Part 20 (1/2)
”I think--I think they must be expecting me at home.”
”There's no sense in funking. If you don't go to-day you must to-morrow.
Better get it over at once. Feel pretty fit?”
”Oh, yes, all right.”
The smile was not a success.
”One more gla.s.s of sherry, then. Now come on or we shall be late. I want you to be well in front.”
”Surely that is not necessary.”
”Oh, it is far better. What a drove of students! There are plenty of new men among them. You can tell them easily enough, can't you? If they were going down to be operated upon themselves they could not look whiter.”
”I don't think I should look as white.”
”Well, I was just the same myself. But the feeling soon wears off. You see a fellow with a face like plaster, and before the week is out he is eating his lunch in the dissecting rooms. I'll tell you all about the case when we get to the theatre.”
The students were pouring down the sloping street which led to the infirmary--each with his little sheaf of note-books in his hand. There were pale, frightened lads, fresh from the High Schools, and callous old chronics, whose generation had pa.s.sed on and left them. They swept in an unbroken, tumultuous stream from the University gate to the hospital.
The figures and gait of the men were young, but there was little youth in most of their faces. Some looked as if they ate too little--a few as if they drank too much. Tall and short, tweed coated and black, round-shouldered, bespectacled and slim, they crowded with clatter of feet and rattle of sticks through the hospital gate. Now and again they thickened into two lines as the carriage of a surgeon of the staff rolled over the cobblestones between.
”There's going to be a crowd at Archer's,” whispered the senior man with suppressed excitement. ”It is grand to see him at work. I've seen him jab all round the aorta until it made me jumpy to watch him. This way, and mind the whitewash.”
They pa.s.sed under an archway and down a long, stone-flagged corridor with drab-coloured doors on either side, each marked with a number. Some of them were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with tingling nerves. He was rea.s.sured to catch a glimpse of cheery fires, lines of white-counterpaned beds and a profusion of coloured texts upon the wall.
The corridor opened upon a small hall with a fringe of poorly-clad people seated all round upon benches. A young man with a pair of scissors stuck, like a flower, in his b.u.t.ton-hole, and a note-book in his hand, was pa.s.sing from one to the other, whispering and writing.
”Anything good?” asked the third year's man.
”You should have been here yesterday,” said the out-patient clerk, glancing up. ”We had a regular field day. A popliteal aneurism, a Colles' fracture, a spina bifida, a tropical abscess, and an elephantiasis. How's that for a single haul?”
”I'm sorry I missed it. But they'll come again, I suppose. What's up with the old gentleman?”
A broken workman was sitting in the shadow, rocking himself slowly to and fro and groaning. A woman beside him was trying to console him, patting his shoulder with a hand which was spotted over with curious little white blisters.
”It's a fine carbuncle,” said the clerk, with the air of a connoisseur who describes his orchids to one who can appreciate them. ”It's on his back, and the pa.s.sage is draughty, so we must not look at it, must we, daddy? Pemphigus,” he added carelessly, pointing to the woman's disfigured hands. ”Would you care to stop and take out a metacarpal?”
”No, thank you, we are due at Archer's. Come on;” and they rejoined the throng, which was hurrying to the theatre of the famous surgeon.
The tiers of horseshoe benches, rising from the floor to the ceiling, were already packed, and the novice as he entered saw vague, curving lines of faces in front of him, and heard the deep buzz of a hundred voices and sounds of laughter from somewhere up above him. His companion spied an opening on the second bench, and they both squeezed into it.
”This is grand,” the senior man whispered; ”you'll have a rare view of it all.”
Only a single row of heads intervened between them and the operating table. It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong and scrupulously clean. A sheet of brown waterproofing covered half of it, and beneath stood a large tin tray full of sawdust. On the farther side, in front of the window, there was a board which was strewed with glittering instruments, forceps, tenacula, saws, canulas, and trocars. A line of knives, with long, thin, delicate blades, lay at one side. Two young men lounged in front of this; one threading needles, the other doing something to a bra.s.s coffee-pot-like thing which hissed out puffs of steam.
”That's Peterson,” whispered the senior. ”The big, bald man in the front row. He's the skin-grafting man, you know. And that's Anthony Browne, who took a larynx out successfully last winter. And there's Murphy the pathologist, and Stoddart the eye man. You'll come to know them all soon.”
”Who are the two men at the table?”
”n.o.body--dressers. One has charge of the instruments and the other of the puffing Billy. It's Lister's antiseptic spray, you know, and Archer's one of the carbolic acid men. Hayes is the leader of the cleanliness-and-cold-water school, and they all hate each other like poison.”