“Nothing to be done,” mumbled McGuire. “No use…. All over.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Gant,” said Creasman quietly. “I’ll let the doctor know as soon as he comes in!”
“C-c-c-comes in, hell!” Luke stammered bitterly. “I’m c-c-comin’down there myself and g-g-get him if I have to wy-wy-wy d-d-drag him here by the s-s-scruff of his neck!” And he hung up the receiver with a bang.
The nurse put the phone down on the desk, and turning to McGuire, said:
“He’s raving. He says if you don’t go, he’ll come for you and get you himself. Can’t you pull yourself together enough to go? If you can’t drive the car, I’ll send Joe along to drive it for you.” (Joe was a negro orderly in the hospital.)
“What’s the use?” McGuire mumbled thickly, a little angrily. “What the hell do these people expect, anyway?… I’m a doctor, not a miracle man…. The man’s gone, I tell you… the whole gut and rectum is eaten away… he can’t live over a day or two longer at the most…. It’s cruelty to prolong it: why the hell should I try to?”
“All right,” she said resignedly. “Do as you please. Only, he’ll probably be here for you himself in a few minutes. And since they do feel that way about it, I think you might make the effort just to please them.”
“Ah-h,” he muttered wearily. “People are all alike…. They all want miracles.”
“Are you just going to sit here all night?” she said with a rough kindliness. “Aren’t you going to try to get a little sleep before you operate?”
He waved fat fingers at her, and did not look at her.
“Leave me alone,” he mumbled; and she left him.
When she had gone, he fumbled for the jug and drank again. And then, while time resumed its sanded drip, and he sat there in the silence, he thought again of the old dying man whom he had known first when he was a young doctor just beginning and with whom his own life had been united by so many strange and poignant memories. And thinking of Gant, the strangeness of the human destiny returned to haunt his mind; there was something that he could not speak, a wonder and a mystery he could not express.
He fumbled for the jug again, and holding it solemnly in his bearish paws, drained it. Then he sat for several minutes without moving. Finally, he got up out of his chair, grunting painfully, and fumbling for the walls, lurched out into the hall, and began to grope his way across the corridor
