Chapter XII: Part III: I (4)

The sheer, grotesque truth of it drove him to an ironical assent.

"As you say, another woman----"

"_Oh, la la_! So there was once upon a time a ver' serious young man who forget to be quite serious. _Voyons_--you 'ave to tell me all now--just as I tell you."

He turned on her then. In five brief, savage sentences he had told her of Frances and the woman in the hospital. And when he had done he read her face with its tolerant good-humour, and the full enormity of it all burst over him like a flood of crude light. He turned away from her stammering:

"I've no business here--I've no business to be your doctor--or anyone's doctor. I think I must be going mad."

She shook her head.

"No--no--only too serious, _mon pauvre jeune homme_. But I like your--your Francey. I think she and I be good friends some'ow. She would see things 'ow I see them."

(He thought crazily:

"Yes, she would sit by you and look over your shoulder at your rotten life, and say: 'So that's the way it seems to you? And you're right. It's been a splendid joke.'")

"One of these days you be friends again too. And then you give 'er my leetle pearl. Say it's from Gyp, who is sorry she made so much trouble. Why not? You think it make her sad? It is not for that I give it you. It is to give you pleasure too."

He was labouring under an almost physical distress. She was poking fun at him, at herself, at death. She was making him a partner of thieves and loose women. And yet:

"It must not make you sad at all. When you see it you laugh--just as you laugh when I dance because I dance so ver' bad. Look 'ere, I 'ave something that you give me too." She dived back into the box and brought out a shilling lying side by side with the pearl in the palm of her open hand. "You tell 'er--that was all poor Gyp was worth to you, Monsieur Robert."

He had taken it. She tried to laugh out loud, triumphantly, the famous laugh. And then grey agony had her by the throat. She turned her face from him to the wall.

He felt that the old woman had risen. She was moving towards them. He said quietly:

"At least I can relieve you."

She made a passionate, absolute gesture of refusal. An astonished nurse had entered. He gave brief instructions. He said good-night, not looking at the limp, quiet figure on the bed, and went out.

He knew that he had seemed competent, unhurried and unmoved as befitted a man to whom death was the most salient feature of life.

But he knew also that he had fled from her.

In the crowd that went with him that night were Francey Wilmot and Connie Edwards and Cosgrave and all the people who had made up his youth. There were little old women who were Christines, and even James Stonehouse was there, tragically and hopefully in search of something that he had never found. Any moment he might turn his face towards his son, and it would not be hideous, only perplexed and pitiful.

It was as though an ugly, monstrous mass had been smashed to fragments whose facets shone with extraordinary, undreamed-of colours.

Not only the bodies of the people drifted with him, but their lives touched his on every side. It became a sort of secret pressure. They were neither great nor beautiful. They were identical with the people he had always seen on the streets and in the hospitals, sickly or grossly commonplace, but he could no longer judge them as from a great distance. He was down in the thick of them. They concerned him--or he had no other concern. He was part of their strangely wandering procession. He looked into their separate faces and thought: "This man says 'I' to himself. And one day he will say: 'I am dying' (as Marie Dubois said it)." And he recognized for the first time something common to them all that was not commonplace--an heroic quality. At least that stark fact remained that at their birth sentence of death had been passed upon them all. Before each one of them lay a black adventure, and they went towards it, questioning or inarticulate, not knowing why they should endure so much, but facing the utter loneliness of that final passage with patience and great courage.

It was not ridiculous that they should demand their immortality, the least and worst of them. Whether it was granted them or not, it was a just demand, and the answer to it more vital than any other form of knowledge. For it was conceivable that one day they would be too strong and too proud to play the part of tragic buffoons in a senseless farce.

In the meantime men might well be pitiful with one another.

"What was it she had said?"

"Nothing that you've gone through is of any use if it hasn't taught you pity."

("Oh, Francey, Francey, if I had told you that Christine was dead would it have helped? Would you have had more patience with me?")

The quiet and emptiness of his own street restored him in some measure to his aloof scepticism. But even then he knew there was a disruptive force secretly at work in him, tearing down stone by stone his confidence and courage. He was afraid of shadows. A bowed figure crouched against the railings of his house checked him as though a ghost had lain in wait for him. He passed it hurriedly, running up the stone steps. The sound of a thin, clear voice calling him made him turn again, his head thrown up in a sort of defiance.

