She interrupted him. ‘Be patient, take things quietly, rest as much as you can and Nurse will give you a nerve-sedative every four hours. Is that what you mean?’
He laughed and said, ‘You’re a wonderful old lady. I’m sure you’ll live to be at least a hundred.’
At a quarter to nine, the last of Justin’s guests said good night, and he went and sat in his bedroom while Magda cleared up in the sitting-room. He was rather tired—so was Magda, though he never noticed it—and his tooth, about which he had forgotten during the party, began to nag him again. As soon as Christmas was over—or at the latest, early in the New Year—he must have it dealt with, whatever the fuss and discomfort he might be let in for. Was that a little abscess near the root? Better dab on some iodine, just in case. He did so, spilling some on a clean towel and staining his fingers a disgusting colour. Still there had been times when he’d been more unhappy, and he felt better for having made a social effort. His guests, in their somewhat second-rate way, had been quite agreeable and seemed to enjoy themselves. It was a good thing to bestir oneself now and then. Sixty-eight wasn’t very old after all. General Drumwell at the Club was over eighty, and his life was one long succession of blood-sports. Not of course that one would think of taking to them, even if they promised eternal youth. Well, another Christmas Eve was nearly over. He would go to bed early and hope that in his dreams Santa Claus would make him the present of a perfect plot and the skill to turn it into a masterpiece that would rank both as a best-seller and a classic.
‘Good night, Magda, and thank you so much. I’m ashamed to have given you all this extra work at such a time. Oh, by the way, will you give this envelope to Hugo? It’s a little present. I meant to give it to your mother this morning.’
‘Yes, Sir. It’s very kind of you. Good night, Sir.’
As she went out, the Fawleys came down the stairs. Dorothy said graciously, ‘What, Magda, are you still busy? You must be exhausted, poor girl. Tell me,—is there any news from the top floor?’
‘No, Madam, no news at all. I think Miss Tredennick is quite well in herself,—apart from——’
‘Yes, of course. What terrible things can happen to one in the twinkling of an eye. I managed to catch Dr Jamieson for a moment on his way down, and he said there was no need at all for us to put off our little party on Monday. If the news had been bad, I shouldn’t have dreamt of giving it. Well, we must be going. My husband insists I shall go out with him and see the decorations. It makes me feel quite like a schoolgirl again! So good night and sweet dreams!’
‘Good night, Madam. Good night, Sir.’
Robert who had been standing by in an embarrassed silence, said gruffly, ‘Good night,’ and without looking round followed Dorothy into the street.
Hugo went to bed early. At half-past eleven his mother tiptoed into his room and found him asleep. She was glad to find that he had remembered to hang a stocking at the foot of the bed. She detached it carefully and carried it into the sitting-room, where she filled it with presents,—a box of Turkish Delight, a bottle of green ink, a case of pencils, a small book entitled, A Hundred Great Poems, a five-year diary, an empty photograph-frame, and a gay figure of Puck, with tinsel wings and its body full of sweets. It had been hard to find things suitable to his age, and next year it would be still harder. She sighed as she thought that a year or two after that he would be really grown up.
Once more in his bedroom, she replaced the stocking and stood watching him in the dim light that came round the door, which she had left ajar. He was lying as he usually did, with his knees drawn up towards his chin and his face buried under the clothes,—a small, almost circular mound beneath the quilt, showing nothing except a patch of white skin at the nape of the neck, the tip of an ear and the flaxen hair on the dome of his head, which she longed to kiss. Tears gathered in her eyes, and fearing that if she stayed by him any longer she might break into sobs and wake him, she went back to the sitting-room and shut the bedroom door.
Then she brought a small Christmas-tree, already decorated, from her own bedroom, put it on a table near the window, and arranged Hugo’s more serious presents round it. Her own gifts were a light, portable easel, which she hoped he would use in the park, or at any rate somewhere in the fresh air, and a pair of lamb’s wool gloves. There were three books from Magda, Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The New Arabian Nights, a silk muffler and three pairs of socks from Miss Tredennick, and from Mr Bray the envelope which he had entrusted to Magda that evening. Mrs Muller hoped that this year it contained a pound instead of ten shillings. She looked at the little heap and wished it could have been bigger. But there was still a Christmas cake in store and a box of lovely fat crackers. Then she knelt down in front of the Christmas-tree and prayed:
‘O most merciful Father, I beg Thee to grant my dear, sweet son a happy Christmas, and a happy New Year. Grant him long life and prosperity, I beg Thee, and grant that I shall never see him ill or in pain or suffering in any way, and that when I die, I shall leave him happy. Visit not the sins of the fathers upon the children. O God, bless my darling Hugo, now and for ever. Amen.’
