A curious instinct drove him out of the room for a space on to the
landing. He shut the door on the human animal in its lonely struggle.
The gas was burning on the landing and also in the hall, for this was
not a night on which to extinguish lights. The clock below ticked
quietly, and then struck three. He had passed more than three hours
with his father. The time had gone quickly. He crept to Maggie's door.
No sound! Utter silence! He crept upstairs to the second storey. No
sound there! Coming down again to the first floor he noticed that the
door of his own bedroom was open. He crept in there, and started
violently to see a dim form on the bed. It was Maggie, dressed, but
fast asleep under a rug. He left her. The whole world was asleep, and
he was awake with his father.
"What an awful shame!" he thought savagely. "Why couldn't we have let
him grow his mushrooms if he wanted to? What harm would it have done
us? Supposing it _had_ been a nuisance, supposing he _had_ tried to kiss
Jane, supposing he _had_ hurt himself, what then? Why couldn't we let him
do what he wanted?"
And he passionately resented his own harshness and that of Maggie as he
might have resented the cruelty of some national injustice.
He listened. Nothing but the ticking of the clock disturbed the calm of
the night. Could his father have expired in one of those frantic bouts
with his enemy? Brusquely, with false valiance, he re-entered the
chamber, and saw again the white square of the blind and the expanse of
carpet and the tables littered with nursing apparatus, and saw the bed
and his father on it, panting in a new and unsurpassable despair, but
still unbeaten, under the thin gas-flame. The crisis eased as he went
in. He picked up the arm-chair and carried it to the bedside and sat
down facing his father, and once more took his father's intolerably
pathetic hand.
"All right!" he murmured, and never before had he spoken with such
tenderness. "All right! I'm here. I'm not leaving you."
The victim grew quieter.
"Is it Edwin?" he whispered, scarcely articulate, out of a bottomless
depth of weakness.
"Yes," said Edwin cheerfully; "you're a bit better now, aren't you?"
"Aye!" sighed Darius in hope.
And almost immediately the rumour of struggle recommenced, and in a
minute the crisis was at its fiercest.
Edwin became hardened to the spectacle. He reasoned with himself about
suffering. After all, what was its importance? Up to a point it could
be borne, and when it could not be borne it ceased to be suffering. The
characteristic grimness of those latitudes showed itself in him. There
was nothing to be done. They who were destined to suffer had to suffer,
must suffer; and no more could be said. The fight must come to an end
sooner or later. Fortitude alone could meet the situation.
Nevertheless, the night seemed eternal, and at intervals fortitude
lacked.
"By Jove!" he would mutter aloud, under the old man's constant appeals
to Clara, "I shan't be sorry when this is over."
Then he would interest himself in the periodicity of the attacks, timing
them by his watch with care. Then he would smooth the bed. Once he
looked at the fire. It was out. He had forgotten it. He immediately
began to feel chilly, and then he put on his father's patched
dressing-gown and went to the window, and, drawing aside the blind,
glanced forth. All was black and utterly silent. He thought with
disdain of Maggie and the others unconscious in sleep. He returned to
the chair.
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