The Great Fog (26 page)

Innes's eyes were now watching something at the curtain with such intensity that Hamilton could not but believe that there was a “presence” between him and the wretched maniac. It was all the more horribly convincing as he saw Innes's eyes drawing in their focus, and, a moment after, Innes's body creeping back, as though giving way before someone approaching him. But, of course, he couldn't give way.

“Take care!” shouted Hamilton. But Innes, dreading something else far more, had stumbled back into the leaping fire.

Hamilton snatched him out. “Shock,” he said, trying to pull himself together, when it was clear there was no use trying any longer to pull the patient round. “Of course, I knew that he'd got to hate her like hell. But naturally he hadn't the nerve to pull off a murder—or even a suicide. But it's the fatal shock all right. And,” he paused in his quick muttering to himself, “were all those—happenings coincidences? Better call the police. Thank heaven, they're even more spirit-proof than we doctors. Still, it's one more queer story for a posthumous case-book.”

THE ROUSING OF MR. BRADEGAR

Mr. Bradegab was not alarmed. That would have been an exaggeration, and a disparaging exaggeration—which is, in itself, so unusual as to awaken doubt. But Mr. Bradegar had been waked in an unusual way, in a way which—he would have been quite happy to allow it, had there been anyone to make happy by the allowance—might well have been alarming to a more highly strung nature. Indeed, the trouble about this sudden summons back from dreams to reality was that Mr. Bradegar was quite at a loss to know what it was that had summoned him. It was not “rosy-fingered dawn.” A glance hadn't shown much—indeed, had shown so little that it seemed clear that dawn wasn't in the offing and would not be for a long while; otherwise you ought to see where “the casement grows a glimmering square.” No—if he had his bearings right—it is hard to be sure when you are waked too quickly—but to the best of his knowledge, the window was where he was looking, and there was no suspicion of a glimmering square about it. Well, ears might be better than eyes. With the fingers of his upper hand, which, with its under fellow, had been folded near his face in the attitude of fetal humility, which we resume when he would rest, Mr. Bradegar got ready to push back the edge of the sheet, under which he lay up to the ears—then paused.

What was that? A rustle? No, it was only the small sound made as his too-vigilant ear moved on its own, obeying an impulse almost as ancient as his sleeping pose, trying to cock itself, but only succeeding now in producing a small sound—the sound of its own movement against the sheet edge—instead of detecting an external disturbance. He must have his ears clear if his eyes wouldn't work. There, now he was unlapped. It was his good ear, too; so he must be lying on his left side! so, again, he must be right about the window and, further, about the time, within limits. It was his good ear, because he could hear the discrete pulse of the mantel clock. Yes, he was now quite awake and had himself well arranged in relation to his whereabouts. He noticed, too, that his heart was beating more slowly. He reflected on this. “I must have had a start in my sleep. Perhaps it was only a dream.”

He worked the back of his neck a little deeper into the pillow until he was quite comfortable, gave up staring into the dark, but still left his “weather ear” uncovered. Half over on his back, he could keep a casual watch until sleep relieved him. It evidently was closer at hand than he thought, for in no perceptible length of time he found himself of the opinion that he was out in the street, just about to cross, when a small dog ran in front of him, turned its head, and barked sharply, “Wake up!” Mr. Bradegar obeyed instantly and, as instantly, he was aware that the same whatever-it-was that had first startled him to wakefulness must have done it again. His ear was still uncovered; the window still as noncommittal; only the mantel clock, after a soft preliminary whirring, began to strike—if strike is not too emphatic a word for its perfect night-nurse manner. But it hadn't much to say: “One, Two.” Mr. Bradegar also noticed again that his heart had evidently caught on to this thing even before it had waked him. It was slackening down from a more rapid pace. “Dormio, sed cor …” he quoted to himself.