She went into her bedroom and began to undress, and then remembered that she had forgotten to put out her presents for Magda, who was already in bed. With a sense of effort, she took the parcels from a drawer—a hat and a blouse—went back with them to the sitting-room and laid them on Magda’s desk.
[2]
Since half-past nine, when she had dismissed the nurse for the night, Miss Tredennick had been wide awake, despite the sedative that Dr Jamieson had prescribed for her. The night was chilly, but both her windows were open eight inches at the top. She had heard the bustle of Christmas Eve die away, and the shrill or raucous performances of the carol-singers become more and more infrequent till they ceased. The only sounds now were the noisy closings of a few front doors, the swish of an occasional car in the street and footfalls on the pavement.
All the bravado which had sustained her so gallantly throughout the day and early evening, and had made her illness seem like a heroic and not unamusing adventure, had suddenly vanished. She felt desperately alone and frightened, and for the first time for many years found herself sobbing. (Could these belated tears bring back her sight?)
She feared that the doctors might be in league with one another to deceive her. Was she going to die? Her father had lived for seven years after his first stroke, and had passed them fairly happily, but he hadn’t gone blind till a fortnight before he died. She had started with blindness. They had said it was only a temporary phase, a neurotic spasm, and that in quite a short time she would recover perfect vision. But she wasn’t neurotic. She had never been a hypochondriac like Mr Bray or Mrs Fawley. When her arthritis was painful, there was no self-pity or anxiety in her cantankerousness. She had adjusted her life to it—with complaints, it was true, yet without mental anguish.
But could she make that far more terrible adjustment which total blindness would demand of her? Could she bear to be dependent on the eyes of a paid companion? Some pert or cringing creature, like the nurse, perhaps, who would say, ‘Now, Miss Tredennick, I’ve made you some really lovely bread and milk. . . . You know where I’ve put your tablets—just here, by the bell-push. . . . I think there’s rain in the air. I do hope it holds off for the holidays. . . . You’ll be feeling ever so much brighter to-morrow. After all, Christmas only comes once a year and it’s our duty to make the best of it, and this is such a comfortable room to spend it in. I put those four cards, which came by the last post, on the little table by the window. There isn’t any room on the mantelpiece. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many before—and such handsome ones, too. . . . Now are you quite sure you’ve everything you want? Remember, you’ve only got to press the bell and I shall be with you in less than half a minute. . . . Good night,—and sleep well.’
Then she had a still more terrifying thought. If sight could go, without warning, as hers had gone, couldn’t touc
h, taste, smell and hearing also go in the same way? Was it true that there were people with vigorous minds, who had to lie completely motionless except when somebody moved them, tasting nothing even when they were forcibly fed, hearing nothing—not even the silly chatter of a nurse or a doctor’s lies—feeling nothing that was tangible, unaware of the scent of freshly made broth or the soap with which they were washed or the flowers left hurriedly by some embarrassed visitor, and in utter darkness except for those wistful or fantastic images which memory or the tormented brain evoked deep behind the eyes? Surely the brain would snap under the strain of such a cruel introspection? Perhaps that was the only hope such people had left,—the hope that the misery of rational thought would some day be spared them, and that their consciousness would become a long dream without an awakening.
As a development of this idea, she tried to relax the tension of her thoughts and to let them flow through her of their own volition, like a languid current which, instead of washing obstacles away, seeps through them imperceptibly and then reforms itself.
