by A. J. Cronin
“I will attempt the operation, though I cannot promise its success. It must be done soon, preferably this evening after I have had a rest. It cannot be performed here. She must be taken to a nursing home or, if you choose, to the side room of my old ward in the Hepperton. And now, if you will excuse me, I’ll go to the hotel.”
Bowley’s eyes still remained on Prescott’s face, like the eyes of a pleading, beaten dog. He made no protestation of gratitude; his expression did not change. “I knew ye’d do it for me, Robert.” He pressed a bell beside him. “But you’re not going to no hotel. If only you’ll take it, there’s a room all ready for ye here.”
CHAPTER 65
Again Prescott yielded, conquered by Bowley’s new humility. Yet when he found himself in the luxurious bedroom, inside this house he had sworn never again to enter, doubts about his own quixotic folly began to reassail him. His reputation was already in jeopardy. Failure in a case such as this would put it inextricably beneath a cloud. Angrily he tried to drive these demons from his mind, to address himself with concentrated thought to the preparation he had still to make. Dr. Sinclair could be trusted to make all local arrangements. After reflection, he drafted a wire instructing his London theatre sister to take the next train north. It was then that a queer shaft of light struck across his gloom.
He thought deeply, his features oddly illuminated. And the longer he reflected, the stronger his strange impulse grew. It was here in this house that Anne had suffered such humiliation and injustice. Why should not she witness Bowley’s abasement, figure also in this final drama of appeasement? It was no more than her right. With sudden determination he took up the receiver of his bedside telephone and sent a telegram to Anne, asking her to leave everything to take duty for him in a special operation in Manchester.
A slight smile touched his lips as he pulled off his coat and shoes and lay down for a few hours’ necessary sleep.
At four o’clock in the afternoon Prescott awakened. The minute he opened his eyes, he felt alert and vigorous, conscious of what lay before him, yet wholly refreshed by his six hours’ sleep. He felt hungry, too, and rang for the butler. When the food arrived, he found on the tray a note from Sinclair: “Sister Lee arrived. Operation 6 p.m. The Hepperton.”
Lately Prescott had known few moments of elation. But now he experienced that subtle and thrilling emotion to the full. He did not realize that his love for Anne made a pretext of the occasion. He knew only that she would be there, working with him again, helping him by her very presence.
At half-past five word was brought to him that the car was at the door. He smoked a final cigarette, descended, and was driven to the hospital. At five minutes to six he entered the operating theatre.
She was there. Though he did not directly look at her, though his expression did not alter, he was instantly aware of her.
When she handed him his gown after he had washed up, he said formally, in an undertone, “Thank you for coming.” No more than that.
She did not reply. No words were needed. And she had been trained to use them sparsely in this arena where deeds alone mattered.
And now the theatre was ready, the last gauze mask was adjusted. At a sign from Prescott the patient, already anesthetized, was wheeled in. Three well-drilled movements and Rose lay upon the table, on that shining mechanism of steel and chromium, her body swathed in white, her head, now shaved of all its lovely hair, a shining iodined sphere beneath the cowled arc lights.
Prescott took a last look around, his glance encompassing the gowned Sinclair opposite him, the stooping figure of the anesthetist, the four nurses, and Anne, all muffled in their white. He poised himself like a strange conductor about to lead this strange, white company into a symphony of life and death. Then he placed his gloved fingers upon the shining ball that was a living human head, drew the skin tense, and slit it to the bone. Without his asking, a swab was in his hand, artery forceps, another swab. Then the trephine. And he began to drill.
How strange was the pinkish, pulsing brain beneath its translucent membranes—this delicate, thinking, human brain, the brain of Rose Bowley, doomed to blindness. Now the membranes had yielded to the lancet, and Anne, bending at her work, could see the convolutions of the cortex, intricate and smooth.
Into this center of the human life it was necessary to thrust the knife, to pierce, dissect, enucleate the lesion, separate the vagrant tissues from the good. All this Prescott had to do.
