Next day we moved Strickland. It needed a good deal of firmness and
still more patience to induce him to come, but he was really too ill to
offer any effective resistance to Stroeve’s entreaties and to my
determination. We dressed him, while he feebly cursed us, got him
downstairs, into a cab, and eventually to Stroeve’s studio. He was so
exhausted by the time we arrived that he allowed us to put him to bed
without a word. He was ill for six weeks. At one time it looked as
though he could not live more than a few hours, and I am convinced that
it was only through the Dutchman’s doggedness that he pulled through. I
have never known a more difficult patient. It was not that he was
exacting and querulous; on the contrary, he never complained, he asked
for nothing, he was perfectly silent; but he seemed to resent the care
that was taken of him; he received all inquiries about his feelings or
his needs with a jibe, a sneer, or an oath. I found him detestable, and
as soon as he was out of danger I had no hesitation in telling him so.
“Go to hell,” he answered briefly.
Dirk Stroeve, giving up his work entirely, nursed Strickland with
tenderness and sympathy. He was dexterous to make him comfortable, and
he exercised a cunning of which I should never have thought him capable
to induce him to take the medicines prescribed by the doctor. Nothing
was too much trouble for him. Though his means were adequate to the
needs of himself and his wife, he certainly had no money to waste; but
now he was wantonly extravagant in the purchase of delicacies, out of
season and dear, which might tempt Strickland’s capricious appetite. I
shall never forget the tactful patience with which he persuaded him to
take nourishment. He was never put out by Strickland’s rudeness; if it
was merely sullen, he appeared not to notice it; if it was aggressive,
he only chuckled. When Strickland, recovering somewhat, was in a good
humour and amused himself by laughing at him, he deliberately did
absurd things to excite his ridicule. Then he would give me little
happy glances, so that I might notice in how much better form the
patient was. Stroeve was sublime.
But it was Blanche who most surprised me. She proved herself not only a
capable, but a devoted nurse. There was nothing in her to remind you
that she had so vehemently struggled against her husband’s wish to
bring Strickland to the studio. She insisted on doing her share of the
offices needful to the sick. She arranged his bed so that it was
possible to change the sheet without disturbing him. She washed him.
When I remarked on her competence, she told me with that pleasant
little smile of hers that for a while she had worked in a hospital. She
gave no sign that she hated Strickland so desperately. She did not
speak to him much, but she was quick to forestall his wants. For a
fortnight it was necessary that someone should stay with him all night,
and she took turns at watching with her husband. I wondered what she
thought during the long darkness as she sat by the bedside. Strickland
was a weird figure as he lay there, thinner than ever, with his ragged
red beard and his eyes staring feverishly into vacancy; his illness
seemed to have made them larger, and they had an unnatural brightness.
“Does he ever talk to you in the night?” I asked her once.
“Never.”
“Do you dislike him as much as you did?”
“More, if anything.”
She looked at me with her calm gray eyes. Her expression was so placid,
it was hard to believe that she was capable of the violent emotion I
had witnessed.
“Has he ever thanked you for what you do for him?”
“No,” she smiled.
“He’s inhuman.”
“He’s abominable.”
Stroeve was, of course, delighted with her. He could not do enough to
show his gratitude for the whole-hearted devotion with which she had
accepted the burden he laid on her. But he was a little puzzled by the
behaviour of Blanche and Strickland towards one another.
“Do you know, I’ve seen them sit there for hours together without
saying a word?”
On one occasion, when Strickland was so much better that in a day or
two he was to get up, I sat with them in the studio. Dirk and I were
talking. Mrs. Stroeve sewed, and I thought I recognised the shirt she
was mending as Strickland’s. He lay on his back; he did not speak. Once
I saw that his eyes were fixed on Blanche Stroeve, and there was in
them a curious irony. Feeling their gaze, she raised her own, and for a
moment they stared at one another. I could not quite understand her
expression. Her eyes had in them a strange perplexity, and perhaps—but
why?—alarm. In a moment Strickland looked away and idly surveyed the
ceiling, but she continued to stare at him, and now her look was quite
inexplicable.
In a few days Strickland began to get up. He was nothing but skin and
bone. His clothes hung upon him like rags on a scarecrow. With his
untidy beard and long hair, his features, always a little larger than
life, now emphasised by illness, he had an extraordinary aspect; but it
was so odd that it was not quite ugly. There was something monumental
in his ungainliness. I do not know how to express precisely the
impression he made upon me. It was not exactly spirituality that was
obvious, though the screen of the flesh seemed almost transparent,
because there was in his face an outrageous sensuality; but, though it
sounds nonsense, it seemed as though his sensuality were curiously
spiritual. There was in him something primitive. He seemed to partake
of those obscure forces of nature which the Greeks personified in
shapes part human and part beast, the satyr and the faun. I thought of
Marsyas, whom the god flayed because he had dared to rival him in song.
Strickland seemed to bear in his heart strange harmonies and
unadventured patterns, and I foresaw for him an end of torture and
despair. I had again the feeling that he was possessed of a devil; but
you could not say that it was a devil of evil, for it was a primitive
force that existed before good and ill.
He was still too weak to paint, and he sat in the studio, silent,
occupied with God knows what dreams, or reading. The books he liked
were queer; sometimes I would find him poring over the poems of
Mallarme, and he read them as a child reads, forming the words with his
lips, and I wondered what strange emotion he got from those subtle
cadences and obscure phrases; and again I found him absorbed in the
detective novels of Gaboriau. I amused myself by thinking that in his
choice of books he showed pleasantly the irreconcilable sides of his
fantastic nature. It was singular to notice that even in the weak state
of his body he had no thought for its comfort. Stroeve liked his ease,
and in his studio were a couple of heavily upholstered arm-chairs and a
large divan. Strickland would not go near them, not from any
affectation of stoicism, for I found him seated on a three-legged stool
when I went into the studio one day and he was alone, but because he
did not like them. For choice he sat on a kitchen chair without arms.
It often exasperated me to see him. I never knew a man so entirely
indifferent to his surroundings.