A little greyness had come into the sky, and Scarsdale turned away from the black van. He began to walk, and he had not covered fifty yards before he realized that his legs were not going to carry him very far. He felt giddy and sick. The personal “I” of him ceased to struggle and to resist; it was a mere numb and acquiescent member carried along by the instinctive urge of an impulse that was more primitive. He was going somewhere; he had to get to a particular place; he had ceased to question the niceness or the shamefulness of surrender. He felt so sick. His very nausea impelled him along those grey streets and through the rawness of the November morning. He had no legs, but a pair of strange and pulpy appendages that somehow seemed to drift with him as in a dream. The pavements had the consistency of cotton wool. More than once he had to stop and cling to some railings. Things went black. He wanted to be sick, and yet the nausea could not vent itself.
That particular stretch of the Canonbury Road seemed to go on for ever and ever; it was timeless, spaceless. He did not notice the few people who passed him in the greyness of the morning; they stared. He had some whisps of straw in his hair; he looked ghastly. He endured. His legs sagged at the knees. He came to the end of Astey’s Row, and was vaguely aware of the great plane tree. He arrived at Eleanor Richmond’s gate, opened it, staggered up the path. Hardly could he get his feet up the steps. His hands fumbled.
4
She opened the door.
He looked ghastly. His eyes stood out in his chalky and unshaven face. His neck was like a cord. And when he tried to speak to her his lips were the lips of a stammerer.
“Eleanor, I’m so cold.”
His eyes expressed a kind of anguish. He was shaking.
“I—I oughtn’t to have come here,—but I’m so cold.”
And suddenly he collapsed. He seemed to crumple up on her doorstep, and before her hands could catch him. Almost his forehead struck the upper step. He did not make a sound. She bent over him, her face had a strange, tragic tenderness, and her strength was sister to it. She got her arms round him, and half raised him and dragged him in, and down the passage to the fire, and even while she was doing it she was aware of how his feet trailed along the polished linoleum. But his hands fumbled at her dress.
He mumbled.
“Shouldn’t have come. Not right. Feel so cold, so sick.”
She laid him in front of the fire, snatched a cushion and put it under his head.
“You ought to have come before. I’ve been waiting, Spenser.”
He made a gasping sound.
“Eleanor,—I—I’m sorry, I’m going to be sick.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
The doctor sat on a chair beside the bed. He had examined Scarsdale’s chest, and he had found that which he had expected to find, for Scarsdale’s trouble was obvious to the trained eye. His eyes were glassy; he lay propped on two pillows with a bright red patch on either cheek, breathing rapidly but shallowly, because breathing hurt him. Especially did that sharp knife pain in his right side catch him when he coughed.
The doctor was a little, stumpy, commonplace man with kind eyes. He folded up his stethoscope and spoke reassuringly.
“We shall have to get you into hospital.”
Scarsdale had turned on the pillow. His glassy eyes stood out; his neck was like a stalk.
“Hospital.”
“Certainly.”
“O, just what you think best, doctor.”
He watched the doctor’s black bulk remove itself from the room. His forehead wrinkled itself up, and his hands lay palms upwards on the coverlet. They too consented. The fever was strong in him, but his grasp upon life was very weak, and he wanted nothing but to be allowed to breathe without pain, to sleep, to sink into forgetfulness. They were sending him to hospital, and he was going to die. He wanted to die, it would be so right and final, the logical solution, the gentle closing of a door.
The doctor was speaking to Mrs. Richmond in the passage.
“I think I can get him into the Royal Free. I’ll telephone, and arrange for an ambulance.”
Her face had a stillness.
“Couldn’t he stay here?”
“Too much nursing—you know. Besides—”
“Day and night?”
“Exactly. He may have a better chance there. He seemed worried about my fee.”
“He would be. You will let me know, doctor, and I’ll tell him it is all settled.”
She put a hand to her cheek.
“What do you think—? Will he?”
“O, these thin people do pretty well. He’s not been a drinker, I gather.”
“No. I have never seen him touch anything.”
“Good. I’ll get along and ring up the hospital.”
She stood at the window for a moment after the doctor had gone, and the window showed her the backs of other houses and a small strip of sky in the north-east, that so very English sky. Could anything be more grey and deplorable and dead? It might be November, but then more than half the English year was November, a cold wet blanket ready to be applied to any illusion, and especially the illusion of happiness. But she caught herself up; it was useless to allow oneself melancholy musings, idle regrets in the cold green sadness of a northern May mood, for the English sky was like life, rain on the meadows, wind in the woods. She crossed the landing to the door of Scarsdale’s room, opened it and went in.
His glassy eyes fixed themselves on her. His breathless voice uttered her name.
“Eleanor.”
She sat down beside the bed. She had every appearance of calmness.
“Don’t worry. The doctor wants you to go to hospital. He is sending an ambulance.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll go. I’ve been such a nuisance to you.”
She laid a hand on one of his.
“No, nothing of the kind.”
“Eleanor,—I owe you a week’s money, and the doctor. If you look in my suitcase you’ll find a tobacco tin with some money in it.”
Her hand exerted gentle pressure.
