Part 20

A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft, muffled voice trailed away into a whisper, blue shadows gathered about his large, mobile, sensitive mouth, much like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and his head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.

"Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red shoulder-straps and brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to another, a fair, handsome, young giant who leaned against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse hurried to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a glass with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse, stooped over the pale figure on the bed;

"No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. Should grouse myself if I was in his shoes--or bed-socks would be the proper word--what?"

Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at the Cabaret de l'Enfer--that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."

Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if they've been told it's _chic_. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead men--healthy dead men, don't you know? But--give you my word--a cadaverous spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"

Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders, until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:

"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the passage, myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."

"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.

The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group of five. The chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped and aproned discipline, upright in the corner.

"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't take the odds you're not as bad?"

"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning. Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions--from Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority--up to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"

"By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth! Where d'you think I'd give a cool fifty to be this minute? Not cooling my heels in a brick-paved passage while a pack of doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a moribund young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin' North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears pricked for--you know what!"

Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? And the Chief must be ten times worse. How he keeps his countenance--demure as my grandmother's cat lappin' cream.... I say, the Transvaal Dutch; they call themselves the true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud, or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women say, when I think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel, masquerading in Service kit.

Within the room the fainting man was coming back to consciousness, his dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain Bingo Wrynche's similitude regarding husks and shavings, rings of blue fire swimming before his darkened vision, and a dull roaring in his ears.... The Royal Army Medical Corps wrought over him; the nurse lent a deft helping hand; the Resident Surgeon talked eagerly to the Colonel; and he, lending ear, scarcely heard the reiterated, stereotyped parrot-phrases, so taken up was his attention with the man in shabby white drill clothes, who leaned over the foot of the bed, his square face set into an expressionless mask, his gentian-blue, oddly vivid eyes fixed upon the wasted, waxy-yellow face of the sick man, his head bent, as he listened with profound, absorbed attention to the husky, rattling, laboured breaths.

Suddenly he straightened himself and spoke, addressing himself to the Resident Surgeon.

"The patient has told us, sir, that he is suffering from tuberculous disease of the lungs. May I ask, was that the conclusion arrived at by a London consulting physician, and whether your own diagnosis has confirmed the assertion?"

The Resident Surgeon nodded with patronising indifference. He was not going to waste civilities upon this rowdy, drunken remittance-man, whom he had seen reeling through the streets of the stad as he went upon his own respectable way.

"_Phthisis pulmonalis._" He addressed his reply to the Chief. "And the process of lung-destruction is, as you will observe, sir, nearly complete."

He encountered from the Chief a look of cool displeasure that flushed him to the top of his knobby forehead, and set him blinking nervously behind his big round spectacles.

"Dr. Saxham asked you, sir, unless I mistake, whether you had ascertained by your own diagnosis, the ..." Lady Hannah's words came back to him. He recalled the "bit of information wormed out of the nurse," and ended with "the presence of the bacillus?"

Saxham's blue eyes thrust their rapier-points at him, and then plunged into the oyster-like orbs behind the spectacles of the Resident Surgeon, who rapidly grew from scarlet to purple, and from purple to pale green. Major Taggart and the Irishman exchanged a look of intelligence.

"Koch's bacillus, sir, were this a case of tuberculosis proper, would be present in the expectoration of the patient, and easy of demonstration under the microscope." Saxham's voice was cold as ice and cutting as tempered steel. "May we take it that you can personally testify to its presence here?" He pointed to the bed.

"And varra possibly," put in Taggart, "ye could submit a culture for present inspection? It would be gratifeeying to me and Captain McFadyen here, as weel as to our friend an' colleague Dr. Saxham, late of St. Stephen's-in-the-West, London, to varrafy the correctness o' your diagnosis."

"And it would that!" the Irishman chimed in. "So trot out your bacillus, by all manner of means!"

The Resident Surgeon babbled something incoherent, and melted out of the room.

"Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said McFadyen, coming back from the door.

"He'll no be in sic a sweatin' hurry to come back," pronounced the canny Scot, shedding a wink from a dry, red-fringed eyelid. He produced from the roomy breast-pocket of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed stethoscope, and put it silently into the hand Saxham had mechanically stretched out for it. Then he drew back, his eyes, like those of the other two spectators of the strange scene that was beginning, fixed upon the chief actor in it. One other, weak after his swoon as a new-born child, lay passively, helplessly upon the bed.

Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a noiseless, feline, padding step towards the prone victim. A gleam of apprehension shot into Julius Fraithorn's great dark eyes, reopening now to consciousness. They fixed themselves, with an instinct born of that sudden thrill of fear, upon the lightly-closed right hand. Instantly comprehending, Saxham lifted the hand, showed that it held no instrument save the stethoscope, and dropped it again by his side, drawing nearer. Then the massive, close-cropped black head sank to the level of Julius Fraithorn's breast, revealed in its ghastly, emaciated nakedness by the open nightshirt. The massive shoulders bowed, the supple body curved, the keen ear joined itself to the heaving surface. In a moment more the agonising, hacking, rending cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising him deftly and tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who hurried to him, answering his low questions in whispers, giving aid where he indicated it required.

Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled over the lung area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching for silent spaces, sucking evidence into the assimilative brain behind the eyes that saw nothing but the man upon the bed, the locked human casket housing the secret that was slowly, surely coming to light. In the fierce determination to gain it, he threw the stethoscope away, and glued his avid ear to the man again.

"Toch! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittie o' Kruger sovereigns!" the Chief Medical Officer whispered to his colleague from Meath. And McFadyen whispered back:

"Nor me, for your shoes. 'Ssh!"

Saxham was lifting up the great stooping shoulders, and beginning to speak in a voice totally different from that of the man known in Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear, ringing, concise, the sentences left his lips:

"Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involuntary simulation of the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary tuberculosis by a patient suffering from a grave disease of totally different and possibly much less malignant character. Oblige me by stepping nearer!"

They crowded about the bed like eager students.

"In order to show what false conclusions loose modes of reasoning and the habitual reliance upon precedent may lead to, take the instance of the consulting physician to whom some years ago this young man, now barely thirty, and reduced, as you may see for yourselves, to the final extremity of physical decline, resorted."

"I would gie five shillin' if the man could hear his ain judgment!" murmured the Chief Medical Officer; for he had gleaned from a whispered answer of Julius's the omnipotent name of Sir Jedbury Fargoe. "Toch!" He chuckled dryly. Saxham went on:

"The consulting patient suffers from cough, painful and racking, from impaired digestive power, from increasing debility, fever, and night-sweats. He visits the specialist, convinced that he is consumptive, he receives confirmation of his convictions, and you see him to-day presenting the appearance, and reproducing all the symptoms of a patient in consumption's final stage. Possibly the germs of tuberculosis may be dormant in his organisation, waiting the opportunity to develop into

## activity! Possibly--a very remote possibility--the disease may have

already attacked some organ of his body! But--and upon this point I can take my stand with the confidence of absolute certainty--the lungs of this so-called pulmonary sufferer are absolutely sound!"

"My certie! Send I may live to foregather wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe!" the Chief Medical Officer prayed inaudibly. "He will gang to the next International Consumption Congress wi' a smaller conceit of himsel', or my name's no Duncan Taggart!"

The lecturer, absorbed in his subject, lifted his hand to silence the murmur, and pursued:

"From what disease, then, is this man suffering? Logical and progressive conclusions drawn from experience, and based upon the local enlargement which the physicians previously consulted have apparently failed to perceive, lead me to diagnose the presence of a tumour in the mediastinum, extending its claws into the lungs, and seriously impeding their action and the action of the heart. An operation, serious and necessarily involving danger, is imperative. The growth may be benign or malignant; in the latter case I doubt whether the life of the patient is to be saved. But in the former case he has good hopes. Understand, I speak with certainty. Upon the presence of the growth, simple or otherwise, I am ready to stake my credit, my good name, my professional reputation----"

Ah! It rushed upon Saxham with a sickening shock of recollection that he was bankrupt in these things, and shame and anger strove for the mastery in his face, and anguish wrung a sob from him, despite his iron composure.

He wrenched at the collar about his swelling throat, as he turned away blindly towards the window, seeing nothing, fighting desperately with the horrible despair that had gripped him, and the mad, wild frenzy of yearning for the old, glorious life of strenuous effort and conscious power. Lost! lost! all that had been won.

