Hospital Corridors

by Mary Burchell.

  “I suppose,” he said to Enid, “that Madeline”—he had never called her that before!—“is showing you over the nurses’ quarters. If you want to see something of the hospital itself and the operating section, do come to my office afterwards and I’ll be glad to act as guide. I shall be there for the next hour,” he added to Madeline.

  “Thank you, Dr. Lanyon,” Madeline murmured in her most submissive and official manner, which seemed to amuse Clarissa greatly. Then Dr. Lanyon bade them a pleasant good-bye and went coolly on his way, apparently unaware of the sensation that had been made.

  “Dear Nat! How lovely to see him again. I adore him in that white coat,” declared Clarissa, thoroughly animated now. “We’ll just hurry up and see Madeline’s room and then rejoin him in his office, as he says.”

  All too obviously, the Nurses’ Home and Madeline’s quarters had become of very secondary interest.

  Without comment Madeline led the way into the lift, where she introduced them both to Ruth and to Eileen, who had come on the scene just in time to witness the incredible greeting. Ruth’s composure rivalled that of Dr. Lanyon himself, but Eileen’s bright eyes were nearly popping out of her head, and only an eloquent glance from Madeline checked the questions which were obviously trembling on her lips.

  Enid was genuinely, and Clarissa perfunctorily, interested in all that Madeline had to show them, but somehow her own pride and pleasure had clouded over now. The meeting with Dr. Lanyon and Clarissa’s evident determination to exploit the situation crowded out anything so simple as the charming appointments of her room or the beautiful view of Montreal from her window. Indeed, though Clarissa did glance from the window absently, she dismissed the view without comment, turning almost immediately to ask,

  “Did Nat know I was coming, Madeline? Or was it a complete surprise for him?”

  “He knew,” Madeline said briefly. “I told him.”

  “And did he seem pleased with the news?”

  “It’s difficult to say.” Madeline felt that sounded stupid and unco-operative, but there was nothing else with winch she could temporize.

  Clarissa laughed impatiently.

  “You are a funny girl. I’ll wager I’d have been able to tell. What did he say?”

  “Oh, I’ve forgotten, Clarissa. Is it all that important, anyway?”

  “It could be.” Clarissa glanced at herself in Madeline’s mirror and laughed mischievously but with genuine charm.

  Madeline had a great desire to cry, “Oh, leave him alone, Clarissa! Why can’t you leave him alone to get over you? You’re only ministering to your own vanity in all this. You don’t care how much he’s hurt, so long as you can make yourself forget the Gerald fiasco for a few weeks.”

  But of course she could not say any of this. Instead she said without enthusiasm,

  “Well, I think that’s about all here. If you’ve seen all you want, we may as well go down. We have a lovely lounge and—”

  “Oh, I expect we could see that another time,” Clarissa cut in, though quite good-humouredly. “One hospital lounge is very much like another, I imagine. Let’s go and find Nat.” There was a very slight silence. Then Enid said,

  “Perhaps it’s a little late to do any more looking round this evening. We have had a tiring day.”

  Madeline could have hugged her stepmother again. But Clarissa countered immediately,

  “Oh, no! We both agreed that we felt as bright as needles. We don’t want to pass this opportunity by. I don’t think one is taken round the Dominion Hospital by Dr. Nat Lanyon every day, is one, Madeline?”

  “No,” Madeline said, angry with herself that she felt so helpless and could add nothing to that.

  It was Enid who put the real issue into words.

  “Don’t you think it would be more—seemly if we let someone else take us round, Clarissa? I suppose he felt bound to make the polite and friendly gesture in that first moment. But after all, darling, you were engaged to him and you did jilt him.”

  “Oh, Mother, don’t be so sweet and stuffy!” Clarissa laughed and gave her mother a light kiss of infinite charm. “One doesn’t treat a broken engagement like a three-act tragedy nowadays. Nat has taken it all in his stride and is probably quite thrilled at the new development.”

