The Web of Life Part 16

Sommers got up from his seat nervously and then sat down again. Lindsay undoubtedly had the right to do exactly what he pleased on his own premises.

"Very well," he replied shortly. "It shan't occur again. I have told the Ducharme woman to call at my rooms for treatment, and I will give Miss Clark her ten dollars. She was an exceptionally interesting and instructive case."

Lindsay elevated his eyebrows politely.

"Yes, yes, but you know we specialists are so liable to be imposed upon.

Every one tries to escape his fee; no one would employ Carson, for example, unless he had the means to pay his fee, would he?"

"The cases are not exactly parallel."

"All cases of employment are parallel," Lindsay replied with emphasis.

"Every man is ent.i.tled to what he can get, from the roustabout on the wharf to our friend Porter, and no more."

"I have often thought," Sommers protested rather vaguely, "that clergymen and doctors should be employed by the state to do what they can; it isn't much!"

"There are the hospitals." Lindsay got up from his chair at the sound of an electric bell. "And our very best professional men practise there, give their time and money and strength. You will have to excuse me, as Mr.

Carson has an appointment, and I have already kept him waiting. Will you see Mrs. Winter and young Long at eleven thirty and eleven forty-five?"

As Sommers was leaving, Lindsay called out over his shoulder, "And can you take the clinic, Sat.u.r.day? I must go to St. Louis in consultation. General R. P. Atkinson, president of the Omaha and Gulf, an old friend--"

"Shall be delighted," the young doctor replied with a smile.

As he stepped into the corridor, one of the young women clerks was filling in an appointment slip on the long roll that hung on a metal cylinder. This was an improved device, something like a cash-register machine, that printed off the name opposite a certain hour that was permanently printed on the slip. The hours of the office day were divided into five-minute periods, but, as two a.s.sisting physicians were constantly in attendance beside Sommers, the allotted time for each patient was about fifteen minutes.

"Mrs. Winter is in No. 3," the clerk told him. "Long in No. 1, and Mr.

Harrison and a Miss Frost in the reception room."

So the machine ground on. Even the prescriptions were formularized to such an extent that most of them were stencilled and went by numbers. The clerk at the end of the corridor handed the patient a little card, on which was printed No. 3033, No. 3127, etc., as he circled by in the last turn of the office. There was an apothecary store on the floor below, where the patient could sit in an easy-chair and read the papers while the prescription called for by his number was being fetched by an elegant young woman.

Sommers hurried through with Mrs. Winter, who was a fussy, nervous little woman from the West Side; she resented having "a young feller" thrust on her.

"I knew Dr. Lindsay when he was filling prescriptions on Madison Street,"

she said spitefully.

Sommers smiled. "That must have been a good while ago, before Chicago was a big place."

"Before you was born, young man; before all the doctors who could came down here in a bunch and set up offices and asked fees enough of a body to keep 'em going for a year!"

Then young Long; then one, two, three new patients, who had to have physical examinations before being admitted to Lindsay. Once or twice Lindsay sent for Sommers to a.s.sist him in a delicate matter, and Sommers hurried off, leaving his half-dressed patient to cool his heels before a radiator. After the examinations there was an odd patient or two that Lindsay had left when he had gone out to lunch with some gentlemen at the Metropolitan Club. By two o'clock Sommers got away to take a hasty luncheon in a bakery, after which he returned to a new string of cases.

To-day "the rush," as the clerks called it, was greater than usual. The attendants were nervous and irritable, answered sharply and saucily, until Sommers felt that the place was intolerable. All this office practice got on his nerves. It was too "intensive." He could not keep his head and enter thoroughly into the complications of a dozen cases, when they were shoved at him pell-mell. He realized that he was falling into a routine, was giving conventional directions, relying upon the printed prescriptions and mechanical devices. All these devices were ingenious,--they would do no harm,--and they might do good, ought to do good,--if the cursed human system would only come up to the standard.

At last he seized his coat and hat, and escaped. The noiseless cage dropped down, down, past numerous suites of doctors' offices similar to Lindsay's, with their ground-gla.s.s windows emblazoned by dozens of names. This building was a kind of modern Chicago Lourdes. All but two or three of the suites were rented to some form of the medical fraternity. Down, down: here a druggist's clerk hailing the descending car; there an upward car stopping to deliver its load of human freight bound for the rooms of another great specialist,--Thornton, the skin doctor. At last he reached the ground floor and the gusty street. Across the way stood a line of carriages waiting for women who were shopping at the huge dry-goods emporium, and through the barbaric displays of the great windows Sommers could see the clerks moving hither and thither behind the counters. It did not differ materially from his emporium: it was less select, larger, but not more profitable, considering the amount of capital employed, than his shop. Marshall Field decked out the body; Lindsay, Thornton, and Co. repaired the body as best they could. It was all one trade.

