“All very well, but you didn’t manage to do the job thoroughly. You
didn’t turn me out lively enough to please Alice. She’s annoyed
because when I take her in my arms, I don’t hold her tight enough. I’m
too quiet, too languid!… Hang it all, Graham, I believe she’d like me
to stand for Parliament!… Why can’t she let me just go along my own
way? Surely a man who’s come through an illness like mine can be let
off parlour tricks? All this worry--it culminated the other day when I
said I wanted to colonize a room down here, and did, with a spurt that
took it out of me horribly,--all this worry, I say, seeing her upset
and so on, keeps me low, and so I feel as if I wanted to take drugs to
soothe me.”
“Soothe!” said Graham. “This stuff is more than soothing if you take
enough of it. I’ll send you something more like what you want, and
I’ll take this away, by your leave.”
“I really can’t argue!” replied Arne.… “If you see Alice, tell her you
find me fairly comfortable and don’t put her off this room. I really
like it best. She can come and see me here, I keep a good fire, tell
her.… I feel as if I wanted to sleep…” he added brusquely.
“You have been indulging already,” said Graham softly. Arne had begun
to doze off. His cushion had sagged down, the doctor stooped to
rearrange it, carelessly laying the little phial for the moment in a
crease of the rug covering the man’s knees.
* * * * * * *
Mrs. Arne in her mourning dress was crossing the hall as he came to
the top of the basement steps and pushed open the swing door. She was
giving some orders to Foster, the butler, who disappeared as the
doctor advanced.
“You’re about again,” he said, “good girl!”
“Too silly of me,” she said, “to be hysterical! After all these years!
One should be able to keep one’s own counsel. But it is over now, I
promise I will never speak of it again.”
“We frightened poor Dolly dreadfully. I had to order her out like a
regiment of soldiers.”
“Yes, I know. I’m going to her now.”
On his suggestion that she should look in on her husband first she
looked askance.
“Down there!”
“Yes, that’s his fancy. Let him be. He is a good deal depressed about
himself and you. He notices a great deal more than you think. He isn’t
quite as apathetic as you describe him to be.… Come here!” He led her
into the unlit dining-room a little way. “You expect too much, my
dear. You do really! You make too many demands on the vitality you
saved.”
“What did one save him for?” she asked fiercely. She continued more
quietly, “I know. I am going to be different.”
“Not you,” said Graham fondly. He was very partial to Alice Arne in
spite of her silliness. “You’ll worry about Edward till the end of the
chapter. I know you. And”--he turned her round by the shoulder so that
she fronted the light in the hall--“you elusive thing, let me have a
good look at you.… Hum! Your eyes, they’re a bit starey.…”
He let her go again with a sigh of impotence. Something must be done…
soon… he must think.… He got hold of his coat and began to get into
it.…
Mrs. Arne smiled, buttoned a button for him and then opened the front
door, like a good hostess, a very little way. With a quick flirt of
his hat he was gone, and she heard the clap of his brougham door and
the order “Home.”
* * * * * * *
“Been saying good-bye to that thief Graham?” said her husband gently,
when she entered his room, her pale eyes staring a little, her thin
hand busy at the front of her dress.…
“Thief? Why? One moment! Where’s your switch?”
She found it and turned on a blaze of light from which her husband
seemed to shrink.
“Well, he carried off my drops. Afraid of my poisoning myself, I
suppose?”
“Or acquiring the morphia habit,” said his wife in a dull level voice,
“as I have.”
She paused. He made no comment. Then, picking up the little phial Dr.
Graham had left in the crease of the rug, she spoke--
“You are the thief, Edward, as it happens, this is mine.”
“Is it? I found it knocking about: I didn’t know it was yours. Well,
will you give me some?”
“I will, if you like.”
“Well, dear, decide. You know I am in your hands and Graham’s. He was
rubbing that into me to-day.”
“Poor lamb!” she said derisively; “I’d not allow my doctor, or my wife
either, to dictate to me whether I should put an end to myself, or
not.”
“Ah, but you’ve got a spirit, you see!” Arne yawned. “However, let me
have a go at the stuff and then you put it on top of a wardrobe or a
shelf, where I shall know it is, but never reach out to get it, I
promise you.”
“No, you wouldn’t reach out a hand to keep yourself alive, let alone
kill yourself,” said she. “That is you all over, Edward.”
