Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

Sebastian stared at me coldly. “Nurse Wade volunteers,” he said. “It is in the cause of science. Who dares dissuade her? That tooth of yours? Ah, yes. Quite sufficient excuse. You wanted it out, Nurse Wade. Wells-Dinton shall operate.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Hilda Wade sat down in an easy chair and took a measured dose of the new anaesthetic, proportioned to the average difference in weight between raccoons and humanity. My face displayed my anxiety, I suppose, for she turned to me, smiling with quiet confidence. “I know my own constitution,” she said, with a reassuring glance that went straight to my heart. “I do not in the least fear.”

As for Sebastian, he administered the drug to her as unconcernedly as if she were a rabbit. Sebastian’s scientific coolness and calmness have long been the admiration of younger practitioners.

Wells-Dinton gave one wrench. The tooth came out as though the patient were a block of marble. There was not a cry or a movement, such as one notes when nitrous oxide is administered. Hilda Wade was to all appearance a mass of lifeless flesh. We stood round and watched. I was trembling with terror. Even on Sebastian’s pale face, usually so unmoved, save by the watchful eagerness of scientific curiosity, I saw signs of anxiety.

After four hours of profound slumber—breath hovering, as it seemed, between life and death—she began to come to again. In half an hour more she was wide awake; she opened her eyes and asked for a glass of hock, with beef essence or oysters.

That evening, by six o’clock, she was quite well and able to go about her duties as usual.

“Sebastian is a wonderful man,” I said to her, as I entered her ward on my rounds at night. “His coolness astonishes me. Do you know, he watched you all the time you were lying asleep there as if nothing were the matter.”

“Coolness?” she inquired, in a quiet voice. “Or cruelty?”

“Cruelty?” I echoed, aghast. “Sebastian cruel! Oh, Nurse Wade, what an idea! Why, he has spent his whole life in striving against all odds to alleviate pain. He is the apostle of philanthropy!”

“Of philanthropy, or of science? To alleviate pain, or to learn the whole truth about the human body?”

“Come, come, now,” I cried. “You analyse too far. I will not let even YOU put me out of conceit with Sebastian.” (Her face flushed at that “even you”; I almost fancied she began to like me.) “He is the enthusiasm of my life; just consider how much he has done for humanity!”

She looked me through searchingly. “I will not destroy your illusion,” she answered, after a pause. “It is a noble and generous one. But is it not largely based on an ascetic face, long white hair, and a moustache that hides the cruel corners of the mouth? For the corners ARE cruel. Some day, I will show you them. Cut off the long hair, shave the grizzled moustache—and what then will remain?” She drew a profile hastily. “Just that,” and she showed it me. ‘Twas a face like Robespierre’s, grown harder and older and lined with observation. I recognised that it was in fact the essence of Sebastian.

Next day, as it turned out, the Professor himself insisted upon testing lethodyne in his own person. All Nat’s strove to dissuade him. “Your life is so precious, sir—the advancement of science!” But the Professor was adamantine.

“Science can only be advanced if men of science will take their lives in their hands,” he answered, sternly. “Besides, Nurse Wade has tried. Am I to lag behind a woman in my devotion to the cause of physiological knowledge?”

“Let him try,” Hilda Wade murmured to me. “He is quite right. It will not hurt him. I have told him already he has just the proper temperament to stand the drug. Such people are rare: HE is one of them.”

We administered the dose, trembling. Sebastian took it like a man, and dropped off instantly, for lethodyne is at least as instantaneous in its operation as nitrous oxide.

He lay long asleep. Hilda and I watched him.

After he had lain for some minutes senseless, like a log, on the couch where we had placed him, Hilda stooped over him quietly and lifted up the ends of the grizzled moustache. Then she pointed one accusing finger at his lips. “I told you so,” she murmured, with a note of demonstration.

“There is certainly something rather stern, or even ruthless, about the set of the face and the firm ending of the lips,” I admitted, reluctantly.

“That is why God gave men moustaches,” she mused, in a low voice; “to hide the cruel corners of their mouths.”

