Chapter II: Part 2

The most repellent thing in the room is a low sofa. It is wide and is covered with very thick leather which is suspiciously shiny and black. It suggests no more comfort than a rack. Its associations are unpleasant. It has been smothered with blood and with every kind of imaginable filth, and has been cleaned up so often that it is no wonder that the deeply stained leather is shiny. It is on this grim black couch that “the case” just carried into the hospital is placed. It may be a man ridden over in the street, with the red bone-ends of his broken legs sticking through his trousers. It may be a machine accident, where strips of cotton shirt have become tangled up with torn flesh and a trail of black grease. It may be a man picked up in a lane with his throat cut, or a woman, dripping foul mud, who has been dragged out of a river. Sometimes the occupant of the sofa is a snoring lump of humanity so drunk as to be nearly dead, or it may be a panting woman who has taken poison and regretted it. In both cases the stomach pump is used with nauseating incidents. Now and then the sofa is occupied by a purple-faced maniac, who is pinned down by sturdy dressers while a strait-jacket is being applied to him. This is not the whole of its history nor of its services, for the Receiving Room nurse, who is rather proud of it, likes to record that many a man and many a woman have breathed their last on this horrible divan.

The so-called dressing room is at its best a “messy” place, as two mops kept in the corner seem to suggest. It is also at times a noisy place, since the yells and screams that escape from it may be heard in the street and may cause passers-by to stop and look up at the window.

Among the sick and the maimed who are “received” in this unsympathetic hall, the most pathetic are the wondering babies and the children. Many are brought in burnt and wrapped up in blankets, with only their singed hair showing out of the bundle. Others have been scalded, so that tissue-paper-like sheets of skin come off when their dressings are applied. Not a few, in old days, were scalded in the throat from drinking out of kettles. Then there are the children who have swallowed things, and who have added to the astounding collection of articles—from buttons to prayer-book clasps—which have found their way, at one time or another, into the infant interior, as well as children who have needles embedded in parts of their bodies or have been bitten by dogs or cats or even by rats.

I remember one bloated, half-dressed woman who ran screaming into the Receiving Room with a dead baby in her arms. She had gone to bed drunk, and had awakened in the morning in a tremulous state to find a dead infant by her side. This particular experience was not unusual in Whitechapel. Then there was another woman who rushed in drawing attention to a thing like a tiny bead of glass sticking to her baby’s cheek. The child had acute inflammation of the eyeball, which the mother had treated with cold tea. The eye had long been closed, but when the mother made a clumsy attempt to open the swollen lids something had popped out, some fluid and this thing like glass. She was afraid to touch it. She viewed it with horror as a strange thing that had come out of the eye. Hugging the child, she had run a mile or so with the dread object still adhering to the skin of the cheek. This glistening thing was the crystalline lens. The globe had been burst, and the child was, of course, blind. Happily, such a case could hardly be met with at the present day.

On the subject of children and domestic surgery as revealed in the Receiving Room, I recall the case of a boy aged about four who had pushed a dry pea into his ear. The mother attempted to remove it with that common surgical implement of the home, a hairpin. She not only failed, but succeeded in pushing the pea farther down into the bony part of the canal. Being a determined woman, she borrowed a squirt, and proceeded to syringe out the foreign body with hot water. The result was that the pea swelled, and, being encased in bone, caused so intense and terrible a pain that the boy became unconscious from shock.

Possibly the most dramatic spectacle in connexion with Receiving Room life in pre-ambulance days was the approach to the hospital gate of a party carrying a wounded woman or man. Looking out of the Receiving Room window on such occasion a silent crowd would be seen coming down the street. It is a closely packed crowd which moves like a clot, which occupies the whole pavement and oozes over into the road. In the centre of the mass is an obscure object towards which all eyes are directed. In the procession are many women, mostly with tousled heads, men, mostly without caps, a butcher, a barber’s assistant, a trim postman, a whitewasher, a man in a tall hat, and a pattering fringe of ragged boys. The boys, being small, cannot see much, so they race ahead in relays to glimpse the fascinating object from the front or climb up railings or mount upon steps to get a view of it as it passes by. Possibly towering above the throng would be two policemen, presenting an air of assumed calm; but policemen were not so common in those days as they are now.

The object carried would be indistinct, being hidden from view as is the queen bee by a clump of fussing bees. Very often the injured person is merely carried along by hand, like a parcel that is coming to pieces. There would be a man to each leg and to each arm, while men on either side would hang on to the coat. Possibly some Samaritan, walking backwards, would hold up the dangling head. It was a much prized distinction to clutch even a fragment of the sufferer or to carry his hat or the tools he had dropped.

