The Masterful Hireling

by Roy Norton

 

THE MASTERFUL HIRELING

BY ROY NORTON

THERE is no accounting for what men will do when “rubbed the wrong way.” It makes the weak combative, and the combatant as peaceful as any member of the Hague Court. It brings out streaks of character that a man's most intimate friends never knew he possessed; and, where two men are concerned, the effect is sometimes interesting. Such was the case of Dr. Harvey, country practitioner, and John Larkin, Esq., capitalist and conquistador.

For nearly thirty years Dr. Harvey had worked among us up there in the mountains. He was responsible for some of us being permitted to come into the world, and, when his efforts and science proved unavailing, helped some of us bury our dead. He was crusty, and homely, and rough; but his heart and hands were tender and his pocketbook empty, because he felt that he belonged to us, and we did to him. And that combination went far. Time and again, as we knew by accident, the great city, so near and yet so remote, had sent its summons to him, clamorous and insistent, or insidious and alluring, and yet he had refused its invitations because he felt that to minister to us had become his duty. There was not a bridlepath in the mountains that had not felt his horse's hoofs, nor a cabin so isolated that he had not, at some time in those thirty years, pushed open the door for a grim fight with death, or a brave encouragement of life.

He kept no accounts. If a patient paid him, he accepted the money, and usually it had not warmed in his pockets before he found some one whom he believed needed it more than he; and so passed it on, to his own financial detriment. His very home was mortgaged, although few of us knew that the money thereby raised was spent in sending a girl genius with a deformed spine abroad for long, expensive treatment. She died; but the mortgage lived. Sometimes Dr. Harvey paid the interest; sometimes the interest wasn't paid and was added to the principal. Sometimes the money was hoarded to meet it; and then along would come the philanthropic demand on the heart and sympathy which made him scatter it broadcast and say that the mortgage could wait.

And those were the conditions when the distinguished millionaire, who made his money from the patent liniment, came obtrusively among us. You may have heard of “Larkin's Living Liniment, Good for Man or Beast”? Well, this was Larkin.

Larkin was the sort of man that we of the humbler planes always imagine as living in a ten thousand-dollar automobile, because it is about as close a view as we ever get—through the dust. At first, he fenced off a game preserve with barbed wire and netting. It took quite a piece out of our mountains, and small boys discovered that they could neither fish, shoot, nor swim within its confines without being called before a justice of the peace by some English gamekeeper. Larkin took a mighty large amount of room in all our affairs. He bought stock in the iron mines where so many of us work, and once I met him. He was a brusk, hard man, who snapped questions at me and bored me through with sharp eyes and appeared ignorant of small amenities. He was red and burly from high living, and those who worked for him said his temper was none of the best, and that frequently he displayed aggravation by the free use of fist or foot. Employees came and went in a never ending stream from his place,—chauffeurs and cooks, gardeners and gamekeepers,—all with tales of his irascibility and overbearing. But in the end he too, like all the others of us, had to come to Dr. Harvey.

 

IT was in the fall and the rains had turned the roads to slippery mush, when Larkin made his man speed a big touring car over the twenty-mile pike to catch a train for some directors' meeting in the city that he wanted to attend. On the turn below the old Westmoreland inn the machine slipped and skidded. There were a few frantic motions by the chauffeur, an oath or two from Larkin, and then a smash that could have been heard for a mile as the car took the embankment, crashed down through the chestnuts, naked in the season's loneliness, and then everything was still.

The millionaire was badly smashed, and the chauffeur lay beneath the machine.

“It seemed very fortunate that I happened to be coming along the road just then,” Dr. Harvey said afterward; “for an hour or two exposure would have cost Larkin his life. The driver, poor chap, was already gone.”

The doctor was not a very powerful man, but what he lacked in muscle he always made up in determination; so he got the millionaire straightened out as best he could, covered him with his own coat, climbed back to the roadside where the big gray stood shivering in the cold rain, and tore off up the road for help with the mud flying from his horse's heels.

Another chauffeur brought a second car down from Larkin's castle, and it wasn't long till its owner was laid out in his room ready for Dr. Harvey to work on broken bones.

Now, most men suffering such an accident would have been too weak to swear when they recovered consciousness; but the very first thing Larkin did when he came to his senses was to start in to curse his luck and everything in general.

“It strikes me,” said Dr. Harvey, who, swathed in an apron, was straightening out some bandages, “that you have much to be thankful for without exciting yourself, and several things in which other men would ordinarily be interested. Your chauffeur, for instance.”

