A Child of the Age (Adams)/Chapter 21
V
Despite every effort that was made to discover her, Rosy remained undiscovered. At the end of a week I made my arrangements and crossed over to London, where I felt sure I should ultimately have news of her. I had been informed by a chief of the Parisian police that either she had got off by the very train which I had intended to take, or else she was dead. I felt a strong conviction that neither had she got off by that train (how was it possible?), nor yet was she dead; but at times a horrible idea came over me that she might be being detained in some infamous den. This the chief of police had confidently assured me was not so: I had, myself, wandered about filthy back-streets enough in the forlorn hope of finding her: had at last, thinking of Marina, visited infamous dens enough, places of hot air and bright light and tawdrily-rich ornament, filled with fat and ghastly painted naked women who had at first almost terrified me, thinking of that awful breathless picture of Juvenal's Agrippina, and then made me sorrowful past tears. And, here in this London, where my own poor mother had offered her body for sale in the public way, what a thought was it to think, that perhaps I had not persevered enough in that search; that perhaps if I had stayed another week, another day, I might have found her! I could do no work. As day followed day, and still no news either from Parisian or London police, I became so feverish at nights that I could not sleep. And I knew then in my dread and anguish and horrible reproachful longing, how dear she was to me—how inexpressibly dear—dearer than anything, my darling of love!
At last, one evening about a fortnight after she had left me, sitting in my easy-chair in the study window, trying to read a book, I began to think about the little canary (up there now, the little pet, asleep in his cage), singing snatches of song, while the sun was on our feet, and, realising once more that all this was not done in a dream, but that she was indeed gone from me, might at this moment be in misery, might die without my ever seeing her again!—the tears came, and then, bowing my head down between my hands, I sobbed and wept. These were the first tears I had shed. They were a relief to me. I began to think of it as I had not yet thought of it, quietly and fully, recognising the great love I had for her and resolute to win the radiant future.
That night, for the first time since she had left me, I had a dreamless refreshing sleep. In the morning I went down the river to Greenwich again, and up on to the Heath, thinking of Rosy and Rayne together, as I had so many times this last fortnight. The place seemed somewhat strange to me now: stranger than it had seemed before. I did not go to the school and the field where Wallace and I had lain and played at 'chuck,' looking out at times over the dark, silver-twining Thames and dusky, far-reaching London.—I determined that I would find out about Rayne when I got back.
I went to Balmoral Street, and, seeing no assuring sign in No. 22 of life or death, rang, and inquired of a maid who opened the door, if Lady Gwatkin was any better? There was no surprise in her face. Rayne was not dead. My breath flowed out almost in a sigh.—Lady Gwatkin was a good deal better. She had gone with Sir James into the country.
It was enough. Further words I did not hear. I went away almost joyfully. She could be dead to me henceforth without a troubling thought.
A few days later, I saw Strachan, and spoke about the Expedition, Starkie, Clarkson and Brooke, again. Worked with a will at my classics, and at my spiritual classics as well: struggled against despondent and not-to-be-dismissed terrors and horrors about Rosy: was once almost setting out for Paris, with a notion (illogical enough) that she was there, but a little reflection showed me that my arrangement of things was best. She was in London I was sure. She would probably write to me in Paris (perhaps not knowing my London address). My man would telegraph at once: I would be with her at once. But a sudden idea that my man might, after all, be negligent, unsettled me.
The afternoon after my consideration of the matter in this light I spent in a long walk and debate with myself.
When I returned home, looking as usual on the hall table for the longed-for telegram, I saw one. (My heart started). I picked it up; came quietly into the study and, at the window, opened it.
She was found.
I threw up my face and laughed. Found! found! found! found at last.
A letter from her. This:
'I cannot give you up. I am ill. Do come to me. I am sorry for it. It was wrong of me. Will you forgive me and come? 'R. H.'