She glided back nearly seventy years to Christmas Eve in Warwickshire, the big church on the hill, the glow of the stained-glass windows as she and her mother walked up the snowy path to the midnight service, the drip of wax from tall candles,—then, with a shift of scene, to her father wasting half a box of matches while he tried to light the brandy on the plum-pudding, the little sprig of holly on the top that crackled in the flame and gave out an acrid smell, while Melford held the dish in his tremulous hands. (Of course, one New Year’s Eve, he was sacked for being drunk.) Next came the pink-coated hunt streaking the crisp white fields, the children’s parties and the Beresford boys almost tearing off Monica Fielding’s fancy-dress. What little devils they were! However, her father had told Gwen’s father to give them a real old-fashioned horsewhipping the next day. Gwen’s father was then a very handsome young groom, though it was easier to remember him as he was thirty years later, with a fringe of straw-coloured hair round his bald pate, and Gwen, a shy, serious, rather stupid girl of ten, not unlike what Magda was destined to be thirty years later still, when the Mullers came back from Germany to Cornwall. Cornwall, stuffed birds, the damp crawling up the walls, the long dreariness of the black-out, the bombing of Falmouth and Truro.
No, it wouldn’t work. The retrospect led her back remorselessly to the present. She was alone and blind, on the top floor of Number Ten Pollitt Place, without real friends or any real ties with life except her money and her will to live.
One o’clock struck. The street had been very quiet for a long time,—but was that the sound of a car? Yes, it was,—a car coming nearer, round the Crescent towards the Place. Suppose it should pull up at Number Seven, would she be able to hear the tell-tale tune on the radio? But on Christmas Eve, the most abandoned foreign station would hardly broadcast Me doodle ’em. She hoped Hugo was awake and on the watch. His eyes at least would be faithful. But he’d been up very late the night before and ought to be sleeping so soundly that nothing could rouse him. Should she summon the nurse? She could hear a muffled snore, coming through the door between her bedroom and the sitting-room, where Nurse was sleeping on an improvised bed. What a dreadful woman she was, with a subtle, inner commonness about her, such as was altogether lacking in Gwen and Magda.
The car seemed to have stopped at the end of the Crescent. Perhaps it had no connexion with ‘Y.V.’ What was she doing that night? Lurking in alleys or plying for hire at some shady club? Or might this be the one night of the year when she gave her trade a rest? Her name and her swarthy colouring indicated some sort of a Roman Catholic origin. Had she been to confession and to Midnight Mass, washing away with one evening’s penitence, the guilt of three hundred and sixty-four evenings? Oh, if only it were possible to see whether or not a light was burning behind the thin curtains of her bedroom window! How beatific and rapturous a vision that well-known glimmer of pale peach would be!
For one moment, Miss Tredennick thought of getting out of bed and groping her way to the window (as she had done only the night before, and many other nights, too,—though they belonged to a different incarnation), and peering across the street with all the strength of her will. But she remembered the oculist’s advice, supported by one of the doctors. ‘Don’t strain your eyes. Don’t even make any effort to distinguish between light and darkness. Let things take their course. Otherwise you might impair the optic nerve. You must try to live like a cabbage for a few days.’ ‘Days’ did they say,—or was it ‘weeks’ or ‘months’? A feeling of hysterical impotence came over her and she quivered with fear and anger. The eiderdown slid off the bed on to the floor, but even so, the bedclothes were too heavy. The air of the room seemed stale and stifling. (O to be standing naked on the top of a wind-swept mountain!) How could she hope to sleep, in that heat and encompassed by a darkness which had no end?
If suffering, as some say, atones for sin, Miss Tredennick atoned for a good many sins that night.
XV
CHRISTMAS DAY
‘A happy Christmas!’ Nurse was the first to say it, and she added, ‘It’s a bright, lovely day, but a bit on the chilly side. Hadn’t I better close one of the windows?’ (Oh, go away!) Magda’s turn came next. ‘May I wish you a very happy Christmas, Madam?’ The girl spoke diffidently and self-consciously, as well she might. A happy Christmas indeed! Soon, they’d all be in,—Gwen, Dr Jamieson, Mrs Fawley, on some excuse or other, and perhaps even the reluctant Mr Bray, for the sake of good manners. Hugo alone,—the only one she really wanted to see—to see, that was a verb she had better try to forget!—would never come up unless she sent for him.
There was another tap on the bedroom door. Life had become a succession of doors opened and doors shut. ‘Come in.’ This was Gwen. She had a heavy walk for such a slim woman.
‘Good morning, Madam, and a happy Christmas, I’m sure.’ Her voice sounded strangely excited,—not at all like a voice modulated to the decencies of a sick-room.
