Surgeon of Distinction

by Mary Burchell

  “It will be lovely seeing you, my dear,” she wrote sincerely. “We see much too little of you, inevitably. But I’ve been working out a plan to remedy that, and I do wish I could persuade you to agree.

  “Why don’t you come back with us, Alma, for a visit? We have a really big apartment now, on the west side of the Park. We could not only find room for you very comfortably, but I, and your father too, would really enjoy doing some entertaining for you.

  “I know you’re devoted to your work. And it’s very nice and flattering to have been asked by that famous surgeon to be his theatre sister. But life doesn’t have to be all work, my dear! I suppose you could get leave and come to us for a month or two?

  “Think it over. And don’t be all prepared to say ‘No’ when we arrive. I’m pretty persuasive myself when I set my mind on something!”

  There was no doubting the warmth of the invitation, and its terms brought very clearly before Alma’s mental vision the picture of her pretty, capable, rather determined young stepmother. They had never been specially intimate—there had not been occasion for that—but Alma knew instinctively that they would get on well together, even if they saw a great deal more of each other than had hitherto been the case.

  She sat there, smiling faintly and absently at the letter in her hand. It was the sort of invitation most girls would have leapt at. She supposed she would have herself in other circumstances. But now, of course—she remembered the fact with a start—she was engaged to marry Maxwell Perring, and presumably sometime soon she would have to say just when she was prepared to do that.

  For the first time, it seemed to Alma that the absolute reality of the position pressed upon her. Even now, she was not her own mistress any longer. She could not say she was going back to New York with her father and stepmother without consulting someone else. Max, in fact.

  If she had not agreed to marry him, she would, she supposed, have snatched thankfully at this invitation. That would have been the easiest way to learn to forget Jeremy and make a new life for herself.

  But now—she was Maxwell Perring’s fiancée, and she could not make future decisions without taking him into account.

  Somehow the idea disturbed and rather frightened her.

  “Not bad news, I hope?” said Alison James beside her, and her air of sympathetic interest showed that she wondered very much if Alma were reading a letter from Maxwell Perring.

  “Bad news? No, of course not.” Alma roused herself and smiled calmly. “It’s from my stepmother in New York, to say that she and my father are coming home on a visit.”

  “Oh, Sister, how nice! More or less in time for the wedding, I suppose?” An oblique, but innocent way of enquiring about dates, Alma realized.

  “No. Even sooner than that, I think. My stepmother makes the suggestion that I should go back to New York with them on a visit.”

  “But you couldn’t, could you?—Or, at least—yes, of course you could, for a short visit. What a wonderful chance! You could even buy some of your trousseau there. I have a cousin who lives there and she says the shops are simply marvellous.”

  “Does she?” Alma said, inadequately, she felt. But it gave such a frightening finality to everything when Nurse James chattered about a trousseau, and obviously saw the proposed trip to New York only in relation to its affect upon the wedding.

  “If I hadn’t agreed to marry Max—” thought Alma again.

  But she had agreed. And the fact was known to everyone in his circle.

  Suddenly, she felt she did not want to go down to Windhurst, after all. She didn’t want to see Max, or discuss details about the house with his sister, or do anything at all which would push her further down what seemed, all at once, a perilous slope.

  Above all, she wanted most passionately to be independent, unattached, uncommitted Alma Miles, who could make her own decisions and go to New York, or anywhere else she liked, without feeling that invisible, unbreakable strands would eventually draw her back again.

  “What have I done?” she thought, engulfed by a wave of something like panic. And she got up abruptly from the breakfast table, and left Alison James looking after her in some surprise.

  “I can’t go to Windhurst this afternoon,” Alma told herself. “I simply can’t. I must make some sort of excuse. I don’t know what. But I can’t go there and talk about plans for the future, when I don’t even know what I want the future to be. I’m being ridiculous, I suppose, and unreasonable—and even unfair to him. But I can’t help it. I can’t go to Windhurst today.”

  Trembling—but not with irresolution—she went to the telephone and put through a call to Windhurst. And as she stood there in the telephone booth she could hear the beating of her own heart. Part of her said that she was behaving stupidly, and even perhaps rather badly.

  “But I can’t help it,” another part of her said. “It’s stronger than I am. Like a—an inner warning.”

  And then there was a click, and Max’s voice said,

  “Windhurst two-three. Maxwell Perring speaking.”

  “Oh, Max, it’s Alma—”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t make it this afternoon, after all. Something’s turned up here, and ”

  “What has turned up?” he enquired, in that unhurried but exact way of his.

  “It—it would take too long to explain. But it’s something I can’t avoid.”

  “You sound agitated. Is it something that’s upset you?”

  “No—oh, no.” Even to her own ears, her voice did not sound convincing. “It’s just—that I can’t come this afternoon.”

  “Very well. Can you make it tomorrow?’’

