It is the privilege of short-tempered women to wax testy under the touch
of trouble, and Mrs. Baxter, her hard face querulous and unlovely, stood
in the doorway of Boland’s Farm, watching the road for the flash of the
doctor’s lamps. A couple of cypress-trees, dead and brown towards the
house, built a deep porch above the door. Beyond the white palings of
the garden the broad roof of a barn swept up against the sombre azure of
the summer night; and the blackness of the byres and outhouses
contrasted with the lawn that was lit by the lighted windows. To the
west stood four great Lombardy poplars whose leaves made the night
breeze seem restless about the house.
The austere figure of her sister joined itself to Mrs. Baxter’s under
the cypresses. They talked together in undertones as they watched the
road, their voices harsh and unmusical even in an attempted whisper.
Mrs. Baxter and Miss Harriet Season were tall and sinewy women, narrow
of face and mind, hard in eye and body, their sense of sex reduced to
insignificance. The unfortunate Inglis, who sat pulling at his
watch-chain beside Mr. Thomas Baxter’s bed, had found their hawk faces
too keen and uncompromising for his self-esteem. They had scented out
his incompetence as two old crows will scent out carrion.
“Drat the man, is he never coming!”
Mrs. Baxter smoothed her dress, and stood listening irritably, an
angular and inelegant silhouette against the lamp-light.
“Just hear Tom groaning.”
“And that poor ninny sitting by the bed and trying to look wise. Ain’t
that a light over the willows? I shall lose my temper if it ain’t
Murchison.”
Miss Harriet tilted her head like an attentive parrot.
“I can hear the thing puffing.”
“Just keep quiet—can’t you?”
“Lor, Mary, you are peevish!”
“How can I listen with all your chattering?”
Murchison, depressed and out of heart, met these two ladies at the
farm-house door. They greeted him with no relieved and hysterical
profuseness. Mrs. Baxter extended a red-knuckled hand, looking like a
woman ready to express a grievance.
“Glad you’ve come at last, doctor; we’ve been waiting long enough.”
They ushered Murchison into the parlor, a room that cultivated ugliness
from the wool-work mantel-cover to the red and yellow rug before the
door. Murchison, like most professional men, had become accustomed to
the impertinent petulance of sundry middle-class patients. Unstrung and
inwardly humiliated as he was that night, the austere woman’s tartness
roused his impatience.
“My car broke down on the way. How is Mr. Baxter?” and he pulled off his
gloves.
“Bad, sir, sorry to say. I can’t think, doctor, how you could send that
young chap over here.”
“Dr. Inglis?”
“He don’t know his business; we hadn’t any faith in him from the minute
he entered the door.”
“Dr. Inglis is perfectly competent to represent me when I am away from
Roxton.”
“Indeed, doctor, I beg to differ.”
Mrs. Baxter’s grieved contempt suggested that Murchison had no Christian
right to rest or eat when duty called him. Had the lady been less
selfish and aggressive she might have been struck by the man’s tired
eyes and nervous, irritable manner. But Mrs. Baxter was one of those
crude and complacent people who never consider the sensitive
complexities of others.
“I will see your husband at once.”
“I hope you’re not going to operate, doctor.”
Murchison’s face betrayed his irritation as he moved towards the door.
“My dear madam, do you wish me to attend your husband, or do you not?”
The bony woman tilted her chin.
“I don’t hold with people being cut about with knives.”
Ignorance when insolent is doubly exasperating, and Murchison was in no
mood for an argument.
“Mrs. Baxter, from what Dr. Hicks has said, your husband will die unless
operated on immediately.”
The farmer’s wife shrugged, and pressed her lips together.
“Very well, doctor, have your own way.”
“If I am to attend your husband you must trust in my opinion.”
“Oh—of course. Do what you think proper, sir. I know we don’t signify.”
Murchison abandoned Mrs. Baxter to her prejudices, and climbed the
stairs to the bedroom, where Dr. Inglis dabbled scalpels and artery
forceps in surgical trays. The assistant’s thin face welcomed his
superior with a worried yet grateful smile. No heroine of romance had
listened more eagerly for the sound of her lover’s gallop than had Dr.
Inglis for the panting of Murchison’s car.
On the bed with its white chintz valance and side curtains lay the
farmer, skin ashy, eyes sunken, the typical facies of acute abdominal
obstruction. A sickly stench rose from a basin full of brown vomit
beside the bed. The man hiccoughed and groaned as he breathed, each
spasm of the diaphragm drawing a quivering gulp of pain.