At this period the present-day stretcher was unknown in civil life. A stretcher provided by the docks was a huge structure with high sides. It was painted green, and was solid enough to carry a horse. A common means of conveyance for the helpless was a shutter, but with the appearance of the modern ambulance the shutter has become as out of date as the sedan chair. Still, at this time, when anyone was knocked down in the street some bright, resourceful bystander would be sure to call out “Send for a shutter!”

The conveying of a drunken man with a cut head to the hospital by the police (in the ancient fashion) was a more hilarious ceremonial. The “patient” would be hooked up on either side by an official arm. His body would sag between these two supports so that his shoulders would be above his ears. His clothes would be worked up in folds about his neck, and he would appear to be in danger of slipping earthwards out of them. As it was, there would be a display of shirt and braces very evident below his coat. His legs would dangle below him like roots, while his feet, as they dragged along the pavement, would be twisted now in one direction and now in another like the feet of a badly stuffed lay figure. He would probably be singing as he passed along, to the delight of the people.

Of the many Receiving Room processions that I have witnessed the most moving, the most savage and the most rich in colour, noise and language was on an occasion when two “ladies” who had been badly lacerated in a fight were being dragged, carried or pushed towards the hospital for treatment. They were large, copious women who were both in an advanced stage of intoxication. They had been fighting with gin bottles in some stagnant court which had become, for the moment, an uproarious cockpit. The technique of such a duel is punctilious. The round, smooth bottoms of the bottles are knocked off, and the combatants, grasping the weapons by the neck, proceed to jab one another in the face with the jagged circles of broken glass.

The wounds in this instance were terrific. The faces of the two, hideously distorted, were streaming with blood, while their ample bodies seemed to have been drenched with the same. Their hair, soaked in blood, was plastered to their heads like claret-coloured seaweed on a rock. The two heroines were borne along by their women friends. The police kept wisely in the background, for their time was not yet. The crowd around the two bleeding figures was so compressed that the whole mass moved as one. It was a wild crowd, a writhing knot of viragoes who roared and screamed and rent the air with curses and yells of vengeance, for they were partisans in the fight, the Montagues and Capulets of a ferocious feud.

The crowd as it came along rocked to and fro, heaved and lurched as if propelled by some uneasy sea. The very pavement seemed unsteady. Borne on the crest of this ill-smelling wave were the two horrible women. One still shrieked threats and defiance in a voice as husky as that of a beast, while now and then she lifted aloft a blood-streaked arm in the hand of which was clutched a tuft of hair torn from her opponent’s head. Every display of this trophy called forth a shout of pride from her admirers.

The other woman was in a state of drunken hysteria. Throwing back her head until the sun illumined her awful features, she gave vent to bursts of maniacal laughter which were made peculiarly hideous by the fact that her nose was nearly severed from her face, while her grinning lips were hacked in two. At another moment, burying her head against the back of the woman in front of her, she would break out into sobs and groans which were even more unearthly than her laughter.

The whole affair suggested some fearful Bacchanalian orgy, associated with bloodshed, in which all concerned were the subjects of demoniacal possession. There is, happily, much less drunkenness nowadays and less savagery, while the police control of these “street scenes” is so efficient and the public ambulance so secretive that such a spectacle as I now recall belongs for ever to the past.

When a crowd, bearing a “casualty,” reaches the hospital gates its progress is stayed. It rolls up against the iron barrier. It stops and recoils like a muddy wave against a bank. The porter is strict. Only the principals, their supporters and the police are allowed to filter through. The members of the crowd remain in the street, where they look through the railings, to which they cling, and indulge in fragments of narrative, in comments on the affair, and on the prospects of the parties injured. If a scream should escape from the Receiving Room the watchers feel that they are well rewarded for long waiting, while any member of the privileged party who may leave the building is subjected to very earnest questioning.

It is needless to say that the Receiving Room is not always tragical, not always the scene of alarms and disorders, not always filled with wild-eyed folk nor echoing the scuffle of heavy feet and the moans of the suffering. It may be as quiet as a room in a convent. I have seen it so many a time, and particularly on a Sunday morning in the heyday of summer. Then the sun, streaming through the windows, may illumine the figure of the nurse as she sits on the awful sofa. She has her spectacles on, and is busy with some white needlework. Her attitude is so placid that she might be sitting at a cottage door listening to a blackbird in a wicker cage. Yet this quiet-looking woman, although she has not fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, has fought with raving drunkards and men delirious from their hurts, and has heard more foul language and more blasphemy in a week than would have enlivened a pirate ship in a year.

