The Dawn of Reckoning (16 page)

He still had all the trappings of weakness—he still stammered when
he spoke to strangers, was still awkward when introduced, was still incapable
of dealing adequately with any situation that required tact. But, by means of
long experience, he had acquired a sort of technique in making a fool of
himself; nobody could “talk down” a crowd better after losing his dignity
before it. He was growing stronger out of his very weakness, and it was a
kind of strength that frightened her.

During the autumn they left Chassingford for a while and lived in the
Kensington flat while Mrs. Monsell was perambulating abroad. Philip had to be
in Chassingford a great deal, so that for a time Stella became one of those
rather forlorn women who spend their afternoons in bustling department stores
and exotic tea-shops. London seemed to her just as devoid of happenings as
Chassingford, but the vacuum was a more interesting one.

One night after a severe rainstorm Philip came back from Chassingford wet
to the skin. A chill developed, and by the evening of the next day medical
attendance seemed advisable. Of course she thought of Ward. She looked up his
name in the telephone directory, but there seemed to be hundreds of Wards.
Not one of them, however, was a doctor living in. Manchester Square; but
there was a Doctor Ward in Bethnal Green Road, East. This could hardly be the
Ward she knew, but she called up the number, thinking that perhaps the
Bethnal Green man might be able to tell her the address of his namesake.

The voice that answered her was a woman’s.

“Oh, yes, I am Doctor Ward’s dispenser…He used to live in Manchester
Square…yes—” the voice sounded rather amused—“Doctor Ward the
explorer, certainly…I’m not sure that he could find time to come out so far
as Kensington…you see, most of his work is round about here…Oh, I
see—a friend? Very well, I’ll ask him when he comes back—he’s
engaged at present…”

Half an hour later the telephone bell rang in the small room, that served
as study and work-room for Philip. Stella, answering the call, heard Ward’s
voice, strong and gruff like the bark of a big dog, “Yes? That you, Mrs.
Monsell? Ward speaking…Philip not well? Right, I’m coming…Immediately, of
course…”

That was all.

When she told Philip whom she had sent for he seemed displeased. “Why not
a local man? Fancy dragging the fellow all the way from Bethnal Green!”

“Oh!” she exclaimed quickly. “So you knew he’d moved to Bethnal Green? Why
didn’t you tell me?”

He looked at her curiously as he replied: “Perhaps because it didn’t occur
to me that you were so deeply interested in his affairs.”

She would never, could never forget the weeks that followed.
They were a strange dreamlike interlude, full of light and shadow, sound and
silence; and, in and about them all, Philip weak and pitiful, Ward strong and
immense. The contrast soothed her. On that dark rainy night when Ward told
her brusquely that Philip was suffering from acute pneumonia, that his
temperature was a hundred and four and his pulse a hundred and sixty, and
that as near as possible would be the margin between life and death—at
that sharp challenging moment her senses cleared and she was a calm warrior
marshalling her forces for victory. “You said once that I should make a good
nurse,” she told Ward. “Very well, I shall nurse Philip. And I shan’t let him
die.”

She said that with quiet confidence, and Ward replied, just as quietly: “I
don’t believe you will.”

The days passed like drab phantoms, with nothing alive in them but the
firelight flickering in the bedroom and the autumn rains lashing the windows.
Philip, almost lost amidst the shadows of the dark days, could hardly speak,
could only breathe heavily, and cough, and stare at her with dim, suffering
eyes. She loved him now as she had loved him at first; he was a child, a
baby, and she was a strong mother fighting his battles for him and protecting
him from a hard world. A great calm was on her as the battle progressed, and
as she urged herself to fight yet more and more strenuously—the calm as
of, perhaps, the motherhood she had missed. For a whole week of days and
nights she hardly slept at all, even in the arm-chair by the fire; yet nature
armed her with a strength that renewed her every hour and every minute. The
restlessness left her: she was radiant, serene, brimful of a deep and
tranquil love that was finding at last an outlet. There was even a change in
her appearance; she looked a mother, and the soft fire-glow gave her body a
curving beauty that it had seemed never to possess before.

