All told, I conclude we had fourdances together, Captain Ashton and I. I learned, or I thought I did, he had asister, also a nurse as was Constance, and that he had loved France in the twoyears preceding 1914 when he, then a very young man, had travelled there. Whatnow happened there appalled him, but he kept his statements on this fact to thebarest bones; perhaps only one – a single bone of sorrow.
Suddenly it was nearly half pastten o’clock. Another man, this one older, and not in uniform, came up andmurmured something to the Captain. The captain nodded, and the man went away.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” the Captainsaid to me. “It’s been a great pleasure to meet you. Do take care of yourself. We’llget through this somehow. As the poet says, The morning always comes.Goodbye.” His voice wasn’t cold, nor relieved to be called away; nor was itsorry. He smiled and nodded to me. I said, or I hope I did, the proper politewords. There was something in his eyes, or did I imagine it? – nothing to dowith regret at leaving me, only a vague, clear shadow, as if, and I’m unsurehow to say this, I had stood for a while between him and something darker andless ordinary. It wasn’t that he would miss me, only what I had represented. Oronly my interruption of other, more awkward, matters, which help anyone elsemight have provided him.
I thought, with a stumble of mypulse, that maybe he had been called directly off to return into the Theatre ofWar. But he did not leave quite then. He went across the room to another groupof people, these known to my parents, and quite important in the town. He stooda while with them, sometimes laughing, or gravely listening. He next chose twomore girls to dance with. Four dances each, or so I seem to have counted. Justthe same as with me. He vanished from the hall some thirty-six minutes after.
My mother had gone in to takesupper with her own friends, so I had sat down again, on another chair, and watchedthe other dancers go past, including, of course, for a time, Captain Ashton. Itoccurred to me somebody had suggested he dance with me and take me for a lemonade,to even the score for me a little.
After he had completelydisappeared, I began to feel cold quite soon, and then very heavy. Shivering, Iput on my wrap. Nobody else had or did ask me to dance. At twenty minutes pastmidnight Constance, who had an early shift at the hospital next day, came overand suggested we should leave. The Findlays would bring Mother home, andbesides I was looking washed-out. I think that was how she put it, unless againthat is another expression I’ve somehow accumulated since; washed-out, like anold and fraying shirt or petticoat, all my colours and my usefulness soaked andrubbed and wrung away.
Duringthe night at first I couldn’t sleep. Then, when I did, I woke over and over,sometimes with great jumps of fear that had no proper source. Once I woke and Iwas boiling hot and soaked in perspiration.
Then, as I lay and cooled andcalmed, my brain seemed to clear in quite a crystalline manner, and deep withinmy mind I knew that I would soon hear from Captain Ashton, and we would meetagain, and be sworn lovers; we would marry in due course. The War next would haveended, nor would there ever be another, and he and I would love each other througha vibrant youth and holy maturity into a serene and gentle old age.
Never, truly I believe, did I everbefore feel so uplifted and so sure, nor so perfectly, radiantly happy, in allmy miniature life.
I’ve never forgotten this, ofcourse not. And perhaps not surprisingly. These were the last definite physicalthoughts and feelings I ever had.
That terrible epidemic, thatplague, that thing called the Spanish Influenza, was already threading andsurging through our world. And so it had come, unseen and unnoticed, into mine.That alarming and radiant night I was already dead, even if I breathed still,and so never knew.
There’s no point in recountingthe stages of the fever and horror and decline, nor all those symptoms, andother awfulness, not even the sound of my mother screaming in lament, which Iheard as if far, far off on the edge of a mountain, and through thick whitefog, when they apparently told her I could not be saved. I can’t understandwhat made her so distressed to lose me. She had never found me in the firstplace. To her I was nothing. Perhaps it was the thought of the waste of timeand money to be entailed in my funeral. I won’t retract this statement.
Other Things
Wehad lived here in the old house all my life, and presumably I didn’t knowenough about anywhere else to go back to. I’d never been to France, or Italy.I’d never even been to London, let alone Heaven. As for Hell, well, in a softand insipid way, it was here at home, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, no doubt I never graspedhow historic this house is, and how lucky I was to live here, and now I’mafraid I still don’t grasp it, or appreciate it, as I should, or really care,and anyway I don’t live here now, do I? I’m dead here.
It was like wandering back infrom a mist, or the fog I spoke of, and I found myself standing in my bluetailored suit, on the stair, and I looked down and there was this pretty, dark-hairedyoung girl below in the hall, and everything smelled and looked and was quitechanged. And then it all melted away and I was sitting instead in the library,which had been my father’s ‘Province’, (as my mother termed it), where he lounged,and read books, and smoked cigars and drank
