Edwin, who saw that surgery was needed, showed the case to Mather. The surgeon stripped the sleeve from her thin, transparent arm and showed him the red lines by which the poison was tracking up the lymphatics towards the glands of the axilla that stood like blockhouses in the way of bacterial invasion.
“Why didn’t you come before?” he said, with a roughness that was not unkind. How many times was Edwin to hear those very words!
“I couldn’t, doctor. There was my work—”
“There’d be no more work for you, my dear, if you went on much longer,” said Mather: and then, to Edwin, “Yes . . . you’d better incise it at once, I’m busy putting up a fracture. Straight down in the middle line. Don’t be afraid of it.”
“Oh, you’re not going to cut me, doctor?” she said. “Not till to-morrow. . . . Oh, please . . . when I’ve had a night’s sleep.”
He was very nervous. He assured her that he would give her no pain; but while he left her to fetch the scalpel and the dressings he heard a queer drumming noise and turned to see that it was made by the heels of his patient trembling on the floor. He was nearly as tremulous himself.
“I promise you I won’t hurt you,” he said, and she returned him a painful smile. It was a look he knew. “Just like the eyes of a dog,” W.G. had said.
He sprayed the finger with ethyl chloride, that froze into a crust like hoarfrost on the fingertip and blanched the skin that was already pale with the pressure inside it. All the time the girl was making little nervous movements, and sometimes her heels began to drum again until she tucked them under the bar of her chair.
“I’m sorry, doctor, I can’t help it,” she said.
Then, with his scalpel, he made a clean longitudinal cut through the tense skin down to the bone of the phalanx. She gave a start and clutched his hand so that he nearly gave it up. “I’ve got to do it,” he thought. “I must do it.” It was the first time that he had ever cut with a knife into living flesh. A strange sensation. . . . But the bead of matter that escaped showed him that he had got to the root of the trouble, and the sight of it filled him with a new and curious exultation.