“Cussed clumsy fool!” Larkin groaned; but Dr. Harvey frowned at him.

“Pray do not trouble to curse the dead,” he said. “The man is beyond ever hearing your criticisms."

And then he turned around and busied himself with his bandages; but Larkin, unrebuffed, swore he was glad of it.

That was the way their acquaintance began. Larkin went off under the ether, fighting to the last, and when he came out of the afterdrowse Harvey was gone.

The doctor had stuck by him for twenty-four hours without a wink of sleep, watching his temperature and fearing internal complications, and then, satisfied that beyond broken bones the millionaire had nothing more to worry over, slipped out of the room and called for his horse. I saw him coming down the road, the faithful old gray plodding along carrying a loose jointed, drooping man who was sound asleep, and I saw too the big hollow marks under the doctor's eyes, and went my way more miserable.

“He kills himself by inches that others may live,” I remember saying to myself as the big horse disappeared round the corner of the road, homeward bound and walking carefully lest he disturb the sleeper, whose every habit he knew.

Before the doctor had come again Larkin had revived enough to swear at everything in our country and to order a wire sent to a distinguished surgeon in New York. The operator over at Mount Arlington showed me the message one day, thus betraying his official secrecy, because the interchange was too good to keep.

 

Take special train and come to me at once (Larkin had wired). All smashed up in automobile accident, and nobody but a country yap called Harvey here to care for me. Money no obstacle.

 

And this was the answer:

 

If it is Dr. Harvey of Kenville, you can do no better and I could do no more. Gentleman and thoroughly competent. I cannot come.

 

Then followed about six similar messages to other doctors; but it seems there is a professional etiquette among them that is too high for them to break and was too fine for Larkin to understand. Harvey knew nothing of this for sometime afterward; but when he returned he found his patient sullen and feverish, and so enraged that he was almost beyond swearing, which same is as good as saying that he was almost dead. He had worked himself to such a pitch that his life was again in peril, and the doctor had fairly to camp beside him for the next week or ten days. It used him up so badly that when he dragged himself home to Kenville Crossroads he took to his own bed for three days, and wouldn't have crawled out then if Larkin hadn't sent an imperative message by his man which led Harvey to think he was in danger.

“Mr. Larkin,” he said after examining his patient, and finding him better than could be expected, “I am a sick man myself. I have far more calls on my time from my own people here in these hills than I can properly attend to. They depend on me. I am their god when there is illness. I cannot come hereafter in response to your whims.”

Larkin tried to sit up in bed; but the doctor held him down. When he got his breath he wanted to know if his money wasn't as good as any other man's.

“It is; but money in my practice is the least thing thought of.”

That was another sentiment Larkin couldn't understand; for money was his sole standard of value for other men's time, lives, or services. He started in with another petulant volley; but Dr. Harvey calmly disregarded him, gave instructions to one of the trained nurses, of which Larkin had hired a whole staff, and left. So Larkin had to make the best of it.

 

AFFAIRS ran on that way for about three months, in which time Harvey came less and less frequently, and then it all ended in an outbreak when Larkin, who had really recovered, but didn't want to admit it, let his temper get the best of him and shook his stick in the doctor's face.

“You little snipe!” he bellowed, looking down on Harvey. “Small thanks to you I got well at all! If I'd been at my house in New York, I'd have found out whether you'd come or not when I wanted you, or I'd have fired you! Do you get that? I'd have fired you bodily, you confounded hireling! That's all any doctor is—a hireling!”

Harvey stood and looked him all over as if thinking of something; but said nothing. There was nothing in his appearance to show that he felt the insult, except the whiteness of his face and the blaze in his gray eyes, which never knew what it was to flinch. He gave back something which Larkin didn't notice, but which any one who knew him would have understood as the highest form of contempt and insult of which he was capable, when he calmly reached for his big slouch hat and put it on his head. It was like saying to the man that he, Dr. Harvey, would not stand uncovered before him. And then, with no more than an abrupt “Good day,” he turned and walked out of the house, and never went back to see his obstreperous patient.

 

IT was about six months later that he had another call from Larkin's palace up on the hill. It was in May, and everything was covered with tender green and the air was like new life. He took the telephone from his desk, where it was half buried in a litter of bottles, medical journals, and books, and said, “Well?”

“This is Mr. Larkin's house,” came a thin voice over the wire. “He wants you to come up here at once.”