“Not ALWAYS cruel,” I cried.

“Sometimes cruel, sometimes cunning, sometimes sensuous; but nine times out of ten best masked by moustaches.”

“You have a bad opinion of our sex!” I exclaimed.

“Providence knew best,” she answered. “IT gave you moustaches. That was in order that we women might be spared from always seeing you as you are. Besides, I said ‘Nine times out of ten.’ There are exceptions—SUCH exceptions!”

On second thought, I did not feel sure that I could quarrel with her estimate.

The experiment was that time once more successful. Sebastian woke up from the comatose state after eight hours, not quite as fresh as Hilda Wade, perhaps, but still tolerably alive; less alert, however, and complaining of dull headache. He was not hungry. Hilda Wade shook her head at that. “It will be of use only in a very few cases,” she said to me, regretfully; “and those few will need to be carefully picked by an acute observer. I see resistance to the coma is, even more than I thought, a matter of temperament. Why, so impassioned a man as the Professor himself cannot entirely recover. With more sluggish temperaments, we shall have deeper difficulty.”

“Would you call him impassioned?” I asked. “Most people think him so cold and stern.”

She shook her head. “He is a snow-capped volcano!” she answered. “The fires of his life burn bright below. The exterior alone is cold and placid.”

However, starting from that time, Sebastian began a course of experiments on patients, giving infinitesimal doses at first, and venturing slowly on somewhat larger quantities. But only in his own case and Hilda’s could the result be called quite satisfactory. One dull and heavy, drink-sodden navvy, to whom he administered no more than one-tenth of a grain, was drowsy for a week, and listless long after; while a fat washerwoman from West Ham, who took only two-tenths, fell so fast asleep, and snored so stertorously, that we feared she was going to doze off into eternity, after the fashion of the rabbits. Mothers of large families, we noted, stood the drug very ill; on pale young girls of the consumptive tendency its effect was not marked; but only a patient here and there, of exceptionally imaginative and vivid temperament, seemed able to endure it. Sebastian was discouraged. He saw the anaesthetic was not destined to fulfil his first enthusiastic humanitarian expectations. One day, while the investigation was just at this stage, a case was admitted into the observation-cots in which Hilda Wade took a particular interest. The patient was a young girl named Isabel Huntley—tall, dark, and slender, a markedly quick and imaginative type, with large black eyes which clearly bespoke a passionate nature. Though distinctly hysterical, she was pretty and pleasing. Her rich dark hair was as copious as it was beautiful. She held herself erect and had a finely poised head. From the first moment she arrived, I could see nurse Wade was strongly drawn towards her. Their souls sympathised. Number Fourteen—that is our impersonal way of describing CASES—was constantly on Hilda’s lips. “I like the girl,” she said once. “She is a lady in fibre.”

“And a tobacco-trimmer by trade,” Sebastian added, sarcastically.

As usual, Hilda’s was the truer description. It went deeper.

Number Fourteen’s ailment was a rare and peculiar one, into which I need not enter here with professional precision. (I have described the case fully for my brother practitioners in my paper in the fourth volume of Sebastian’s Medical Miscellanies.) It will be enough for my present purpose to say, in brief, that the lesion consisted of an internal growth which is always dangerous and most often fatal, but which nevertheless is of such a character that, if it be once happily eradicated by supremely good surgery, it never tends to recur, and leaves the patient as strong and well as ever. Sebastian was, of course, delighted with the splendid opportunity thus afforded him. “It is a beautiful case!” he cried, with professional enthusiasm. “Beautiful! Beautiful! I never saw one so deadly or so malignant before. We are indeed in luck’s way. Only a miracle can save her life. Cumberledge, we must proceed to perform the miracle.”

