Part 10

“You know I would. I will the minute you ask me.”

“I shall never ask you.”

“Why not? I can wait.”

“My dear, for what?” He paused again. “I can’t marry in my mother’s lifetime.”

“Oh, Wilfrid—I didn’t mean that. Your dear, beautiful mother. You know I didn’t.”

“Of course, darling, I know. But there it is.”

He left her at the gate of the cottage where she lived with her father.

As he went back up the hill he meditated on his position. He was right to make it clear to her, now that she had begun to care for him. He would have told her long ago if he had known that she cared. Yesterday he didn’t know it. But to-day there had been something, in her manner, in her voice, in the way she looked at him in the church after his playing, that had told him.

Poor little Effie. She would have nothing either, unless her father—and Effie’s father was a robust man, not quite fifty.

Well—he mustn’t think of it. And he mustn’t let his mother think. He wondered whether he was too late, whether she had seen anything. He tried to slink past the drawing-room and up the stairs. But his mother had heard him come in. She called to him. He went to her, shame-faced, as if he had committed a sin.

Her large, gentle eyes looked at him, wondering. He could see them wondering.

“Wilfrid,” she said suddenly, “do you care for that little girl?”

“What’s the good of my caring? I can’t marry her. I’ve just told her so.”

“It’s too late. She’s in love with you. You should have told her before.”

“How could I if she didn’t care? You can’t be fatuous.”

“No—poor boy. Poor Effie.”

“Mother—why couldn’t I have been brought up to a profession?”

“You know why—you weren’t strong enough. It was as much as I could do to keep you alive.”

“I’m strong enough now.”

“Only because I took such care of you. Only because you hadn’t to go out and earn your own living. You’d have been dead before you were twenty if I hadn’t kept you with me.”

“It would have been better if you’d let me die.”

“Don’t say that, Wilfrid. What should I have done without you? What should I do without you now?”

“You mean if I married?”

“No, my dear. I’d be glad if you could marry. I don’t want to keep you tied to me for ever. If you can get better work and better pay by going anywhere else, I shan’t mind your leaving me.”

“I shouldn’t get anything. I’m not good enough. I shall never be worth more than fifty pounds a year anywhere. We can’t live on that.”

“If you could live on half my income, I’d give it you, but you couldn’t.”

“No. We’ll just have to wait.”

“I hope for your sake, my dear, it won’t be too long.”

“What do you mean, mother?”

“What did _you_ mean?”

“Why, I meant we’d have to wait till I heard of something.”

“You _might_ have meant something else.” She smiled.

“Oh, mother—_don’t_.”

“Why not?” she said cheerfully.

“You know—you know I couldn’t bear it.”

“You’ll have to bear it some day—I’m an old woman.”

“Well, I shall be an old man—by then.”

He tossed it back to her, laughing, as he left her to wash his hands and brush his hair. He laughed, to shake off her pathos and to hide his own.

When he talked about waiting, he hadn’t meant what she thought he meant. He was simply trying to dismiss a too serious situation with a reassuring levity. Waiting to hear of something? Was it likely he would ever hear of anything? Could he have made a more frivolous suggestion?

It was she who had faced it. She had made him see how hopeless their case was, his and Effie’s. He saw it now, as he saw his own face in the glass, between two hair-brushes, a little drawn, even now, a little sallow and haggard. Not a young face.

He would be an old man—an old man before he could dream of marrying. His mother, after all, was only sixty, and she came of a long-lived family. Her apparent fragility was an illusion; she had never had a day’s illness as long as he could remember. Nerves like whipcord, young arteries, and every organ sound. She would live ten—fifteen—twenty years longer, live to be eighty. He was thirty-five now, and Effie was twenty-five. Before they could marry, they would be fifty-five and forty-five; old, old; too old to feel, to care passionately. He had no right to ask Effie to wait twenty years for him.

He must give up thinking about her.

His mother was still in her chair by the drawing-room fire, waiting for him. She turned as he came to her, and held up her face to be kissed, like a child, he thought, or like a young wife waiting for her husband. She put her hands on his hair and stroked it. And he remembered the time when he used to say to her: “I shall never marry. You’re all the wife I want, Mother.”

And now it was as if he had been calculating on her death.

