First Person Paramount Part 11

The second negro bowed and glided from the room, followed by Dr.

Fulton. Sir Charles dipped his hands into a basin of fluid offered him by Marion, and wiped his fingers with a towel. Two minutes later a bell tinkled, "Beudant," said the surgeon.

The negro bowed again like a slave to a lamp, and noiselessly departed.

Very soon I heard the dull tramp of slippered feet on the corridor without. The door opened, and the negroes re-entered the room bearing between them a long slab, on which rested the inert figure of a young man. He seemed about twenty-two years of age. His face was extremely pale. His eyes were closed and his mouth was propped wide open with a curious spring wedge. He was nude to the waist, but thence downwards wrapped in an eiderdown shawl. His chest was narrow and his body hideously emaciated. As his chest moved up and down under his deep laboured breathing the ribs projected horribly, leaving dark hollows between. He was strapped securely to the slab and in such a thorough fas.h.i.+on that he could scarcely have moved a muscle howsoever much he had been minded. But he was evidently unconscious, doubtless in an anaesthetised sleep. This curious procession was followed by Dr. Fulton and a tall elderly gentleman similarly apparelled to the surgeons. I had never set eyes on him before. He had an eager, enthusiastic face.

His nose was very long; he had high cheek-bones and prominent grey eyes full of a strange fanatical light. I put him down at one glance as a devotee of science. Afterwards I discovered that his name was Vernet, that he was a Frenchman, and resident house-surgeon to the hospital, which in fact he owned.

He was the last to enter, and he closed and locked the door behind him.

The negroes advanced to the bench, and having deposited the slab with its senseless burden, they moved over to the other operating table.

Already the room had become oppressively hot, and I noticed beads of perspiration stand out on Sir Charles Venner's forehead as he bent to examine his patient with a stethoscope. Dr. Fulton beckoned Cavanagh and myself to approach, and by signs he directed us to stand at the feet of the young man upon whom Sir Charles was about to operate. We were thus quite out of the way of those who had work to do, but we could see everything, and I desired no better vantage post. Dr. Fulton stood behind the patient's head at the other end of the slab, holding in one hand a large rubber face mask, in the other a large stoppered phial, connected by a tube with the mask. Sir Charles Venner stood beside the patient between the two operating benches; and beside him was Dr. Vernet. Marion faced them from across the patient's body. She held in one hand a sponge, in the other a basin.

Sir Charles Venner lost no time in proceeding to business, nor did he give us the least warning of his intention. Casting his stethoscope aside, he seized a small thin-bladed knife and applied its edge with a free sweeping stroke, as an accomplished artist might draw a freehand with a pencil, diagonally across the patient's third and fourth ribs, within an inch of the breast bone. A thin streak of blood followed the cut as quickly as thunder follows lightning. Marion instantly applied her sponge to the wound, and the red line disappeared. The surgeon, without pausing, made another swift incision at right angles to the first along the third rib, and followed this with a third, parallel to the first, some six inches apart. Marion pursued his cuts with her sponge, dipping it each time into her basin, which doubtless contained some powerful astringent drug, for the wounds once touched ceased to bleed. Sir Charles Venner made some further rapid cuts, and with inimitable dexterity he presently raised the flap of flesh and muscle so detached by his knife from the patient's ribs, back across the chest, and secured it there with a dart attached by a string to a bandage pa.s.sed about the subject's loins. With the speed of magic he applied half a dozen tiny silver spring clips to the dripping flesh, in order to secure the ruptured blood vessels. Dr. Vernet then handed him a tiny razor bladed saw, with which, to my horror, he immediately attacked the bared heaving ribs. The ghastly sight sickened me so much that I closed my eyes, and for some minutes I fought like a tiger with the weakness that threatened to undo me. The world was rocking, rocking, ay, and beginning to swing. I should in the end probably have fainted, but that my companion, Mr. Cavanagh, observing my condition of a sudden pressed his handkerchief to my nostrils. I inhaled an intoxicating, subtle, but most powerful reviving essence. Afterwards I learned that Marion had supplied him with several capsules of nitrate of amyl, of which he had himself already consumed more than one. I felt the blood rush to my head and swell out my cheeks and scalp and skin.

