Doctor Bicknell was in a remarkably gracious mood. Through a minor
accident, a slight bit of carelessness, that was all, a man who might
have pulled through had died the preceding night. Though it had been
only a sailorman, one of the innumerable unwashed, the steward of the
receiving hospital had been on the anxious seat all the morning. It was
not that the man had died that gave him discomfort, he knew the Doctor
too well for that, but his distress lay in the fact that the operation
had been done so well. One of the most delicate in surgery, it had been
as successful as it was clever and audacious. All had then depended upon
the treatment, the nurses, the steward. And the man had died. Nothing
much, a bit of carelessness, yet enough to bring the professional wrath
of Doctor Bicknell about his ears and to perturb the working of the
staff and nurses for twenty-four hours to come.
But, as already stated, the Doctor was in a remarkably gracious mood.
When informed by the steward, in fear and trembling, of the man's
unexpected take-off, his lips did not so much as form one syllable of
censure; nay, they were so pursed that snatches of rag-time floated
softly from them, to be broken only by a pleasant query after the health
of the other's eldest-born. The steward, deeming it impossible that he
could have caught the gist of the case, repeated it.
“Yes, yes,” Doctor Bicknell said impatiently; “I understand. But how
about Semper Idem? Is he ready to leave?”
“Yes. They're helping him dress now,” the steward answered, passing on
to the round of his duties, content that peace still reigned within the
iodine-saturated walls.
It was Semper Idem's recovery which had so fully compensated Doctor
Bicknell for the loss of the sailorman. Lives were to him as nothing,
the unpleasant but inevitable incidents of the profession, but cases,
ah, cases were everything. People who knew him were prone to brand him a
butcher, but his colleagues were at one in the belief that a bolder
and yet a more capable man never stood over the table. He was not an
imaginative man. He did not possess, and hence had no tolerance for,
emotion. His nature was accurate, precise, scientific. Men were to him
no more than pawns, without individuality or personal value. But as
cases it was different. The more broken a man was, the more precarious
his grip on life, the greater his significance in the eyes of Doctor
Bicknell. He would as readily forsake a poet laureate suffering from a
common accident for a nameless, mangled vagrant who defied every law of
life by refusing to die, as would a child forsake a Punch and Judy for a
circus.
So it had been in the case of Semper Idem. The mystery of the man had
not appealed to him, nor had his silence and the veiled romance which
the yellow reporters had so sensationally and so fruitlessly exploited
in divers Sunday editions. But Semper Idem's throat had been cut. That
was the point. That was where his interest had centred. Cut from ear to
ear, and not one surgeon in a thousand to give a snap of the fingers
for his chance of recovery. But, thanks to the swift municipal ambulance
service and to Doctor Bicknell, he had been dragged back into the world
he had sought to leave. The Doctor's co-workers had shaken their heads
when the case was brought in. Impossible, they said. Throat, windpipe,
jugular, all but actually severed, and the loss of blood frightful. As
it was such a foregone conclusion, Doctor Bicknell had employed methods
and done things which made them, even in their professional capacities,
shudder. And lo! the man had recovered.
So, on this morning that Semper Idem was to leave the hospital, hale
and hearty, Doctor Bicknell's geniality was in nowise disturbed by the
steward's report, and he proceeded cheerfully to bring order out of the
chaos of a child's body which had been ground and crunched beneath the
wheels of an electric car.
As many will remember, the case of Semper Idem aroused a vast deal
of unseemly yet highly natural curiosity. He had been found in a slum
lodging, with throat cut as aforementioned, and blood dripping down upon
the inmates of the room below and disturbing their festivities. He had
evidently done the deed standing, with head bowed forward that he might
gaze his last upon a photograph which stood on the table propped against
a candlestick. It was this attitude which had made it possible for
Doctor Bicknell to save him. So terrific had been the sweep of the razor
that had he had his head thrown back, as he should have done to have
accomplished the act properly, with his neck stretched and the elastic
vascular walls distended, he would have of a certainty well-nigh
decapitated himself.