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t. You couldn’t calculate on anything so far-off, so unlikely. He had done the only possible, the only decent thing. He had given Effie up.

II

The doctor had gone. Hollyer went back into his mother’s room. She lay there, dozing, in the big white bed, propped high on the pillows. Through her mouth, piteously open, he could hear her short quick breath, struggling and gasping.

The illness had lasted nine days. Even now Hollyer hadn’t got used to it. He still looked at the figure in the bed with the same stare of shocked incredulity. It was still incredible that his mother’s influenza should have turned to pleurisy, that she should lie like that, utterly abandoned, the neat pile of her hair undone, and her face, with its open mouth, loose and infirm between the two white loops that hung askew, rumpled by the pillow. He knew in a vague way how it had happened. First his own attack of influenza, then his mother’s. His had been pretty bad, but hers had been slight, so slight that it had not been recognized, and through it she had still nursed him. Then she had gone out too soon, in the raw January weather. And now the doctor came morning and evening; she had a trained nurse for the night, and Hollyer looked after her all day.

He had got used to the nurse. Her expensive presence proved to him that he had nothing to reproach himself with; he had done, as they said, everything that could be done.

He knew that the nurse and the doctor disagreed about the case. Nurse Eden declared that his mother would get over it. Dr. Ransome was convinced she wouldn’t; she hadn’t strength in her for another rally. Hollyer himself agreed with Nurse Eden. He couldn’t believe that his mother would die. The thought of her death was unbearable, therefore he denied it, he put it from him. When he left her for the night he would come creeping back at midnight and dawn, to make sure that she was still there.

The little room was half filled by the big white bed. It seemed to him there was nothing in it but the white bed and his mother and Nurse Eden in her white uniform. She had looked in on her way downstairs to tea. Everything was cold and white. On the window-panes the frost made a white pattern of moss and feathers. From his seat between the bed and the fire he could see Nurse Eden and her small, pure face brooding above the pillows as she shifted them with tender, competent hands.

“She’ll be better in the morning,” she said. “She always gets better in the night.”

She did. Always she gained ground in the night under Nurse Eden and always she lost it in the daytime, getting worse and worse towards evening.

The afternoon wore on. At four o’clock old Martha, the servant, tapped at the door. Miss Carroll, she said, was downstairs and wanted to see him. Martha took his place at the bedside.

Every day Effie came to inquire, and every day she went away sad, as if it had been her own mother who was dying. This time she stayed, for the old doctor had stopped her in the Square and told her to get Hollyer out of his mother’s room, if possible. “Talk to him. Take him off it. Make him buck up.”

She sat in his mother’s chair behind the round tea-table and poured out his tea for him, and talked to him about his music and a book she had been reading. When he looked at her, at her sweet face, soft and clear with youth, at her hands moving with pretty gestures, his heart trembled. That was how it would be if Effie was his wife. They would sit there every day and she would pour out his tea for him. He would hear her feet running up and down the stairs.

When she got up to go she said, “Whatever you do, Wilfrid, don’t keep on thinking about it.”

“I can’t help thinking.”

She put her hand on his sleeve and stroked it. At her touch he broke down.

“Oh, Effie—I cannot bear it. If she dies, I shall never forgive myself.”

“Nonsense. Don’t talk about her dying. Don’t think about it.”

She turned to him on the doorstep. “Just think how strong she is. I can’t see her ill, somehow. I see her there, all the time, sitting upright in her chair, looking beautiful.”

That was how _he_ had once seen her, sitting there between the fire and the round tea-table, for years and years, as long as his own life lasted.

But now he saw Effie. Upstairs, in his mother’s room, as he watched, he saw Effie. Effie—the sweet face, and the sweet hands moving. He heard Effie’s voice in the rooms, Effie’s feet on the stairs. That was how it would be if Effie was his wife.

That was how it would be if his mother died.

He would have an income of his own, and a house of his own; he would be his own master in his house.

If his mother died, Effie and he would sleep together. Perhaps in that bed, on those pillows.

He shut his eyes and covered his face with his hands, pressing in on his eyelids as if that way he could keep out the sight of Effie.

III

That evening the doctor came again. He left a little before nine o’clock, the hour when Nurse Eden would begin her night watch. He refused to hold out any hope. She was sinking fast.