“Any of the help or the household ill?” asked Dr. Harvey, automatically reaching over with his disengaged hand for his emergency medicine case.

“No, it is Mr. Larkin himself who is indisposed.”

“Just indisposed, eh? No accident, or anything serious?”

“No, sir.”

“Thank you. Please tell Mr. Larkin I am too busy to come and it will be useless to call me again for several days. Good morning.”

Then he hung the receiver on its hook, leaned back in his dilapidated old chair, straightened his legs up to a clear space on the corner of his desk, and calmly absorbed himself in a newspaper. Apparently, despite his statement to the Larkin mansion, that was the most urgent business he had on hand.

Once more the telephone rang, and he listened.

“Oh,” he said, “so you are Mr. Larkin! I'm afraid you will have to call some other doctor. I shall be permanently engaged. Goodby.”

That was the end of it for that time. Then about a month later the doctor got a call to the Larkin place, and this time the old gray went plunging off over the roads and trails, taking the shortest path, because the boy of the gardener had foolishly fallen from a tree and broken a leg. Harvey visited the child with more punctiliousness than he had ever condescended Larkin during his more serious trial, and one day passed his crabbed patient; but it is not on record that either of them said more than a “Howdydo,” although the millionaire did take time to inquire what had brought him there, and learned for the first time that one of his smaller tenants had been injured a week or two before.

 

LARKIN was one of the kind of men who can never keep out of business in any form offered. He was what they call down on Wall Street “a hustler after coin”; although what he wanted it for no one knows, because he certainly had enough. He began to invest in loose ends of property around the hills, until it looked as if he wanted to absorb all of Lake Hopacong. With half an opportunity he would have cornered the sky. He bullied and bluffed everyone within reach, except the famous powder inventor on the other side of the lake, who was rich enough and gentleman enough to ignore him entirely.

Rich men, or corporations, as a rule, pay what they owe far less promptly than poorer individuals. Perhaps it is because they want to steal from a month's to a year's interest on the money. Larkin was like them. He didn't ask for Dr. Harvey's bill, and as Harvey didn't send one it ran along into September of the year after the automobile accident, and then one day he had his big car stopped outside the doctor's office at the crossroads.

“Go in and tell the doctor to come out here,” he ordered his chauffeur. “Tell him I want to see him and am in a hurry.”

Harvey came out in a few minutes, blinking his eyes in the sunlight and looking as if curious to know what was wanted.

“How much do I owe you?” Larkin asked without any preliminary courtesies.

The doctor's eyes glinted a little and he appeared pleased. “I'll have to trouble you to step inside to straighten out that account,” he answered.

Larkin growled. “Your books ain't so big you can't carry them out here, are they?”

“I always settle large accounts in my office. Do you do your business on the highways?” the doctor said, turning his back and walking away without waiting for a reply.

What Larkin said about country jayhawkers and yap doctors, as he crawled down out of his automobile, made the chauffeur, who knew and liked Harvey, frown; but of course he dared say nothing.

Harvey stood in the hall and motioned Larkin inside, and the latter tramped in and threw himself into a chair, looking as if he wanted to eat some one. The doctor calmly hung up his hat and bolted the door.

“What—what does this mean?” the millionaire asked.

Harvey was taking off his coat and vest and hanging them beside the hat on a home made rack against the wall.

“What does it mean?” he asked turning and dropping his suspenders off his lean shoulders. “It means that I'm going to square that account with you. Hold on! Don't get red in the face and go to using language like a stable sweep. It won't do you any good. I'm going to teach you your place.”

He walked over to one side of his flat topped desk and leaned over on the back of his knuckles, while Larkin watched him with a face in which a sneer and a surprised twist were all mixed up.

“I stood more abuse from you than I ever stood from any man,” the doctor said icily, “because you were badly injured and my business is to pay no attention to what may be said so long as I have my work to do. You made a mistake after I had saved your life and you were well. You called me a hireling! Men in my profession are never hirelings. The true physician cannot be hired. He is above it. His first impulse is for his profession, which is devoted to the saving of life. You have also been pleased to refer to me as a yap. An apology from you will not suffice in settlement, because I came from Virginia. I want a crude man's satisfaction, the kind you can understand. I'm going to try to beat you before you leave this office!”

