Kind Are Her Answers (36 page)

He was letting the second patient out of his consulting room, when he saw some one standing in the doorway. It was Mrs. Fraser; he hardly knew her for a moment—she had always been a red-faced woman, and young for her age.

“Oh, Dr. Anderson. I’m so sorry—in the middle of surgery. Could you come? John’s been taken ill.”

“Of course. Where is he?” The words formed themselves; he felt dissociated from them. He himself was saying, “No; I’ve been had like this before. Not this time.”

“He’s in his room. We just managed to get him there—the maid and I. It came on in the morning room, just after breakfast. I thought at first it was simply another gastric twinge, but then when he went such a terrible colour, and couldn’t move, I knew it must be something serious. He makes light of everything, as a rule. He seems to have less pain now. … So thankful you were in.” He did not hear everything she said. She trotted beside him on her thick stocky legs, wheezing a little as she kept up with his longer strides.

He was thinking, The old fool’s had this coming to him for months. I knew it all along. Why couldn’t he get himself seen to? Why should I pay for his pig-headed heroics? Not this time. His voice, separately animated it seemed, spoke soothingly to Mrs. Fraser and asked what her husband had had for breakfast.

“I—really, I don’t think I can remember. Just our ordinary breakfast.” She was a sensible woman, as a rule. He did not ask her anything more. They had reached Fraser’s room, and he had all the information he needed.

Fraser lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, breathing quickly from the top of his chest. His hands were clasped behind his head, and his knees drawn upward. His skin looked grey and shrunken, and his eyes were deep cavities ringed with blue. He turned his head as Kit came in, and his face flickered in the way of one who is unwilling to labour the obvious. With a caution that sat grotesquely on her solid frame, Mrs. Fraser began to tiptoe from the room. Kit followed her to the door to ask for hot-water bottles.

He went up to the bed, searching for words of reassurance, and feeling the usual diffidence of one medical man in the presence of another. The running, thready pulse, when he found it, was of a piece with everything else.

“This is too bad,” he said quietly. “No, don’t worry, I can manage.” He loosened Fraser’s clothes.

In a voice that seemed to form itself on his palate, Fraser said, “Almost—waste of time. I should say—a classic perforation. I’m afraid—been a little unwise.”

Kit had felt the board-like rigidity of the abdomen, and refrained from uttering euphemisms. Fraser still had an intelligence to be insulted.

“I’ll get on to Harbutson right away. You’d like him, I expect? Just time to catch him before he starts for the hospital.”

Mrs. Fraser came in with her bottles and blankets. He helped her to pack Fraser in them; she sat down beside him, and took his hand under the clothes, murmuring, as if she were encouraging a little boy, all those heartening platitudes which Kit had avoided. Fraser gave her a smile which made his face look more sunken than ever, and closed his eyes.

The call to the surgeon did not take long; Kit had been Harbutson’s houseman at the hospital. He suggested that Fraser be got into a private ward at once; he would look at him there.

An interval followed in which Kit seemed to be in several places at once: explaining to Fraser; telephoning for an ambulance, then for a locum; finding his house-keeper (a small brisk woman who was everything the agency had claimed for her) and sending her off to help Mrs. Fraser; weeding through Fraser’s patients and his own, asking the urgent ones to wait and the less urgent to come back in the evening. It was not till he had repeated this formula for the third time that he remembered.

For a moment all the interlocking wheels of activity seemed to stop together. The chain of mental and physical habit snapped. Two opposites became self-evident at once. The only difference between them was that what he was doing here could have been done by any one of several hundred men with the same qualifications. His qualifications for what he had meant to do were unique.

Even as he thought it, the chain linked up again, the wheels revolved; his mind returned to Fraser, the ambulance, the locum, the patient in front of him. She was saying that she was so sorry to hear about Dr. Fraser, that her little trouble would do to-morrow just as well. The clock on the mantelpiece had not moved.

The wheels of the ambulance sounded in the drive; Kit went up to see Fraser put on the stretcher. His pulse was weaker, but he was still conscious.

“Everything’s all right. Locum on the way. It’s Garrould—you had him the year before last.”