As Hollyer turned from the front-door he met Nurse Eden coming downstairs. She signed to him to follow her into the drawing-room, moving before him without a sound. She shut the door.

He was afraid of Nurse Eden; there was something—he didn’t know what it was, but—there was something unbearable in her small, pure face; in the thrust of her chin tilted by the stiff cap-strings; in her brave, slender mouth, straightening itself against the droop of its compassion; and in the stillness of her dense, grey eyes. Her eyes made him feel uneasy, somehow, and unsafe. He was going to sit up with her to-night; but he would rather have shared his night-watch with old Martha.

“Well?” she said.

“He says this is the end.”

“It may be,” said Nurse Eden. “But it needn’t.”

“You’ve seen her.”

“Yes.”

“_Well—?_”

“She hasn’t gone yet, Mr. Hollyer— She’s on the edge. She’s in that state when a breath would tip her one way or the other.”

“A breath?”

“Yes, Mr. Hollyer. Or a thought.”

“A thought?”

“A thought. If I had Mrs. Hollyer to myself, I believe I could bring her round even now.”

“Oh, Nurse—”

“I _have_ brought her round. Night after night I’ve brought her.”

“What do you do?”

“I don’t know what I do. But it works. Haven’t you noticed she gets better in the night when I’ve had her; and that she slips back in the day?”

“Yes, I have.”

“You see, Mr. Hollyer, Dr. Ransome’s made up his mind. And when the doctor makes up his mind that the patient’s going to die, ten to one the patient does die. It lowers their resistance. It isn’t every one that would feel it; but your mother would.”

“If,” she went on, “I had her day _and_ night, I might save her.”

“You really think that?”

“I think there’s a chance.”

He didn’t know whether he believed her or not. Dr. Ransome shrugged his shoulders and said Nurse Eden could try it if she liked. She had a wonderful way with her; but he wouldn’t advise Hollyer to count on it. Nothing but a miracle, he said, could save his mother.

Hollyer didn’t count on Nurse Eden’s way. But he thought—something stronger than himself compelled him to think—that his mother would not die.

And each hour showed her slowly coming back. Under his eyes the miracle was being accomplished. At midnight her breathing and temperature and pulse were normal; and by noon of the next day even Ransome was convinced. He wouldn’t swear to the miracle, but whatever Nurse Eden had or had not done, he believed Mrs. Hollyer would recover.

Hollyer not only believed it, but he was certain, as Nurse Eden was certain. She came to him, radiant with certainty, and told him that his mind could be at rest now.

But his mind was not at rest. It had only rested while he doubted, as if doubt absolved him from knowledge of some secret that he could not face. With the first moment of certainty he was aware of it. It was given to him in physical sensations, a weight and pain about his heart that did not lie. In a flash he saw himself back in his old life of dependence and frustration. There would be no Effie sitting with him in the house, no Effie running up and down the stairs. He would not sleep with Effie in the big, white bed. They would grow old, wanting each other.

He tried to jerk his mouth into a smile, but it had stiffened. It opened, gasping, as his muffled heart-beats choked him.

He went upstairs to his mother’s room. She was sitting up in bed, clear-eyed, almost alert, and she turned her face to him as he entered.

“I don’t know how it is,” she said. “I thought I was going, but there’s something that won’t let me go. It keeps on pulling me back and back.” (Nurse Eden looked at him.) “Is it you, Wilfrid?”

He knelt down and buried his face in the bedclothes by her side. His sobs shook the mattress. The nurse took him by the arm; he got up and stared at her as if dazed and drunk with grief. She led him from the room.

“You’re upsetting her,” she said. “Don’t come back till you’ve pulled yourself together.”

When he went back his mother was sleeping calmly. Hollyer and the nurse withdrew from the bedside to the window and talked there in low voices.

“Did you hear what she said. Nurse?”

“Yes. We can get her through, between us, if we make up our minds she’s to live. Think of what she was yesterday.”

“But do you think we ought to? I don’t want her brought back to suffer.”

“She isn’t going to suffer. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be as well as ever. If you want her to live.”

“Want her? Of course I want her to live.”

“I know you do. But you must get rid of your fear.”

“My fear?”

