"Please do."
They sat by the fireside, for even in mid-June the night was chilly. A
few scattered ashes showed at the lowest bar of the grate. Laura had
raked out the fire that had been lit to warm her father.
Papa, she explained, was not always as Mr. Prothero saw him now. His
illness came from a sunstroke.
He said, yes; he had seen cases like that in India.
"Then, do you think----"
She paused, lest she should seem to be asking for a professional
opinion.
"Do I think? What do I think?"
"That he'll get better?"
He was silent a long time.
"No," he said. "But he need never be any worse. You mustn't be afraid."
"I _am_ afraid. I'm afraid all the time."
"What of?"
"Of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face
it."
"You've nerve enough for anything."
"You don't know me. I'm an utter coward. I can't face things. Especially
the thing I'm afraid of."
"What is it? Tell me." He leaned nearer to her, and she almost
whispered.
"I'm afraid of his having a fit--epilepsy. He _might_ have it."
"He might. But he won't. You mustn't think of it."
"I'm always thinking of it. And the most--the most awful thing is
that--I'm afraid of _seeing_ it."
She bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to
an unpardonable shame.
"Poor child. Of course you are," said Prothero. "We're all afraid of
something. I'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood."
"You?"
"I."
"Oh--but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it."
"Wouldn't I?"
"No. Or you couldn't go and be a doctor. Why," she asked suddenly, "did
you?"
"_Because_ I was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way.
My father was a country doctor--a surgeon. One day he sent me into his
surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek
cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me--I was a boy
about fifteen at the time--to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop
the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?"
"You fainted?--You were ill on the spot?"
"No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away."
A slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for
the vibration of some spiritual recoil.
"What do you say to that?"
"I don't say anything."
"My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a
hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."
"They might have known," she said.
"They might have known what?"
"That you were different."
"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept
rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put
it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a
skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd
got to prove that I _was_ a man--that I wasn't different after all."
"Well--you proved it."
"If I did my father never knew it."
"And your mother?" she said softly.
"I believe she knew."
"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"
"I never let her know, really, how different I was."
"You kept it to yourself?"
"It was the only way to keep it."
"Your genius?"
"If you choose to call it that."
"The thing," she said, "that made you different."
"You see," he said, "they didn't understand that _that_ was where I was
most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."
"You couldn't lose it."
"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my
medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge
of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to
do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a
better berth in Bombay; and it went again."
She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of
something more than it.
"You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months
and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and
there's the terror--_the_ most awful terror there is--of never getting
back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of
it without seeing it--seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling
them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where
you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else
matters. Nothing else is."
She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.
"And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the
other part remains where it got to."
"I see."
Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he
spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid
of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as
he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had
to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into
life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He
knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it
wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he
would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit
surer than she was now.
No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself
that he put to the test.
And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to
face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them,
he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him
exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it
all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his
soul and its exultant, processional vision of God.
"The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'm _still_
afraid of the sight of blood."
"So I suppose _I_ shall go on being afraid."
"Probably. But you won't turn tail any more than I should. _You_ never
ran away."
"There are worse things than running away. All the things that go on
inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries.
Things that come of never being alone. I have to sit up at night to be
alone."
"My child, you mustn't. It's simply criminal."
"If I didn't," she said, "I should never get it in."
He understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift.
"I know it's criminal, with Papa depending on me, and yet I do it.
Sometimes I'm up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own
things; things, I mean, that won't sell, just to gratify my vanity in
having done them."
"To satisfy your instinct for perfection. God made you an artist."
She sighed. "He's made me so many things besides. That's where the
misery comes in."
"And a precious poor artist you'd be if he hadn't, and if the misery
didn't come in."
She shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "Misery's all very well
for the big, tragic people like Nina, who can make something out of it.
Why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?"
"And if _you_'re being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection
that you're not aware of----?"
She shook her head again.
"I'm certainly not aware of it. Still, I can understand that. I mean I
can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and
trying things too big for it and their not coming off. But--look at
Papa."
She held her hands out helplessly. The gesture smote his heart.
"If Papa had been one of its experiments--but he wasn't. It had got him
all right at first. You've no idea how nice Papa was. You've only to
look at him now to see how nice he is. But he was clever. Not very
clever," (she wasn't going to claim too much for him), "but just clever
enough. He used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. And he can't
say them any more."
She paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went.
"And to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you'd made as fine as
it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away--it
doesn't look like an Instinct for Perfection, does it?"
"The finest bits aren't thrown away. It's what you still have with you,
what you see, that's being thrown away--broken up by some impatient,
impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its
instinct for perfection. Do you see?"
"I see that you're trying to make me happier about Papa. It's awfully
nice of you."
"I'm trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body.
To you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. To me it is
simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual
energies. We're nowhere near understanding the real function of disease.
It probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies.
It's a sign of their approaching freedom. Especially those diseases
which are most like death--the horrible diseases that tear down the body
from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and
leaving the viscera exuberant with life. And if you knew the mystery of
the building up--why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful
than you can conceive. But, if you really knew, that would be nothing to
the secret--the mystery--the romance of dissolution."
His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the
darkness that wrapped her.
"If you could see _through_ it you'd understand, you'd see that this
body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium,
transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to
the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual
germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any
of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside
what we give."
Laura looked grave. "I can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that I
understand."
"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how
before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in
nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the
whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our
body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts,
infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to
minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable
forces, and that we--_we_--unmake the work of millions of aeons in a
moment, that we charge it with _our_ will, _our_ instincts, _our_
memories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by
spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ
of us--so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when
they scatter, is the seed of _our_ universe, flung heaven knows where."
For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura's eyes. "Do you know,"
she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of
intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and
I can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to
know how you know about it."
A change passed over his face. It became suddenly still and
incommunicable.
"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and
it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad."
"What won't I tell you?"
"What's become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"
"I've been trying to tell you. I've been trying to make you see."
"I can only see that they've gone."
"And I can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely
than ever. Too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them."
"Ah----"
"And I should say the same of a still-born baby that I had never seen
alive, or of a lunatic whom I had not once seen sane."
"How do you know?" she reiterated.
"I can't tell you."
"You can't tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when I look at
it."
"I can't tell you anything," he said gently. "I can only talk to you
like an intoxicated medical student, and it's time for me to go."
She did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent.
It was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both
pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the
unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech.
"I'm glad I've seen you," she said at last.
He ignored the valediction of her tone.
"And when am I to see you again?" he said.
This time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause.
He asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were
standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted
his preposterous pretext? Up till now she had appeared to be taking him
and his pretext simply, as they came. Her silence, her pause had had no
expectation in it. It evidently had not occurred to her that the deep
could open up. That was how she had struck him, more and more, as never
looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look
forward. She regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that
might turn upon her at any time and hurt her.
He rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. He
turned.
"Well," he said, "have you seen enough of me?"
They were outside the threshold now, and she stood there, one arm
holding her lamp, the other stretched across the doorway, as if she
would keep him from ever entering again.
"Or," said he, "may I come again? Soon?"
"Do," she said, "and bring Nina with you."
She set her lamp on the floor at the stairhead, and backed, backed from
him into the darkness of the room.