WHEN Mr. Joe first came down into our country we were all a little afraid of him. Some of us had read about him in the newspapers, his adventures, divorces, etc. Evidently he wanted to find a quiet place. He went out from town a few miles, and bought a farm. It was in the hills. When he built his house the workmen, some from town, others country fellows, all liked him.
You couldn’t help liking him. He was so unpretentious. If I were to put down here his real name . . . a man like that . . . successful plays on Broadway . . . married to first this and then that successful actress . . . the marriages breaking up . . . anyway, there he was, a man you’d like.
He was a quiet man, walking around, never thrusting himself forward. He was always wanting to pay his workmen a little more than they asked.
It was Doctor Haggerty who took me to Mr. Joe’s. Our country doctor is something rather special. He is a shy man, a bachelor who has been practicing in this one section since he came out of medical school. It is a section of poor farms and poor little towns. How the doctor has managed to live on us I don’t know. It doesn’t cost much to keep such a man going. Although he does all kinds of difficult and dangerous operations . . . in cabins in winter on lonely mountain roads . . . very likely the patient snowed in . . . and treats every kind of disease; he has nothing but his small, worn medicine case and the few surgeon’s tools he must have had when he started his practice.
The doctor, a small, bald-headed man, with a little turned-up nose and quick, alive hands, has one passion. He loves to play croquet, and used to play every afternoon with old Judge Graves, also a bachelor. Then Judge Graves died, and Mr. Joe came in here, bought his mountain farm out on Swift Creek, and built his house.
Mr. Joe must have taken a fancy at once to Doctor Haggerty. Being a New Yorker, he couldn’t have had a passion for croquet. But the croquet ground he built cost a lot. A hill was cut down, sod was brought in, and men worked for days, watering and rolling. It was as though every blade of grass had been touched by some man’s hand. We all talked about it in the drug store in town. “Say, it must be nice to be rich, be the author of successful plays, have money rolling in like that.” The cashier of the bank told me about it. “The money comes in gobs,” he said.
It was something for our Doctor Haggerty, the little shy one. There were the two shy men, he and Mr. Joe, together almost every afternoon that summer . . . that is to say, when the little doctor wasn’t racing over the hills in his shabby, wornout car, doing his operations sometimes—often, I dare say, up all night. It didn’t matter how busy he was, some time during the day or night he would be at Mr. Joe’s.
Sometimes they played their game at night. Mr. Joe had built a high stone wall, shutting the croquet ground off from the road. He had put up electric lights. Harry Thompson, a farmer who lives out that way, told me that he got curious and went over there two or three times at night to sit around and watch, but that, when he did it, the game broke up. Mr. Joe went into his house and to his typewriter, and our doctor got into his old car and drove away.
I was glad they didn’t mind me, sitting and watching. They were like two kids at their game. Our little doctor is past sixty, but when he played with Mr. Joe he became a kid. The two men had something going on between them, a laughing kind of thing. You see it sometimes between married couples that really make a go of marriage.
* * *
But here is the point to my story: Last summer a famous surgeon from New York came to visit Mr. Joe. It is all a little odd. Our own people are just people to us. Who would think of Doctor Haggerty, living right here with us all these years, dressing rather shabbily, driving his rickety car, as anything special?
The city surgeon who came here to visit Mr. Joe had a big foreign car and he had style. You could tell, looking at him a mile away, that he was a successful man. He had the air. It was in his clothes, in his walk.
And he also took at once to our little doctor. I was out there when the city surgeon came. He planned to stay only the day, but at once he and Doctor Haggerty began to talk . . . our little doctor not at all shy before him, and pretty soon they drove off together, not in the big foreign car, but in Doc Haggerty’s little shabby one.
They went up to look at a case our doctor had begun talking about, a Mrs. Friedman. She is a poor woman, a widow who lives with her son in a cabin on a poor farm back up in the hills. The big car never could have got up there. They were gone all afternoon and went again the next day.
And when you come to that, who would think that anything wrong with a woman like Mrs. Friedman would be of special interest to a big, successful city surgeon? It seems it was a matter of an operation. We haven’t any hospitals in our country. They performed an operation on her; that is to say, our Doctor Haggerty did, the city man watching.
It was the city surgeon who told me about it. That was after he had been here four or five days. I was out at Mr. Joe’s, and Doctor Haggerty and Mr. Joe were at one of their games and the city doctor and I were sitting on a low stone wall and watching. I am writing about this whole matter because it was an eye-opener to me. I had been rather afraid of the swank city man myself but had got over it a little.
He began to talk to me, speaking of our little country doctor, and there was a curious note of respect in his voice that puzzled me.
“There’s a man,” he said, indicating with a movement of his head that he meant our funny little doc. At the moment Doc was down on his hands and knees sighting across at Mr. Joe’s ball. Then he spoke of something that puzzled me.
“I might have been O. K. myself if I had been given his opportunities,” he said.
Gee, life gets you woozy. The city man got reflective.
“Do you know,” he said to me, “I think maybe the little cuss has got an inferiority complex. Isn’t it swell!” he said. “That may have saved him. He doesn’t think he’s anything special.
“Say,” he said, “take a look. Look at his hands, so delicate, so alive.
“Gee, he’s had a swell life,” he said.
The city doc seemed to think that his own life, being what he was, having the kind of personality that would make success inevitable, was a pure waste. He amused me, that man did.
“Here I am,” he said, “and what am I?” He sighed. “A fool specialist,” he said.
He seemed to think he had pretty much wasted his life, being what he so evidently was, a successful big-city surgeon. I laughed. I didn’t know what to say.
* * *
And anyway, afterward, on that same evening, I drove back to town with our own little doc. I can smell his old car as I write, I can hear it rattle. Our own little doc was very humble that night.
“I was ashamed,” he said.
“About what?” I asked.
As I said, he had performed the operation on Mrs. Friedman in the presence of the city surgeon. He was ashamed of his equipment for the job. He had wanted the city man to do the operation, but the city man wouldn’t. He had told our doc that he wanted to watch.
“He had the nerve to tell me that his own diagnosis of Mrs. Friedman’s case was wrong and that mine was right,” Doctor Haggerty said. Evidently our little doc didn’t believe it. “I guess he was trying to let me down easy,” he said.
“And about this Mrs. Friedman,” I asked; “did you operate? Was it a difficult case? Will she live?”
“Yes,” he said. He had that curious doctor’s tone, as though the patient didn’t matter so much. I suppose it is inevitable. He was concerned with the other doctor. He looked at me with his funny little childlike eyes. “I was so ashamed before him,” he said.
“You mean?” I asked. I was amused.
“I mean I haven’t any equipment,” he said.
The other doctor had spoken of him with such sincere admiration, even envy. “What that man can do with a pocket-knife!” he had said.
“If I had only had the nerve, when I was younger,” our own doctor said, “I should have gone off to the city, been a specialist. I might have learned something, got an education.
“I might have amounted to something, been something,” Doctor Haggerty said to me that day, driving his rickety old car along the road and regretting, just as had the city man, the opportunities he had missed in his life.