  “I still think it would be better to go back to our hotel now, and have a quiet meal with Madeline,” Enid said obstinately. But she was not the only obstinate one in the family.

  “Well, you go, darling, if that’s how you feel,” Clarissa replied, without a trace of ill-humour. “I expect I can find someone to direct me to Nat’s office, and he can give me a one-man lecture on operating theatres. I’ll join you later.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” Madeline spoke again, somehow hiding her dismay and anger under a casual exterior. “We will all go, but we mustn’t keep him long. I know he has had a very long day.”

  So down they went in the lift once more and back to the main block, Madeline wondering unhappily all the way if he would hold it against her that she had not been able to prevent this.

  If he did, he hid the fact. For when they entered his office he rose to receive them, with that slight, charming smile on which Madeline had commented with such unfortunate results, and seemed ready to conduct them round that part of the hospital which was his special domain.

  Either by design or chance Madeline found herself paired off with Enid, while Clarissa and Dr. Lanyon walked a little ahead of them. Certainly from time to time he turned to include Enid in any special explanation, but .more than once Madeline, while showing something to Enid, caught snatches of conversation which were intended for two rather than four.

  Once she heard Clarissa say, almost challengingly, “You don’t ask me where Gerald—where my husband—is.” But she could not hear his reply.

  Then Clarissa said, a surprised note in her voice,

  “Oh, she told you as much as that? I didn’t realize you had such a cosy chat about me. She told me she couldn’t even decide whether you were pleased or not at the news of my coming.”

  Then Enid asked a rather fearful question about some very harmless piece of equipment, and Madeline had to lose the thread of the conversation between the other two.

  In the theatre where Dr. Lanyon did most of his operating he waited for the other two to come up with him before he made some brief but interesting explanations.

  “It all seems a bit gruesome,” Enid said, glancing over her shoulder as though she thought an unconscious body might be wheeled in at any moment.

  “It really isn’t, you know.” Dr. Lanyon smiled at her. “It’s tremendously interesting and—exhilarating.”

  “Depending on whether you’re on the table or beside it,” retorted Enid, unconvinced.

  He laughed then, and looked at Enid as though he liked her.

  “If you’re on the table you don’t know anything about it,” he assured her kindly. “And for the rest of us, there is really nothing quite so exciting and rewarding as the challenge to preserve fife and make whole. It ‘gets you’ as nothing else does.”

  “Yes, I can imagine that,” Enid conceded. While Clarissa, looking round with a reflective smile, said,

  “So this, so to speak, is your stage.”

  He shot her an amused glance.

  “Yes. Here I play to my gallery—if that’s what you meant.”

  “I suppose I did.” Clarissa’s glance slid over him with a sort of admiring appraisal which obviously took in everything that was attractive about him. “Do you play the great man just a little, as well as being the conscientious surgeon, Nat?”

  “Madeline says not,” he replied unexpectedly.

  “Madeline!” Clarissa looked at her half-sister in some astonishment, as though it had never occurred to her that Madeline would express an opinion in such terms. “Is that the way you doctors and nurses talk to each other when you get together?”

  “Not really—no.” He smiled slightly at Madeline, who
stood by, faintly flushed and, she knew quite well, curiously at a disadvantage when her lovely half-sister was holding the floor. “I’ve forgotten how we got on the subject. But I know my secretary held the view that I dramatized myself a little, while Madeline defended me.”

  “Defended you?” Clarissa laughed lightly and scornfully. “I think it’s much more interesting if you do dramatize yourself a little. I wouldn’t thank anyone who reduced me to terms of solid worthiness and nothing else.”

  “I didn’t do that!” Madeline exclaimed indignantly. So indignantly that the others all laughed, and Dr. Lanyon put his hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “I’ve forgotten just what you did say,” he told her, “but I remember thinking you defended me in very acceptable and gratifying terms. I’m sure I shouldn’t have felt that way if you had reduced me to a dead level of solid worthiness only, as your sister says.”