"Monsieur--excuse--excuse--I wait 'ere so long. They tell me you come back 'ere perhaps. But they don't know I 'ave come. I creep out---- Monsieur she cannot sleep--she cannot sleep. They don't do nothing. It is not right. I cannot 'ave it--that she suffer so."

He came back down the steps. He was conscious of having sighed deeply. He looked into the shrivelled, up-turned face, and saw the tears that filled the furrows with a slow moving stream. He had hardly noticed her before. Now she hurt him. A very little old woman. He said briefly, hiding a shaken voice:

"They do all they can. I can do no more."

She reiterated with a peasant's obstinacy.

"I will not 'ave it--I will not--not 'ave it--I cannot bear it."

"Dr. Rutherford is there. I tell you he can do all that can be done. I offered her an injection--she would not have it."

"She pretend--all ze time she pretend. Even before me, 'er mother, she pretend. But I know."

"Her mother!"

He stepped back against the railings, freeing himself fretfully from the hand that clutched his arm.

"If you are her mother she treats you strangely. She treats you like a servant."

"Before others, Monsieur. She is different--of different stuff. We 'ave always understood. If I am to be with 'er it must be as 'er servant. That is our affair. But you are not kind. You let 'er suffer too much. I will not 'ave it."

She drew herself up. She almost menaced him. He saw that she knew. As a physician he had done what lay in his power, but as a human being he had failed utterly and deliberately. Had always failed. And he was aware of an incredible fear of her.

"I will come now," he stammered.

He gave her such sleep that night that it seemed unlikely that she would ever wake again. He knew that he had exceeded the limits of mercy set down by his profession and that the nurse had looked strangely at him. But he was indifferent. It was as though he, too, had been momentarily released.

Nor did he leave her again until the morning, but watched over her, whilst on the other side of the bed the old woman knelt, her face pressed against a still hand, a battered, sullen effigy of grief.

3

From the beginning she had defied the regulations of the hospital, as she had defied the rules of life, with an absolute success. The inelastic, military system bent and stretched itself beneath her good-humoured inability to believe that there could be any wilful opposition, to her desires. The macaw had been a case in point, the gramophone another. After tea the old woman set the instrument going for her, and when the authorities protested, ostensibly on behalf of neighbouring patients, it transpired that the patients rather liked it than otherwise, and there were regular concerts, with the macaw shrieking its occasional appreciation.

She inquired interestedly into her neighbours. She seemed less concerned with their complaints than with their ages, their appearance, and the time when they would return to the outside world. With a young man on her right hand she became intimate. It began with an exchange of compliments and progressed through little folded notes which caused her infinite amusement to a system of code-tapping on the intervening wall, sufficiently scandalous in import, if her expression were significant.

The nurses became her allies in this last grim flirtation, unaware apparently of its grimness.

"Don't you let 'im know I am so bad," she adjured them. "I tell 'im I 'ave a leetle nothing at all, and that I am going 'ome next week to my dear 'usband. I think that make 'im laugh ver' much. 'E is ver' bored, that young man. 'E say if I 'ave supper with 'im, the first night 'e come out 'e won't--'ow you say?--grouse so much. I say my 'usband ver' jealous, but that I fix it some'ow. 'E like that. Promise you won't tell?"

They promised.

She was almost voiceless now. That she suffered hideously, Stonehouse knew, but not from her. He believed--in the turmoil of his mind he almost hoped--that when she was alone she broke down, but before them all she bore herself with an unflagging gallantry. It was that gallantry of hers that dogged him, that would not let him rest or forget. It demanded of him something that he could not, and dared not, yield.

And she was pitifully alone. The woman in the hospital had not been more forsaken by her world. As to Gyp Labelle she went her way, and the gossip columns cautiously recorded the more startling items of that progress. It was as though some clever hand were building up a fantastic figure that should pass at last into the mists of legend.

Men laughed together over her.

"What poor devil of a millionaire has the woman hobbled now?"

It was the matron who showed Stonehouse an illustrated paper which produced her full-length portrait. She sat on the edge of her absurd fountain and her hand was raised in a laughing gesture of farewell. Over the top was written: "Gyp off to Pastures new," and underneath a message which all the daily papers were to reproduce.

"I want this way to thank all the friends who have been so very kind to me. We have had good times together. I miss you very much. I am going to find new friends now, but one day, I think, I dance for you again. I love you all. I kiss my hands to you. _Au revoir_, Gyp."

It was her vanity, that insatiable desire to figure impudently and triumphantly in the public eye. He brought the paper to her. But at the moment she was busy tapping feebly on the wall. She winked at him.

"Sh! I tell 'im I go to-day. I make an appointment--next week--ze Carlton Grill--seven o'clock--'e 'ave to wait a long time, ze poor young man. There, it is finished."

He showed her the picture without comment. He had to hold it for her--hold it very close--for she had exhausted herself with that last gesture of bravado. And then, as she smiled, a protest born of gathering distress and doubt burst from him.

"Why do you allow--this--hideous, impossible pretence?"

He could feel the old woman turn towards him like a wild beast preparing to spring. But she herself lay still, with closed eyes. He had to bend down to catch the remote suffering whisper.

"_C'est vrai_. We 'ave--such good times. And they come 'ere--all those kind people--who 'ave laughed so much--and bring flowers--and pretend it is not true. And they won't believe--and when they see it they won't believe--they won't dare----" She tried to speak more clearly, clinging to his hand for the first time, whilst a sweat of agony broke out upon her face and made ghastly channels through its paint and powder. "_Vous voyez_--for them--I am--ze good times. They come to me--for good times. When they are too sad--when things too 'ard for them and they cannot believe any more--that ze good times come again--they think of me. '_Voyons, la_ Gyp, she 'ave a good time always--she dance at 'er own funeral!' But if they see me 'ere--like this--they go away--and think in their 'earts: '_Grand Dieu, c'est comme ca avec nous tous_--_avec nous tous_,' and they not laugh with me--any more."

Her hand let go its hold--suddenly.

They sent for him that night. Haemorrhage had set in. There was a light burning by her bedside, for she had complained of the darkness. She wore a lace cap trimmed with blue ribbons, but she had not had strength to paint her lips and cheeks again, and the old woman's efforts had ended pitifully. She had grown very small in the last few hours, and with her thin, daubed face and blood-stained lips, she looked like a sorrowful travesty of the little circus clown who had ridden the fat pony and shouted "_Oh la--la_!" and blown kisses to the people.

She smiled vaguely in Stonehouse's direction, but she was only half conscious. Her hand strayed over the gorgeous quilt, stroking it with a kind of simple pleasure.

(She was like that, too, he thought--a dash of gay, unashamed colour in the sad scheme of things.)

Towards midnight she motioned to him and whispered something that he could not understand. But the old woman rose heavily from her knees and went over to the gramophone, thrusting aside with savage resolution the nurse who tried to intercept her. Stonehouse himself made an involuntary gesture.

"Why not?" he said. "Let her alone."

He stood close to her and waited. He felt that some part of him was dying with her, that he stood with her before a black partition which was thinning slowly, and that presently they would both know whatever lay beyond.

The macaw fidgeted on its golden perch, craning towards the light and blinking uneasily as though a strange thing had come into the room. The needle scratched under a shaking hand.

"I'm Gyp Labelle;
Come dance with me. . ."

He bent over her so that his face almost touched hers.

"I'm sorry--I'm sorry, Gyp."

She turned her head a little, her lips moving. It was evident that she had not really heard. But he knew that she had never borne him malice.

And then suddenly it was over. He had broken through. Beyond were understanding and peace and strange and difficult tears. He loved her, as beneath the fret and heat of passion Cosgrave and all those others had loved her, for what she sincerely was and for the brave, gay thing she had to give. He loved her more simply still as in rare moments of their lives men love one another, saying: "This is my brother--this is my sister." From his lonely arrogance his spirit flung itself down, grieving, beside her mysterious, incalculable good.

He could hear the jolly bang-bang of the drum and the whoop of a trumpet. He could see her catherine-wheeling round the stage, and the man with the bloated face and tragic, intelligent eyes.

"Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself."

And she was dead.