"I ... I had forgotten ...!" he muttered; and then a hard, vigorous hand found his and gripped it.

"Go on forgetting, Saxham!" said a voice in his ear--a voice he knew, instantly steadying--such virtue is there in honest, heartfelt, comprehending sympathy between man and his fellow-man--the spinning brain, and quieting the leaping pulses, and giving him back, as nothing else could have done, his lost self-control. "You have earned the right!"

"Man, you're a wonder!" groaned the enraptured Chief Medical Officer. He added, with a relapse into the national caution: "That is, ye will be if your prognosis proves correc'. But the Taggarts are a' of the canny breed of Doobtin' Tammas, an sae I'll just keep a calm sugh till I see what the knife lays bare."

"Use the knife now, sir. At once--without delay!"

It was the weak, muffled voice of the patient on the bed. Saxham wheeled sharply about, and the stern blue eyes and the great lustrous pleading brown ones, looked into each other.

The pale Julius spoke again:

"I entreat you, Doctor!"

Saxham spoke in his curt way:

"You are aware that there is risk?"

Julius Fraithorn stretched out his transparent hands.

"What risk can there be to a man in my state? Look at these; and did I not hear you say ..."

"Whatever I may have said, sir, and however urgent I may admit the necessity for immediate operation, you must wait until to-morrow morning."

"I am fasting, sir, and fed. I received Holy Communion this morning, and have not yet breakfasted."

The return of the chart-nurse followed by a probationer carrying a laden tray provoked an exclamation from the little Irishman.

"Signs on it, the boy's as empty as a drum. The devil a wonder he went off like he did a bit back. And you can't deny him, Saxham?"

"I wad gie him the chance, Saxham"--this from Surgeon-Major Taggart--"in your place; and maybe I'm putting in six worrds for mysel' as well as half a dozen for the patient. For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe, aboot a Regimental patient he slew for me, three years back, wi' his jawbone of a Philistine ass."

Saxham spoke to Fraithorn authoritatively, kindly.

"You have no near relative to sign the Hospital Register?"

"My family are all in England, sir. I have not thought it necessary to distress them with the knowledge of my state."

"I think Lady Hannah Wrynche, who is now in Gueldersdorp, happens to be an acquaintance of theirs, if not a friend?"

Julius turned eagerly to the Colonel.

"It is true, she did come here yesterday. But I should hardly wish ... Surely, being of mature age and in the full possession of all my faculties"--there was a smile on the pale lips--"I may be allowed to sign the book myself?"

The doctors interchanged a look. The Colonel said to the patient:

"Mr. Fraithorn, if the idea is not unwelcome to you, I myself will sign the book, and"--he stooped over the bed and laid his hard, soldierly hand kindly on the pale one--"in the event of a less fortunate termination than that we hope for"--the faces of the three surgeons were a study in inscrutability--"I will communicate, as soon as any communication is rendered possible, with the Bishop and Mrs. Fraithorn."

The cough shook Julius as a terrier shakes a rat before he could gasp out:

"Thank you, sir. With all my heart I thank you!"

"You shall thank me when you get well!" The Chief shook the pale hand, crossed the bare boards to Saxham, who stood staring at them sullenly, and took him by the arm. They went out of the ward together, talking in low tones. The medical officers followed. Then the chart-nurse and the probationer who had been banished with the tray, came bustling back with towels, and razors, and a soapy solution in a basin, having a carbolic smell.

Dr. Saxham had gone to take a disinfecting bath, the nurse said, as she went about her minute preparations; and the Commanding Officer had gone with the Staff, and now her poor dear must let himself be got ready.

They wrapped the gaunt skeleton in a white blanket-robe with a heavy monkish cowl to it, and drew thick padded blanket-stockings over the ligament-tied, skin-covered bones that served the wasted wretch for legs, and wheeled in a high, narrow, rubber-wheeled, leather-cushioned stretcher, and laid him on it, light to lift, a very handful of humanity, and wheeled him, hooded and head-first, through the tile-floored passage and out into the golden African sunshine, that baked him gloriously through the coverings, and so into the main building and down a tile-floored passage there.

He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with blinded, cowled eyes, through double doors at the end....

XXVI

The operation was over, and the two Celts, self-appointed to the temporary posts of assistant-surgeon and anaesthetist, expressed their emotions in characteristic manner....

"Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision an' the last stitch.... Och, Owen, the jewel you are! Give me the loan of your fist, man, this minute."

"What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo? The auld-farrant, scraichin', obstinate grey gander. A hand I will tak' at him ower the head o' this, or I'm no Taggart of Taggartshowe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was a pretty operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quickness. And I'm sorry there are no' a baker's dozen o' patients for ye to deal wi'. It's a gran' treat to see a borrn genius use the knife."

"You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time."

"Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna! I doubt but we Army billies are better at puttin' men thegither than at takin' them to pieces in the long run.... Gently now, porter, wi' liftin' the patient.... Ay, McFadyen, that's richt, gie the man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no' fine to luik at? A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse is better than I would have expeckit. Wheel him awa', nurse; he'll no come round for another hour...."

They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward. The porter followed. The three surgeons standing by that grim table in the rubber-floored central space of the amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and aproned with sterilised material, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered, and splashed with the same ominous stains that were on the table and upon the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and sinister as ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber, or figured in a nightmare-tale of Poe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of sharp and gleaming implements in a glass bath of carbolic; Taggart, standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled and movable, like everything else for use, and laden with rolls of lint and bandaging, and blue-glass bottles of peroxide of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily returning reels of silk-worm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their velvet-lined case.

"You're no' fatigued? You would no' like a steemulant?"

Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been staring with dull intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter, forgotten by the matron, whose usual charge it was. And the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart followed the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.

"Fatigued? I hardly think so!"

He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remembering the lengthy line of patients operated on in a single mid-week morning at St. Stephen's. And yet his steady hand shook a little, and a curious soft, subtle dulness of sensation was stealing over him. He had gone to bed sober, had risen after three hours of blessed, unexpected, helpful sleep, to battle with his desperate craving until morning. When the old woman left in charge of the housekeeping arrangements had come to his door with hot water and his usual breakfast--a mug of strong coffee with milk and a roll--he had gulped down the reviving, steadying draught thirstily, and swallowed a mouthful or two of the bread; and when he was shaved and tubbed and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone down to the dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric ether and strychnine, strong enough to brace his jarred nerves for the coming ordeal.

Not that Saxham habitually drugged: that craving was not yet known to him. But the habitual intemperance had exacted even from his iron constitution its forfeit of shakiness in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the man suffering and unstrung.

Looking about him as the dose began its work of stringing the lax nerves and stimulating the action of the heart, he saw that many of the drawers were open, a costly set of graduated scales missing, with their plush-lined box....

With a certain premonition of what would next be missing, he went into the surgery. A case of silver-mounted surgical instruments had vanished from a shelf, with a presentation loving-cup, given by admirers among De Boursy-Williams's patients to that gifted practitioner. A roll-top desk was partly broken open, but not rifled, the American boltlocks having defied the clumsy efforts of the thief, Koets, the Dutch dispensarist, who had cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the previous night, crossing, with the portable property reft from the accursed Englander, the barbed-wire fence that formed the line of demarcation between the British Imperial Forces and the Army of the United Republics. He had meant to wait yet another day, and take many things more, but the coming of those verdoemte soldiers of the Engelsch Commandant to fetch away the carboys of carbolic acid and the other medical stores had roused him to prompt

## action.

Later, wearing the brass badge of a Surgeon on the sleeve of his greasy black tail-coat, Koets ruled a Boer Field-Hospital, fearlessly slashing his way into the confidence of the United Republics through the tough, wincing brawn and muscle of Free Stater and Transvaaler. It speaks for the enduring qualities of the Boer constitution to say that many of his patients survived.

* * * * *

But the brandy in the decanter....

How it beckoned and allured and tempted. And the throat and palate of the man were parched with the desire of it. And yet, a moment before, with the toils about his feet, Saxham had wondered at the thought of these degraded years of bondage. He shook his head sullenly as Taggart repeated his question, and went away to wash and get dressed.

Then he meant to shake off his companions and go where he could quench that inward fire. He loathed them as they followed, chatting pleasantly....

But above the hissing of the hot water from the faucets over the basins came presently another sound, most familiar to the ears of the gossiping Celts....

"Rifle-fire! Out on the veld over yonder." McFadyen's towel waved North. "Do ye hear it?"