A few minutes after four o’clock that morning as McGuire lay there sprawled upon his desk, the phone rang again. And again he made no move to answer it: he just sat there, sprawled out on his fat elbows, staring stupidly ahead. Creasman came in presently, as the telephone continued to disturb the silence of the hospital with its electric menace, and this time, without a glance at him, answered.
It was Luke Gant. At four o’clock his father had had another h?morrhage, he had lost consciousness, all efforts to awaken him had failed, they thought he was dying.
The nurse listened carefully for a moment to Luke’s stammering and excited voice, which was audible across the wire even to McGuire. Then, with a troubled and uncertain glance toward the doctor’s sprawled and drunken figure, she said quietly:
“Just a minute. I don’t know if the doctor is in the hospital. I’ll see if I can find him.”
Putting her hand over the mouth-piece, keeping her voice low, she spoke urgently to McGuire:
“It’s Luke Gant. He says his father has had another h?morrhage and that they can’t rouse him. He wants you to come at once. What shall I tell him?”
He stared drunkenly at her for a moment, and then, waving his finger at her in a movement of fat impatience, he mumbled thickly:
“Nothing to do. . . . No use . . . . Can’t be stopped. . . . People expect miracles. . . . Over. . . . Done for. . . . Tell him I’m not here . . . gone home,” he muttered, and sprawled forward on the desk again.
Quietly, coolly, the nurse spoke into the phone again:
“The doctor doesn’t seem to be here at the hospital, Mr. Gant. Have you tried his house? I think you may find him at home.”
“No, G-g-g-god-damn it!” Luke fairly screamed across the wire. “He’s not at home. I’ve already t-t-tried to get him here. . . . N-n-n-now you look here, Miss Creasman!” Luke shouted angrily. “You c-c-can’t kid me: I know where he is — He’s d-d-down there at the hospital right now — wy-wy-wy — stinkin’ drunk! You t-t-tell him, G-g-g-god-damn his soul, that if he d-d-doesn’t come, wy-wy-wy — P-p-p-papa’s in a bad way and and and f-f-frankly, I fink it’s a rotten shame for McGuire to act this way, wy-wy-wy after he’s b-b-been Papa’s doctor all these years. F-f-frankly, I do!”
“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 toward the stairs. And the first step fooled him as it had done so many times before; he missed his step, even as a man stepping out in emptiness might miss, and came down heavily upon his knees. Then, pushing with his hands, he slid out peacefully on the oiled green linoleum, pillowed his big head on his arms with a comfortable grunt, and sprawled out flat, already half dead to the world. It was in this position — also a familiar one — that Creasman, who had heard his thump when falling, found him. And she spoke sharply and commandingly as one might speak to a little child.
“You get right up off that floor and march upstairs,” she said. “If you want to sleep you’re going to your room; you’ll not disgrace us sleeping on that floor.”
And like a child, as he had done so many times before, he obeyed her. In a moment, as her sharp command reached his drugged consciousness, he grunted, stirred, climbed painfully to his knees, and then, pawing carefully before him like a bear, unable or unwilling to stand up, he began to crawl slowly up the stairs.
And it was in this position, half-way up, pawing his burly and cumbersome way on hands and knees, that Luke Gant found him. Cursing bitterly, and stammering with wild excitement, the young man pulled him to his feet, Creasman sponged off the great bloated face with a cold towel and, assisted by Joe Corpering, the negro man, they got him down the stairs and out of the hospital into Luke’s car.
Dawn was just breaking, a faint glimmer of blue-silver light, with the still purity of the earth, the sweet fresh stillness of the trees, the bird-song waking. The fresh sweet air, Luke’s breakneck driving through the silent streets, the roaring motor — finally, the familiar and powerfully subdued emotion of a death chamber, the repressed hysteria, the pain and tension and the terror of shocked flesh, the aura of focal excitement around the dying man revived McGuire.
Gant lay still and almost lifeless on the bed, his face already tinged with the ghostly shade of death, his breath low, hoarse, faintly rattling, his eyes half-closed, comatose, already glazed with death.
McGuire sighted at his shining needle, and thrust a powerful injection of caffeine, sodium, and benzoate into the arm of the dying man. This served partially to revive him, got him through the low ebb of the dark, his eyes opened, cleared, he spoke again. Bright day and morning came, and Gant still lived. And with the light, their impossible and frenzied hopes came back again, as they have always been revived in desperate men. And Gant did not die that day. He lived on.