Lilith (33 page)
“Oh, you’re a fool!” she said shrilly. “It’s very true—you
are
one of these people. Yes, you must stay here in this town, because you belong here. Ignorant country lout!”
She turned and began to climb swiftly up the slope, either forgetting or abandoning the skull in her anger—as I was very relieved to see. But when we reached the fence where we had left the bicycles she turned and looked back down the hill.
“I must go back and get it,” she said.
“Oh, leave it there. It’s an ugly thing.”
“No. I want to keep it. It’s little enough you’ve given me.”
So I was obliged to return with her to the cluster of boulders where she had left the skull, and once more up the slope to the bicycles. We were both panting when we reached the top of the hill for the second time, and stood leaning against the cedar fence to regain our breath.
“There’s blood on your mouth,” Lilith said. I took my handkerchief out and rather self-consciously wiped my lips with it. “Do you feel cleaner now?” I did not reply. “Are you afraid I have infected you?” She laughed softly and bent down to wrap the skull in the hem of her skirt, where she tied it with her scarf. It swung between her thighs all the while we were riding home, and I remembered once seeing a country girl walking home from the fair with melons tied up in her skirt in much the same manner.
When we returned to her room she untied it and set it on a pile of her manuscripts, raising her eyes to me modestly. She had become quite demure.
“Must you keep it?” I asked again.
“I would like to very much.”
“And you refused Warren’s gift.”
“It was no such gift as this.”
“No; it was a better one. He made it, out of love.”
“But you destroyed this, out of love. It is more valuable.” She lifted her cut hand and looked at it idly.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“Not any more.”
“I’ll ask the nurse to come and look at it.”
“No, don’t, please.”
“I’ll have to report it. We have to report all injuries.”
She raised her eyes to me gently. “All of them, Vincent?”
While she looked at me with mild, steadfast reproach I allowed myself, for the first time since I had known her, fully to examine and define the beauty of her face. How delicate the modeling of her lips and nostrils; how firm and lovely the swell of bone above her violet eyes; how slender and exquisitely arched the glistening crescents of her brows! I longed to touch and claim each feature with my finger tips, and felt again desperately near to declaring this desire.
“Lilith,” I said in a hushed, constricted voice.
“Yes.”
“I’ve never in my life done anything worth while. I wish . . . you would help me to do one thing well.”
“Do you think you can do it well without me?” she asked. When I did not reply she turned away with gentle impatience, her hair swinging across her shoulders with a demoralizing grace, and stood in silence for a long time, gazing out of the window into the sunlight. I did not trust myself to break the pause. She said quietly at last, “I thought I knew what your passion was, Vincent. I thought you wanted to make something beautiful. And yet you talk about nothing but honor. It’s a word that poets and lovers seldom use.”
“I think it’s too late for me to make anything beautiful,” I said. “All I can hope to be now is honorable.”
“Then if you want to help me, go away,” she said. “I cannot be saved by honor.”
I left her room in a state of feverish agitation, thanking God that the charge nurse was busy with a restless patient, and the floor office vacant, as I let myself in and with trembling hands wrote, destroyed and wrote again a report that was neither honorable nor beautiful:
Special duty. Took patient bicycling four or five miles into country. Obedient, cooperative and in good contact throughout. Conversation general and cheerful, with less fantasy material. Seemed very observant and responsive to everything we saw, landscape, wildlife, etc. Found skull of an animal beside the road and asked to be allowed to keep it, which I granted. Cut her hand slightly, probably requiring minor treatment. Seems considerably improved.
9:30-11:15 A.M.
V. Bruce
, O. T.
I left the report on the nurse’s desk so that she could not fail to see it and went out into the hall, feeling a strange sense of haste, as if I were pursued. While I waited impatiently for the elevator to arrive I glanced down the hall and saw Mrs. Meaghan standing in the corridor, looking into the open door of Lilith’s room. She turned toward me and smiled wryly.
