In this way, because his gifts filled her with rapture on account of their opulence and weightiness, he had assumed for her the aspect by degrees of a godhead who could bless—and possibly blast—inscrutably. For many years after he had first picked her up in the Edgware Road outside the old Apollo she had regarded him with suspicion, since he was a man and it is the nature of men to treat women with treachery, lust and meanness. Now she regarded herself as the companion of a godhead, secure and immune from the evil workings of Fortune—as if she had been seated on the shoulder of one of Jove’s eagles, beside his throne. The Immortals had been known to choose human companions: when they had so done fortunate indeed had been the lot of the chosen. Of them she felt herself to be one.
Even his seizure had not deprived her of her sense of his wide-spreading and inscrutable powers, and she could not rid herself of the conviction that if he would, he could talk, walk and perform the feats of strength of a Hercules. It was impossible not to think so; the strength of his glance was undiminished, and it was the dark glance of a man, proud, vigorous, alert and commanding. And the mysterious nature and occurrence of the seizure itself only confirmed her subconscious conviction. The fit had come so undramatically that although the several pompous and, for her, nearly imbecile, English physicians who had been called in to attend on him, agreed that some sort of fit must have visited him as he lay in his bed, that had done nothing to change her mind. Indeed, even when her own Doctor, Drouant-Rouault, asserted with certitude and knowledge that this was a case of fulminant hemiplegia of a characteristic sort, though her reason accepted his conclusion, her subconscious intuition remained the same. Doctor Drouant-Rouault was a sensible man; that he had proved by pointing out the anatomical excellence of the works of sculpture by Monsieur Casimir-Bar and agreeing that only a conspiracy of rivals could have prevented his arriving at the post of President of the École des Beaux Arts. He was, then, a man of sense and his reputation amongst the French tradesmen of the Quarter stood very high: she had never herself needed the attentions of a doctor. But if you needed a doctor, obviously you went to a Frenchman and acquiesced in what he said.
But although she acquiesced in words to others, and indeed to herself, she could not convince herself in her for intérieur, nor indeed had she arrived at that amount of exterior conviction without some argument at least. She had pointed out, not only to Doctor Drouant-Rouault, but she had even conceived it to be her duty to point out to the English practitioners to whom she would not otherwise have spoken, that the man lying there in her bed was a North-countryman, from Yorkshire, where men were of an inconceivable obstinacy. She had asked them to consider that it was not unusual for Yorkshire brothers and sisters or other relatives to live for decades together in the same house and never address a word to each other, and she had pointed out that she knew Mark Tietjens to be of an unspeakable determination. She knew it from their lifelong intimacy. She had never, for instance, been able to make him change his diet by an ounce in weight, or the shaking of a pepper-pot as to flavour—not once in twenty years during which she had cooked for him. She pleaded with these gentlemen to consider as a possibility that the terms of the Armistice were of such a nature as to make a person of Mark’s determination and idiosyncrasies resolve to withdraw himself forever from all human contacts, and that if he did so determine nothing would cause him to change his determination. The last word he had spoken had been whilst one of his colleagues at the Ministry had been telephoning to tell her, for Mark’s information, what the terms of the Armistice were. At the news, which she had had to give him over her shoulder, he had made from the bed some remark.—He had been recovering from double pneumonia at the time.—What the remark had been she could not exactly repeat; she was almost certain that it had been to the effect—in English—that he would never speak again. But she was aware that her own predilection was sufficient to bias her hearing. She had felt herself, at the news that the Allies did not intend to pursue the Germans into their own country—she had felt herself as if she could say to the High Permanent Official at the other end of the telephone that she would never speak word to him and his race again. It was the first thing that had come into her mind, and no doubt it had been the first thing to come into Mark’s.
So she had pleaded with the doctors. They had paid practically no attention to her, and she was aware that that was very likely due to her ambiguous position as the