Sebastian loved such cases. They formed his ideal. He did not greatly admire the artificial prolongation of diseased and unwholesome lives, which could never be of much use to their owners or anyone else; but when a chance occurred for restoring to perfect health a valuable existence which might otherwise be extinguished before its time, he positively revelled in his beneficent calling. “What nobler object can a man propose to himself,” he used to say, “than to raise good men and true from the dead, as it were, and return them whole and sound to the family that depends upon them? Why, I had fifty times rather cure an honest coal-heaver of a wound in his leg than give ten years more lease of life to a gouty lord, diseased from top to toe, who expects to find a month of Carlsbad or Homburg once every year make up for eleven months of over-eating, over-drinking, vulgar debauchery, and under-thinking.” He had no sympathy with men who lived the lives of swine: his heart was with the workers.

Of course, Hilda Wade soon suggested that, as an operation was absolutely necessary, Number Fourteen would be a splendid subject on whom to test once more the effects of lethodyne. Sebastian, with his head on one side, surveying the patient, promptly coincided. “Nervous diathesis,” he observed. “Very vivid fancy. Twitches her hands the right way. Quick pulse, rapid perceptions, no meaningless unrest, but deep vitality. I don’t doubt she’ll stand it.”

We explained to Number Fourteen the gravity of the case, and also the tentative character of the operation under lethodyne. At first, she shrank from taking it. “No, no!” she said; “let me die quietly.” But Hilda, like the Angel of Mercy that she was, whispered in the girl’s ear: “IF it succeeds, you will get quite well, and—you can marry Arthur.”

The patient’s dark face flushed crimson.

“Ah! Arthur,” she cried. “Dear Arthur! I can bear anything you choose to do to me—for Arthur!”

“How soon you find these things out!” I cried to Hilda, a few minutes later. “A mere man would never have thought of that. And who is Arthur?”

“A sailor—on a ship that trades with the South Seas. I hope he is worthy of her. Fretting over Arthur’s absence has aggravated the case. He is homeward-bound now. She is worrying herself to death for fear she should not live to say good-bye to him.”

“She WILL live to marry him,” I answered, with confidence like her own, “if YOU say she can stand it.”

“The lethodyne—oh, yes; THAT’S all right. But the operation itself is so extremely dangerous; though Dr. Sebastian says he has called in the best surgeon in London for all such cases. They are rare, he tells me—and Nielsen has performed on six, three of them successfully.”

We gave the girl the drug. She took it, trembling, and went off at once, holding Hilda’s hand, with a pale smile on her face, which persisted there somewhat weirdly all through the operation. The work of removing the growth was long and ghastly, even for us who were well seasoned to such sights; but at the end Nielsen expressed himself as perfectly satisfied. “A very neat piece of work!” Sebastian exclaimed, looking on. “I congratulate you, Nielsen. I never saw anything done cleaner or better.”

“A successful operation, certainly!” the great surgeon admitted, with just pride in the Master’s commendation.

“AND the patient?” Hilda asked, wavering.

“Oh, the patient? The patient will die,” Nielsen replied, in an unconcerned voice, wiping his spotless instruments.

“That is not MY idea of the medical art,” I cried, shocked at his callousness. “An operation is only successful if—”

He regarded me with lofty scorn. “A certain percentage of losses,” he interrupted, calmly, “is inevitable, of course, in all surgical operations. We are obliged to average it. How could I preserve my precision and accuracy of hand if I were always bothered by sentimental considerations of the patient’s safety?”

Hilda Wade looked up at me with a sympathetic glance. “We will pull her through yet,” she murmured, in her soft voice, “if care and skill can do it,—MY care and YOUR skill. This is now OUR patient, Dr. Cumberledge.”

It needed care and skill. We watched her for hours, and she showed no sign or gleam of recovery. Her sleep was deeper than either Sebastian’s or Hilda’s had been. She had taken a big dose, so as to secure immobility. The question now was, would she recover at all from it? Hour after hour we waited and watched; and not a sign of movement! Only the same deep, slow, hampered breathing, the same feeble, jerky pulse, the same deathly pallor on the dark cheeks, the same corpse-like rigidity of limb and muscle.

At last our patient stirred faintly, as in a dream; her breath faltered. We bent over her. Was it death, or was she beginning to recover?