No one who did not realize the frightful complications and dangers involved could have fully comprehended the staggering difficulty of the task. But Anne realized. She saw in her mind’s eye the hundreds of brain cells coupled in their insulated sheaths like electric circuits. She knew that Prescott had only to cut or cross one complex circuit and the fatal thing was done. To operate elsewhere is serious enough; but at least some latitude is permitted to the surgeon, who can ligature a ruptured artery and repair a false incision. Here there was no room for error, no latitude to effect repairs, no second chance.
Anne’s heart went out to Prescott as he bent, sure and unhurried, over his work. He had been operating for close upon an hour, and he had not yet penetrated to the deepest point of the growth. Nothing could expedite the separation of the obstructing fibers. The operation might take at least three hours. It demanded infinite patience as well as infinite skill. Signs of strain were visible to Anne upon Prescott’s face; a fine dew of perspiration was showing on his brow. The theatre was unendurably hot.
The minutes moved slowly. And slowly, too, Prescott’s fingers moved within the living skull of Rose Bowley. Suddenly, on Dr. Sinclair’s face, Anne observed a swift expression of dismay. He leaned forward, peered through the wound into the tissues of the brain. With a shrinking of her heart Anne knew there was unexpected trouble. Momentarily Prescott stopped working and raised his head to meet his colleague’s gaze. The eyes of the two men, shining in their mask-enshrouded faces, met above the operating table. Sinclair’s eyes were filled with apprehension and silent warning. Instinctively Anne read their message. They said: “Stop! The growth is far more extensive than we thought. It presses on vital nuclei. Retrace your steps; close the wound. Go farther, and the patient will die.”
Prescott’s eyes did not waver. And Anne found their message even easier to read: “If I go back, she will still be blind. Come what may, I am going forward.”
CHAPTER 66
This interchange of glances, so vital and so vibrant, was only a matter of seconds. No person in the theatre had noticed it but Anne. No one else observed the sickly apprehension on Sinclair’s face as Prescott extended his hand and said deliberately, “Trephine, please.”
Anne gave him the instrument. He was going to enlarge the opening in that already tortured skull.
For a moment Anne’s pulses almost ceased to beat. Sinclair would not wear that look unless the risk incurred by Prescott were a deadly one. She saw then, in a blinding revelation, why she had come here so willingly to aid him, why, beyond everything, she wished him to succeed. Not merely her great devotion to her work. That was great enough—but there was more. The whole pretense of her professional friendship with Prescott melted like wax in flame. And with a strange inward revulsion, she hated herself for her self-deception, for having run in cowardly fashion, all these past months, from the irrevocable truth. She knew at last that she loved him.
While she stood, immobile and impassive, at his side, handing him each shining instrument in turn, she prayed feverishly that he would succeed.
Subtly, Anne was conscious, as the minutes lengthened and Rose Bowley still breathed, of a change in Dr. Sinclair.
No longer did he emanate a disapproving fear. With a half-unwilling fascination he followed the surgeon’s movements as they went deeper and still deeper into the brain. And then, something like a sigh of wonder broke from his muffled lips as, with careful delicacy, Prescott drew a jagged, fibroid mass from the deep recesses of the wound. It was the last, the final remnants of t
he tumor.
Anne could have cried in triumph and relief. Now that the danger point was passed, Prescott was working much faster than before, ligaturing, suturing the membrane, working outward, closing up the wound. And with that same current of unexpressed emotion Anne urged him to greater and still greater speed. An operation so protracted must have taxed Rose’s strength to the utmost.
Then, quite quietly, it was over, the last catgut cut, the last stitch inserted. Rose, on the trolley with blankets and hot bottles around her, was on her way back to the side room off the ward.
Long and relentless though the strain had been, reaction, following at its heels, was even worse. Anne was hardly able to drag herself toward the drum to begin her task of resterilizing the instruments. Prescott himself still stood by the table, bowed over it, as though unaware that he need stoop and strain no more. Only when Sinclair laid a hand upon his shoulder did he stir. He drew a long breath and moved with the other man toward the washroom.
