I just lay and watched the grey, blind world outside the windows, and counted the half-hours as the morning wore by. And isn’t it amazing how long the very minutes can be when one is right-down ill, and waiting for a doctor?
In a small isolated community like ours, one excitement is made to do duty for a long while. The impending visit of the surgeon from London was soon the topic of general conversation. And little white curtains were pulled aside from cottage windows as the car, with the doctor and a stranger, was seen coming down one hill and over the bridge into the village in the valley, switchbacking again up the opposite hill to reach the particular crag on which my cottage is perched.
Owing to previous heavy rains, the lanes were almost impassable in places; overflowing brooks made rivers and swamps in most unexpected spots. Thus it was that the car could not come within half-a-mile of the cottage; it had to be “beached” high and dry in somebody’s farmyard, and the rest of the journey made on foot. The walk is a positive fairyland dream in summer; but on the bleak December day the ferns and flowers were gone, and the withered grass stalks rustled with a disconsolate wheeze, while the pine-trees creaked and moaned in the wind. It seemed an unkind, inhospitable sort of a day to bring a busy, valuable man such a long, cold distance.
At last I heard brisk footsteps coming down the path to the door, scrunching the cones that had fallen from the larches. Then a cheerful voice was speaking, while great-coats were being taken off down below. I shut my eyes, and felt I need not worry any more.
After all, we women are curious creatures! We consult a specialist when we have some weakness that won’t give way to ordinary treatment, and then, when, out of his exceptional knowledge and wide experience, he tells us what will probably cure us, many of us immediately beseech him to make it something else.
When the surgeon told me what course it would be necessary to take if I was to be got on to my feet again, I immediately began to state a hundred reasons why I wished he would prescribe something entirely different. He said he was going to have me brought to London at once and taken to a hospital. I knew that was the very last thing I could endure. I have always had an absolute terror lest I should ever have to go into a hospital; and here I was confronted with it face to face. I said I could not go into one; whatever treatment was necessary must be done in my own home. I didn’t want to be among strangers and with nurses whom I had never seen before; I wanted to be nursed by people I knew. And as for chloroform, well, I would gladly die first! such was the horror I had of it. And I continued on these lines.
The surgeon listened very patiently and let me have my say out. (Where in the world does a man like this get his marvellous stock of patience from!) He even agreed with most of my arguments. Anæsthetics were disagreeable; it certainly would be pleasanter to be in my own home; and it might be nicer if I had only friends around me, etc.
But, all the same, it was borne in upon me that I might as well try to get the Sphinx to turn its head and nod over to a pyramid, as to attempt to make the man who was talking to me budge an eighth of an inch. And he wound up by saying, “I am afraid, however, that it will have to be a hospital—I’m so sorry—but I want you to go into a private ward in Mildmay. You shall have the best man in London to administer the anæsthetic; and as for nurses—well, if you don’t say they are some of the finest women you have ever met, I shall be much surprised.”
By this time I had my head under the eiderdown again, and was howling away (quietly). I was so truly sorry for myself!