Green Light , livre ebook

Green Light
by Lloyd C. Douglas

First published in 1935
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
Trava2909@gmail.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.




















GREEN LIGHT


by Lloyd C. Douglas









THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
WITH ESTEEM AND AFFECTION TO
A. O. DAWSON
OF MONTREAL
Chapter One
Uncommonly sensitive to her owner’s moods—for he had imputed personality to her—Dr. Paige’s rakish blue coupé noted at a glance that this was one of those eventful mornings when she would be expected to steer her own course to Parkway Hospital.
The signs of Dr. Paige’s preoccupation were unmistakable. Sylvia, who usually plunged through the street door of the Hermitage Apartments wagging her tawny tail from a hinge located in the lumbar region, was following her broad-shouldered master with an air of gravity absurdly appropriate to the serious concern of his flexed jaw and faraway eyes. Pete, the garage-boy, instead of loitering to tell the young surgeon what kind of day it was, had ambled off without venturing the customary amenities valued at a quarter.
Assured that her entire family was safely aboard, the coupé hummed a subdued monody on her twelve well-organized cylinders, and glided into action. Reckless of Sylvia’s precarious dignity on the slippery rumble seat, she illegally swung herself around in the middle of the busy block, narrowly missing a ten-ton removal-van, and earning an impolite salutation from the burly driver of a gasoline tank. Dusting apprehensive fenders for a half-mile on Elm, she nonchalantly scraped the whole arc of the right kerb at the corner of Euclid, made pretence of colour-blindness at One Hundred and Eighty-Sixth, where she knew the cop, grazed a hub-cap at the narrow entrance gate, forced an empty ambulance into the dogwood bushes as she scudded round the big stone building, and demobilized a small convention of smoke-stealing orderlies in the parking-ground at the rear.
Pleased with her undamaged arrival, she belatedly made a great show of professional poise, by rolling to a discreet stop on the crunching gravel between Dr. Armstrong’s sand-coloured sedan and the five-year-old roadster of Dr. Lane, who at that moment was noisily tuning up for departure.
Sighting the smart car sliding into the stall beside him, the grey-haired anæsthetist turned off his cyclone and nodded a greeting without enthusiasm.
“Where to?” queried Paige. “We’re doing that tuberculous kidney at nine.”
“Not till tomorrow,” explained Lane discontentedly. “What’s the trouble?”
“Oh—Endicott has been detained somehow. Just now ‘phoned from Harrisburg or some place. Business conference or something. Back in the morning, or some time. I wish he had given orders for you to go ahead with it.”
Paige, still at the wheel, absently lifted an expressive hand, and with a single flick of the fingers acknowledged the compliment and dismissed the suggestion.
“The lady is Dr. Endicott’s patient, Lane. Came here especially to have him—and quite properly, too,” he added meaningly, almost militantly, after a frosty pause.
“Of course!” agreed Lane, too fervently to be convincing. “I said I wished you were doing this Dexter excision because I dislike these postponements. They’re too hard on the patient’s morale. Once you’ve got a case all nerved up for an operation, it’s—”
The banal platitude perished of its own stupidity under the unfocused steel-blue stare. Paige wasn’t hearing a word; just sitting there glowering at a distant ghost. What was eating him? Lane guessed—and thought he knew.
Silently curious and more than a little perturbed, he watched the athletic young fellow’s abstracted movements as he locked the gears, stepped out of his car, chained the whimpering setter to the steering-wheel, and mechanically moved away without another word or a backward glance. It wasn’t like Newell Paige to do that.
With narrowed eyes he broodingly followed the tall figure towards the rear entrance, a bit hurt but not offended. He liked young Paige, often wondering why; for, as a passionate social radical, Lane was naturally contemptuous of the well-to-do.
He chuckled a little. Dr. Benjamin Montgomery Booth—specialist in radium, with a degree from Edinburgh, one of Paige’s most intimate friends—had just been curtly disposed of with the briefest of nods as they encountered each other in the doorway. Bennie Booth’s open-mouthed expression of bewilderment was amusing. Paige was playing no favourites; he evidently had something important on his mind.