Two
A.M.
The heart should now be at its slowest. Poor old thing, having to put in some overbeats, when it should be on its half time. Mr. Bradegar was sensibly concerned—not alarmed—about his heart. “Guest and companion of my clay,” he quoted again; a little more sadly and secularly this time; for sixty years beating away to get him enough energy—to be born, to fight at school, row himself blind at college, pull himself, for a dozen seasons, to the top of two score Alpine “first-class” peaks, and leap down the throats of “the opposing attorney” and his witnesses, day after day, for half a lifetime. It was a reputable record for a soft piece of sinew which has to be as precise as the best clockwork and as ready as a rattler. He must give it a chance. That is what Wilkinshaw, the big heart man, had said. “Give it a chance—” and give me a hundred dollars for asking you to do what you intend! Easy job, these big doctors; easier than ours in the courts. I'd never have been able to pay to ask him to disapprove of the pace I've had to live at if I hadn't worked harder than he ever had to work. “Give it a chance!” I never could let my heart or anyone else have a chance till I was over fifty. Heart and head, lungs and liver, kidneys and skin, all had to stand the racket, or give if they couldn't.

That was why he was alone. Mabel wouldn't stand for it, nor the two girls. They sided with their mother. Girls usually don't. One of them nearly always likes her father. But both went with Mabel. “Mental cruelty!” If all day you've been getting their living, and they wanted a lot, by watching like a pike to see if the other fellow couldn't be snapped up, you couldn't turn off the trick when you came home. You'd got into the way of striking as quickly, as surely, as automatically as a sidewinder. Well, they wouldn't stand for it. So here he was now with his heart to watch, and nothing else. He'd done well and, he'd hoped, as soon as he was through with getting on, he'd get liked. He'd do the things—he'd have time—that get you liked: the big, generous things with which the big, easy, famous men convince everyone, everyone who now wants to forget that they were ever small, keen, mean. They're formidable still, of course, but in such a grand way. They just go on getting their way, but with no more than an inflection of the voice—they don't have so much as to raise a finger any longer. The old proverbial success of success. But—“Where are the monuments of those who were drowned?” “Nothing succeeds like succession: nothing succeeds like surcease.” The phrase “declined” itself, as one used to say of verbs in school grammar lessons.… He was trying to memorize the whole conjugation. There was only a little time. The clock above the desks showed that the preparation hour was nearly over. He had learned all the other irregular verbs but this silly one: “Success, succession, surcease”—How did the rest of it go? “Success, succession, surcease, decease, death, cremation”—that was it—not a very irregular verb, after all: you could tell each declension from the one before pretty well. He'd be able to remember it when called out to say it in front of the class. He looked up at the clock again. It was just going to strike the hour but, instead, it remarked in a sharper tone of voice, “Wake up!”

Mr. Bradegar once more sprang to attention to find as before that he was horizontal, sheet-swathed, pillow-sunk—and had once more missed the tide. He
had
been called, but by the time he'd hurried up to the doors of his body, the summoner, like a “ring-and-run” street urchin, had made off. But had it? Mr. Bradegar's mood, which had nearly risen to the vigorous daylight state of irritated disappointment, suddenly sank, sank to apprehension. Perhaps he wasn't going to be disappointed this time? Perhaps, this time, the ringer hadn't run?

He was now fully awake and realized how keenly sorry he was that he wasn't going to be disappointed. “This is the third time I've been roused,” he remarked to himself. There was a gentle whirring, and, as if in answer to his half-question, the clock announced that it was Three. But, whether it was because he was more awake this time, the tone of voice in which his timepiece made this, its third, summons to a new day, struck Mr. Bradegar as being a trifle more peremptory, less deferential than the discreet summons of an hour ago. Then it had almost seemed to say by its tone, “Excuse me, Sir, but should you be wishing to know the precise hour, I beg to inform you that it is just two
A.M.
” Now its stroke rather suggested, “Take it or leave it,” with perhaps even a hint of, “But if you do slip off again I'm not responsible if you never wake up in time.”

But what was Mr. Bradegar meant to do? He was roused, but for what? The only thing was to set oneself to listen. Putting on the light wouldn't throw any on what might be present but which always seemed just to have done what it was up to and escaped into the past. “If I did put on the light,” he reflected, “I'd only have the unpleasant feeling that whatever it is that's nibbling at me had been looking right at me the moment before I pressed the switch.” That thought was so unpleasantly convincing that Mr. Bradegar, who had been vainly peering over the sheet's fold into the dark, involuntarily shut his eyes—only for a moment, he felt sure. But the clock had another opinion. Mr. Bradegar was all ears as, having started striking, as if worked up to a kind of angry protest, the clock went on making its points like a lawyer pressing a conviction: “One, Two, Three, Four.” “What?” thought Mr. Bradegar. “Five, Six.” Six! And there was no doubt that the clock's tone was as harshly startling as the information it imparted.