  She smiled then, curiously comforted by the touch of his hand on her shoulder. And after a few minutes they all came out of the theatre and Dr. Lanyon seemed to think the tour of inspection was over. To Madeline, who feared Clarissa was quite capable of suggesting that they should all have supper together, it was a relief to see Dr. Lanyon glance at his wrist-watch and to hear him say,

  “I’m so sorry, but I must leave you now. I have a late consultation.”

  “Of course. You’ve been most kind to give us so much of your time,” Enid told him sincerely.

  “It was a pleasure.”

  “Is it a pleasure that you’re going to repeat, Nat?” Clarissa gave him her lovely, casual smile. “We shall be in Montreal for some time and, if you’re not too busy and too much in demand, I hope we shall see something of you.”

  “Of course,” he said pleasantly. “I’ll call you up some time next week.” Then he said good-bye and left them.

  Conscientiously Madeline showed them over lecture halls, library and dining-rooms. But, as Clarissa said, none of it seemed quite so exciting as the experience of having a famous surgeon show them over one of the operating theatres.

  “I’d forgotten how attractive he was,” she added musingly. “I can’t think now why I turned him down so finally. Or else maybe he’s mellowed a bit. Or perhaps I’ve changed.”

  Madeline felt so panic-stricken when she heard this that she found herself wishing Clarissa would turn round and go right back home. Then she calmed herself determinedly with the assurance that Dr. Lanyon was not such easy game as all that. It was true that he had returned Clarissa’s kiss when she had greeted him, but he had never once appeared to find the situation out of his control.

  In fact, when she reflected on his faintly smiling, easy manner, she thought perhaps Clarissa was the one who had been left guessing. But guessing very pleasurably—which was what made the situation dangerous.

  Madeline accompanied Enid and Clarissa back to their hotel, but she did not stay with them. By now they were both feeling the reaction after their day of excitement, and Madeline too had to think about early duty in the morning. So she bade them both an affectionate good-night, promised to telephone as soon as she was off duty the next day, and returned in a rather sober mood to her own quarters in the hospital.

  Here she was greeted with a flood of questions and comments, Eileen dominating the chorus with,

  “How on earth did you keep all this to yourself? You never even hinted that you had a sister who was on kissing terms with Dr. Lanyon!”

  “Oh, well—” Madeline laughed rather feebly. “Clarissa kisses very easily. She’s an expansive type, and—”

  “Expansive! I’ll say she’s expansive. But he kissed her back again instead of withering her to the roots with a glance. That’s what none of us can get over.”

  “He knew her rather well, back home in England,” Madeline said, trying to make that sound very natural and matter-of-fact.

  “Then you must have known him too,” one of the other girls said curiously.

  “No. I just knew of him. And I met him on the boat coming out.”

  “But was it because he knew your sister so well that he rather took you under his wing?” Eileen wanted to know. “You never said much about his connection with her.”

  “I didn’t know how much he would like his private background talked about,” Madeline said. “I thought the—the less I talked about them—him—the better.”

  “Well, of course, what we all really want to know is—Is she the girl who sent him back here rather—rather humanized?” Eileen retorted mischievously.

  “I don’t know,” Madeline said, with an admirably casual shrug. “I can only tell you that my sister is married to someone else.”

  “O-oh!” They all seemed rather disappointed at this.

  “But you said—” began Eileen, and then stopped. For she had evidently suddenly recollected Madeline’s saying that Clarissa had had some trouble with her husband. Even Eileen, however, had her moments of sympathetic discretion, and in spite of the fact that one or two of the girls looked curious, she shook her head and did not complete the sentence.

  “Well, anyway, it seems quite natural to you that, in an expansive mood, one kisses Dr. Lanyon,” said one of Madeline’s colleagues in the theatre amusedly. “Does that mean that, in an expansive mood, he has also kissed you at some time or other?”

