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Updated: May 23, 2025
A third man, horribly smashed about the head, walked almost unaided into the operating-room. Gleeson and I led him, with just a touch on his arm. Next morning he lay dead on a little pile of straw in a quiet corner of the courtyard. I sat down to a supper which I had not expected to eat. There was a strange excitement in my body, which trembled a little after the day's adventures.
In the men's ward a young man was pointed out to us who had been shot twice during a kolo dance in the arm and leg. "The Montenegrins," said the doctor, "are very careless when they fire their revolvers during a dance, and I get a good many patients that way." Afterwards we visited some other wards, and we were finally taken to the other operating-room, or theatre.
Gasping surprisedly towards the Senior Surgeon the White Linen Nurse saw his grim mouth yank round abruptly in her direction as it yanked sometimes in the operating-room with some sharp, incisive order of life or death. Instinctively she leaned forward for the message. Not over-loud but strangely distinct the words slapped back into her straining ears.
A little glow of service revived in her. If Johnny lived, it was a small price to pay for a life. If he died, she had given him his chance. The operating-room nurses were very kind. They liked her courage, but they were frightened, too. She, like the others, had been right, but also she was wrong. They paid her tribute of little kindnesses, but they knew she must go.
The operation was performed successfully, and Varley had issued from the operating-room with the look of a man who had gone through an ordeal which had taxed his nerve to the utmost, to find Valerie Meydon waiting, with a piteous, dazed look in her eyes. But this look passed when she heard him say, "All right!"
And when I go from my knees to the operating-room I feel armed to the teeth." He smiled, a brilliant, heart-warming smile, and suddenly he looked, to the man on the bed who gazed at him, more like a conqueror than any one he had ever seen.
Then abruptly he stopped and shot an odd, puzzled glance at the White Linen Nurse, and right there before her startled eyes she saw every vestige of human expression fade out of his face as it faded out sometimes in the operating-room when in the midst of some ghastly, unforeseen emergency that left all his assistants blinking helplessly around them, his whole wonderful scientific mind seemed to break up like some chemical compound into all its meek component parts, only to reorganize itself suddenly with some amazing explosive action that fairly knocked the breath out of all on-lookers but was pretty apt to knock the breath into the body of the person most concerned.
As we were taking our leave, the surgeon asked us if we should not like to see the operating-room; and before we could reply he threw open the door, and behold, there was a roll of linen "garments rolled in blood," and a bloody fragment of a human arm! The surgeon glanced at me, and smiled kindly, but as if pitying my discomposure.
"Stand back with those lanterns, boys," he ordered. I sniffed, expecting to smell illuminating-gas. Instead, a peculiar, sweetish odour pervaded the air. For a moment it made me think of a hospital operating-room. "Ether," exclaimed Kennedy. "Stand back farther with those lights and hold them up from the floor." For a moment he seemed to hesitate as if at loss what to do next.
"Stand back with those lanterns, boys," he ordered. I sniffed, expecting to smell illuminating-gas. Instead, a peculiar, sweetish odour pervaded the air. For a moment it made me think of a hospital operating-room. "Ether," exclaimed Kennedy. "Stand back farther with those lights and hold them up from the floor." For a moment he seemed to hesitate as if at loss what to do next.
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