Doctor Bicknell was in a remarkably gracious mood.Through a minor accident, a slight bit of carelessness, that was all, a man who might have pulled through had died the preceding night.Though it had been only a sailorman, one of the innumerable unwashed, the steward of the receiving hospital had been on the anxious seat all the morning.It was not that the man had died that gave him discomfort, he knew the Doctor too well for that, but his distress lay in the fact that the operation had been done so well.One of the most delicate in surgery, it had been as successful as it was clever and audacious.All had then depended upon the treatment, the nurses, the steward.And the man had died.Nothing much, a bit of carelessness, yet enough to bring the professional wrath of Doctor Bicknell about his ears and to perturb the working of the staff and nurses for twenty-four hours to come.
But, as already stated, the Doctor was in a remarkably gracious mood.When informed by the steward, in fear and trembling, of the man's unexpected take-off, his lips did not so much as form one syllable of censure; nay, they were so pursed that snatches of rag-time floated softly from them, to be broken only by a pleasant query after the health of the other's eldest-born.The steward, deeming it impossible that he could have caught the gist of the case, repeated it.
"Yes, yes," Doctor Bicknell said impatiently; "I understand.But how about Semper Idem? Is he ready to leave?""Yes.They're helping him dress now," the steward answered, passing on to the round of his duties, content that peace still reigned within the iodine-saturated walls.
It was Semper Idem's recovery which had so fully compensated Doctor Bicknell for the loss of the sailorman.Lives were to him as nothing, the unpleasant but inevitable incidents of the profession, but cases, ah, cases were everything.People who knew him were prone to brand him a butcher, but his colleagues were at one in the belief that a bolder and yet a more capable man never stood over the table.He was not an imaginative man.He did not possess, and hence had no tolerance for, emotion.His nature was accurate, precise, scientific.Men were to him no more than pawns, without individuality or personal value.But as cases it was different.The more broken a man was, the more precarious his grip on life, the greater his significance in the eyes of Doctor Bicknell.He would as readily forsake a poet laureate suffering from a common accident for a nameless, mangled vagrant who defied every law of life by refusing to die, as would a child forsake a Punch and Judy for a circus.
So it had been in the case of Semper Idem.The mystery of the man had not appealed to him, nor had his silence and the veiled romance which the yellow reporters had so sensationally and so fruitlessly exploited in divers Sunday editions.But Semper Idem's throat had been cut.That was the point.That was where his interest had centred.Cut from ear to ear, and not one surgeon in a thousand to give a snap of the fingers for his chance of recovery.But, thanks to the swift municipal ambulance service and to Doctor Bicknell, he had been dragged back into the world he had sought to leave.The Doctor's co-workers had shaken their heads when the case was brought in.Impossible, they said.Throat, windpipe, jugular, all but actually severed, and the loss of blood frightful.As it was such a foregone conclusion, Doctor Bicknell had employed methods and done things which made them, even in their professional capacities, shudder.And lo!
the man had recovered.
So, on this morning that Semper Idem was to leave the hospital, hale and hearty, Doctor Bicknell's geniality was in nowise disturbed by the steward's report, and he proceeded cheerfully to bring order out of the chaos of a child's body which had been ground and crunched beneath the wheels of an electric car.