“And don’t you see that is why I did die,” he said, with earnestness
unexpected by her. “And then, unfortunately, you and Graham bustled up
and wouldn’t let Nature take its course.… I rather wish you hadn’t
been so officious.”
“And let you stay dead,” said she carelessly. “But at the time I cared
for you so much that I should have had to kill myself, or commit
suttee like a Bengali widow. Ah, well!”
She reached out for a glass half-full of water that stood on the low
ledge of a bookcase close by the arm of his chair.… “Will this glass
do? What’s in it? Only water? How much morphia shall I give you? An
over dose?”
“I don’t care if you do, and that’s a fact.”
“It was a joke, Edward,” she said piteously.
“No joke to me. This fag end of life I’ve clawed hold of, doesn’t
interest me. And I’m bound to be interested in what I’m doing or I’m
no good. I’m no earthly good now. I don’t enjoy life, I’ve nothing to
enjoy it with--in here”--he struck his breast. “It’s like a dull party
one goes to by accident. All I want to do is to get into a cab and go
home.”
His wife stood over him with the half-full glass in one hand and the
little bottle in the other. Her eyes dilated… her chest heaved.…
“Edward!” she breathed. “Was it all so useless?”
“Was what useless? Yes, as I was telling you, I go as one in a
dream--a bad, bad dream, like the dreams I used to have when I
overworked at college. I was brilliant, Alice, brilliant, do you hear?
At some cost, I expect! Now I hate people--my fellow creatures. I’ve
left them. They come and go, jostling me, and pushing me, on the
pavements as I go along, avoiding them. Do you know where they should
be, really, in relation to me?”
He rose a little in his seat--she stepped nervously aside, made as if
to put down the bottle and the glass she was holding, then thought
better of it and continued to extend them mechanically.
“They should be over my head. I’ve already left them and their petty
nonsense of living. They mean nothing to me, no more than if they were
ghosts walking. Or perhaps it’s I who am a ghost to them?… You don’t
understand it. It’s because I suppose you have no imagination. You
just know what you want and do your best to get it. You blurt out your
blessed petition to your Deity and the idea that you’re irrelevant
never enters your head, soft, persistent, High Church thing that you
are!…”
Alice Arne smiled, and balanced the objects she was holding. He
motioned her to pour out the liquid from one to the other, but she
took no heed; she was listening with all her ears. It was the nearest
approach to the language of compliment, to anything in the way of
loverlike personalities that she had heard fall from his lips since
his illness. He went on, becoming as it were lukewarm to his subject--
“But the worst of it is that once break the cord that links you to
humanity--it can’t be mended. Man doesn’t live by bread alone… or
lives to disappoint you. What am I to you, without my own poor
personality?… Don’t stare so, Alice! I haven’t talked so much or so
intimately for ages, have I? Let me try and have it out.… Are you in
any sort of hurry?”
“No, Edward.”
“Pour that stuff out and have done.… Well, Alice, it’s a queer
feeling, I tell you. One goes about with one’s looks on the ground,
like a man who eyes the bed he is going to lie down in, and longs for.
Alice, the crust of the earth seems a barrier between me and my own
place. I want to scratch the boardings with my nails and shriek
something like this: ‘Let me get down to you all, there where I
belong!’ It’s a horrible sensation, like a vampire reversed!…”
“Is that why you insisted on having this room in the basement?” she
asked breathlessly.
“Yes, I can’t bear being upstairs, somehow. Here, with these barred
windows and stone-cold floors… I can see the people’s feet walking
above there in the street… one has some sort of illusion.…”
“Oh!” She shivered and her eyes travelled like those of a caged
creature round the bare room and fluttered when they rested on the
sombre windows imperiously barred. She dropped her gaze to the stone
flags that showed beyond the oasis of Turkey carpet on which Arne’s
chair stood.… Then to the door, the door that she had closed on
entering. It had heavy bolts, but they were not drawn against her,
though by the look of her eyes it seemed she half imagined they were.…
She made a step forward and moved her hands slightly. She looked down
on them and what they held… then changed the relative positions of the
two objects and held the bottle over the glass.…
“Yes, come along!” her husband said. “Are you going to be all day
giving it me?”
With a jerk, she poured the liquid out into a glass and handed it to
him. She looked away--towards the door.…
“Ah, your way of escape!” said he, following her eyes. Then he drank,
painstakingly.