The chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers of the Garrison
Staff were making the rounds, and was stricken to the soul by the
discovery that the Reverend Julius Fraithorn had had no breakfast.
Occupying a small, single-cotted, electric-bell-less room in the outlying
ward--brick-lined and corrugated-iron-built like the greater building, and
reserved for infectious cases--the Reverend Julius might have been said to
be marooned, had not his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created
such hot competition among the nurses for the privilege of attending on
him, that he had frequently received breakfast and dinner in duplicate,
and once three teas. Some of the probationers, reared in the outer
darkness of Dissent, knew no better than to term him "the minister." To
the matron, who was High Church, he existed as "Father Fraithorn." Julius
is hardly complete to the reader without an intimation that he very dearly
loved to be dubbed "Father." The matron had never failed in this.
A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under
the bony hand--a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the
skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to
say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen
band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at
Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday evening Confirmation classes
for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record
attendance by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and
ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs
of trousers. Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that
the first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners would be
as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy
Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the stuffy
West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew of London roughs hulking and
hustling on the benches, learning per medium of "the dodger," that one's
duty to one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to
refrain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-raiding, hustling, and
jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or iron knuckle-dusters, and not
to get drunk before Saturday night.
He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of
physicians--honestly-meaning wiseacres--ignorant of the shifts, the
fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the panting,
tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company with the hale
traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, protracted journeys, the
neglect and discomfort of the inns and taverns and boarding-houses, where
Kaffirs are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them
because he must, and struggled on, learning by painful experience that
fever-patches are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to
the man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting
better, and would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and take
up his mission in the West and West-Central districts, and begin work
again.
Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light chair slipped
in behind them, hospital-fashion, he looked beyond the whitewashed walls
northwards, to grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still
apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the
sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the
Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered
roof, the organ pealed ... then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki
Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and
well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the _cachet_ of authority.
Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound
fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the
poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing
about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which
his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally smote his breast and
repented. What was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should dare
to oppose the Holy Will?
"Weel now, and how are we the day?" said the Chief Medical Officer,
presented by the Resident Surgeon to the occupant of the bed. He read
approaching death in the sunken face against the pillows, and in the
feeble pulse as he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon,
catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting
information that was not needed.
"It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the conventional
answer," said Julius Fraithorn. "To be plain and brief, I am suffering
from tuberculous lung-disease, and I am advised that I have not many days
to live."
He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.
"Everything that can be done for me here is done. I cannot be too
thankful. But I should have liked--I should have wished to have been
spared to return to England, if not to live a little longer among my
friends, at least to ..." He broke off panting, and his rattling breaths
seemed to shake him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; he
wheezed like the mildewed harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he
had once tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the flat,
deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved
he had suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced the
wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin.
"I can't!" he gasped out. "You see----"
A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft, muffled voice trailed
away into a whisper, blue shadows gathered about his large, mobile,
sensitive mouth, much like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and
his head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.
"Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red shoulder-straps and
brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to another, a fair, handsome, young
giant who leaned against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse
hurried to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the
shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a
glass with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse,
stooped over the pale figure on the bed;
"No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. Should grouse myself
if I was in his shoes--or bed-socks would be the proper word--what?"
Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at
the Cabaret de l'Enfer--that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de
Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the
party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."
Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar
experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if
they've been told it's _chic_. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead
men--healthy dead men, don't you know? But--give you my word--a cadaverous
spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and
breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the
Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"
Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders,
until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:
"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the passage,
myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."
"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a
ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.
The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group of five. The
chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped
and aproned discipline, upright in the corner.
"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a
cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't
take the odds you're not as bad?"
"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a
look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted
from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the
champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels
before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning.
Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions--from
Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier
tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority--up
to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth
having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"
"By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth! Where d'you think I'd give a
cool fifty to be this minute? Not cooling my heels in a brick-paved
passage while a pack of doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a
moribund young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin'
North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears pricked for--you
know what!"
Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? And the Chief must
be ten times worse. How he keeps his countenance--demure as my
grandmother's cat lappin' cream.... I say, the Transvaal Dutch; they call
themselves the true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses
and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud,
or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw
material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in
among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women
say, when I think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel,
masquerading in Service kit.
Within the room the fainting man was coming back to consciousness, his
dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain Bingo Wrynche's similitude
regarding husks and shavings, rings of blue fire swimming before his
darkened vision, and a dull roaring in his ears.... The Royal Army Medical
Corps wrought over him; the nurse lent a deft helping hand; the Resident
Surgeon talked eagerly to the Colonel; and he, lending ear, scarcely heard
the reiterated, stereotyped parrot-phrases, so taken up was his attention
with the man in shabby white drill clothes, who leaned over the foot of
the bed, his square face set into an expressionless mask, his
gentian-blue, oddly vivid eyes fixed upon the wasted, waxy-yellow face of
the sick man, his head bent, as he listened with profound, absorbed
attention to the husky, rattling, laboured breaths.
Suddenly he straightened himself and spoke, addressing himself to the
Resident Surgeon.
"The patient has told us, sir, that he is suffering from tuberculous
disease of the lungs. May I ask, was that the conclusion arrived at by a
London consulting physician, and whether your own diagnosis has confirmed
the assertion?"
The Resident Surgeon nodded with patronising indifference. He was not
going to waste civilities upon this rowdy, drunken remittance-man, whom he
had seen reeling through the streets of the stad as he went upon his own
respectable way.
"_Phthisis pulmonalis._" He addressed his reply to the Chief. "And the
process of lung-destruction is, as you will observe, sir, nearly
complete."
He encountered from the Chief a look of cool displeasure that flushed him
to the top of his knobby forehead, and set him blinking nervously behind
his big round spectacles.
"Dr. Saxham asked you, sir, unless I mistake, whether you had ascertained
by your own diagnosis, the ..." Lady Hannah's words came back to him. He
recalled the "bit of information wormed out of the nurse," and ended with
"the presence of the bacillus?"
Saxham's blue eyes thrust their rapier-points at him, and then plunged
into the oyster-like orbs behind the spectacles of the Resident Surgeon,
who rapidly grew from scarlet to purple, and from purple to pale green.
Major Taggart and the Irishman exchanged a look of intelligence.
"Koch's bacillus, sir, were this a case of tuberculosis proper, would be
present in the expectoration of the patient, and easy of demonstration
under the microscope." Saxham's voice was cold as ice and cutting as
tempered steel. "May we take it that you can personally testify to its
presence here?" He pointed to the bed.
"And varra possibly," put in Taggart, "ye could submit a culture for
present inspection? It would be gratifeeying to me and Captain McFadyen
here, as weel as to our friend an' colleague Dr. Saxham, late of St.
Stephen's-in-the-West, London, to varrafy the correctness o' your
diagnosis."
"And it would that!" the Irishman chimed in. "So trot out your bacillus,
by all manner of means!"
The Resident Surgeon babbled something incoherent, and melted out of the
room.
"Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said McFadyen, coming back
from the door.
"He'll no be in sic a sweatin' hurry to come back," pronounced the canny
Scot, shedding a wink from a dry, red-fringed eyelid. He produced from the
roomy breast-pocket of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed
stethoscope, and put it silently into the hand Saxham had mechanically
stretched out for it. Then he drew back, his eyes, like those of the other
two spectators of the strange scene that was beginning, fixed upon the
chief actor in it. One other, weak after his swoon as a new-born child,
lay passively, helplessly upon the bed.
Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a noiseless, feline,
padding step towards the prone victim. A gleam of apprehension shot into
Julius Fraithorn's great dark eyes, reopening now to consciousness. They
fixed themselves, with an instinct born of that sudden thrill of fear,
upon the lightly-closed right hand. Instantly comprehending, Saxham lifted
the hand, showed that it held no instrument save the stethoscope, and
dropped it again by his side, drawing nearer. Then the massive,
close-cropped black head sank to the level of Julius Fraithorn's breast,
revealed in its ghastly, emaciated nakedness by the open nightshirt. The
massive shoulders bowed, the supple body curved, the keen ear joined
itself to the heaving surface. In a moment more the agonising, hacking,
rending cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising him deftly and
tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who hurried to him, answering his
low questions in whispers, giving aid where he indicated it required.
Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled over the lung
area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching for silent spaces, sucking
evidence into the assimilative brain behind the eyes that saw nothing but
the man upon the bed, the locked human casket housing the secret that was
slowly, surely coming to light. In the fierce determination to gain it, he
threw the stethoscope away, and glued his avid ear to the man again.
"Toch! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittie o' Kruger sovereigns!"
the Chief Medical Officer whispered to his colleague from Meath. And
McFadyen whispered back:
"Nor me, for your shoes. 'Ssh!"
Saxham was lifting up the great stooping shoulders, and beginning to
speak in a voice totally different from that of the man known in
Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear, ringing, concise, the sentences
left his lips:
"Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involuntary simulation of
the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary tuberculosis by a patient suffering
from a grave disease of totally different and possibly much less malignant
character. Oblige me by stepping nearer!"
They crowded about the bed like eager students.
"In order to show what false conclusions loose modes of reasoning and the
habitual reliance upon precedent may lead to, take the instance of the
consulting physician to whom some years ago this young man, now barely
thirty, and reduced, as you may see for yourselves, to the final extremity
of physical decline, resorted."
"I would gie five shillin' if the man could hear his ain judgment!"
murmured the Chief Medical Officer; for he had gleaned from a whispered
answer of Julius's the omnipotent name of Sir Jedbury Fargoe. "Toch!" He
chuckled dryly. Saxham went on:
"The consulting patient suffers from cough, painful and racking, from
impaired digestive power, from increasing debility, fever, and
night-sweats. He visits the specialist, convinced that he is consumptive,
he receives confirmation of his convictions, and you see him to-day
presenting the appearance, and reproducing all the symptoms of a patient
in consumption's final stage. Possibly the germs of tuberculosis may be
dormant in his organisation, waiting the opportunity to develop into
activity! Possibly--a very remote possibility--the disease may have
already attacked some organ of his body! But--and upon this point I can
take my stand with the confidence of absolute certainty--the lungs of this
so-called pulmonary sufferer are absolutely sound!"
"My certie! Send I may live to foregather wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe!" the
Chief Medical Officer prayed inaudibly. "He will gang to the next
International Consumption Congress wi' a smaller conceit of himsel', or my
name's no Duncan Taggart!"
The lecturer, absorbed in his subject, lifted his hand to silence the
murmur, and pursued:
"From what disease, then, is this man suffering? Logical and progressive
conclusions drawn from experience, and based upon the local enlargement
which the physicians previously consulted have apparently failed to
perceive, lead me to diagnose the presence of a tumour in the mediastinum,
extending its claws into the lungs, and seriously impeding their action
and the action of the heart. An operation, serious and necessarily
involving danger, is imperative. The growth may be benign or malignant; in
the latter case I doubt whether the life of the patient is to be saved.
But in the former case he has good hopes. Understand, I speak with
certainty. Upon the presence of the growth, simple or otherwise, I am
ready to stake my credit, my good name, my professional reputation----"
Ah! It rushed upon Saxham with a sickening shock of recollection that he
was bankrupt in these things, and shame and anger strove for the mastery
in his face, and anguish wrung a sob from him, despite his iron composure.
He wrenched at the collar about his swelling throat, as he turned away
blindly towards the window, seeing nothing, fighting desperately with the
horrible despair that had gripped him, and the mad, wild frenzy of
yearning for the old, glorious life of strenuous effort and conscious
power. Lost! lost! all that had been won.
"I ... I had forgotten ...!" he muttered; and then a hard, vigorous hand
found his and gripped it.
"Go on forgetting, Saxham!" said a voice in his ear--a voice he knew,
instantly steadying--such virtue is there in honest, heartfelt,
comprehending sympathy between man and his fellow-man--the spinning brain,
and quieting the leaping pulses, and giving him back, as nothing else
could have done, his lost self-control. "You have earned the right!"