 

LARKIN must be credited with physical courage. Probably he had known a rough, combative youth. Most millionaires of his pushing, energetic sort have; but he had one big disadvantage. He couldn't control his temper. Red in the face and shaking and swearing, he jumped to his feet and kicked his chair back, another sign that at some time or other he had gained experience in a fighting school where rough and tumble and gouge were ethical. Then, as if recollecting past battles, he grinned a little, as if prepared to enjoy it. He was much larger than Harvey, and so confident that he didn't think it necessary to take off his coat. He let out a bellow and ran round the desk.

“You would, would you? You little scrub!” he yelled as he came, and then he got the surprise of his life.

Harvey jumped nimbly to one side, struck like a streak of lightning, and caught him full on the jaw. Larkin went down in a nice, sitting position and then scrambled to his feet.

“That's an uppercut I learned at Yale,” the doctor said cheerfully. “Better take off your coat. It isn't all I learned.”

Larkin looked at him an instant, then took off his coat and vest, showing that he now anticipated serious business. Then he advanced more cautiously and with his arms up in fairly good form. There was a feint or two, an attempt at straight arm work by Larkin, a block by the doctor, and Larkin was again sitting on the floor, this time wiping his nose. He lost his temper entirely. He piled to his feet and roughed it, and away they went round the room, smashing away at each other in grim earnest, and breaking stray furniture, the doctor fighting speechlessly and avoiding clinches, and Larkin at first swearing like a madman, then beginning to conserve his wind. That round ended when he stumbled backward over what was left of the office chair, and Harvey put his hands down, then reached over and helped him up.

“Thanks!” Larkin said, showing that he was at least getting a lesson in politeness.

Then there was another good, fast passage, and when Larkin came back to consciousness the doctor, unscathed, was holding a bottle of ammonia to his nose and he had a faint, hazy recollection that a voice that sounded strangely like his chauffeur's had kept yelling through the window, “Soak him, Doc! Kick him now you've got him down! Look out he don't bite you when he gets up!”

He turned his head dizzily toward the window; but was not quick enough to see a flitting shadow disappear. After he had sat in the only whole chair in the room for five minutes and permitted the doctor to bathe his nose he grinned between his swollen lips and remarked, “Gad! I ain't as fast as I used to be! If you're a good specimen they certainly do teach something at Yale. More'n I ever thought they did. Were you and Johnson class mates?”

Being from Virginia, Dr. Harvey didn't like that either; but he helped Larkin on with his coat and vest after which the capitalist fumbled with his nervous fingers for his fountain pen and pulled out a checkbook Harvey put on his own coat and vest and retied the rusty old string tie he always wore. Larkin was just tearing out a check for a thousand dollars.

“It's worth it!” he declared, handing it to the doctor, but Harvey merely held it in his hand for a moment then tore it across and threw the pieces on the floor.

“We're square,” he said. “I've had my pay. Now get out!”

Larkin looked at him for an instant as if he wanted to have another go at him, and then, without a word jammed his hat on his head and banged the door behind him. He looked sharply at his chauffeur as he climbed into the tonneau and told him to drive on to Dover; but the man's face was as wooden and unreadable as that of a Chinese joss.

 

A COUNTRY doctor has the best of a city man, because he has to be a specialist on everything, from the pharmacopoeia to mastoidectomy. He must be a diagnostician and physician, and ready to perform anything in surgery from a minor to a major operation without five minutes' warning or a hospital back of him. Sometimes he operates in the shade of a coal truck and within an hour is trying to cure the wife of a woodchopper of some heart complication. And so he gets to know his profession.

Larkin's oldest daughter was taken down sick the next summer, and the attack was an acute one. I don't know what it was; but I do know he had his private car hooked on down at Hoboken and it brought several specialists up to Mount Arlington, from which it took two automobiles to take them around the mountain ridge to the big country house. They held a consultation over the unfortunate Miss Larkin and wagged their heads and disagreed. They argued and disagreed They lectured one another and didn't change their views. They were too eminent to back down, and each believed and insisted that he was right and gave his reasons; until Larkin, who had been getting more fidgety and confused all the time, lost his temper, which had been remarkably docile since he had settled Dr. Harvey's bill, and ran them all out with a line of language they weren't accustomed to.

Then he sent for Harvey.

“I'll come up there,” Harvey told him over the telephone, “if there are no other physicians on the case and you agree to one condition.”

Of course Larkin, distracted, agreed, and wanted to know what the condition was.

“That you keep out of the sickroom and keep out of my sight.”

It spoke well for Larkin's new self control that he assented, and so Harvey, “just attending to his business,” went and took the case.

