Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among a clientèle européenne la plus chic. … One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky nightclub breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America. My poor ten-franc note must have seemed pathetic to this old lay-sister, who probably thought nothing of receiving a mille from an anxious Dago.
I had until then been trying not to wonder about Iris in the vile shadow of a prison. Suddenly I was furiously hot. What on earth was I doing here! Intruding where I was not wanted! I was about to go, to run, when the lay-sister was as though distracted from the last piece of carrot by the opening of a door in the back room. Frantically she hurried towards it. It would look too silly of me to run now. I could but ask, anyhow.
The lay-sister’s voice, voluble, vindictive, explanatory. Much good my ten francs had done! Then steps came towards me, into the lodge. “Eh,” I said. How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards. …
A man, bald, sharp-featured as a bird, in a rough brown greatcoat, a tired-looking, an anxious-looking, middle-aged—Englishman!
“Masters! Conrad Masters!”
“Well,” muttered that anxious-looking man. He looked just the same when he was playing bridge. He was always playing bridge, that man. And he said he hated playing bridge. That kind of man. “Well? How are you?”
“Glad,” I said, “glad it’s no worse. Glad it’s only you. I was afraid of a purple beard.”
“And how did you get here?” A man given to muttering, that. One could hear what he said or not just as one pleased. One couldn’t, you understand, be afraid of Conrad Masters.
“Masters, the fight I’ve had with this Cerberus to see you!”
“Rules … must have rules, you know. …” A decidedly undecided man. Soft-speaking but not plausible, a combination peculiarly English. A man of nerves. Shifty without suavity … and then, suddenly, apt to bite your head off like a very captain of men: “And how did you know Mrs. Storm was ill? Here?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. …” And I thought of many things. Of Conrad Masters, of “Should a doctor tell?” of Cherry-Marvel, that confidant at third-hand, of Mrs. Conrad Masters. A dashing lady, that.
“Who but Cherry-Marvel told me!” said I.
“God in Heaven, that man!”
But Iris swept out of my mind her doctor’s problematical indiscretions to his dashing wife. …
“Ill,” he muttered. “Decidedly ill … mm. …”
“I heard,” I said desperately, “that she’d had a sort of operation—”
“There’s been no operation!” snapped that captain of men. “Simply maddens a man, the way these things get about. …”
“Well, I’m only repeating what I heard, Masters. And you can’t hope for secrecy once our friend gets hold of anything—”
“Who said anything about secrecy?” A dangerous, feline muttering. “I don’t want secrecy. …”
Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm with that lank man’s doubtful heat.
“I say, Masters, is she—is she very ill? But, of course, if I’m intruding. …”
Those worried eyes were fixed on the feet stuck far out from the chair on which he lay as though exhausted. The lay-sister appeared to be pottering about in the next room. “Thinking of Donna Guelãra, are you? Haven’t much faith in me and Martel-Bonnard, have you?” Faintly amused those worried eyes looked to be. That was that man’s way. You would think he was being shifty with you when he might be just laughing at you.
Some would speak well, very well, of Dr. Masters; whilst others almost libellously, saying that, working as he did with Eugene Martel-Bonnard, the surgeon, he couldn’t be over-scrupulous in advising profitable but unnecessary operations. Martel-Bonnard’s wife wore a famous pearl rope, of which it was said that each pearl had been bought at the price of a woman’s life. But a brilliant surgeon’s life. Martel-Bonnard would say, is full of drawbacks. He charged accordingly. I think that he and Mrs. Masters must have bullied Masters every now and then—not that he wouldn’t have looked worried in the Elysian Fields. Between them, those three had once made poor Anna Estella Guelãra very sorry she had ever left Chile. She was quite well, Martel-Bonnard said she was very ill, he almost killed her, then he saved her, and how he hurt her! “Naturally,” smiled Martel-Bonnard. “Such things hurt. But, my friend, she was—pouf!—but for me.” How one would have liked to operate on that sleek little man, unsuccessfully! He despised you if you differed from him, operated on you if you were fool enough, and robbed you according to a special system he had of discounting the exchange. One hundred thousand francs, poor Anna Estella’s life had cost her that time. And pain, such as falls only to the lot of women!
“But. Masters, it’s surely not as bad a case as that!”
“Mm … not as bad? Well … different shall we say?”
“But that was an internal operation! You just said—”
“Quite. That’s why it’s different. …”
Talking with Conrad Masters was like playing a game in which he who made out the most of the other’s words scored the most points. … But Iris alone here, in this obscure place as full of crucifixes as a cemetery!
“I’m sorry,” I said, rising from the stool. “I’m intruding. …”
“You’re all right,” he mumbled. “So you heard about it from that femme fatale, did you? Damn that man! Bla, bla, bla!”
Those worried but faintly amused eyes were on me. “Been hearing quite a lot about you lately. Nurses would have your dossier complete by now if they could understand English. You seem to have put your foot in it somewhere. Rather sorry for you if. …”
This bantering … medical bantering! Only doctors dare do it. “Well, how are we today?” But by paying close attention to the game I had scored one point. She was delirious. So far, delirious. Then … “if!”
“Masters,” I said, “are you telling me that
