “that I did not exactly force myself into this situation. My presence was requested.”

“I am aware of that, Ferrier. I shall deal with Summers Bayne in my own way at my own leisure.”

Jonathan considered this. “I am not without friends,” he said.

“You would be surprised,” said Brinkerman, and chuckled hoarsely.

Jonathan frowned. He was remembering what Philip Harrington had told him recently, and the odd way his former friends were treating him in the hospital corridors and in the lounge rooms recently. But he made himself smile, knowing that Brinkerman was watching him closely.

“Very ambiguous,” he said. “But I have enough friends to protect Summers, and I am famous for protecting my friends.” He motioned to one of the nurses, who came forward to powder his drying hands and to help him with his rubber gloves. “Moreover, Summers’ brother is a State Senator, close to the Governor, or did you not know that? I also believe that brother is on the Medical Board. If I am wrong, please correct me.”

Dr. Brinkerman had forgotten. He gave Jonathan another vicious look but remained silent. The young nurse assisting Jonathan held her mouth prominently disapproving of him and avoided his eyes, and Jonathan again wondered at human nature, for he knew that Dr. Bayne was very popular with the nurses and Brinkerman’s ugly threat against him should have vexed the girl. Jonathan mentally checked another black mark against mankind.

The patient was ready when the two surgeons went into the operating room and Dr. Bayne, already scrubbed and masked and covered, was waiting for them. He gave Jonathan an inquiring look and Jonathan winked at him. The patient was under anesthesia, and all was in readiness. Jonathan looked at her pretty unconscious face, the face of a child. Then he looked at Dr. Brinkerman, who was also studying those soft and childlike features, and his eyes were lustful and hungry as a torturer’s, and as the sadist’s they were.

There was no denying that he was a competent surgeon, and he made the incision with a preciseness and skill and smoothness that won Jonathan’s admiration. It was a routine matter. The pregnant tube was large and bulging but was not unduly inflamed, nor had it ruptured. The girl was lucky. Dr. Brinkerman neatly excised it, and then he said to the watching interns, ignoring Dr. Bayne and Jonathan, “I will now closely examine the uterus for deformities, and the other ovary. I have not yet decided if this one should be removed, and possibly the uterus.”

The men exchanged troubled glances. But Jonathan said, “I can see for myself that the uterus and both ovaries are in prime condition, and there is no need for an extensive exploration.”

Dr. Brinkerman paused. He turned his head slowly and his pale eyes glowed with evil fire. “Am I the surgeon, or are you, Ferrier?”

“I am your assistant, if you wish to call it that, and I am also bound by the Oath of Hippocrates and am a defender of the public weal. Therefore, if you do any damage to this girl’s reproductive system, I shall do everything I can to prevent you from ever operating oh anyone again.”

He spoke clearly and sharply and with assurance, fully aware that he had now done the irrevocable: he had deliberately insulted and defamed the operating surgeon in his own domain, before the faces of witnesses. But to him the young girl on the table, so unaware, so trustful, so helpless, was more to him than any consequences to him, though he knew they could be grave. However, only the strongest of threats could stop this sadist, and Jonathan had used them.

“For this alone,” said Brinkerman, in a terrible voice, “you could have your license revoked.”

Jonathan laughed. “I should like to see you try it.
I
will bring witnesses against you, and be damned to professional ethics and always protecting the bungler or the intentional mutilator. Well? Aren’t you going to suture the girl or are you going to permit her to bleed to death?”

He nodded to Dr. Bayne and, still watching Brinkerman closely, he went to the tubal pregnancy on its receiving basin, and he dipped his hand in water and baptized the exposed embryo. Some of the interns smiled indulgently, but at least two looked grave, and Dr. Bayne blessed’ himself. Dr. Brinkerman laughed lewdly and made a low indecent remark to the nurse nearest him. But the girl was unexpectedly near tears.

“After your vindictive remarks, Ferrier,” said Dr. Brinkerman, “I have no recourse but to report you to the Board. Moreover, if this patient of mine suffers unfortunate results, the blame rests with you, for interference and overt intimidation.”

Jonathan came back to the table. “I shall protect myself by watching every move you make, Brinkerman, so you don’t do the girl a sly mischief, which I would not put past you. You have a reputation for that.” He looked at Dr. Bayne, whose eyes showed his worry and alarm. “Don’t be too concerned, Summers,” he said. “Just watch the child carefully.”

Everyone was convinced that Dr. Brinkerman was about to have a stroke. His hand trembled and shook. Jonathan dared not take the needle from him, for his hand had become contaminated, he believed, even in the presumably sterile water in which he had dipped it. He did not, however trust the sterilizing of very much in the operating room, and so refrained. But he watched every movement of Dr. Brinkerman’s. The older surgeon had considerable self-control when he wished, and he recovered himself and his awful color receded, and he completed the stitching without incident Then he strode,

without a word, from the room, viciously stripping the gloves from his hands and banging the door behind him.

“He’d kill you if he could, Jon,” said Dr. Bayne, as the interns and nurses tenderly covered the girl closely with the blankets and sheets and wheeled her out. “That is a very bad man.”

“And a man who should not be permitted to operate on any woman under the age of fifty,” said Jonathan. “Jon, be careful.”

“In this business it is a crime to be too careful of a colleague’s delicate sensibilities,” said Jonathan. “I’ve never covered for a man like Brinkerman before and I do not intend to do it now.”

When Jonathan was half across the unusually quiet water of the river, he noticed that the sky had a disturbingly hot brazen quality, actually saffron, and burning. It reflected itself on the small blue ripples of the water, not with the clarity of sunlight, though the sun shone hot enough, but with a dullness. He looked down the river and saw the white steeple of a little church on the winding mainland, and for some reason it appeared bleak to him and hard and cold. It’s only my depression, he thought. He had seen that steeple countless times, and never had it affected him so before with a sense of loneliness and removal.

