For a long time now, McGuire had sat there without moving, sprawled out upon the desk in a kind of drunken stupor. About half-past three the telephone upon the desk began to ring, jangling the hospital silence with its ominous and insistent clangour, but the big burly figure of the man did not stir, he made no move to answer. Presently he heard the brisk heel-taps of Creasman, the night superintendent, coming along the heavy oiled linoleum of the corridor. She entered, glanced quickly at him, and saying, “Shall I take it?” picked up the phone, took the receiver from its hook, said “hello” and listened for a moment. He did not move.
In a moment, the night superintendent said quietly:
“Yes, I’ll ask him.”
When she spoke to him, however, her tone had changed completely from the cool professional courtesy of her speech into the telephone: putting the instrument down upon the top of the desk, and covering the mouth-piece with her hand, she spoke quietly to him, but with a note of cynical humour in her voice, bold, coarse, a trifle mocking.
“It’s your wife,” she said. “What shall I tell her?”
He regarded her stupidly for a moment before he answered.
“What does she want?” he grunted.
She looked at him with hard eyes touched with pity and regret.
“What do you think a woman wants?” she said. “She wants to know if you are coming home tonight.”
He stared at her and then grunted:
“Won’t go home.”
She took her hand away from the mouth-piece instantly, and taking up the phone again, spoke smoothly, quietly, with cool crisp courtesy:
“The doctor will not be able to go home tonight, Mrs. McGuire. He has to operate at seven-thirty. . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . At seven-thirty. . . . He has decided it is best to stay here until the operation is over. . . . Yes. . . . I’ll tell him. . . . Thank YOU. . . . Good-bye.”
She hung up quietly and then turning to him, her hands arched cleanly on starched hips, she looked at him for a moment with a bold sardonic humour.
“What did she say?” he mumbled thickly.
“Nothing,” she said quietly. “Nothing at all. What else is there to say?”
He made no answer but just kept staring at her in his bloated drunken way with nothing but the numb swelter of that irremediable anguish in his heart. In a moment, her voice hardening imperceptibly, the nurse spoke quietly again:
“Oh, yes — and I forgot to tell you — you had another call tonight.”
He moistened his thick lips, and mumbled:
“Who was it?”
“It was that woman of yours.”
There was no sound save the stertorous labour of his breath; he stared at her with his veined and yellowed eyes, and grunted stolidly:
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to know if the doc-taw was theah,” Creasman said in a coarse and throaty parody of refinement. “And is he coming in tonight? Really, I should like to know. . . . Ooh, yaas,” Creasman went on throatily, adding a broad stroke or two on her own account. “I simply must find out! I cawn’t get my sleep in until I do. . . . Well,” she demanded harshly, “what am I going to tell her if she calls again?”
“What did she say to tell me?”
“She said”— the nurse’s tone again was lewdly tinged with parody — “to tell you that she is having guests for dinner tomorrow night — this evening — and that you simply GOT to be th?h, you, and your wife, too — ooh, Gawd, yes! — the Reids are comin’, don’t-cherknow — and if you are not th?h Gawd only knows what will happen!”
He glowered at her drunkenly for a moment, and then, waving thick fingers at her in disgust, he mumbled:
“You got a dirty mouth . . . don’t become you. . . . Unlady-like. . . . Don’t like a dirty-talkin’ woman. . . . Never did. . . . Unbecomin’. . . . Unlady-like. . . . Nurses all alike . . . all dirty talkers . . . don’t like ’em.”
“Oh, dirty talkers, your granny!” she said coarsely. “Now you leave the nurses alone. . . . They’re decent enough girls, most of ’em, until they come here and listen to you for a month or two. . . . You listen to me, Hugh McGuire; don’t blame the nurses. When it comes to dirty talking, you can walk off with the medals any day in the week. . . . Even if I am your cousin, I had a good Christian raising out in the country before I came here. So don’t talk to me about nurses’ dirty talk: after a few sessions with you in the operating room even the Virgin Mary could use language fit to make a monkey blush. So don’t blame it on the nurses. Most of them are white as snow compared to you.”
