A Woman's War, Warwick Deeping [have you read this book .TXT] 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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“Thank you; you sympathize, I am sure.”
“Of course.” And being a nice youth he showed his
consideration by retreating and buttoning his coat up
over his burden of incompetence.
The physical prostration of a strong man who has
sinned against his body is as nothing to the bitter humiliation of his soul. Ethical defeat is the most poignant of
all disasters. Like an athlete who has strained heart and
lungs only to be beaten, he feels that anguish of exhaustion, that miserable sense of impotence, the conviction
that his strength has been of no avail. Spiritual defeat
has its more subtle agonies. In some such overwhelming
of the soul the man may turn his face like Hezekiah to the
wall, and refuse to be comforted because of his own shame.
To Catherine her husband’s awakening anguish had
been pitiable in the extreme. He had lain like one wounded to the death, refusing to be comforted or to be assured
of hope. Slowly, as she had sat by him and held his hand,
he had told her everything, blurting out the confession
with a sullen yet desperate self-hate. The very pathos of
her trust in him, the divine quickness in her to forgive,
had been as girdles of thorn about his body. What had
he done to justify her love? Disgraced and humiliated
her in this haven of rest her hands had made for him!
To appreciate to the full the irony of life, a man has
but to be unfortunate for perhaps three days. It
was about four in the afternoon when Catherine, sitting
beside her husband’s bed, heard the unwelcome panting
of the car. The man Gage had driven fast from Boland’s
Farm. He had a letter from Dr. Inglis, an urgent message, so he had been told.
Catherine met him at the gate, and took the letter to
her husband.
“A message, dear, from Dr. Inglis.”
He reached for it with a hand that trembled, his eyes
faltering from her face. She sat down by the bed, watching him silently as he tore open the envelope and read
the letter.
“DEAR MURCHISON, Please come over at once, if possible. Hicks has diagnosed acute internal strangulated
hernia. He has been called off to a midwifery case.
The relatives are getting out of hand. I think an immediate operation will be necessary. I have been to
Lombard Street, and got the instruments together.
“INGLIS.”
The jerky, straggling sentences betrayed the theorist’s
loss of nerve and self-control. It was evident that the
gentleman with the gilded degrees was in no enviable
panic.
“Well, dear?”
She bent over him, and touched his forehead.
“I shall have to go,” he said, sombrely.
“Go, but you are not fit!”
He sat up in bed, looked at her, and gave a wry and
miserable smile.
“If I had not been such an infernal fool! The last time,
Kate, I swear!”
She caught the letter and read it through.
“Inglis is a miserable thing to lean on.”
“Don’t blame the youngster. At least he is sober.”
She winced, as though his self-condemnation hurt her,
and surrendering her fortitude of a sudden, broke out
into tears. Murchison looked at her helplessly, feeling
like a man bound and chained by the shame of his own
manhood. He felt himself unworthy to touch her, too
much humiliated even to offer comfort. The very sincerity
of his self-disgust drove him to action. He sprang out
of bed and began to dress.
Catherine, still sobbing, went to the window and strove
to overcome the shuddering weakness that had seized
her. Her husband’s determination appeared to increase
at the expense of her surrender. It was as though they
had exchanged moods in a moment, and that the wife’s
tears had given the man courage.
“Kate.”
She leaned against the window, and brushed her tears
aside with her hand.
“Forgive me, dear. I was a fool, an accursed fool.
Never again. Trust me.”
He touched her arm appealingly, like an awed lover
who fears to offend. Catherine turned her head and
looked at him, her courage shining through her tears.
“Your words hurt me. You called yourself a drunkard. No, no, you are not that. Oh, my beloved, I need
you now and you must go.”
His arms were round her in an instant.
“Wife, look up. God help me, I will conquer the curse!
How can I fail, with you?”
“Never again? swear it.”
“Never. It was a trick of the brain, a damned piece
of moral vanity. And I am a man who advises others!”
She turned, and, standing before the glass, pinned on
her hat and threw her dust cloak round her.
“I will come with you.”
“Where?”
“Home, to the children,” and she gave a great sob.
“Mrs. Graham can look after the cottage. You will
want me at home.”
“Wife, I want you always.”
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 watchchain 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
lamplight.
“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 farmhouse 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 anaesthetics?”
“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
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