‘The same to you, Gwen. Is there anything—anything special—you want to say to me? Nurse isn’t here, is she?’
‘No, Madam, she’s in the bathroom. Oh, I must tell you, there’s been a piece of the most startling news—though it’s very sad—from Number Seven over the way. The young lady who lives in the top-floor front was found dead half an hour ago.’
‘That woman—dead?’
Miss Tredennick almost shouted the words and raised her head and looked straight into Mrs Muller’s eyes, which were sparkling with pleasure, while her cheeks were red and her fingers fiddled with a button on her house-coat. Miss Tredennick thought, ‘She seems quite delighted—and it makes her look so silly, like a young bird that’s going to be given a worm.’ Then she gasped and felt as if she were going to choke. This was real. She could see Mrs Muller. She could see the whole room and everything in it.
She said very quietly, ‘Oh, Gwen, I wonder if you’d arrange those cards on the mantelpiece. One’s fallen on to the floor near the radiator and that blue one with the daffodils is right on the edge.’
With instinctive obedience, Mrs Muller turned round to do as she was told, then suddenly the truth dawned on her too, and she turned round again.
‘Why, Madam, you can—are you—are your eyes——? Oh, Madam, I don’t know what to say.’
‘Yes, Gwen. I can see as clearly as ever I did. It’s a miracle. That’s to say, it’s as miraculous as my going blind.’
Mrs Muller wiped her own eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Oh, Madam, I’m so thankful,—so very thankful.’
‘So am I, Gwen—though I suppose I might have been still more thankful if the whole thing had never occurred at all. But that’s a tricky question. Now tell me at once, what happened to the poor woman at Number Seven? How did you come to hear of it?’
‘Through Mrs Petcham, Madam,—who works at Number Fourteen in return for the basement. Mrs O’Blahoney came over to ask her advice. They’ve always been friendly. Mrs O’Bla
honey said that when Miss Wheeler—she’s the elderly party who has the first-floor back at Number Seven—came out of her room—she was going to early service—she noticed a strong smell of gas coming down from the landing above. There’s still an old gas-bracket on the top floor, which hasn’t been disconnected, though it’s never used—and gas-fires in the bedrooms. So Mrs O’Blahoney went up to see what was the matter, and as soon as she turned the corner of the stairs, she saw a sheet of drawer-paper on the young lady’s door. It was fixed there with sticking-plaster, and had written on it, “Gas—Beware”. She telephoned to the gas people at once and then came across to see Mrs Petcham. Of course, Mrs Petcham asked her if she’d rung up the police, but Mrs O’Blahoney—who, between ourselves, Madam, I don’t think is any too fond of the police—said she hadn’t. Well, Mrs Petcham said she must ring them immediately and suggest they should send a doctor or bring one with them, and she said she would. They came in a car just before eight o’clock—I didn’t see them, but Mrs Petcham told me—and found the young lady lying dead on her bed. She was dressed in her day-clothes. According to Mrs O’Blahoney, she never left her room since she came back yesterday afternoon at half-past five. That’s all I know, so far.’
Miss Tredennick said reflectively, but without any trace of mournfulness in her voice, ‘Oh dear, oh dear! What a thing to happen in Pollitt Place. I can’t pretend—but one mustn’t speak evil of the dead. Was there no note? These people usually leave something behind by way of explanation, even if the explanation isn’t quite true.’
‘I haven’t heard of any note being found, Madam.’
‘Well, I suppose we shouldn’t be too curious. I’m glad to see it doesn’t seem to have spoilt your Christmas for you.’
Mrs Muller blushed at the question implied by Miss Tredennick’s steady scrutiny. It was quite true she felt an enormous relief. Hugo had said that somebody in the house was going to die before the end of the year. Obviously, when he said, ‘in this house’, he had meant to say, ‘in this street’. And with this small amendment, not only was his gift of prophecy confirmed, but all was well. That worry, at least, was done with. But she couldn’t confess all this to Miss Tredennick, who, for twenty-four hours had seemed by far the most likely victim of Hugo’s clairvoyance. So she changed the subject and said, ‘And now, Madam, what are your plans for the day? Dr Jamieson said he’d be round at ten o’clock.’
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