“Dome up, O heavens! yet higher o’er my head;
Back, back, horizon! widen out my world;
Rush in, O infinite sea of the Unknown!
For though He slay me, I will trust in God.”
GEORGE MCDONALD.
It was evening, and the heat was more terrible because of the darkness,
the stones were hot to the touch of one’s feet: the very shadows seemed
a mockery and a delusion. The air that hung above the hospital had a
pressure, and a thickness, that made breathing an intolerable burden.
Katherine, sitting by the open window within sight of a great market,
wondered how she had been able to keep on her feet all day; now it
seemed almost too much of a struggle even to wonder.
The door opened, and Daphne came into the room. At first Katherine did
not see her face; when she did, she started to her feet.
“What is the matter?” she asked quickly. Daphne sank into a chair and
covered her face with her hands; she was trembling from head to foot.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” she gasped. “I can’t bear to die! I can’t—die!” For a
moment Katherine thought she had gone mad.
“What are you talking about?” she asked her.
“Sister said I was to go to him, but she did not tell me!” Daphne moaned
incoherently. “Only his face—Katherine, his face! He gasped as I lent
over him, ‘Don’t let me die, nurse!’ And he kept muttering ‘I’m only
nineteen! I’m only nineteen!’ And then he began to struggle, and the
terror in his eyes! Oh! Katherine, I never saw such terror in anybody’s
eyes before! and I couldn’t think what to say to him! I asked him if he
wanted to pray to God, and he said ‘I don’t want God—I want to live!’
And I saw he couldn’t! It seemed as if there was really someone
struggling with the spark of life in him, and he died fighting it, died
with that frightful look of terror in his eyes.” She rose to her feet
and began walking up and down hurriedly in the tiny room. “I didn’t know
it was like that!” she said. “Think! It is summer-time, and somewhere
there is sea, and coolness, and roses, and he was only nineteen! They
say it is a beautiful world, but it isn’t! It’s cruel! It’s simply
cruel! to let him die like that when he was fighting so, to send his
soul out of his fine young body into the dark! Oh! I am afraid! It is
all going on the same—nobody knows, nobody cares, and all around us is
this struggle between our weak, impotent lives, and this cruel,
masterful death! picking us—oh! so short sometimes, like a heedless
child in a field of flowers, only to throw them away! Katherine, _you_
have got to die! And I? Oh, I don’t want to! I wish I had never been
born, and no one can help us! We have to go out alone, and we don’t know
_what_ is on the Other Side! Arthur said he had fifteen years more work,
and then he would drop in his tracks, only fifteen years, and I—perhaps
I may not have so long.” Daphne’s face was working terribly—she was
completely unnerved and worn out. Katherine blamed herself bitterly for
not having taken more care of her.
“Anyway, you’re not dying now!” she said, “so you had better sit down
and get rested; it is much too hot to run up and down the room!” Daphne
obeyed her listlessly.
“Nothing is worth while!” she said. “I might have married David, or gone
to Arthur! When Dora died it nearly broke my heart, but I wasn’t
frightened, now——” she began to shiver again. “I can’t go back to the
ward!” she muttered, “I can’t face them again, they might—die! I tell
you it’s the end!” she cried fiercely to Katherine. “It’s the end! the
end! I don’t believe in Heaven, and Hell is here! To have love and
beauty, and the gifts of life, and then be robbed of them one by one,
and last of all hustled out of one’s own familiar world! And then you
ask me to believe in something else!” Katherine looked at her in blank
astonishment; this was a Daphne whom she did not know.
“God gave them to you, and so can’t you believe He has got something
better for you as well?” she asked at last, and Katherine smiled at her.
“You have had so much love,” she said, “and that is the way to Eternity,
and the consolation for all that is beautiful which seems to perish.
Surely you understand?”
“What do you mean by love?” Daphne asked angrily. “Arthur’s profession
coming before his heart, or David’s fits of passion, or Philip
Mitchell’s spiritual twaddle?” Katherine’s eyes flashed.
“I have loved you, Daphne,” she said.
“Thank you!” said Daphne. “What is a girl’s love for another girl, but a
kind of make-shift before the bridge is built? Do you suppose I love
_you_, as you call it? I can assure you, you have frequently bored me to
death!”
“I will be more careful in the future,” said Katherine.
Daphne laughed. “Future?” she questioned—“is there to be a future?”
“It is ten o’clock,” said Katherine quietly, “and I am going to bed.”
Daphne held out her arms to her.
“I didn’t mean it!” she cried, “not one single, cruel word of it! It was
only those eyes, that poor boy’s eyes!” And she began to cry. Katherine
held her hands and soothed her, as she would a frightened child. Later
she prayed, and Daphne knelt by her gazing out of the window across the
hot roofs and heavy London sky. For the first time in her life she felt
the call of green fields, and quiet country lanes, for the pureness of
the sky, and the clear air, and all the life of trees, and birds, and
flowers. She began to think about her uncle and Dora; as she knelt she
became aware that he had loved her, and that she had been very cruel to
leave him when he needed her most. Words and thoughts of his came back
to her, that she had never really understood, and she began to ponder
them in her heart. She remembered once she had been very angry with him;
they had been sitting in his study, and he had turned to her and said,
“Daphne, I know what you are thinking about.” She had questioned him,
and he had answered very sadly. “You are thinking of yourself. One day
you will have to stop doing that.” Now she knew that the time had come.
The life behind her became a terrible burden even to think of. One got
paid for selfishness (she thought) by Death, for pleasure by satiety,
for luxury by ruin, for scepticism by despair, and for the love of
others by vanity of heart.
Katherine was in bed, but Daphne knelt on, forgetting everything but the
new vision that was born in her.
“Katherine,” she asked, “are you awake?”
“Yes,” said her friend sleepily.
“I was afraid of Death,” said Daphne, “because I was not alive. I
believe I know now what it is to be alive.”
“Well, you’d better go to sleep,” said Katherine. Daphne smiled to
herself in the dark.
“Oh! no!” she said, “I am going to wake up now.”