Magnificent Obsession

To
Betty and Virginia

I

It had lately become common chatter at Brightwood Hospital—better known for three hundred miles around Detroit as Hudson’s Clinic—that the chief was all but dead on his feet. The whole place buzzed with it.

All the way from the inquisitive solarium on the top floor to the garrulous kitchen in the basement, little groups—convalescents in wheeled chairs, nurses with tardy trays, lean interns on rubber soles, grizzled orderlies trailing damp mops—met to whisper and separated to disseminate the bad news. Doctor Hudson was on the verge of a collapse.

On the verge? … Indeed! One lengthening story had it that on Tuesday he had fainted during an operation—mighty ticklish piece of business, too—which young Watson, assisting him, was obliged to complete alone. And the worst of it was that he was back at it again, next morning, carrying on as usual.

An idle tale like that, no matter with what solicitude of loyalty it might be discussed at Brightwood, would deal the institution a staggering wallop once it seeped through the big wrought-iron gates. And the rumour was peculiarly difficult to throttle because, unfortunately, it was true.

Obviously the hour had arrived for desperate measures.

Dr. Malcolm Pyle, shaggy and beetle-browed, next to the chief in seniority, a specialist in abdominal surgery and admiringly spoken of by his colleagues as the best belly man west of the Alleghenies, growled briefly into the ear of blood-and-skin Jennings, a cynical, middle-aged bachelor, who but for his skill as a bacteriologist would have been dropped from the staff, many a time, for his rasping banter and infuriating impudences.

Jennings quickly passed the word to internal-medicine Carter, who presently met eye-ear-nose-and-throat McDermott in the hall and relayed the message.

“Oh, yes, I’ll come,” said McDermott uneasily, “but I don’t relish the idea of a staff meeting without the chief. Looks like treason.”

“It’s for his own good,” explained Carter.

“Doubtless; but … he has always been such a straight shooter, himself.”

“You tell Aldrich and Watson. I’ll see Gram and Harper. I hate it as much as you do, Mac, but we can’t let the chief ruin himself.”

Seeing that tomorrow was Christmas, and this was Saturday well past the luncheon hour, by the time Pyle had tardily joined them in the superintendent’s office each of the eight, having abandoned whatever manifestation of dignified omniscience constituted his bedside manner, was snappishly impatient to have done with this unpleasant business and be off.

When at length he breezed in, not very convincingly attempting the conciliatory smirk of the belated, Pyle found them glum and fidgety—Carter savagely reducing to shavings what remained of a pencil, Aldrich rattling the pages of his engagement book, McDermott meticulously pecking at diminutive bits of lint on his coat sleeve, Watson ostentatiously shaking his watch at his ear, Gram drumming an exasperating tattoo on Nancy Ashford’s desk, and the others pacing about like hungry panthers.

“Well,” said Pyle, seating them with a sweeping gesture, “you all know what we’re here for.”

“Ab‑so‑lute‑ly,” drawled Jennings. “The old boy must be warned.”

“At once!” snapped Gram.

“I’ll say!” muttered McDermott.

“And you, Pyle, are the proper person to do it!” Anticipating a tempestuous rejoinder, Jennings hastened to defend himself against the impending din by noisily pounding out his pipe on the rim of Mrs. Ashford’s steel waste basket, a performance she watched with sour interest.

“Where do you get that ‘old boy’ stuff, Jennings?” demanded Pyle, projecting a fierce, myopic glare at his pestiferous crony. “He’s not much older than you are.”

Watson tilted his chair back on its hind legs, cautiously turned his red head in the direction of Carter, seated next him, and slowly closed one eye. This was going to be good.

“Doctor Hudson was forty-six last May,” quietly volunteered the superintendent, without looking up.

“You ought to know,” conceded Jennings drily.

She met his rough insinuation with level, unacknowledging eyes.

“May twenty-fifth,” she added.

“Thanks so much. That point’s settled, then. But, all the same, he wasn’t a day under a hundred and forty-six when he slumped out of his operating room, this morning, haggard and shaky.”

“It’s getting spread about too,” complained Carter.

“Take it up with him, Doctor Pyle,” wheedled McDermott. “Tell him we all think he needs a vacation—a long one!”

Pyle snorted contemptuously and aimed a bushy eyebrow at him.

“Humph! That’s good! ‘Tell him we all think,’ eh? It’s a mighty careless, offhand damn that Hudson would give for what we all think! Did you ever …” He pointed a bony finger at the perspiring McDermott, “… did you ever feel moved to offer a few comradely suggestions to Dr. Wayne Hudson, relative to the better management of his personal affairs?”

McDermott rosily hadn’t, and Pyle’s dry voice crackled again.

“As I thought! That explains how, with so little display of emotion, you can advise somebody else to do it. You see, my son,”—he dropped his tone of raillery and became sincere—“we’re dealing here with an odd number. Nobody quite like him in the whole world … full of funny crotchets. In a psychiatric clinic—which this hospital is going to be, shortly, with the entire staff in straitjackets—some of Hudson’s charming little idiosyncrasies would be brutally referred to as clean-cut psychoses!”