The Receiving Room nurse was, in old days, without exception the most remarkable woman in the hospital. She appeared as a short, fat, comfortable person of middle age, with a ruddy face and a decided look of assurance. She was without education, and yet her experience of casualties of all kinds—from a bee-sting to sudden death—was vast and indeed unique. She was entirely self-taught, for there were no trained nurses in those days. She was of the school of Mrs. Gamp, was a woman of courage and of infinite resource, an expert in the treatment of the violent and in the crushing of anyone who gave her what she called “lip.” She was possessed of much humour, was coarse in her language, abrupt, yet not unkindly in her manner, very indulgent towards the drunkard and very skilled in handling him. She was apt to boast that there was no man living she would not “stand up to.” She called every male over fifty “Daddy” and every one under that age “My Son.” She would tackle a shrieking woman as a terrier tackles a rat, while the woman who “sauced” her she soon reduced to a condition of palsy. She objected to the display of emotion or of feeling in any form, and was apt to speak of members of her sex as a “watery-headed lot.”

She had, like most nurses of her time, a leaning towards gin, but was efficient even in her cups. She had wide powers, for she undertook—on her own responsibility—the treatment of petty casualties. The dressers regarded her with respect. Her knowledge and skill amazed them, while from her they acquired the elements of minor surgery and first aid. The house-surgeons were a little frightened of her, yet they admired her ready craft and were duly grateful for her unswerving loyalty and her eagerness to save them trouble. Her diagnosis of an injury was probably correct, so sound was her observation and wide her experience. She was a brilliant bandager, and was accepted by the students as the standard of style and finish in the applying of a dressing. She was on duty from early in the morning until late at night, and knew little of “hours off” and “half-days.” In the personnel of the hospital of half a century ago she was an outstanding figure, yet now she is as extinct as the dodo.

The hospital in the days of which I speak was anathema. The poor people hated it. They dreaded it. They looked upon it primarily as a place where people died. It was a matter of difficulty to induce a patient to enter the wards. They feared an operation, and with good cause, for an operation then was a very dubious matter. There were stories afloat of things that happened in the hospital, and it could not be gainsaid that certain of those stories were true.

Treatment was very rough. The surgeon was rough. He had inherited that attitude from the days when operations were carried through without anæsthetics, and when he had need to be rough, strong and quick, as well as very indifferent to pain. Pain was with him a thing that had to be. It was a regrettable feature of disease. It had to be submitted to. At the present day pain is a thing that has not to be. It has to be relieved and not to be merely endured.

Many common measures of treatment involved great suffering. Bleeding was still a frequent procedure, and to the timid the sight of the red stream trickling into the bowl was a spectacle of terror. There were two still more common measures in use—the seton and the issue. The modern student knows nothing of these ancient and uncleanly practices. He must inform himself by consulting a dictionary. Without touching upon details, I may say that in my early days, as a junior dresser, one special duty was to run round the ward before the surgeon arrived in order to draw a fresh strand of thread through each seton and to see that a fresh pea was forced into the slough of every issue.

Quite mediæval methods were still observed. The first time in my life that I saw the interior of an operating theatre I, in my ignorance, entered by the door which opened directly into the area where the operating table stood. (I should have entered by the students’ gallery.) When I found myself in this amazing place there was a man on the table who was shrieking vehemently. The surgeon, taking me by the arm, said, “You seem to have a strong back; lay hold of that rope and pull.” I laid hold of the rope. There were already two men in front of me and we all three pulled our best. I had no idea what we were pulling for. I was afterwards informed that the operation in progress was the reduction of a dislocated hip by compound pulleys. The hip, however, was not reduced and the man remained lame for life. At the present day a well-instructed schoolgirl could reduce a recent hip dislocation unaided.

In this theatre was a stove which was always kept alight, winter and summer, night and day. The object was to have a fire at all times ready whereat to heat the irons used for the arrest of bleeding as had been the practice since the days of Elizabeth. Antiseptics were not yet in use. Sepsis was the prevailing condition in the wards. Practically all major wounds suppurated. Pus was the most common subject of converse, because it was the most prominent feature in the surgeon’s work. It was classified according to degrees or vileness. “Laudable” pus was considered rather a fine thing, something to be proud of. “Sanious” pus was not only nasty in appearance but regrettable, while “ichorous” pus represented the most malignant depths to which matter could attain.

There was no object in being clean. Indeed, cleanliness was out of place. It was considered to be finicking and affected. An executioner might as well manicure his nails before chopping off a head. The surgeon operated in a slaughter-house-suggesting frock coat of black cloth. It was stiff with the blood and the filth of years. The more sodden it was the more forcibly did it bear evidence to the surgeon’s prowess. I, of course, commenced my surgical career in such a coat, of which I was quite proud. Wounds were dressed with “charpie” soaked in oil. Both oil and dressing were frankly and exultingly septic. Charpie was a species of cotton waste obtained from cast linen. It would probably now be discarded by a motor mechanic as being too dirty for use on a car.