'Forgive you? Come?' I said, laughing: 'Oh, little Rosebud, I will forgive you for forgiving me! I will come to you, and keep you, and' Ending in laughter and tears.
To have found her again! To know that I had not … Nay, I knew nothing yet! And she was ill.
How long it took for the gold-incited hansom to get to the place! How long the Anglicised Italian woman took to tell me where she was! But upstairs I went at last: up, up, to the very top of the house, the dusty, dingy attic. She was there.
I knocked softly at the door and, on her voice saying that I was to come in, went in, and stood for a moment looking. I had but seen her pale worn face on the pillow before she had started up with a wild cry. And then I was holding her in my arms, and she me, silently.
In a little I felt how she squeezed me in her old dear child's way, so quietly, pulling me in to her, and I bent back my head so as to look at her face. But she would not let me: turning round her head and pressing it to my neck, in her old dear child's way. It seemed a dream that we had ever been away from one another. And then all at once she kissed me on the lips, such a long kiss; and hid her face again, and sighed contentedly. And so we remained in one another's arms some time—in perfect silence.
At last I began to think; but had no more than begun, when her breast heaved, all her body heaved, before the sound of the cough came as a relief to it. I feared that my holding her might increase the effort, and made a little move to loosen from her, but she would not. Feared indeed: there was fear in me still.
'Rosebud,' I said, when I was sitting by her on the bed, stroking her hand, she lying back on the pillow looking at me, 'you've got a very bad cold.'
'Yes,' she said, 'I' And went off into another fit of coughing, the third she had had since I came in.
'How did you get it?' I asked.
Got it!' she said with a smile, 'Caught it!'
'Well' I began; and stopped. I was determining that she should be out of London before that night.
And so she was.—We went down together to Micklehurst, a place I had once heard of as sunny and with a deep blue sky. The child seemed very contented, quietly contented, dreamily contented, somehow contented as I did not quite like her to be. The patience with which she bore her convulsive fits of coughing seemed to me strange. Once I caught myself thinking of a dying monkey I had seen in the Paris streets.
Arrived in the hotel, albeit I hesitated a little, I determined that I would go and bring a doctor to see her at once. And, having made her comfortable in the window of a room that looked over the blue winding sea-y river, with its girdling darkened mountains, over which the sun was setting in mellow golden warmth, I went down and inquired the name and address of some doctor. I seemed to be drinking in the clear, pure air as I walked along.
I found the doctor's house, and the doctor; and brought him to see her. He reported a bad cold, cautiously adding that he would come again and see her on Saturday. (This was Wednesday). I accompanied him down to the hotel door. I rather liked his face: he had a little gold light in his eyes somewhere, perhaps only something to do with the sun there. I asked him one or two questions about her which he answered simply. She had caught a bad cold: that was clear. Perhaps it was nothing more: perhaps again it was; perhaps even it might develop into congestion of the lungs. She seemed in rather a low state of health; but he would see her again in a few days, on Saturday, and then he should be able to tell me if there was anything. I said:
'Thank you; very well, be it so. My name is Leicester. We shall probably be staying here for some little time.'
And so we parted.
Rosy spent a bad night with the coughing. She did not care to go out, although the day was delightfully sunnily warm, but stayed in an easy-chair by the open window looking over the blue winding sea-y river and the girdling mountains, all set in the deep blue enamelled firmament. I left her with a book for an hour in the morning and went down on to the shore; and again, late in the afternoon. Her cough grew worse towards evening, and at last it struck me to go out and get her some sweets to suck to try and stop it. I brought in a large packet of divers sorts, which pleased her: and we sat by the fire, which she had wished should be lit, and talked quietly and happily about ourselves in the past.
This night was worse than the last, and the next day than that which preceded it; and so with the next night. Two or three times during this last after a long fit of convulsive coughing, she brought up some sticky, rusty-coloured stuff, with thin streaks of blood in it, that I examined in the candle-light, and having examined, felt a renewal of that indefinable fear that had entered me when all her body heaved before the sound of the cough came as a relief to it. As I lay back, wondering about this, she all at once said:
'I think, dear, I 'm going to die.'
