The Hospital in Buwambo

by Anne Vinton

  Sylvia had never known the attack of a jealous female before. She was amazed at the venom spilled over her innocent head in a matter of moments. Velda Carroll was obviously a woman who would stop at nothing and stoop to anything to gain her ends. She would never hesitate to use any weapon that might harm the man who had once professed love for her.

  I must never be that weapon, Sylvia vowed, pacing in the now familiar darkness of the compound. Even at the risk of his misunderstanding. I’ll see as little of him as possible. It’s easier with Mike back.

  She was suddenly conscious of a presence in front of her, though she could barely see anything, the moon not yet having risen. By the creeping of her flesh, a natural recoil, she knew the answer before she spoke the words.

  “Is that you, Dr. Wilstrop?”

  “It is I, Dr. Phillips. I was taking a walk, like you. Rather crowded in our quarters, you know. The superintendent is playing symphonies on the phonograph, but it is sufficient that Dr. Shale should stay to be bored, don’t you think?”

  "Does music bore you, then?” She conjured up a mental picture: she and David in two deep porch chairs, and a Beethoven symphony in the background of a star-studded tropical night. She sighed sharply.

  “I will escort you if you wish a little walk, Dr. Phillips,” came the persistent voice.

  “Oh—I—not far. Just once around the compound.”

  “Take my arm, please.”

  As she hesitated the fellow reached out and sought her fingers. “It’s so hot!” she exclaimed, dreading closer contact. “I know my way. Just once around the compound.” She bumped into him and her voice caught. “Sister is expecting me, you know.”

  Her panic was obvious and inexplicable. The walk became a chase with Sylvia the hunted, blundering, bent on keeping just that one step ahead of her unwelcome escort. Of course she stumbled and fell. She wanted to scream as the arms picked her up and held her for a moment firm and close. Then she was set upon her feet and dusted down.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Phillips? Is it nerves again? I do not understand you, quite.”

  Gideon was busily engaged in the kitchen garden behind the bungalow. The quarter-acre was enclosed by a high hedge of flowering frangipani, a broomlike evergreen with clear pink clusters of blossom. Apart from the frangipani, however, this garden might well have been a corner of Kent.

  Out of the corner of his eye Gideon watched Dr. Carroll and Dr. Hogan come through a gap in the frangipani and survey the growing things. Mike plucked a ripe tomato and bit into it appreciatively. Carroll knelt in front of the rhubarb.

  “Well, what do you think, Mike?” Carroll asked, curling and uncurling the rhubarb leaves. “Will you take the job on?”

  Hogan stopped to mop his chin free of tomato juice. “There’s certainly some upheaval going on around here,” he observed. “You say Winnie’s staying—how will she react to yours truly as superintendent?”

  “Since you took your membership you can’t go wrong in Sister’s eyes. Ibadan have promised us a physician and a junior to yourself. Our fame seems to be spreading in the world of medicine. It seems Sylvia Phillips answered the last call for help we’ll need to make.”

  “Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about poor old Flip.”

  “What about her, if by that ridiculous appellation you mean Dr. Phillips?”

  “I’ve been wondering what’s going to happen to her when she leaves Buwambo.”

  Dave was turning away, apparently admiring the cucumbers. “There’s you,” Mike proceeded “moving happily off to Ebe Mula with the government’s blessing, and me taking over Buwambo as a going concern. I naturally want to know what’s going to happen to Flip.”

  “Surely that is her business alone?”

  The reproof was lost on Mike, however.

  “You know darned well she’s a woman in a million, Dave. I want to keep her for Buwambo, if she’ll stay.”

  “For—Buwambo—or yourself, Mike?”

  “Now a dig like that isn’t nice, Dave, and you know it. When I go on leave I look for a little light relief, I admit that much, but I don’t find it with a girl like Flip. She’s the type that has a sorta permanent effect on a man. If you love ‘em you’re pretty sick and kinda never get over it. But Flip has already frankly told me I haven’t a hope in that direction. I admit it was early days of asking, but at least it saves me the journey. No—I mean quite honestly I like her work, and if she would consider it I think it’s worth putting to her.”