The effect was magical. My weakness pa.s.sed like a black dream, and with restored courage I opened my eyes. There was now a gaping cavity in the patient's breast, through which I could see at work the mysterious machinery of life. The inner flap of the exposed lung had been uplifted and secured aside with a ligature. Below panted and pulsed a crimson and purple-coloured shapeless thing. It fascinated and at the same time terrified me. With a frightful effort I tore my eyes away and looked at Sir Charles. He was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a sharp-edged, curved hollow tube to the end of a long and curiously fas.h.i.+oned syringe. This syringe was furnished here and there with golden taps and tubes and tiny force pumps. One tube stretched beyond the operator and ran to the other operating table. I followed it with my eyes and saw that it terminated in a long, thick, hollow needle which reposed in the hands of the negro Beudant. The other negro, Jussieu, knife in hand, bent over an object lying on the slab before him--the squat, bulky figure which had excited my curiosity upon my entering the chamber, and which then had been covered with a sheet. But the sheet had now vanished, and before and exposed to my view lay an enormous ape, a chimpanzee I fancy, which was strapped to the bench exactly in the same fas.h.i.+on and att.i.tude as Sir Charles Venner's patient. The ape's huge hairy breast was disfigured with a square, b.l.o.o.d.y opening, but I saw that he was alive, for he breathed. The negro Jussieu had evidently performed an operation on all fours with that executed by Sir Charles Venner! The idea almost stunned me. Jussieu was then a great surgeon, although a negro. Next instant I considered the ape, and a panic horror almost overwhelmed me. George Cavanagh was again my saviour. There came a sound of rus.h.i.+ng waters to my ears, and the room began to whirl and sway. On the very threshold of oblivion once again the thin and penetrating flavour of the nitrate of amyl restored to me my faculties. I buried my teeth in my lower lip and cursed myself for a pitiful poltroon. I looked up to meet Marion's eyes. She smiled at me so tender an encouragement that I turned cold with shame; that she, a delicate woman, could bear unmoved a sight that stole my manhood, fired my heart with more of rage than wonder, though I wondered too. I fiercely resolved not to be weak again.

Until that moment the silence had been absolute, but of a sudden Sir Charles spoke. "Wait for the systole, Vernet!"

I glanced down and saw Dr. Vernet insert his right hand into the hole in the patient's breast. He was armed with a large, cup-shaped clasp.

He fumbled for a moment, and then, nodding his head, he withdrew his hand.

Sir Charles threw Cavanagh a quick scornful glance. "Attend, if you wish to understand," he commanded. "I'll try to be explicit!"

I looked for the first time at Cavanagh. He held a kerchief tightly to his face, but his eyes, which I alone could see, were simply lurid.

"Go on!" he muttered in a m.u.f.fled voice.

Sir Charles inserted the edged tube attached to the syringe with both hands into the patient's breast.

"This is the right ventricle," he began, speaking in quick, disjointed sentences. "Its function is to force the venous blood through the pulmonary veins to the right auricle; thence to be distributed over the body. I am now--about to--insert--a needle into the right ventricle through the pericardium and walls. How is the pulse, Fulton?"

"Right, sir."

"Are you ready, Beudant, Jussieu?"

"At the word, sir," replied the negroes.

"Good!" exclaimed Sir Charles. "I am too!" He withdrew one hand from the ghastly cavity and seized the syringe pump, which he began to compress. "I am now forcing into our subject's right ventricle the solution of my invention, which is destined to slay the tubercle bacilli. In two seconds the lungs will be suffused with the fluid, and in two minutes we shall have worked the miracle of absolutely destroying every bacillus contained therein. But we shall also have killed the patient's blood. See, it is already decomposing. Mark how white the lung grows. To work, Jussieu!" he cried. "To work!"

"Ready, sir!" cried back the negro. I could not see what he did, but I saw the tube connecting Sir Charles Venner's patient with the opposite table suddenly rigidify as though a rod had been slipped down its hollow interior.

"We are now correcting the solution's destructive action on our subject's blood by forcing into his heart a fresh supply of living arterial blood taken from the left auricle of the ape lying yonder,"

explained Sir Charles. "Vernet is meanwhile extracting our subject's own decomposed and now useless blood, which is really blood no longer, from the greater artery in his right leg. You see, Cavanagh, we have established a perfect system of drainage. We are supplying good blood and removing bad."

"My G.o.d!" cried Cavanagh. "It is white!"

His exclamation referred to Dr. Vernet's work. The French surgeon had made a deep incision in the patient's right thigh, from which gushed a steady fountain of yellow fluid.

"Shout when it colours, Vernet!" commanded Sir Charles.

