ALAS! POOR HELIA!
Phil had been struck down by a rush of blood to the brain. For a long
time he had been living as in a dream. His fits of absent-mindedness
had already amazed Suzanne. Too artificial a life, constant
exasperation, his fierce persistence at work which was beyond his
present strength, and the ravages of a fixed idea had prepared him for
brain-fever. The ruin of his guitar picture was the last blow.
Suzanne quickly drove Socrate out of the room, and took the mattress
which was lying on the floor and put it back in its place. She hastily
made the bed, and then, with the help of Poufaille, placed Phil on it.
He was still without motion, pale and bloodless, like a dead man.
Suzanne ran to the Charité Hôpital. She was acquainted with some of
the young hospital doctors, and she explained the case as well as
she could. One of them followed her to Phil’s studio and made a long
examination of him. As soon as he entered the disordered room with its
tale of want, the young doctor understood all; he had already cared for
victims like this of the ideal.
Phil came back to life and moaned feebly.
“He is not dead!” Suzanne said.
“People don’t die like that!” the doctor replied, continuing his
examination. “Tell me how it happened.”
Suzanne told the doctor everything.
“It is as I thought,” he said. “We’ll pull him out of it. But, first
of all, take away all those canvases—put the room in order; and
those portraits of a young girl, always the same one, there along the
wall—take them all away! You must deliver him from that vision when he
comes back to himself!”
“But he can’t live without her,” Suzanne said.
The doctor smiled sadly.
“If he only remembers her!” he murmured. “No lesion; long overdoing
followed by anemia, too strong emotion, and doubtless some fixed idea,”
the young doctor rambled on as he looked at the portraits of Helia
which Poufaille was taking down. “It’s a kind of intoxication of the
nervous system—a railway brain, as it were; we’ll give him things to
build him up, and rest and silence in the meantime.”
“Doc—doctor!” Poufaille stammered, livid with fear, “is the disease
catching?”
“No fear!” the doctor answered, as he glanced at the hairy face of
Poufaille, with its crimson health. “It only comes from exaggerated
intellectual functions.”
“Oh, I’m better already!” said Poufaille, reassured.
Phil was delirious for a week.
His mind, sunk in abysses of sleep, made obscure efforts to come
back to the light of day. Sometimes an ocean of forgetfulness rolled
him in its waves. Sometimes great flashes of light illuminated his
consciousness in its least details and gave to his dreams the hard
relief of marble.
Oftenest he simply wandered, mingling Helia and Suzanne, seeing in
his nightmare guitars, yellow on one side and blue on the other, like
worlds lighted up at once by sun and moon—a whole skyful of guitars,
amid which, motionless, the skull of the poet-painter-sculptor-musician
thought constantly, never sleeping—until the thought burned like a
red-hot iron, and then Phil put his hand to his own burning forehead
and asked for something to drink.
But there was some one to anticipate his wish. A gentle hand raised his
head on the pillow and an anxious face bent over him, seeking to read
his eyes, now dulled, and now brilliant with the light of fever.
“Is it Helia?” Phil asked.
“It is I!” Helia answered. “Don’t speak—rest! You must rest!”
Yes, Helia had come back. Suzanne, in her belief that Phil was on the
point of dying, had not been able to resist the impulse to write to
her. It did not occur to Helia to ask if the disease was catching. She
gave up everything. She paid her forfeit, took her leave of absence,
her own good money going to pay another attraction as a substitute.
Nearly all her savings went in this way—but she heeded it not. Nothing
in the world would have held her back. She had to be with Phil. She
alone had the right to tend him. Another with her own betrothed in time
of danger? No!
Helia nursed him night and day. Suzanne helped her, and Poufaille did
the errands, going for food to Mère Michel’s and for scuttles of coal
to the _charbonnier_. From morning to night his heavy shoes shook the
staircase.
“Why don’t you give him wine?” he said, as he looked at the sick man.
“Why not goat’s-milk cheese?” retorted Suzanne. “Will you keep silence,
_grand nigaud_? Go and get some wood!”
“And the money to buy it with?”
“Here!” Helia said.
With what joy Helia watched Phil’s progress toward health!
“Dear, dear friend, my little Saint John,” Phil said to her. “How can
I ever thank you for all you are doing for me!”
He kissed her hand or put it to his burning forehead. Once he rose up
and looked around the room saying: “Who is there?”
“It is I—Helia!”
“Who is Helia?”
“Helia, your friend—your Helia; I am here with Suzanne!”
“Out, wretches!” And he fell back exhausted.
“Leave him alone,” said the young doctor. “In a fortnight he will be on
his feet and I’ll send him to the country.”
Helia, who was forced to depart, went away. Her leave was over.
Besides, she had no more money. Phil grew better and better. At first
he was surprised to find his room so changed.
“Where are my pictures?” he asked. “What have you done with them?”
“We’ve put them one side—you can see them later,” answered Suzanne.
“What were they about?” inquired Phil. “Anyway, it’s all the same to
me!”
The young doctor, with the good-fellowship that binds students
together, accompanied him to a public sanatorium not far from Paris.
From that moment Phil changed visibly. He who had been so anemic in the
vitiated atmosphere of his studio, with his nose always over his oils
and colors, and his eyes fixed on the canvas, in Socrate’s company, had
now abundance of pure air and walks through the open fields. He felt
himself reborn, although his head was a little empty and his body stiff
and sore like one just taken from the torture-rack. But good food and
quiet did wonders for him. He had an excellent constitution, made for
work and struggle, and it came up again.
With a beefsteak an idea would arrive; and with a glass of wine joy
entered his heart. His blood, renewed, gave him new feelings. He had
again become a man, after the illness in which his youth had been
shipwrecked.
Helia, anxious to see him, came back one day. How difficult it had
been for her—slave to her profession as she was, and still bound to it
for many months! Never mind—she came! Phil was better, Phil was cured.
She would have his first smile; he would be her Phil in health as in
sickness. But at the gate of the sanatorium a magnificent guardian,
adorned with brass buttons and a gilt-banded cap, stopped her. It was
society closing its doors to the intrusion of vagabonds. This man of
law and order asked Helia why, how, in whose name, by what right, she
wished to see Phil, and he refused the favor to her, the mountebank
who—had one ever seen the like?—pretended to be his betrothed!
* * * * *
Phil came back to Paris cured. Strength and the daring of courage
returned with him. His long rest seemed to have increased his energy
tenfold. He went forth from his past as one escapes from a prison,
without even looking backward. The young doctor had guessed only too
truly: Phil had forgotten many things!
Phil, who had received some unexpected money from his uncle in
Virginia, now changed his _quartier_, and set himself up in better
style; and the Salon medal gave him his start. His professor made him
acquainted with the Duke of Morgania, who ordered from him the great
decorative picture of Morgana. The Comtesse de Donjeon asked his aid
for her charity sale.
One effort and then another, and this time Phil would reach the goal.
He had one of those happy dispositions which attract luck as the magnet
attracts iron filings. He was ready; life was open before him like
slack water at sea; there was only wanting to him a good breeze to
swell his sail.
From what side was it to blow?
[Illustration: “A magnificent guardian stopped her”]