“You’re dirty talkers — all of you,” he muttered, waving his thick fingers in her direction. “Don’t like it. . . . Unbecomin’ in a lady.”
For a moment she did not answer, but stood looking at him, arms akimbo on her starched white hips, a glance that was bold, hard, sardonic, but somehow tinged with a deep and broad affection.
Then, taking her hands off her hips, she bent swiftly over him, reached down between his legs, and got the jug and lifting it up to the light in order to make her cynical inspection of its depleted contents more accurate, she remarked with ironic approbation:
“My, my! You’re doing pretty well, aren’t you? . . . Well, it won’t be long NOW, will it?” she said cheerfully, and then turning to him abruptly and accusingly, demanded:
“Do you realize that you were supposed to call Helen Gant at twelve o’clock?” She glanced swiftly at the clock. “Just three and a half hours ago. Or did you forget it?”
He passed his thick hand across the reddish unshaved stubble of his beard.
“Who?” he said stupidly. “Where? What is it?”
“Oh, nothing to worry about,” she said with a light hard humour. “Just a little case of carcinoma of the prostate. He’s going to die anyway, so you’ve got nothing to worry about at all.”
“Who?” he said stupidly again. “Who is it?”
“Oh, just a man,” she said gaily. “An old, old man name Mr. Gant. — You’ve been his physician for twenty years, but maybe you’ve forgotten him. You know — they come and go; some live and others die — it’s all right — this one’s going to die. They’ll bury him — it’ll all come out right one way or the other — so you’ve nothing to worry about at all. . . . Even if you kill him,” she said cheerfully. “He’s just an old, old man with cancer, and bound to die anyway, so promise me you won’t worry about it too much, will you?”
She looked at him a moment longer; then, putting her hand under his fat chin, she jerked his head up sharply. He stared at her stupidly with his yellowed drunken eyes, and in them she saw the mute anguish of a tortured animal, and suddenly her heart was twisted with pity for him.
“Look here,” she said, in a hard and quiet voice, “what’s wrong with you?”
In a moment he mumbled thickly:
“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“Is it the woman business again? For God’s sake, are you never going to grow up, McGuire? Are you going to remain an overgrown schoolboy all your life? Are you going to keep on eating your heart out over a bitch who thinks that spring is here every time her hind end itches? Are you going to throw your life away, and let your work go to smash because some damned woman in the change of life has done you dirt? What kind of man are you, anyway?” she jeered. “Jesus God! If it’s a woman that you want the woods are full of ’em. Besides,” she added, “what’s wrong with your own wife! She’s worth a million of those flossy sluts.”
He made no answer and in a moment she went on in a harsh and jeering tone that was almost deliberately coarse:
“Haven’t you learned yet, with all you’ve seen of it, that a piece of tail is just a piece of tail, and that in the dark it doesn’t matter one good God-damn whether it’s brown, black, white, or yellow?”
Even as she spoke, something cold and surgical in his mind, which no amount of alcohol seemed to dull or blur, was saying accurately: “Why do they all feel such contempt for one another? What is it in them that makes them despise themselves?”
Aloud, however, waving his thick fingers at her in a gesture of fat disgust, he said:
“Creasman, you got a dirty tongue. . . . Don’t like to hear a woman talk like that. . . . Never liked to hear a dirty-talkin’ woman. . . . You’re no lady!”
“Ah-h! No lady!” she said bitterly, and let her hands fall in a gesture of defeat. “All right, you poor fool, if that’s the way you feel about it, go ahead and drink yourself to death over your ‘lady.’ That’s what’s wrong with you.”
And, muttering angrily, she left him. He sat there stupidly, without moving, until her firm heel-taps had receded down the silent hall, and he heard a door close. Then he reached down between his knees and got the jug and drank again. And again there was nothing in the place except the sound of silence, the rapid ticking of a little clock, the thick short breathing of the man.