Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal Read Free Page B

love best those whom we serve most zealously. It is an ennobling experience to love anyone in need of tender ministries. The time comes when nothing else matters much but the happiness of one’s beloved.
    There are plenty of afflictions more difficult to deal with than pulmonary tuberculosis. The patient is usually hopeful, cheerful, wistful. As physical vitality ebbs, the psychical forces flow with the strength and speed of a harvest tide.
    If it ever becomes your destiny to entertain an invalid over any considerable length of time, it will be to your advantage if the patient’s disability has not struck him below the belt. Your heart and lung people are optimists.
    Of course I couldn’t help knowing that Joyce was doomed. Had she been only one-tenth as sweet and patient, my sense of obligation to her would have kept me by her side. But I sincerely enjoyed that final year with her. We read innumerable books, lounged in the sun, swam in the pool, played together like children; and all this at a period of my career when, under normal conditions, I should have been working eighteen hours of every twenty-four to get a start in my profession.
    Once in a while I would be swept by a surge of dismay over my inability to do anything at all when it was so obvious that I should have been going forward with my vocation. But these misgivings gripped me less frequently and more feebly as the days passed. The sunshine was genial, the air was sedative, my excuse for indolence was valid. I almost forgot I wanted to be a doctor.
    Even now, after more than nine years, I cannot bring myself to the point of relating the events of Joyce’s last hours, the sad and all but interminable journey home, the funeral, and, afterwards, the enervating depression; the feeling that life was barely worth the bother; the almost sickening aversion to the thought of resuming the old routine in the clinic.
    The people at the hospital were very kind and forbearing. I must have been a dreadful nuisance. It should have been easy enough to see that my heart wasn’t in it. But they seemed to understand; Doctor Pyle, especially. Pyle had always been a bit crusty, and I hadn’t known him very well. They used to say of Pyle that if you could let him do all the abdominal surgery with the understanding that the patient would never see him again, he might become popular. Next morning after removing a kidney or a gall-bladder, Pyle would call on his uncomfortable victim and offer him some such amenity as, “What in hell are you making so much racket about? Lots of people in this hospital with more pain than you have.”
    But it was good old Pyle that helped me, roughly, back into the harness. I still hated it, and it galled me, but I wore it. Pyle fitted it on me again, muttering many a what-in-hell, but apparently bent on making something of me, a very unpromising project. One day I told him I believed I had better give it all up and go into business.
    “What kind of business?” he growled. “If you went out as grim and glum and licked as you look today, you couldn’t sell silver dollars for a nickel apiece. You stick to your job, young fellow.”
    So I stuck to the job; but I didn’t like it.
    It was in that state of mind that I went to look for the little tombstone. I told the manager it would have to be something inexpensive. He was quite obliging, treated me as considerately as he might if I had come to spend a thousand dollars. We agreed upon a small block of granite at what I thought was a merciful price. Then he asked me what I wanted engraved on the stone. I wrote Joyce’s name and the dates.
    “Would you like a brief epitaph?” he asked.
    “Is it necessary?” I wondered.
    “It is customary,” he replied.
    I told him I had nothing in mind, and he suggested that I go out into the production room where many monuments were in process. Perhaps I might see something suitable. It was a good idea.
    He opened the door and considerately left me to explore