The house-physician did not approve of these experiments. On principle he would have disapproved of poetry, and in this case he considered the reading of it unhealthy. As if there were any element of health in this misfortune! . . . A few weeks later the patient had an attack of hæmoptysis and died.
It was only in such cases of chronic illness that the question of the patient’s intellectual state arose. Such speculations might mitigate the fatigue of slow siege warfare that had only one end in view, but the acute medical wards, and particularly those devoted to acute pneumonia, were the scene of shorter and more desperate conflicts, grapplings with death, in which the issue was doubtful and medicine could at least give support, and sometimes turn the tide.
These were indeed terrible battles, in which devoted nursing counted for much. To Edwin it was a sight more awe-inspiring than the quiet of death, to watch a strong man stretched upon his back, breathing terribly through the night-long struggles of pneumonia. In it he could see the most tremendous expression of a man’s will to live, in the clenched hands, in the neck, knotted and swollen with intolerable strain, in the working of the muscles of the face and nose in their supreme thirst for air. The sound of this breathing would fill the room that was otherwise so silent that one could hear the soft hiss of the oxygen escaping from its cylinder. The train of students that followed Sir Arthur round the wards would stand waiting in the doorway, knowing that nothing was to be seen, and the physician himself would step quietly to the square of red screens and exchange a whisper with the sister who stood at the patient’s bedside, her lips compressed as though their muscles were contracting in sympathy with the other tortured muscles that she watched.
“Weill, how is he?” the physician would ask.
“I think he’s holding his own. No sleep.”
“That’ a pity. Well, persevere with the brandy and the warm oxygen.”
“Yes, sir.” Her tense lips scarcely moved.
And then Edwin’s chief, so quietly that the patient did not know what he was doing, being indeed no more than a mass of labouring muscles bent on life, would feel the temporal pulse in front of the ear with his firm white finger.
“Not so bad, sister . . . not so bad.”
Then he would sweep away with the tails of his frock-coat swinging.