Murchison, his eyes noting each significant detail, seated himself on
the edge of the bed. He had hoped that Inglis might have been mistaken,
and that he should find the case less grave than Dr. Hicks had
suggested. Murchison dreaded the thought of an operation, even as a
tired man dreads the duty he cannot justify. He felt unequal to the
nerve strain that the ordeal demanded, for his hand was not the steady
hand of the master for the night. Slowly and with the uttermost care he
examined the man, realizing with each sign and symptom that Hicks’s
diagnosis appeared too true. There was no escaping from the gravity of
the crisis. Unless relieved, Thomas Baxter would surely die.
Murchison rose with a tired sigh, and pressing his eyes for a moment
with the fingers of his right hand, went to the table where Inglis had
been arranging the instruments and dressings.
“You have anæsthetics?”
“Yes. Are you going to operate?”
“Yes, I must. It is our only chance.”
“And the bed, it is a regular feather pit.”
“We have to put up with these things in the country. I have performed
tracheotomy with a pair of scissors and a hair-pin.”
Inglis had faith enough in his chief’s resources. True, Murchison looked
fagged and out of fettle, yet the theorist little suspected how greatly
the elder man dreaded what was before him. Poor Porteus Carmagee’s port
had worked havoc with that delicate marvel, the brain of the scientific
age. Murchison had sustained a moral shock, and he was still tremulous
with humiliation and remorse. One of the most trying ordeals of surgery
lay before him, with every disadvantage to test his skill. A weaker man
might have temporized, or played the traitor by surrendering to nature.
Murchison’s conscience was too strong to suffer him to shirk his duty.
He crossed the room to the bed, and bent over the farmer.
“Mr. Baxter, you are very ill; we must give you chloroform.”
The man’s sunken eyes looked up pathetically into Murchison’s face.
“Oh, dear Lord, doctor, anything; I can’t stand the gripe of it much
longer.”
“You understand that I am going to operate on you?”
“All right, sir, do just what you think proper.”
In a few minutes the instrument table, with a powerful electric
surgical-lamp, had been brought near the bed. Murchison had taken off
his coat, tied on an apron, and was soaking his hands in perchloride of
mercury. Inglis had the chloroform mask over the farmer’s face. The man
was weak with the anguish he had suffered, and took the anæsthetic
without a struggle. Soon came the twitching of the limbs and the
incoherent babbling as the vapor took effect. Murchison gave a rapid
glance at the instrument table to see that everything he needed was to
hand. Then he bared the farmer’s body, packed it round with towels, and
began to scrub and cleanse the skin.
“He’s nearly under, sir.”
“Good.”
Murchison felt Baxter’s pulse, and frowned.
“We must waste no time,” he remarked, setting back his shoulders.
“The pupil reflex has gone.”
“Keep him as lightly under as you can.”
There was the glimmer of a knife, and a long streaking of the skin with
red. Murchison worked rapidly, spreading the lips of the wound with the
fingers of his left hand while he plied the knife. The patient’s
stertorous breathing seemed to fill the room. Murchison swabbed the
wound briskly, and worked on with grim and quiet patience.
Soon half a dozen artery forceps were dangling about the wound.
Murchison was bending over the farmer, insinuating his hand into the
abdominal cavity. Inglis glanced at him with a worried air.
“Can you feel anything, sir?”
“Not yet.”
“I don’t like the pulse.”
“We must risk it; watch the breathing.”
Murchison’s forehead had become full of lines. His face was the face of
a man whose intelligence is strained to the utmost pitch of
sensitiveness. The ordeal of touch, the education of four finger-tips,
stood between failure and success.
Inglis shot a questioning glance at his chief’s face.
“Found anything?”
“No. I must enlarge the wound.”
The knife went to work again, with swabs and artery forceps to choke the
blood flow. Murchison was sweating as though he had run half a mile
under a July sun. There was an impatient twitching of the muscles of his
face. He breathed fast and deeply, like a man whose staying power is
being taxed.
“Confound the man’s fat!”
Inglis smiled feebly but sympathetically.
“Not an easy case.”
“Wait. No, I thought I had something. Look after the pulse.”
The strain was beginning to tell on Murchison after the overthrow of the
previous night. He looked jaded, pale, and impatient. The reek of the
anæsthetic made the blood buzz in his temples. At such a time a surgeon
needs superhuman nerve, that iron patience that is never flustered.
