A Woman's War, Warwick Deeping [have you read this book .TXT] 📗

CHAPTER XXV

THE windows of Parker Steel’s consulting-room looked out on the garden at the back of the house, where

Lent lilies were already swinging their golden heads over

borders of crocuses, purple, yellow, and white. The lower

part of the window was screened by a wire gauze blind,

and the red serge curtains were looped back close to the

shutters.

 

However drab and dismal it may be, a physician’s consulting-room has much of the mystery that shadows the

confessional of the priest. The uninitiated enter with a

pleasurable sense of awe. Wisdom seems to admonish

them from her temple of text-books piled up solemnly in

the professional bookcase. There is an air of suave confidence and quiet reserve about the room. Even the

usual Turkey carpet suggests comfortable sympathy and

the touch of the healing hand.

 

Even as it is unnatural to suspect a priest of the sins

he rebukes in others, so to the lay mind the physician

appears as a being above the diseases that he treats.

There is always something illogical in a doctor needing

his own physic. And yet of all men he is the last that

can boast of the bliss of ignorance. He knows the curses

that afflict man in the flesh, how grim and inevitable his

own end may be. He is too well aware of the malignant

significance of symptoms, and a month of dyspepsia may

reduce him to a state of morbid and half hypocondriacal

self-introspection. It is told of a great surgeon how he

lay awake all through one night imagining that he had

discovered an aneurism of his aorta. It is dangerous to

know too little, but on occasions it may be desperately

unpleasant to know too much.

 

It was a serious and rather worried figure that moved

to and fro in the lofty room, as the March day drew towards

a dreary close. The house was silent, a depressing silence,

suggestive of stagnation and cynical melancholy. A fitful wind set the tops of the cypress-trees swaying and

jerking in the garden. The only living thing visible from

Dr. Steel’s window was a black cat stalking birds under

the shadow of a bank of laurels.

 

Parker Steel had taken off his coat and folded it carefully over the back of a chair. He stood by the window,

fumbling at his cuff-links, a preoccupied frown pinching

up the skin of his forehead above the thin, acquisitive

nose. After turning up his shirt-sleeves, he picked up a

pocket-lens from the table and focused the light upon

the forefinger of his right hand.

 

The hand that held the lense trembled very perceptibly.

On the right forefinger, immediately above the base of the

nail, a dull red papule stood out upon the skin. It was

clearly circumscribed in outline, and hard to the touch.

Parker Steel noticed all these details with the strained air

of a man scrutinizing an unpleasant statement of accounts.

 

Presently he laid the lens down on the flap of the

bureau by the window, and, unbuttoning his waistcoat,

passed his left hand under his shirt and vest. The deft

fingers half buried themselves in the hollow of his right

armpit. Parker Steel’s eyes had a peculiar, hard, staring

look, the expression seen in the eyes of the expert whose

whole intelligence is concentrated for the moment in the

sense of touch. His lower lip fell away slightly from his

teeth. Sharp lines of strain were visible upon his forehead.

 

“Good Lord!”

 

The words escaped from him involuntarily as he drew

his hand out from under his shirt. The smooth face had

grown suddenly haggard and sallow, and there was a

glint of ugly fear in the eyes. Parker Steel stood staring

at his hand, his mouth open, the lips softening as the lips

of a coward soften when his manhood melts before some

physical ordeal. The dapper figure has lost its alertness,

its neat and confident symmetry, and had become the

loose and slouching figure of a man suffering from shock.

 

Parker Steel roused himself at last, forced back his

shoulders, and walked slowly towards the door. He turned

the key in the lock, and stood listening a moment before

picking up a hand-mirror from among the multifarious

books and papers on the table. Returning to the window,

he peered at the reflection of his own face, furtively, as

though dreading what he might discover. The sallow

skin was blemishless as yet. Not a spot or blur showed

from the line of the hair to the clean curve of the wellshaven chin.

 

In another minute Parker Steel was turning over the

leaves of his journal with impetuous fingers. He worked

back page by page, running a finger down each column of

names, stopping ever and again to recollect and reconsider. It was on a page dated “February I2th” that he

discovered an entry that gave him the final pause.

 

“Mrs. Rattan, 10 Ford Street. Partus, 5 A.M.”

 

A foot-note had been added at the bottom of the page,

a foot-note whose details were significant to the point of

proof.

 

Parker Steel threw the book upon the table.

 

“Good Lord!”

 

He looked round him like a man who has taken poison

unwittingly, and whose brain refuses to act under the

paralyzing pressure of fear. He, Parker Steel, a !

Physician and egoist that he was, he could not bring himself to think the word, to brand himself with the poor

fools who crowd the hospitals of great cities. The very

vision, a hundred visions such as he had seen in the

dingy “out-patient rooms” of old, made the instinct of

cleanliness in him sicken and recoil. For Parker Steel

had much of the delicate niceness of a cat. This sense

of unutterable pollution struck at his vanity and his selfrespect.

 

He moved close to the window, and stood staring over

the wire blind into the garden.

 

Was it not possible that he might be mistaken? He

could consult an expert. And yet in the inmost corners

of his heart he knew that the truth was merciless towards

him.

 

What then?

 

The question threw him into a more desperate dilemma.

He remembered his wife.

 

Again, his profession? He would have to abandon it

for one year, perhaps for two. And Parker Steel knew

that success in professional life is largely a matter of personality. Withdraw that individual power, and the whole

structure, like the city of an Eastern fable, may melt

abruptly into mist.

 

Baffled and irritated, a man with no great moral hold

on the deeper truths of life, he moved aimlessly about the

room, holding his right hand a little from him like one

with bleeding fingers, who fears the blood may stain

his clothes. The leather-padded consulting-chair stood

empty before the table. Parker Steel dropped into it by

the casual chance of habit, and sat staring dully at the

patterning of the paper on the wall.

 

It was the ordeal of an egoist unlightened by a signal

sense of self-abnegation or of public duty. Mercenary

motives and professional ambition prompted a compromise at any hazard. The temptation to procrastinate

is ever with us, and the man of the polite world is the

most ingenious of sophists. For more than half an hour

Parker Steel sat silent and almost motionless in his chair.

When he at last left it, it was with the air of a man to

whom sanity, the sanity of the self-centred ego, had returned after the hideous doubt and discord of a dream.

 

The wisest course was for him to temporize, seeing

that it was possible that he might be mistaken.

 

He recognized no immediate need for trusting any one

with mere suspicions.

 

Was he not a physician, and therefore wise as to all

precautions?

 

As for his wife? That was a problem that might have

to be considered.

 

The sound of the front door closing roused him to the

needs of