The Citadel (23 page)

‘What’s the matter?’ said Abbey unexpectedly.

‘Nothing, sir,’ Andrew stammered. ‘ I think I’ve done rather badly with Doctor Gadsby – that’s all.’

‘Never mind about that. Have a look at these specimens. Then just say anything you think about them.’ Abbey smiled encouragingly. He was a clean shaven, ruddy complexioned man of about sixty-five with a high forehead, a long, humorous upper lip. Though Abbey was now perhaps the third most distinguished physician in Europe he had known hardship and bitter struggles in his earlier days when, coming from his native Leeds, with only a provincial reputation to sustain him, he had encountered prejudice and opposition in London. As he gazed, without seeming to do so, at Andrew, observing his ill-cut suit, the soft collar and shirt, the cheap, ill-knotted tie, and above all, the look of strained intensity upon his serious face, the days of his own provincial youth came back to him. Instinctively his heart went out to this unusual candidate and his eye, ranging down the list before him, noted with satisfaction that his markings, particularly in the recent practical, were above pass level.

Meanwhile Andrew, with his eyes fixed upon the glass jars before him, had been stumbling unhappily through his commentary upon the specimens.

‘Good,’ Abbey said suddenly. He took up a specimen – it was an aneurism of the ascending aorta – and began in a friendly manner to question Andrew. His questions, from being simple, gradually became wider, and more searching in their scope until finally they came to bear upon a recent specific treatment by the induction of malaria. But Andrew, opening out under Abbey’s sympathetic manner, answered well.

Finally, as he put down the specimen, Abbey remarked:

‘Do you know anything of the history of aneurism?’

‘Ambrose Paré’ – Andrew answered, and Abbey had already begun his approving nod – ‘is presumed to have first discovered the condition!’

Abbey’s face expressed surprise.

‘Why presumed, Doctor Manson? Paré did discover aneurism.’

Andrew reddened then turned pale as he plunged on:

‘Well, sir, that’s what the text-books say. You’ll find it in every book – I myself took the trouble to verify that it was in six.’ A quick breath. ‘But I happened to be reading Celsus, brushing up my Latin – which needed brushing up, sir – when I definitely came across the word
aneurismus.
Celsus knew aneurism. He described it in full. And that was a matter of thirteen centuries before Paré!’

There was a silence. Andrew raised his eyes, prepared for kindly satire. Abbey was looking at him with a queer expression on his ruddy face.

‘Doctor Manson,’ he said at length, ‘you are the first candidate in this examination hall who has ever told me something original, something true, and something which I did not know. I congratulate you.’

Andrew turned scarlet again.

‘Just tell me one thing more – as a matter of personal curiosity,’ Abbey concluded. ‘What do you regard as the main principle – the, shall I say, the basic idea which you keep before you when you are exercising the practice of your profession?’

There was a pause while Andrew reflected desperately. At length, feeling he was spoiling all the good effect he had created, he blurted out:

‘I suppose – I suppose I keep telling myself never to take anything for granted.’

‘Thank you, Doctor Manson.’

As Andrew left the room, Abbey reached for his pen. He felt young again and suspiciously sentimental. He thought: ‘If he’d told me he went about trying to heal people, trying to help suffering humanity, I’d have flunked him out of sheer damned disappointment.’ As it was, Abbey traced the unheard-of maximum, 100, opposite the name of Andrew Manson. Indeed, could Abbey have ‘ got away with it’ – his own eloquent reflection – that figure would have been doubled.

A few minutes later Andrew went downstairs with the other candidates. At the foot of the stairs beside his leather hooded cave a liveried porter stood with a little pile of envelopes before him. As the candidates went past he handed an envelope to each of them. Harrison, walking out next to Andrew tore his open quickly. His expression altered: he said quietly, ‘ It would appear I’m not wanted tomorrow.’ Then, forcing a smile, ‘How about you?’ Andrew’s fingers were shaking. He could barely read. Dazedly he heard Harrison congratulate him. His chances were still alive. He walked down to the ABC and treated himself to a malted milk. He thought tensely, if I don’t get through now, after all this, I’ll – I’ll walk in front of a bus.

The next day passed grindingly. Barely half the original candidates remained and it was rumoured that out of these another half would go. Andrew had no idea whether he was doing well or badly: he knew only that his head ached abominably, that his feet were icy, his inside void.

