Free The Story of Dr. Wassell by James Hilton

The men, all awake now, were suddenly
exultant—thinking that long-awaited reinforcements had arrived at last,
and that the planes they had heard were en route to bomb the enemy at sea or
on adjacent islands. It was a tonic thought to them lying there—that
overhead the tide was already turning, that monster weapons from Seattle and
Santa Monica and Long Beach were racing at last to their rescue.
    The doctor, wandering in and out of the ward in a state of intense
restlessness, said nothing to dampen this feeling.
    The roaring went on, plane after plane, until, when it seemed to end, an
argument sprang up among the men as to how many had flown over
altogether.
    “Twelve!” cried Hanrahan.
    “Thirteen!” retorted McGuffey. “I counted right from the
beginning— you were asleep.”
    Somebody else joined in: “No, twelve. I’m sure it was only twelve.”
    “Thirteen, I tell you!”
    Renny, who was still in a good deal of pain, muttered from his bed: “Can’t
you boys find anything better to argue about? Twelve or thirteen—what
the hell does it matter?”
    The doctor thought that it had really mattered a great deal, but he backed
up Renny and urged the men to go to sleep again. Then he went into Wilson’s
room across the corridor. He did not speak for a long time. Wilson was awake
and smoking.
    “Twelve it was,” said Wilson quietly. “I heard the men arguing.”
    “Yes, twelve,” agreed the doctor. “The thirteenth should have been
ours.”
    After another long pause Wilson lit a fresh cigarette and added more
quietly still: “Did you ever feel as bad about anything in your life?”
    “Yes, once.”
    “When?”
    “About fifteen years ago—in China.”
    “Anything similar to this?”
    “Hardly.”
    “What then? Or is it something private?”
    “Oh no. Don’t mind telling you if you’re interested. I’d been working for
years tracking down the carrier of amoebic dysentery, and at last I found it
just about a day before an article appeared in a medical journal announcing
the same discovery by someone else.”
    “Tough luck.”
    “Well, maybe—in a sense—but after all it’s the discovery that
counts, not who makes it. Don’t you think so?”
    Later the doctor could not sleep, and while he was lying awake he heard a
tap on his door and went to open it. Dr. Voorhuys was standing in the
corridor, fully dressed and apparently quite calm. But there was something a
little odd about him that the doctor sensed immediately, though he could not
exactly say what it was.
    “I’m glad you are awake,” said Dr. Voorhuys, “because there is something
you ought to know at once. I did not think it would happen. The enemy has
landed on Java.”
    The doctor from Arkansas nodded. It was a blow but he felt himself struck
rather than surprised by it. And suddenly, at that singularly inappropriate
moment, he began to smile, because he had just noticed what was particularly
odd about the doctor. It was something he would not have mentioned, except
that he felt he must explain the smile, and there was nothing, he could think
of but the truth. Dr. Voorhuys was already walking away along the corridor
when the Arkansas doctor overtook him. “Why, Doctor,” he exclaimed, “you’re smoking !”
    Dr. Voorhuys puffed the smoke of his long black cigar into the clean
antiseptic air of the hospital corridor. Then he smiled also. “Perhaps, sir,
it is a time for breaking the rule of a lifetime, since our lifetime may not
be as long as we expect.”
    The doctor went back to his own room, dressed quickly and glanced into the
ward where the men lay. All were asleep, and the Dutch nurse in charge was
reading a book so comfortably that it was clear she had not heard the bad
news. The doctor then glanced into Wilson’s room and saw that he too was
asleep. Next he telephoned to Tjilatjap, waiting almost an hour before he
could get through. After that he left the hospital and walked into