Free Each Man's Son by Hugh Maclennan Page A

still stiff with a tension that had become chronic. He heard through the open window the distant scream of tramcar wheels grinding around MacDonald’s Corner. On the hat rack he recognized a battered felt with several fishing flies hooked to its ribbon and recognized it as the property of Big Collie McCuen, a man who might have found his professional level more easily in Nelson’s fleet than on the staff of a hospital, Ainslie thought. In the corner behind the hat rack were a heavy blackthorn and a worn umbrella. Ordinarily Ainslie would have seen none of these things.Tonight his eyes missed nothing. The blackthorn belonged to Jack Paterson, a man built as ponderously as McCuen, a heavy breather and a heavy eater, but a sound enough doctor so far as he went. His chief weakness was his incapacity for learning anything new and his resentment of those who did. It was Paterson who had dubbed Ainslie the Regius Professor. The umbrella belonged to Ronald Sutherland, a good surgeon but tied inexorably to the textbooks. Ainslie sighed and closed his eyes. The accouterments of his colleagues reminded him how few men there were in Broughton with whom he could talk.
    Beyond the oak door the hospital was still. Ainslie began to feel some of the tension easing out of the muscles of his back and passing like a quivering presence down his legs and out his toes. He lay back in the half-darkness and tried to sleep, but his mind refused to blur. He thought about Margaret and the things she had said to him. Did they spring from something she had been thinking about for a long time or were they words of the moment only? It made no difference. They were one more symptom to add to the diagnosis. He was past forty, he had no children, he was in a treadmill which he could neither slow down nor escape by jumping off, and Margaret’s unhappiness made him feel increasingly guilty day by day.
    He heard the post office clock striking the hour, but he missed the count and could not trouble to take out his watch to check the time. When had he got to sleep last night? He couldn’t remember. As his mind began to blur at last he saw the curve of a woman’s hip as golden as a harvest moon, but when he reached out to caress it, the color changed to white and it was Margaret. The doctor’s hands went loose on the arms of his chair, his head dropped to one side and his dark hair became tousled over his forehead. The lines of his face smoothed perceptibly as his consciousness disappeared like a ship into a fog.
    Dr. Dougald MacKenzie was standing over him when Ainslie’s eyes opened, and for an instant Ainslie thought hewas looking up at the picture of the founder of the hospital that hung over the mantel of the fireplace, rather than at the man himself. But he came out of sleep with a doctor’s trained rapidity. He rubbed his forehead and looked with undenied pleasure at his old friend, the only person in the whole of Cape Breton whom he honored totally and without question.
    â€œSorry, Dan. I should have left you to rest.”
    â€œI wasn’t really asleep.” Ainslie sat up. “What time is it, anyway?”
    Dr. MacKenzie took a gold hunter from his pocket and snapped open the cover. “Twenty past eleven. What keeps you here so late tonight?”
    â€œA confinement. It’s Morton’s wife. I thought it was best to bring her in here because she’s got a bad heart and I don’t like the look of it.”
    MacKenzie sat down in the other armchair across the hearth, jerked it forward and lifted his long legs until his heels rested on the edge of the low mantel. His heels had been scraping that mantel ever since it had been built, but this was MacKenzie’s favorite posture at home and he saw no reason to change it here.
    Ainslie felt some of the weight leave his mind as he looked at the old man. Dougald MacKenzie was now seventy-six, he was still active and all his life he had been equal to