Chapter XXII

The very fact that Anthony had fought with the image of Kitty for months undermined his resistance to her; the sight of her set him ablaze, and there was nothing left in him which could put out the fire. He turned his eyes from her only because she possessed the universe. As long as he was sure of her presence, he could go on behaving as if she were not there; but from the moment the big door swung behind him and his sight was robbed of her, he lost all other consciousness.

It was a cold, raw evening in December, unhappy flakes of snow fell without direction or intent, and changed instantly to moisture on the pavement. Henry acquired a taxi with precision. He said something about skidding and something about the evening having been a pleasant one, and he was prepared to share the comfort of the taxi with Anthony; but Anthony shook his head. He stood there ambiguously without offering to give the taxi driver Henry’s address. Henry gave it himself, finally, and dissolved like the uneasy snow, leaving Anthony to the wet streets and his persistent phantom.

Everything held Kitty, each darkened window, each hard bright light, each flying taxi. Anthony saw over and over again her thin wrists and hands, the hollows under her eyes, the mocking spirit of her laughter. What did it cover? What dreadful thing was Kitty hiding? What had attacked and eaten away her youth?

The physical aspect of her dimmed all other questions; he did not ask himself who the man was she had with her, or why she was in London. Sickeningly and with increasing pressure fear and memory rushed over Anthony. He saw the apple-orchards in June, he remembered how the buttercup-fields sailed toward him on their sea of gold, but fear was in every image of that returning spring. His heart beat uneasily under the vision of beauty.

All these things were Kitty. She had the mastery of the green hills and open skies. She was the breath of meadow sweet and the songs of birds; he saw again the innocent, reckless Kitty of his dreams. But why was she so changed and thin—what haunted her gay eyes and shadowed her soft lines and delicate curves? She was like a spring on which a blight has fallen.

When Anthony reached his empty rooms he walked to and fro till the late winter morning sent its unlovely, muffled light into the room; then he lay down on his bed without undressing. Sleep caught him and flung him like an enemy.

When he awoke it was late, and he could hurry through the early details of his day and let the hurry blind him. Anthony was only aware of an intense uneasiness awaiting him. He had to take a minor bone operation at the hospital for Hilton Laurence. It was a tedious, ticklish small operation on which Anthony could force his mind; he did not let himself think of anything beyond it. The usual instruments, the heavy net of the ether fumes filling the theater, came down like a shelter between him and his stalking fear.

After the operation he went the round of his wards, but here the sense of emergency died out and refused to support him.

The patients felt the quality of Anthony’s attention was different; there was no strength in it. He looked at them, listened and commented on what they told him, but the force he used on them and for them was no longer there. It was reserving itself for an unknown ordeal; they could not touch it.

Anthony stopped to look at his bone case, slowly coming back to consciousness from the world into which the ether had mercifully plunged him. The white, inexpressive face on the pillow, with drugged, blank eyes, roused in him a sense of envy. This man could get through his worst moments buried in unconsciousness. Anthony was alive and aware as a man tied to a stake and facing flame is aware.

He prolonged his work till the late afternoon, and then hurried with a desperate sense of frustration toward Trevor Road. It was an unexpected small road lying between two main thoroughfares, a small, unmeaning little byway of low, fawn-colored houses.

The street was respectable, but dingy; it seemed planted there without intention, and it was difficult to imagine Kitty in any place so unobtrusive and so without the forms of life.

Peckham opened the door to Anthony, and Peckham, too, was changed. Her face was older and smaller than Anthony remembered it. She had faded, and become uncertain of herself. Her standards of life had fought with her love for Kitty. Love had, in the end, triumphed, but at the expense of Peckham’s solidity; she could go on serving Kitty without believing in her, but there was less of Peckham left to serve.

She was glad to see Anthony, but her eyes told him that though she would rather see him than any one else, he had come too late to save her ruined standards.

She said a little dryly:

“It’s a long time, sir, since we’ve seen you. You’ll find Miss Kitty up-stairs; she has the front room on the right.”

Kitty had the most expensive spot in the inexpensive house. There were more windows and heavier curtains in her room than in any of the others, and it was filled with larger pieces of insignificant furniture. Massive, curious-headed chrysanthemums bloomed oddly in hideous vases, and a box of chocolates lay unopen on the table.

