A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping (ap literature book list .txt) đź“–
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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The panting of Murchison’s car seemed to outrage the
atmosphere of the place, as though the fierce and aggressive present were intruding upon the dreamy past. A manservant met the doctor, and led him across the Jacobean
hall to the library, whose windows looked towards the west.
Parker Steel was standing before the fire, biting his
black mustache. He had the appearance of a man
whose vanity had been ruffled, and who was having an
unwelcome consultation forced upon him by the preposterous fussing of some elderly relative.
The two men shook hands, Steel’s white fingers limp
in his rival’s palm. His air of cultured hauteur had fallen
to freezing point. He condescended, and made it a matter of dignity.
“Sorry to drag you over here, Murchison. Mr. Pennington has been on the fidget with regard to his daughter,
and to appease him I elected to send for you at once.”
Murchison warmed his hands before the fire. Steel’s
grandiloquent manner always amused him.
“I am glad to be of any use to you. Who is the patient, Miss Julia Pennington?”
“Yes.”
“Anything serious?”
“Nothing; only hysteria; the woman’s a tangle of
nerves, a mass of emotions. I have grown to learn her
idiosyncrasies in a year. One month it is palpitation
and imaginary heart disease, next month she is swearing
that she has cancer of the oesophagus and cannot swallow.
The lady has headaches regularly every other week, and
merges on melancholia in the intervals.”
Murchison nodded.
“What is the present phase?” he asked.
“Acute migraine and facial neuralgia. She is worrying about her eyes, seems to see nothing and everything,
mere hysterical phantasmagoria. The woman is not to
be taken seriously. She is being drenched with bromide
and fed upon phenacetin. Come and see her.”
Parker Steel led the way from the library as though he
regarded the consultation as a mere troublesome formality, a pandering to domestic officiousness that had to be
appeased. Miss Julia Pennington was lying on a sofa
in the drawingroom with a younger sister holding her
hand. The room smelled horribly of vinegar, and the
blinds were down, for the patient persisted that she could
not bear the light.
The younger lady rose and bowed to Murchison, and
drew aside, with her eyes fixed upon her sister’s face.
Miss Julia was moaning and whimpering on the sofa, a
thin and neurotic spinster of forty with tightly drawn
hair, sharp features, and the peevish expression of a
creature who had long been the slave of a hundred imaginary ills.
Murchison sat down beside her, and asked whether she
could bear the light. His manner was in acute contrast
to Parker Steel’s; the one incisive, almost brusque in his
effort to impress; the other calm, quiet, deliberate, sympathetic in every word and gesture.
The younger Miss Pennington drew up the blinds.
Murchison was questioning her sister, watching her face
keenly, while Parker Steel fidgeted to and fro before the
fire.
“Much pain in the eyes, Miss Pennington?”
“Oh, Dr. Murchison, the pain is terrible, it runs all
over the face; you cannot conceive—”
She broke away into a chaos of complaints till Murchison quieted her and asked a few simple questions. He
rose, turned the sofa bodily towards the light, and proceeded to examine the lady’s eyes.
“Things look dim to you?” he asked her, quietly.
“All in a blur, flashes of light, and spots like blood.
I’m sure—”
“Yes, yes. You have never had anything quite like
this before?”
“Never, never. I am quite unnerved, Dr. Murchison, and Dr. Steel won’t believe half the things I tell
him.”
Her voice was peevish and irritable. Parker Steel
grinned at the remark, and muttered “mad cat” under
his breath.
“You are hardly kind to me, Miss Pennington,” he
said, aloud, with a touch of banter.
“I’m sure I’m ill, Dr. Steel, very ill—”
“Please lie quiet a moment,” and Murchison bent over
her, closed her lids, and felt the eyeballs with his fingers.
Miss Pennington indulged in little gasps of pain, yet feeling mesmerized by the quiet earnestness of the man.
Murchison stood up suddenly, looking grave about the
mouth.
“Do you mind ringing the bell, Steel? I want my bag
out of the car.”
Steel, who appeared vexed and restless despite his selfconceit, went out in person to fetch the bag. When he
returned, Murchison had drawn the blinds and curtains
so that the room was in complete darkness.
“Thanks; I want my lamp; here it is. I have matches.
Now, Miss Pennington, do you think you can sit up in a
chair for five minutes?”
The thin lady complained, protested, but obeyed him.
Murchison seated himself before her, while Parker Steel
held the lamp behind Miss Pennington. A beam of light
from the mirror of Murchison’s ophthalmoscope flashed
upon the woman’s face. She started hysterically, but
seemed to feel the calming influence of Murchison’s personality.
Complete silence held for some minutes, save for an
occasional word from Murchison. Parker Steel’s face
was in the shadow. The hand that held the lamp quivered a little as he watched his rival’s face. There was
something in the concentrated earnestness of Murchison’s
examination that made Mrs. Betty’s husband feel vaguely
uncomfortable.
Murchison rose at last with a deep sigh, stood looking
at Miss Pennington a moment, and then handed the
ophthalmoscope to Steel. The lamp changed hands and
the men places. Miss Pennington’s supply of nerve power,
however, was giving out. She blinked her eyes, put her
hands to her face, and protested that she could bear the
light from the mirror no longer.
Parker Steel lost patience.
