The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the
air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the
stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which
had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and
their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants
of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still
remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. It was
too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let
fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the
words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary
to understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words;
one could almost handle them.
There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,
he read,
That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
That had the sceptre from his father Brute.
The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with
meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to
listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things from
what they usually meant. Rachel at any rate could not keep her
attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of thought
suggested by words such as “curb” and “Locrine” and “Brute,” which
brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their
meaning. Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked
strange—the trees were either too near or too far, and her head almost
certainly ached. She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not
know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading. She
decided that she would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and
if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it ached
in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head
ached.
Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save!
But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.
She sat up and said as she had determined, “My head aches so that I
shall go indoors.” He was half-way through the next verse, but he
dropped the book instantly.
“Your head aches?” he repeated.
For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding
each other’s hands. During this time his sense of dismay and
catastrophe were almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to
hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him
sitting in the open air. But at the end of two minutes, noticing that
she was not sharing his dismay, but was only rather more languid and
heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked her to
tell him what they had better do, for Rachel had a headache.
Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to
bed, and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to
all hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure
it completely. Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he
had been unreasonably depressed the moment before. Helen’s sense seemed
to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which
avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature’s good sense, might be
depended upon.
Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very
long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she
saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time
before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it
would be gone when she woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now
quite well again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully
white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turning
her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there.
The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out,
drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed
to her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room.
She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each
thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little
stab of pain. It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had
a headache. She turned from side to side, in the hope that the coolness
of the sheets would cure her, and that when she next opened her eyes to
look the room would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain
experiments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She got out
of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of
the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of
her hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of
the floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and
walk than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the
discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have to
stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow,
relinquished the happiness of the day.
When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful
words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact
that she was ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the
whole household knew of it, when the song that some one was singing in
the garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water,
slipped past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the morning to
get through, and then all the afternoon, and at intervals she made an
effort to cross over into the ordinary world, but she found that her
heat and discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the ordinary
world which she could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and
Helen came in with a little dark man who had—it was the chief thing she
noticed about him—very hairy hands. She was drowsy and intolerably hot,
and as he seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer
him, although she understood that he was a doctor. At another point the
door opened and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as
she realised, for it to be natural. He sat down and talked to her,
stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie any more in
the same position and she turned round, and when she looked up again
Helen was beside her and Terence had gone. It did not matter; she would
see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary again. Her chief
occupation during the day was to try to remember how the lines went:
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;
and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted in getting
into the wrong places.
The second day did not differ very much from the first day, except that
her bed had become very important, and the world outside, when she
tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. The glassy,
cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the
end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her
mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long;
sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was
teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the
outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such as the
sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their cause
by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or
of what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded
entirely. On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed
itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different
sensations were more and more important each day. She was completely
cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated
alone with her body.
Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through
the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to
the depths of the night. One evening when the room appeared very dim,
either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen
said to her, “Some one is going to sit here to-night. You won’t mind?”
Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles,
whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. She had
seen her in the chapel. “Nurse McInnis,” said Helen, and the nurse
smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she did not find many
people who were frightened of her. After waiting for a moment they both
disappeared, and having turned on her pillow Rachel woke to find
herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not
end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen,
and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and
then the forties. She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights
from doing this if they choose. At a great distance an elderly woman
sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw
with dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which
stood in the hollow of a newspaper. The sight had something
inexplicably sinister about it, and she was terrified and cried out,
upon which the woman laid down her cards and came across the room,
shading the candle with her hands. Coming nearer and nearer across the
great space of the room, she stood at last above Rachel’s head and
said, “Not asleep? Let me make you comfortable.”
She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. It struck
Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long
would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.
“Why, there’s a toe all the way down there!” the woman said, proceeding
to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was
hers.
“You must try and lie still,” she proceeded, “because if you lie still
you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself more
hot, and we don’t want you to be any hotter than you are.” She stood
looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.
“And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well,” she repeated.
Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and
all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should
move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above
her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours
had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was
still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and
the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her. She cried
“Terence!” and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the
woman with an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still
above her.
“It’s just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr.
Forrest in bed,” the woman said, “and he was such a tall gentleman.”
In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut
her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames,
where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing
cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp,
which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old
women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the
window together whispering, whispering incessantly.
Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
throughout the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her
illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her
temperature was very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday,
Terence was filled with resentment, not against her, but against the
force outside them which was separating them. He counted up the number
of days that would almost certainly be spoilt for them. He realised,
with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time
in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness
was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling,
immaterial things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity
all the usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point.
The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel’s
illness, and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this
subject was exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused
them, and what cured them.
Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the
same thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark,
where the music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters,
his spirits rose instantly. When he saw her he felt completely
reassured. She did not look very ill. Sitting by her side he would tell
her what he had been doing, using his natural voice to speak to her,
only a few tones lower down than usual; but by the time he had sat
there for five minutes he was plunged into the deepest gloom. She was
not the same; he could not bring them back to their old relationship;
but although he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself
from endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when
this failed he was in despair. He always concluded as he left her room
that it was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as
the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became almost too
great to be borne.
On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual
increase of confidence. She turned round and made an effort to remember
certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.
“You have come up from the hotel?” she asked.
“No; I’m staying here for the present,” he said. “We’ve just had
luncheon,” he continued, “and the mail has come in. There’s a bundle of
letters for you—letters from England.”
Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them,
she said nothing for some time.
“You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,” she said
suddenly.
“Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There’s nothing rolling.”
“The old woman with the knife,” she replied, not speaking to Terence in
particular, and looking past him. As she appeared to be looking at a
vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.
“Now they can’t roll any more,” he said cheerfully. Nevertheless she
lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention although
he spoke to her. He became so profoundly wretched that he could not
endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he found St. John, who
was reading _The Times_ in the verandah. He laid it aside patiently,
and heard all that Terence had to say about delirium. He was very
patient with Terence. He treated him like a child.
By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer an
attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that
required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention of at
least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. Instead of
lasting five days it was going to last ten days. Rodriguez was
understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness.
Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the illness with
undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of
confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside
his anxious and minute questions with a kind of flourish which seemed
to indicate that they were all taking it much too seriously. He seemed
curiously unwilling to sit down.
“A high temperature,” he said, looking furtively about the room, and
appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen’s
embroidery than in anything else. “In this climate you must expect a
high temperature. You need not be alarmed by that. It is the pulse we
go by” (he tapped his own hairy wrist), “and the pulse continues
excellent.”
Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview was conducted
laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact
that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical
profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would have been
had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. Unconsciously he
took Rodriguez’ side against Helen, who seemed to have taken an
unreasonable prejudice against him.
When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be
more strictly organised than they had been. St. John offered his
services; he said that he had nothing to do, and that he might as well
spend the day at the villa if he could be of use. As if they were
starting on a difficult expedition together, they parcelled out their
duties between them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours upon a
large sheet of paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. Their
distance from the town, and the difficulty of procuring rare things
with unknown names from the most unexpected places, made it necessary
to think very carefully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult to do
the simple but practical things that were required of them, as if they,
being very tall, were asked to stoop down and arrange minute grains of
sand in a pattern on the ground.
It was St. John’s duty to fetch what was needed from the town, so that
Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the
drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs,
or call from Helen. He always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that
he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his knowing what
was the cause of it. The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable.
There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books. He
tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too
bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which with
its news of London, and the movements of real people who were giving
dinner-parties and making speeches, seemed to give a little background
of reality to what was otherwise mere nightmare. Then, just as his
attention was fixed on the print, a soft call would come from Helen, or
Mrs. Chailey would bring in something which was wanted upstairs, and he
would run up very quietly in his socks, and put the jug on the little
table which stood crowded with jugs and cups outside the bedroom door;
or if he could catch Helen for a moment he would ask, “How is she?”
“Rather restless. . . . On the whole, quieter, I think.”