Ward came twice a day. He said very little, was always curt, would waste
no time in idle conversations. He came dressed in rough tweeds that seemed
oddly at variance with his profession; once he told her very brusquely why he
had left Manchester Square. “Couldn’t stand fashionable women with
fashionable complaints. Couldn’t stand a morning-coat and top-hat. Prefer the
East-End people who don’t bother me till they’re really ill…”

Then at last there came the morning when she stood with him in the small
entrance-hall of the flat, and he told her that for the future he would call
only once a day, in the evenings.

“I suppose that means he’s out of danger?” she queried eagerly.

He answered: “Yes, I think I can say he’s out of danger now.”

She looked at him with vague, swimming eyes. She was speechless with joy,
and smiled stupidly. She stood still for some moments, grappling with this
fierce overwhelming joy, and also with a new feeling that she could not
analyse, but which seemed somehow to rob her of her strength.

He said simply: “You’ve saved his life.”

“And you also,” she replied, with sudden passionate eagerness.

There was a long silence. Then it was, when the battle was over and the
fight won, that she could open her eyes at last and see the fighter who had
stood shoulder to shoulder with her and had helped her to victory. She looked
at him, slowly and carefully, as if she had never seen him before.

The memory of their common fight and their common victory was a bond
between them. That bond might grow and grow until—

He was speaking. “I’m—I’m more glad than I can say. I’m very fond of
Philip.”

“So am I.”

She felt then that he, Ward, was her husband, and that Philip, weak and
puny on the bed in the next room, was their child, whom they had watched over
and tended together.

And in another moment, with a quick embarrassed smile, he had stepped into
the lift and was gone.

Mrs. Monsell, hurriedly interrupted in the midst of a tour
in Tunis and Algiers, arrived in London just after Philip had been reported
out of danger. Stella saw her from the window as she arrived, heavily furred
and cloaked, in a taxi; saw her engage in a sharp and short altercation with
the driver with no less
sang-froid
because, for all she knew, her only
son might be lying dead a few yards away. There was something hard and frosty
in the look of her, something which, for the first time in her life, Stella
actively disliked.

A minute later she was kissing her and telling her that Philip was better.
And, incidentally, mentioning Ward. “Oh, so
he’s
your doctor,”
remarked Mrs. Monsell. “You’re in luck, I can see.”

Stella wondered what she meant by that—whether it was merely one of
the vaguely cynical remarks that fell so easily from her lips. Soon
afterwards mother and son were alone together for some time, while Stella
remained in the drawing-room, feeling for some reason or other acutely
uncomfortable. She made up her mind that she would go back to Chassingford as
soon as ever Philip was well enough.

Coming soundlessly out of the sick-room, Mrs. Monsell greeted the brooding
Stella with a calm smile. “Philip has been telling me all about it,” she
said.

Something in Stella’s subconscious mind forced her to exclaim sharply:
“All about what?”

Mrs. Monsell’s eyes fixed themselves on Stella in a cold relentless stare.
“He has been telling me how good you have been to him.” She began to smile as
she added: “You and Doctor Ward.”

She insisted on going out of town as soon as Philip was
better, and as Mrs. Monsell vastly preferred Kensington to Chassingford the
matter was easy to arrange.

Yet almost as soon as the train pulled up at Chassingford’s wind-swept
station she wished she were back in London again. It was the hour of
twilight; the sky was grey with heavy rain clouds, and the station lamps
creaked and jangled as the wind shook them. The stationmaster touched his cap
to Philip as they passed the ticket barrier; Philip replied by a sombre
smile.

There seemed to her to be an air of melancholy brooding over the place. As
the horse-drawn cab squelched through the mud of the station-yard and turned
at last into the High Street, she felt a sudden sickening pull of
depression—an almost physical sensation that gripped her like pain. The
green-white gas lamps of the shops lit up Philip’s face in passing; he was
sitting rigidly upright in his corner of the cab. His face was drawn and
pale, a witness of the struggle from which he had just emerged; but in his
eyes there was a keener, fiercer light, as of, perhaps, the victory won. She
had thought at first that after his illness he would need to be nursed and
coddled back to health, and she had looked forward to it rapturously. But
from the moment that he left his bed she had realised that he was different.
He repelled her attentions with frigid politeness; he was colder,
sterner—had even the beginnings of power.