  “Oh, no!” exclaimed Madeline. And immediately wondered, with a sort of pleasurable curiosity, what it would be like if he did.

  Everyone laughed, and presently the conversation drifted off on to other topics of hospital interest, though it was obvious that everyone hoped to hear more sometime of Madeline’s interesting sister, who was on such intriguing terms with their celebrated Dr. Lanyon.

  Madeline was glad that the next day was Saturday. Except in an emergency, Dr. Lanyon did not usually operate at the weekend, and she thought it was just as well that she would not have to see him in official circumstances immediately after the problematical meeting with Clarissa.

  However, as was sometimes his wont, he chose to come in during the morning to do some work on the office side of his cases, and, on going to his room to verify a reference, Madeline unexpectedly found him there.

  “Oh, I’m sorry Dr. Lanyon. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “All right” He looked up from whatever he was writing. “What did you want?”

  She told him and, instead of telling her to look up the reference, she felt awkwardly that perhaps she should say In the slight pause that followed, while he searched for the reference, she felt awkwardly that perhaps she should say something about the encounter the previous evening. So finally she said rather shyly,

  “Thank you very much for taking my stepmother and Clarissa round yesterday evening. They were tremendously interested.”

  “Not at all.” He seemed to speak rather absently, his attention apparently still on his files. “Would they like to come for a drive along the river tomorrow afternoon?”

  This was so unexpected that Madeline was startled into completely unconsidered speech.

  “I—I’m sure they would. But, Dr. Lanyon, you mustn’t think that you have to—to put yourself out about them. I’m afraid Clarissa is rather—forthcoming. You don’t have to pay any attention to what she said about your seeing them again. One can show a little too much bravado in an anxiety to—to appear cured.”

  She had not, of course, intended to say anything so personal, and was horrified to hear her own words trip out. But there was no way of recalling them, or even modifying them, and the colour rushed into her face as he turned and regarded her with quizzically raised eyebrows.

  “Very kind of you, Miss Gill,” he said rather drily. “But your anxiety is misplaced.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked down at her tightly clasped hands. “I—I just didn’t want you—hurt again.”

  For a moment his amused glance softened, but she did not see that as her head was bent.

  “I shall rely on the protective company of your charming stepmother and you
rself,” he told her lightly.

  “Well”—she laughed rather vexedly—“I’m sorry if I was interfering.”

  “Not at all. I assure you I am going to need you during the next few weeks. I rely on you not to let me down.” She looked up then, to see that he was smiling a little mockingly. But though she knew he had spoken at least half in joke, somehow his words pleased her inordinately.

  “I shan’t let you down,” she promised.

  “I’m sure you won’t. Now suppose you telephone to ask if Clarissa and her mother will be available tomorrow afternoon. It is your free Sunday, isn’t it?”

  “Why, yes! How did you know?” She was amazed to realize that he must have gone to some trouble to discover this.

  “I made it my business to know,” he told her carelessly. “I may be full of bravado, as you suggest, and certainly I’m not refusing any challenge Clarissa may throw down,” he added, with a sudden tightening of his mouth. “But I am not so foolish as to become involved in a tête à tête meeting with her.”

  “I see,” Madeline said, rather soberly—for, after all, it seemed that the joking element in all this was suddenly thin. Then she picked up the telephone on Dr. Lanyon’s desk and, having dialled the hotel number, asked for. her stepmother’s room.

  It was, however, Clarissa who replied.

  In rather matter-of-fact tones Madeline explained that she was speaking from Dr. Lanyon’s office, which meant that she could not indulge in any long conversations.

  “He would like to know if we would all like to go out in the car with him tomorrow afternoon, Clarissa. We could drive along the river to—”

  “But how sweet!” Laugher and interest bubbled up in Clarissa’s voice. “Tell him I shall be delighted to come. But—I was just going to tell you—Mother isn’t very well. It’s nothing serious—some sort of chill inside, I think. But she means to have a couple of days in bed, so as to be fit for the more strenuous sightseeing.”