Minutes passed, and the skilled fingers were still baffled. Murchison
straightened his back with a kind of groan.
“Wipe my forehead,” he said, curtly.
Inglis leaned forward, and wiped the sweat away with a napkin.
“Thanks,” and he went to work again, yet with a hand that trembled. That
supreme self-control had deserted him for the moment. He seemed feverish
and spasmodic, out of temper with the difficulties of the case.
“The devil take it! Ah—at last.”
He drew a relieved breath, his eyes brightening, his face clearing a
little. The deft fingers had succeeded, and swabs and sponges were soon
at work. Sweat dropped from his forehead into the wound, but Murchison
did not heed it in his strained intentness.
“Pass me some sponges. Thanks. Count for me.”
More minutes passed before Murchison lifted his head with a great sigh
of relief.
“Thank God, that’s over.”
“Shall I stop the chloroform?”
“No, keep it on a little longer. How many sponges were there? Six? One,
two, three, four, five, and the last. Now for the ligatures,” and he
handled the threads with quivering fingers.
Inglis was feeling the man’s pulse.
“He won’t stand much more, Murchison.”
“All right, you can stop.”
Scarcely had the concentration of his mind force relaxed for him than
Murchison felt dizzy in the head, and saw a luminous fog before his
eyes. Sweat ran from him; the room seemed saturated with the reek of
chloroform. The reaction rushed on him with a feeling of nausea and a
great sense of faintness at the heart. Bandage in hand, he swayed back,
collapsed into a chair, and bent his head down between his knees.
A decanter of brandy stood on the dressing-table. Inglis, not a little
scared, darted for it, and poured out a heavy dose into a tumbler.
“What’s up, Murchison? Here, drink this down. Baxter’s all right for the
moment.”
Murchison lifted a gray face from between his hands to the light.
“Thanks, Inglis, I feel done up. Don’t bother about me. I shall be right
again in a moment.”
He put the brandy aside, and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his
shirt. Inglis was completing the bandaging of the wound that Murchison
had left unfinished. The farmer was breathing heavily, a streak of foam
blubbering at his blue and swollen lips.
“You had better turn home, sir, I can manage now.”
Murchison rose wearily and went to wash his hands.
“You must be fagged, Inglis,” he retorted.
“Not a bit of it,” and the theorist displayed more courage now that the
responsibility was on other shoulders.
“You might stay for an hour or two. I left word in Roxton for Nurse
Sprange to come out. You must put up with the old ladies’ tongues.”
The assistant frowned slightly as he recollected Mrs. Baxter and her
sister.
“You will see them, Murchison, before you go?”
“Yes, of course.”
The two shallow-chested women were waiting for news in the hideous
parlor. Even Mrs. Baxter’s stupidity could not ignore the look of
distress on Murchison’s face. By the time the doctors had taken, she
guessed that an operation had been performed, and by Murchison’s manner
that it had not proved successful.
“Well, doctor, bad news, I suppose?”
Mrs. Baxter was more ready to quarrel than to weep.
“The operation has been perfectly satisfactory.”
“Indeed!”
“Your husband is still in very grave danger, but I see no reason why he
should not recover.”
Murchison picked his gloves out of his hat. An expressive glance passed
between Mrs. Baxter and her sister.
“You’re not going, doctor?”
“Yes, Dr. Inglis remains in charge. One of the Roxton nurses will be
here any moment.”
The farmer’s wife betrayed her indignation.
“What, that ninny! He ain’t fit to doctor a cat. I tell you, Dr.
Murchison, I don’t want him in my house.” The man’s eyes flashed in his
tired face. The woman’s impertinence was insufferable.
“Really, madam, Dr. Inglis is perfectly competent to be left in charge.
I shall see your husband early to-morrow.”
Mrs. Baxter sniffed.
“Well, I call it an insult!”
“Call it what you will, my dear woman, but I need rest—like other
people, and I must go.”
And go he did, leaving two sour and quarrelsome faces at the farm-house
door.
At Lombard Street, Catherine was waiting for her husband after putting
Gwen and Jack to bed. She rose anxiously at the sound of the car, and
met Murchison in the hall. His face shocked her even in the shaded
lamplight. He looked like a man who had come through some great travail.
“James, dear—how—”
“I’m through with it, thank God!”
“Safely?”
“Yes.”
“Well done—well done. I know how you have suffered.”