During the drive down the long lampless lane from the village to the Hall
the darkness fell rapidly, and with it came big drops of rain that blew in
through the open window of the cab. “Isn’t it miserable?” she said, hoping
for comfort. But he gave her no more than a perfunctory affirmative.

During dinner that night she felt she could cry at the loneliness of it
all. She looked at Philip, in his starched shirt and dinner-jacket (he was
becoming more and more punctilious in such matters); at Venner, standing at
his elbow with the usual featureless benignity; at the rather disappointing
dinner served with a kind of morose magnificence; and finally, in the mirror
opposite, at herself, thoroughly and completely miserable. She never analysed
herself, never tracked down her thoughts and wants to their ultimate
foundations; she merely
felt
, and now she felt
dead
. She longed
for the noisy gaiety of some “popular” restaurant in town, for somebody who
would talk to her eagerly about something. Philip was so silent; if he talked
at all, it was as a professor delivering a lecture to a rather exasperating
pupil.

After dinner he went to his study to work. She amused herself for an hour
or so with the gramophone, and then, being tired, went up to bed. Yet she did
not sleep well; her head was throbbing and unquiet. Once when she stirred out
of a troubled sleep she heard Philip coming upstairs to his room. She looked
at the radium clock at her bedside; the time was half-past one.

Philip was “busy.” He gave that as his reason for
everything; for seeing so little of her, for shutting himself in his study
till the early hours of the morning, for declining her suggested excursions
with him, for his silence, his strangeness, his curious grim energy. Hard
work (or perhaps something else which she did not understand) was certainly
having its results. “Your husband is becoming a really good speaker,” said a
friend whom she met one day in Chassingford. “He’s got a touch of what he
never had before—emotion.”

She wondered, and was puzzled, and suffered meanwhile the extremes of
loneliness in the sombre old house. Music was her only
consolation—music, and then, fortuitously, Roly. Roly was a black and
white kitten that, rain-sodden and half-starved, had mewed on the window-sill
one stormy December night. She had opened the window a few inches and Roly
had promptly squeezed his way through. From that moment she felt she had a
friend.

She was rather stupid about Roly. During a party to which Philip had
invited various political people, she spent most of the time holding out a
piece of cotton for Roly to play with. “Surely rather childish,” as Philip
remarked afterwards. “What must people have thought of you, sitting there all
the time playing with a cat?”

“A kitten,” she corrected. “Well, anyway, what must Roly have thought of
you all, chattering nonsense and taking notice of neither him nor me?”

“That’s absurd.”

“Is it? Perhaps it is.”

Roly was certainly an intelligent creature, with a voluptuous fondness for
having his belly rubbed and scratched. Wherever Stella went he followed; she
used to take him in the car on shopping expeditions, and it was only through
an intense fear of dogs that he would stay in the car while she went into the
shops. And on the dark winter evenings when Philip was in his study working,
the pressure of Roly asleep on her lap in front of the fire soothed her and
made her less lonely.

One night she was lying full-length on the hearth-rug, enjoying a fierce
and exciting game with the kitten, when she looked up and saw a figure
standing by the curtained doorway. She thought at first it was Philip, but as
her eyes accustomed themselves to the shadows she saw something that startled
her and made her scramble hastily to her feet.

It was Ward.

He was looking at her curiously, and as soon as he saw that she was
looking at him, he went forward and held out his hand. “I rang the bell,” he
said, “but I couldn’t get any answer. The front door was half-open, so I took
the liberty of coming in on my own.”

“Yes…” she replied nervously. “Venner’s very deaf.”

“And Philip?”

She said quickly: “Oh, Philip wouldn’t hear you. He’s had a sound-proof
door put in his study. He works every night till late.”