Owing to the suppurating wounds the stench in the wards was of a kind not easily forgotten. I can recall it to this day with unappreciated ease. There was one sponge to a ward. With this putrid article and a basin of once-clear water all the wounds in the ward were washed in turn twice a day. By this ritual any chance that a patient had of recovery was eliminated. I remember a whole ward being decimated by hospital gangrene. The modern student has no knowledge of this disease. He has never seen it and, thank heaven, he never will. People often say how wonderful it was that surgical patients lived in these days. As a matter of fact they did not live, or at least only a few of them. Lord Roberts assured me that on the Ridge at Delhi during the Indian Mutiny no case of amputation recovered. This is an extreme instance, for the conditions under which the surgeons on the Ridge operated were exceptional and hopelessly unfavourable.

The attitude that the public assumed towards hospitals and their works at the time of which I write may be illustrated by the following incident. I was instructed by my surgeon to obtain a woman’s permission for an operation on her daughter. The operation was one of no great magnitude. I interviewed the mother in the Receiving Room. I discussed the procedure with her in great detail and, I trust, in a sympathetic and hopeful manner. After I had finished my discourse I asked her if she would consent to the performance of the operation. She replied: “Oh! it is all very well to talk about consenting, but who is to pay for the funeral?”

III

THE TWENTY-KRONE PIECE

More than once in speaking at public meetings on behalf of hospitals I have alluded to my much valued possession—a twenty-krone piece—and have employed it as an illustration of the gratitude of the hospital patient.

The subject of this incident was a Norwegian sailor about fifty years of age, a tall, good-featured man with the blue eyes of his country and a face tanned by sun and by salt winds to the colour of weathered oak. His hair and his beard were grey, which made him look older than he was. He had been serving for three years as an ordinary seaman on an English sailing ship and spoke English perfectly. During his last voyage he had developed a trouble which prevented him from following his employment. Accordingly he had left his ship and made his way to London in the hope of being cured. Inquiring for the hospital of London he was directed to the London Hospital and, by chance, came into my wards. He had an idea—as I was told later—that the operation he must needs undergo might be fatal, and so had transferred his savings to his wife in Norway.

He was a quiet and reserved man, but so pleasant in his manner that he became a favourite with the nurses. He told them quaintly-worded tales of his adventures and showed them how to make strange knots with bandages. The operation—which was a very ordinary one—was successful, and in four or five weeks he was discharged as capable of resuming his work as a seaman. His ship had, however, long since started on another voyage.

One morning, three weeks after he had left the hospital, he appeared at my house in Wimpole Street. My name he would have acquired from the board above his bed, but I wondered how he had obtained my address. I assumed that he had called to ask for money or for help of some kind. As he came into my room I was sorry to see how thin and ill he looked, for when he left the wards he was well and hearty.

He proceeded to thank me for what I had done, little as it was. He had an exaggerated idea of the magnitude of the operation, which idea he would not allow me to correct. I have listened to many votes of thanks, to the effulgent language, the gush and the pompous flattery which have marked them; but the little speech of this sailor man was not of that kind. It was eloquent by reason of its boyish simplicity, its warmth and its rugged earnestness.

As he was speaking he drew from his pocket a gold coin, a twenty-krone piece, and placed it on the table at which I sat. “I beg you, sir,” he said, “to accept this coin. I know it is of no value to you. It is only worth, I think, fifteen shillings. It would be an insult to offer it as a return for what you have done for me. That service can never be repaid. But I hope you will accept it as a token of what I feel, of something that I cannot say in words but that this coin can tell of. When I left my home in Norway three years ago my wife sewed this twenty-krone piece in the band of my trousers and made me promise never to touch it until I was starving. A seaman’s life is uncertain; he may be ill, he may be long out of a job; and so for three years this coin has been between me and the risk of starvation. When I was in the hospital I had a wish to give it to you if it so happened that I got well. Here I am, and I do hope, sir, you will accept it.”

I thanked him as warmly as I could for his kindness, for his thought in coming to see me and for his touching offer, but added that I could not possibly take the gold piece and begged him to put it back into his pocket again and present it to his wife when he reached home. At this he was very much upset. Pushing the coin along the table towards me with his forefinger, he said: “Please, sir, do take the money, not for what it is worth but for what it has been to me. I am proud to say that since I left the hospital I _have_ been starving. I have been looking for a ship. I have not slept in a bed since you saw me in the wards. Now, at last, I have got a ship and, thank God, I have kept the coin unbroken so that you might have it. I implore you to accept it.”

I took it; but what could I say that would be adequate for such a gift as this? My attempt at thanks was as stumbling and as feeble as his had been outright; for I am not ashamed to confess that I was much upset.

