K. (A Crime Thriller Novel). Mary Roberts Rinehart

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СКАЧАТЬ as he came down the stairs, Dr. Ed, who had wiped his tiny knife with a bit of cotton,—he hated sterilizing it; it spoiled the edge,—thrust it hastily into his pocket. He had cut boils without boiling anything for a good many years, and no trouble. But he was wise with the wisdom of the serpent and the general practitioner, and there was no use raising a discussion.

      Max's morning mood was always a cheerful one. Now and then the way of the transgressor is disgustingly pleasant. Max, who sat up until all hours of the night, drinking beer or whiskey-and-soda, and playing bridge, wakened to a clean tongue and a tendency to have a cigarette between shoes, so to speak. Ed, whose wildest dissipation had perhaps been to bring into the world one of the neighborhood's babies, wakened customarily to the dark hour of his day, when he dubbed himself failure and loathed the Street with a deadly loathing.

      So now Max brought his handsome self down the staircase and paused at the office door.

      “At it, already,” he said. “Or have you been to bed?”

      “It's after nine,” protested Ed mildly. “If I don't start early, I never get through.”

      Max yawned.

      “Better come with me,” he said. “If things go on as they've been doing, I'll have to have an assistant. I'd rather have you than anybody, of course.” He put his lithe surgeon's hand on his brother's shoulder. “Where would I be if it hadn't been for you? All the fellows know what you've done.”

      In spite of himself, Ed winced. It was one thing to work hard that there might be one success instead of two half successes. It was a different thing to advertise one's mediocrity to the world. His sphere of the Street and the neighborhood was his own. To give it all up and become his younger brother's assistant—even if it meant, as it would, better hours and more money—would be to submerge his identity. He could not bring himself to it.

      “I guess I'll stay where I am,” he said. “They know me around here, and I know them. By the way, will you leave this envelope at Mrs. McKee's? Maggie Rosenfeld is ironing there to-day. It's for her.”

      Max took the envelope absently.

      “You'll go on here to the end of your days, working for a pittance,” he objected. “Inside of ten years there'll be no general practitioners; then where will you be?”

      “I'll manage somehow,” said his brother placidly. “I guess there will always be a few that can pay my prices better than what you specialists ask.”

      Max laughed with genuine amusement.

      “I dare say, if this is the way you let them pay your prices.”

      He held out the envelope, and the older man colored.

      Very proud of Dr. Max was his brother, unselfishly proud, of his skill, of his handsome person, of his easy good manners; very humble, too, of his own knowledge and experience. If he ever suspected any lack of finer fiber in Max, he put the thought away. Probably he was too rigid himself. Max was young, a hard worker. He had a right to play hard.

      He prepared his black bag for the day's calls—stethoscope, thermometer, eye-cup, bandages, case of small vials, a lump of absorbent cotton in a not over-fresh towel; in the bottom, a heterogeneous collection of instruments, a roll of adhesive plaster, a bottle or two of sugar-milk tablets for the children, a dog collar that had belonged to a dead collie, and had put in the bag in some curious fashion and there remained.

      He prepared the bag a little nervously, while Max ate. He felt that modern methods and the best usage might not have approved of the bag. On his way out he paused at the dining-room door.

      “Are you going to the hospital?”

      “Operating at four—wish you could come in.”

      “I'm afraid not, Max. I've promised Sidney Page to speak about her to you. She wants to enter the training-school.”

      “Too young,” said Max briefly. “Why, she can't be over sixteen.”

      “She's eighteen.”

      “Well, even eighteen. Do you think any girl of that age is responsible enough to have life and death put in her hands? Besides, although I haven't noticed her lately, she used to be a pretty little thing. There is no use filling up the wards with a lot of ornaments; it keeps the internes all stewed up.”

      “Since when,” asked Dr. Ed mildly, “have you found good looks in a girl a handicap?”

      In the end they compromised. Max would see Sidney at his office. It would be better than having her run across the Street—would put things on the right footing. For, if he did have her admitted, she would have to learn at once that he was no longer “Dr. Max”; that, as a matter of fact, he was now staff, and entitled to much dignity, to speech without contradiction or argument, to clean towels, and a deferential interne at his elbow.

      Having given his promise, Max promptly forgot about it. The Street did not interest him. Christine and Sidney had been children when he went to Vienna, and since his return he had hardly noticed them. Society, always kind to single men of good appearance and easy good manners, had taken him up. He wore dinner or evening clothes five nights out of seven, and was supposed by his conservative old neighbors to be going the pace. The rumor had been fed by Mrs. Rosenfeld, who, starting out for her day's washing at six o'clock one morning, had found Dr. Max's car, lamps lighted, and engine going, drawn up before the house door, with its owner asleep at the wheel. The story traveled the length of the Street that day.

      “Him,” said Mrs. Rosenfeld, who was occasionally flowery, “sittin' up as straight as this washboard, and his silk hat shinin' in the sun; but exceptin' the car, which was workin' hard and gettin' nowhere, the whole outfit in the arms of Morpheus.”

      Mrs. Lorenz, whose day it was to have Mrs. Rosenfeld, and who was unfamiliar with mythology, gasped at the last word.

      “Mercy!” she said. “Do you mean to say he's got that awful drug habit!”

      Down the clean steps went Dr. Max that morning, a big man, almost as tall as K. Le Moyne, eager of life, strong and a bit reckless, not fine, perhaps, but not evil. He had the same zest of living as Sidney, but with this difference—the girl stood ready to give herself to life: he knew that life would come to him. All-dominating male was Dr. Max, that morning, as he drew on his gloves before stepping into his car. It was after nine o'clock. K. Le Moyne had been an hour at his desk. The McKee napkins lay ironed in orderly piles.

      Nevertheless, Dr. Max was suffering under a sense of defeat as he rode downtown. The night before, he had proposed to a girl and had been rejected. He was not in love with the girl,—she would have been a suitable wife, and a surgeon ought to be married; it gives people confidence,—but his pride was hurt. He recalled the exact words of the rejection.

      “You're too good-looking, Max,” she had said, “and that's the truth. Now that operations are as popular as fancy dancing, and much less bother, half the women I know are crazy about their surgeons. I'm too fond of my peace of mind.”

      “But, good Heavens! haven't you any confidence in me?” he had demanded.

      “None whatever, Max dear.” She had looked at him with level, understanding eyes.

      He put the disagreeable recollection out of his mind as he parked his car and made his way to his СКАЧАТЬ