Fraser’s grey-white face made a faint movement of assent and satisfaction. Kit saw, because he was trying to steady his diaphragm with his hand, that he wanted to speak.

“Then—possibly—” (his voice was so shallow that he needed a breath almost for every word) “—you might—manage—give the anaesthetic. Always felt—utmost confidence—” His voice faded.

Kit said, “Of course, if you want me to. I was hoping Harbutson might see his way to letting me. I don’t think he’ll mind.” The stretcher was ready; he helped the porters and the nurse to lift Fraser onto it.

The negotiation of corners and steps was a longish business; but to Kit it seemed that immediately after he had spoken he was standing alone in the hall. The clockwork had slowed down. Suddenly, there seemed to be a great deal of time. He stood staring at a salver with visiting cards on it, thinking of Christie, who an hour ago had been on the other side of an unlocked door. He could hear her voice, saying something familiar. “You know the way things happen.” At the time he had pitied her incompetence, and wondered how it felt.

He looked at his watch. There would just be time to deal with the urgent cases before they had the theatre ready for Fraser. He went into the consulting room, and found the place in the day-book.

“I
S HE DEEP ENOUGH?”
asked Kit.

Harbutson nodded. His scalpel traced its first delicate line across the skin. Kit pulled the gas-and-oxygen cylinder an inch or two nearer. Fraser had become anonymous, reduced to an incision between sterile towels, a faint pulse beating in the carotid under Kit’s fingertips.

The warm air of the theatre hung motionless; its rubber flooring swallowed the sounds of shifting feet. Each rustle of the theatre Sister’s crisp gown was audible. From an anteroom the bubbling of a sterilizer came clearly through the quiet, like the humming of a single insect in summer calm.

A faint click told Kit that Harbutson was being handed artery forceps. He did not look up. Just beyond the level of his eyes, four gloved hands came and went, stealthy in their silence and spare movement, but they were nothing to do with him. His field of attention was bounded by the throat where his fingers rested.

“He’s a shade rigid; can you get him a little deeper?”

“Sorry, sir.” Harbutson was an excellent surgeon, but not a rapid one. Kit looked at the gas-gauge, and moved the handle over. His senses were reduced to a fine point, concentrated in his finger-ends.

“He’ll do now.”

Yes, thought Kit, he’ll have to do; he’s got what he can take. He lifted his eyes for a second; Harbutson had got into the stomach at last. The Sister was extending a needle-holder. Kit thought, Why doesn’t he get a move on? I’d forgotten he was so slow. How many hours does he think he can take over a semi-collapsed patient of nearly seventy? Rigid, hell.

Harbutson was clucking softly in his throat over the extent of the perforation. Why, wondered Kit unreasonably, does he waste time making damn-fool noises? He lifted Fraser’s eyelids; the limit was very close.

“What’s he like now?”

“Not too good, sir.” (What do you expect, pottering about as if it were a post-mortem? It will be, too, if it goes on much longer.)

His irritability, the press of an extra sense of urgency, was the only personal trace of Fraser for which his concentration had room. One of the nurses dropped a dirty instrument on the floor. Its slight ring sounded shockingly loud. Fraser’s pulse was barely perceptible. He glanced at the emergency hypodermic on the glass trolley beside him. Catching his eye, the nurse who had brought Fraser down came forward and filled it.

At last, at last, Harbutson was suturing the peritoneum. Repressing an audible noise of relief, Kit eased the flow of nitrous oxide. For the minutes that were left, Fraser’s chances had risen, perhaps, to fifty-fifty. But the words, “He’s not breathing, sir,” still formed themselves, ready, on his tongue. He saw, as if it were happening, the high-pressure machinery they would set in motion.

At last, like a shaken kaleidoscope, the smooth silent group relaxed and broke. Harbutson was stepping back, the assistant putting pads of gauze on the wound, the ward nurse hurrying forward with her wide rolled bandage, the theatre nurses whisking instruments away. It was over. Kit unstrapped the mask from Fraser’s face; the porters came in with the trolley to take him back to the ward. More instruments were produced, more sterile towels; by the time the trolley had disappeared, the theatre was already half prepared for the next case.