Damn it, he thought, I had such dreams for this town. I’d have an X-ray in one of the hospitals. I’d have a store of radium. I’d induce famous doctors to come here to lecture our bumpkins. I’d build a tuberculosis wing on St. Hilda’s, and a cancer research laboratory. That’s what I, the great Samaritan, wanted to do for Hambledon—to make a small, compact, modern medical center, which even Boston wouldn’t despise. God knows we—I mean they—need it Farewell, dreams. Farewell everything except Jenny.

He had taken off his tie and his tall stiff white collar and his coat, yet he was sweating profusely by the time he reached the island and had tied up the little boat. He noticed that the river had fallen again, and more stones were bare. He looked at the sky. When this extraordinary weather broke, it would be hell. He had already forgotten Claude Brinkerman. All his thoughts, as he climbed toward the castie, were of Jenny Heger. He carried his coat
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his arm, and his hat in his hand, for his skin was so naturally dark and of an autumn color that he did not fear for sensitivity to the sun. He began to whistle.

The mica in the stone of the little castle glistened and glittered in the brassy sunlight, as if the whole edifice had been erected of mingled cement and diamond dust Jonathan could see its small turrets and its thin high windows and its bronze doors. He heard the silence all about him except for the weary chirping of an occasional bird. Not even a gardener was about, and the whole pretty island and its granite walls and its flowers and brilliant grass had an abandoned air, as if the sleeping inhabitants had awakened and had left it forever.

Jonathan was informed at the door by old Albert, who had a curiously sly look today, that Mr. Ferrier was not at home, Doctor, no, I really don’t know where he is. Miss Jenny? It was believed that she had gone into Hambledon, though not certain. Would Dr. Ferrier like a drink? Dr. Ferrier declined and went away glumly. Where the devil was the girl, if she was on the island? There were all sorts of cool nooks, of course. Then Jonathan remembered that only one boat had been tied up on the opposite bank, in Hambledon. That meant that Harald had left it there before going into the town. Three, including the one Jonathan had used, were now on the island. He began to smile. When Harald arrived across the river, he would find no way to get back unless he signaled and someone saw. Of course, he could be away all day, and even the evening, and by that time Jonathan would have returned to the mainland and left a boat for him.

So, Jenny was on the island, hidden away as usual. Jonathan began to explore. He knew the island fairly well, for it had intrigued and amused him from the beginning. He toured the island, peering into every hidden grotto, into every trellised arbor. The scent of pine was very fresh here of a sudden, for a slight breeze had risen. After he had searched one side of the island, Jonathan, feeling hotter and hotter and more and more irritated, began on the opposite side. He saw the mountains clearly against that yellowish sky, and they were ochre-colored or bronzed, except for sharp islands of green where the lawns flourished about houses which appeared tiny and white from this distance. Again he thought of the plains and mountains of Spain, and what would happen here if there should be a flood and the water rose in this valley. Everything was parched enough.

His whistling became a little shriller and now a few birds answered peevishly. The light on the river was blinding and
it
had a torpid, oily look smeared with metallic blue. Little paths crept down the “fraudulent” woods, as Jonathan called the stands of expensive, rare trees, but he was grateful for their brief shade as he passed into it and then out of
it.
He could smell damp earth, rich and carnal, and old fallen leaves, and the rank odor of the few wild flowers permitted to grow here. He saw the tiny artificial bay in which Peter Heger had intended to keep tropical fish. It was covered with algae, another thing which was unusual, and the confined water stank unpleasantly. But a wild duck or two sailed its surface placidly.

The stone walls that surrounded most of the island were overgrown with glossy green leaves of ivy or climbing rosebushes which, though their time was spent weeks ago, still bore a scarlet blossom here and there which looked like blood in the sun. Now, as if at a signal, cicadas began
to
whirr and shrill loudly in the hot silence. Jonathan passed a single apple tree and noticed that an apple or two looked red and ripe and he plucked one and chewed on it. It was a mistake. It was still green, and he threw it away.

He stopped to mop his face, and turned his eyes from the river and the walls and saw a grotto practically hidden by honeysuckle bushes and untended shrubbery. He saw a yellowish movement, quick and alert, beyond the bushes, and then it was still. He had found Jenny. Had he not stopped to sample the apple and then to throw it away, he would have missed this natural grotto, this small cavelike place sunken into the rising bank of the island. A curtain of wild wisteria drooped over it like a frail banner. He was certain that Jenny had heard his approach and his whistling. Yet now she crouched on the big stone in the grotto like a hunted thing, avoiding pursuit. This made Jonathan more annoyed than ever.

He pushed through the shrubbery and lifted aside the wisteria, and saw Jenny indeed crouched on the stone, with books and papers about her, and in a yellow cotton dress as plain as a shift. She looked at him in a white, mute silence and her eyes were very large and blue as a sudden little ray of sunlight touched them. She said nothing in recognition. She merely sat there and regarded him, not with anger
or
aversion or indignation, but with no expression at all.

“Hello, Jenny,” he said, and in spite of his annoyance his voice was very gentle, and he was surprised at the emotion that took him at the sight of the girl, and the tender desire for her, and his longing. He stood and looked at her, and smiled, and after
a
moment Jenny turned her head and her beautiful mouth trembled. He saw her profile, and it was dearer to him than anything he had known before, and he wanted to put his hands to her face, turn it to him and kiss that mouth and those long black lashes and the slender white throat. “Jenny,” he said. Her black hair was not dressed. It tumbled over her shoulders and back like the hair of
a
very young girl.