“Come, Miss Pennington, come; I must insist—”
“I can’t, I can’t, the glare burns my eyes out.”
“Nonsense, my dear lady, control yourself—”
His irritability reduced Miss Pennington to peevish
tears. She called for her sister, and began to babble
hysterically, an impossible subject.
Parker Steel pushed back his chair in a dudgeon.
“I can’t see anything,” he said; “utterly hopeless.”
Murchison drew back the curtains and let dim daylight into the room. He helped Miss Pennington back
to the sofa, very gentle with her, like a man bearing with
the petulance of a sick child, and then turned to Steel with
a slight frown.
“Shall we talk in the library?”
“Yes.”
“I will just put my lamp away.”
They crossed the hall together in silence, and entered
the room with its irreproachable array of books, and the
logs burning on the irons. Murchison went and stood
by one of the windows. A red sunset was coloring the
west, and the dark trees in the garden seemed fringed
with flame.
Parker Steel had closed the door. He looked irritable
and restless, a man jealous of his self-esteem.
“Well? Anything wrong?”
The big man turned with his hands in his trousers pockets. Steel did not like the serious expression of his face.
“Have you examined Miss Pennington’s eyes?”
Parker Steel shifted from foot to foot.
“Well, no,” he confessed, with an attempt at hauteur,
“I know the woman’s eccentricities. She may be slightly
myopic—”
Murchison drew a deep breath.
“She may be stark blind in a week,” he said, curtly.
“What!”
“Acute glaucoma.”
“Acute glaucoma! Impossible!”
“I say it is.”
Parker Steel took two sharp turns up and down the
room. His mouth was twitching and he looked pale,
like a man who has received a shock. He was conscious,
too, that Murchison’s eyes were upon him, and that his
rival had caught him blundering like any careless boy.
There was something final and convincing in Murchison’s
manner. Parker Steel hated him from that moment with
the hate of a vain and ambitious egotist.
“Confound it, Murchison, are you sure of this?”
“Quite sure, as far as my skill serves me.”
“Have you had much experience?”
There was a slight sneer in the question, but Murchison
was proof against the challenge.
“I specialized in London on the eyes.”
Parker Steel emitted a monosyllable that sounded remarkably like “damn.”
“Well, what’s to be done?”
“We must consider the advisability of an immediate
iridectomy.”
They heard footsteps in the hall. The library door
opened. A spectacled face appeared, to be followed by
a long, loose-limbed body clothed in black.
“Good-day, Dr. Murchison. I have come to inquire—”
Parker Steel planted himself before the fire, a miniature Ajax ready to defy the domestic lightning. He cast
a desperate and half-appealing look at Murchison.
“We have just seen your daughter, Mr. Pennington.”
A pair of keen gray eyes were scrutinizing the faces of
the two doctors. Mr. Pennington was considered something of a terror in the neighborhood, a brusque, snappish old gentleman with a ragged beard, and ill-tempered
wisps of hair straggling over his forehead.
“Well, gentlemen, your opinion?”
Murchison squared his shoulders, and seemed to be
weighing every word he uttered. He was too generous
a man to seize the chance of distinguishing himself at the
expense of a rival.
“I think, Mr. Pennington, that Dr. Steel and I agree
in the matter. We take, sir, rather a serious view of the
case. Is not that so, Steel?”
The supercilious person bent stiffly at the hips.
“Certainly.”
“Perhaps, Steel, you will explain the urgency of the case.”
Mr. Pennington jerked into a chair, took off his spectacles and dabbed them with his handkerchief.
“I am sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your daughter’s
eyesight is in danger.”
The gentleman in the chair started.
“What! Eyesight in danger! Bless my bones, why—”
“Dr. Murchison agrees with me, I believe.”
“Absolutely.”
“Good God, gentlemen!”
“A peculiarly dangerous condition, sir, developing
rapidly and treacherously, as this rare disease sometimes
does.”
Perspiration was standing out on Parker Steel’s forehead. He flashed a grateful yet savage glance at Murchison, and braced back his shoulders with a sigh of
bitter relief.
“I think a London opinion would be advisable, Murchison, eh?”
“I think so, most certainly, in view of the operation
that may have to be performed immediately.”
“Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. I presume this
means my writing out a check for a hundred guineas.”
“Your daughter’s condition, sir—”
“Of course, of course. Don’t mention the expense.
And you will manage—”
Parker Steel resumed his dictatorship.
“I will wire at once,” he said; “we must lose no time.”
He accompanied Murchison from the house, jerky and
distraught in manner, a man laboring under a most unwelcome obligation. The rivals shook hands. There
was much of the anger of the sunset in Parker Steel’s
heart as he watched Murchison’s car go throbbing down
the drive amid the slanting shadows of the silent trees.
PARKER STEEL’S wife, in a depressed and melancholy mood, wandered restlessly about the house in
St. Antonia’s Square, with the chimes of St. Antonia’s
thundering out every “quarter” over the sleepy town. Mrs.
Betty had attended a drawingroom meeting that afternoon in support of the zenana missions, and such social
mortifications, undertaken for the good of the “practice,”
usually reduced her to utter gloom. Mrs. Betty was one
of those cultured beings who suffer seriously from the
effects of boredom. Her mercurial temper was easily
lowered by the damp, gray skies of Roxton morality.
The tea was an infusion of tannin in the pot, and still
the unregenerate
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