Part 16 (2/2)

At the time I did not seize the full significance of the other pa.s.sage, longer than this, and far sadder when its meaning was finally grasped.

”The love our parents gave us we do not pay back, nor a t.i.the of it, even. We may bestow it to our children, but we never render it again to our father and our mother. And what can equal the love of a woman for the son she has borne? No peak is as lofty, and no ocean is as wide; it is fathomless, boundless, immeasurable; it is poured without stint, unceasing and unfailing. And how do we men meet it? We do not even make a pretense of repaying it, most of us. Now and again there may be a son here and there who does what he can for his mother, little as it is, and much as he may despise himself for doing it: and why not? Are there not seven swords in the heart of the Mater Dolorosa? And what sort of a son is he who would add another?”

Although I had already begun to guess at the secret of my friend's conduct, a mystery to all others, it was the first of these two final entries in his note-book which came flas.h.i.+ng back into my memory one evening toward the end of March, ten weeks or so after he had bidden me good-by and had gone away to Egypt. I was seated in my library, smoking, when there came a ring at the door, and a telegram was handed to me. I laid my cigar down on the brownish-yellow sh.e.l.l, at the crinkled edge of which the green frog was sitting, reaching out his broken arms for the trombone whereon he had played in happier days. I saw that the despatch had come by the cable under the ocean, and I wondered who on the other side of the Atlantic had news for me that would not keep till a letter could reach me.

I tore open the envelope. The message was dated Alexandria, Egypt, and it was signed by my friend's widow. He had died that morning, and I was asked to break the news to his mother.

(1893)

[Ill.u.s.tration: On an Errand of Mercy]

The ambulance clanged along, now under the elevated railroad, and now wrenching itself outside to get ahead of a cable-car.

With his little bag in his hand, the young doctor sat wondering whether he would know just what to do when the time came. This was his first day of duty as ambulance surgeon, and now he was going to his first call. It was three in the afternoon of an August day, when the hot spell had lasted a week already, and yet the young physician was chill with apprehension as he took stock of himself, and as he had a realizing sense of his own inexperience.

The bullet-headed Irishman who was driving the ambulance as skilfully as became the former owner of a night-hawk cab glanced back at the doctor and sized up the situation.

”There's no knowin' what it is we'll find when we get there,” he began.

”There's times when it's no aisy job the doctor has. Say you give the man ether, now, or whatever it is you make him sniff, and maybe he's dead when he comes out of it. Where are you then?”

The young man decided instantly that if anything of that sort should happen to him that afternoon, he would go back to Georgia at once and try for a place in the country store.

”But nothing ever fazed Dr. Chandler,” the driver went on. ”It's Dr.

Chandler's place you're takin' now, ye know that?”

It seemed to the surgeon that the Irishman was making ready to patronize him, or at least to insinuate the new-comer's inferiority to his predecessor, whereupon his sense of humor came to his rescue, and a smile relieved the tension of his nerves as he declared that Dr.

Chandler was an honor to his profession.

”He is that!” the driver returned, emphatically, as with a dextrous jerk he swung the ambulance just in front of a cable-car, to the sputtering disgust of the gripman. ”An' it's many a dangerous case we've had to handle together, him and me.”

”I don't doubt that you were of great a.s.sistance,” the young Southerner suggested.

”Many's the time he's tould me he never knew what he'd ha' done without me,” the Irishman responded. ”There was that night, now--the night when the big sailor come off the Roosian s.h.i.+p up in the North River there, an' he got full, an' he fell down the steps of a barber shop, an' he bruck his leg into three paces, so he did; an' that made him mad, the pain of it, an' he was just wild when the ambulance come. Oh, it was a lovely jag he had on him, that Roosian--a lovely jag! An' it was a daisy sc.r.a.p we had wid him!”

”What did he do?” asked the surgeon.

”What didn't he do?” the driver replied, laughing at the memory of the scene. ”He tried to do the doctor--Dr. Chandler it was, as I tould you.

He'd a big knife--it's mortial long knives, too, them Roosians carry--an' he was so full he thought it was Dr. Chandler that was hurtin' him, and he med offer to put his knife in him, when, begorra, I kicked it out of his hand.”

”I have often heard Dr. Chandler speak of you,” said the doctor, with an involuntary smile, as he recalled several of the good stories that his predecessor had told him of the driver's peculiarities.

”An' why w'u'dn't he?” the Irishman replied. ”It's more nor wanst I had to help him out of trouble. An' never a worrd we had in all the months he drove out wid me. But it 'll be some aisy little job we'll have now, I'm thinkin'--a sun-stroke, maybe, or a kid that's got knocked down by a scorcher, or a thrifle of that kind; you'll be able to attend to that yourself aisy enough, no doubt.”

To this the young Southerner made no response, for his mind was busy in going over the antidotes for various poisons. Then he aroused himself and shook his shoulders, and laughed at his own preoccupation.

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