Part 79 (1/2)

”I shouldn't be afraid,” said Rose, ”if it was me.”

”It's because I've been so happy.”

”You'll be 'appier still when it's come. It'd make all the difference to me if I 'ad a child. But that's what I haven't and never shall have.”

”You don't know. You don't know.”

”Yes. I do know.” Rose's mouth trembled. She glanced unaware at the pillow that lay so smooth beside her own. ”I 'aven't let on to him how much I want it. I wouldn't” (Rose steadied her mouth to get the words out). ”Not if it was ever so.”

”You darling,” said Jane, and kissed her, and at that Rose burst into tears.

”I oughtn't to be keeping you here,” she said. And they left the bedroom.

”Aren't you coming in?” said Jane.

Rose had turned away from her at Tanqueray's door.

”I can't,” she whispered. ”Not with me eyes all swelled up like this.”

She went down-stairs to her little kitchen, where in the half-darkness she crouched down beside Minny who, with humped shoulders and head that nodded to the fender, dozed before the fire.

x.x.xVII

Laura Gunning was writing a letter to Tanqueray to congratulate him on his book and to explain why she had not come to his birthday party. It was simply impossible to get off now. Papa, she said, couldn't be left for five minutes, not even with the morning paper.

It was frightfully hard work getting all this into any intelligible form of words; getting it down at all was difficult. For the last hour she had been sitting there, starting and trembling at each rustle of the paper. Mr. Gunning could not settle down to reading now. He turned his paper over and over again in the vain search for distraction; he divided it into parts and became entangled in them; now he would cast them from him and trample them under his feet; and now they would be flapping about his head; he would be covered and utterly concealed in newspaper.

It was a perpetual wind of newspaper, now high, now low; small, creeping sounds that rose to a crescendo; rus.h.i.+ng, ripping, shrieking sounds of agitated newspaper, lacerating Laura's nerves, and murderous to the rhythm of her prose.

Tears fell from Laura's eyes as she wrote; they dropped, disfiguring her letter. Her head ached. It was always aching now. And when she tried to write she felt as if she were weaving string out of the grey matter of her brain, with the thread breaking all the time.

At four o'clock she rose wearily and began to get tea ready. Nina was coming to tea that afternoon. It was something to look forward to, something that would stave off the pressure and the pain.

Her tether had stretched; it had given her inches; but this was the end of it. She did not see, herself, now, any more than Nina or Jane or Tanqueray saw, how she was to go on. She did not know how, for instance, she was to face the terrible question of finance. For the last six months she had not written any paragraphs. Even if Papa had not made it impossible for her to write them, her head and all the ideas in it were giving out. She had lost her job. She was living precariously on translation, which could be done, she maintained, when you hadn't any head at all. She would get twenty pounds for it, and there would be forty, perhaps, for the book which she had been sitting up to write. She did not know where the money for next year was coming from; and there were the doctor and the chemist now to pay for poor Papa.

The doctor and the chemist had not cured him of his dreams. The dreams were incessant, and they were more horrid than they had ever been. She hadn't slept for fear of the opening of the door, and the sound of the slow feet shuffling to her bedside, and the face that took on more and more the likeness of the horrors that he dreamed.

The dreams, she had gathered, were a very bad sign. She had been told that she must be on the look-out; she must not leave him. She knew what that meant. Her fear might take shape any day or any night.

Last night she had moved her bed into his room.

The doctor had looked grave when she told him what she had done. There should be, he said, an attendant for the night. To be on the look-out night and day were too much for any woman. She should husband her strength, for she would want it. She was in for a very long strain. For the old man's bodily health was marvellous. He might last like that for another ten years, and, with care, for longer.

Nina had been drawn apart into the inner room to receive this account of Mr. Gunning. She was shocked by the change she found in her little friend. The Kiddy was very thin. Her pretty, slender neck was wasted, and her childlike wrists were flattened to the bone. A sallow tint was staining her whiteness. Her hair no longer waved in its low curves; it fell flat and limp from the parting. Her eyes, strained, fixed in their fear, showed a rim of white. Her mouth was set tight in defiance of her fear. Nina noticed that there was a faint, sagging mark on either side of it.

”Kiddy,” she said, ”how _will_ you----?”