In the middle of the night, Anthony, the Jamaican porter, came to knock at his door and call Collis to the ward. Sister Agnes was there, and Sister Rosa, and Father Xavier. They were standing by Hannah’s bed, exhausted and sweaty by the light of an oil lamp, and it was clear that Hannah’s condition had deteriorated even further. She was a terrifying livid yellow, and she was shaking and mumbling in the throes of a freezing fever.
‘She’s conscious,’ said Sister Rosa, a middle-aged nun with a vast bosom and a distinctive limp. ‘That’s why we called you. You may wish to say your goodbyes.’
‘She’s dying?’ asked Collis, looking down at Hannah’s drawn, waxy face. It hardly seemed like Hannah at all, but some grotesque death mask poured out of tallow. Only the flickering eyes and the softly gnashing teeth told him that she was still a real living being; and only the wedding band on her finger reminded him that she was Mrs West.
‘She’s very bad,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘Unless this fever breaks, she may go before morning.’
‘It hardly ever breaks,’ added Father Xavier. ‘In a few lucky cases, perhaps. But you can see for yourself how sick she is.’
Collis looked around at their faces, and then knelt down beside Hannah’s bed. She was murmuring and muttering, and throwing her head from side to side on the pillow, and she was glistening with sweat. Every now and then she coughed, and the coughing brought up dark spatters of blood, which Sister Rosa dabbed away with a muslin cloth.
‘Hannah?’ said Collis.
She moaned, and reached out as if she were trying to seize something out of the air, but she didn’t answer.
‘Hannah?’ he repeated.
This time she simply tossed her head, and snarled and dribbled under her breath.
Collis waited for a moment, and then he stood up again.
‘I think she’s too –’
He couldn’t say the words at all. He pressed his knuckles against his lips to try and regain his composure. In the darkness of Gethsemane Ward, in this hot and overwhelming equatorial night, he knew that Hannah was really lost. The nuns gently surrounded the bed, like settling doves, and patted the sweat from Hannah’s face, but all the patting and the soothing and the selfless care in Christendom wasn’t going to save her from the ravages of yellow jack.
‘Thank you for calling me,’ Collis said. ‘I don’t think there’s much more I can do. Thank you.’
He left the ward and walked back across the garden. He paused at the door of his cottage, and looked up, and suddenly realised the stars were out. The humid clouds which had oppressed Panama City for the past week had at last passed over. He wondered whether it was a good omen, or whether it would simply make it easier for Hannah’s spirit to rise and join the angels she had always been so unhappy without.
In the morning, at ten, she was no better. He waited in the corridor outside Gethsemane Ward for a while, but Sister Agnes wouldn’t let him in. The fever was reaching crisis point. He went back to his cottage and drank the last of a bottle of Spanish wine which Anthony had brought up from the city for him. There wasn’t even enough to get drunk on.
That afternoon, after a lunch of steamed fish and rice, he was driven in the donkey trap down to the offices of the United States Mail Steamship Company, where his ticket for sailing on to San Francisco was endorsed. The California was due to sail out of Panama City at seven on Monday morning, and make her way back up the coast, with stops at Tehuantepec, Guadaljara, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. In the high-ceilinged office with its marble counters and clustered flypapers, Collis had to present a letter to the blue-uniformed Panamanian behind the desk, certifying that he had been kept in isolation after his exposure to fiebre amarilla, and that he was now considered by the sisters of the Hospital of the Sacred Heart to be free of infection. The Panamanian read the letter slowly, tracing each word with the tip of his pencil, and pausing every now and then to regard Collis, with deep mistrust. Finally, he stamped Collis’s ticket, and returned the letter, folded, on the end of his letter opener, lest he catch some disease through touching it.
Collis left the office and climbed back into the donkey trap. The Spanish boy clicked his tongue, and they rattled off through the streets. They climbed the Avenida Central to the wide, rubbish-strewn Cathedral Plaza, under the shadow of the twin brownstone towers, where priests hurried as if Panama were about to sink into the sea, and old men sat and smoked cigars as if they didn’t care if it did. The sun touched the spire of one of the towers and gave it a dazzling halo.