  “I don’t know. I’ll try. Can I ring you in the morning?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “I wish you would tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she reiterated desperately. “I can’t come. That’s all.”

  And then she rang off, aware that she had handled the whole thing badly, but not knowing what else she could have said which would have made her story more plausible.

  Slowly she came out of the telephone box. She had obtained the reprieve she so urgently wanted, but now she had no idea what she was to do with it.

  “I shall go out,” she thought. “I can’t hang around here. I shall go out and do some shopping”—the idea of shopping immediately brought back Alison James’ chatter about trousseau—“and then I might go home to the flat. I haven’t been there for some time. It’s not connected in any way with—with the present.” She supposed by that she meant her entanglement with Maxwell Perring. “It would be a relief to be there.”

  And so she went out, and wandered round the shops in the early autumn sunshine, and pretended to herself that she was interested in what she saw in the windows. She walked slowly, but all the time she knew that this was really a sort of flight. A flight from herself and the future which she could not, or would not, define.

  Presently, she took her way to the flat. Up the stairs of the Chelsea house and past the door of Jeremy’s flat. Such a little time, really, since that door had represented the threshold to happiness.

  She thought about Jeremy a lot, as she moved about her own little place, dusting and arranging things and putting them in order. She had not seen him since the evening when she had told him she had never taken him seriously when he had tried to give her his ring—that she had known the whole thing was an illusion due to his illness.

  It was the same evening that she had become engaged to Max. How was it possible that so many dramatic events could have been telescoped into so short a period? No wonder she felt frightened now, and had the impression that she had acted with ill-judged haste.

  Alma did not return to the nursing home until late in the afternoon. And then, as the lift appeared to have stuck maddeningly at one of the upper floors, she walked slowly up the main stairs.

  On the first floor she ran into Sister Pollock, who exclaimed,


  “Oh, hello, Sister. I was just going to send someone in search of you.”

  “Were you? Why?”

  “Well,” Sister Pollock explained—diffidently in view of all the rumors—“it’s about Mr. Truscott, really.”

  “What about him?” Alma enquired, in her calmest voice.

  “He’s asked several times to see you. And as he’ll be leaving tomorrow or Monday, and going to a convalescent home, I thought perhaps you would like to go in and see him.”

  “Like” was not quite the right expression, Alma thought, for this mixture of revulsion and longing which immediately came over her. Her common sense told her that she had much better make some excuse and go on up the stairs. But her rebellious heart betrayed her, and she said, as coolly as she could,

  “I’ll go and see him, of course, if you think he wants it. Shall I go now?”

  “Now would be as good a time as any,” Sister Pollock agreed. “You’ll find him up in a chair. But he’s pretty weak still.”

  She remembered the evening she had looked along at his door and thought that she would never go into that room again—at least while Jeremy was there. That was just after she had become engaged to Max.

  Then she thrust the recollection from her, and went along the corridor and tapped on Jeremy’s door.

  “Come in,” he called, but in a bored, rather dispirited tone, she thought.

  Alma entered the room. He was sitting by the window, looking paler and thinner than she had expected, as though it were only when he was out of bed that one noticed his illness had taken such heavy toll of him.

  “Oh, it’s you!” He smiled and immediately looked less wan. “I thought you were never coming to see me again.”

  “I’ve been very busy,” she explained quickly. “And—and when you’re Theatre Sister, you know, you can’t go running in and out of the rooms, visiting all the patients.”

  “Not all of them.” He grinned up at her engagingly. “Only me.”

  She stood beside his chair and looked down at him.

  “Perhaps particularly not you, Jeremy,” she said deliberately. “In the circumstances, it was better not.”

  “What circumstances?” He looked faintly truculent.

  “Don’t be tiresome. You know perfectly well. There’d been gossip and misunderstanding .enough. Once you’d recovered your memory completely and—and straightened things out with yourself, the best thing I could do was to keep out of the way.”

  “But even when I’d recovered my memory, I’m not at all sure that I straightened filings out with myself, as you put it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Alma! Do you think it’s easy to find you’ve been living your life along two different lines, as it were? You can’t reconcile them in a matter of minutes and decide exactly where you want to take things up again.”

  “I thought,” she said, going pale, “that was precisely what you had decided. What did our conversation mean, if it didn’t mean that?”

  “It meant merely that you were angel enough not to tie me to anything in advance. That you made it easy for me to feel I was not irrevocably committed to something which had happened while I was not entirely myself.”

  “But, once that entanglement was out of the way, you were committed. To Geraldine.”

  “Not irrevocably.” A curiously obstinate look came over his face.

  “Oh, Jeremy! What about that inscription on the ring case?”

  “Neither the ring nor the case has been given to her,” he said slowly. “I can’t help it if this sounds caddish to you. But—I don’t know that I even want to give them to her now.”

