For the last three days before the operation Anthony had succeeded in
warding off from Kitty any fresh attack of pain. He had studied her with
an absorption as acute as the absorption of personal consciousness in
the presence of mortal danger. All his senses had been alert to forewarn
and protect Kitty, and he had accomplished the temporary miracle.
After the luncheon party, Anthony noticed with alarm that she showed
that peculiar physical restlessness which is often the forerunner of
severe pain. He made Kitty go to bed, and sat beside her hour after
hour, soothing and quieting her. Peckham had been invaluable; she had
brought out various garments of Kitty’s for correction and comparison.
She had been full of stories of Kitty’s childhood, and questions about
their going abroad. It had been settled that as soon as Kitty recovered
from the operation they were to go to Spain.
At last Anthony had left her quiet and apparently asleep. He went into
the dressing-room next to hers, leaving the door open so that he could
hear her turn or sigh. He felt that he must be alone for an hour. All
these days his mind had been taking bitter account of the symptoms
ranged against him.
This was his hour of reckoning. He knew that he had done all that was in
his power; he had given Kitty a respite before the operation, but he
could do no more: the disease was progressive and inexorable. Anthony
saw with a terrific clarity the force of all that was against him. The
symptoms of Kitty’s case came on against his mind like the resistless
impact of waves. If he succeeded in beating the first line of breakers,
the limitless ocean heaved up a further challenge. His puny strength
would spend itself against them in vain; sooner or later the sea would
overwhelm them both.
It was too late to save Kitty. Anthony did not need Hilton Laurence’s
verdict; something in his own heart suddenly failed him. He saw that he
had done his utmost in the last few days, and that his utmost was worth
nothing. He wondered fearfully, if he had been a younger man, untried
and undaunted by experience, could he by mere audacity and blindness
have snatched Kitty back from disease? Suffering is not a school of
strength; it is a school in which one learns one’s weakness.
Anthony knew what he could bear, and to that extent knowledge freed his
mind; he was not surprised by the weight of pain. He was too used to it,
but he was incapable in his turn of surprising pain. He had learned not
only his powers, but his limitations. Facts entrapped and hampered him.
He was aware of the frailness of his mind; strung to too high a pitch,
it would not give him any reassurance of its capacity.
Ever since the early days of Anthony’s captivity darkness had broken in
upon him from time to time and shaken the steadiness of his mind. He
knew the only thing to do was to wait till it passed, to keep before his
eyes the fact that the darkness was from outside and impermanent, and to
hold to the integrity of his unflinching will.
In the long run, what Anthony had decided to do he could do; he could
not attain the desired result, but he could force himself step by step
to take the right direction toward the result. He held to his will now,
but he was aware that the struggle was harder. He needed more for Kitty
than he had ever needed for himself.
He steadied his mind to confront the future. He wanted to envisage the
whole course of Kitty’s case. He had to put out of his mind the
insistent pictures of the operating-table, the arrangements he had made
with Hilton Laurence, the minute preparations and precautions for the
actual hour. The details kept rushing at him like delusive lists of
uncompleted purchases. He knew there was no need for him to keep them in
his mind, but they flickered to and fro, taunting him with his
fallibility.
Suppose he forgot something important, something vital? Kitty depended
on his memory, and his memory was outrageously tired. It played Anthony
tricks to show him how tired he was, and then with a gloomy clearness it
reiterated a string of details none of which he needed or could control.
He did not want to use his memory now. He wanted to get beyond it to
some point of decision. If he could not save Kitty, what should he do?
If he let things take their course, Anthony saw exactly what would take
place. There would be the operation, a tedious, dangerous business,
which must in the nature of the case be left incomplete. Moment by
moment Kitty’s life would hang by a thread. Hilton Laurence would hold
the threads. Anthony could trust the task to him; he was a masterly
operator with a thorough, placid mind. He had been known in moments of
great tension to hold the ends of a severed artery together and tell a
funny story to relieve the nerves of his audience. Probably Hilton
Laurence would safely disentangle and keep together the threads of
Kitty’s life. She would, what is called, get over the operation.
Her left arm would be powerless for a long time. She would suffer
again regularly and without strength the onslaughts of atrocious
pain. Kitty would very gradually get better up to a certain point;
then she would stick for perhaps two or three months; then the little
innocuous-seeming, deadly signs of a return would start up. The disease
would be very quick on its returning pathway, and, short of the mercy
of an accident, it would be very dreadful.
