‘I suppose it is,’ I said.
‘How badly are you ill?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. The doctors don’t know either.’
‘It may be serious?’
‘Yes, it may be.’
She was staring full at me.
‘I don’t think you’ll die in obscurity,’ she said in a high, level voice, with a curious prophetic certainty. She went on: ‘You wouldn’t like that, would you?’
‘No,’ I said.
Somehow, in her bleak insistence, she made it easier for me. Her eyes were really like searchlights, I thought, picking out things that no one else saw, then swinging past and leaving a gulf of darkness.
She tried to talk of the future. She broke away again: ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you’re more frightened than I should be.’ She considered. ‘Yet you can put on a show to fool your lawyer friends. There are times when you make me feel a child.’
The day went on. Once she said, without any preliminary: ‘Darling, I wish I were a different woman.’
She knew that I was begging her for comfort.
‘Why didn’t you love someone else? No decent woman could let you go like this.’
I had said not a word, I had not embraced her that day. She knew that I was begging for the only comfort strong enough to drive out fear. She knew that I craved for the solace of the flesh. She had to let me go without.
At Mentone I sat on the terrace by the sea, happy in the first few days as though I were well again, as though I were sure of Sheila. I had never been abroad before, and I was exhilarated by the sight of the warm sea, the quickening of all the senses which I felt by that shore. Some of my symptoms dropped away overnight, as I basked in the sun. The sea was so calm that it lost its colour. Instead it stretched like a mirror with a soft and luminous sheen to the edge of the horizon, where it darkened to a stratum of grey silk. It stretched like a mirror without colour, except where, in the wake of each boat that was painted on the surface, there was pencilled, heightening the calm, a dark unbroken line.
And when the Mediterranean summer broke into storms, I still had a pleasure, a reassurance of physical well-being, as I stood by the bedroom window at night and, through the rain and wind, smelt the bougainvillea and the arbutus. Turning back to see my bed in the light of the reading lamp, I was ready to forget my fears and sleep.
An old Austrian lady was living in the hotel. Because of her lungs she had spent the last ten years by the Mediterranean; she had a viperine tongue and a sweet smile, and I enjoyed listening to her talk of Viennese society in the days of the Hapsburgs. Inside a fortnight we became friends. I used to take her for gentle walks through the gardens, and I confided in her. I told her as much about my career as I had told Charles March; and I told her more of my love for Sheila and my illness than I had told anyone alive.
Slowly that respite ended. Slowly the illness returned, at first by stealth, so that I did not know whether a symptom was a physical fact or just an alarm of the nerves; one day I would be abnormally fatigued, and then, waking refreshed next morning, I could disbelieve it. Gradually but certainly, after the first mirage-like week, the weakness crept back, the giddiness, the sinking of the ground underfoot. I had provided myself with an apparatus so that I could make a rough measure of my blood count. While I felt better, I left it in my trunk. Later, as I became suspicious of my state, I tried to keep away from it. Once I had used the apparatus, quite unrealistically I began going through the process each day, as though in hope or dread I expected a miracle. It was difficult to be accurate with the little pipette, I had not done many scientific experiments, I longed to cheat in my own favour, and then overcompensated in the other direction. By the third week in August I knew that the count was lower than in July. It seemed more likely than not that it was still going down.
I used to wake hour by hour throughout the night. Down below was the sound of the sea, which in my first days had given me such content. I was damp with sweat. I thought of all I had promised to do – instead, I saw nothing but the empty dark. In my schooldays I had seen a master in the last stage of pernicious anaemia – yellow-skinned, exhausted, in despair. I had not heard of the disease then. Now I knew what his history must have been, step by step. I had read about the intermissions which now, reconstructing what I remembered, I realised must have visited him. For six months or a year he had come back to teach, and seemed recovered. If one were lucky – I thought how brilliant my luck had been, how, despite all my impatience and complaints, no one of my provenance had made a more fortunate start at the Bar – one might have such intermissions for periods of years. Lying awake to the sound of the sea, I felt surges of the fierce hope that used to possess my mother and which was as natural to me. Even if I had this disease, then still I might make time to do something.
