Part 32 (1/2)
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-cus.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sage and out into the golden African suns.h.i.+ne, that baked him gloriously through the coverings, and so into the main building and down a tile-floored pa.s.sage there.
He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with blinded, cowled eyes, through double doors at the end....
XXVI
The operation was over, and the two Celts, self-appointed to the temporary posts of a.s.sistant-surgeon and anaesthetist, expressed their emotions in characteristic manner....
”Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision an' the last st.i.tch.... Och, Owen, the jewel you are! Give me the loan of your fist, man, this minute.”
”What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo? The auld-farrant, scraichin', obstinate grey gander. A hand I will tak' at him ower the head o' this, or I'm no Taggart of Taggartshowe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was a pretty operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quickness. And I'm sorry there are no' a baker's dozen o' patients for ye to deal wi'. It's a gran'
treat to see a borrn genius use the knife.”
”You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time.”
”Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna! I doubt but we Army billies are better at puttin' men thegither than at takin' them to pieces in the long run.... Gently now, porter, wi' liftin' the patient.... Ay, McFadyen, that's richt, gie the man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no' fine to luik at? A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse is better than I would have expeckit. Wheel him awa', nurse; he'll no come round for another hour....”
They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward. The porter followed. The three surgeons standing by that grim table in the rubber-floored central s.p.a.ce of the amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and ap.r.o.ned with sterilised material, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered, and splashed with the same ominous stains that were on the table and upon the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and sinister as ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber, or figured in a nightmare-tale of Poe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of sharp and gleaming implements in a gla.s.s bath of carbolic; Taggart, standing at a gla.s.s table, rubber-wheeled and movable, like everything else for use, and laden with rolls of lint and bandaging, and blue-gla.s.s bottles of peroxide of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily returning reels of silk-worm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their velvet-lined case.
”You're no' fatigued? You would no' like a steemulant?”
Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been staring with dull intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter, forgotten by the matron, whose usual charge it was. And the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart followed the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.
”Fatigued? I hardly think so!”