Lane’s grin changed to a reflective scowl. Drawing a tiny red book from his ticket-pocket, he moistened his thumb and extracted a thin leaf; brought up a small hard package of cheap tobacco, opened it, tilted it, peppered the leaf expertly, tugged the package shut with two fingers and his teeth, rolled a cigarette, ran his tongue along the margin, struck a match, inhaled deeply, all the while reminiscently spinning the reel of Paige’s singular relationship to the celebrated Endicott.
It was a dramatic story, the first spectacular episode of which had been witnessed by a very small audience. Lane, himself, knew it only from hearsay, for he had been a mere stripling at the tail of a muddy ambulance in France when Jim Paige died, here at Parkway, of a swift pneumonia, following the malignant flu that had mown a broad swath through the hospitals after the manner of a medieval pestilence.
His old friend Sandy McIntyre, long since a lung specialist in Phoenix, had once recited that initial chapter for Lane in a dusty day-coach on the Santa Fe inexpensively en route from Chicago to the Coast.
“I understand Jim’s boy is working now at Parkway,” McIntyre had remarked in the course of their shop-talk. “Does he still take such good care of his hands?”
“Hadn’t noticed,” Lane remembered having replied. “Why?”
McIntyre had grinned broadly.
“They used to say that when the kid was thirteen or so he would sit on the fence and watch the rest of ‘em play ball. Willing to play tennis, sail a boat, ride a horse, dive from high places, and almost anything else requiring speed, skill, and courage, but he wouldn’t play baseball for fear of damaging his fingers. Said he was going to be a surgeon. Took up the violin, not because he wanted to be a musician, but to improve the dexterity of his left hand. They tell me that chap could walk right on to a stage and play the fiddle along with the best of ‘em if he wanted to. Newell’s a chip off the old block. You should have known Jim.”
Sandy had followed with a dreamily reflective monologue. He had been Jim’s classmate through their medical training. Knew all about him. He had also known the incomparable Sally Newell.
“As a student,” McIntyre had recounted meditatively, “I used to think that Jim was the luckiest chap of my acquaintance. Boy!—he had everything! Plenty of money, and mighty generous with it, too. Handsome as a Greek god. Brilliant student. Born surgeon, if there ever was one. Not quite so audacious as Endicott, who was seven years his senior and already making a name for himself, but in a fair way to be as competent when he had had the experience.
“Never knew anybody as serious as he was about his profession,” McIntyre had rumbled on, half to himself. “They ragged him about it a good deal when we were in school. You remember, Lane, the sort of fooling that goes on among cocky young medicals, as if the whole business was full of hanky-panky. Can’t blame ‘em much; just sensitive, scared youngsters, trying to build up some kind of defence-apparatus against the screams and shocking sights and stupefying stinks of a big hospital. But Jim hated their kidding about it.
“I recall one cruelly hot afternoon when Brute Spangler—best diagnostician we ever had, but hard-boiled as the handles o’ hell—was leading a flock of us through the open ward of the women’s surgical, he growled at Jim, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Cheer up, Father Paige. We’re not doing the stations of the cross.’ Jim’s heavy black brows drew together into one straight line, and looking down into Spangler’s beady little eyes, he said, without a smile, ‘No—we’re not, unfortunately. Perhaps that’s what ails us!’
“And then—there was Sally Newell—”
There had been a long pause at this point in McIntyre’s memories. They had made a tedious job of reloading their pipes to account for the delay.
“Paige’s wife?” Lane had queried at length, knowing the answer.
“It was an ideal match,” declared McIntyre. “Most beautiful girl I ever saw. You may be sure it hadn’t required old Oliver Newell’s money to make her the exact centre of interest wherever she went.”
Lane, who had taken more than a merely inquisitive interest in psychoanalysis, would have liked to ask a few pertinent questions at this point, but had hesitated, knowing that the lean Scot with the prominent pink cheek-bones would have closed up like a clam. McIntyre didn’t need anybody to inform him—even by tactful indirection—that the heart is located close to the lungs. There was another long wait while McIntyre fondled the things he had laid away in lavender.
“Nothing in my professional experience,” he continued moodily, “ever stirred me more