I was startled.
After a pause:
'What makes you think that?' I said.
After another pause:
'I wanted to die! I knew I was catching it all the while, and I didn't care: I didn't stop it a bit! That was because I wanted to die. But when I found how … I think God is going to punish me for it.'
I turned over, and kissed her on the cheek.
'Serious,' she said, moving her head a little and looking at me, 'Serious!'
'Quite serious,' said I, beginning to smile. 'Quite serious,' and kissed her again and was silent.
That inspection of the handkerchief ultimately decided me at breakfast to go and find the doctor again: which I did, but he could not come till later.
Then Rosy was informed that she would have to go to bed again, and perhaps have to stop there a little. I at once suspected congestion of the lungs, whatever that precisely meant.
As the doctor and I went down stairs together I catechised him. He said that she had pneumonia. I inquired the precise meaning of pneumonia.
'Inflammation of the substance of the lungs.'
'Was it dangerous?'
'Sometimes.'
'Fatal?'
'Sometimes.'
'How long did it last?'
'Three or four days, in good cases; more generally a fortnight or so.'
I asked him a few more questions, and then he took up the word, and told me what would and what might be required to be done. And so we parted again.
I came upstairs to Rosy with a feeling as if there was going to be a species of campaign undertaken. The first thing to do was to find out if she minded leaving the hotel. She did not. Then I went out to observe the house that the doctor had recommended to me.
It was rather a cottage than a house. I liked it. It had a small garden, bright with flowers, in front of the dining-room, a long thin room with two garden-windows opening on to a little lawn. I came back with a description of it, which, having pleased her, sent me off to take the place at once; and back to brinsg her to it.
By lunch-time we, I and the landlady and the servant, that is, had the dining-room turned into a bed-room—light, airy, and comfortable.
The doctor came in the afternoon again. Further directions were given, and he left us, saying that he would leave the prescriptions at the chemist's as he went home. By tea-time everything was ready. Rosy had throughout remained quiescent, except that, as she was coming into the house, she noticed some red daisies in the bed under the window, and plucked one, saying: 'A pretty thing!' and for a moment stood looking at it, while I stood looking at her. I had everything to hand—inhaler, medicines, milk, beef-tea; and the kettle, with a long brown-paper spout to it, so as to keep the atmosphere moist with the steam, on the fire, from whose immediate heat and light she was sheltered by the bed-curtain drawn out and tucked under the mattress. I felt no fear now. The sense of her lying there as she was, seemed to admit of no feeling but calm tenderness.
The cough was very troublesome: more violent, more as it were ineffectual. She was very thirsty, and complained of the warm milk and beef-tea. Orders had been left that it was to be warm, and so of course she would have to drink it warm. I had to coax her to it like a child. The same with the inhalation. At first she, half sleepy, would not inhale, but kept moaning, and turning her mouth away from the pipe, till I bantered her into taking twenty pulls to show she was not afraid of it, and then turned the twenty into thirty, and the thirty into fifty, and so on up to a hundred, and far over (I deceiving her by dropping back the number several times). So the requisite ten minutes inhalation was achieved. The poor child could get no sleep. She kept up a low moaning all the while, occasionally sitting up with her chin on her knees, and the lower part of her hands turned round in her eyes. Once she suddenly looked up at me and said:
'Don't you believe I got this as a punishment for wanting to die?'
'No,' I answered 'I don't. I think you got it as the result of catching a severe cold.'
'But I did it—I did it on purpose!'
'The cold wouldn't know anything about that. And you mustn't talk any more.'
She had a violent fit of coughing. When it was done she said:
'I do wish you'd talk to me. I can't get to sleep. I like to hear you talking!'
'Very well,' I said, 'I'll tell you a story. Will that do?'