Sometimes, in those nights, I was inexplicably calmed. I woke up incredulous that this could be my fate. The doctors were wrong. I was frightened, but still lucid, and they were confused. Apart from the misshapen cells, I had none of the true signs of the disease. There were no sores on my tongue. Each time I woke, I tested my tongue against my teeth. It became a tic, which sometimes, when I felt a pain, made me imagine the worst, which sometimes gave me the illusion of safety.
In those hot summer nights, with the sea slithering and slapping below, I thought of death. With animal fear, once or twice with detachment. I should die hard, I knew. If the time was soon to come, or whenever it came, I was not the kind to slip easily from life. Like my mother, I might manage to put a face on it, while others were watching: but in loneliness, in the extreme loneliness before death, I should, again like her, be cowardly and struggling, begging on my knees for every minute I could wrench out of the final annihilation. At twenty-five, when this blow struck me, I begged more ravenously. It would be bitterly hard to die without knowing, what I had longed for with all the intensity of which I was capable, any kind of achievement or love fulfilled. But once or twice, I thought, with a curious detachment, that I should have held on as fearfully and tenaciously if it came twenty or forty years later. When I had to face the infinite emptiness, I should never be reconciled, and should cry out in my heart ‘Why must this happen to
me
?’
After such a night, I would get up tired, prick my finger, extract a drop of blood and go through my meaningless test, then I had breakfast on the terrace, looking out at the shining sea. My Austrian friend would come slowly along, resting a hand on the parapet. She used to look at me and ask: ‘How is it this morning, my dear friend?’
I said often ‘A little better than yesterday, I think. Not perfect–’ For it was difficult to disappoint her. A bright concern came to her eyes, intensely alive in the old face.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘when autumn is here, perhaps we shall both be better.’
Then each day I had to wait for the post from England. It arrived just before teatime; and as soon as it arrived I was waiting for the next day. I had written to Sheila on my first morning there, a long, loving, hopeful letter; the days passed, the days became weeks, August was turning into September, and I had heard nothing. For a time it did not worry me. But suddenly, one afternoon, as I waited while the porter ran through the bundle, it seemed that all depended on the next day – and so through afternoons of waiting, of watching the postman bicycle along the road, of the delay while they were sorted. At last, each afternoon, the sad and violent anger when there was nothing from her.
In cold blood, knowing her, I could not understand it. Was she ill herself? She could have told me. Had she found another man? In all her caprices she had never neglected a kind of formal etiquette towards me. Was it an act of cruelty? Had I thrown myself too abjectly on her mercy, that last day? It seemed incredible, even for her, I thought, with my temper smouldering, on those evenings as the lights came out along the shore. I had loved her for five years. I would not have treated the most casual acquaintance so, let alone one in my state. Whatever she was feeling, she knew my state. I could not forgive her. I wanted her to suffer as I did.
I wrote again, and then again.
There were other letters from England, some disquieting rumours about George’s indiscretions in the town; the news of the birth of Marion’s child, a girl; a story of Charles March’s father; and, surprisingly, a letter from Salisbury, saying that he had thought I was not so tireless as usual last term and that – if this was not just his imagination – I might like to know that he himself had a minor collapse just after he began to make a living at the Bar. Was he probing, I thought? Or was it a generous impulse? Perhaps both.
From all that news I got no more than a few minutes’ distraction. I was more self-centred than ever in my life. I had no room for anything but my two concerns – my illness, and my obsession with Sheila. All else was trivial; I was utterly uninterested in the passing scene and, for once, in other human beings. I knew that my two miseries played on each other. I had the sense, which all human beings dread, which I was to see dominate another’s existence, of my life being outside my will. However much we may say and know that we are governed by forces outside our control, and that the semblance of volition is only an illusion to us all, yet that illusion, when it is challenged, is one of the things we fight for most bitterly. If it is threatened, we feel a horror unlike anything else in life.
