“You’re dressed. Run for the doctor.”
VIII
On the Landing
During the day Henry had asked several times for bulletins as to Elsie’s consumption of food, and he received them with satisfaction, but also with a certain sardonic air new in Violet’s experience of him. This demeanour was one of the things that disquieted Violet. Another was that, contrary to his habit of solicitude for her, he made absolutely no inquiry as to her own health, though he surely ought to have been ever so little disturbed about it. And another was that he no longer showed his customary quiet pleasure in being worried over her. After taking some soft food he demanded a toothpick, and had employed himself with it in the most absurd way for quite an hour. In answer to her questions he said blandly again and again that he was all right. Soon after nightfall he insisted that the electricity should be switched off. Violet refused, as she was determined to watch him carefully. He said that the light hurt his eyes. She took the paper lining from a tray in her wardrobe and fashioned a shade for the lamp—the first shade ever known in that house.
At ten o’clock, feeling cold and ill, she undressed and got into bed, but kept the light burning. Henry was perfectly tranquil. The trams seemed to make a tremendous uproar. She could not sleep, but Henry apparently dozed at intervals. Then she had a severe shock. He was violently sick.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he murmured feebly and sadly.
He did not know what it was; but Violet, who had witnessed a deal of physical life during her peregrinations with the clerk of the works, knew what it was. It was what Violet’s varied acquaintances had commonly called, in tones of awe on account of its seriousness, the “coffee-grounds vomit.” It was, indeed, a sinister phenomenon.
Henry had dropped back exhausted. His forehead was wet, and his hair damp with perspiration. Also he seemed to be terrorized—he who was never afraid until hours or days after the event! At this point it was that Violet went out of the bedroom to send Elsie for the doctor.
As soon as Elsie was gone Violet dressed. She still felt very cold and ill. The minutes dragged. Henry lay inert. His aspect had considerably worsened. The facial emaciation was accentuated, and the pallor of the ears and the lips, and even his beard and hair were limp as if from their own fatigue. Elsie’s greed was now an infinitesimal thing in Violet’s mind, and the importance attached to it struck her as wildly absurd. Yet she had a strange, cruel desire (which she repressed) to say to Henry: “Your bluff has failed! Your bluff has failed! And look at you!” She thought of the approaching Christmas, for which she had secretly been making plans for merriment; she had meant to get Elsie’s aid, because she knew that Elsie had in her the instincts of fancy and romance. Pathetic! She thought of her anger at Elsie’s indiscretion in telling a customer that the master would never get up again. Ridiculous anger! He never would get up again; and what did it matter if all Clerkenwell knew in advance? The notion of Henry spending money on the cure of his damaged knee seemed painfully laughable. His dread, genuine or affected, of communism, seemed merely grotesque. She saw a funeral procession, consisting of a hearse and one coach, leave Riceyman Steps. The coffin would have to be carried across the space from the shop-door to the main road, as no vehicle could come right to the door. Crowds! Crowds of gapers!
Then she heard a noise below. Elsie, who had run all the way to Myddelton Square and all the way back, tapped with tremulous eagerness.
“He’s coming, ’m.” She was panting.
Dr. Raste arrived, but only after an interval of nearly half an hour, which seemed to Violet like half a night. The fact was that, despite much practice, he could not dress in less than about twenty minutes; nor was it his habit to run to his patients, whatever their condition. He came with the collar of his thick overcoat turned up. Violet met him on the landing; she had shut the bedroom door behind her. He was calm; he yawned; and his demeanour hovered between the politely indifferent and the politely inimical. He spoke vaguely, but in his loud tone, in reply to Violet’s murmur: “I was afraid you weren’t coming, doctor.”
Violet had by this time lost her sense of proportion. She was incapable of bearing in mind that the doctor lived daily and nightly among disease and death, and that he was more accustomed to sick people than to healthy. She did not suspect that in the realism of his heart he regarded sick people and their relations in the mass as persons excessive in their fears, ruthless in their egotism, and cruel in their demands upon himself. She had no conception that to him a night-call was primarily a grievance and secondarily an occasion to save life or pacify pain. She might have credited that fifty percent of his night-calls were unnecessary, but she could never have guessed that he had already set down this visit to Riceyman Steps as probably the consequence of a false, foolish, feminine alarm. She began to explain to
