"He"ll be home in a few days now!" she said in answer to Isabelle"s glance.
"Some day he will be a great football player."
The child colored at the reference to his ailment.
"I can walk now," he said, "a little."
Dr. Renault was at the other end of the ward sitting beside a girl of twelve, with one arm about her thin back, talking to her. The child"s face was stained with half-dried tears. Presently the doctor took the child up and carried her to the window, and continued to talk to her, pointing out of the window. After a time he joined Isabelle, saying:--
"I was kept from meeting you when you came by that little girl over there.
She is, by the way, one of our most interesting cases. Came here for hip disease. She is an orphan,--nothing known about her parents,--probably alcoholic from the mental symptoms. She has hysteria and undeveloped suicidal mania."
"What can you do for her?"
"What we can with medicine and surgery, and where that fails--we try other means."
Isabelle was eager to know what were those "other means," but the doctor was not a man to be questioned. Presently as he sauntered through the room he volunteered:--
"I have been talking to her,--telling her how the hills are made.... You see we have to clean out their minds as well as their bodies, get rid so far as we can of the muddy deposit, both the images a.s.sociated with their environment--that is done by bringing them up here--and also what might be called inherited thought processes. Give "em a sort of spiritual purge, in other words," he said with a smile. "Then we can build up, feed their minds something fresh. Sarah Stern there is an obstinate case,--she has a deep deposit of ancestral gloom."
"But you can"t overcome the temperament, the inherited nature!"
Renault waved his hand impatiently.
"You"ve been told that since you were born. We have all grown up in that belief,--it is the curse of the day! ... It can"t be done altogether--yet.
Sarah may revert and cut her throat when she leaves here.... But the vital work for medicine to-day is to see just how much can be done to change temperament,--inherited nature, as you call it. In other words, to put new forces to work in diseased brains. Perhaps some day we can do it all,--who knows?"
"Plant new souls in place of the old!"
Renault nodded gravely.
"That"s the true medicine--the root medicine,--to take an imperfect organism and develop it, mould it to the perfected idea. Life is plastic,--human beings are plastic,--that is one important thing to remember!"
"But you are a surgeon?"
Renault"s lips quivered with one of his ironical smiles.
"I was a surgeon, just as I was a materialist. When I was young, I was caught by the lure of so-called science, and became a surgeon, because it was precise, definite,--and I am something of a dab at it now--ask the boys here! ... But surgery is artisan work. Younger hands will always beat you.
Pallegrew in there is as good as I am now. There is nothing creative in surgery; it is on the order of mending shoes. One needs to get beyond that.... And here is where we get beyond patching.... Don"t think we are just cranks here. We do what we can with the accepted tools,--the knife and the pill. But we try to go farther--a little way."
They descended to the bas.e.m.e.nt of the main house where the more active children were playing games.
"We have to teach some of them the primitive instincts,--the play instinct, for example,--and we have a workroom, where we try to teach them the absorbing excitement of work.... I am thinking of starting a school next.
Don"t you want to try a hand at a new sort of education?"
So, pausing now and then to joke with a child or speak to an a.s.sistant, Renault took Isabelle over his "shop" once more, explaining casually his purposes. As a whole, it developed before her eyes that here was a laboratory of the human being, a place where by different processes the diseased, the twisted, the maimed, the inhibited, the incomplete were a.n.a.lyzed and reconstructed. As they emerged on the broad platform where they had stood the night before, Isabelle asked:--
"Why is it you work only with children?"
"Because I started with the little beggars.... And they are more plastic, too. But some day the same sort of thing will be done with adults. For we are all plastic.... Good-day!" and he walked away rapidly in the direction of his office.
Isabelle returned to the village in a strange excitement of impressions and thoughts. She felt as if she had been taken up out of the world that she had lived in and suddenly introduced to a planet which was motived by totally other ideas than those of the world she knew. Here was a life laboratory, a place for making over human character as well as tissue. And in bravado, as it were, the mere refuse of human material was chosen to be made anew, with happiness, effectiveness, health! She realized that a satisfactory understanding of it would come slowly; but walking here in the winter sunshine along the village street, she had that sensation of strangeness which the child has on coming from the lighted playhouse into the street.... The set vision that tormented her within--that, too, might it not be erased?