  “Jeremy! I—I don’t understand you.”

  “I don’t quite understand myself,” he said unhappily. “But you can’t go through a hell of an experience like this and come out the same the other side. I suppose—I’ve changed in some way.”

  “You’ve had time to think things over,” was the lightning reflection which flashed through Alma’s mind. But, in fairness, she suppressed it, and said instead, very calmly,

  “You’re not quite yourself yet. You’ll find it easier to think things over, and get them straight, when you’re away from here, at the convalescent home.”

  “But I couldn’t bear the idea of going without seeing you. I thought—”

  And then suddenly his glance dropped to her left hand, which rested calmingly upon his arm. And he said, in a strange, choked sort of voice,

  “What’s that?”

  “What, Jeremy?”

  “That ring.”

  “That’s my engagement ring,” she said, with what composure she could. “Didn’t you know I was engaged?”

  “Know? know? No, of course I didn’t know. How should I? When did this happen?”

  “A—a few evenings ago.” In the agitation of the moment, she could not even remember which evening it had been. “It’s—Maxwell Perring.”

  “That self-satisfied surgeon!”

  She found she violently resented this description of Max, and she said coldly,

  “He’s not in the least self-satisfied. And he saved your life, don’t forget.”

  “Saved my life—and then stole my girl!” Jeremy retorted furiously.

  “Oh, Jeremy, don’t say such absurd things. I’m not your girl. You know quite well—”

  “Don’t you say that!” He reached up suddenly and, with quite surprising strength, caught her in his arms and drew her down and kissed her.

  “Don’t!” she breathed, quite instinctively. But her lips were crushed against his and her protest was lost.

  It was a moment of the most extraordinary self-revelation, for she could not have believed that she could so resent any embrace of Jeremy’s. It was not even the suddenness of it. It was the quality of it. And she found herself thinking angrily,

  “That’s no way to kiss anyone! Max would never kiss me in that selfish, brutal way.”

  The reaction was so startling that she had no word to say. She released herself—gently because Jeremy was, after all, still a sick person—but with a sort of finality that was almost symbolic.

  Then, as she straightened up again, something made her glance towards the door, and she caught her breath in a horrified gasp. For, framed in the doorway, stood Maxwell Perring, regarding the scene with a cold and stony attention.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was a second of almost unbearable silence. Then Maxwell Perring came into the room and said coolly,

  “I thought I’d like to see you before you actually left the nursing home, Truscott. Were you just going, Sister?”

  “Y-yes,” stammered Alma. “Yes, I was just going.”

  “Wait a minute.” Jeremy looked annoyed and undecided.

  “No.” Alma felt that nothing in the world mattered more than that she should snatch at the chance of escape afforded her by Max’s cold words. If she stayed, what and how could she explain? Even her own feelings were beyond her comprehension at this moment.

  She gave a frightened glance at the surgeon’s impassive face and, without another word to Jeremy, she almost literally fled from the room.

  “It’s too much!” she told herself, as she hurried up the stairs to her own room. “It’s too much! Why does this all have to happen to me? What must Max have thought? What was Jeremy really trying to say? And—I wish he hadn’t kissed me like that. I hated it. Max would never have kissed me like that.”

  She knew it was silly to keep on laboring that point. And yet, in some inexplicable way, it seemed of vital importance. At one time it would have been inconceivable that she could dislike any kiss of Jeremy’s. Still less that she should compare him unfavorably with anyone else in any respect.

  “I don’t know what’s come over me,” she thought distractedly. “Oh, Max—what must you think of me?”

  She would have to explain the whole unfortunate, tasteless scene to him somehow. But how? And, in practical fact—when?
>
  He would presumably ask to speak to her, when he had finished the interview with Jeremy. And she must be ready then to answer his questions—More than that. It would be for her to volunteer a full explanation. Otherwise, he could only think that she was enjoying romantic passages with Jeremy while she was really engaged to himself.

  “Oh, it’s all so—so vulgar!” Alma ran her hands through her hair unhappily. “The surgeon catches the nurse kissing the patient! It’s so unlike anything to do with Max. It makes me seem so horribly—unworthy.”

  She wondered anxiously what Max and Jeremy were saying to each other now. Presumably Jeremy had offered some sort of explanation for the scene. But what had he said? That he still loved her himself?

  And, if that was what his outburst had meant—where did they go from there?

  “He didn’t really put it as positively as that,” she told herself slowly. “He didn’t really commit himself—”

  And then, suddenly, before that horrid, safe, ungenerous phrase, the idealized picture of Jeremy began to slip out of focus.

  He didn’t commit himself.

  No—of course he didn’t. He never did. Never had done so. Either to her or to Geraldine. The nearest he had ever come to doing so was when he had that inscription engraved on the case which held Geraldine’s ring. And even that he had now withdrawn, after time for thought.