The Story of Dr. Wassell Read Free Page B

to him and searched the town for ice cream. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t;
he couldn’t remember ice cream as having been listed as either good or bad
for men suffering from burns, but McGuffey’s condition wasn’t serious,
anyway; it certainly couldn’t do him any harm. And if he wanted
it…well, it had always been one of the doctor’s ideas that it did people
good (within limits) to give them what they wanted.
    So he found a likely looking shop in the main street and made his
purchases. The ice cream came in a little cardboard cup—it certainly
wasn’t anything like a chocolate malt, but the doctor didn’t think it was so
bad for the middle of Java in wartime. Somehow he hadn’t expected Java to be
quite as modern, so that you could walk along a main street and buy pretty
well anything you wanted, almost as you could in Little Rock or San
Francisco. Of course people were a bit jittery; you saw knots of people
talking urgently at street corners, and the roads were full of Army trucks
scurrying about, and there were freshly painted signs pointing to improvised
air-raid shelters at strategic points; but there was still a good deal of
impetus left in a civilized machine that had only partly broken down. After
Surabaya, which would naturally attract air raids on account of its being a
naval base, the inland town seemed almost safe. All its inhabitants were
assuring themselves and each other that there was no real danger except from
casual bombs (one said “casual bombs” as casually as possible), and that no
Jap would ever set foot on Javanese soil. The doctor wasn’t quite so
confident. He thought’ Japs might succeed in landing on a few beaches if they
were ready (as apparently they were) to commit suicide. Of course he hadn’t
the slightest doubt that Java would be held at all costs.
    “It’ll last for at least an hour,” said the woman in the shop, referring,
of course, to the ice cream.
    The doctor carried it carefully back to the hospital and (because it would
probably not last more than an hour) woke up McGuffey to have it. The
boy blinked and stared, and a little Javanese nurse whose name (in Javanese)
sounded like Three Martini began to giggle.
    “Well, for the love of Mike…” began McGuffey. “Did you really think I
was serious?”
    “Eat it,” answered the doctor. “It’s very good ice cream. I had some
myself.”
    McGuffey sat up in bed and smacked his lips appreciatively after the first
swallow. Some of the men along the ward were watching the scene with
amusement, and one of them called out: “Hi, Doc, where do we come
in?”
    The doctor smiled. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, with sudden
expansiveness. “As soon as you’re all well enough, I’ll get ice cream for the
whole bunch of you…and you too,” he added, nodding to Three Martini.
    Then he went out and wondered what the auditors would think—Navy
money spent on ice cream. He had drawn a thousand guilders in Surabaya when
they assigned him to the job—just a round sum to spend any way he chose
on looking after the men, but of course the authorities would expect medical
items, transportation expenses, almost anything, in fact, except ice cream.
And he wasn’t good at concocting a swindle sheet. He made up his mind that if
Nilson passed the crisis he would ask his advice about it.
    So the days went by during which the British were falling back on
Singapore and Chiang Kai-shek was visiting India and the Japs were already
landing in Borneo. To the men from the Marblehead in the hospital none
of these things mattered much, because at the extremity of human suffering
one is really always alone, islanded from disaster as much as from
companionship. There was little the doctor could do for the majority of the
patients except watch their fluctuating condition and make his daily reports.
There was little that even the nurses could do except wait for the
tannic-acid jelly to