Collis said to the donkey-trap boy: ‘Stop here for a moment, will you?’
The boy, without a word, obeyed, and the trap came to a halt. Collis, his eyes still on the cathedral, climbed out and walked across the plaza. He went up the steps and through the open doors into the musty interior.
It wasn’t a grand cathedral, although it might have been once. There was a gaudy stained-glass window, some of its panes cracked and others missing, and by the Lady Chapel there was a glittering forest of devotional candles, most of them in memory of the dead, of which Panama City had more than its share. Several elderly women were kneeling in prayer, and, unaccountably, a man in a cream linen suit was sitting at a back pew, with a small mirror resting on the hymn-book rack of the seat in front, clipping the hairs in his ears with scissors.
Collis had never been into a Roman Catholic cathedral before, although he had an Irish friend who had once persuaded him to attend a Mass in New York. He shuffled uncomfortably into a pew and knelt down, glancing at the elderly women to see if Catholics prayed any differently from Protestants, and then he closed his eyes and said a prayer for Hannah.
It was a very plain prayer, but he addressed it to the Virgin Mary, because he knew that Hannah trusted and believed in Her. He didn’t ask that Hannah should live. That seemed to be out of everybody’s hands now. But he asked that she find happiness in heaven, and that she be reassured that she had been loved when on earth.
He bent his head forward and rested it on the hard wood of the pew. Under his breath, he whispered. ‘Please give her peace. She deserves that much. Please.’
He knelt there in silence for a while, and then he realised that he had nothing more to ask for. He stood up and left the cathedral, leaving a dollar he could ill afford in the poor box. Across the plaza, under the glaring sun, its skeletal outlines etched away by the heat and the brilliant light, the donkey trap waited. Collis walked towards it, his head lowered, the sun on the back of his neck.
Sister Agnes was waiting for him at the hospital gate. He could see her from a long way off as they scaled the hill. When the donkey trap drew up, she hurried closer and held the brass rail around the seats. ‘You must come quickly,’ she said.
‘What is it?’ he asked her. ‘Is it Hannah?’
She nodded, without answering, and led the way into the hospital, her habit flying out behind her. Collis swung himself down from the trap and followed, through the double oak doors, across the hallway, and down the bare tiled corridor to Gethsemane Ward. He knew that Hannah was dead. He was sure of it. While he had been away fixing his ticket, the Lord God and the Virgin Mary had taken her away from him, and that was all there was to it. He turned into the doorway, and almost bumped into Father Xavier, who was on his way out to see where Collis was.
Collis looked down the length of the ward. At the far end, the gauze screens had been taken down from Hannah’s bed. Three nuns were busying themselves with sheets and pillowcases, and Sister Agnes was walking quickly towards them, telling them to make haste, make haste, in Spanish.
Sister Agnes turned and beckoned to Collis, and it was only when she did so that Collis understood what was happening. As she stepped back, he could see that Hannah was still there in her bed, that Hannah was actually sitting up, propped by pillows, and that she was not only alive but awake. She was vividly white, and her eyes were smudged with exhaustion, but she was alive, and she was awake, and she was even smiling.
Collis walked alon
g the ward, and the ward seemed endless. At last he stood beside Hannah’s bed, while the nuns clustered around and watched him with smug benevolence, little fat-faced girls from Rheims.
‘The fever has broken,’ Sister Agnes said. ‘We didn’t expect it to; but the infection appears to have passed its worst. It seems that Mrs West has survived the disease, praise be to God.’
Neither Collis nor Hannah could speak at first. Collis took her hand, bony and thin after five days of debilitating sickness, and held it between his own hands as if it were the most precious possession he had ever owned. Sister Agnes, who had been cheerfully busy up until now, suddenly turned away and took a handkerchief out of her white habit, and the three young nuns from Rheims, who would probably die themselves within a few months, shed unashamed tears of delight.