I have received many presents from kindly patients—silver bowls, diamond scarf-pins, gold cigarette cases and the like, but how little is their value compared with this one small coin? As I picked it up from the table I thought of what it had cost. I thought of the tired man haunting the docks in search of a ship, often aching with hunger and at night sleeping in a shed, and yet all the time with a piece of gold in his pocket which he would not change in order that I might have it.

A coin is an emblem of wealth, but this gold piece is an emblem of a rarer currency, of that wealth which is—in a peculiar sense—“beyond the dream of avarice,” a something that no money could buy, for what sum could express the bounty or the sentiment of this generous heart?

It would be described, by those ignorant of its history, as a gold coin from Norway; but I prefer to think that it belongs to that “land of Havilah where there is gold” and of which it is truly said “and the gold of that land is good.”

IV

A CURE FOR NERVES

In the account of the case which follows it is better that I allow the patient to speak for herself.

I am a neurotic woman. In that capacity I have been the subject of much criticism and much counsel. I have been both talked to and talked at. On the other hand I have detailed my unhappy symptoms to many in the hope of securing consolation, but with indefinite success. I am afraid I have often been a bore; for a bore, I am told, is a person who will talk of herself when you want to talk of yourself.

My husband says that there is nothing the matter with me, that my ailments are all imaginary and unreasonable. He becomes very cross when I talk of my wretched state and considers my ill-health as a grievance personal to himself. He says—when he is very irritated—that he is sick of my moanings, that I look well, eat well, sleep well, and so must be as sound as a woman can be. If I have a headache and cannot go out he is more annoyed than if he had the headache himself, which seems to me irrational. He is often very sarcastic about my symptoms, and this makes me worse. Once or twice he has been sympathetic and I have felt better, but he says that sympathy will do me harm and cause me to give way more. I suppose he knows because he is always so certain. He says all I have to do is to cheer up, to rouse myself, to pull myself together. He slaps himself on the chest and, in a voice that makes my head crack, says, “Look at me! I am not nervous, why should you be?” I don’t know why I am nervous and so I never try to answer the question. From the way my husband talks I feel that he must regard me as an impostor. If we have a few friends to dinner he is sure to say something about “the deplorable flabbiness of the minds of some women.” I know he is addressing himself to me and so do the others, but I can only smile and feel uncomfortable.

I have no wish to be nervous. It is miserable enough, heaven knows. I would give worlds to be free of all my miseries and be quite sound again. If I wished to adopt a complaint I should choose one less hideously distressing than “nerves.” I have often thought I would sooner be blind than nervous, and that then my husband would be really sorry for me; but I should be terribly frightened to be always in the dark.

I get a good deal of comfort from many of my women friends. They at least are sympathetic; they believe in me, know that my complaints are real and that what I say is true. Unfortunately, when I have described certain of my symptoms—such as one of my gasping attacks—they say that they have just such attacks themselves, only worse. They are so sorry for me; but then they will go on and tell me the exact circumstances under which they have had their last bouts. I am anxious to tell them of my other curious symptoms, but they say that it does them so much good to pour out their hearts to someone, and I, being very meek, let them go on, only wishing that they would listen to me as I listen to them.

I notice that their husbands have for the most part just the same erroneous views about nerves that mine has. Some of them say that they would like to make their menfolk suffer as they do themselves. One lady I know always ends with the reflection: “Ah, well! I shall not be long here, and when I am dead and under the daisies he will be sorry he was not more appreciative. He will then know, when it is too late, that my symptoms were genuine enough.” I must say that I have never gone to the extreme of wishing to die for the mere sake of convincing my husband of obstinate stupidity. I should like to go into a death-like trance and frighten him, for then I should be able to hear what he said when he thought I was gone and remind him of it afterwards whenever he became cynical.

It is in the morning that I feel so bad. I am really ghastly then. I wake up with the awful presentiment that something dreadful is going to happen. I don’t know what it is, yet I feel I could sink through the bed. I imagine the waking moments of the poor wretch who has been condemned to death and who is said to have “slept well” on the night before his execution. He will probably awake slowly and will feel at first hazily happy and content, will yawn and smile, until there creeps up the horrible recollection of the judge and the sentence, of the gallows and the hanging by the neck. I know the cold sweat that breaks over the whole body and the sickly clutching about the heart that attend such an awakening, but doubt if any emerging from sleep can be really worse than many I have experienced.

I can do so little in the day-time. I soon get exhausted and so utterly done up that I can only lie still in a dark room. When I am like that the least noise worries me and even tortures me almost out of my mind. If someone starts strumming the piano, or if a servant persistently walks about with creaky boots, or if my husband bursts in and tries to be hearty, I feel compelled to scream, it is so unbearable.

