A Man's Woman. Frank Norris
was begun; there was no delay, no hesitation; what there was to be done had been carefully planned beforehand, even to the minutest details. Street, a master of his profession, thoroughly familiar with every difficulty that might present itself during the course of the work in hand, foreseeing every contingency, prepared for every emergency, calm, watchful, self-contained, set about the exsecting of the joint with no trace of compunction, no embarrassment, no misgiving. His assistants, as well as he himself, knew that life or death hung upon the issue of the next ten minutes. Upon Street alone devolved the life of the little girl. A second's hesitation at the wrong stage of the operation, a slip of bistoury or scalpel, a tremor of the wrist, a single instant's clumsiness of the fingers, and the Enemy—watching for every chance, intent for every momentarily opened chink or cranny wherein he could thrust his lean fingers—entered the frail tenement with a leap, a rushing, headlong spring that jarred the house of life to its foundations. Lowering close over her head Lloyd felt the shadow of his approach. He had arrived there in that commonplace little room, with its commonplace accessories, its ornaments, that suddenly seemed so trivial, so impertinent—the stopped French clock, with its simpering, gilded cupids, on the mantelpiece; the photograph of a number of picnickers "grouped" on a hotel piazza gazing with monolithic cheerfulness at this grim business, this struggle of the two world forces, this crisis in a life.
Then abruptly the operation was over.
The nurse and surgeons eased their positions immediately, drawing long breaths. They began to talk, commenting upon the operation, and Lloyd, intensely interested, asked Street why he had, contrary to her expectations, removed the bone above the lesser trochanter. He smiled, delighted at her intelligence.
"It's better than cutting through the neck, Miss Searight," he told her. "If I had gone through the neck, don't you see, the trochanter major would come over the hole and prevent the discharges."
"Yes, yes, I see, of course," assented Lloyd.
The incision was sewn up, and when all was over Lloyd carried Hattie back to the bed in the next room. Slowly the little girl regained consciousness, and Lloyd began to regard her once more as a human being. During the operation she had forgotten the very existence of Hattie Campbell, a little girl she knew. She had only seen a bit of mechanism out of order and in the hands of a repairer. It was always so with Lloyd. Her charges were not infrequently persons whom she knew, often intimately, but during the time of their sickness their personalities vanished for the trained nurse; she saw only the "case," only the mechanism, only the deranged clockwork in imminent danger of running down.
But the danger was by no means over. The operation had been near the trunk. There had been considerable loss of blood, and the child's power of resistance had been weakened by long periods of suffering. Lloyd feared that the shock might prove too great. Farnham departed, but for a little while the surgeon remained with Lloyd to watch the symptoms. At length, however, he too, pressed for time, and expected at one of the larger hospitals of the City, went away, leaving directions for Lloyd to telephone him in case of the slightest change. At this hour, late in the afternoon, there were no indications that the little girl would not recover from the shock. Street believed she would rally and ultimately regain her health.
"But," he told Lloyd as he bade her good-bye, "I don't need to impress upon you the need of care and the greatest vigilance; absolute rest is the only thing; she must see nobody, not even her father. The whole system is numbed and deadened just yet, but there will be a change either for better or worse some time to-night."
For thirty-six hours Lloyd had not closed an eye, but of that she had no thought. Her supper was sent up to her, and she prepared herself for her night's watch. She gave the child such nourishment as she believed she could stand, and from time to time took her pulse, making records of it upon her chart for the surgeon's inspection later on. At intervals she took Hattie's temperature, placing the clinical thermometer in the armpit. Toward nine in the evening, while she was doing this for the third time within the hour, one of the house servants came to the room to inform her that she was wanted on the telephone. Lloyd hesitated, unwilling to leave Hattie for an instant. However, the telephone was close at hand, and it was quite possible that Dr. Street had rung her up to ask for news.
But it was the agency that had called, and Miss Douglass informed her that a telegram had arrived there for her a few moments before. Should she hold it or send it to her by Rownie? Lloyd reflected a moment.
"Oh—open it and read it to me," she said. "It's a call, isn't it?—or—no; send it here by Rownie, and send my hospital slippers with her, the ones without heels. But don't ring up again to-night; we're expecting a crisis almost any moment."
Lloyd returned to the sick-room, sent away the servant, and once more settled herself for the night. Hattie had roused for a moment.
"Am I going to get well, am I going to get well, Miss Searight?"
Lloyd put her finger to her lips, nodding her head, and Hattie closed her eyes again with a long breath. A certain great tenderness and compassion for the little girl grew big in Lloyd's heart. To herself she said:
"God helping me, you shall get well. They believe in me, these people—'If any one could pull us through it would be Miss Searight.' We will 'pull through,' yes, for I'll do it."
The night closed down, dark and still and very hot. Lloyd, regulating the sick-room's ventilation, opened one of the windows from the top. The noises of the City steadily decreasing as the hours passed, reached her ears in a subdued, droning murmur. On her bed, that had for so long been her bed of pain, Hattie lay with closed eyes, inert, motionless, hardly seeming to breathe, her life in the balance; unhappy little invalid, wasted with suffering, with drawn, pinched face and bloodless lips, and at her side Lloyd, her dull-blue eyes never leaving her patient's face, alert and vigilant, despite her long wakefulness, her great bronze-red flame of hair rolling from her forehead and temples, the sombre glow in her cheeks no whit diminished by her day of fatigue, of responsibility and untiring activity.
For the time being she could thrust her fear, the relentless Enemy that for so long had hung upon her heels, back and away from her. There was another Enemy now to fight—or was it another—was it not the same Enemy, the very same, whose shadow loomed across that sick-bed, across the frail, small body and pale, drawn face?
With her pity and compassion for the sick child there arose in Lloyd a certain unreasoned, intuitive obstinacy, a banding together of all her powers and faculties in one great effort at resistance, a steadfastness under great stress, a stubbornness, that shut its ears and eyes. It was her one dominant characteristic rising up, strong and insistent the instant she knew herself to be thwarted in her desires or checked in a course she believed to be right and good. And now as she felt the advance of the Enemy and saw the shadow growing darker across the bed her obstinacy hardened like tempered steel.
"No," she murmured, her brows levelled, her lips compressed, "she shall not die. I will not let her go."
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