There was a fog outside, and some of it had crept into the overloaded little room and given it an air of mystery. Kitty was sitting over the fire, crouched on a large blue-velvet footstool.

Her small, white face had a look of stubborn suffering. She glanced unsmilingly at Anthony over her shoulder.

“You’ve come, then,” she said; “you’d have been more sensible not to. It’s such a boring day! I don’t say I wouldn’t be pleased to see the Angel Gabriel walk in with his last trump. It would be some kind of sensation, anyhow. I’ve always thought the day after the judgment would be rather fun. It’ll be such a joke rubbing it into the other goats that they’re in the same box as you. There are sure to be some pious ones who thought they’d get off cheap and leave you to the burning.

“What do you think of my new quarters? Third-class lodgings rather remind one of hell, don’t they?” She waved her hand in the direction of the spotty, leaden oil paintings on the walls. “It’s not very amusing, is it?”

“You’ll have to tell me why you’re here before I can say whether it’s amusing or not,” said Anthony, carefully. “People’s idea of amusement differ. I didn’t find ‘Yellow Slippers’ entertaining last night, for instance.”

“It was better than the alternative, anyhow,” said Kitty, defensively. “Fancy being shut up with these spiky book-cases and blue roses all the evening! Personally, I consider my present surroundings a certificate of my respectability. Poor old Peckham! You might tell her it strikes you like that; it would please her. I shouldn’t stay in a place like this if I were going in for gilded rapture, should I?

“The truth is, I’m stony broke. I’ve forgotten all about the two ends somebody or other tries to make meet. I haven’t even got one; and if I had, I’d sell it for twopence.”

Anthony’s eyes rested on Kitty’s jeweled fingers and on her barbaric dress of wallflower and old gold.

“Well,” he said, “you ought to see your way to twopence.”

“That’s clever of you,” she said approvingly. “Any one else would have offered me fifty pounds, and I should have no use whatever for fifty pounds. What I want is five thousand a year and no questions asked.”

“Even that,” said Anthony, “you might get if you put your mind to it.”

“Not without questions,” said Kitty, quickly. “If people do anything for you at all, they want to know what you do with it, and all about you. Then they try to make you do something else. Curiosity is so tiresome! I never want to know anything I don’t know already; the kind of things you can be told aren’t the least interesting.”

“I’m afraid they have a distinct interest for me,” said Anthony, slowly. “I came here to find out one of them to-day.”

Kitty looked at him appealingly.

“Didn’t you just come to see me?” she murmured. “Don’t ask silly questions, and after I’ve warned you so nicely, too, and I wasn’t feeling nice when you first came in. I might quite easily stop being nice now if you bother me about anything.”

“Kitty,” interrupted Anthony, “I’m sorry, but I don’t care a damn whether you’re nice or not. I’ve got to find out now what is the matter with your shoulder.”

Kitty stammered in a gust of frightened anger. She flung her head back, and her face grew pinched and changed, as a flower withers and alters under a touch of frost.

“What do you mean?” she said sharply. “There _is_ nothing the matter with my shoulder. You’re stupid and interfering. I wish you hadn’t come.”

“Still, I have come,” said Anthony, “and I’ve got to find out.”

He got up and took her very gently by both arms. She twisted under his hands, and struggled madly against him like a wild thing.

“Let me go!” she muttered between clenched teeth. “I hate you! I’ve always hated you! Let me go, Anthony!”

But he did not let her go. He held her with a gentle force against which all her struggles failed her. She sank passively against him; the wild throbbing of her whole being stilled itself. She neither fainted nor cried.

Her eyelids covered her eyes. There was no color in her face except the delicate touches of rouge that stained its deadly whiteness. Anthony carried her over to a small, hard sofa by the window and laid her down on it. She was no heavier than a child.

Kitty opened her eyes and smiled at him. Her anger was gone as suddenly as it had come.

“Do what you like,” she said, shutting her eyes again. “After all, it doesn’t really matter what anybody knows.”

