“Mrs. Faber?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. “Mrs. Faber? Oh, yes; why, of course. Yes, indeed, she’s extraordinarily well. I never saw her better.”
“She must have been very lonely without you this past month,” rasped the Superintendent of Nurses, perfectly polite.
“Yes, she was,” replied the flushed Senior Surgeon. “She—she suffered keenly.”
“And you, too?” drawled the Superintendent of Nurses. “It must have been very hard for you.”
“Yes, it was,” replied the Senior Surgeon. “I suffered keenly, too.”
Distractedly he glanced back at the open door. An extraordinarily large number of nurses, internes, orderlies, seemed to be having errands up and down the corridor that allowed them a peculiarly generous length of neck to stretch into the Superintendent’s office.
“Great Heavens!” snapped the Senior Surgeon, “what’s the matter with everybody this morning?” Tempestuously he started for the door. “Hurry up my cases, please, Miss Hartzen!” he ordered. “Send them to the operating-room, and let me get to work.”
At eleven o’clock, absolutely calm, absolutely cool, as pure as a girl in his white operating-clothes; cleaner, skin, hair, teeth, hands, than any girl who ever walked the face of the earth, in a white-tiled room as free from germs as himself, with three or four small glistening instruments, and half a dozen breathless assistants almost as spotless as himself, with his sleeves rolled back the whole length of his arms, and the faintest possible little grin twitching oddly at one corner of his mouth, he “went in,” as they say, to a new-born baby’s tortured, twisted spine, and took out fifty years, perhaps, of hunchbacked pain and shame and morbid passions flourishing banefully in the dark shades of a disordered life.
At half-past twelve he did an appendix operation on the only son of his best friend; at one o’clock he did another appendix operation. Whom it was on didn’t matter; it couldn’t have been worse on any one. At half-past one no one remembered to feed him. At two, in another man’s operation, he saw the richest merchant in the city go wafted out into eternity on the fumes of ether taken for the lancing of a sty. At three o’clock, passing the open door of one of the public waiting-rooms, an Italian peasant woman rushed out and spat in his face because her tubercular daughter had just died at the sanatorium where the Senior Surgeon’s money had sent her. Only in this one wild, defiling moment did the lust for alcohol surge up in him again, surge clamorously, brutally, absolutely mercilessly, as though in all the world only interminable raw whisky was hot enough to cauterize a polluted consciousness. At half-past three, as soon as he could change his clothes again, he rebroke and reset an acrobat’s priceless leg. At five o’clock, more to rest himself than anything else, he went up to the autopsy amphitheater to look over an exhibit of enlarged hearts whose troubles were permanently over.
At six o’clock, just as he was leaving the great building, with all its harrowing sights, sounds, and smells, a peremptory telephone call from one of the younger surgeons of the city summoned him back into the stuffy office again.