It is on such an occasion as this that my husband is apt to beg me “to pull myself together.” He quite maddens me when he says this. I feel as full of terror, awfulness and distress as a drowning man, and how silly it would be to lean over a harbour wall and tell a drowning man in comfortable tones that he should “pull himself together.” Yet that is what my husband says to me, with the irritating conviction that he is being intelligent and practical.

I cannot walk out alone. If I attempt it I am soon panic-stricken. I become hot all over, very faint, and so giddy that I reel and have to keep to the railings of the houses. I am seized with the hideous feeling that I can neither get on nor get back. I am not disturbed by the mere possibility of falling down on the pavement, but by the paralysing nightmare that I cannot take another step.

If anyone were to put me down in the middle of a great square, like the Praço de Dom Pedro at Lisbon, and leave me there alone, I think I should die or lose my reason. I know I should be unable to get out. I should fall in a heap, shut my eyes and try to crawl to the edge on my hands and knees, filled all the time with a panting terror. A man who finds himself compelled to cross a glassy ice slope which, twenty feet below, drops over a precipice, could not feel worse than I do if left adrift, nor pray more fervently to be clear of the abhorred space and safe. My husband says that this is all nonsense. I suppose it is, but it is such nonsense as would be sense if the jester were Death.

The knowledge that I have to go to a dinner party fills me with unutterable alarm. By the time I am dressed and ready to start I am chilled, shaking all over and gasping for breath. The drive to the house is almost as full of horror as the drive of the tumbril to the guillotine. By the time I arrive I am so ill I can hardly speak and am convinced that I shall fall down, or be sick, or shall have to cry out. More than once I have insisted upon being driven home again, and my husband has gone to the dinner alone after much outpouring of language.

Possibly my most direful experiments have been at the theatre, to which I have been taken on the ground that my mind needed change and that a cheerful play would “take me out of myself.” My worst terrors have come upon me when I have chanced to sit in the centre of the stalls with people packed in all around me. I have then felt as if I was imprisoned and have been filled by one intense overwhelming desire—the passion to get out. I have passed through all the horrors of suffocation, have felt that I must stand up, must lift up my arms and gasp. I have looked at the door only to feel that escape was as impossible as it would be to an entrapped miner about whom the walls of a shaft had fallen.

It is useless for my husband to nudge me and tell me not to make a fool of myself. If I did want to make a fool of myself I should select some more agreeable way of doing it. It is useless, moreover, to argue. No argument can dispel the ever-present sense of panic, of being buried alive, or relieve the hopeless feeling of inability to escape. I have sat out a play undergoing tortures beyond expression, until I have become collapsed and until my lip had been almost bitten through in the effort not to scream. No one would believe that I—a healthy-looking woman in a new Paris dress, sitting among a company of smiling folk—could be enduring as much agony as if I were lodged in an iron cell the walls of which were gradually closing in around me.

I am very fond of my clothes when I am well, but there are certain frocks I have come to loathe because they recall times when I have nearly gasped out my life in them.

I have taken much medicine but with no apparent good. I envy the woman who believes in her nerve tonic, since such faith must be a great comfort to her. I knew a poor girl who became for a time a mental wreck, owing to her engagement having been broken off. She refused food and lived for a week—so she told me—on her mother’s nerve tonic. She declared that it saved her reason. I tried it, but it only brought me out in spots. I have seen a good many doctors, but although they are all very kind, they seem to be dense and to have but the one idea of treating the neurotic woman as they would treat a frightened child or a lost dog.

I was taken to one doctor because he had the reputation of being very sensible and outspoken. My husband said there was no nonsense about him. He certainly made no effort to be entertaining. After he had examined me he said that all my organs were perfectly sound. He then began to address me as “My dear lady,” and at once I knew what was coming. It was to tell me that I wanted rousing and that all I had to do was to get out of myself. He said I was not to think about myself at all, which is very good advice to a person who feels on the point of dissolution. He told my husband afterwards, in strict confidence, that if I was a poor woman and had to work for my living I should be well directly. He went farther and said that what would cure me would be a week at the washing tub—at a laundry, I suppose. My husband imparted these confidences to me as we drove home from the doctor’s and said what a shrewd, common-sense man he was. My husband quite liked him.

Another doctor I went to was very sympathetic. He patted my hand and was so kind that he almost made me cry. He said he understood how real and intense my sufferings were. He knew I must have gone through tortures. He gave me a great many particulars as to how I was to live and said I was never to do anything I did not like. I wanted to come and see him again, but he insisted that I must go abroad at once to break with my sad associations and afford my shattered nerves a complete rest. He gave me a letter to a doctor abroad which he said contained a very full and particular account of my case.

