CHAPTER XIII

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 watch-chain 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 lamp-light.

“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 farm-house 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 an?sthetics?”

“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 have temporized, or played the traitor by surrendering to nature. Murchison’s conscience was too strong 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 an?sthetic 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 an?sthetic 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 dressing-table. 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 doctors 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 to-morrow.”

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 farm-house 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 know how you have suffered.”