‘Hannah,’ whispered Collis, his voice thick with emotion. ‘Hannah, I prayed so hard for this.’
She smiled. Almost inaudibly, she whispered, ‘Dear Collis, thank you.’
Collis looked up to Sister Agnes. ‘When did this happen?’ he asked her. ‘Is she really better?’
Sister Agnes nodded through her tears. ‘Early this morning was the worst time of all. Sister Rosa sat beside her from three until ten. She had a high fever, but she stopped coughing up blood and while you were out she cooled down. We don’t know why. Sometimes, very occasionally, it happens this way. But she has almost certainly overcome the fever, and if she takes care she will soon be well again.’
She paused, and then she said, ‘She is one of the few spared by God to serve Him longer on Earth. I am very happy.’
‘How much longer will she have to stay here?’ asked Collis.
‘A week, probably two. We have to get her strength up if she is not to succumb to the fever again.’
‘It’s a miracle. I can hardly believe it.’
‘Do you want to stay for a while?’ asked Sister Agnes. ‘There’s a chair here. Sister Hilda, the chair, please. You can talk for five minutes, but please don’t tax Mrs West too much.’
‘Sister Agnes?’ said Collis.
The nun half turned, but didn’t look at him directly.
‘I just wanted to say thank you, Sister Agnes,’ Collis told her, trying to convey everything he felt for her in a few simple words. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. Whatever he said, she had her own inner voice that was far more convincing than anything he could ever tell her. She stood there for a moment, still keeping her eyes averted, and then she gave a tiny nod to show that she had heard, before walking quickly along the ward and out through the door.
Collis sat down by Hannah’s bed. He hardly knew what to say to her. She looked as if she had aged fifteen years in five days, and her profile was cut as sharp as white onyx. Her very cheekbones seemed to be translucent, and her blonde hair seemed to have been drained of its pigment by some strange effect of her disease, leaving it as dry and silvery as moonlight.
‘I never believed this kind of thing could happen,’ Collis said. ‘I said a prayer for you in the cathedral on my way back here. It’s like magic.’
Hannah turned to him. Her smile was wan but warm. She reached out for his hand with hers, and he took it again, and pressed his lips to it.
‘God isn’t magic, Collis,’ she whispered. ‘He must have a purpose in saving me. Perhaps He wanted me to know real happiness with you.’
‘I don’t know what His purpose is. I don’t really care. I’m just overwhelmed that He spared you.’
They were silent for a time, and then Hannah said, ‘You must go on without me, you know. To San Francisco. Sister Agnes told me the California is here, and that you went down to book your passage on her.’
‘That was before I knew you were going to be well,’ said Collis. ‘My God, Hannah, that was when I thought that I was going to be burying you by Sunday.’
‘I know. But you must still go.’
‘I won’t hear of it,’ Collis told her. ‘I want to stay here until you get your strength back. From now on, I’m not going to leave you.’
She weakly shook her head. ‘Collis, you’ll have to. I have so much to work out in my mind before we can think of staying together.’
‘What do you have to work out? Do you love me, or don’t you?’
She smiled. ‘I believe I do.’
‘Then that’s all you have to think about.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s much more. I can’t just arrive in San Francisco and tell Walter our marriage is over, and that I want to live with you. I have to prepare the ground properly, in a decent manner.’
‘Walter’s feelings are going to be hurt, Hannah, whether you do it decently or indecently.’
‘I know. But Walter is my husband, and he has been sending me money every since he set up the business. He’s been supporting me, and, in his way, caring for me. It wouldn’t be kind or Christian to desert him so abruptly.’
‘Christian? What does being a Christian have to do with it?’
‘Being a Christian has to do with everything, Collis. You prayed today, remember? You can’t appeal to God with one breath and dismiss Him with the next.’
‘I didn’t mean to be blasphemous, or anything like that,’ Collis said. ‘I just feel that it’s more honest, and probably kinder in the end, if you tell Walter straight away.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ she said. There was a long pause while she swallowed, and regained her breath. ‘But I still want time to think about it, and I still need time to recover.’
‘I can stay here without worrying you, can’t I?’
‘You know you can’t. In any case, you can’t afford to stay in Panama much longer, can you? If you keep on missing boats, the steamship company may ask you to pay a surcharge, and what about making your fortune in San Francisco? The sooner you start, the better.’
‘You really don’t want me around? Is this a gentle goodbye?’
‘No,’ she whispered, ‘it isn’t. But you must let me find my feet. I came very close to death last night. I knew that if I weakened, if I gave in, I would be drawn into the darkness, and that would be the end of me. It was an experience that brought me face to face with myself, Collis, with what I am; as if someone had set up a looking glass before me that showed me my soul as well as my body. I was frightened. I thought that I had actually died. And when I came around this afternoon, while you were away, I believed for a moment that I was in heaven, and not on earth at all.’
Collis stared at her for a while in silence. He understood what she was trying to tell him. She needed to feel more confident about herself and what she wanted out of life before she was prepared to make a final decision about Walter. And she needed something else, too, although she hadn’t said so. She needed to see Walter, to make absolutely sure of her disappointment in him, to check if his whiskers were really as dreary as she had remembered them, and his conversation as dull.
If she didn’t have the opportunity to do that on her arrival in San Francisco, she would be fretful until she did, and that would make any love affair between Collis and herself both irritating and unstable. That was why she wanted Collis to go to San Francisco ahead of her; so that when she came on a later ship, she would be able to go to the store on Montgomery Street at once, unruffled by arguments, and discover among the ribbons and the laces and the button hooks whether there was anything left of her once-rebellious marriage but a steady income, worthiness, and duty.
Collis turned away for a moment, looking down the lines of sick and dying women towards the afternoon sunlight.
‘I don’t know what we have between us, Hannah,’ he said reflectively, ‘but whatever it is, I don’t want to lose it yet.’
‘I don’t, either,’ said Hannah. ‘But you will give me time, won’t you?’
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
Sister Rosa came limping into the ward then, with flowers she had picked from the hospital garden. ‘Mrs West,’ she ordered, ‘you must take a sleep now. You are still very ill.’
> ‘I must go,’ Collis told Hannah. ‘I’ve been overtaxing you.’
‘No, no,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve been marvellous. You couldn’t have been better. My mind will be at rest now.’
‘If you’re better tomorrow morning, we’ll talk some more,’ he said, and gently squeezed her hand. He turned to Sister Rosa and asked, ‘May I kiss her?’
Sister Rosa frowned. ‘That is up to you, Mr Edmonds. The doctors would not disapprove, but I am not so sure about the Almighty.’
Collis bent over Hannah’s bed and brushed his lips against hers. ‘As long as the doctors are happy, I’ll take my chances with the Almighty.’
Then he left the ward, and walked out into the garden, and stood with his hands on his hips, elated, and breathing as if he had run all the way up from the railroad depot.
He saw Hannah briefly at six on Monday morning, attended by Sister Rosa and Sister Hilda. The ward was still in the twilight of pre-dawn, and the nuns walked to and fro like ghosts. Hannah was weak and exhausted, but Sister Rosa told Collis grudgingly that she had eaten a bowl of gruel the night before, and that her condition was much improved.
‘I shall leave my address at the post office when I get settled in San Francisco,’ Collis said softly. ‘In any case, if I don’t hear from you in a month, I shall call around at the store.’
‘I won’t fail you,’ whispered Hannah. ‘I promise I won’t fail you.’
Collis kissed her on her forehead, and then he stood up. He looked down at her for a moment, at her well-boned, animal-attractive face, as if he were taking a mental photograph of her. Then he turned and left the ward, his shoes clicking on the polished floor, and went through to the hallway where his trunk and his bag were waiting for him.
There was no sign of Sister Agnes as he left the hospital in the donkey trap and was taken down the rutted streets in the first light of the day. He looked back once or twice, but he couldn’t even see her face at a window. It wasn’t long before they went around a steep corner, and the Hospital of the Sacred Heart disappeared from sight.
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