  “No,” Dave frowned. “I’m making the appointments around here, and I don’t want her in Buwambo.”

  Mike shrugged and put his arms behind his back.

  “When you shoo me off like that, Dave, I know I’ve trodden on your corns. Why don’t you come clean and admit you love the girl?”

  “But it’s no confounded business of yours!” There was an offended silence, then Carroll sighed. “I’m sorry, Mike. I know you mean well, but some things can’t be expressed in words even to a friend. I did fall in love with Sylvia, and—as you say—it looks like being a permanent affliction. I can’t get her out of my mind! But it was she who turned me down. It seems Sister quite innocently told her about—everything, and it became too much for the lady to countenance. She met me one day on my return from the district, obviously deeply shocked and holding me off with both hands. I tried to find a loophole for us, but she thrust my self-respect in my face. What could I do? Carry her off into the bush or something? One doesn’t use force with the Sylvias of this world.”

  “I begin to see,” said Mike, “and I’m sorry. It has left her miserable, too. She has snapped my head off quite regularly since my return, on occasions when I’ve tried to stimulate a little fellow-feeling between us. You are aware, of course, that she is in a dangerous emotional condition known as hiatusamoris?”

  “Don’t be a loonie, Mike. I can’t laugh these days.”

  “But it’s true. In plain words she’s fair game for anyone. Wilstrop, perhaps?”

  David’s blue eyes blazed. He seized Mike by the shoulders in an iron grip.

  “What are you hinting?” he demanded. “Say it, you swine!”

  “I hardly like to, any more than you like to think it. That pompous oaf never takes his eyes off her nowadays. I don’t think he does anything. He just waits about, and watches. She comes out for a breath of air, and he’s there. The other night I watched her escape from him...”

  “But what did she escape from?” Dave demanded harshly. “God, man! Tell me!”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she knew. But she looked as though she had escaped from something. But there’ll come a time when someone—and it might be Wilstrop—won’t let her escape. I don’t want to be there when that happens. If I loved her, I’d...”

  “He always asks that she accompany him,” Dave said thoughtfully. “I never thought it odd. He took her off with him to do that autopsy in the next village. It was after tea when they returned and I never saw her. Last night he was the only one of us not inside playing cards, and I didn’t connect the two facts when Sister sent a steward across asking the whereabouts of Dr. Phillips. I thought she must be with Velda. I never took the trouble to find out! Now Wilstrop has asked that she accompany him to Ba-bai, to make tests for sleeping sickness. He said not to worry if they couldn’t get back before morning!”

  The two men exchanged meaning glances.

  “Come on!”

  Sylvia had slid into the big red car with a feeling of relief that she was escaping one of those dreadful dinners, with Velda darting glances of sheer venom, alternated with malicious amusement, at her. As the car moved out of the compound she looked toward the rear seat, her eyebrows raised.

  “I thought we were taking Samuel with us.”

  “I told him we could manage without him. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “The superintendent might mind. He gives the orders.”

  “But it isn’t as if we need a chaperone, Dr. Phillips. You are a matur
e woman, and I a grown man—and we’re out on a working trip.”

  The car was supercharged. It tore along comfortably at eighty miles per hour.

  “Please—” Sylvia begged, as a shower of feathers told her they had struck something in flight. “We aren’t in such a hurry as that!”

  “I was only thinking of getting the job done and you back to hospital. Otherwise it means we shall be out all night.”

  “I thought we had provided for that. We will be made perfectly comfortable at Ba-bai in the clinic building.”

  “May I remind you that you are in my capable hands, Dr. Phillips? I may not wish you to stay to Ba-bai with an epidemic of this sort. I will make an effort to get you back tonight.”

  She shrugged away her fears as they reached their destination in record time and proceeded about their business. Sylvia found herself kept surprisingly busy. She opened an abscess, dug out an ingrown toe nail, pulled a stubborn milk tooth and stitched an open wound. Harold Wilstrop took all the specimens he needed, packed his slides and vials carefully and suggested they get back to Buwambo.