I looked on, speechless with amazement, I had no longer the least inclination to faint. Indeed, my whole soul was so steeped in wonder, that I forgot I lived. I was merely a rapt acquisitive spirit being initiated into the fundamental mysteries of nature by a great, indeed, a giant intellect. Sir Charles Venner appeared to me then something like a G.o.d. His left hand was plunged into the patient's breast, perhaps grasping the heart, that seat of life. His right compressed and controlled the movements of the syringe. His face gleamed like marble in the brilliant white light of the reflectors. It was pale, composed, expressionless, yet full of watchful intelligence and power. He stood upon his feet as steady as a rock. Every moment he uttered some sharp, pregnant direction to one or other of his a.s.sistants, which was at once implicitly obeyed. "No greater man has ever lived!" thought I then, and I have not altered my opinion since.

In about three minutes, though the period seemed longer to my electrified imagination, I saw a red light flash into the milky fountain that flowed under Dr. Vernet's guidance.

"Enough!" he cried.

"Good!" exclaimed Sir Charles.

The fountain stopped flowing on instant, for Dr. Vernet had squeezed the artery between a pair of forceps, and with deft fingers he began to bind it with a ligature of golden wire. I glanced from him to Sir Charles. He was now bending closely above the cavity in the subject's breast; the syringe had disappeared. He seemed to be sewing something in the hollow, but I could distinguish nothing for blood. Marion's sponge plied backwards and forwards with the regularity of a machine.

"What are you doing now?" cried a voice beside me, so harsh and strained that I hardly recognized it.

"Sewing up the punctured ventricle," replied Sir Charles with a sort of chuckle. "Some of your friends would be a bit surprised, eh, Cavanagh, if you told them that you saw a doctor patch a man's heart with thread and needle, as a sempstress might a rent gown!"

Cavanagh uttered a hollow groan, and I turned just in time to catch him. He had swooned! I carried him to the other end of the room, where I laid him down upon the floor and hurriedly unfastened his collar and cravat. I was hot with rage, for I wished to witness the end of the operation; but I dared not leave him because of Marion. Even as I knelt to chafe his wrists, I heard Sir Charles address her sharply: "Now then, Marion, attend to me. The young fool is all right. Dagmar will look after him."

I managed to awaken Cavanagh at last with a capsule I found clutched in his hand, but several precious minutes had been wasted, and we returned to the table only in time to see Sir Charles sewing up with golden wire the flap of muscle which had been the door of his more important work.

The operation was over. The negroes were already starting to remove the carcase of the dead ape, whose life blood had been stolen to try and prolong the existence of its fellow creature, man! The other surgeons were grouped about the still living subject, but Sir Charles Venner was no longer in command. Dr. Fulton now held supreme authority. He occupied Venner's former post, and with one hand he fingered the subject's now unfastened wrists, while in the other he grasped a small hypodermic syringe. For some moments a deathly hush obtained, that was but intensified by the slow and stertorous breathing of the patient on the slab.

Dr. Fulton's expression was strained and pa.s.sionately anxious. It formed a curious contrast to Sir Charles Venner's stolid immobility.

The others watched him, not the patient. That is to say, all but Marion. She had slipped an arm about George Cavanagh, and she was tenderly supporting him, oblivious of everything else.

"Well?" asked Sir Charles at last.

I gasped with relief to hear his voice.

"Weaker; curse it!" replied Dr. Fulton.

"Inject?"

"No; last of all. The battery, quick, the gla.s.s stool!"

Sir Charles and Dr. Vernet darted off. Sir Charles returned with a gla.s.s bench, which he placed upon the floor at Fulton's feet, and upon which Fulton immediately stepped. Dr. Vernet stopped beside a distant table and began to pull out something that looked like a cylinder from the side of a huge wooden box. We heard the rapidly intermittent clicking sound of the working battery at once.

"Stop!" shouted Fulton.

I saw the patient's legs twitch and draw up half way to his stomach, and his arms spasmodically jerk.

This was repeated a dozen times in as many seconds, but gradually the motions ceased.

"Awaken him!" commanded Dr. Fulton.

Sir Charles applied a small phial to the patient's nostrils. After a while the poor fellow turned his head aside as though unconsciously trying to escape a torture. But the phial followed him remorselessly, and presently he moaned. Sir Charles at once removed the spring wedge from his mouth. His teeth clicked, shut, and he uttered a heartrending gurgling groan.

"More battery!" shouted Fulton. "Softly, softly!"

The patient's muscles jerked again, but less violently than before. He tossed and turned his head, trying vainly to escape the phial; thus for a moment, then of a sudden his eyes opened and he gazed about him.

"Stop battery!" cried Dr. Fulton. "Marion, come here!"