Anthony fixed his face so that, if she looked at him later, she would not see his expression change. He was aware of what he had to meet, and he knew that he must show nothing. The strength of her resistance to him had been the strength of her fear. He became aware of every sound in the small room: the muffled noises of the foggy street; a stir below him in the dining-room, where some visitors were pushing back their chairs; the plunge and vent of the small flames in the fireplace; and Kitty’s light, swift breathing under his hands.

He made his examination methodically and quickly. It was what he had feared, but it was worse, because not even Anthony had dreamed that Kitty could bear in silence such a burden of hidden pain. The lump on her shoulder and beneath her arm extended in a long line down her side; the growth had probably been very rapid for the last six months. It was already close to the wall of her lungs, if the poison had not already invaded it. He guessed from the unstable lightness of her breathing that the invasion had already taken place.

He finished his examination without comment, drawing the shimmering dress lightly over her deadly secret. He knew that Kitty’s eyes were on him now, and he turned his own to meet them. They showed her nothing but his steadiness.

“I hate lying down,” said Kitty, impatiently. She pulled herself up by a hand on his shoulder, shivered a little, and moved back to the fireplace. For a while neither of them spoke; then Anthony broke the haunted silence.

“It may be one of two things,” he said quietly. “I must get a second opinion before I decide which it is. Hilton Laurence had better see you with me to-morrow; but if you don’t mind, I must ask you a few questions first. I think we can do something about it, you know.”

“Oh, but I don’t want anything done,” said Kitty, quickly; “that’s just why I haven’t told any one. I arranged it all in my mind—you see, I hate fuss and doctors and nurses. I was afraid from the first it might be rather bad, and I simply won’t be an invalid. Directly I’ve had as much as I can stand, I shall send Peckham off for a holiday and then I shall go away by myself, to some nice, undisturbed place, and take veronal. It’s just been a kind of race between the fun and the pain. I didn’t mean to stop until I’d had enough fun, and I meant to stop if I had too much pain; but after I’d decided—it was—it was enough—” Anthony lowered his eyes. The room was foggier than before. Kitty leaned forward a little. The words that came from her seemed forced against her will; they crept out into the dim air like frightened things. “I’ve had enough pain now,” she whispered.

Their hands groped for each other. Anthony knelt down beside her and put his arms round her waist. He held her to him as if he could hold off the onslaught of all enemies; but it was Anthony who broke down.

Kitty drew his head into her lap and stroked his hair.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said under her breath. “It’s not as bad as you think. It’ll be all right, Tony. I won’t go on too long. I’m glad you know after all. I didn’t want you to, because I hate the—the ugliness; but you mustn’t mind so much. You see, my life isn’t really anything very important. I’m just waste—like a bit of dust that dances in the sunlight. It looks pretty jumping up and down, but when the light’s gone, it’s only dust.”

“Don’t, Kitty! don’t!” said Anthony. “I can’t stand it. I’m so horribly strong myself, and I can’t use my strength for you. I can’t get any of it out.”

“But there isn’t anything for you to worry about,” Kitty urged. “I’ve had all the things I wanted—I mean all the things I could have if I’d lived to be a hundred—and it would bore me awfully to grow old and fat, perhaps, with wrinkles. Now I shall just slip out, nicely and young, without any fuss.”

Anthony pulled himself together.

“Not yet,” he said, “Kitty darling. You haven’t begun to have the things you want yet, because I hadn’t got them to give you before; now I have. Only give me a chance. Let me fight your pain! For God’s sake, Kitty, let me fight it!”

She looked curiously down at him.

“How funny of you to care still,” she said, “when I thought I’d killed it! Dear old Tony, I didn’t mean you to have this wretched time. What is it that you want me to do?”

“Be patient,” he urged her; “do what I tell you. I’ll have to see Hilton Laurence first before I’m sure, but there are things that can be done for you. I admit it’s a fight, but you’ll have the whole of us on your side. Everything I am and everything I can do will go into this fight, Kitty.”

Her eyes looked gravely at him. She seemed to be weighing for him and for him alone the cost of what he asked her. She shut herself out of it as completely as if she had already ceased to exist. Then she said gently:

“All right, old boy. I promise you I won’t back out of it.”