The answer would be one or the other.
As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say, and
Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying it
aloud, were arguing against each other. But she was too hurried and
pre-occupied to talk.
The strain of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements
and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence’s power.
Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think
what it amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that
there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they were
wanted. Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill.
Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because the
strain was a little greater every day, although nothing else had
changed. The separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain, which
combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn
sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom. He had never been so
bored since he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. The vision
of Rachel as she was now, confused and heedless, had almost obliterated
the vision of her as she had been once long ago; he could hardly
believe that they had ever been happy, or engaged to be married, for
what were feelings, what was there to be felt? Confusion covered every
sight and person, and he seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray
people who came up now and then from the hotel to enquire, through a
mist; the only people who were not hidden in this mist were Helen and
Rodriguez, because they could tell him something definite about Rachel.
Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain hours they
went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they
talked about indifferent things. St. John usually made it his business
to start the talk and to keep it from dying out.
“I’ve discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,” said St.
John on Sunday at luncheon. “You crackle a piece of paper in his ear,
then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes on quite well
after that.”
“Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has corn.”
“I don’t think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems a
dirty little rascal.”
There was then a long silence. Ridley murmured a few lines of poetry
under his breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact that he had
done so, “Very hot to-day.”
“Two degrees higher than it was yesterday,” said St. John. “I wonder
where these nuts come from,” he observed, taking a nut out of the
plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at it curiously.
“London, I should think,” said Terence, looking at the nut too.
“A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time,” St.
John continued. “I suppose the heat does something funny to people’s
brains. Even the English go a little queer. Anyhow they’re hopeless
people to deal with. They kept me three-quarters of an hour waiting at
the chemist’s this morning, for no reason whatever.”
There was another long pause. Then Ridley enquired, “Rodriguez seems
satisfied?”
“Quite,” said Terence with decision. “It’s just got to run its course.”
Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh. He was genuinely sorry for every
one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably, and was a
little aggrieved by the constant presence of the two young men.
They moved back into the drawing-room.
“Look here, Hirst,” said Terence, “there’s nothing to be done for two
hours.” He consulted the sheet pinned to the door. “You go and lie
down. I’ll wait here. Chailey sits with Rachel while Helen has her
luncheon.”
It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting
for a sight of Helen. These little glimpses of Helen were the only
respites from strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make up
for the discomfort of the day, although she might not have anything to
tell them. However, as they were on an expedition together, he had made
up his mind to obey.
Helen was very late in coming down. She looked like a person who has
been sitting for a long time in the dark. She was pale and thinner, and
the expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. She ate her
luncheon quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she was doing. She
brushed aside Terence’s enquiries, and at last, as if he had not
spoken, she looked at him with a slight frown and said:
“We can’t go on like this, Terence. Either you’ve got to find another
doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I’ll manage for
myself. It’s no use for him to say that Rachel’s better; she’s not
better; she’s worse.”
Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered when
Rachel said, “My head aches.” He stilled it by reflecting that Helen
was overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion by his obstinate
sense that she was opposed to him in the argument.
“Do you think she’s in danger?” he asked.
“No one can go on being as ill as that day after day—” Helen replied.
She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation with
somebody.
“Very well, I’ll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon,” he replied.
Helen went upstairs at once.
Nothing now could assuage Terence’s anxiety. He could not read, nor
could he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite of
the fact that he was determined that Helen was exaggerating, and that
Rachel was not very ill. But he wanted a third person to confirm him in
his belief.
Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, “Well, how is she? Do you
think her worse?”
“There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you—none,” Rodriguez replied in
his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little movements all
the time as if to get away.
Hewet stood firmly between him and the door. He was determined to see
for himself what kind of man he was. His confidence in the man vanished
as he looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appearance,
his shiftiness, and his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that
he had never seen this before.
“You won’t object, of course, if we ask you to consult another doctor?”
he continued.
At this the little man became openly incensed.
“Ah!” he cried. “You have not confidence in me? You object to my
treatment? You wish me to give up the case?”