“Don’t worry, Spen. There is nothing to worry about. You have got to keep your strength. And don’t talk. Just give up.”
He was silent, but his hand moved itself and clasped hers. His anxious face showed a little flickering smile.
“You don’t mind, Eleanor, do you? I’ve often wanted to hold your hand. You’re so—so different.”
Her fingers closed on his.
“Now, just lie still.”
“Yes,—I’ll give up. I’ve always been such a failure, Eleanor. It’s as it should be—somehow—this. I shan’t be any more bother to anyone, no more bother to myself. Such a failure.”
She bent over him and kissed his forehead.
“No, not that.”
He lay still; he was exhausted, and she sat beside him till the ambulance men came, and wrapped him up in blankets and carried him to the ambulance that was waiting in Canonbury Road at the end of the Row. She walked with them to the ambulance. She laid a hand for a moment on one of his.
“You are going to get well. I shall come and see you. Remember.”
2
For five days Scarsdale’s consciousness was blurred. The fever ran high, and the business of breathing was always with him; he coughed, and his head ached, and thirst was upon him. He lay in a long ward, with a red screen round his bed, for a case of pneumonia can be distressing to others. For two nights he was delirious, and uttered strange cries and was full of a busy, breathless anguish. Fantastic delusions drifted about inside his head. He was lying next to Marwood, and Marwood would keep talking on the most preposterous subjects, though Scarsdale’s delusion was that both he and Marwood were dead. They were broiling somewhere in a place of stuffy heat where the air steamed, and on occasions an imaginary Marwood persisted in sitting up in bed while picking his shirt. Also, there were times when Marwood had no face, but a sort of formless bag of pulpy flesh that emitted sounds.
But on the eighth day Scarsdale came back to life. It
was as though he had drifted suddenly over a bar into calm water where everything was still, and the bed itself had ceased to rock and leap, but lay like a boat in the midst of tranquillity. Scarsdale saw the windows and walls, and his own hands lying on the coverlet, and the two hummocks that were his knees and his feet, and the faces of the patients on either side of him. People came into him round the screen, nurses, and the matron, and the doctor. They were kind people, astonishingly kind people. Their kindness made him want to weep.
The face on his left lay and regarded him. It was an old face with a grizzled moustache and wrinkles and haze-blue eyes. It spoke to Scarsdale.
“Well, mate, you’ve done it.”
Scarsdale’s response was vague and perplexed. Almost, he felt accused.
“Done what?”
“Pulled through. You’ve cheated the old gentleman. Good biz.”
And suddenly Scarsdale wept. The tears ran down his face, though he did not know why he was weeping. He was so weak, and even a kind and casual voice affected him absurdly. He was like a very small child. His consciousness seemed to grope at all this newness, nor did he yet grasp life as a thing that was very old, a repetition, a beginning all over again, the same old sum on the same old slate. The anguish of that realization waited for him.
It came to him suddenly when they took the screen away. He saw the rows of beds, and the ward tables. He was alive and among other men, and some of them were sitting up and reading. One old fellow had spectacles perched on his nose. He was alive among other men, horribly and nakedly alive, and confronting other faces and other problems, the weary business of living, and of getting a living.
He was horrified; he was afraid. He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, but the blackness was peopled with a hundred distressful thoughts. He felt paralysed with fear, helpless in the presence of the dreadful reality, the knowledge that he had to go on living. What would he do? What could he do? He shivered. And then he was aware of a presence. He opened his eyes and saw the face of the doctor; he stared at it like a very young child.
He asked a question.
“Doctor, am I going to get well?”
“Why, of course. You are doing splendidly.”
And Scarsdale wept. He did not want to get well.
The night that followed was the uttermost edge of misery. He could not get to sleep. He lay quite still, with his eyes shut and his hands clenched, and his consciousness was a mirror in which all the woes of the world were reflected. He did not want to live. He was a preposterous failure. He would always be a failure. He had no prospects of earning a living, and no home to go to. He could not return to Astey’s Row, and Eleanor Richmond was well rid of him. She had been kind, just as these nurses and the doctor had been kind, perhaps because he was too futile a person to be trodden on. He was an old skin that had burst when the new wine was poured into it.
He lay awake half the night, while the life of the ward went on. Someone was snoring exultantly; here and there a figure moved restlessly under the bedclothes; the night-nurse sat by the fire. She too reacted to the sound of snoring, and she rose and going to the bed of the snorer, shook him gently. He woke with a start and a grumble.
“What’s wrong?”
“You are snoring terribly; you are keeping some of the others awake. Lie on your side.”
The man answered her in a husky whisper.
“Sorry, Miss. I’ll try it.”
She came down the ward and paused at the foot of Scarsdale’s bed. She had been watching Scarsdale; she was one of those women with gentle, patient souls, and a strange love for the sick. Her intuition walked the ward, and she seemed to know by instinct when some case was in distress or trouble. She had divined Scarsdale’s agonized wakefulness; his eyes might be shut and his body still and stiff as a board, but she felt that all was not well with him.
“No. 12, you are not asleep.”
Her accusation was whispered.
“No, nurse.”