Something happened to prevent me from leaving England, but six months later I came across the letter and, feeling it was no longer of use, opened it. It began, “My dear Harry,” and contained a great deal about their respective handicaps at golf and their plans for the summer. The kind doctor ended in this wise in a postscript: “The lady who brings this is Mrs. ——. She is a terrible woman, a deplorable neurotic. I need say no more about her, but I hope you won’t mind my burdening you with her, for she is the kind of tedious person who bores me to death. However she pays her fees.” My husband sent the letter back to the doctor who wrote it, because he thought the memoranda about the golf handicaps would be interesting for him to keep.

As I made no progress and as my friends were getting as tired of me as I was of myself, it was resolved that I should be taken “seriously in hand.” I was therefore sent to a nursing home to undergo the rest cure. I had to lie in bed, be stuffed with food and be massaged daily. I was cut off from all communion with the familiar world and was allowed to receive neither letters nor newspapers.

The idea underlying this measure is, I think, a little silly. It is in the main an attempt to cure a patient by enforced boredom. The inducement offered is crudely this: “You can go home as soon as you think fit to be well.” I did not mind the quiet nor the lying in bed. The excessive feeding merely made me uncomfortable. The massage was a form of torture that I viewed with great loathing. The absence of news from home kept me in a state of unrest and apprehension. It was the continued speculation as to what was going on in my household which prevented me from sleeping at night.

The withdrawal of all newspapers was evidently a punishment devised by a man. It was no punishment to me nor would it be to the average woman. The nurse, of course, kept me informed of current events as she was extremely fond of talking and thereby rendered a newspaper unnecessary. She told me of the occasions when my husband called to inquire and always said that he looked very well and remarkably cheerful. She walked past my house once and came back with the information that the drawing-room blinds were up and that the sun was streaming into the room. This worried me a great deal as I don’t like faded carpets and silks and am very fond of my furniture.

After I had been in the home a few days I discovered that the institution was not wholly devoted to rest-cure cases, but that it was also a surgical home where many operations were performed. This frightened me terribly because I began to wonder whether an operation had been an item of the programme when I was taken seriously in hand. I arrived at the conclusion that I was being “prepared for operation,” that I was being “built up,” with the result that I was prostrated by alarm. I felt that at any moment a man with a black bag might enter the room and proceed to chloroform me. There came upon me a conviction that I was being imprisoned, that I had been duped and trapped. Above all was the awful feeling, which nearly suffocated me, that I was powerless to escape. I thought my husband had been most base to desert me like this and hand me over, as it were, to unknown executioners.

I have a dread of operations which is beyond expression. The mere thinking of the process of being chloroformed makes me sick and faint. You are held down on a table, I believe, and then deliberately suffocated. It must be as if a man knelt upon your chest and strangled you by gripping your throat with his hands. When I was a small girl I saw a cook dispose of a live mouse by sinking the mouse-trap in which it was imprisoned in a bucket of water. I remember that the struggles of the mouse, as seen under water, were horrible to witness. When I grew up and was told about people being chloroformed for operation I always imagined that their feelings would be as hideous as those of the drowning mouse in a trap.

I told all my suspicions and alarms to the nurse, who laughed at me contemptuously. She said: “You are merely a nerve case.” (“Merely,” thought I.) “No surgeon ever thinks of operating on a nerve case. The greater number of the patients here come for very serious operations. They are real patients.” As she conversed further I must confess that my pride began to be touched. I had supposed that my case was the most important and most interesting in the establishment. I had the largest room in the house while the fussing over me had been considerable. I now began to learn that there were others who were in worse plight than myself. I, on the one hand, had merely to lie in bed and sleep. They, on the other, came to the home with their lives in their hands to confront an appalling ordeal. I was haunted by indefinite alarms; they had to submit to the tangible steel of the surgeon’s knife. I began to be a little ashamed of myself and of the trouble I had occasioned. Compared with me these women were heroines. They had something to fuss about, for they had to walk alone into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I had many times said that I wished I was dead, but a little reflection on the modes of dying made me keep that wish ever after unexpressed.

My nurse deplored that she was not a surgical nurse. “To nurse an operation case is real nursing,” she said. “There is something satisfactory in work like that. I am only a mental nurse, you see”—a confession which humbled me still further.

It was in September that I entered the home, and as the leading surgeons were still out of London there were no operations. When October came the gruesome work was resumed. The house was set vibrating with excitement. In this I shared as soon as I discovered that the operating theatre was immediately over my bedroom. Almost the first operation happened to be a particularly momentous one, concerned with which was none other than the great surgeon of the day. His coming was anticipated with a buzz of interest by the nurses, an interest which was even shared by the mental nurse in whose charge I was.

