And they had every right to be proud. The Rev. Bruce McLaren, Ph. D., was by no means an intellectual coxcomb or a solemn blatherskite with a fondness for big words and an itch to achieve the reputation of a savant. His scholarship was sound, and the sermon that morning was a credit to it.
Deacon Chester, warmly gripping his pastor’s hand, shouted above the shrill confusion of the metal-piped postlude that he guessed it was the most profound sermon ever delivered in Grace Church! The statement was entirely correct; nor was the word “guess” used in this connection a mere colloquialism. Had Mr. Chester been a painstaking stylist—he was a prosperous baker of cookies by the carload lot, and not averse to admitting that he had left school at thirteen—he could not have chosen a word more meticulously adequate than “guess” to connote his own capacity to appraise the scholarship disclosed by that homily. Had a photographic plate been exposed to Mr. Chester’s knowledge of the subject which Doctor McLaren had treated, it could have been used again, quite unimpaired, for other purposes.
The warm friendship which had arisen between Doctor McLaren and Doctor Merrick dated from a raw March evening when the rangy, bronze-haired preacher had been brought into Brightwood, unconscious and breathing stertorously, with an ugly and dangerous smash in the right squamous temporal. He was muddy, bloody, and limp. It had looked black for him, that night; and the only recess Doctor Merrick had permitted himself, from the time he finished the necessary repairs at nine until the next morning at seven, were brief pacings up and down the corridor in front of his important patient’s door, tugging nervously at cigarettes, and disinterestedly accepting the sandwiches and milk brought up by a nurse at three.
Bobby Merrick had liked McLaren from the first moment; liked the length and strength of him as he lay on the operating table, subconsciously making his good fight for life; liked the shape of his broad forehead, the cut of his ears, the cleft of his chin, the hardness of his well-tennised right forearm, the texture of his hide, the elliptical curve of his thumb. All these things were significant. Had Doctor Merrick been required, he could have written a two thousand word paper on the character of Doctor McLaren before ever he had heard him speak.
He had liked his patient, next day, for the inherent poise he exhibited when, rousing for the first time to a vague consciousness of his surroundings, he had taken in the situation at a glance, and, apparently considering it as all in the day’s work, had dropped off to sleep, at the nurse’s suggestion, without bothering to ask questions. Bobby had liked him even more, a few days later, for his quite superior capacity to take his punishment—and there was a lot of it—without flinching or grousing. And, finally, he had liked Doctor McLaren’s state of mind when, a week after the accident, he had spoken calmly and without rancour of the drunken insolvent who had run him down in a safety zone.
“He probably feels bad enough about it,” remarked McLaren, in his deep bass, mellowed by an ancestral Scotch burr. “Anyway, I’m not going to press the matter, or make myself wretched by mulling it over.”
“That’s amazingly good sense!” Merrick had commented, privately resolving to see more of this man when he was up and had his boots on. He had never known a preacher before. His rather nebulous opinion of the clergy had been collected from cartoons, the quips and jibes of paragraphers, and satirical sideswipes at the profession roughly projected from the stage and screen. He had lately thumbed, scowlingly, a nasty novel vilifying men of this vocation. He was not conscious of an active dislike for them, but shared what seemed to be the unchurched public’s general belief that preachers were—to put the matter laconically—a bunch of saps.
Every day, the young surgeon found himself more and more pleasantly attracted by his patient, enjoyed his droll comments, offered in moments when drollery came high, admired the adroitness with which he parried the friendly raillery of doctors and nurses—chaff invited by his own whimsical humour. Almost everybody in the organization at Brightwood was in to see him, at one time or another, during his convalescence; and it was quite unanimously held that he was a good sport.
And no less cordially interested had been the Brightwood household in the brown-eyed, deep-dimpled Mrs. McLaren who had appeared, anguished but admirably controlled, a half hour after her husband’s arrival. They had telephoned her that Doctor McLaren was seriously injured, suggesting that she come at once. When she came, there was no hysteria … Would Doctor McLaren recover? They couldn’t say. It was too soon to tell. He was very, very badly hurt … She took the blow standing, and they rejoiced in her pluck. She was invited to stay the night, and they were at pains to give her every scrap of available information about her husband—both good and bad.
From the first, Mrs. McLaren was adopted at Brightwood on unusual terms. When Doctor Merrick told her, at noon, that her husband was putting up a very encouraging resistance, and had at least an even break in the decision, she did not stage a scene. There was a momentary tight closing of her eyes, a quick breath of relief, and a misty smile; but no theatricals. She had herself well in hand. Bobby liked her for that. He was glad to have her about. Sometimes, when her husband was asleep, she would read to other convalescents. On several occasions she offered first aid to hysterical next-of-kins, who waited while operations of interest to them were in progress. One day, upon invitation of Doctor Pyle, she went into the operating-room to see “some interesting surgery”—from which entertainment she hastily excused herself, however, when a diminutive