  It was just after nine o’clock and—of course—quite dark.

  “If you think it best,” Sylvia agreed uneasily.

  There was no conversation on the return journey. Sylvia feigned sleep. Once Wilstrop’s hand reached out speculatively, passing over her closed eyes. Controlling her shudder, she thought he must hear the pounding of her heart. All at once a great surge of masculine demand came at her, like a tangible thing. She held herself rigid, anticipating the stopping of the car, which now braked to a standstill.

  In a tight voice Wilstrop spoke.

  “Dr. Phillips, you must wake up. There seems to be something wrong.”

  “What is it?” she demanded. “We must get back. See what is wrong, please?”

  “I will try,” he said, getting out of the car.

  She heard him raise the red hood, saw his flashlight beaming. Another vehicle passed, which he made no effort to stop.

  Noiselessly Sylvia unfastened the car door and slid out, uttering a silent prayer. The menace that had loomed so long was near now. She must try to escape it.

  The scurry of sound she made as she plunged into the darkness of the bush was lost in all the other sounds of the African night.

  “There she is!” Mike said joyfully, picking the battered-looking figure up in the glare of headlights. “Safe—and I believe—sound.”

  “Sylvia! Thank God!” David was out of the car and crushing her cruelly to his chest as though there had been nothing to separate them. “We met Wilstrop. What happened? He said he lost you.”

  “I—I got out of the car for—for air. I—couldn’t find him again.” She seemed glad to rest in his arms. He laid his head against hers.

  “No matter what happened, Sylvia, I always love you.”

  She sighed.

  Content to watch the romantic little play in the headlights’ glare, Mike suddenly froze as he saw a black satin head rise from a coil by the roadside.

  “Watch it, Dave,” he warned. “Don’t move. Mamba by Sylvia’s foot.”

  Sylvia felt her eyes drawn to David’s. The horror in them made her look over her shoulder. She saw the wicked diamonds of eyes now waist high, and still mounting, as though the creature wished to look her in the face.

  “Courage, darling!” begged David. He slowly eased his right hand away from her.

  “What are you going to do?” she breathed.

  “Throttle it, if I can. There!”

  The dart of the hand was not as quick as the arrowlike head, however. David cried out, and then Mike was battering the mamba into pulp.

  “Did it get you, Dave?”

  “Yes, right in the palm. Knife! Knife, someone, quick!”

  Sylvia tremblingly produced a scalpel from the torn jacket she was wearing.

  “Open my hand,” David instructed, quietly, revealing an evil-looking black swelling rising like a bubble. “You must be quick.”

  “Will you do it, Sylvia?” Mike begged.

  “I’d rather you did it. I can’t hurt him.” Sylvia hid her eyes in her hands.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CTL theater gown has a leveling effect on all those who don it. Great specialists, nervous students attempting their first surgery, even lovers look much the same in the voluminous, shapeless garment that hangs on them. A bald head can hide as cheerfully as a mop of curls under the severely tied cap, and only the eyes above the mask reveal what may be in the wearer’s heart about the business in hand.

  “Carry on, Sylvia,” invited Mike Hogan, across the inert body of the superintendent.

  “No, you please!” she whispered hoarsely.

  “We can’t keep passing the buck like this, Sylvia. We did it back there on the road. Remember what happened then? This mess!”

  Sylvia immediately set to work, Sister anticipating her requests from the instrument trolley. She always said, afterward, that some mighty, impersonal force must have taken charge of her scratched, mauled hands and applied them with unearthly skill to the delicate operation. She swore she could never have done what she apparently did, alone. She felt sick the whole time, and her knees trembled beneath her, longing to sag into recumbency.

  Mike was the only one who spoke; he said if he didn’t feel his jaw wagging he would think a paralysis had overtaken him.