“Not at all,” Terence replied, “but in serious illness of this kind—”
Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.
“It is not serious, I assure you. You are overanxious. The young lady
is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady of course is
frightened,” he sneered. “I understand that perfectly.”
“The name and address of the doctor is—?” Terence continued.
“There is no other doctor,” Rodriguez replied sullenly. “Every one has
confidence in me. Look! I will show you.”
He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over as if
in search of one that would confute Terence’s suspicions. As he
searched, he began to tell a story about an English lord who had
trusted him—a great English lord, whose name he had, unfortunately,
forgotten.
“There is no other doctor in the place,” he concluded, still turning
over the letters.
“Never mind,” said Terence shortly. “I will make enquiries for myself.”
Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.
“Very well,” he remarked. “I have no objection.”
He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat that
they took the illness much too seriously and that there was no other
doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him an impression that he was
conscious that he was distrusted, and that his malice was aroused.
After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs. He went up, knocked
at Rachel’s door, and asked Helen whether he might see her for a few
minutes. He had not seen her yesterday. She made no objection, and went
and sat at a table in the window.
Terence sat down by the bedside. Rachel’s face was changed. She looked
as though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort of keeping
alive. Her lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken and flushed,
though without colour. Her eyes were not entirely shut, the lower half
of the white part showing, not as if she saw, but as if they remained
open because she was too much exhausted to close them. She opened them
completely when he kissed her. But she only saw an old woman slicing a
man’s head off with a knife.
“There it falls!” she murmured. She then turned to Terence and asked
him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he could not
understand. “Why doesn’t he come? Why doesn’t he come?” she repeated.
He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs in
connection with illness like this, and turned instinctively to Helen,
but she was doing something at a table in the window, and did not seem
to realise how great the shock to him must be. He rose to go, for he
could not endure to listen any longer; his heart beat quickly and
painfully with anger and misery. As he passed Helen she asked him in
the same weary, unnatural, but determined voice to fetch her more ice,
and to have the jug outside filled with fresh milk.
When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst. Exhausted and
very hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke him
without scruple.
“Helen thinks she’s worse,” he said. “There’s no doubt she’s
frightfully ill. Rodriguez is useless. We must get another doctor.”
“But there is no other doctor,” said Hirst drowsily, sitting up and
rubbing his eyes.
“Don’t be a damned fool!” Terence exclaimed. “Of course there’s another
doctor, and, if there isn’t, you’ve got to find one. It ought to have
been done days ago. I’m going down to saddle the horse.” He could not
stay still in one place.
In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the
scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to find one and
bring him back if he had to be fetched in a special train.
“We ought to have done it days ago,” Hewet repeated angrily.
When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing was
there, standing very erect in the middle of the room, having arrived,
as people did in these days, by the kitchen or through the garden
unannounced.
“She’s better?” Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not attempt
to shake hands.
“No,” said Terence. “If anything, they think she’s worse.”
Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight
at Terence all the time.
“Let me tell you,” she said, speaking in nervous jerks, “it’s always
about the seventh day one begins to get anxious. I daresay you’ve been
sittin’ here worryin’ by yourself. You think she’s bad, but any one
comin’ with a fresh eye would see she was better. Mr. Elliot’s had
fever; he’s all right now,” she threw out. “It wasn’t anythin’ she
caught on the expedition. What’s it matter—a few days’ fever? My
brother had fever for twenty-six days once. And in a week or two he was
up and about. We gave him nothin’ but milk and arrowroot—”
Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.
“I’m wanted upstairs,” said Terence.
“You see—she’ll be better,” Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he left the
room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great, and when he left
her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied and restless; she did
not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. She wandered from room
to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.
Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen’s
directions, looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her.
She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to
disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him.
For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside,
because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick
sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was
of enormous importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp
their meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see
something which would explain it all. For this reason, the
faces,—Helen’s face, the nurse’s, Terence’s, the doctor’s,—which
occasionally forced themselves very close to her, were worrying because
they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue. However, on
the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable to keep Helen’s face
distinct from the sights themselves; her lips widened as she bent down
over the bed, and she began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The
sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape.