'Yes,' she said, 'but lie down there. I don't like you sitting up.'
I lay down on the extreme edge of the bed, with my head on the bolster, and began my story. It was the story of Undine. Often I had to stop on account of her coughing. Once the story was so broken into by a fit of it, that I hoped she would forget or not care to hear any more and would try to go to sleep. Not so. She began to talk about what had happened to her in London, and would not brook interruption. At last, I let her say what she had to say. She told me of her life at Wiltshire Crescent. Then, suddenly, after a pause:
'I was glad when you came,' she said slowly, 'I had a most horrid dream of you. I dreamed you were dead, and that I saw your coffin carried by men to the ceme-tery. I thought I was in such grief about parting with you in anger, that I would have given half my life to have parted with you friendly.… I know I have been very wicked in doing what I have, but I do believe God will forgive me. I did love you! I was also in trouble as to whether you were safe in heaven, and I thought I wept so bitterly, and my grief was so great that, while I was following to see where you were buried, I was obliged to kneel down to pray God to take you to heaven, and to forgive all, at the same time promising I would be good all the rest of my life, in hope to see you there—when I awoke and found it all a dream. And I was pleased, but it upset me for days, and at last I made up my mind to write to you, as I could not rest."
She had another fit of coughing, and I got up to give her some milk. After that I thought she had forgotten the story, but she requested its continuance, and so I continued it, with the necessary breaks, till four in the morning, when she fell asleep.
Not even the orders of the doctor prevailed over my disinclination to awakening her at five for her medicine. She herself awoke a little later: the medicine was given; and at her request the story continued; but only for a little, for we could not get on with it 'one little bit,' as she said, owing to the growing frequency of her fits of coughing. She was quite exhausted by the time the sun came into the room over the top of the hedge; that is, about seven o'clock. I was tired, but not sleepy: and less tired when I had washed myself. Then she fell asleep again.
The doctor came about eleven. He sanctioned her drinking her milk and beef-tea cold if she really did not like to drink it warm; and Rosy's silence said that she did not like. I went with him to the door and into the garden, where I asked him if he could not give her some opiate? He shook his head. I said that she was being torn to pieces by the cough, and that I could not help thinking that it was dangerous to let her get as exhausted as she had been a few hours ago, and was yet. He said:
'I dare not give her anything.'
The words and their tone settled the matter. I asked again if it was possible to give her any stimulants now? He said:
'No; best not. Go on just the same as yesterday with the inhaler and the poultices, and the milk and beef-tea. That is all.'
I said that as fast as I gave it her, she brought it all up again: purposelessly. Then, after a proposal about a nurse, which I refused, he left me. I thought no more of him.
At about five she would have me lie down on the edge of the bed and try to get some sleep; and, with the promise from her that she would awaken me in an hour, when it would be time for her to inhale again, I closed my eyes. She deceived me. It was seven when I awoke: was awakened by what was, probably, an unusually violent fit of coughing. I scolded her, my thin-faced little darling, as I got the inhaler ready: she, between her coughings, smiling at me.
After tea—I sitting by the bedside, holding her hand and thinking—she all at once quite opened her eyes and looked at me.
'Where do people go to when they die?' she said.
I looked at her dear child's eyes, but did not answer her.
'Do tell me,' she said, in a child's aggrieved tone, rumpling her brow, 'Don't tease me! Tell me true!'
After a pause, I answered her:
'I believe that they go into the earth and the air from which they came.'
'Yes,' she said, ' but that's not their spirits. What do their spirits do?'
'Their spirits, too, go into the earth and the air.'
She shook her head:
'No,' she said, 'their spirits go up'—(looking up)—'up into heaven!'
I lifted her hand, and bent my head, and kissed her hand softly.
'But don't you think so too?' she said.
'No,' I said, still bent over her hand, 'But' (looking up at her and smiling), 'what does it matter what I think, dear?'
She began to cough, and went on for a little. Then:
'Don't you think,' she said, 'that good people go up to heaven when they die?'