I spent the rest of the day in a state of nervous apprehension at the necessity of facing Bea at the evening O. T. meeting, a condition which intensified as the hour of that necessity approached until it was very nearly one of hysteria. What would I say to her? I tried for a time, while carrying out my duties with other patients in a most abstracted way, to prepare an account for her—it must be thoroughly ambiguous and must, while omitting all that was compromising, contain no actual untruths, no actual inventions or distortions; it was to be only a delaying action which would give me time to think and which, like my written report, would be consistent either with greater subterfuge or subsequent confession. This was a brief, harassed and fragmentary effort, which I abandoned in a sudden enervating wave of shame. This is not to say that I decided to tell Bea all that had happened, including the revelation of my true feelings for Lilith; for I had in fact decided nothing, leaving my behavior ultimately—not so much through resolution as through the lack of it—entirely to the disposition of the moment. Whether it would be governed by candor or deceit—whether I would break forth with a confession of all that I had said and felt, or whether I would sustain the noncommittal cunning of my report—I could not say until I was actually face to face with Bea, and I had not the stamina to determine.
As it developed, it was a decision that I was temporarily to be spared, for Bea was once again busy at a staff conference, and our meeting was postponed. My relief at this reprieve was not so great as may be imagined; it left me with a feeling of dismay at having gained what I had so short a while ago been conspiring to secure: time to think. I almost wished that I had forfeited this privilege, and the night of lonely and tormented questioning which it would incur, by the spontaneous confession I had half anticipated making.
As I walked down the hospital drive toward the street I looked up at Lilith’s window, feeling sure that she would be waiting there to see me pass; and I was not mistaken. Neither of us spoke, and I did not dare to pause, for I heard the chattering of a group of nurses in the drive behind me; but I felt that there was almost more exchanged between us in that brief passing glance than in all that we had said that morning.
TUES., MAY 26:
. . . That I am in love with her I cannot deny, and would not wish to (I am surely not responsible for that); but I haven’t yet, thank God, betrayed my trust by expressing it to her. Perhaps that report I wrote can be excused on the basis of confusion, astonishment or panic—at any rate an O. T. report is not the place for the full, complex and conscientious statement which I shall have to make. I will explain this to Dr. Lavrier tomorrow when I see him. There is nothing for me to do but resign. No doubt whatever about this. I have tried for hours to think of some other solution, but there is none which is even remotely practical or which I would trust myself to attempt.
How long have I loved her? From the very morning I met her, I think, when Bob took me to her room for the first time; no, before that: from the moment I first looked into her eyes, four years ago, that summer afternoon when she was standing behind the willows on the lawn. Or even earlier—forever, it seems to me. How have I remained unaware of it for so long? I can’t believe that I am so obtuse by nature; yet to believe the only possible alternative—that I am so consummately cunning as to have deceived myself completely—is hardly more comforting. It is more likely, however, for reading back through these pages I seem to find them riddled with equivocation. But there is no point in accusing myself this way. There is still time, thank heaven, to make an end of it without disgracing my profession.
It is reassuring to know that Dr. Lavrier is a man of such great understanding. Perhaps he will be able to recommend me to some other hospital. I would like very much to go on with this work; and I am sure he will appreciate my sincerity and be willing to help me. But could I do that? Could I go away from this town, where she is? Well, I will have to, of course. Unless I go to work for Grandpa in the tavern, or find something else to do around Stonemont. What a foolish thought that is! It would be agony to stay here, knowing she is there, inside the Lodge, and not being able to see her. But then, of course, she may soon be well enough to be allowed into town alone—many of the patients are. Perhaps I could meet her there sometimes. What an insidious thought! Why leave the Lodge at all, if that were my intention! And what would I have to offer her, then, anyway? What would she have to do with a garage attendant or a busboy, which is all I could hope to be if I stayed here in Stonemont. If she really loves me, of course, it would make no difference at all. But
does
she really love me? God, if I only knew the answer to that question, I think I could make any sacrifice, I could wait forever for her—if waiting were any use.