It must have been a bad one, as I said. I don't know what it was; but the doctor practically lived there night and day for more than two months, dodging across th» hills to help some poor mountaineer, facing storms that made the old gray shut his eyes, knowing no hours, and yet coming back to the patient for whom he was fighting with every fineness of intelligence in him. He looked like a ghost that season, just a wreck buoyed up by the spirit of flame that drove the tired body on and on, when for other men the end of endurance would have been reached. Somehow or other, it was as if the fighting soul of him had been challenged and he was meeting the gage, and would continue to meet it, until success or death brought the long battle to an end. And he won.

We saw nothing at all of Larkin during that time He was like a man half demented; for he did love that girl. It was as if every bit of human softness that he had ever sheltered had been for her. Men said he walked long hours in the night through his woods when she was at her worst, and talked to himself, and begged God to help the little doctor out. They say he became disheveled in his garb, and thin, and that the new agony had torn away his bruskness and overbearing. They tell how he used to tiptoe through the quiet, carpeted hall, and listen at her door, and of how he would slip furtively away lest the doctor see him and abandon the fight. A game warden caught him standing in a copse with wringing hands and peering eyes, when a gray horse and a weary rider passed along a fog-strewn trail at dawn. For Larkin—with his millions, who had mercilessly overridden all obstacles he had ever met in life—everything under the skies was wrapped up in the skill of that man, the man who had threshed him in settlement of a bill. The Lord only knows where he found his faith; but it was well founded!

 

THE girl recovered, and our doctor had had time to rest when Larkin paid his second visit to the crossroads. It must have been a strange meeting.

He didn't send the chauffeur in this time. Somehow I doubt if he would have done so in any circumstances; for Larkin, of Larkin's Living Liniment, had changed, and those who were nearest to him said they had discovered he had a heart. When he opened the door of Harvey's office he looked about the same, except that he was less hard and forbidding. That hardest trial of his life, with its hours for introspection, perhaps, had wrought some subtle change; just that intangible molding of expression that makes the difference between a hard and selfish man and one who is charitable and sympathetic.

Harvey lifted his tired eyes, and looked bewildered as if aroused from some abstract study, opened his lips as if to speak, and then leaned a little forward. Larkin, big and embarrassed, stepped slowly into the room and came to a stop before the doctor's desk. For an instant both seemed at loss for words. The call of a distant plowboy, the humming of the waiting motor, and the “whish” of some woodsman's ax on the mountainside blended in autumn diapason.

“Doctor,” Larkin said, looking confused as if in an unaccustomed rôle, “I shall bother you but a moment. I've—I've—” The big man was actually stammering for speech—Larkin who was used to bellowing his commands at timid boards of directors! He cleared his throat and proceeded more bravely.

“I've come to apologize for calling you a hireling and a few other things. It's the best I can do. If ever one man owed another anything, everything, I am that man. I haven't come to pay you money, but to square myself. I want to be friends with you. May I?”

Larkin couldn't have said more; for Harvey was a soft hearted sort when his obstinacy was not aroused. He colored up, pretended to sort some papers on his desk, fumbled at his tie, and then got to his feet, and went around and took the heavy, red hand that had been held out—and both were still more embarrassed. The motor, and the plowboy, and the woodcutter all seemed to have rested from their activities, and there was no noise to relieve them; so they stood there, without another word, for several seconds, looking into each other's eyes and understanding. Then Larkin used a few rough exclamations to hide sentiment and bolted for the door. He rushed out as if running away from something; for it is hard for men of his sort to betray themselves, fairly jumped into his car, and bawled to the driver, “Go on!”

 

ON Harvey's desk lay an envelop which appeared strange. After he had run his fingers through his hair a few times, berated himself for having emotions, and calmed down, he opened it. There was a cancelled mortgage and a check which was signed but left in blank, and this note:

 

I shall try to leave this with you, somehow. In what way I don't know, because you are a very hard man to deal with. I don't leave either of the inclosures in payment of your bill to me and mine, but to show you, in the only way I know, that I want you to be my friend. Life hasn't been easy with me, and I've been taught in a school where men often make mistakes. I owe you one lesson which that school never taught: that there are many things which money cannot buy.

John Larkin.

 

And somehow I think it is to Dr. Harvey's credit that he accepted the cancelled mortgage and that John Larkin's check, still blank, but with “Paid in Full” written across its face in the doctor's handwriting, hangs framed upon his dingy office wall.