The doctor had gone. Hollyer went back into his mother’s room. She lay
there, dozing, in the big white bed, propped high on the pillows.
Through her mouth, piteously open, he could hear her short quick breath,
struggling and gasping.
[Illustration]
The illness had lasted nine days. Even now Hollyer hadn’t got used to
it. He still looked at the figure in the bed with the same stare of
shocked incredulity. It was still incredible that his mother’s influenza
should have turned to pleurisy, that she should lie like that, utterly
abandoned, the neat pile of her hair undone, and her face, with its open
mouth, loose and infirm between the two white loops that hung askew,
rumpled by the pillow. He knew in a vague way how it had happened. First
his own attack of influenza, then his mother’s. His had been pretty bad,
but hers had been slight, so slight that it had not been recognized, and
through it she had still nursed him. Then she had gone out too soon, in
the raw January weather. And now the doctor came morning and evening;
she had a trained nurse for the night, and Hollyer looked after her all
day.
He had got used to the nurse. Her expensive presence proved to him that
he had nothing to reproach himself with; he had done, as they said,
everything that could be done.
He knew that the nurse and the doctor disagreed about the case. Nurse
Eden declared that his mother would get over it. Dr. Ransome was
convinced she wouldn’t; she hadn’t strength in her for another rally.
Hollyer himself agreed with Nurse Eden. He couldn’t believe that his
mother would die. The thought of her death was unbearable, therefore he
denied it, he put it from him. When he left her for the night he would
come creeping back at midnight and dawn, to make sure that she was still
there.
The little room was half filled by the big white bed. It seemed to him
there was nothing in it but the white bed and his mother and Nurse Eden
in her white uniform. She had looked in on her way downstairs to tea.
Everything was cold and white. On the window-panes the frost made a
white pattern of moss and feathers. From his seat between the bed and
the fire he could see Nurse Eden and her small, pure face brooding above
the pillows as she shifted them with tender, competent hands.
“She’ll be better in the morning,” she said. “She always gets better in
the night.”
She did. Always she gained ground in the night under Nurse Eden and
always she lost it in the daytime, getting worse and worse towards
evening.
The afternoon wore on. At four o’clock old Martha, the servant, tapped
at the door. Miss Carroll, she said, was downstairs and wanted to see
him. Martha took his place at the bedside.
Every day Effie came to inquire, and every day she went away sad, as if
it had been her own mother who was dying. This time she stayed, for the
old doctor had stopped her in the Square and told her to get Hollyer out
of his mother’s room, if possible. “Talk to him. Take him off it. Make
him buck up.”
She sat in his mother’s chair behind the round tea-table and poured out
his tea for him, and talked to him about his music and a book she had
been reading. When he looked at her, at her sweet face, soft and clear
with youth, at her hands moving with pretty gestures, his heart
trembled. That was how it would be if Effie was his wife. They would sit
there every day and she would pour out his tea for him. He would hear
her feet running up and down the stairs.
When she got up to go she said, “Whatever you do, Wilfrid, don’t keep on
thinking about it.”
“I can’t help thinking.”
She put her hand on his sleeve and stroked it. At her touch he broke
down.
“Oh, Effie—I cannot bear it. If she dies, I shall never forgive myself.”
“Nonsense. Don’t talk about her dying. Don’t think about it.”
She turned to him on the doorstep. “Just think how strong she is. I
can’t see her ill, somehow. I see her there, all the time, sitting
upright in her chair, looking beautiful.”
That was how _he_ had once seen her, sitting there between the fire and
the round tea-table, for years and years, as long as his own life
lasted.
But now he saw Effie. Upstairs, in his mother’s room, as he watched, he
saw Effie. Effie—the sweet face, and the sweet hands moving. He heard
Effie’s voice in the rooms, Effie’s feet on the stairs. That was how it
would be if Effie was his wife.
That was how it would be if his mother died.
He would have an income of his own, and a house of his own; he would be
his own master in his house.
If his mother died, Effie and he would sleep together. Perhaps in that
bed, on those pillows.
He shut his eyes and covered his face with his hands, pressing in on his
eyelids as if that way he could keep out the sight of Effie.