A heavy wind has come up and the cherry tree is creaking like ship’s rigging. I have just opened my window and found the sill littered with little black twigs. I don’t know what time it is now; around three o’clock, I think. I’ve been lying on my back for hours, trying to sleep, but it’s impossible. It has taken me half the night to work up the honesty and courage to ask the question that Lilith answered with such sure anticipation this morning (she has more of both than I):
I think neither of us would recognize the other, then.
Why do I love this girl? Is it because she is—the way she is? Mad, inspired, enchanted, whatever she is? What will she be like when she is well?
Will
I recognize her, then; or will she recognize me?
I have been trying to visualize this restored, this “normal” Lilith (Lilith does not seem to be her name): pretty (not wildly beautiful); carefully, expensively dressed; modest and agreeable, but rather formal in her manner (I have always felt this, somewhere, buried and despised within her); intellectual, industrious, anxious to resume her studies, to take up a career; interested only in the companionship of young men of her own social class and education; gracious, however—oh, very understanding, very appreciative! I have even managed to conjure up an image of her speaking: she is leaving the hospital, surrounded by expensive luggage, pausing at the open door of a glittering limousine in which her mother, smilingly adjusting a mink stole, waits for her. She turns toward me and offers me her gloved hand—“Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me, Mr. Bruce. I hope you will forgive some of my more outrageous eccentricities. I never meant to embarrass you.” Oh, my Lilith, what has happened to your ragged skirt, your bare white feet, your flying yellow hair, the flashing, tender cruelty of your eyes? And to all the shining villages of your mind, and the tall, fair, sandaled folk who lived in them, and their songs and instruments and gospels? And what will happen to me, alone in this bleak vale of sanity, haunted forever by your face and the sound of your running feet?
I clench my eyes shut and demand an answer of myself: Do I
want
her to be well? What is “well” for her? She was never happy in this world—my world (when did it ever claim me as a son?). She does not want to return to it; I am sure of that. I have heard her say so.
She does not want to be well.
I must have fallen asleep a while ago, for I woke up with a shutter banging, sitting at the open window with the rain lashing at me coldly. My head and shoulders were drenched, and there was a pool of water on the floor around me. I have mopped it up with a towel, and am sitting now watching the storm outside the window, which rattles softly in the sill. Sometimes in the flashes of lightning I can see the hard silhouettes of the housetops across the street and the black, plunging trees. Just now a wet leaf blew against the pane and stuck there, a little cherry leaf with delicate shark’s-tooth edges, fragile victim of the storm.
Are you watching, too, Lilith—your white face suddenly flooded with light, your throat wet with rain and your fingers clutching the crossed bars? Oh, my dear, I love you. I have loved you forever, and I will love you always. God help me to relinquish you!
WED., MAY 27:
I am astonished at myself. I have powers of deception I never dreamed of. What a masterpiece of quiet bravura my interview with Dr. Lavrier turned out to be! And I did not even arrange it—which is probably the reason for that wonderfully calm bold confidence that I felt; for if I had not met him by chance like that, walking in the drive, I’m sure I would never have been able to carry it off the way I did. If I had had to wait through the whole morning for an interview with him, for a specified and inevitable hour, I would have been demoralized by the strain. (“Demoralized” seems hardly the appropriate word!) But meeting and walking along together as we did, quite accidentally and casually—it seemed so easy, so perfectly spontaneous, so inspired, even!
He lives at Doctors’ House, and was just coming to work up the driveway as I started up the shop steps.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Oh, good morning.” (Genuine surprise, a moment of panic, of the desire to flee, a rather startled smile, then, as we began to speak, a gathering feeling of resolution, of confidence in my own powers of dissimulation and of joy in exercising them that was really quite delightful—like an actor’s, I suppose, before a royal audience.)