Max Brand

Dr. Kildare’s Girl

Warsaw 2020

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 1

IN the crowded waiting room of Dr. Gillespie there were people of ten nations of more than ten degrees, from the old pugilist with rheumatism in his broken hands to the Indian mystic whose eyes already were forgetting this world; but little Florrie Adams took precedence over all of these. Her mother lagged breathless, a step behind, as Florrie was led quickly on by a nurse so pretty that the little girl had to keep looking up at that freshness and that bloom; and so her stumbling feet forgot their way.

“Emergency!” said the nurse to the Negro who was on duty as though to guard the door. “Emergency, Conover!”

So they came to the threshold and the mother leaned over the child, saying: “He’s a great man, Florrie. He’s a great, great man; and you just look at him and listen at him, and he’ll make you well!”

Then the door opened and little Florrie entered, prepared to listen with all her soul, and to see. She saw an office worn and old and littered, with the smell of a drug store and the look of a second-hand furniture shop. She saw a young man in white with a pale face and eyes darkly stained by sleeplessness; he seemed to Florrie like someone who has stared too long and too hard at intangible, fading things; there was about him the humility and the tension of a foreigner who listens to speech that is only partially understood. But the great man was not he. The great man sat yonder in a wheelchair. To Florrie he was as old as her private conception of the deity, and like her God he wore a tangled radiance of white hair, thin and luminous. He had a high forehead with a blue vein of wrath etched across it; he had the smile of a fighting Irishman who may be delighting in the battle or suffering from a twist of exquisite pain; and beyond all else he had eyes of fire that made Florrie forget the rest. He barked at the pretty nurse in a harsh voice: “Well, Lamont, what’s this?”

“An emergency, Dr. Gillespie,” she answered.

Florrie expected her to shrink, but there seemed no fear in her; she even smiled at this great and terrible doctor.

“It’s scarlet fever, Dr. Gillespie,” said the mother. “Little Joanie, she come down exactly like this; but I thought maybe there’s a way of...”

“Never mind what you thought,” snarled the great Gillespie. “What the devil is this, anyway?”

The last words were for another nurse who had come in with a tray that she placed across the arms of the wheelchair.

“It’s two boiled eggs with some toast and crisp bacon crumbled into them,” said the nurse.

“Take the stuff away!” shouted Gillespie. “Take it away and bring me coffee!”

The young doctor, in the meantime, sat on his heels and took the hand of Florrie with a touch so gentle, so firm, so assured, that she could not help feeling that everything would be all right, if only the terrible old man would stop roaring. She smiled at him and he smiled back as he scanned her face deliberately, reading it up, reading it down.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the nurse of the tray was saying. “It was orders to bring this.”

“By the jumping thunder&mdash:by the living...whose orders?” boomed Gillespie.

“Dr. Kildare, sir.”

“Kildare!” exploded the great voice.

“Yes, sir?” answered the young man who sat on his heels.

Florrie trembled, but this Kildare did not even turn his head from the examination as he spoke.

“And what am I to say is the meaning of this?” said the terrible voice. “About this confounded interference, what am I to do?”

“If I were you, I would eat the eggs, sir. You’ve had nothing since yesterday.”

He rose as he spoke and kept on smiling down at Florrie. The wrath of the great Gillespie dissolved.

“Not since yesterday? Haven’t I, Jimmy?” he said, apologetically. But instantly he was barking: “Where’s the coffee, Parker?”

His anger drove her back toward the wall.

“It wasn’t ordered for the tray, Dr. Gillespie,” she said.

“I’m to be treated like a babe in swaddling clothes, am I?” demanded Gillespie. “You think I’m going to put up with this damned outrage? Well, get out of my sight! What are you waiting for, Nosey?”

The nurse vanished.

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