At the hospital, during all the time he travelled the repugnant road
back to life, not a word had left his lips. Nor could anything be
learned of him by the sleuths detailed by the chief of police. Nobody
knew him, nor had ever seen or heard of him before. He was strictly,
uniquely, of the present. His clothes and surroundings were those of the
lowest labourer, his hands the hands of a gentleman. But not a shred
of writing was discovered, nothing, save in one particular, which would
serve to indicate his past or his position in life.
And that one particular was the photograph. If it were at all a
likeness, the woman who gazed frankly out upon the onlooker from the
card-mount must have been a striking creature indeed. It was an amateur
production, for the detectives were baffled in that no professional
photographer's signature or studio was appended. Across a corner of the
mount, in delicate feminine tracery, was written: “Semper idem; semper
fidelis.” And she looked it. As many recollect, it was a face one could
never forget. Clever half-tones, remarkably like, were published in all
the leading papers at the time; but such procedure gave rise to nothing
but the uncontrollable public curiosity and interminable copy to the
space-writers.
For want of a better name, the rescued suicide was known to the hospital
attendants, and to the world, as Semper Idem. And Semper Idem he
remained. Reporters, detectives, and nurses gave him up in despair.
Not one word could he be persuaded to utter; yet the flitting conscious
light of his eyes showed that his ears heard and his brain grasped every
question put to him.
But this mystery and romance played no part in Doctor Bicknell's
interest when he paused in the office to have a parting word with his
patient. He, the Doctor, had performed a prodigy in the matter of this
man, done what was virtually unprecedented in the annals of surgery. He
did not care who or what the man was, and it was highly improbable
that he should ever see him again; but, like the artist gazing upon a
finished creation, he wished to look for the last time upon the work of
his hand and brain.
Semper Idem still remained mute. He seemed anxious to be gone. Not a
word could the Doctor extract from him, and little the Doctor cared.
He examined the throat of the convalescent carefully, idling over the
hideous scar with the lingering, half-caressing fondness of a parent.
It was not a particularly pleasing sight. An angry line circled the
throat--for all the world as though the man had just escaped the
hangman's noose--and, disappearing below the ear on either side, had the
appearance of completing the fiery periphery at the nape of the neck.
Maintaining his dogged silence, yielding to the other's examination in
much the manner of a leashed lion, Semper Idem betrayed only his desire
to drop from out of the public eye.
“Well, I'll not keep you,” Doctor Bicknell finally said, laying a hand
on the man's shoulder and stealing a last glance at his own handiwork.
“But let me give you a bit of advice. Next time you try it on, hold
your chin up, so. Don't snuggle it down and butcher yourself like a cow.
Neatness and despatch, you know. Neatness and despatch.”
Semper Idem's eyes flashed in token that he heard, and a moment later
the hospital door swung to on his heel.
It was a busy day for Doctor Bicknell, and the afternoon was well along
when he lighted a cigar preparatory to leaving the table upon which it
seemed the sufferers almost clamoured to be laid. But the last one, an
old rag-picker with a broken shoulder-blade, had been disposed of, and
the first fragrant smoke wreaths had begun to curl about his head, when
the gong of a hurrying ambulance came through the open window from
the street, followed by the inevitable entry of the stretcher with its
ghastly freight.
“Lay it on the table,” the Doctor directed, turning for a moment to
place his cigar in safety. “What is it?”
“Suicide--throat cut,” responded one of the stretcher bearers. “Down on
Morgan Alley. Little hope, I think, sir. He's 'most gone.”
“Eh? Well, I'll give him a look, anyway.” He leaned over the man at the
moment when the quick made its last faint flutter and succumbed.
“It's Semper Idem come back again,” the steward said.
“Ay,” replied Doctor Bicknell, “and gone again. No bungling this time.
Properly done, upon my life, sir, properly done. Took my advice to the
letter. I'm not required here. Take it along to the morgue.”
Doctor Bicknell secured his cigar and relighted it. “That,” he said
between the puffs, looking at the steward, “that evens up for the one
you lost last night. We're quits now.”