The Fire in the Flint

Kenneth Harper gazed slowly around his office. A smile of satisfaction wreathed his face, reflecting his inward contentment. He felt like a runner who sees ahead of him the coveted goal towards which he has been straining through many gruelling miles. Kenneth was tired but he gave no thought to his weariness. Two weeks of hard work, countless annoyances, seemingly infinite delays —all were now forgotten in the warm glow which pervaded his being. He, Kenneth B. Harper, M.D., was now ready to receive the stream of patients he felt sure was coming.

He walked around the room and fingered with almost loving tenderness the newly installed apparatus. He adjusted and readjusted the examining-table of shining nickel and white enamel which had arrived that morning from New York. He arranged again the black leather pads and cushions. With his handkerchief he wiped imaginary spots of dust from the plate glass door and shelves of the instrument case, though his sister Mamie had polished them but half an hour before until they shone with crystal clearness. Instrument after instrument he fondled with the air of a connoisseur examining a rare bit of porcelain. He fingered critically their various parts to see if all were in perfect condition. He tore a stamp from an old letter and placed it under the lens of the expensive microscope adjusting and readjusting until every feature of the stamp stood out clearly even to the most infinite detail. He raised and lowered half a dozen times or more the lid of the nickelled sterilizer. He set at various angles the white screen which surrounded the examining-table, viewed it each time from different corners of the room, and rearranged it until it was set just right. He ran his hand over the card index files in his small desk. He looked at the clean white cards with the tabs on them —the cards which, though innocent now of writing, he hoped and expected would soon be filled with the names of innumerable sick people he was treating.

His eye caught what he thought was a pucker in the grey-and-blue-chequered linoleum which covered the floor. He went over and moved the sectional bookcase containing his volumes on obstetrics, on gynaecology, on materia medica, on the diseases he knew he would treat as a general practitioner of medicine in so small a place as Central City. No, that wasn’t a pucker —it was only the light from the window striking it at that angle.

“Dr. Kenneth B. Harper, Physician and Surgeon.” He spelled out the letters which were painted on the upper panes of the two windows facing on State Street. It thrilled him that eight years of hard work had ended and he now was at the point in his life towards which he had longingly looked all those years. Casting his eyes again around the office, he went into the adjoining reception room.

Kenneth threw himself in utter exhaustion into one of the comfortable armchairs there. His hands, long-fingered, tapering to slender points, the hands of a pianist, an artist, whether of brush or chisel or scalpel, hung over the sides in languid fashion. He was without coat or vest. His shirtsleeves were rolled back above his elbows, revealing strongly muscled dark brown arms. His face was of the same richly coloured brown. His mouth was sensitively shaped with evenly matched strong white teeth. The eyes too were brown, usually sober and serious, but flashing into a broad and friendly smile when there was occasion for it. Brushed straight back from the broad forehead was a mass of wavy hair, brown also but of a deeper shade, almost black. The chin was well shaped.