"Glad father and mother, who were sensible people, had a sense of harmony or something like that," he would say, "and didn't name me Decourcey or Charlemagne Smith. Good old name, Smith! Everybody knows how to spell it. Makes the inside of the city directory look companionable. But usually," he pointed to his hair, "I'm known as Bricktop. At school they called me Bill Bricktop; but I considered that too illiterate and undignified after I hung out my shingle. D.D.S.—I'm a dental surgeon; dental surgeon—surgeon, mind, and some other kinds of a surgeon, too. When I get time I'm going to do a book on jaws. 'Bricktop on Jaws'! Sounds like the personal memoirs of a henpecked husband, eh?"
Not only dentist, but surgeon! That was the fact that he kept beating into the British mind, which seemed to him somewhat opaque at times, when he was fighting to get the opportunity to do the work that he was now doing. He had an air of not caring for anybody, this William Smith, with his bright grey eye and smiling mouth, which frequently leads to professional success and even to average mortals being regarded as geniuses. In New York his reputation for delicate and original work brought him many rich patients, which he never allowed to interfere with his hospital experiments on jaws. He made enough money to take care of the little Smiths as they arrived, one, two, three, four, and all red-headed.
"I should have been rather disappointed if they hadn't been," he said. "There's something in the very fact of being a red-headed Smith that ought to give any kid a start in life."
When the war broke out and he read about the havoc wrought by bursting shells he set out for Europe, believing in himself and his mission to do more good in the world repairing fractured jaws than by making up the deficiencies of nature in the mouths of the rich; but because he believed in himself that was no reason why the War Office should believe in him.
The first permission that he had secured after arriving in England was to look around the hospitals for bad cases and then to go ahead with one which everybody had given up. When he transformed an officer condemned to wear a black cloth over his face for life into a presentable human being, he had a walking testimonial of his skill which gave him an entry into the big hospital in France. What an amazing lot of things he required: laboratories and X-ray apparatus and the more the authorities gave him, the more he wanted—this William Smith, D.D.S. When equipment was not forthcoming through the regular official channels, he went into his own pocket for the funds to buy it. His bank account depleted, he was relieved from a fit of depression by a draft from an angel in New York for twenty thousand dollars.
"Now, don't say that angels cannot draw drafts," he told Dr. Braisted, the great eye specialist from London, "or I'll think that the English have no sense of humour at all."
Braisted was as extremely British as Bricktop was American. Possibly this was why they got on so well together. Being a big man himself who had given up a practice of a hundred thousand dollars a year to save soldiers from blindness, Braisted could appreciate Bricktop's professional eagerness and altruism; and after a half-hour's talk with the American he understood that the American had a thorough groundwork of training, plus a gift. This made him one of Bricktop's early partisans. Another was Helen. There was no criticising William Smith, D.D.S. when she was about. She knew the subjects of his skill.
"You sit down and draw for them and they forget their jaws ache," he told her, as he nodded to the figures with faces and jaws swathed in bandages in the courtyard of his kingdom.
As soon as their wounds healed he had them again under the knife, for the next process in reconstruction. Those little contrivances fashioned in his laboratory which they had to wear caused intense pain; but they bore it with noble patience. Whenever he appeared their eyes followed him with a beautiful gratitude, a childlike confidence. He was changing them from monstrosities into whole men.
"Better pay than you get filling teeth for millionaires!" said Bricktop. "Stopping teeth, I should say; that's English."