“Yes,” I said, rising from my knees at the bedside; “we have it.”
Of the days that followed it is not my intention to say much. A woman once told me that I was afraid of nothing. She was mistaken. If she chance to read this and recognize it, I hope she will believe the assertion: I am, and always have been, afraid of cholera—in India. In Europe it is a different matter. The writing of those days would be unpleasant to me; the reading would be still less pleasant to the reader.
Brigadier-General Thurkow rose to the occasion, as we all expected him to do. It is one thing to send a man to a distant danger, and quite another to go with him into a danger which is close at hand. Charlie Thurkow and I were the only two doctors on the spot, and before help could reach us we should probably all be dead or cured. There was no shirking now. Charlie and I were at work night and day, and in the course of thirty-six hours Charlie got interested in it. He reached the fighting point—that crisis in an epidemic of which doctors can tell—that point where there is a certain glowing sense of battle over each bed—where death and the doctor see each other face to face—fight hand to hand for the life.
The doctor loses his interest in the patient as a friend or a patient; all his attention is centred on the life as a life, and a point to be scored against the adversary Death.
We had a very bad time for two days. At the end of that time I had officers bearing Her Majesty's commission serving under me as assistant nurses, and then the women came into it. The first to offer herself was the wife of a non-commissioned officer in the Engineers, who had been through Netley. I accepted her. The second woman was Elsie Matheson. I refused point blank.
“Sooner or later,” she said, looking at me steadily with something in her eyes which I could not make out, “you will have to take me.”
“Does your father know you have come to me?” I retorted.
“Yes; I came with his consent.”
I shook my head and returned to my writing. I was filling in a list of terrific length. She did not go away, but stood in front of me with a certain tranquillity which was unnatural under the circumstances.
“Do you want help?” she asked calmly.