Mr. Bradegar's attention flooded from ears to eyes. He opened them, found the sheet was over them, pushed it aside with an impatiently anxious finger—and, in a flash, realized what had happened. His whole body signaled it. Every sense, with a sort of cannonading broadside, thundered the fact. He blinked his eyes—yes, the room was light, but he could see only faintly, blurredly. He moved his legs, yes, with difficulty. He knew at once: he was not the sort of fool that fools himself. He knew how to diagnose that curious sense of constriction, that feeling as though one were walking along the foot of the bed, that imaginary sensation. Of course, it was the typical projection phenomenon, the massive sensation-pattern similar to the acute nerve response which the leg-amputation patient feels when he says his toes are being pinched.

Mr. Bradegar again stretched a little, to be quite sure. Yes, there wasn't a shadow of doubt—that illusion of being restricted, of touching the foot of the bed, could mean only one thing. He knew he couldn't actually be doing so, because, as it happened, he'd had that bed built to make impossible precisely that horizontal nocturnal ambulation. As a boy he'd hated a too-short bed in which he'd been made to go on sleeping when he'd outgrown it—really a child's cot—and he'd made a promise to himself, which he'd kept, that when he grew up he'd have a footless bed and one in which, stretch as you would, you just couldn't touch the end. Mabel had laughed at him and, later, had been annoyed. He'd grown to be a tall man. She'd said a seven-foot bed was nonsense—looked positively unbalanced. He'd replied that a bed was balanced if it stood steady on its four feet and, anyhow, it wasn't for looks but for closing your eyes in. Of course, she'd replied that, at least as long as they were up and about, she didn't see why her mouth should be shut by his snapping. It was one of those useless, fruitless, but fecund quarrels. They'd found by then that they could quarrel over anything, by the time he was making enough money for her always to be wanting more, and he without any time but to make it.

He felt with his foot once more. Not a doubt of it. Well, he'd like to see Mabel's face when she heard the news—remorse for a moment, then relief—until his lawyer, whom she'd ring up quick enough, gave her the will in brief.

Thinking of Mabel's face reminded him to repeat the visual check-up. He opened his eyes again, which had closed as he felt about with his feet under the bedclothes. True enough, eyes answered to toes, repeating the first message that they'd given him at the clock's summons. His eyes confirmed the numbed constricted feeling of his legs, interpreting the general condition in their particular terms. He was seeing as blurredly as he felt numbly. He'd face the music: those starts in the night, he knew now exactly what they were. One, two, three, the little lesions had taken place. He'd had a serial stroke: he was quite extensively paralyzed.

He pulled himself together inwardly, as outwardly he must leave himself sprawled—“As the tree falls, so shall it lie.” He was alone in the house (he began his summary of his situation), not in pain—well, that was a reasonable expectation. But, more, he felt wonderfully light and fresh. Indeed, if he hadn't known beyond a doubt that he was extensively paralyzed and perhaps on the verge of death, he would actually-funny thought (he began actually to chuckle), he would have thought he was wonderfully well—indeed, years younger than when he had crawled under the sheets to begin the night.

He wished a moment that he'd troubled to ask his other friends who'd had strokes whether they'd felt this lightness, freshness, this absurd sense of being free and careless. Perhaps they had all felt it. He'd often heard doctors say that many of the insane are happier than when they had their wits. Consumptives, too, they're peculiarly optimistic just before their final hemorrhage. So it would be that when your brain is wrecked you have illusions of being young, a sort of mental face lifting—he chuckled again, and the thought floated out of his mind. He felt so careless and so easy that it wasn't worth thinking about anything very long. That was perhaps the funniest part about it all—to be so completely at one's ease, to feel so well in one's body that one didn't care about anything else, when, as a matter of fact, everything, mind, body, and estate were gone.