“Going to be a warm one to-day, doctor.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Feeling the heat? You look tired.”

“Oh, just a bit sleepy, that’s all. How’s the case?”

“All ready for you.” And Jones added, rather nervously: “Difficult, do you think?”

Then, as at a signal, David’s manner changed. No longer was he the tired man harassed by the chafings of events, but a reserve power that could be tapped immediately by anyone who craved it. Young Jones was new and not yet very expert; he had bungled once or twice before and had blamed himself into a state of nervousness. David took him by the arm, sensing and combating his anxieties. “Oh, I wouldn’t call it difficult, Fred. Just watch the pulse and be ready for transfusions.”

They passed into the theatre together, and there, even if nowhere else, the little doctor was in his kingdom.

At that time patients were usually anaesthetized on the table with all the apparatus of surgery to add panic to their trepidation. But David, always aware of fear as a poison in the blood, would never allow the more suggestive items to be exposed to that last frightened consciousness — instruments, clamps, sponges, and so on. Trays containing these were covered over till ether or nitrus oxide had begun its work; and this, among the hospital staff, was regarded as just one of the little doctor’s fads. He had several others.

The patient lay outstretched, with pain-sharpened eyes swerving restlessly amidst his new environment. He was an old man, night watchman at a factory, grey-haired and thin-featured, the thinness accentuated by disease. His hands, loosely taped to the cross rests, were white and wasted, but emaciation could not hide the seams and scars of a hardworking lifetime. The hipbones, almost fleshless, lifted the covering sheet into ridges.

“Nothing to worry about, Charlie,” David said, smiling as he touched the pulse for a moment. He always called his patients by their names when they were on the table, because he believed it primed a man with some personal dignity when he lay pinioned and anxious under the glare.

David nodded to Jones and the stream of stupefying gas began to pour into nostrils and lungs, while the battery of arcs, now switched full on, shone down on a shrouded human body, shrouded except for a stained rectangle of flesh that rose and sagged irregularly. The little doctor stood by, like an actor waiting for his cue; presently he uncovered a tray of instruments and arranged them, giving instructions to the nurses in a low muttering. “More clamps here, sister … smaller ones … Too much iodine — wash a little off with alcohol … Sponges … smaller ones … no, never cut a sponge … the man’s very thin, that’s a help … How’s he going, Jones?”

Sometimes, waiting at such moments, he felt that his words were like an incantation, and the thought came to him that if, twenty thousand years ago, human eye could have looked ahead to glimpse the supine victim, the tray of instruments, the white-gowned and masked officiants, it could only have deduced some scene of ritual torture.