The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there
was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now
they were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they
were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But
just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped in
her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again. The heat
was suffocating. At last the faces went further away; she fell into a
deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She
saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the
sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors
thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the
bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes
light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom
of the sea.
After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on a
holiday in the hills. It was quite impossible, so they said, to find
him. With his experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely
that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having reduced
the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from a hundred
miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and horses, he
started at once to fetch the doctor himself. He succeeded in finding
him, and eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife
and return forthwith. They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.
Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact
that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white
too; his eyes looked strange. But the curt speech and the sulky
masterful manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although
at the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the
whole affair. Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically,
but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of the
presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious, or
because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be
known.
“Of course,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence asked
him, “Is she very ill?”
They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage
was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a
few hours’ time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them
to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. They
quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road. St. John said that it is
macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he
knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point. In the
course of the argument they said some very sharp things to each other,
and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an occasional
half-stifled reflection from Ridley.
When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to
control his irritation any longer. St. John went to bed in a state of
complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more
affection than usual because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to
his books. Left alone, Terence walked up and down the room; he stood at
the open window.
The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath, and
it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped out on
to the terrace. As he stood there in the darkness, able only to see the
shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome by a
desire to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget that
Rachel was ill. He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of
everything. As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell
asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him
passed away. He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little
island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter
whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were
apart or together; nothing mattered—nothing mattered. The waves beat on
the shore far away, and the soft wind passed through the branches of
the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark
and nothingness. Surely the world of strife and fret and anxiety was
not the real world, but this was the real world, the world that lay
beneath the superficial world, so that, whatever happened, one was
secure. The quiet and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool
sheet, soothing every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and
become natural.
But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him;
he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of
the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten
that he stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything,
the hour, the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to
come. He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things
were different from what they are. The night was now harder to face
than ever.
Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat on
the stairs half-way up to Rachel’s room. He longed for some one to talk
to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep; there was no sound in
Rachel’s room. The only sound in the house was the sound of Chailey
moving in the kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs
overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening the links in her cuffs,
in preparation for the night’s watch. Terence rose and stopped her. He
had scarcely spoken to her, but it was possible that she might confirm
him in the belief which still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was
not seriously ill. He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been
and what he had said.
“Now, Nurse,” he whispered, “please tell me your opinion. Do you
consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any danger?”
“The doctor has said—” she began.
“Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases
like this?”
“I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet,” she replied
cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. “The case is
serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can
for Miss Vinrace.” She spoke with some professional self-approbation.
But she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who
still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair
and looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the
sea.
“If you ask me,” she began in a curiously stealthy tone, “I never like
May for my patients.”
“May?” Terence repeated.
“It may be a fancy, but I don’t like to see anybody fall ill in May,”
she continued. “Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps it’s the moon.
They say the moon affects the brain, don’t they, Sir?”
He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when
one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one’s eyes and become
worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.
She slipped past him and disappeared.
Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off.
For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the
window gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of
the sky. With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim
black cypress trees which were still visible in the garden, and heard
the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is
still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of
hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and
the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to
be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their
effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him.
He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had
never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life
of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to
be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the
edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought
for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed
to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew
for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at the
scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan,
or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness
laying themselves open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to
love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he
had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another,
loving Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he
would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of
pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety. It
seemed to him as he looked back that their happiness had never been so
great as his pain was now. There had always been something imperfect in
their happiness, something they had wanted and had not been able to
get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young
and had not known what they were doing.
The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the
window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his
mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought
of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry
earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea
the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between
the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying
exposed to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to
think how few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or
single glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the
swelling uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were
little men and women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one
thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What
did anything matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and
here in his little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of
their bodies in this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies,
seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated; they
had no power, no hope. He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he
almost forgot the time and the place. Nevertheless, although he was
convinced that it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small
and hopeless, he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow
formed part of a life which he and Rachel would live together.
Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather
better next day. Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked, there was
a slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these days in her
eyes.
“She talked to me,” she said voluntarily. “She asked me what day of the
week it was, like herself.”
Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason, the tears
formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. She cried with
scarcely any attempt at movement of her features, and without any
attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know that she was crying. In
spite of the relief which her words gave him, Terence was dismayed by
the sight; had everything given way? Were there no limits to the power
of this illness? Would everything go down before it? Helen had always
seemed to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. He
took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child, crying softly
and quietly upon his shoulder. Then she roused herself and wiped her
tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said; very silly, she
repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She
asked Terence to forgive her for her folly. She stopped at the door and
came back and kissed him without saying anything.
On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. She
had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to
bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her
own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly
of weakness. The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her body
became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge
peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true that she saw Helen and saw
her room, but everything had become very pale and semi-transparent.
Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes
when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel’s eyes could
hardly follow her. The room also had an odd power of expanding, and
though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it
became a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever
reached the person she was talking to. There were immense intervals or
chasms, for things still had the power to appear visibly before her,
between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to
raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out
medicine. Helen’s form stooping to raise her in bed appeared of
gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling. But for
long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body floating
on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her
body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. All sights were
something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest
effort, because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to
remember something. She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when
people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She
wished for nothing else in the world.
Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen’s greater hopefulness
with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made
the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong. He waited for Dr.
Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with
the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force
them all to admit that they were in the wrong.
As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his
answers. To Terence’s demand, “She seems to be better?” he replied,
looking at him in an odd way, “She has a chance of life.”
The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant his
forehead against the pane.
“Rachel,” he repeated to himself. “She has a chance of life. Rachel.”
How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday
seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged for
four weeks. A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. What could
fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this? To
realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life was
beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned, still
enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door.
Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. For the
first time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what she looked
like and the way in which they cared for each other. The immense
happiness of feeling her close to him mingled with a more intense
anxiety than he had felt yet. He could not let her die; he could not
live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the curtain fell
again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. It was all going
on—going on still, in the same way as before. Save for a physical pain
when his heart beat, and the fact that his fingers were icy cold, he
did not realise that he was anxious about anything. Within his mind he
seemed to feel nothing about Rachel or about any one or anything in the
world. He went on giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing
out lists, and every now and then he went upstairs and put something
quietly on the table outside Rachel’s door. That night Dr. Lesage
seemed to be less sulky than usual. He stayed voluntarily for a few
moments, and, addressing St. John and Terence equally, as if he did not
remember which of them was engaged to the young lady, said, “I consider
that her condition to-night is very grave.”
Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to
bed. They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open.
St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted
that Terence should lie upon it. They began to quarrel as to who should
lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered with
rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.
“Don’t be a fool, Terence,” he said. “You’ll only get ill if you don’t
sleep.”
“Old fellow,” he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly,
fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.
He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was sorry
for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. Did she
know how much he cared for her—had she said anything, asked perhaps? He
was very anxious to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a
selfish question after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence
to talk about such things? He was already half asleep. But St. John
could not sleep at once. If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in
the darkness, something would happen—if only this strain would come to
an end. He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of
these hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. He
felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that he
had no feelings left.
All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and
shutting of the bedroom door once. By degrees the light returned into
the untidy room. At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept
downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour later the day began
again.
Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before,
although it would have been hard to say in what the difference
consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something.
There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual. People drifted
through the drawing-room—Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They
spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but
remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing
they had to say was, “Is there anything we can do?” and there was
nothing they could do.
Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had
said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people
behaved. Was she right, or was she wrong? He was too little interested
to frame an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if
one of these days he would think about them, but not now. The mist of
unreality had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of
numbness all over his body. Was it his body? Were those really his own
hands?
This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit
alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he did
not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not
leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read, and having nothing to do,
he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied
in various ways—now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now
in writing directions, the sound of Ridley’s song and the beat of his
pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as
a half comprehended refrain.
