He followed her in fussily, hoping that there was nothing to keep him, for he had a long list of country visits to get through before the broken heads should begin to roll up in the evening. Abner had laid the child down on a high couch covered with American leather. In the road she had screamed her breath away and now she lay shivering and whimpering softly, almost quiet.
‘Well, what is it?’ said the doctor brusquely.
‘It’s her leg,’ Mary whispered. ‘I’m afraid it’s broken.’
‘A kick from a horse,’ said the doctor’s wife from the background.
‘Let’s see!’
Mary’s fingers fumbled with the tapes of the child’s drawers.
‘Scissors!’ said the doctor. The sudden touch of steel made Gladys cry out loud, and the first cry of alarm was quickly changed to one of pain. She struggled with the pain and by her movement increased it. The doctor leaned his left arm above her body and held her still. Mary, clasping Gladys’s hands in hers, put down her face to the child’s tear-dabbled cheek. Her own tears were mingled with those of her child, but she made no sound. Abner stood helpless, watching, and behind him also stood the doctor’s wife, gaunt, flat, immobile. In a former state she had been a sister at the North Bromwich Infirmary.
The doctor was leaning over Gladys and breathing heavily through his nostrils. His hands, lean, brown, and slightly stained with iodine, were placed firmly yet tenderly upon the pink and white of the child’s thigh. His fingers moved like tentacles, searching, soothing the spastic muscles under the skin. Gladys gave a sudden frightened, ‘Oh . . . mam!’—and the fingers tightened like bands of steel. All the man’s mind was in his fingers; his eyes gazed vaguely out of the window to the cascades of fading laburnum blossom in his shrubbery, the billowy outline of lilac against the white sky.
‘Yes . . .’ he said at last. ‘Separated epiphysis. Lower end of femur. I shall want a small Liston splint and plenty of strapping. I expect she’ll need a whiff of chloroform, too. If you’ll get it I won’t move.’ Then he addressed Mary. ‘I think it will be better if the small boy is out of the room. They can look after him in the kitchen.’
Bribed by a sup of cocoa, Morgan allowed himself to be taken away from his mother by the doctor’s wife, who soon returned with the splint, the dressings, and the anæsthetic.