“Your fear of her dying.”

“Do you think my fear could—could make her?”

“I know it could. Make up your mind with me that she’s going to get well.”

“Supposing she wants to go? Supposing she’s fighting against us all the time?”

“She isn’t fighting. She hasn’t any fight in her— Now, while she’s sleeping, is the time. You’ve only got to say to yourself ‘She shall live. She’s going to live.’ There—you sit in that chair, make yourself quite comfortable, shut your eyes, and keep on saying it. Don’t think of anything else.”

He sat down. He said it over and over again: “She shall live. She’s going to live. She shall live—” He tried to think of nothing else; but all the time he was aware of the dragging of his heart. He shut his eyes, but he couldn’t get rid of the vision of Effie. Effie sitting in his mother’s place. Effie sleeping beside him in the big bed.

“She _shall_ live. She’s going to live.” The words meant nothing. Only the dragging weight at his heart had meaning. And it didn’t lie.

He thought: If that’s how I feel about it, I’d better keep my mind off her.

Then he was aware that he was tired, dead beat, too tired to think. And presently, sitting upright in the chair, he fell asleep.

He was waked by Nurse Eden’s voice calling to him from the bed: “Mr. Hollyer! She’s going!”

His mother lay in the nurse’s arms, her head had fallen forward on her chest, her mouth was open; and through it there came a groaning, grating cry. Once, twice, three times; and she was gone.

After the funeral Hollyer went up into his mother’s room. Nurse Eden was there, removing the signs of death. She had covered the bed with a white counterpane. She had opened the door and window wide, and a flood of clean cold air streamed through the room.

“Nurse,” he said, “come here a minute.”

She followed him into his bed-sitting room on the other side of the landing. Hollyer shut the door.

“You remember that night when my mother got better?”

“Indeed I do.”

“Do you still think you brought her back?”

“I do think it.”

“Do you really believe that a thought—_a thought_ could do that?”

“Yes.”

“But it doesn’t always work. It breaks down.”

“Sometimes. That night she died I felt it wasn’t working. I was up against a wall. I couldn’t get through. But remember, before that, she was going when I brought her back.”

“Could a thought—another thought—kill?”

“It depends. Perhaps, if it was a very strong thought. A wish.”

Her queer eyes looked through him and beyond him, not seeing him, seeing some reality that was not he. He had gone to her for her truth and she had given it him. A wish, even a hidden wish, could kill. In the dark, secret places of the mind your thoughts ran loose beyond your knowing; they burrowed under the walls that shut off one self from another; they got through. It was as if his secret self had broken loose, and got through to his mother, and had killed her secretly, in the dark. His wish was a part of himself, but stronger than himself. The force behind it was indestructible, for it was a form of his desire for Effie; so that while he lived he could not kill it.

It had been there all the time, cunningly disguised. It was there in his fear of Nurse Eden; it was there in that obstinate belief of his that his mother would live. His beliefs were always the expression of his fears. He had been afraid that his mother would not die. That was his fear. He saw it all clearly in the moment while Nurse Eden’s voice went on.

“But it wasn’t _that_, Mr. Hollyer,” she was saying. “We were all wishing her to live— No. I think she was too far gone. She had got beyond us.”

It was too late for Nurse Eden to go back on it. He knew. He was certain.

IV

He knew, and if he were to keep on thinking about it—but he was afraid to think. You could go mad, thinking. The moment of his certainty remained in his memory; he knew where to find it if he chose to look that way. But he refused to look. Such things were better forgotten.

He told himself there was nothing in it. Nothing but Nurse Eden’s hysteria and vanity. She wanted you to believe she was wonderful, that she could do things. She didn’t really believe it herself. In her own last moment of honesty she had confessed as much. He was a fool to have been taken in by her.

Meanwhile, three months after his mother’s death, he had married Effie Carroll. Her father, who had held out against the engagement, surrendered suddenly on the day of the wedding, and made his daughter an allowance of fifty pounds a year. He said he didn’t want to profit by her folly, and the fifty pounds were no more than the cost of her keep.

It was horrible to think they should owe their happiness to his mother’s death; but as things had turned out they didn’t owe it; they could have married even if she had lived. And as he had now no motive for wishing her dead, he almost forgot that he had ever wished it.