I could learn very little about this great case save that it was desperate and the victim a woman. I know that she entered the home the night before, for my nurse planned to meet her on her way to her room. I know also that just before the hour of closing the house I heard sobbing on the staircase as two people slowly made their way down. I came to know afterwards that one was the husband, the other the daughter.

The operation was to be at nine in the morning. By 6 A.M. the whole house was astir. There was much running up and down stairs. Everybody was occupied. My morning toilet and breakfast were hurried through with little ceremony. The nurse was excited, absent-minded and disinclined to answer questions. After my breakfast was cleared away she vanished—it was supposed that I was never to be left alone—and did not appear again until noon. When she did come back she found me an altered woman.

I lay in bed in the solitary room with my eyes fixed upon the white ceiling over my head. I was terrified beyond all reason. There was everywhere the sense of an overstrung activity, hushed and ominous, which was leading on to tragedy. I knew that in the room above me was about to be enacted a drama in which one of the actors was Death.

There was considerable bustle in the room in question. They were moving something very heavy into the middle of the floor. It was, I am sure, the operation table. Other tables were dragged about and adjusted with precision. Above the ceaseless patter of feet I could hear the pouring of water into basins.

I knew when the surgeon and his assistants arrived, for I heard his voice on the stair. It was clear and unconcerned, the one strong and confident thing among all these portentous preparations. Heavy bags were carried up from the hall to be deposited on the floor above. I could hear the surgeon’s firm foot overhead and noticed a further moving of tables. There came now a clatter of steel in metal dishes which made me shiver.

I looked at the clock on my table. It was three minutes to nine.

What of the poor soul who was waiting? She also would be looking at the clock. Three minutes more and she would be led in her nightdress into this chamber of horrors. The very idea paralysed one. If I were in her place I should scream until I roused the street. I should struggle with every fibre of my body. I should cling to the door until my arms were pulled out of their sockets. A barrel-organ in the road was playing a trivial waltz, a boy was going by whistling, the world was cheerfully indifferent, while the loneliness of the stricken woman was horrible beyond words.

As the church clock struck nine I knew that the patient was entering the room. I fancied I could hear the shuffle of her slippers and the closing of the door—the last hope of escape—behind her. A chair was moved into position. She was stepping on to the table.

Then came an absolute silence. I knew they were chloroforming her. I fancied that the vapour of that sickly drug was oozing through the ceiling into my room. I was suffocated. I gasped until I thought my chest would burst. The silence was awful. I dared not scream. I would have rung my bell but the thought of the noise it would make held me back.

I lay glaring at the ceiling, my forehead covered with drops of cold sweat. I wrung my fingers together lest all sensation should go out of them.

In a while there came three awful moans from the room above and then once more the moving, of feet was to be heard, whereby I felt that the operation had begun. I could picture the knife, the great cut, the cold callousness of it all. For what seemed to me to be interminable hours I gazed at the ceiling. How long was this murdering to go on! How could the poor moaning soul be tortured all this while and endure another minute!

Suddenly there was a great commotion in the room above. The table was dragged round rapidly. There were footsteps everywhere. Was the operation over? No. Something had gone wrong. A man dashed downstairs calling for a cab. In a moment I could hear the wheels tear along the street and then return. He had gone to fetch something and rushed upstairs with it.

This made me wonder for a moment what had happened to the husband and daughter who were waiting in a room off the hall. Had they died of the suspense? Why did they not burst into the room and drag her away while there was yet time? The lower part of the house was practically empty and I was conscious that two or three times the trembling couple had crept up the stairs to the level of my room to listen. I could hear the daughter say, “What shall we do! What shall we do!” And then the two would stumble down the stairs again to the empty room.

I still glared at the ceiling like one in a trance. I had forgotten about myself, although there was such a sinking at my heart that I could only breathe in gasps. The loathsome bustle in the room above continued.

Now, as I gazed upwards, I noticed to my expressionless horror a small round patch of red appear on the white ceiling. I knew it was blood. The spot was as large as a five-shilling piece. It grew until it had become the size of a plate.

It burnt into my vision as if it had been a red-hot disk. It became a deeper crimson until at last one awful drop fell upon the white coverlet of my bed. It came down with the weight of lead. The impact went through me like an electric shock. I could hardly breathe. I was bathed with perspiration and was as wet and as cold as if I had been dragged out of a winter’s river.

Another drop fell with a thud like a stone. I would have hidden my head under the bedclothes but I dared not stir. As each drop fell on the bed the interval came quicker until there was a scarlet patch on the white quilt that grew and grew and grew. I felt that the evil stain would come through the coverings, hot and wet, to my clenched hands which were just beneath, but I was unable to move them. My sight was now almost gone. There was nothing but a red haze filling the room, a beating sound in my ears and the drop recurring like the ticking of some awful clock.