Words from “The Duchess of Malfi” haunted Anthony’s mind: “her death a
hideous storm of terror.” Was that all he could do for Kitty?
It wasn’t any use fighting for her life. The question was a smaller one
than that—he was only fighting for time. Fighting for life, with every
symptom set plainly against you, was only fighting for a convention, an
idea. But this convention was a sacred one to Anthony.
It was a professional necessity, a point of honor to prolong menaced
existences. It was not a real necessity; because, unlike real
necessities, he had in his hands the power to evade it. Nor could
Anthony delude himself with the mercy of an accident. He had no talent
for self-delusion, and he had seen too many cases where there were no
accidents.
If all he wanted was to save Kitty, why couldn’t he still save her by
letting her go? Why force her through a year of misery, with its
shadowed horror at the end? Why not now, on the top of the course of her
momentary security, grant her freedom?
But had he the right to let her go? She would have let herself go
without a qualm—it was only her confidence in his love, her pity for
him, which held her back. But who was he to judge what was best for
Kitty? He could not see the sky for the stars, nor her body for her
soul. All his being was invaded by his tenderness for Kitty; there was
no desire in her which did not meet in him with a passion of response.
He did not know what she most wanted now; her reticent, shy spirit was
buried under all the haphazard promiscuities of her life. Kitty had
fenced it away not only from Anthony, but from herself. She had snatched
at the trivial to cover the eternal.
He longed desperately at this moment of her great ordeal to stand by her
spirit, as he stood by her beleaguered body, and help it forth upon the
chartless seas. Was it fair to set this child soul free? Fear of her
anguish and her mortal struggle bit deep into his heart, but he had a
deeper fear, a deeper question, to which he found no answer.
He sat torn with his indecision; then he heard her voice murmuring,
“Tony! Tony!” and went back into the lighted circle of her room.
The room was full of flowers and shaded wax candles. Kitty sat up in bed
with long plaits of dark hair down her back. She looked like a child of
ten, a very frightened child.
“Tony,” she said, “Tony, it’s the pain coming—”
Her eyes fastened themselves on his with a look of shaken entreaty—then
they left him, to wander restlessly about the room, as if to hold and
keep all the safety of the inanimate things beside which her own
existence was so fugitive and insecure.
Anthony gave her a slight sedative, and lay down beside her, taking her
hand in his. He felt his old power flow back into him to meet her
emergencies. He fixed his mind steadily upon Kitty’s pain, and held it
as the one point upon which his whole conscious being hung. He meant to
take her pain away, reduce it, and keep it from her.
He had never yet succeeded in moving pain by his will; he had only
helped by his actual services to relinquish the grip of it. The
experiment he tried now was different. He determined literally to _take_
Kitty’s pain. He felt as if in the room beside them there was another
strength more formidable than his own fighting for Kitty.
He did not know what the power was, but he was aware of it to his
finger-tips. It seemed to be tearing at Kitty as desperate hands tear at
a wall between themselves and safety. It was as if the power in the room
wanted to take Kitty’s life to pieces in order that something behind her
life might escape.
It did not occur to Anthony that this was a benevolent power, for
Anthony did not believe that there was anything behind Kitty’s life; he
was concerned only with what he saw, the inert and pain-stricken body
beside him. Kitty spoke no word; only her eyes moved—moved as the eyes
move of some one who is searching for something which they cannot find.
It was an unhurried, implacable search. Kitty herself knew nothing of
it. She lay still with her small, stubborn mouth set to bear her pain,
and all her faith centered upon Anthony.
For an hour the fight went on between Anthony and his unseen opponent,
and then suddenly he felt it relax; the power, whatever it was, had
withdrawn. Anthony knew instinctively that he had not conquered. This
had been a voluntary retreat; but it was Anthony, and not the retreating
power, who was exhausted.
“I’m better,” Kitty said in a thin, flickering voice; “much better,
Tony. I’ve not been better so quickly for a long time.”
Anthony did not answer at once. He was too aware of a swift, massive
pain set like a vise upon his arm and shoulder. He was astonished at the
violence of this sensation, but his reason quickly supplied a cause. He
had removed Kitty’s pain by hypnosis, and had weakened himself too much
in the process to be able to defend himself against the hysterical
reaction of his own body.
He assured himself that he could not really have taken Kitty’s pain, but
he could, of course, really think he had taken it. This was the true
explanation, and not the delusion which suggested itself to Anthony,
that the power he had felt himself struggling against had agreed to
transfer the pain in answer to his own intensity.