About the post-office people were gathered gossiping and laughing, waiting for the noon mail to be distributed. Country-women in fur coats drove up in dingy cutters to do their Sat.u.r.day shopping. The wood-sleds went jogging past towards the valley. School children were recklessly sliding down the cross street into the main road. Sol Short was coming over from his shop to get his paper... Here the old world was moving along its wonted grooves in this backwater community. But over it all like the color swimming over the hills was SOMETHING more,--some aspect of life unseen! And faintly, very dimly, Isabelle began to realize that she had never really been alive,--these thirty years and more.
"We are all plastic," she murmured, and looked away to the hills.
CHAPTER LVIII
Life at Grosvenor moved on in a placid routine, day after day. What with her children and the engrossing work at the doctor"s Margaret was busy every morning, and Isabelle rarely saw her before the noon meal. Then at the plentiful dinner over which the blacksmith presided with a gentle courtesy and sweetness there was gossip of the hospital and the village, while Short, who had the father instinct, entertained the children. He knew all the resources of the country, every animal wild or tame, every rod of wood and pasture and hill. The little Poles opened him like an atlas or encyclopedia.
"Mr. Wilson begins to haul from his lot to-morrow," he would announce for their benefit. "I guess he"ll take you up to the clearing where the men are cutting if you look for him sharp. And when you get there, you want to find a very tall man with a small head. That"s Sam Tisdell,--and you tell him I said he would show you the deer run and the yard the deer have made back there a piece behind the clearing."
Then he told them how, when he was a young man, he had hunted for deer on the mountains and been caught one time in a great snowstorm, almost losing his life.
"The children have so much to do and to think about here in Grosvenor that they are no trouble at all. They never have to be entertained," Margaret remarked. "Mr. Short is much better for them than a Swiss governess with three languages!"
There were long evenings after the six o"clock suppers, which the two friends spent together usually, reading or talking before Isabelle"s fire.
Wherever the talk started, it would often gravitate to Renault, his personality dominating like some mountain figure the community. Margaret had been absorbed into the life of the hospital with its exciting yet orderly movement. There were new arrivals, departures, difficult cases, improvements and failures to record. She related some of the slowly wrought miracles she had witnessed during the months that she had been there.
"It all sounds like magic," Isabelle had said doubtfully.
"No, that is just what it isn"t," Margaret protested; "the doctor"s processes are not tricks,--they are evident."
And the two discussed endlessly these "processes" whereby minds were used to cure matter, the cleansing of the soul,--thought subst.i.tution, suggestion, the relationship of body and mind. And through all the talk, through the busy routine of the place, in the men and women working in the hospital, there emerged always that something unseen,--Idea, Will, Spirit, the motiving force of the whole. Isabelle felt this nowhere more strongly than in the change in Margaret herself. It was not merely that she seemed alert and active, wholly absorbed in the things about her, but more in the marvellous content which filled her. And, as Isabelle reflected, Margaret was the most discontented woman she had known; even before she married, she was ever hunting for something.
"But you can"t stay here always," Isabelle said to her one evening. "You will have to go back to the city to educate the children if for no other reason."
"Sometimes I think I shan"t go back! Why should I? ... You know I have almost no money to live on." (Isabelle suspected that Larry"s last years had eaten into the little that had been left of Margaret"s fortune). "The children will go to school here. It would be useless to educate them above their future, which must be very plain."
"But you have a lot of relatives who would gladly help you--and them."
"They might, but I don"t think I want their help--even for the children. I am not so sure that what we call advantages, a good start in life, and all that, is worth while. I had the chance--you had it, too--and what did we make of it?"
"Our children need not repeat our mistakes," Isabelle replied with a sigh.
"If they were surrounded with the same ideas, they probably would!" ...
"The doctor has thrown his charm over you!"
"He has saved my life!" Margaret murmured; "at least he has shown me how to save it," she corrected.
There it was again, the mysterious Peace that possessed her, that had touched Margaret"s hard, defiant spirit and tamed it. But Isabelle, remembering the letters with the Panama postmark she had seen lying on the hall table, wondered, and she could not help saying:--