On State Street the sandwich men were sauntering dejectedly through the crowd of shoppers: "_Professor Herman Sorter, Chiropodist._" "_Go to Mana.s.sas for Spectacles_";--it was the same thing. Across the street, on the less reputable western side, flared the celluloid signs of the quacks: "_The parlors of famous old Dr. Green_." "_The original and only Dr.

Potter. Visit Dr. Potter. No cure, no charge. Examination free._" The same business! Lindsay would advertise as "old Dr. Lindsay," if it paid to advertise,--paid socially and commercially. Dr. Lindsay's offices probably "took in" more in a month than "old Dr. Green" made in a year, without the expense of advertising. Lindsay would lose much more by adopting the methods of quackery than he could ever make: he would lose hospital connections, standing in the professional journals, and social prestige.

Lindsay was quite shrewd in sticking to the conventions of the profession.

CHAPTER XIV

When Sommers reached his rooms that evening, he found Mrs. Ducharme waiting for him. She held in her hand his card.

"I thought you'd give me the go-by," she exclaimed, as he entered. "Your kind is smooth enough, but they don't want to be bothered. But I came all the same--on the chance."

"What have you been doing?" the doctor inquired, without noticing her surliness. "Walking about in the streets all day and making your inflammation worse?"

"Well, you see I must find _him_, and I don't know where to look for him."

"Well, you won't find your husband walking about the streets, especially if he's gone off with another woman; but you will get blind and have to go to the hospital!"

"Well, I'll kill _her first_."

"You will do nothing of the sort," said the doctor, wearily. "You'll make a fuss, and your husband will hit you again, and go away."

"He was all right, as nice a man as you could find before _she_ came to Peory. You see she is married to another man, a baker, and they lived in Decatur. Ducharme--he's a Frenchman--knew her in Decatur where he worked in a restaurant, and he came to Peory to get rid of her. And he got a job and was real steady and quiet. Then we got married, and Ducharme was as nice a man as you ever knew. But we wasn't married a week--we had a kafe together--before _she_ got wind o' his being married and come to town.

He told me she was trying to get him to go away, and he said how he didn't want to; but she had influence with him and was worrying around. Well, the third day he sent me a note by a little boy. 'Caroline,' it said, 'you'se a good woman and an honest woman and we could get on first rate together; but, Caroline, I don't love you when she is about. She calls me, and I go.'"

"Well, that's all there is to it, isn't it?" Sommers asked, half amused.

"You can't keep him away from the other woman. Now you are a sensible, capable woman. Just give him up and find a place to work."

Mrs. Ducharme shook her head sorrowfully.

"That won't do. I just think and think, and I can't work. He was such a nice man, so gentlemanlike and quiet, so long as she stayed away. But I didn't tell you: I found 'em in Peory in a place not fit for hogs to live in, and I watched my chance and gave it to the woman. But Ducharme came in and he pushed me out, and I fell, and guess I cracked my head. That's when my eye began to hurt. The kafe business ran out, and I followed them to Chicago. And here I been for three months, doing most anything, housework generally. But I can't keep a place. Just so often I have to up and out on the road and try to find him. I'll brain that woman yet!"

She uttered this last a.s.sertion tranquilly.

"She don't amount to much,--a measly, sandy-haired, cheap thing. _I_ come of respectable folks, who had a farm outer Gales City, and never worked out 'fore this happened. But now I can't settle down to nothin'; it's always that Frenchman before my eyes, and _her_."

"Well, and after you have found her and disposed of her?" asked Sommers.

"Oh, Ducharme will be all right then! He'll follow me like a lamb. He doesn't want to mess around with such. But she's got some power over him."

"Simply he wants to live with her and not with you."

The woman nodded her head sadly.

"I guess that's about it; but you see if she weren't around, he wouldn't know that he didn't love me."

Mrs. Ducharme wiped away her tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those blind newspaper tragedies,--a trial, and a term of years in prison. As he meditated on this an idea seized the doctor; there was a way to distract her.

"The best thing for you to do," he said severely, "is to go to work."

"Can't get no place," she replied despondently. "Have no references and can't keep a place. See a feller going up the street that looks like Ducharme, and I must go after him."

"I have a place in mind where you won't be likely to see many men that look like Ducharme!"