“Hope this youngster will be able to realize how valuable a person he is,” said Doctor Bliss, putting down the paper, “now that he has had his life handed back to him at such a price!”
There was still another coincidence connected with this event. The village physician, suspecting that Merrick’s head injury might be in need of more skilful examination than he could give it, had sent him in a swift ambulance to Brightwood Hospital. At that moment he did not know that the man who had made Brightwood famous for its brain surgery would be unable to see his young patient.
“What do you suppose the boy said,” speculated Mrs. Bliss, “when he learned what it had cost to save his life?”
“Well,” reflected the doctor glumly, “from my own observation of the type of young cub whose father is dead, whose mother lives in Paris, whose doting grandfather is a retired millionaire, and who gets himself bumped off his boat by a boom in broad daylight, I should suppose he just scratched a match on the head of his bed and mumbled, ‘Whadda yuh know about that!’ ”
II
Slowly and carefully—for he was still limp from his battle with pneumonia, resultant from the prolonged use of a lung-motor in the inexperienced hands of excited people—two nurses had trundled young Merrick up to the well-appointed solarium.
“It won’t hurt him a bit,” Doctor Watson had said, “and there is at least the suspicion of a breeze upstairs.”
Parking his chair in an alcove somewhat sequestered from the general assembly of convalescents, most of them white-turbaned like himself, his uncommunicative attendants had pattered quickly away as if relieved to be off to more pleasant undertakings.
Their scamper added to his perplexity. Yesterday he had tried to explain the prevailing taciturnity of the people who waited on him: it was the weather. The muggy, mid-August humidity accounted for it. If doctors were brief and brusque, nurses crisp and remote, it was because the patients were fretful … everybody out of sorts … naturally.
But, even so, something more serious than a low barometer ailed this hospital. Its moodiness was too thick to be interpreted by a murky yellow sky, the abominable rasp of cicadas in the dusty maples, or the enervating heat. Brightwood was in trouble; nor could Bobby shake off the feeling that he, himself, was somehow at the bottom of it; else why this conspiracy of mute glumness in their attitude toward him? My God! … He might as well have been some penniless bum, fished out of the gutter, and patched up for sheer humanity’s sake … Didn’t they know who he was? … Why, his grandfather could buy up the whole works and never miss it!
It wasn’t that they’d neglected him, he was bound to admit. Somebody had been always hovering over him … God! … What a ghastly experience he had been through! … That fog … drifting in greyish-white, balloon-like billows across the road—impenetrable, acrid, suffocating—a damp, chilling, clinging cloud that pressed painfully against his chest, swathed his arms, clogged his feet … That trip back from Elsewhere! … Would he ever live long enough to forget? It made him shudder to remember it! … That unutterable fatigue!
Sometimes it had been more than he could bear. After he had plodded, staggering, groping his way for a few shaky steps, the Thing would rush him, with a roar like heavy surf, and hurl him incredible distances back toward oblivion. Then the violence of the storm would subside, followed by an ominous silence … Was he really dead, this time? … Suddenly, the Thing would swoop him up again and pitch him deeper into the stifling fog …
After years and years of that—he had grown old and stiff and sore with his hopeless struggle—the situation had begun to clear. Now and again there were ragged rents in the fabric of the fog through which certain landmarks might be fleetingly recognized, as steeples and spires come up, faintly, on an acid-touched plate. These hazy perceptions were, at first, exclusively olfactory. He had read, somewhere, that the nose was more integrally a part of the brain than the other sense organs. Perhaps the smelling faculty (he had taken more than a casual interest in physiology) was the oldest of all the perceptive organs; earliest to evolve. But no; that would be feeling … feeling first, then smelling … It had amazed and amused him that part of his mind seemed to be trudging alongside, analyzing the predicament of the rest of his mind, wading through the fog.
Now there had come a much wider gap in the drifting cloud, and through it breezed a combination of identifiable odours; strong scents crushed hard against his face; smell of good wool, and, buried in the wool, iodoform, cigarette smoke, chlorides of this-that-and-the-other, anaesthetics, antiseptics, laboratory smells, hospital smells.
A weight shifted about on his chest. It was warm. It throbbed. It pressed firmly, rested briefly, moved a little space, paused again, listened; went back to spots it had visited before; listened, more intently.
Then the weight had lifted and the medley of smells vanished. Through the next rift in the fog, voices were speaking from a vast distance; one of them calm, assured; the other bitter, unfriendly … That had been the beginning of his perplexity …
“I believe he’s going to pull through!”
“Doubtless—and it’s a damned shame!”
After that, there had been a complicated jumble of voices—one of them a woman’s—before the fog closed in on him again. Occasionally, the cloud would tear apart, and he would take up his load … he seemed to be carrying some enormous weight …
