“Oh, doctor!” Violet cried, suddenly plaintive. “I don’t know. You must examine me. Perhaps I ought to have come to you before.”
At this point the light went out and they were in darkness.
“Oh, dear!”—a sort of despair in Violet’s voice now—“I knew that lamp would be going soon.” The fact was that the lamps in the house generally had begun to go. All of them had passed their allotted span of a thousand burning hours. Two in the shop had failed. Henry possessed no reserve of lamps, and he would not buy, and Violet had not yet wound herself up to the resolve of buying in defiance of him. Once a fuse had melted. For two days they had managed mainly with candles. Violet, irritated, went forth secretly to buy fuse wire. She returned, and with a half-playful, half-resentful gesture threw the wire almost in his face; but it had happened that during her absence he had inserted a new fuse made from a double thickness of soda-water-bottle wire which he had picked up from somewhere. His reproaches, though unspoken, were hard for her to bear.
The doctor promptly struck a match, and Violet lit the candle on the night-table.
“I’m afraid I can’t examine you by that light,” said the doctor.
“Oh, dear!” She nearly wept, then masterfully took hold of herself. “I know!” She rushed to the bathroom, stood on the orange-box, and detached the bathroom lamp, and returned with it to the bedroom. “Here! This will do.”
The doctor climbed on to a chair. As soon as he had fixed the new lamp Violet economically blew out the candle; and then, quaking, she yielded up her body, in the glacial chill of the room, for the trial and verdict which would reassure or agonize her. However, she was neither reassured or agonized; there was no verdict.
When Dr. Raste redescended the dark stairs the shop lay in darkness and the bookseller was wheeling in the bookstand. The doctor entered the still lighted office to get his two parcels, which he arranged on his left side exactly as before.
“Oh?” said Mr. Earlforward, approaching him. It was an interrogation.
“I should prefer not to say anything at present,” the doctor announced in loud, prim, clearly articulated syllables. “There may be nothing abnormal, nothing at all. At any rate, it is quite impossible to judge under existing conditions. I shall call again in a week or ten days—perhaps earlier. No immediate cause for anxiety.”
He had been but little more communicative than this to Violet herself. He was inhuman again—for his patients. Within him, however, glowed the longing to see his child’s eyes kindle when he presented her with the Globe Shakespeare for her very own.
That night, contrary to custom, Henry went to bed earlier than Violet. He stated that he felt decidedly better, but that he had finished all his bookkeeping and oddments of work, and that it would be a pity to keep the office fire alive for nothing. Violet, in her mantle, had to darn a curtain in the front room. When she went into the bedroom and switched on the light she saw him, with the counterpane well up to his chin, lying flat on his back, eyes shut, but not asleep. He had the pallor of a corpse, and the corpse-like effect was enhanced by the indications of his straight, thin body under the clothes. She stood bent by the side of the bed and looked at him, as it were passionately, but vainly trying by the intensity of her gaze to wrench out and drag up from hidden depths the inaccessible secrets of his mind.
Though saying little to her about her trouble he had behaved to her through the evening with the most considerate kindliness. He had caressed her with his voice. And about her trouble she had not expected him to say much. He had a very inadequate conception of the physical risks which women by nature are condemned to run. And she had never talked much in such directions, for not only was he a strangely modest man, but she deliberately practised the reserve which he himself practised. She argued, somewhat vindictively: “He tells me nothing. I will tell him nothing.” Moreover, the doctor’s calm noncommittal attitude had given Henry an exceptional occasion to exercise his great genius for postponement. Never would Henry go halfway to meet an ordeal of any sort. Lastly, his reactions were generally slow. Fear, anxiety, seemed to come late to him.
He opened his eyes. She gave him one of the long kisses which he loved. Could he guess (she wondered) that her kiss was absentminded that night, perfunctory, a kiss that emerged inattentive to him from the dark, virginal fastnesses of her being, which neither he nor any other would or could invade. With intention she pressed her lips on his.
“Come to bed,” he murmured gently, “and get that light out.”
Half undressed she looked carefully at herself in the mirror of the perfectly made, solid, everlasting Victorian wardrobe. Yes, her face showed evidence of illness; it frightened her. No, she was merely indisposed; she was frightening herself. She had no pain, or extremely little. She thought, as she regarded herself in the glass, how inscrutable, how enigmatic, how feminine she was, and how impossible it was for him to comprehend her. She felt superior to him, as a complex mind to a simple one. She thought that she, far better than he, could appreciate the significance of the terrible day. She was overwhelmed by it. Situations were evolving one out of another. Nothing had happened, and yet all was changed. The night was twenty years away from the morning.
“Do you know about that girl?” he asked with soft weariness when she had slipped into bed and the