“Any pain?”
“No, nurse.”
“You must go to sleep.”
She fetched something in a glass, and supporting his head, made him drink it.
“Doctor’s orders. Sleep’s what you want.”
He gazed up at the gentle dimness of her face.
“Yes—I know. Thank you, nurse. You’re all so good.”
Her gentleness and her voice soothed him as potently as did the sleeping draught. His spirit consented; it lay still; a drowsiness descended upon him, and intermingled with it was a sense of surrender. He seemed to divine some presence that transcended all the shamefulness and the sorrows of life, its little sordid scuffles, its cynicism, its jealousy and greed. A figure floated near him, woman, a face of compassion, hands that ministered and strengthened. He fell asleep, and beyond the closing wings of his consciousness were other wings.
3
The sun was shining. It might be only a transient and a November sun, and the lord of a frosty morning, but it penetrated into the hospital ward and fell upon human faces. Even the coverlets of the beds looked the brighter for it, and the man next to Scarsdale indulged in a surreptitious, muted whistling.
“No Number 13 in this ward, mate.”
Scarsdale was propped up on pillows, and his eyes were regarding a vase full of chrysanthemums on the ward table. Marvellous things—flowers. They did not ask you for anything.
“No Number 13. How’s that?”
The whistler quizzed him.
“What! You’re twelve, and I’m fourteen. Ain’t you noticed it?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a fact.”
But how significant a fact, and Scarsdale found himself reflecting upon it with a childish innocence. He and his neighbour, by some marvellous interposition of providence, had eluded that unlucky number. And what was the omen? Were they to be immune from all the thirteens of life, like the flowers on the ward table? How very pleasant to be a flower, to arrive at that state of perfection without any display of effort. What an absence of fuss and of fury, for flowers had not to fight for motor-buses, and think of shoe-leather, and frown over exports and imports, and worry about the rent. What a pity that the product of man’s toiling and moiling could not evolve like a flower.
The voice at his side interrupted his sentimentalizing.
“Wash and brush up—tuppence.”
Scarsdale observed an amazing thing. The fellow was busy on his finger-nails, and using a match end and a pair of scissors. What was this absurd ritual?
“My gel’s coming to-day.”
“Oh!”
“Visiting day. Got to do somethink abart it.”
Visiting day! Was it conceivable that he too might have a visitor? There was but one visitor in the world for him, but even while envisaging her possible coming he felt both eager and afraid. His heart beat faster, and its contractions were too violent for his weak body; they shook him; they seemed to shake the bed. He tried to calm himself, and lying very still he looked at the flowers and told himself that most certainly she would not come, that she had work to do, and that he had no right to hope for anything. And were she to come what would he say to her? That he was getting well, that he would have to begin life over again and try to find work to do? But Astey’s Row was closed to him. He could not dream of going back there, and of imposing himself upon her.
He began to feel very sad. He both yearned and feared, and when they gave him a book to read he tried to fix his attention upon it, but the book would not possess him. It was a crime story, rather crude and unpleasant, and he laid it aside and made it appear that he was asleep. He envied the chirrupy optimism of his neighbour with the scissors and the match-stick. He lay there pretending to be asleep until the doctor and the attendant matron and nurse arrived on their official round. He opened his eyes with an assumption of innocence.
“Well, how’s No. 12?”
Scarsdale smiled a little, wincing smile.
“Better, doctor.”
“Very well.”
He was examined, and his state was approved of. Pulse and temperature were down, the chest clearing, the bowels open. The doctor patted his shoulder.
Scarsdale looked anxious.
“Doctor, can I see people?”
“Well, that depends. Not a whole crowd. Ten minutes perhaps, but not much talking.”
Scarsdale’s eyes transferred their anxious glance to the face of the matron. She nodded at him consentingly, and smiled.
4
Scarsdale’s suspense concealed itself in scepticism. He lay with his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, because he both feared that she would come and that she would not come. He could hear the voices in the ward, and the footsteps of the visitors making their way to the various beds. There were salutations. From somewhere close to him came the sound of a hearty and wholesome kiss.
“O,—Jim.”
“Give me another one, Sally. Some tonic, what! Talk about peaches!”
He of the match-stick had not laboured in vain, and Scarsdale tried not to listen to the simple, unselfconscious chatter. But his ears were troubled, and in the wilful darkness he waited for footsteps to draw near to his own bed, but no one came, and a sudden sense of desolation descended upon him. He felt abandoned. But what right had he to feel like that? He had no claim upon Eleanor Richmond; he had no claim upon anybody. He wanted to weep.
A voice said, “Spen, are you asleep?”
He turned his head and opened his eyes with a start. She was sitting there beside him, and for a moment he could not believe it. She had come to him so silently, but then she was always so silent and easy in her movements. He lay and looked at her. She was in black. He felt that he could lie and look at her for ever, at the calm, dark-eyed comeliness of her. He moved a hand. And suddenly two silly tears trickled.
“Eleanor, you’ve come.”
His poor face twitched. She put out a hand and took hold of his tentative, unsure fingers. Her eyes dwelt upon him.
Old Wine and New Page 31