“I shan’t do anything of the sort,” she heard her voice saying.
Instantly the suave, polite Mr. Brinton became a perfectly different person, sharp and peremptory.
“Do as you like,” he said. “Now, then, move the bed up to the window, there’s better light. Are you ready with the sponges, nurse?”
Instantly the whole room sparkled with swift, deft energy, energy quiet and contained and fearfully alert. The doctor stripped off Jaye’s pyjama trousers, and Mr. Brinton looked at him a moment. Then, with forefinger and thumb, he felt his way down the thigh of his right leg till he came to the knee. That was swollen into a monstrous hump, and on the side of it was the gangrenous wound. He felt his way very carefully up again to about the middle of the thigh.
The nurse had already removed the cloth from the covered table, and Mr. Brinton looked at it. He took up a knife with a bulged edge to it, looked once more at the patient, and cut.
“Sponge,” he said sharply, “and be ready with forceps. Fine pair of legs the boy has got.”
“Half-back for Fulham,” said the anæsthetist. “He did good work in the League matches last year. They would never have got into the final otherwise. I was playing on the other side. We should have won except for him.”
“Hopping-race for the future, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Brinton. “Pull his jacket up.”
Helen had seen the first incision, and the whole thing seemed to her the most heartless exhibition she had ever witnessed. They were talking about football ... when here was this poor boy—— And then a sudden illumination came to her. They were not heartless at all; they were simply employed in their work, doing the best they could, making life instead of death. It was natural they should talk about a League match: it was one of those humanities that enabled you to face the grim work of healing.
A button had torn loose as the nurse took the edge of Jaye’s pyjama jacket out of the way, and the whole of his body was exposed, strong and supple and charged with the potentiality of its manhood. Soon he would be a truncated thing, an object of pity. And why? Just because he had faced the peril and the pain. He had been willing, even as Robin had been willing, to fight for the inviolable law. He had done it for her.... Suddenly Jaye began to talk. For a moment Helen almost shrieked at the idea that he had come out of the anæsthetic, and was conscious again with that great gash in his leg, and a half-dozen of forceps clinging like leeches to the severed veins and arteries. Then she remembered having heard that people under an anæsthetic talked, and listened to a mumble of obscene things. Surely the nurse who had thought it unladylike to smoke, would be paralysed by this....