"Man, you're a wonder!" groaned the enraptured Chief Medical Officer. He
added, with a relapse into the national caution: "That is, ye will be if
your prognosis proves correc'. But the Taggarts are a' of the canny breed
of Doobtin' Tammas, an sae I'll just keep a calm sugh till I see what the
knife lays bare."
"Use the knife now, sir. At once--without delay!"
It was the weak, muffled voice of the patient on the bed. Saxham wheeled
sharply about, and the stern blue eyes and the great lustrous pleading
brown ones, looked into each other.
The pale Julius spoke again:
"I entreat you, Doctor!"
Saxham spoke in his curt way:
"You are aware that there is risk?"
Julius Fraithorn stretched out his transparent hands.
"What risk can there be to a man in my state? Look at these; and did I not
hear you say ..."
"Whatever I may have said, sir, and however urgent I may admit the
necessity for immediate operation, you must wait until to-morrow morning."
"I am fasting, sir, and fed. I received Holy Communion this morning, and
have not yet breakfasted."
The return of the chart-nurse followed by a probationer carrying a laden
tray provoked an exclamation from the little Irishman.
"Signs on it, the boy's as empty as a drum. The devil a wonder he went off
like he did a bit back. And you can't deny him, Saxham?"
"I wad gie him the chance, Saxham"--this from Surgeon-Major Taggart--"in
your place; and maybe I'm putting in six worrds for mysel' as well as half
a dozen for the patient. For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir Jedbury
Fargoe, aboot a Regimental patient he slew for me, three years back, wi'
his jawbone of a Philistine ass."
Saxham spoke to Fraithorn authoritatively, kindly.
"You have no near relative to sign the Hospital Register?"
"My family are all in England, sir. I have not thought it necessary to
distress them with the knowledge of my state."
"I think Lady Hannah Wrynche, who is now in Gueldersdorp, happens to be an
acquaintance of theirs, if not a friend?"
Julius turned eagerly to the Colonel.
"It is true, she did come here yesterday. But I should hardly wish ...
Surely, being of mature age and in the full possession of all my
faculties"--there was a smile on the pale lips--"I may be allowed to sign
the book myself?"
The doctors interchanged a look. The Colonel said to the patient:
"Mr. Fraithorn, if the idea is not unwelcome to you, I myself will sign
the book, and"--he stooped over the bed and laid his hard, soldierly hand
kindly on the pale one--"in the event of a less fortunate termination than
that we hope for"--the faces of the three surgeons were a study in
inscrutability--"I will communicate, as soon as any communication is
rendered possible, with the Bishop and Mrs. Fraithorn."
The cough shook Julius as a terrier shakes a rat before he could gasp out:
"Thank you, sir. With all my heart I thank you!"
"You shall thank me when you get well!" The Chief shook the pale hand,
crossed the bare boards to Saxham, who stood staring at them sullenly, and
took him by the arm. They went out of the ward together, talking in low
tones. The medical officers followed. Then the chart-nurse and the
probationer who had been banished with the tray, came bustling back with
towels, and razors, and a soapy solution in a basin, having a carbolic
smell.
Dr. Saxham had gone to take a disinfecting bath, the nurse said, as she
went about her minute preparations; and the Commanding Officer had gone
with the Staff, and now her poor dear must let himself be got ready.
They wrapped the gaunt skeleton in a white blanket-robe with a heavy
monkish cowl to it, and drew thick padded blanket-stockings over the
ligament-tied, skin-covered bones that served the wasted wretch for legs,
and wheeled in a high, narrow, rubber-wheeled, leather-cushioned
stretcher, and laid him on it, light to lift, a very handful of humanity,
and wheeled him, hooded and head-first, through the tile-floored passage
and out into the golden African sunshine, that baked him gloriously
through the coverings, and so into the main building and down a
tile-floored passage there.
He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with blinded, cowled eyes, through
double doors at the end....