Kit stood up, feeling as if something immensely heavy had fallen from his straightened back. Harbutson was having his tapes untied by a probationer while he peeled off his gloves. Kit glanced at the electric clock on the wall; after all, it had only taken a minute or two over the average time.

Harbutson, scrubbing at the sink, looked round at him.

“He should do, with luck. Must have been working up to this for some time, you know.” His voice was faintly reproachful.

“Yes. I suppose he was treating himself; but he wasn’t fond of talking about it.”

Harbutson clucked to himself; the sound probably indicated sympathy. “He ought to have an intravenous right away. I could ask the R.S.O. presently, but I was wondering whether you’d care to do it? We shall be rather pushed with the list to-day.”

Kit said, “Certainly, I’ll be glad to.”

He threw down his theatre coat in a corner of the anteroom (the trolley with the next case was there already) and took down the white one he had been wearing. He hoped the private ward would have the intravenous set ready. With a man in Fraser’s condition it would probably be a long job to get into the vein. The sense of time and urgency still pressed on him; the feeling that something must be done in a hurry or it would be too late. He wanted to get rid of the feeling; the operation was over, after all, and an intravenous saline was nothing desperate. But he hurried along the corridors, quickly getting rid of any one who wanted to stop and greet him, the longing for haste still thrusting him on.

Fraser was just conscious, too weak to do more than follow Kit’s movements with his eyes. It was hard to remember who he was; he looked like a hundred old men whom Kit had seen among the same paraphernalia, wearing the same shapeless operation gown. The set was ready; the Sister, who helped him herself, quick and efficient. Everything was done in the minimum of time. He felt a deep, unconscious release in setting his own pace instead of waiting on some one else’s. The Sister, who had known him as a houseman, showed signs of wanting to keep him for a chat, but he eluded her.

There were two urgent cases waiting when he got back; he drove straight out to them, and from them to the ordinary round, without stopping for a meal. Speed satisfied him, like a drug to which he was becoming addicted. When he had finished, he drove back to the hospital to see Fraser again.

Mrs. Fraser, he found, was already with her husband. They seemed satisfied with his condition. Kit said he would wait till she had gone; there was no hurry. The phrase, as he uttered it, sounded odd and unreal.

Every one was busy, so he strolled out into the corridor. It was his first moment of inactivity since morning; the muscles of his mind seemed suddenly to sag, and his thoughts, which had consisted for hours of plans for immediate action, were wiped clean like a sponged slate. Voices drifted out to him from the nurses’ duty room; for a few minutes they were simply noises, like the noises of feet in the main passage outside.

“… that intravenous on top of everything. It saved my bacon, Sister doing it. I will say, she does work.”

“Well, you know why—it was Mr. Anderson. She was batty about him when he was R.S.O. here. Walker says the week he got married it was just hell to be on the ward.”

Kit, his ears suddenly opened, began a cautious retreat. Just before he moved out of earshot, the first nurse said,

“No, really? That was before my time. I must say, I thought he was rather a lamb when he came to Collis on Christmas Day.”

Kit passed beyond their voices, into a silence which nothing penetrated. From the memory of that Christmas other memories ringed outward, like the expanding rings made in water by a stone; back to the night when he had first seen Christie, onward to yesterday. For the first time, as if he were looking down from a height over a winding stream along which he had drifted, he saw it all together, without the interference of desire or dread. As a deep sleep clears perplexities away, the absolute removal of his mind during these last hours gave him now, by accident, the knowledge he had wrestled for in vain. He saw that he had failed her. Imprisoned in his own longing, he had been able only to reach for her or to thrust her away; he had not been able to free her or to give her light. She had required wisdom of him, not sacrifice; and he had been wise, not for her but for himself.

He had won a victory in his own will, achieving a discipline of which this moment of true perspective was the reward. He would, perhaps, be stronger and more confident for it all his life. But her he had weakened, because he had made a decision for her which she had had it in her to make for herself. Remembering her last letter, he knew that she was groping towards the same realization.

Well, it was finished. Perhaps she would be happy with Burford, perhaps unhappy; it was certain that she would be more alone. Probably Burford, who would not confuse the innermost part of her because he would never find it, would be more use to her in the end.