It was like Hoyting to be lying up for repairs in Soerabaya when the Dorriens drifted by; like him to be there at the psychologic moment; like him, above all, not to follow up their trail for a solution, but to tack off into the China Sea to renew his acquaintance with belligerent Mongols. It was I, years later, at Marseilles, who supplied Hoyting with the last act of the play; and I can see his gray eyes narrowing above his glass of vermouth as, for once, he listened. I shall have to put it together as best I can, though I shall, as best I can, put Hoyting’s part of it in his own mouth. I’ve learned a kind of mental stenography by dint of listening to him; and though it’s unfair to quote a man inexactly, I’m not sure it isn’t less unfair than inditing Hoyting’s jerks and pauses, his zigzag structure. Some of the story, as I say, he got from me. That part—most of it—I’ll give you in the beginning. After that, if only for the sake of one or two of his own phrases, I shall make shift to let him talk as he talked to me. If I could reproduce for you that evening at Marseilles—Hoyting, his arms folded on the café table, paying out his story unevenly, as if in response to unseen strains and unseen relaxations at the other end—oh, as if Dorrien himself had been fitfully pulling and letting go; and then the sharpening of the eyes, the shrug of the great shoulders, when I told him the end—if I could, I might let it go at that. But you who know Hoyting will know that I had to shape it; and you who don’t might loathe the imperfectly visualized scene.
Science moves at an extraordinarily uneven gait. We laymen follow as best we can. I don’t pretend to make a history of medical discoveries, and poor Dorrien’s theories may have been exploded long since. The public knows only vain gossip of the laboratory’s “expectations” until the serum is born. I don’t even know how much he contributed, but I do know that at one moment terror-stricken multitudes were looking to him for help. He had been the last man, in college days, who seemed marked out for the work of discovery: easy-going, delighting in musical comedy, to which he listened with the least subtle laugh in the world. He married, at about thirty, the very worldly daughter of a public-spirited American family. There wasn’t anything for two centuries, from witch-burning to slave-rescuing, the Hewells hadn’t had their fingers in. The Hewell spinsters have always headed intense and short-lived leagues for the suppression of unsuspected evils or the maintenance of out-dated ideals. The Hewell men are bred to reform as the English race-horse is bred to the turf. Their marriages are apt to be bloodlessly tragic.
Agatha Hewell—that is, Agatha Dorrien—was a special case, very worldly, as I’ve said. She didn’t care for money, but she cared for fame, which meant, she had the sense to see, marrying a clever man. She made herself rather absurd, when she came out, by dashing at celebrities; but she also made herself popular with her contemporaries by letting the dancing men alone. When she married Dorrien, she seemed likely to eat her cake and have it, too; for he was young and good-looking, and there could be by that time no question about his ability. She and Dorrien both danced a good deal in the earlier years of their marriage. The serious Hewells approved of him none the less, for he had interested himself pretty constantly, since his Johns Hopkins days, in tuberculosis, which suited their public spirit admirably. The Hewells found campaigns rather nasty work, but they loved legislation, and Dorrien was always appearing passionately before boards and commissions, and getting “machine” mayors to lift the submerged tenth into so many cubic feet of air. He had always a natural leaning, though, it was interesting to recall later, to the maladies of immigrants; and Ellis Island had more than once summoned him. He chafed a little, in the end, under the vocabularies of boards and commissions, and I once heard him say that he’d be damned if he’d lecture again to any woman’s club, no matter if they built a sanatorium the next minute. He was flat against woman suffrage, and said so, but the Hewell aunts forgave him on account of his tuberculosis activity. They called it a crusade. Agatha said nothing.
Mrs. Dorrien was inexhaustibly pretty in a white and gold type, all purity and lustre; and she wore endless French tea-gowns, each lovelier than the last. They doubtless explained Dorrien’s sticking to his fat and fashionable practice when his desire was to this or that new disease out of Italy. Yet I’ve heard her take him lightly to task for letting the dust grow thick in his laboratory. She certainly didn’t think she wanted money. Nor, I fancy, in any bloated and disproportionate way did she. She was, as I say, ambitious—muddle-headedly, sentimentally, but incurably ambitious; and she seemed always, I’ve been told, to be watching his career in the hope of its suddenly flaring into the spectacular. It was she, I’ve also been told, who defended Dorrien from outraged Hewells when he broke entirely with official tuberculosis and turned his attention publicly to leprosy. There had been one of the periodic “scares”; some respectable artisan in Kansas City had developed it quite unaccountably. There was a good deal of the yellow peril in the yellow journals. They sent for Dr. Dorrien. I’ve a notion that the Misses Hewell were almost reconciled to him in that moment. Mrs. Dorrien did not go to Kansas City with her husband. She stayed at home, and explained to every one that leprosy was really becoming a public menace, that the danger should be considered, that steps should be taken, especially that research should be subsidized.
It had been a chance current that had swept me for a little into the Dorriens’ world, and my main stream of life soon swept me out of it. At the moment of my departure from America, the Kansas City scare was over, and Dr. Dorrien had still done nothing that one could legitimately present to one’s wife as spectacular. That was all I knew of them for years—until I knew the last. The last set us all to wondering, and by an odd chance I once wondered aloud before Hoyting. “Oh, the Dorriens? Yes, of course, the Dorriens. I knew them.”
That was all, and it sufficed. Whatever Hoyting knew was sure to be the right answer. It would take too long to expound Hoyting to those of you who don’t know him. Those of you who do will understand my faith. He’s like nothing so much, I’ve sometimes thought, as a badly tinkered craft plying between obscure and unsafe ports. Sometimes he carries junk, and sometimes treasure; you never know beforehand. But I always bargain for the cargo. Hoyting has wandered so much: the mere dust on the crazy little capstan may have blown from some unpronounceable paradise. He doesn’t always know, himself; he “steams for steaming’s sake,” Hoyting does. Somewhere inside his lurching bulk is an inexhaustible hunger for life, which has made of two hemispheres an insufficient meal. For some of us he’s an unfailing cache in the desert. Provided he has had life at first hand, the jackals are welcome to do the rest. So I had only to wait my moment. In Marseilles, that haven of ships, Hoyting’s tongue would be loosed. I should not have to wait long.
“Vermouth,” said Hoyting; “yes, just vermouth. I always did like Marseilles. Full of people who really want to get somewhere, and know how to go, and don’t talk more than is necessary. Brindisi’s disgusting. I never touch Brindisi if I can help it.”
“The Dorriens.” I held him to his promise.
“Oh, the Dorriens. Yes. Funny, the kind of thing a woman who looks like that is sometimes willing to muck about in. She seemed like a good sport, too. Ever been in Turkestan? I suppose not. If you go to places in this world, you haven’t time left for anything else. So very likely you never saw a Kirghiz nomad hunting on horseback with a golden eagle on his wrist. Using it like a falcon, you know. They go after wildish game—wolves and such. Ripping. But not very practical, after all. Mrs. Dorrien was a little like that. She was ripping, too. But I’ve always had a notion that Dorrien might have had better hunting with almost any other kind of woman.
“I don’t understand modern medical science—scrapping with ultravisible germs that good may come. Blood is different: when you see that, it’s your business to stop it anyhow. A flow of blood is the devil at war with man. You know it instinctively. I myself don’t hold much with anything that doesn’t come by instinct. And as for deciding things by theory! There wasn’t a mouldering idea any one had held since the Christian era that Mrs. Dorrien didn’t drag out of its grave to get help from. That was the trouble: all the mouldering ideas were knocking about together in her mind. And therefore, exit Dorrien.