The Story of Dr. Wassell by James Hilton Read Free Book Online Page A

to his pride.
    The crowds on the dock were greater now, but at last he got his men near
to the ships, the largest and likeliest-looking of which was called the Breskens ; then he helped them down from the trucks and ambulances. To
his dismay there was no shade anywhere, and even a moment in the broiling sun
must be distressing for the men lying on their backs on the stretchers. Then
suddenly, while he was making sure that no one was missing, he found that one
person was missing—McGuffey, of course. That sent him into a
sharp temper, the sharpest he had known since—well, since before he
joined the Navy. “I’m not going back for him,” he shouted. “If he finds us
here, okay…if not…That boy’s been nothing but trouble all the time, and
to choose a day like this for…I suppose he sloped off from the hotel when
you weren’t looking?”
    “We were looking,” Edmunds said. “But she was good -
looking.”
    The doctor did not smile. He could almost understand why Sun never smiled;
there was nothing to smile at in a world where wounded men had to be embarked
from crowded docks with the possibility of bombs falling at any moment. He
told the men sharply to wait where they were while he arranged for them to go
on board, and as he pushed his way through the crowd he tried to push also
the thought of McGuffey from his mind. Whatever happened to him, that boy
deserved it.
    The Breskens was already packed with agitated humanity. All crowds
on all steamers are always agitated till a journey begins, but on the Breskens there was a note of extra confusion, a sort of fourth-
dimensional tension that matched the third and skyward direction to which so
many eyes were turned. The doctor could not even get aboard himself, because
a Dutch officer standing at the gangway politely but firmly (and in Dutch)
demanded some permit he didn’t possess, and when he produced the Navy
document waved it gently aside. The doctor could be persuasive, but only in
English, and all that the Dutch officer could reply in English was “You talk
to the captain, please.” Apparently the captain was to be found ashore, in a
vaguely indicated building several hundred yards beyond the edge of the
crowd. The more the doctor argued and waved his document, the more firmly and
politely the Dutch officer insisted that he should talk to the captain; so
presently, with a shrug, the doctor set off on this troublesome quest, and in
pushing through the crowd collided with a middle-aged high-ranking officer of
the American Navy who asked him where the devil he thought he was going. The
doctor, as is unusual in such encounters, informed him, whereupon the officer
exclaimed: “Good God, sir, I wish you luck! There’s a line of them trying to
see him!”
    The doctor then explained he had forty-one wounded sailors in his charge
and wished to get them on board. “They’re from the Marblehead ,
sir—they’ve been at a hospital inland, and I’ve brought them here for
evacuation.” He added: “Acting on Navy instructions.”
    “ Instructions? …Wait a minute—weren’t you the fellow I
telephoned last night?…I thought I recognized that accent. Tennessee, isn’t
it?”
    “No, sir, Arkansas.”
    “And so what? All right, get ‘em on board.”
    “That’s what I’m trying to do, but the Dutch officer doesn’t understand
this paper—he said I must see the captain about it—but perhaps if you could explain—”
    “Sure, I’ll explain…Where are your men, anyway?”
    It was too bad that the Navy officer had at that moment caught sight of
the group waiting near by, too bad that there was nothing for the doctor to
do but point confirmingly. “Good God, sir!” exclaimed the Navy officer again,
so loudly that the men heard him and turned their heads. Sensing that
something was wrong, they valiantly remembered the doctor’s advice to look as
well as they could, but there was something almost more pathetic in