“Lie quite still, Kitty,” he said, “while I make you a cup of tea. You
want something to make you warm and comfortable after that attack.”
“You’re awfully clever, Tony,” she murmured. “I want to ask you
something rather queer. You won’t mind, will you? What is there ahead of
me to-morrow if—if things don’t go right?”
“They will go right,” said Anthony, quietly, lighting the spirit-lamp.
“I am quite positive of it, or I shouldn’t have suggested the operation.
What is it you mean exactly by—‘ahead of you’?”
“Well,” Kitty explained, “you know, when you set out on a railway
journey, how quickly everything changes, and you don’t. What I mean is,
what will happen if nothing else changes, and you _do_? Or shall I just
be dead?”
Anthony’s mind shot back to Tom. It was curious how he and Kitty claimed
with the same simplicity and without dread a prospect beyond mortality.
Tom had felt it more solidly than Kitty, but neither of them had had
Anthony’s blank incredulity in the face of the invisible. How could he
believe what nobody could prove or see? And yet, since he had answered
Tom’s question, he had felt his skepticism shaken over and over again.
He was no longer sure that there was nothing else.
“I used to think,” said Anthony, slowly, watching Kitty’s face as he
chose his words to meet her need, “that there was nothing beyond death,
that all our struggles and our troubles ceased automatically. I am not
so sure now. When I thought like that I hadn’t been in love. There was
nothing in my life that felt it wanted to reach beyond it. I can imagine
now something stronger than death. I don’t say there _is_ something
stronger, but I can imagine it. You see, I don’t know how to put it
quite, but since I’ve known you, I’ve cared, cared all round a lot more
for everybody. Before I only knew things from the outside. My work was
as good as I could make it, but I always stood outside it. Since I cared
for you, lots of me gets inside. It isn’t only liking to make a success;
it’s caring for a person. It’s you, Kitty, who have given me that
feeling.”
“Have I really?” asked Kitty, incredulously. “How nice of you to tell
me, Tony. I should have thought I’d put you off. I’ve put off most
people. I’m awfully glad you care more because of me. I care, too;
that’s what rather upsets me just now. I’m not afraid a bit, but I do
feel sorry. I see now I must have done such a lot of harm not caring. I
don’t believe my doing all the things I oughtn’t really matters, do you?
“But not having cared enough about the people I did them with, that’s
all wrong, and having hurt poor women who loved their men, that’s rather
awful, isn’t it? I don’t like to think of hurting people now I know what
being hurt is like. Besides, if there is a God, I suppose we’re all in
the same boat and part of Him; so the worst thing we can do is to hurt
each other, isn’t it?”
Anthony nodded. He did not attempt to evade Kitty’s scruples. Brushing
aside truth did not seem to him a kindness.
“We all do it,” he said gently, “some of us from being too strict with
our lives, so that we feel better than other people, and are worse, and
perhaps those who haven’t been strict enough—hurt as well. Because, if
you haven’t counted the cost, other people have to pay as well as you.
Still, you’ve paid a good deal by now, Kitty, and I suppose, if there is
a God, what matters most, is to have learned love and courage. I don’t
see anything else I want to carry on myself into another world, and
you’ve had plenty of those. If you do go out anywhere, you’ll take them
both with you.”
Kitty drew his hand against her cheek.
“I’ll take love with me,” she said, “now, Tony.”
They were silent while Kitty drank her tea, then she said:
“I’m awfully sleepy, Tony, but it seems such a waste of time to go to
sleep.”
He bent over her and kissed her.
“Go to sleep,” he said. “There’s plenty of time really for everything,
and it will make to-morrow better.”
“To-morrow,” said Kitty after a little pause, “is just a sort of
adventure, isn’t it, Tony? It’ll be awfully funny if you and the monks
and Peckham and I all come out some day in the same place. Can you hear
the bell? They go and pray in the church at two o’clock.”
Anthony listened from the open window. He heard very faintly the signal
of the monks for their first prayers.
Kitty turned towards him, smiling, and she was still smiling when
Anthony saw that she was asleep. Anthony’s mind stilled itself, and
turned once more to meet its new ordeal.
He had determined what to do. Just as he had taken her pain, so he would
take her life; he would take everything that menaced her, and dispose of
it. It did not matter what the consequences were or what the risk; they
would fall upon him and upon him alone. Kitty should go forth upon that
great adventure freed of her pain and of the long year’s waiting.
Anthony was intensely sure of himself now, and he was aware of nothing
else with which he had to reckon.