They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
They wrestled sore and still:
The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
That night he had his will.
Like stags full spent, among the bent
They dropped awhile to rest—
“Oh, it’s intolerable!” Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as
if it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence would
creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of
Rachel. But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had
drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the
same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save
once when he volunteered the information that he had just been called
in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of
eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror of being buried alive.
“It is a horror,” he remarked, “that we generally find in the very old,
and seldom in the young.” They both expressed their interest in what he
told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about
the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was
late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked
strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were
rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance,
however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm
of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she
talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them
naked on her knee. She assured them over and over again that it was
their duty to eat.
The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they
expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut
it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she
stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her. She
stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful
beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him
now—as something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about
afterwards. They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to
be suspended or forgotten.
Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley
paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a
subdued but suddenly sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted
in at the open window as he passed and repassed.
Peor and Baalim
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twice batter’d God of Palestine
And mooned Astaroth—
The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young
men, but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red light
of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of
desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the
day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance
of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a
repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob.
Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She explained that Maria, in
opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she
had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much work to be
done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but
it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly
flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr. Lesage arrived
unexpectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once
and drank a cup of coffee.
“She is very ill,” he said in answer to Ridley’s question. All the
annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave and formal,
but at the same time it was full of consideration, which had not marked
it before. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the
drawing-room. Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to
be thoroughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements and
exclamations that were stifled at once, they waited in complete
silence. It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to
face with something definite.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the
room. He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. He
looked first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence, “Mr.
Hewet, I think you should go upstairs now.”
Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage
standing motionless between them.
Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again,
“It’s wicked—it’s wicked.”
Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying, but it
conveyed no meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs he kept saying to
himself, “This has not happened to me. It is not possible that this has
happened to me.”
He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The stairs were
very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them.
Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel, he felt
nothing at all. When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting by the
bedside. There were shaded lights on the table, and the room, though it
seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. There was a
faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. Helen rose and gave up
her chair to him in silence. As they passed each other their eyes met
in a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the extraordinary clearness
of his eyes, and at the deep calm and sadness that dwelt in them. He
sat down by the bedside, and a moment afterwards heard the door shut
gently behind her. He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of
the sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone
possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some terrible
change in her, but there was none. She looked indeed very thin, and, as
far as he could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always
been. Moreover, she saw him and knew him. She smiled at him and said,
“Hullo, Terence.”
The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long vanished
immediately.
“Well, Rachel,” he replied in his usual voice, upon which she opened
her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. He kissed her
and took her hand.
“It’s been wretched without you,” he said.
She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue
or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.
“But when we’re together we’re perfectly happy,” he said. He continued
to hold her hand.
The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face.
An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish
to move or to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last
days were over, and he had come out now into perfect certainty and
peace. His mind began to work naturally again and with great ease. The
longer he sat there the more profoundly was he conscious of the peace
invading every corner of his soul. Once he held his breath and listened
acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some time;
they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as
himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So
much the better—this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to
breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what
they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible
while they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke
them aloud, he said, “No two people have ever been so happy as we have
been. No one has ever loved as we have loved.”
It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the
room with rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the
world left unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from
them.
He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later,
moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. The
arms were round him. He did not want to have arms round him, and the
mysterious whispering voices annoyed him. He laid Rachel’s hand, which
was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked
across to the window. The windows were uncurtained, and showed the
moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface of the waves.
“Why,” he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, “look at the moon.
There’s a halo round the moon. We shall have rain to-morrow.”
The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round him
again; they were pushing him gently towards the door. He turned of his
own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms, conscious of a
little amusement at the strange way in which people behaved merely
because some one was dead. He would go if they wished it, but nothing
they could do would disturb his happiness.
As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups and
the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world in which he
would never see Rachel again.
“Rachel! Rachel!” he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they
prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far
from her room. Downstairs they could hear the thud of his feet on the
floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice they heard him shout,
“Rachel, Rachel!”