Jones signaled and David began, calmly confident, at home with the familiar feel of the knife ploughing through skin and flesh, so swiftly that the first reddening crept into the slope of the cavity almost like a blush. Deeper … then the click of the clamps as the nurses handed them … “There … another one … lay them outside the gauze … now a retractor …” Precision hypnotized the room and its occupants; the minutes passed as in a dream which only the hands of the clock could certify. “He was a fine surgeon,” Trevor said, long afterwards. “You watched his hands and had an impression at first that they were behaving automatically — then you realized a perfect coordination between brain and muscle, a quiet fearless exactness that was almost boring after a time, like championship billiards. After all, it’s the mistakes that make drama — and God knows there were doctors in Calderbury who made drama enough of that kind — fellows who had the whole hospital staff in a state of nerves if they were only going to lance an abscess … But the little doctor, as we called him, made everyone as calm as himself. And he had a curious way — a sort of mystic way, if you let yourself be fanciful about it — of looking up and blinking while his fingers told him things. He’d put his hand inside an abdomen as far as the wrist and feel around and just mutter to himself and to youngsters like me who were looking on: ‘No, there’s no pelvic inflammation … rather a small spleen … oh, dear, that’s too bad — C.A. just here … ’ He made us always say ‘C.A.’ even amongst ourselves, lest otherwise the fatal word might slip out in front of patients; but of course some of ’em were cute enough to suspect what the initials meant, and then he’d tell the most fantastic lies about them. Often he’d made up a disease with a flower name like Calceolaria or Caprifoliaceas, and when once we reminded him that the patient might, after all, know something about gardening, he said: ‘Well, that’s all right — it’s a nice association of ideas — can’t do any harm. And diseases are like flowers — they seed and grow and spread … ’ God, he had some crazy ideas — yet there was something great about him, too — something that made you want to worship him at times.”

And Jones, who afterward conquered his nervousness and became an anaesthetist in a big city hospital, commented when he was prosperous and successful: “Yes, I used to work under Newcome at Calderbury. He was damn nice to me, say what you like about him. He’d have had a career, that man, if he hadn’t stuck in Calderbury — well, maybe he wouldn’t — he wasn’t the kind to use his chances properly. Funny little chap, rather like a wise child, but not wise enough for municipal politics. Didn’t know which side his bread was buttered on.”