At last it was over. At four o’clock in the afternoon Andrew came out of the cloakroom, spent and melancholy, pulling on his coat. Then he became aware of Abbey standing before the big open fire in the hall. He made to pass. But Abbey, for some reason, was holding out his hand, smiling, speaking to him, telling him – telling him that he was through.

Dear God, he had done it! He had
done
it! He was alive again, gloriously alive, his headache gone, all his weariness forgotten. As he dashed down to the nearest post office his heart sang wildly, madly. He was through, he had done it, not from the West End of London, but from an outlandish mining town. His whole being was a surging exaltation. It hadn’t been for nothing after all: these long nights, these mad dashes down to Cardiff, these racking hours of study. On he sped, bumping and cannoning through the crowds, missing the wheels of taxis and omnibuses, his eyes shining, racing, racing to wire news of the miracle to Christine.

When the train got in, half an hour late, it was nearly midnight. All the way up the valley the engine had been battling against a high wind and at Aberalaw, as Andrew stepped out on the platform, the force of the hurricane almost bowled him off his feet. The station was deserted. The young poplars planted in line at its entrance bent like bows, whistling and shivering at every blast. Overhead the stars were polished to a high glitter.

Andrew started along Station Road, his body braced, his mind exhilarated by the batter of the wind. Full of his success, his contact with the great, the sophisticated medical world, his ears ringing with Sir Robert Abbey’s words, he could not reach Christine fast enough to tell her joyously everything, everything which had taken place. His telegram would have given her the good news; but now he wished to pour out in detail the full exciting story.

As he swung, head down, into Talgarth Street he was conscious, suddenly, of a man running. The man came behind him, labouring heavily, the noisy clatter of his boots upon the pavement so lost in the gale he seemed a phantom figure. Instinctively Andrew stopped. As the man drew near he recognised him, Frank Davis, an ambulance man of Anthracite Sinking No 3, who had been one of his first-aid class the previous spring. At the same moment Davis saw him.

‘I was comin’ for you, doctor. Comin’ for you to your house. This wind’s knocked the wire all to smash.’ A gust tore the rest of his words away.

‘What’s wrong?’ shouted Andrew.

‘There’s been a fall down at Number Three.’ Davis cupped his hands close to Manson’s ear. ‘A lad got buried there, almost. They don’t seem to be able to shift him. Sam Bevan, he’s on your list. Better look sharp, doctor, and get to him.’

Andrew took a few steps down the road with Davis, then a sudden reflection brought him up short.

‘I’ve got to have my bag,’ he bawled to Davis. ‘You go up to my house and fetch it for me. I’ll go on to Number Three.’ He added, ‘And, Frank! – tell my missus where I’ve gone.’

He was at No 3 Sinking in four minutes, blown there, across the railway siding and along Roath Lane, by the following wind. In the rescue room he found the under-manager and three men waiting on him. At the sight of him the under-manager’s worried expression lifted slightly.

‘Glad to see you, doctor. We’re all to bits with the storm. And we’ve had a nasty fall on top of it. Nobody killed, thank God, but one of the lads pinned by his arm. We can’t shift him an inch. And the roof’s rotten.’

They went to the winding shaft, two of the men carrying a stretcher with splints strapped to it and the third a wooden box of first-aid material. As they entered the cage another figure came bundling across the yard. It was Davis, panting, with the bag.

‘You’ve been quick, Frank,’ Manson said as Davis squatted beside him in the cage.

Davis simply nodded; he could not speak. There was a clang, an instant’s suspense, and the cage dropped and rocketed to the bottom. They all got out, moving in single file, the under-manager first, then Andrew, Davis – still clutching the bag – then the three men.

Andrew had been underground before, he was used to the high vaulted caverns of the Drineffy mines, great dark resounding caves, deep down in the earth where the mineral had been gouged and blasted from its bed. But this sinking, No 3, was an old one with a long and tortuous haulage way leading to the workings. The haulage was less a passage than a low-roofed burrow, dripping and clammy, through which they crawled, often on their hands and knees, for nearly half a mile. Suddenly the light borne by the under-manager stopped just ahead of Andrew who then knew that they were there.

Slowly, he crept forward. Three men, cramped together on their bellies in a dead end, were doing their best to revive another man who lay in a huddled attitude, his body slewed sideways, one shoulder pointing backwards, lost seemingly in the mass of fallen rock around him. Tools lay scattered behind the men, two overturned bait cans, stripped off jackets.

