V. V.'s Eyes

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

It was a summer that broke records for heat, and those fled from it who could. But in the industrious backwaters of towns, where steady work means steady bread, it is the custom of men to take the climate as it comes to them, freezing or sweating at the weather-man's desire. Mountain and ocean, awninged gardens and breeze-swept deck: those solaces are not for these. Ninety Fahrenheit it ran and over, day after day, half of June, half of July. But in the old Dabney House Mrs. Garland stood on by the steaming wash-tubs, and Kern fared daily to the bunching-room at Heth's and its air like the breath of a new bake-oven, and Vivian, the doctor, was never "on his vacation" when his sick called, and stout Mr. Goldnagel, week on week, mopped his bald Hebraic head and repaired while you waited, with all work strictly guaranteed.

Of these four it was the young physician who kept the busiest, for his work never ended. Falling back from his brief appearance in the upper world, he had been speedily swallowed again by his own environment. Routine flattened him out as never before; the problem of life was to find time to sleep.

For one thing, there was a mild epidemic of typhoid this summer, breaking out in those quarters of the town where moderate conveniences (as Mrs. Garland called them) were matters of hearsay only, and the efficient and undermanned Health Department, fighting hard, did not have the law to drive home orders where they would do the most good. But the doctor of the Dabney House needed no epidemic to keep him occupied, so acceptable was his no-bill custom--still maintained--to the unwell laity of the vicinage. Through the dingy waiting-room, old state bedchamber, there rolled a waxing stream, and the visiting rounds of V. Vivian, M.D., ran long and overlong.

Had these been pay patients, carriage trade, Receipts would have soared dizzily in these days, and handsome additions might have been made to that Beirne residue of fifteen thousand dollars, now lying useless, not even at three per centum, in Mr. Heth's Fourth National Bank. But here trooped only the unworthy with unworthy troubles, not always of the body; the poor and the sinful with their acute complaints; waiters and day-laborers and furtive sisters in sorry finery, plumbers' helpers with broken heads, bankrupt washerwomen, married grocer's clerks with coughs not destined to stop. To these through the sweltering days and nights, young Dr. Vivian ministered according to his gifts. They took his pills, his bottles and his "treatment"; they lauded but rarely took his moral counsel; and not a few spoke of loans....

All July the old hotel rang with the blows of hammer and the rasp of saw, in preparation for its new birth in September, as the Union Settlement House. There came often, in the late afternoons, the Rev. George Dayne, the tireless and kind-faced Secretary of Charities, who wandered whistling over the lower floor, while his mind's eye saw, beyond the litter of boards and brick and demolished partitions, the emerging visage of a great institution. And Mr. Dayne rarely failed to climb the stairs for a little chat with the young man in the polished coat who, under promise of secrecy, had called these wonders into being.

More regular were the visits of Hon. Samuel O'Neill, desirous of talking over the state of the Union, particularly as touching the new advanced labor law he was now beginning to draft--"stiffest factory legislation ever passed in the South." And sometimes, when the condition of the sick permitted it, these two would slip away from the Dabney House for a welcome swim, with a growing swarm of boys behind; for Vivian had been the best swimmer on the river in his day, and still did things from the springboard which many lads with two sound feet could not copy. So diversion from the medical grind was not wanting. And once in June, the doctor lunched with Mr. Dayne at Berringer's, and twice he was dragged off to supper at the Cooneys' and enjoyed himself very much, and once he took Sunday dinner with his aunt, Mrs. Mason, and his little Mason cousins: only that time he was called away from the table before dessert, and got back to South Street just a minute before Mrs. Meeghan died....

The Garlands rarely saw their boarder now except at mealtimes, and by no means always then. Kern, for her part, was off to the Works at quarter to seven each morning, and had stopped coming home for dinner since the heat got so bad. However, the women observed him, and talked him over of nights as they washed the dishes in the new detached kitchen. For the Garland ménage boasted this moderate convenience now, directly attributable to the remarkable growth of Receipts (voluntary) which had reached $21.75 by the book for the single month of June. It was agreed that Mr. V.V. was not so jokey at the supper-table as formerly, and looked po'ly, in fine, and no wonder, the heat and all, and the way he let Hazens and Epsteins roust him out of bed in the middle of his sleep.

Kern deplored the doctor's thinness, and hardly less, in her secret heart, his strange indifference to his personal appearance. She observed to her mommer that she never see a gempman go so shabby. She longed to admonish Mr. V.V. on some of these matters, but on the whole hardly saw her way clear. However, it is possible to do a thing or two by indirection in this world, as one half the race has had gone reason to learn. And one sultry night in mid-July, the little buncher seemed able to talk of nothing but the astonishing suit Jem Noonan had just obtained at the One-Price Outfitting Company for the somewhat laughable sum of $7.90. A three-piece Prince serge, warranted fast, with the English shoulders and high-cut vest, which only last week had been $15, for Jem had seen it in the window with his own eyes, but had waited around, knowing that the Mid-Summer Stock Rejuicing Sales were now about due. Such a Chance Would Not Soon Occur Again: so it said on the card in the window, and so Didymus himself would have believed, hearing Kern Garland's abandoned eulogies....

And, sure enough, Mr. V.V., at length fired out of his purely civil interest, was visited with a brilliant association of ideas, as his eye betrayed. It was a matter, it will be remembered, which he had always meant to take up some day.

"Did you say the One-Price," he inquired, not without an inner sense of cleverness and enterprise, "or was it the Globe?"