He went to Scotland, and she stayed in London. She was inexorable. It
was as if his soft, enveloping pillow had turned into a rock. She lied
at last--how avoid lying, sooner or later, when one was married?--so as
to get rid of him, for he was insisting on taking rooms for them both at
the sea near Chickover, where she could be within reach of Virginia and
yet not away from him. Driven into this corner what could she do but
lie? It is what one does in corners, she thought, excusing herself. She
told him Virginia was probably coming up to London to have her baby in a
nursing home, and that was why she couldn’t go away.
He went off puzzled and unhappy, and his unhappiness filled her with
secret joy. What balm to her spirit, which had lately been so anxious,
to see all these unmistakable symptoms of devoted love in him. And she
pictured his return in September, and herself at the station to meet
him, changed, young, able to do everything with him, a fit mate for him
at last.
‘You’ll never, never know how much I love you,’ she said, her arms round
his neck when she said good-bye.
‘It looks like it, doesn’t it,’ he said gloomily.
‘Exactly like it,’ she laughed. She was always laughing now, just as she
used always to be laughing at their very first meetings.
‘I can’t make it out,’ he said, looking down at her upturned face.
‘You’re sending me away. Suppose I meet that girl up there--Miss
Wickford, or that other one who looked like a shark--I should comfort
myself.’
Even that only made her laugh. ‘Do, Chris darling,’ she said, patting
his face. ‘And then come back and tell me all about it.’
She <i>was</i> changed. He went away extremely miserable, and Lewes’s
talk--that talk he had thirsted for when he thought he wasn’t going to
get it--seemed like just so much gritty drivel.
Left alone in London Catherine gave herself up entirely to the
treatment. Twice a week she went to Portland Place and suffered,--for it
hurt, though Dr. Sanguesa told her through the nurse that it didn’t.
They laid her on a table, and a great machine was lowered to within a
hair’s breadth of her bare skin, her eyes were bandaged, and crackling
things--she couldn’t see what, but they sounded like sparks and felt
like little bright stabbing knives--were let loose on her for half an
hour at a stretch, first on one side of her and then on the other. When
this was over she was injected with some mysterious fluid, and then went
home completely exhausted.
All day afterwards she lay on her sofa, and Mrs. Mitcham brought her
trays of nourishing food. She read and slept. She went to bed at nine
o’clock. She did nothing to her face after Christopher had gone, and
Mrs. Mitcham, looking at her and seeing her so persistently yellow,
asked her with growing concern if she felt quite well.
After the fourth treatment she was to begin and see a difference. How
anxiously she scanned herself in the glass. Nothing. And her body felt
exactly as her face looked,--amazingly weary.
‘It takes longer with some people,’ said the nurse, when Catherine
commented on this on her fifth visit. ‘There was one lady came here who
noticed nothing at all till just before the end, and then you should
have seen her. Why, she skipped out of that door. And sixty, if a day.’
‘Perhaps I’m not old enough,’ said Catherine. ‘All the people you tell
me about are sixty or seventy.’
She was sitting on the sofa of the Rose du Barri boudoir being dressed.
She was too tired to stand up. Those crackles, going on for half an
hour, were a great strain on her endurance. They didn’t hurt enough to
make her cry out, but enough to make her need all her determination not
to.
The nurse laughed. ‘Well, we <i>are</i> depressed to-day, aren’t we,’ she
said brightly. ‘People do get like that about half-way through--the slow
ones, I mean, who don’t react at once as some do. You’ll see. Rome
wasn’t built in a day.’
The next time she came the nurse flung up both hands on seeing her.
‘Why, aren’t you looking well this morning!’ she cried.
Catherine hurried to the glass. ‘Am I?’ she said, staring at herself.
‘<i>Such</i> a change,’ said the nurse with every sign of pleasure. ‘I was
sure it would begin soon. Now you’ll see it going on more and more
quickly every day.’
‘Shall I?’ said Catherine, scrutinising the face in the glass.
For the life of her she could see no difference. She said so. The nurse
laughed at her.
‘Oh, you doubting Thomas,’ said the nurse, whose friendliness had
flowered into a robust familiarity. ‘Just look at yourself now. Don’t
you see?’ And she took her by the shoulders and twisted her round to the
glass again.
