He then tried to repair the damage he had done; took up instrument after instrument and dropped them again until the patient’s body was covered with soiled and discarded forceps, knives and clamps. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his hand and left a wide streak of blood across his forehead. His knees shook and he stamped to try to stop them. He cursed the doctor who was helping him, crying out: “For God’s sake do this,” or “For God’s sake don’t do that”; sighed like a suffocating man; looked vacantly round the room as if for help; looked appealingly to his wife’s masked face for some sign of her tender comfort, but she was more than dumb. Frenzied with despair, he told the nurse to send for Mr. Heron. It was a hopeless mission, since that surgeon—even if at home—could not arrive for hours.
He tried again and again to close the awful rent, but he was now nearly dropping with terror and exhaustion. Then the anæsthetist said in a whisper: “How much longer will you be? Her pulse is failing. She cannot stand much more.” He felt that he must finish or die. He finished in a way. He closed the wound, and then sank on a stool with his face buried in his blood-stained hands, while the nurse and the doctor applied the necessary dressing.
The patient was carried back to her bedroom, but he dared not follow. The doctor who had helped him crept away without speaking a word. He was left alone in this dreadful room with its hideous reminders of what he had done. He wandered about, looked aimlessly out of the window, but saw nothing, picked up his wife’s handkerchief which was lying on the table, crunched it in his hand, and then dropped it on the floor as the red horror of it all flooded his brain. What had he done to her? She! She of all women in the world!
He caught a sight of himself in the glass. His face was smeared with blood. He looked inhuman and unrecognizable. It was not himself he saw: it was a murderer with the brand of Cain upon his brow. He looked again at her handkerchief on the ground. It was the last thing her hand had closed upon. It was a piece of her lying amid this scene of unspeakable horror. It was like some ghastly item of evidence in a murder story. He could not touch it. He could not look at it. He covered it with a towel.