“Thanks, Merrick. You’re a good sort. Perhaps it wouldn’t be bad for me to let off steam. I’ll tell you a little about it … I always wanted to be a surgeon … prattled about it as a child … never thought of anything else … thought of it as a novitiate in holy orders thinks of his vocation! … After college, I was out for three years trying to scrape up enough to bring me back … Got discouraged: gave it up; fell in love; married. The girl revived the old hope in me … Worked like dogs—both of us; she in an office, I selling bonds … So we came, last September … She found a job … Then the baby came … lot of expenses. Living was higher than we figured … I began to work down town nights in a bowling-alley … setting pins for freshmen to knock down one at a time … How’s that for your inferiority complex?”
“Well, it certainly wouldn’t drive a man into a state of hallucinatory omnipotence; that’s sure!”
“A woolly caterpillar! … That’s what it made of me! … No wonder I was a dunce! … And now—as if I hadn’t already enough to … But—hell—what’s the good of talking about it?”
“Drive on!” commanded Bobby. “It’s no farther through to the other side than to back out. Let’s have the rest of it. You were a caterpillar and a dunce—and now you’re something else again? … What’s happened lately?”
“My wife is sick. No—nothing acute. Just fagged and undernourished and neurotic; says she’s a dead weight on me and wishes she were dead. She’s brooding over it. I’m half afraid to go home for fear I’ll find that she has destroyed herself!”
“She should be out in the country for the summer,” advised Bobby. “Fresh air, good milk, sunshine.”
“Might as well suggest a trip to Europe,” muttered Dawson. “We’ve nothing.”
“Hasn’t she people she could go to for the summer?”
“Nobody … There’s a tight old stepfather who threw her out when she married me. He’d picked a yokel for her who lived in the neighbourhood … My mother is a widow, living with my sister, up state. They’re poor too and crowded.”
“How about a little loan? You’re not always going to be on your uppers. Almost anybody would consider that a safe investment, I should think.”
“I don’t know anyone I could approach with a proposition like that.”
Bobby’s guest ate hungrily. His hand trembled when he cut his meat.
“I have a little money that isn’t in use just now.”
Dawson shook his head.
“No!—By God, I didn’t tell you my story with the hope of panhandling some money out of you. You’re probably like all the rest of the medics—just scraping along … Thanks all the same, old man … It’s mighty generous of you … No—I’m going to give it up and get a job!”
“You didn’t understand me, Dawson. I didn’t mean to propose handing you the price of next week’s groceries. I’d like to lend you, say, five thousand dollars.”
Here was one chap that had accepted him as a pal in poverty … Natural enough, though. Dawson had had his nose to the grindstone; kept aloof from the others. He needn’t have heard that there was a wealthy student in the class … And this interview had not been of his seeking.
“You mean that?”
“Of course! … You didn’t think I’d joke with you about a business matter involving five thousand dollars, did you?”
Bobby would never have suspected the fellow of so much sparkle and spontaneous wit. He expanded as if some miracle had been performed on him.
“Merrick,” he said solemnly, as they reached the street. “You’ve come near saving a couple of lives today! … Mind if I run home now? … I’ve got to tell her! … I say—wouldn’t you like to come along?”
They were a shabby pair of rooms on the third floor of a third-rate apartment house over north of the big hospital, disorderly with the clutter incident to an attempt to make a bedroom, dining-room, nursery and kitchen of such cramped quarters.
Marion Dawson had no apologies to offer for the appearance of her house. Bobby liked her for that. He was instantly delighted with this pale, tawny-haired, hazel-eyed young woman who gave him a man’s handgrip and unloaded a chair for him without a flurry of embarrassment. The baby was dug up for inspection and greeted the visitor with big, blinking eyes, amusingly like his father’s. Having had no experience with babies, Bobby regarded this one with something of the same solemn interest it bestowed on him. Marion laughed.
“You can’t get acquainted with him that way,” she exclaimed. “You’ve got to boo at him, or something! He expects it, you know. He wouldn’t think of making a little ass of himself by booing at you; but he’ll be dreadfully disappointed if you don’t make some idiotic noises at him.”
Bobby knew he was going to like this girl.
“Marion,” said Dawson, with an unsteady voice, “Mr. Merrick is going to lend us some money. He says we’re a good risk. I’m not sure about me; but I know you are.”
She dropped her air of banter and stared at their guest for a long moment, trying to realize the significance of her husband’s announcement; then said, with deep feeling, “So—after all we’ve been through—Jack is to have his chance, at last!” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Dear boy! … It has been so long—so hard for you!”
She reached out her left hand to Bobby and clasped his with grateful fingers. “What a lovely thing for you to do!” she said.
“Oh—everybody has his troubles,” stammered Bobby, hoping the situation would be spared a debauch of sentimentality. “The least trouble in the world is a shortage of money.”
“Unless one hasn’t any,” chuckled Dawson.
Bobby arrived late in the little amphitheatre of the surgical clinic, that afternoon. The operation proved of exceptional interest. He found himself leaning far forward. That night, he almost enjoyed his Brill. Before he went to bed at one, he wrote to Nancy Ashford, to whom he had owed