It was strange that they should speak again after that long period of silence. Sinclair seemed to find it so. Minutes passed before he said: “There are some things we can’t talk about, Prescott. This is one of them. I won’t congratulate you—ordinary praise won’t do. But you have shown me such operating as I had never dreamed that I should see. It was superb.”
Prescott looked at his friend dazedly. “How did I do it?” he asked.
“How should I know?” Sinclair smiled. “It was you performed the miracle—not I.”
No more was said. When they had finished washing up, a tray of coffee was brought in.
“This should be champagne, Prescott.” Sinclair tried to rouse the other with a jest. “A magnum of Pol Roger 1928?”
“We’ll leave that to Bowley,” Prescott answered, with unsmiling face.
CHAPTER 67
No sooner had he spoken than the outer door opened, and Bowley came into the anteroom. Though he showed signs of his ordeal of waiting, once more there was color in his face. His haggard aspect of despair was gone. And yet, for all the fervent jubilation in his eyes, he was as timid as a child. Very slowly and uncertainly he advanced until he stood in front of Prescott.
“Robert,” he said at length, in a voice which plainly trembled, “what am I to say to ye?”
There was a heavy and embarrassed silence.
“When it was my turn,” Matt went on in that labored tone, “I treated ye like a mangy dog. Then your turn came. And ye treat me like a god.” He paused. “Ye’ve saved my Rose’s life. Ye’ve given her back her sight. That’s more to me than my own life. How am I to thank ye?”
“There’s no need to thank me,” Prescott muttered.
“Then let me give ye this.”
Prescott recoiled from the check the other man held out to him. His face hardened. “I don’t want your money, Bowley. Wait until I ask you for a fee before you offer it.”
“This isn’t a fee,” Matt replied humbly. “It’s something I promised ye a long time ago—at least, the start of it. All I hope ye’ll say is, ‘Better late than never.’ ”
Automatically, Prescott took the proffered slip and glanced at it. His face paled. It was a check made out in favor of the Rose Bowley Clinic Fund. And it was for fifty thousand pounds.
“You don’t mind me naming it for Rose?” Matt went on. “It’s your clinic just the same. Ye can have it here or in London, wherever ye please. I’ll find the brass all right. I’ll start a subscription list tomorrow that’ll snow ye under with funds.”
Prescott mastered his emotion. “It’s generous of you,” he said at length. “It’s more than that—it’s magnificent. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
“Thanks is no good, Robert,” said Bowley, with something of his old, sly humor. “Ye said so a minute ago yourself. I don’t want no thanks unless ye give me back your friendship with it.”
In reply, Prescott came forward and offered Matt his hand. As the two men shook hands, the door of the theatre swung open, and Anne entered. She had imagined the room to be empty, but now, observing Bowley, she started to withdraw. But Matt stopped her with a gesture.
“Don’t go, my dear,” he said. “You’re another one I want to see.” He broke off, blinking the moisture from beneath his shaggy brows. “Since shaking hands has come to be the fashion, will ye do so with an old scoundrel who is proper sick and sorry and ashamed of himself?”
CHAPTER 68
Half an hour later Anne was ready to go. Now she stood on the front porch of the hospital, waiting for the taxi which her old friend Mulligan, the porter, had gone to call for her. She hoped to take the 10:15 express from Manchester, which would get her to London shortly after two o’clock in the morning. After the tension of the operation and the deep emotional experience it had brought her, she felt strangely desolate and forlorn. The revelation that she loved Prescott gave her a sweet and bitter pain. All her fixed beliefs, her whole scheme of life, lay in ruins at her feet. At least, in her present mood, this was how she judged it.
Yet through the storm of her conflicting thoughts one thought persisted, inescapable and inexorable: the knowledge that she loved him.