'Don't talk any more in this way!' I said, getting up and sitting on the bed by her, 'or I shall—Well, I shall have to stop you some way.' And I put my arm round her shoulders, and drew her head to mine.
'Ah,' she said, drawing her head back so as to look at me, 'but don't you?'
'Don't I what?'
Her brow rumpled.
'Don't tease me!' she said, 'You must tell me!'
'Very well,' I said, 'I will tell you, then. 'I don't think anyone goes up to heaven, dear, however good they are, for I don't believe there's any heaven to go to.'
'But what be-comes of them, then?'
'They go into the earth and the air from whence they came.'
'That's horrid!' she said, 'I don't' and began to cough again.
I put my arm round her shoulders, and leant my cheek to hers that was wet.
'What is it?' I said, 'Why are you crying?'
In a little:
'I was thinking,' she said, 'that God wouldn't let us see one another then, perhaps, because we had been so sinful, and because you—because you talked in that way. If you didn't talk in that way, perhaps He would, you know; because I did love you so!' (She had turned and thrown her arms round my neck.) 'Oh, I couldn't do without you! I did try, I did try! But you were so much to me!' Her trembling lips could scarcely finish it.
At last:
'Oh, Rosy,' I said, with a low, choking voice, 'My little Rosebud!'
'Hush!' she said, ' hush, dear. Don't trouble about it afterwards. I don't think God'll be so hard upon us; I don't think He will! And it wasn't your fault, this. It was all my fault; I did it! I knew I did! But I don't mind now. Kiss me, dear; kiss me. It wasn't your fault.'
I kissed her, and straightway the cough caught and shook her poor body through and through; but she would not have me take my arms from round her.
And as I felt all this, the thought in me turned to utter fierceness.
We talked no more of these things, except that Rosy told me that last night she had dreamt of being smothered by wreaths of smoke, and could not wake me. We talked of the dear hours in the past, and of the dearer that were to be in the future—by snatches; for her cough was almost ceaseless, and, it seemed to me, more violent than last night. She had, apparently, forgotten about the story.
But, as the night wore on, she became worse. I had great trouble to get her to take the inhalation. She kept up the low moaning all the time, as she had done on the first night; occasionally, too, sitting up as before, with her chin on her knees, and the lower parts of her hands turned round in her eyes. I did not leave the bed-side for a moment. Now and then she fell asleep, but the low moaning did not cease, except when she muttered incoherently.
The slow hours passed. I must have dozed. I awoke with a start. She was struggling violently, I saw that, and her swollen, livid face, and eyes strangely prominent with strange, clear brightness. Then I knew that she wanted me, and, in a moment, was across the bed, with one arm round her body and the other loosening her nightdress at the throat; but she had caught it, as it were, by chance, and rent it down wide open, just as the button was coming undone. I held her steadily up, despite her violent, downward struggles. She knew I was holding her. She could not get breath; she was suffocating. Her chest seemed rigid. I looked at her livid face again, her bright eyes, her stretched nostrils.
Then, before I scarcely knew what had happened, except a tightened effort of her body in my arms, she had ceased struggling.
I looked at her face: looked long, and at last, wildly. I shook her gently; lowered my arm to shake her again. Her head fell back with upward, staring eyes. I thought, She is dead, she is dead. What did it mean? No … No …
I gathered her close in my arms, kissing her warm, pure throat, talking to myself; and let both of us lie back in the soft pillows, I with my cheek on her warm, pure breast. Ah, better to sleep now without more words; better to sleep! Think no more of that phantasy. I was ever given to such. As a boy, I could not quite tell sometimes whether I was in a dream or awake; I could not quite tell sometimes whether I had seen things in dreams or in the vital air: So now! But that was enough of speaking. Better to sleep now without more words; better to sleep!
'A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; she shall lie all night betwixt my breasts. I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up nor awake my love till she please.'
THE END.
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