Not that Hollyer reproached himself; his tendency, when he thought it all over, was to reproach his mother. He had found out something about himself. Before he married he had gone to Dr. Ransome to be overhauled, and Ransome had told him there was nothing much the matter with him; never was. And if the old pessimist said there wasn’t much the matter, you might depend upon it there wasn’t anything at all. Except, Ransome said, molly-coddling; and that wasn’t Hollyer’s fault.

“Whose was it, then?” Hollyer had asked. “My mother’s?”

“No. Your dear mother, Hollyer, had no faults. But she made mistakes, as we all do.”

“You mean, if I’d been allowed to live like other people I’d have been all right?”

“Well—you weren’t a very robust infant; and later on there _was_ a slight risk. Personally, I’d have taken it. You must take some risks. But your mother was afraid. You were all she had. And I daresay she wasn’t sorry to keep you with her.”

“I see.”

He saw it clearly. He had been sacrificed to his mother’s selfishness. Nothing but that had doomed him to his humiliating dependence, his poverty, his intolerable celibacy. He found himself brooding over it, going back and back to it, with a certain gratification, as if it justified him. His mind was appeased by this righteous resentment. When the remembrance of his mother’s beauty and sweetness rushed at him and accused him he turned from it to his brooding.

He had begun to talk, to say things about his mother. Put into spoken words his grievance seemed more real; it acquired validity.

He had felt so safe. His mother couldn’t hear him. She would never know what he thought about her; he would have died rather than let her know. And he had only talked to Effie. Talking to his wife was no worse than thinking to himself. After all he had gone through, he felt he was entitled to that relief.

It was June, a hot, close evening before lamplight; they were sitting together in the drawing-room, Effie in his mother’s chair and he at his piano in the recess on the other side of the fireplace. And there was something that Effie said when he had stopped playing and had turned to her, smiling.

“Wilfrid—are you happy?”

“Of course I’m happy.”

“No, but—really?”

“Really. Absolutely. You make me happy.”

“Do I? I’m so glad. You see, when I married you I was afraid I couldn’t. It was so hard to come after your mother.”

He winced.

“How do you mean? You don’t come ‘after’ her.”

“I mean, after all she was to you. After all she did. Your life with her was so perfect.”

“If it’s any consolation to you, Effie, it wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t?”

“No. Anything but.”

“Oh, Wilfrid!”

He seemed to her to be uttering blasphemy.

“It’s better you should know it. My dear mother didn’t understand me in the least. My whole up-bringing was a ghastly blunder. If I’d been let live a decent life, like any other boy, like any other man, I might have been good for something. But she wouldn’t let me. She pretended there was something the matter with me when there wasn’t, so that she could keep me dependent on her.”

“Wilfrid _dear_, it may have been a blunder and it may have been ghastly—”

“It was.”

“But it was only her love for you.”

“A very selfish sort of love, Effie.”

“Oh _don’t_,” she cried. “Don’t. She’s _dead_, Wilfrid.”

“I’m not likely to forget it.”

“You talk as if you’d forgotten— If the dead knew—”

If the dead knew—

“If they knew,” she said, “how we spoke about them, how we thought—”

If the dead knew—

If his mother had heard him; if she knew what he had been thinking; if she knew that he had wished her dead and that his wish had killed her—

If the dead knew—

“Happily for us and them, they don’t know,” he said.

And he began playing again. He was aware that Effie had risen and was now seated at the writing-table. As he played he had his back to the writing-table and the door.

The book on the piano ledge before him was Mendelssohn’s _Lieder ohne Worte_ open as Effie had left it at Number Nine. He remembered that was the one his mother had loved so much. His fingers fell of their own accord into the prelude, into the melody, pressing out its thick, sweet, deliberate sadness. It wounded him, each note a separate stab, yet he went on, half-voluptuously enjoying the self-inflicted pain, trying to work it up and up into a supreme poignancy of sorrow, of regret.

As he stopped on the closing chord he heard somewhere behind him a thick, sobbing sigh.

“Effie—”

He looked round. But Effie was not there. He could hear her footsteps in the room overhead. She had gone, then, before he had stopped playing, shutting the door without a sound. It must have been his imagination.