Her taxi now stood at the door, and she was about to get into it when a quick step sounded behind her and she heard someone calling her name. It was Prescott.
“Where have you been?” he asked quickly. “These last twenty minutes I’ve looked everywhere for you.”
“I went to have a word with some of the nurses. And with Matron.”
“And now you’re going, without even giving me a chance to thank you.”
She let her eyes fall. “I was glad to come, glad to see the old Hepperton again.”
“But that’s nonsense. There’s so much I want to discuss with you—your business and mine. I’ve just had a talk with Bowley. He’s interested in your campaign, wants to help you.” He broke off, glanced at his watch. “What train are you taking?”
“The ten-fifteen.”
He made up his mind on the spot. “I’ll come with you. I meant to leave on the midnight. But this will suit me as well.”
Before she could protest, he had asked the porter to fetch his bag and put it in the taxi. And the next minute they were bowling along toward the Central.
Seated opposite her in the train, he produced his wallet and drew out Matthew’s check. “Take a look at that. An interesting scrap of paper. At least, it will be when it’s translated into bricks and mortar for the Clinic.”
A bright excitement rushed into her eyes, a brighter color to her cheeks. For an instant she forgot everything but the joy of knowing that his ambition was achieved. “At last,” she said.
He inclined his head. “At last.”
The train, gathering speed, rushed through the night, a great canopy of darkness lit by the flares of foundries, the high glitter of neon signs, of street lights, of many-win-dowed factories, and, above all this tawdry glare of civilization, the ever-present stars.
“And now,” he went on decisively, “I want to talk about your work. I spoke to Bowley pretty strongly. He feels he owes you some reparation, and he wants to do his bit for you. Oh! I know that a lot of this great remorse of conscience may slip off him in time. But not all of it. He’s too set on Rose for that.” Prescott leaned a little forward in his earnestness. “Tomorrow morning in your office postbag you’ll find a generous contribution to the Union’s war chest. But the financial aspect doesn’t end matters. Our worthy Matt is standing for Parliament at the next election, and when he gets in, he has promised faithfully to whip round opinion in the House in the nurses’ favor. Of course, the way you are going at present you may not need his help. Nor mine either, though I assure you most sincerely it is at your service.”
With a great effort she composed herself to answer. But somehow the logic of her reply was lost. All she could say was, “You are very good to me.”
“And why shouldn’t I be?” That grave smile touched his lips again rather sadly. “You k
now I love you. There’s no disguising the fact.”
The ache in her side was unendurable. He was gazing beyond her now, as though distantly envisaging the past.
“Do you remember,” he said, “those early days of ours, that first lunch we had together after the accident? What a snob I was, what a damned supercilious snob. How quick I was to eliminate the fact that you were a woman and I a man. I deserved to be punished for that. And I have been.” He seemed bent, with a strange and melancholy bitterness, on hurting himself, belittling himself before her. “And that time at Bryngower, when I startled you, made you run out in the rain. I had all my arguments prepared, my case was ready. I was about to demonstrate, like some dry-as-dust professor, that we could work, each of us, infinitely better, if we were married. That I could help you, that you could help me. That my clinic and your campaign could be common objectives in our common life. That each would benefit by our individual and united effort.” He winced at his own thoughts. Then he sighed. “I forgot the one small essential fact, overlooked it in my egotism, my conceit—the fact that you didn’t and couldn’t love me.”
CHAPTER 69
Her eyes were stinging with tears she dared not show. She felt lost, confused, and hopelessly defeated. Then, all at once, a ray of light broke in on her. She could not, would not, let this moment pass. She had a sudden recollection of Joe’s injunction at their last meeting, when he had begged her to forget her pride. And so, gathering all her courage, she said, tremblingly, “It was I who overlooked a fact. Not you.”
He stared at her in odd perplexity. Then the furrow disappeared suddenly from between his brows. Her words alone would not have moved the heavy oppression from his breast. But in her eyes he read a meaning unmistakable. He reached out and took her hand.