The patient still sat up rigidly, and for so long that the surgeon placed a hand upon his shoulder to motion him to lie down. But he kept fixedly gazing out to sea. Minutes elapsed and yet he moved not. The surgeon, with some expression of anxiety, once more motioned him to lie down, but still he kept his look seawards. At last the rigid muscles relaxed, and as he let his head drop upon the pillow he said, “I have seen the last of it—the last of the sea—you can do what you like with me now.” He had, indeed, taken, as he thought, farewell of his old love, of the sea of his boyhood and of many happy memories. The eyes of the patient closed upon the sight of the English Channel radiant in the sun, and as the mask of the anæsthetist was placed over his face he muttered, “I have said good-bye.”
The trouble revealed by the surgeon proved to be cancer, and when, some few days after the operation, the weary man was told the nature of his malady he said, with a smile, he would take no more trouble to live. In fourteen days he died.
Every day his bed was brought close to the window so that the sun could fall upon him, so that his eyes could rest upon the stretch of water and the sound of waves could fall upon his tired ears.
The friend of his boyhood, the clerk, came down from London to see him. They had very little to say to one another when they met. After the simplest greeting was over the sick man turned his face towards the sea and for long he and his old companion gazed at the blue Channel in silence. There was no need for speech. It was the sea that spoke for them. It was evident that they were both back again at Salcombe, at some beloved creek, and that they were boys once more playing by the sea. The sick man’s hand moved across the coverlet to search for the hand of his friend, and when the fingers met they closed in a grip of gratitude for the most gracious memory of their lives.
The failing man’s last sight of the sea was one evening at sundown when the tide was swinging away to the west. His look lingered upon the fading waves until the night set in. Then the blind of the window was drawn down.
Next morning at sunrise it was not drawn up, for the lover of the sea was dead.
VII
A CASE OF “HEART FAILURE”
WHAT a strange company they are, these old patients who crowd into the surgeon’s memory after a lifetime of busy practice! There they stand, a confused, impersonal assembly, so illusive and indistinct as to be little more than shadows. Behind them is a dim background of the past—a long building with many windows that I recognize as my old hospital, a consulting room with familiar furniture, an operating theatre, certain indefinite sick-rooms as well as a ward in which are marshalled a double row of beds with blue and white coverlets.
Turning over the pages of old case books, as one would idle with the sheets of an inventory, some of these long departed folk appear clearly enough, both as to their faces and the details of their histories; but the majority are mere ghosts with neither remembered names nor features, neither age nor sex. They are just fragments of anatomy, the last visible portions of figures that are fading out of sight. Here, among the crowd, are the cheeks of a pretty girl encircled by white bandages and the visage of a toothless old man with only one ear. I can recollect nothing but their looks. They belong to people I have known, somewhere and somehow, in the consulting room or the ward. Here a light falls upon “that knee,” “that curious skull,” “that puzzling growth.” Here is a much distorted back, bare and pitiable, surmounted by coils of beautiful brown hair. If the lady turned round I should probably not recognize her face; but I remember the back and the coils of hair.