No, Catherine didn’t see. She saw the nurse’s laughing, rosy face close
to hers, and hers yellow and pale-lipped,--just as it always was now
when nothing out of Maria Rome’s box had been put on it. Maria Rome had
had a terrible effect on her. Her hair was startlingly more grey, now
that the dye had had time to wear off, than it used to be before any was
put on.
‘It’s the trained eye that can tell,’ said the nurse brightly. ‘I notice
a <i>great</i> change.’
‘Do you?’ was all Catherine could say.
That day she seemed so much more quiet and tired than usual, lying on
her sofa in the flat and not even reading, that Mrs. Mitcham, who hadn’t
been at all happy about her since Christopher’s departure, asked her if
it wouldn’t be a good plan to see a doctor.
Catherine couldn’t help smiling at this. Why, that was what was the
matter with her, that she <i>was</i> seeing a doctor.
‘I shall be all right soon,’ she assured Mrs. Mitcham; for she still
hoped.
It wasn’t till after the ninth treatment that her hopes began to grow
definitely pale. Nothing had happened. She was just as old as ever;
older, if anything, for those stabbing sparks made her brace herself to
an endurance that left her utterly exhausted. The nurse, it is true,
continued stoutly to express delighted surprise each time she saw her,
but this merely caused Catherine to distrust either her sincerity or her
eyesight. She became more silent and less interested in the tales about
other old ladies. Their alleged skipping began to leave her cold. It was
possible, of course, that they had skipped, but she wasn’t able to bring
herself to believe in it really.
‘Those other old ladies----’ she said, on her eleventh visit.
The nurse interrupted her with a gay burst of laughter. ‘You’re never
going to class yourself with old ladies?’ she cried. ‘Now, Mrs.
Monckton, that’s really naughty of you. I won’t allow it. I shall have
to scold you soon, you know.’
‘Well, but this is my eleventh time, and you said they were all skipping
by their eleventh time----’
‘Not all. Come, come now. It takes people differently, you know.’
Not that I want to skip,’ said Catherine, wearily pinning up a strand of
hair the eye-bandage had loosened. ‘It’s that I don’t feel the least
shred of the remotest desire to.’
‘That’ll come. It’ll all come in time.’
‘In what time?’ asked Catherine. ‘I’ve only got one treatment more.’
‘It often happens that people feel the benefit afterwards. Weeks,
perhaps, afterwards. They wake up one morning, and find themselves
suddenly quite young.’
Catherine said nothing to this. Her hopes had flickered very small by
now.
The nurse, as jolly as ever, rallied her and laughed at her for being so
ungrateful, when she only had to look at herself to see----
‘I’m always looking at myself, and I never see,’ said Catherine.
‘Oh, <i>aren’t</i> you a naughty little thing!’ cried the nurse. ‘I don’t
know what would become of poor Dr. Sanguesa if all his patients were as
obstinately blind as you. Well, there’s still Thursday. Sometimes the
last treatment of all convinces the patient, and we shall have you
writing us wonderful testimonials----’
There was no response to this gaiety. Catherine went away heavy-footed.
She was poorer by fifty pounds, Christopher was coming home in a week,
and that bright dream of meeting him at the station seemed to the last
degree unlikely to be realised. Useless for the nurse to pretend there
was a difference in her; there was none. Perhaps if she hadn’t pretended
Catherine would have been more able to believe. But the nurse treating
her like a fool--well, but wasn’t that precisely what she was? Wasn’t
any woman a fool who could suppose that she could be stirred up to youth
again by showers of stabbing crackles?
She went home heavy-footed and ashamed. Trouble, expense,
disappointment, an intolerable long separation from Christopher,--that
was all she had got out of this. Oh yes--she had got the useful
knowledge that she was a fool; but she had had that before.
Still, she wouldn’t quite give up hope yet. There was one more
treatment, and it might well be that she would suddenly take a turn....
But she never had the final treatment, and never saw either Dr. Sanguesa
or the nurse again; for when she got home that day, she found a telegram
from Mrs. Colquhoun, asking her to come to Chickover at once.