‘Well then, lads?’ asked the under-manager in a low voice.

‘We can’t shift him, nohow.’ The man who spoke turned a sweat grimed face. ‘ We tried everything.’

‘Don’t try,’ said the under-manager with a quick look at the roof. ‘Here’s the doctor. Get back a bit, lads, and give us room. Get back a tidy bit if I were you.’

The three men pulled themselves back from the dead end and Andrew, when they had squeezed their way past him, went forward. As he did so, in one brief moment, there flashed through his head a memory of his recent examination, its advanced bio-chemistry, high sounding terminology, scientific phrases. It had not covered such a contingency as this.

Sam Bevan was quite conscious. But his features were haggard beneath their powdering of dust. Weakly, he tried to smile at Manson.

‘Looks like you’re goin’ to ’ ave some amb’lance practice on me proper!’ Bevan had been a member of that same first-aid class and had often been requisitioned for bandage practice.

Andrew reached forward. By the light of the under-manager’s lamp, thrust across his shoulder, he ran his hands over the injured man. The whole of Bevan’s body was free except his left forearm which lay beneath the fall, so pressed and mangled under the enormous weight of rock, it held him immovably a prisoner.

Andrew saw instantly that the only way to free Bevan was to amputate the forearm. And Bevan, straining his pain tormented eyes, read that decision the moment it was made.

‘Go on, then, doctor,’ he muttered. ‘Only get me out of here quick.’

‘Don’t worry, Sam,’ Andrew said. ‘I’m going to send you to sleep now. When you wake up you’ll be in bed.’

Stretched flat in a puddle of muck under the two foot roof he slipped off his coat, folded it, and slipped it under Bevan’s head. He rolled up his sleeves and asked for his bag. The under-manager handed forward the bag and as he did so he whispered in Andrew’s ear:

‘For God’s sake hurry, doctor. We’ll have this roof down on us before we know where we are.’

Andrew opened the bag. Immediately he smelt the reek of chloroform. Almost before he thrust his hand into the dark interior and felt the jagged edge of broken glass he knew what had occurred. Frank Davis, in his haste to reach the mine, had dropped the bag. The chloroform bottle was broken, its contents irretrievably spilled. A shiver passed over Andrew. He had no time to send up to the surface. And he had no anaesthetic.

For perhaps thirty seconds he remained paralysed. Then automatically he felt for his hypodermic, charged it, gave Bevan a maximum of morphine. He could not linger for the full effect. Tipping his bag sideways so that the instruments were ready to his hand he again bent over Bevan. He said, as he tightened the tourniquet:

‘Shut your eyes, Sam!’

The light was dim and the shadows moved with flickering confusion. At the first incision Bevan groaned between his shut teeth. He groaned again. Then, mercifully, when the knife grated upon the bone, he fainted.

A cold perspiration broke on Andrew’s brow as he clipped the artery forceps on spurting, mangled flesh. He could not see what he was doing. He felt suffocated here, in this rat-hole, deep down beneath the surface of the ground, lying in the mud. No anaesthesia, no theatre, no row of nurses to run to do his bidding. He wasn’t a surgeon. He was muddling hopelessly. He would never get through. The roof would crash upon them all. Behind him the hurried breathing of the under-manager. A slow drip of water falling cold upon his neck. His fingers, working feverishly, stained and warm. The grating of the saw. The voice of Sir Robert Abbey, a long way off: ‘ The opportunity for scientific practice …’ Oh God! would he never get through!

At last. He almost sobbed with relief. He slipped a pad of gauze on the bloodied stump. Stumbling to his knees he said:

‘Take him out.’

Fifty yards back, in a clearing in the haulage way, with space to stand up and four lamps round him he finished the job. Here it was easier. He tidied up, ligatured, drenched the wound with antiseptic. A tube now. Then a couple of holding sutures. Bevan remained unconscious. But his pulse though thin was steady. Andrew drew his hand across his forehead. Finished.

‘Go steady with the stretcher. Wrap these blankets round him. We’ll want hot bottles whenever we get out.’

The slow procession, bent double in the low places, began to sway up the shadows of the haulage. They had not gone sixty paces when a low rumbling subsidence echoed in the darkness down behind them. It was like the last low rumble of a train entering a tunnel. The under-manager did not turn round. He merely said to Andrew with a quiet grimness: