CHAPTER IX

ALAS! POOR HELIA!

Phil had been struck down by a rush of blood to the brain. For a long time he had been living as in a dream. His fits of absent-mindedness had already amazed Suzanne. Too artificial a life, constant exasperation, his fierce persistence at work which was beyond his present strength, and the ravages of a fixed idea had prepared him for brain-fever. The ruin of his guitar picture was the last blow.

Suzanne quickly drove Socrate out of the room, and took the mattress which was lying on the floor and put it back in its place. She hastily made the bed, and then, with the help of Poufaille, placed Phil on it. He was still without motion, pale and bloodless, like a dead man.

Suzanne ran to the Charité Hôpital. She was acquainted with some of the young hospital doctors, and she explained the case as well as she could. One of them followed her to Phil’s studio and made a long examination of him. As soon as he entered the disordered room with its tale of want, the young doctor understood all; he had already cared for victims like this of the ideal.

Phil came back to life and moaned feebly.

“He is not dead!” Suzanne said.

“People don’t die like that!” the doctor replied, continuing his examination. “Tell me how it happened.”

Suzanne told the doctor everything.

“It is as I thought,” he said. “We’ll pull him out of it. But, first of all, take away all those canvases—put the room in order; and those portraits of a young girl, always the same one, there along the wall—take them all away! You must deliver him from that vision when he comes back to himself!”

“But he can’t live without her,” Suzanne said.

The doctor smiled sadly.

“If he only remembers her!” he murmured. “No lesion; long overdoing followed by anemia, too strong emotion, and doubtless some fixed idea,” the young doctor rambled on as he looked at the portraits of Helia which Poufaille was taking down. “It’s a kind of intoxication of the nervous system—a railway brain, as it were; we’ll give him things to build him up, and rest and silence in the meantime.”

“Doc—doctor!” Poufaille stammered, livid with fear, “is the disease catching?”

“No fear!” the doctor answered, as he glanced at the hairy face of Poufaille, with its crimson health. “It only comes from exaggerated intellectual functions.”

“Oh, I’m better already!” said Poufaille, reassured.

Phil was delirious for a week.

His mind, sunk in abysses of sleep, made obscure efforts to come back to the light of day. Sometimes an ocean of forgetfulness rolled him in its waves. Sometimes great flashes of light illuminated his consciousness in its least details and gave to his dreams the hard relief of marble.

Oftenest he simply wandered, mingling Helia and Suzanne, seeing in his nightmare guitars, yellow on one side and blue on the other, like worlds lighted up at once by sun and moon—a whole skyful of guitars, amid which, motionless, the skull of the poet-painter-sculptor-musician thought constantly, never sleeping—until the thought burned like a red-hot iron, and then Phil put his hand to his own burning forehead and asked for something to drink.

But there was some one to anticipate his wish. A gentle hand raised his head on the pillow and an anxious face bent over him, seeking to read his eyes, now dulled, and now brilliant with the light of fever.

“Is it Helia?” Phil asked.

“It is I!” Helia answered. “Don’t speak—rest! You must rest!”

Yes, Helia had come back. Suzanne, in her belief that Phil was on the point of dying, had not been able to resist the impulse to write to her. It did not occur to Helia to ask if the disease was catching. She gave up everything. She paid her forfeit, took her leave of absence, her own good money going to pay another attraction as a substitute. Nearly all her savings went in this way—but she heeded it not. Nothing in the world would have held her back. She had to be with Phil. She alone had the right to tend him. Another with her own betrothed in time of danger? No!

Helia nursed him night and day. Suzanne helped her, and Poufaille did the errands, going for food to Mère Michel’s and for scuttles of coal to the _charbonnier_. From morning to night his heavy shoes shook the staircase.

“Why don’t you give him wine?” he said, as he looked at the sick man.

“Why not goat’s-milk cheese?” retorted Suzanne. “Will you keep silence, _grand nigaud_? Go and get some wood!”

“And the money to buy it with?”

“Here!” Helia said.

With what joy Helia watched Phil’s progress toward health!

“Dear, dear friend, my little Saint John,” Phil said to her. “How can I ever thank you for all you are doing for me!”

He kissed her hand or put it to his burning forehead. Once he rose up and looked around the room saying: “Who is there?”

“It is I—Helia!”

“Who is Helia?”

“Helia, your friend—your Helia; I am here with Suzanne!”

“Out, wretches!” And he fell back exhausted.

“Leave him alone,” said the young doctor. “In a fortnight he will be on his feet and I’ll send him to the country.”

Helia, who was forced to depart, went away. Her leave was over. Besides, she had no more money. Phil grew better and better. At first he was surprised to find his room so changed.

“Where are my pictures?” he asked. “What have you done with them?”

“We’ve put them one side—you can see them later,” answered Suzanne.

“What were they about?” inquired Phil. “Anyway, it’s all the same to me!”

The young doctor, with the good-fellowship that binds students together, accompanied him to a public sanatorium not far from Paris. From that moment Phil changed visibly. He who had been so anemic in the vitiated atmosphere of his studio, with his nose always over his oils and colors, and his eyes fixed on the canvas, in Socrate’s company, had now abundance of pure air and walks through the open fields. He felt himself reborn, although his head was a little empty and his body stiff and sore like one just taken from the torture-rack. But good food and quiet did wonders for him. He had an excellent constitution, made for work and struggle, and it came up again.

With a beefsteak an idea would arrive; and with a glass of wine joy entered his heart. His blood, renewed, gave him new feelings. He had again become a man, after the illness in which his youth had been shipwrecked.

Helia, anxious to see him, came back one day. How difficult it had been for her—slave to her profession as she was, and still bound to it for many months! Never mind—she came! Phil was better, Phil was cured. She would have his first smile; he would be her Phil in health as in sickness. But at the gate of the sanatorium a magnificent guardian, adorned with brass buttons and a gilt-banded cap, stopped her. It was society closing its doors to the intrusion of vagabonds. This man of law and order asked Helia why, how, in whose name, by what right, she wished to see Phil, and he refused the favor to her, the mountebank who—had one ever seen the like?—pretended to be his betrothed!

* * * * *

Phil came back to Paris cured. Strength and the daring of courage returned with him. His long rest seemed to have increased his energy tenfold. He went forth from his past as one escapes from a prison, without even looking backward. The young doctor had guessed only too truly: Phil had forgotten many things!

Phil, who had received some unexpected money from his uncle in Virginia, now changed his _quartier_, and set himself up in better style; and the Salon medal gave him his start. His professor made him acquainted with the Duke of Morgania, who ordered from him the great decorative picture of Morgana. The Comtesse de Donjeon asked his aid for her charity sale.

One effort and then another, and this time Phil would reach the goal. He had one of those happy dispositions which attract luck as the magnet attracts iron filings. He was ready; life was open before him like slack water at sea; there was only wanting to him a good breeze to swell his sail.

From what side was it to blow?