A Woman's War, Warwick Deeping [have you read this book .TXT] 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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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 anaesthetic 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 anaesthetic 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 dressingtable.
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 doctor’s 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 tomorrow.”
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 farmhouse 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 knowhowyou have suffered.”
MURCHISON slept the sleep of the just that night,
to wake to the golden stillness of a July day. With
the return of consciousness came a feeling of profound
relief as he remembered the ordeal of the preceding evening. Catherine had risen while he was yet asleep, and
was standing before the pier-glass combing her lambent
hair. Murchison’s eyes had opened to all the familiar
beauty of the room, the delicate touches of color, the
books and pictures, the sunlight shining upon the curtains with their simple stencilling of scarlet tulips. He
lay still awhile, watching his wife, and the tremulous
glimmer of the, golden threads tossed from the sweeping
comb. Catherine had been spared the lot of many of
the married, that casual kindness, that familiar monotony
that smothers all romance. Love is often blessed when
gleaning the fields of sorrow, and the pathos of life is an
inspiration towards poetry. Those who suffer most are
the children of the spirit. Life never loses its mystery
for the idealist, while your epicier has no stronger joy
than the purchasing of a red-wheeled gig or the building
of some abominable and inflamed-face villa.
Murchison rose, kissed his wife, and dressed to the
sound of his children laughing and romping in the nursery.
There was something invigorating to him in their noisy
prattle, a breath of the east wind, a glimpse of the sea.
On the landing he met Miss Gwen running to him with
open arms. Murchison seized on the child, and kissed
her, as though God had given him a pledge of honor.
The clean home-life seemed very sweet to him that morning. He felt strong and sure again, ready to retrieve the
unhappiness of yesterday.
The day’s first rebuff met him at the breakfasttable
when a rough cart stopped outside the house, and the
maid brought him a dirty note from Boland’s Farm,
with “Immediate” scrawled across the corner of the
envelope. Instinct warned Murchison that it contained
bad news, and Catherine saw the clouding of her husband’s face as he read the letter.
“Mr. Baxter is worse, dear?”
“Yes,” and he passed her the note; “it is the species
of case that breeds bad feeling.”
Catherine flushed angrily as she read the letter. It
came from Mrs. Baxter, and was the impertinent production of a vulgar and half-educated mind.
“What an insufferable person. And this is gratitude!
Shall you go, dear?”
“I must. They refuse to see Inglis.”
Catherine’s eyes glistened as she returned the letter.
“Professional men have much to bear,” she said.
“Chiefly the criticism of ignorant people.”
“And the ingratitude!”
Murchison smiled.
“I have found the good to outweigh the bad,” he said;
“but these cases sadden one.”
The hours had passed stormily at Boland’s Farm.
There had been a brisk battle between Mrs. Baxter and
the nurse, before the latter lady had spent sixty minutes
under the farmhouse roof, a battle that had originated
in the simple brewing of a basin of beef-tea. The nurse
and the housewife advocated different methods, and the
trivial variation had been sufficient to set the women
quarrelling. Dr. Inglis had intervened in the middle of
the discussion, only to divert Mrs. Baxter’s anger to himself. She had assured the theorist bluntly that they
needed him no further, and had requested him to inform
Dr. Murchison that the Baxters, of Boland’s Farm,
were not to be insulted by being served by an assistant.
Despite the
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