Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

The theatre was very hot and it was full of a hot bubbling and hissing. At the head of the table the anæsthetist sat on a round white stool with metal cylinders near and red tubes and an enormous red bag. The anæsthetist was a woman, too, and she was very calm and bored.

Great coloured bottles of antiseptic solution stood near the table and trays of instruments which came hot from the steaming sterilisers. The instruments were handed to Hilda. Hilda did not look at the instruments, she simply held out her black rubbery hand and an instrument was placed there, and Hilda used it.

Hilda bent over the table slightly to use the Instruments. It was almost impossible to see what was on the table because the nurses pressed round closely as though looking and trying to screen what was on the table. It was Jenny, though, the body of Jenny. And yet it was not Jenny, nor Jenny’s body. Everything was covered up and swathed in white as with a great secrecy, white towels clipped everywhere, covering white towels.

Only one neat square of Jenny’s body remained uncovered and the neat square showed up distinctly against the white clipped towels because the square was coloured a fine bright yellow. The picric acid did that. It was inside this square that everything was taking place, inside the square that Hilda used her instruments, her smooth rubbery hands.

First there came the incision, yes, the incision came first. The warm shining lancet drew a slow firm line across the bright yellow skin and the skin took lips and smiled in a wide red smile. Little jets of red spouted from the smiling red lips and Hilda’s black hands moved and moved and a ring of shiny forceps lay all round the wound.

Another incision, deeper and deeper inside the red mouth of the wound, which was not smiling now, but laughing, the lips were so wide.

Then Hilda’s hand went right inside the wound. Hilda’s black shiny hand drew small and pointed like the black shiny head of a snake and penetrated deep within the wound. It was as though the laughing red mouth swallowed the head of the snake.

After that more instruments were used and the forceps in the ring lay thickly one upon another. The confusion of instruments seemed inextricable, but it was not inextricable, it was all necessary and mathematical. It was impossible to see Hilda’s face behind the white gauze mask, but Hilda’s eyes showed above the white mask and the eyes were steeled. Hilda’s hands became the projection of Hilda’s eyes. They too were inexorable and steeled.

It was necessary to be steeled. In the operating theatre the healthy body was a disenchantment, but in disease the body was obscene. Men should be brought to the operating theatre to view the last extremity of the painted smile. Useless, quite useless. Forgetfulness was too easy. Even now the wound itself was losing its horror and its instruments and forgetting and becoming again a warm smiling wound, a painted smile.

The lips of the painted smiling wound drew together as the sutures quickly went in. Hilda put in the sutures with a beautiful precision and the lips of the wound puckered together thinly. It was nearly over now, sealed up and finished, and forgotten. The hissing and bubbling faded a little and the room did not seem to be so hot. The nurses did not press so closely round the table. One coughed into her mask and ended the long silence. Another began to count the bloodied swabs.

In the cool high vestibule David stood motionless with his eyes upon the frosted doors. And at last the doors swung open and the wheeled stretcher came out. Two nurses wheeled the stretcher which moved without sound on its rubber tyres. The nurses did not see him as he pressed back against the wall, but he saw Jenny upon the stretcher. Jenny’s face was twisted sideways towards him, flushed and swollen; the eyelids and cheeks especially were very swollen and suffused as though Jenny were in a deep and beautiful drunken sleep. The cheeks puffed in and out as Jenny snored. The hair had fallen out of Jenny’s white cap and was tangled as if someone had tried to tug it out. Jenny did not look romantic now.

He watched the swing doors of the ward close upon the wheeled stretcher as they took Jenny to her room at the end of the ward. Then he turned and saw Hilda coming down the incline from the theatre. She advanced towards him. She looked cold and remote and contemptuous. She said abruptly:

“Well, it’s over, and she ought to be all right.”

He was grateful for her hardness; he could not have borne anything else. He asked:

“When can I see her?”

“Some time this evening. It was not a long anæsthetic.” She paused. “By eight o’clock she should be receiving visitors.”

He felt her coldness and again he was glad; kindness would have been odious, too abominable for words. Something of the hardness and cold brilliance of the theatre still clung to her and her words cut sharply like a knife. She would not stand in the vestibule. Almost impatiently, she flung open the door of her room and went in. The door remained open and although she appeared to have forgotten him he followed her into the room. He said in a low voice:

“I want you to know that I’m grateful, Hilda.”

“Grateful!” She moved about the room picking up reports and laying them down. Under her cold hardness she was deeply upset. Her whole purpose had been the success of the operation, she willed herself fiercely to succeed, to demonstrate before him her skill, her brilliance. And now that it was done she hated it. She saw her exquisite handiwork as brutal and crude, adjusting only the relations of the body and leaving the adjustments of the mind and soul untouched. What was the use! She patched up the carcass of the animal and that was about all. This worthless woman would return to him, sound only in body, still morbid in her soul. It rankled more deeply with Hilda because of her own feeling for David. This was not love — oh no, it was subtler far than that. He was the one man who had ever attracted her. At one time indeed she had almost willed herself to fall in love with him. Impossible! She could not love any man. The sense of her failure, that she could like but never love him, made it harder than ever to restore this woman, this Jenny, to him. She swung round. “I shall be here at eight this evening,” she said. “I’ll leave word then if you may see her.”

“Very well.”

She went to the tap and ran the water hard, filled a tumbler and, masking her emotion, drank it.

“I must go round the ward now.”

“Very well,” he said again.

He went away. He went down the stairs and out of the hospital. At the end of John Street he jumped on to a bus going towards Battersea Bridge and in the bus his thoughts ran deeply. No matter what Jenny had done to him or to herself he was glad that she had come through. He could never dissever himself completely from Jenny, she was like a light shadow which had always lain across his heart. Through all these years of her absence she had still lived with him dimly, he had never forgotten her, and now that he had found her and everything was dead between them his curious sense of being bound and obligated to her persisted. He saw, perfectly, that Jenny was cheap and common and vulgar. He knew that she had been on the streets. His attitude should normally have been one of horror and disgust. But, no, he could not. Strange. All that was best in Jenny presented itself to him, he remembered her moments of unselfishness, her sudden kind impulses, her generosity with money, especially he remembered the honeymoon at Cullercoats and how Jenny had insisted that he take the money to buy himself a suit.

He descended from the bus and walked along Blount Street and into his room. The house was very quiet. He sat down by the window and stared at the tree-tops of the park which showed above the opposite roofs, at the sky which showed beyond the tree-tops. The silence of the room sank into him, the tick of the clock took on a slow and measured rhythm, it was like the tramp of marching feet, of men marching slowly forward.