Part 66 (1/2)
”How did you know? Did Louis tell you?” asked Marcella in a low voice.
The pain had been unbearable all day but she had wrapt herself in a great cape of her father's and taken it out on Lashnagar, where no one could see her, leaving Andrew at the hut with Wullie. For a long time she had lost consciousness, to waken very cold in the winter dusk.
”No, Louis said nothing. But I've eyes. You're marked for death. I saw it when you came in at the door that night. Besides, you and I are very much alike, so I understand you. And you're getting very much like your mother.”
”I think I'll see Dr. Angus to-morrow,” said Marcella presently. ”But I don't think it's much use. That's the worst of being married to an enthusiastic medical student! You know so much!”
The wood crackled for a while before Aunt Janet spoke.
”We are getting wiped out, Marcella! Only an old stick like me, who has repressed everything, lives to tell the tale. I've ruled myself never to feel anything.”
”I'm glad I haven't. I'd rather be smashed up with pain than be dead.
You see, Aunt Janet, you repressed things and I took them out and walked over them.”
”Maybe I would if I had my time to go over again. But I don't know. It's a blessing not to feel. I'm fond of you, you know, but I scarcely felt your going away. And I don't suppose I shall feel your dying very much.”
”You care about Andrew,” said Marcella quickly.
”Yes, I care about Andrew,” said Aunt Janet and gathered herself into the past.
The next day Marcella went to see Dr. Angus who was horrified and incredulous, and wired for a specialist from Edinburgh. Marcella knew it was all useless, and when the specialist went away after talking to Dr.
Angus, without saying anything more about operations, she felt very glad.
Louis suspected nothing; he was working very hard for his first examination the week before Easter and she would not have him worried; she wrote to him every day, though writing grew more and more difficult.
She fought desperately against being an invalid and staying in bed, but at last she had to give way; Dr. Angus came every day and talked to her for hours; sometimes he gave her morphia; once or twice when the pain had stranded her almost unbreathing on a sh.o.r.e of numbness and exhaustion she wished that she had died in the hospital in Sydney: but not for long; in spite of the pain she wanted to live. Once or twice, when all was quiet, and the pain was having its night-time orgy with her, she cried out in the unbearable agony of it. She would have no one with her at nights, but Aunt Janet's uncanny penetration guessed at the pain and she made Dr. Angus leave morphia tablets for her. At first, though they were at her hand, she refused them.
”I don't want to waste time in unconsciousness,” she said once. Later, she grew glad to waste time: she understood how her father used to pray for drugs when he was too tired to pray for courage in those weary nights of his. Another time she said that it was cowardly: Louis, in his whisky days, had been seeking anesthesia from painful thoughts; she was too proud to seek it for a painful body. She tried hard, too, to keep s.h.i.+ning Kraill's conception of her courage; she did not realize that he would never know, however much she gave way: always, for her, he lived just on the threshold of her consciousness.
One day when the doctor was sitting beside her and she had got out of a maze of pain into a buoyant sea of bodily unconsciousness, she talked to him about his letter in which he had grieved at his inadequacy. Then she told him about Louis, and about Kraill, for she thought it might encourage him to know how the miracle of healing had come about.
”He wrote to me this morning, doctor,” she said. ”Will you feel under my pillow and get the letter? I know he wouldn't mind your reading it.”
The doctor unfolded the thick bundle of pages and read--and as he read he saw that the words were all blurred by tears, and guessed that they were certainly not tears shed by the exuberant young man who had written the letter.
”Three cheers, old girl. The week of torture is past! I know I got through. I simply sailed through. My brain is a fifty times better machine than it was seven years ago. And they're accommodating at these Scotch medical schools. I told 'em I'd got through part of my Final in London before the bust-up came, and the Dean sent for me to-day and said it seemed a pity for me to slog at the donkey-work again, when I knew it. So we talked it over, and he says I ought to do the Final next year.
And then, Marcella, look out! I've told you I've laid down my challenge to sickness! I'll have it whacked before I die. I can't see why anyone should die except of senile decay or accident--and those we'll eliminate in time! I feel that there's only a d.y.k.e of matchboarding between me and the ocean of knowledge. One day it's going to break, and I'll be flooded with it. It's a most uncanny feeling, old girl. One of the chaps here--a rather mad American--says that there are people who've broken that d.y.k.e down--Shakespeare, for instance. (But if I broke it down, I wouldn't be such a footler as to write plays and poems, would you?) Corlyon--that's the mad American--is the son of a big psychologist at Harvard; he gave me some light on Kraill's remark about dreams that day. He says they're being used a lot by some German and American alienists in curing all sorts of neuroses. (By the way, old girl, next time you write, tell me if you understand all these technicalities. I want you to understand them, and if you don't I'll explain as I go on. One never can be sure about you. Sometimes you seem no end of a duffer, and next minute you come out with an amazing piece of penetration.) Well, these new psychologists say that things like drinking, s.e.x, drugging, kleptomania, and all these bally nuisances that make people impossible members of a community, come from repression. A man has a perfectly well-meaning impulse to do something. His education, or his religion or his convention tells him it's wrong, so he represses it. He fights it, pushes it back. It gets encysted and, in time, forms a spiritual abscess. It's got to break through. Of course, the idea is not to repress things at all. I don't say let things rip, and go in for a whole glorious orgy of wine, woman and song. But take the desire out, have a talk with it, and make it look silly like Kraill made whisky look silly to me. There, I thought that would interest you. (A bit more proof how d.a.m.nably clever he was!)
”Marcella, I told you then I'd be the same to you as Kraill was, didn't I? I wors.h.i.+pped you; I wanted you; you were my saviour, and I'd have picked up the Great Pyramid and walked off staggering with it if you'd asked me. That was the path that carried me over my particular messy mora.s.s (that, and my acquisitive spirit that objected to giving up part of my goods and chattels!) And now--listen here, old lady! It's a thing a chap couldn't say to most of his wives. I can say it to you and know that you'll understand. (That's the heavenly safeness of you. You do understand, and never judge resentfully) Marcella, I'm going to be the sort of man Kraill is! And I'm going to be it not for you at all now!
I'm going to be bigger than he, even. And I know he'll be big enough to be glad if I am. A good doctor's reward is in his patient's recovery, and in a way, whatever the patient does afterwards counts to the doctor, doesn't it? So now, old girl, if there was no you on earth, I'd still keep my tail up! Put that in your pipe of peace and smoke it! Different days, isn't it to the time when I couldn't be sent to buy a baby's feeding-bottle without getting boozed? I knew you'd like to know that.
Oh, wasn't I a fool to think you wanted to tie me to your ap.r.o.n strings?
I've got to neglect you for a bit now. I've got to run on without you, dear. Thank G.o.d you're not the sort to get huffy about it, and want me dancing attendance on you. A man with a man's job to do can't have time for the softness of women about him: he can't stop to look to right or left! But when I'm in Harley Street--well there! No more decayed castles or wooden huts for you!
”I'm aching to see you, Marcella. It's the Mater's birthday on Easter Sunday, so I'm running down to see her on Sat.u.r.day. I shall travel back by that train that leaves Euston at midnight on Sunday. It's great to be away from you, because it's so great to come back.”
The doctor looked at her as he put the letter down, and blew his nose and polished his gla.s.ses.
”Two or three years ago I'd have been sick to think I was only the bridge to carry him over--to his job. But now--” She smiled a little, wondering why he should talk to her of the softness of women, that he must dispense with for a while; and Kraill had seen her hard, and asked her to be courageous for him!