The rheumatism rage lasted long enough for him to buy a house in Harley Street, a country home on the Thames, a cottage in Sussex, a small sailing yacht, and a new Rolls, in which he was still wafted round between the four of them and the hospital. By then he was ready to operate on anything-he was, he told his dressers with pride, one of the last of the general surgeons. He claimed to be capable of removing a stomach or a pair of tonsils with equal success, or to be able to cut off a leg or a lung.
Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon he operated in his own theatre on the top floor. The list for the session was pinned up outside like a music-hall bill-the best cases were always at the top for Sir Lancelot to operate on himself, and the programme degenerated into a string of such minor surgical chores as the repair of hernias and the removal of varicose veins, to be done by his assistants when he had gone off to his club for a glass of sherry before dinner.
On the first Tuesday after my appointment to the firm I walked up the stairs to the theatre-students were not allowed to use the hospital lift-and went into the dressers' changing-room. A row of jackets and ties hung under a notice in letters three inches high: DO NOT LEAVE ANYTHING IN YOUR POCKETS. Everyone entering the theatre had to wear sterile clothing, which was packed away in three metal bins opened by foot pedals. Using a pair of long sterile forceps I took an oblong cap from one, a mask from another, and a rolled white gown from the third. Unfortunately there was no indication of the size of these coverings, and the gown fell round my feet like a bridal dress while the cap perched on my head like a cherry on a dish of ice-cream. I pushed open the theatre door and stepped inside reverently, like a tourist entering a cathedral. Standing by the door, my hands clasped tightly behind me, all I wanted was completely to escape notice. I felt that even my breathing, which sounded in my ears like the bellows of a church organ, would disturb the sterile, noiseless efficiency of the place. I was also a little uncertain of my reactions to cut flesh and wanted to keep as far away from the scene of activity as possible.
'You, boy!'
Sir Lancelot's head popped above the caps of his attendants. All I could see of him was a single brown, bushy strip that separated the top of his mask and the edge of his cap, through which there glared two unfriendly eyes like a hungry tiger inspecting a native through the undergrowth.
'Come over here,' he shouted. 'How often have I got to tell you young fellers you can't learn surgery from the door-post?'
The operating table was in the centre of the bare, tiled room, directly under the wide lamp that hung like a huge inverted saucer from the ceiling. It was completely invisible, as about twenty figures in white gowns were packed round it like tube passengers in the rush-hour. These were mostly students. The operating team was made up of Sir Lancelot himself, who was a head higher than anyone else in the room; his theatre Sister, masked and with all her hair carefully tucked into a sterile white turban, standing on a little platform beside him; his senior houseman, Mr. Stubbins, and his registrar, Mr. Crate, assisting him from the opposite side; and his anaesthetist, sitting on a small metal piano stool beside a chromium-plated barrow of apparatus at the head of the table, reading the _Daily Telegraph._ On the outskirts of this scrum two nurses in sterile clothes dashed round anxiously, dishing out hot sterilized instruments from small metal bowls like waiters serving spaghetti. A theatre porter, also gowned and masked, leant reflectively on a sort of towel rail used for counting the swabs, and another strode in with a fresh cylinder of oxygen on his shoulder. The only indication that there was a patient present at all was a pair of feet in thick, coarse-knitted bed-socks that stuck pathetically from one end of the audience.
As soon as Sir Lancelot spoke, the group round the table opened as if he were Aladdin at the mouth of his cave. I walked unhappily into the centre. My companions closed tightly behind me, and I found myself wedged against the table opposite Sir Lancelot with a man who played in the second row of the hospital forwards immediately behind me. Escape was therefore out of the question, on physical as well as moral grounds.
The operation was on the point of starting. The patient was still invisible, as the body was covered with sterile towels except for a clean-shaved strip of lower abdomen on the right-hand side of which the operating light was focused diagnostically. I couldn't even see if it was a young man or a woman.
Having forced me into a ringside seat, Sir Lancelot then appeared to dismiss me from his mind. He paused to adjust the cuff of the rubber glove that stretched over his bony hand. Stubbins and Crate were waiting with gauze dabs, and the theatre sister was threading needles with catgut as unconcernedly as if she was going to darn her stockings.
'Stubbins,' said Sir Lancelot chattily, making a three-inch incision over the appendix, 'remind me to look into Fortnum's on my way home, there's a good lad. My missus'll give me hell if I forget her dried ginger again. I suppose it was all right for me to start?' he asked the anaesthetist.
The Daily Telegraph rustled slightly in assent.
I was surprised. Dried ginger in an operating theatre?
Shopping lists disturbing the sanctity of surgery? And the _Daily Telegraph?_
'I've got a damn funny story to tell you lads,' went on Sir Lancelot affably, deepening his incision. 'Make you all laugh. Happened to me last week. An old lady turned up in my rooms in Harley Street…Sister!' he exclaimed in a tone of sudden annoyance, 'do you expect me to operate with a jam-spreader? This knife's a disgrace.'
He threw it on the floor. Without looking at him she handed him another.
'That's better,' Sir Lancelot growled. Then, in his previous tone, as though he were two people making conversation, he went on: 'Where was I? Oh yes, the old lady. Well, she said she'd come to see me on the advice of Lord-Lord Someoneorother, I can't remember these damn titles-whom I'd operated on last year. She said she was convinced she'd got gallstones.
'Now look here, Stubbins, can't you and Crate keep out of each other's way? Your job is to use that gauze swab sensibly, not wave it around like a Salvation Army banner. How the devil do you think I can operate properly if everything's wallowing in blood? Why am I always cursed with assistants who have a couple of left hands? And I want a clip, Sister. Hurry up, woman, I can't wait all night!'
Sir Lancelot had cut through the abdominal wall while he was talking, like a child impatient to see inside a Christmas parcel.
'Well,' he went on, all affability again, seemingly conducting the operation with the concentration of a gossipy woman knitting a pair of socks, 'I said to this old lady, "Gallstones, eh? Now, my dear, what makes you think you've got gallstones?" And I've never seen anyone look so embarrassed in my life!'
He returned to the operation.
'What's this structure, gentlemen?'
A reply came from under a student's mask on the edge of the crowd.
'Quite correct, whoever you are,' said Sir Lancelot, but without any congratulation in his voice. 'Glad to see you fellers remember a little fundamental anatomy from your two years in the rooms…so I wondered what was up. After all, patients don't get embarrassed over gallstones. It's only piles and things like that, and even then it's never the old ladies who are coy but the tough young men. Remember that bit of advice, gentlemen…Come on, Stubbins, wake up! You're as useless as an udder on a bull.'
He produced the appendix from the wound like a bird pulling a worm from the ground, and laid it and the attached intestine on a little square of gauze.
'Then the old lady said to me, "As a matter of fact, Sir Lancelot, I've been passing them all month…", Don't lean on the patient, Stubbins! If I'm not tired you shouldn't be, and I can give you forty or fifty years, my lad.