In its extreme form, this horror is the horror of madness, and most of us know its shadow, for moments anyway, when we are in the grip of an overmastering emotion. The emotion may give us pleasure or not, for most of its duration we can feel ourselves in full control; but there are moments, particularly in love, particularly in such a love as mine for Sheila, when the illusion is shattered and we see ourselves in the hands of ineluctable fate, our voices, our protests, our reasons as irrelevant to what we do as the sea sounding in the night was to my wretchedness, while I lay awake.
It was in such moments that I faced the idea of suicide. Not altogether in despair – but with the glint of a last triumph. And I believed the idea had come in that identical fashion to other men like me, and for the same reason. Not only as a relief from unhappiness, but also a sign, the only one possible, that the horror is not there, and that one’s life is, in the last resort, answerable to will. At any rate, it was so with me.
In much the same spirit as I entertained the idea of suicide, I made plans for the future that ignored both physical health and Sheila. I’ve been unhappy for long enough, I thought. I’m going to forget her and get better. I must settle what steps to take. Framing plans that assumed that the passion was over, that I could make myself well by a resolution, plans of all the things I should never be able to do.
Beyond the horror of having lost my will, there was another, a simpler companion of those days. That was suffering. Suffering unqualified and absolute, so that at times the anger fled, the complaints and assertions became squallings of my own conceit, and there was nothing left but unhappiness. It was a suffering simple, uneventful, and complete. It lay upon me as weakness lay on my body. I thought I could never be as unhappy again.
It was the middle of September. I had known this suffering for some weeks, during which it was more constantly with me than any emotion I had known. I was sitting by the rocks, looking over to the mountains, arid in brown and purple, overhung by rotund masses of cloud. The water was as calm as in my first days there, and the clouds threw long reflections towards me – thin strips of white across the burnished sea. Mechanically I puzzled why these lattice-like separate strips should be reflected from clouds which, seen from where I sat, were flocculent masses above the hills.
It was as tranquil a sight as I had seen.
Then, for a moment, I knew that I was crying out against my fate no more. I knew that I was angry with Sheila no more (I was thinking of her protectively, reflecting that she must be restless and distressed); that all my protests and plans and attempts to revive my will were as feeble as a child’s crying to drown the storm; that my arrogance and spirit had left me, that I could no longer keep to myself the pretence of self-respect. I knew that I had been broken by unhappiness. In that clear moment – whatever I protested to myself next day – I knew that I had to accept my helplessness, that I had been broken and could do nothing more.
October came. Term would begin in a few days. I had to make a practical decision, Should I return?
In the past weeks letters had arrived from Sheila, one every other day, remotely apologetic, without any reason for her silence, yet intimate with a phrase or two that seemed to ask my help. I tried to dismiss those letters as I made my decision. I had to dismiss all I had felt by that shore or seen within myself.
My physical condition was no better, but not much worse. Or rather my blood count was descending, though the rate of descent seemed to have slowed. In other respects I was probably better. I was deeply sunburned, which caused me to look healthy except to a clinical eye. That would be an advantage, I thought, if I tried to brazen it out.
If I were not going to get better, it did not matter what I did.
For any practical choice, I had to assume that I should get better.
That assumed, was it wiser to return to Chambers, persist in concealing that I was ill, and try to carry it off? Or to stay away until I had recovered?
There was no doubt of the answer. If, at my stage, I stayed away long, I should never get back. One term’s absence would do me great harm, and two would finish me. I might scrape a living or acquire a minor legal job, but I should have been a failure.
No, I must return. Now, before the beginning of term, as though nothing had happened.
There were grave risks. I was very weak. I might, with discipline and good management, struggle through the paper work adequately; but I was in no physical state to fight any case but the most placid. I might disgrace myself. Instead of losing my practice by absence, I might do so by presence.