  “Atta girl!” he encouraged, as the delicate nerve ends were joined, the ligaments stitched. “Isn’t it a mercy this is the same hand that had become a passenger with him? Talk about lightnin’ strikin’ in the same place twice! What’s the betting you improve on the old job, Sylvia? Nothing would surprise me about you, gal! Absolutely nothing.”

  “Are you all right, Dr. Kalengo?” Sister asked sharply.

  It had always been a matter of good-natured joking between the superintendent and his black colleague and they shared the same blood group, an unusual one. Now Kalengo was lying on a couch under the ministration of a staff nurse, giving a pint of his blood in readiness.

  “I’m quite all right, thank you, Sister,” he acknowledged in his rather clipped tones, and went back to his silent fretting.

  “There!” Sylvia announced at last, surveying the perfect “X” of the original incision once more, crisscrossed over the gaps in the flesh with neat stitches. “It’s ready for the dressing, Sister.”

  “Well done!” breathed the older woman, in spontaneous admiration and thanksgiving.

  Carroll, when Kalengo joined him, managed a wan smile from the bed where he lay in the room that was normally used as the office. Sister would not hear of his being placed in the ward.

  “They tell me you’re providing a pint of our common blood, Kalengo,” he twinkled, but weakly. “Now, you tell me—have I still got a hand? You never know these surgeons when they’re turned loose.”

  “Dr. Phillips operated, sir,” said Kalengo, as though this was all-explanatory.

  “She did?” David looked suddenly happy.

  “Please don’t tire yourself, sir,” said Sister. “If the transfusion is taking place now I must go for Dr. Hogan.”

  “No,” David said firmly. “I want Dr. Phillips to do me. I want to watch her do it. I missed all the last excitement.”

  “Dr. Phillips is very tired, sir, as you must understand.”

  “I know. I still want her. Please tell her that.”

  Sylvia arrived shortly with Sister and Mike Hogan. She sat on the side of the bed. A smile of perfect understanding passed between her and the patient.

  “How about the ankle?” she asked. “That will leave you one arm free to wave about when you feel like it.”

  “I am in your hands,” he sighed obligingly, poking a leg from under the bedclothes. “This is my first transfusion. Will you please give me all the professional patter?”

  “You know,” Mike said to Sister, “I somehow think we wouldn’t be missed and I’m just about out on my feet. Supposing we leave ‘em to it?”


  “I will glance in at the wards,” Sister agreed, dumping a bottle of saline solution on the bedside table. “I’ll be back.”

  Sylvia regarded the hypodermic syringe she held against the light, squirted out a bubble of air, then announced, “Just a little prick.”

  “Never felt it,” David sighed contentedly.

  “You shouldn’t feel this, either. I wouldn’t watch, if I were you.”

  “But I want to watch.”

  “I am deeply conscious,” David said, “that you have just about saved my life among you.”

  “As conscious as I am,” said Sylvia, “that all this happened in your saving mine. I can’t forget that awful moment, David, when the snake just looked at me...”

  “Yet you still deny me that life?” he asked softly.

  “It is not a denial, David. It never was. It remains an acceptance of insuperable facts as far as I am concerned.”

  “Insuperable is a big word,” David pondered. “I am prepared to accept blindly, for the moment, your devoted professional attentions, Sylvia. I will not be fobbed off with a substitute. I will even expect you to sit and hold my good hand for hours at a time, thus delaying, pleasantly, my complete recovery for days to come. After that...” His eyes questioned hers.

  “Shall we say sufficient unto the day?” Sylvia prompted him. “Now go to sleep, David. I’ll sit here beside you.”

  Sister entered the room and beheld the two sleeping heads on the same pillow, the hands entwined. Gently she tugged.

  “Dr. Phillips—dear...”

  Sylvia regarded her uncomprehendingly.

  “ ... go to bed, do!”

  “But David...”

  “I know. I’ll look after him for you. Don’t worry. He’ll want you again in the morning when the soreness has really set in. You must rest, my girl. You’re all in.”

  “You are kind, really.” Sylvia wanted to weep.