Count von Borgk’s condition did not at first cause much anxiety. His temperature was comparatively low and his strength seemed to hold out.
Laura felt normal again by and by after her own terror of infection had passed. She telephoned each day to the nursing home and sent flowers and little notes.
But as the time passed she found it more and more difficult to find anything to write. She began to feel out of sorts, listless, bitter. She had looked forward to some pleasant weeks at the seaside and now she had to sit here and be baked at the Grand Hotel in the midst of the summer heat and the dead season.
That Count Alexis should immediately fall ill was not a part of the marriage contract.
Laura consoled herself as far as possible with Georg. During her long stay abroad he had been boarded out in the family of a bank cashier. There he had a tiny room about as big as a wardrobe, which just held his bed and school books. The cashier and his wife were cold, silent, nervous people who made a face if you talked aloud or banged the door, but who otherwise left Georg completely alone. Nobody during the last two years had asked how he was doing at school. But this very forlornness had awakened in him a defiant ambition that had kept him up to the mark.
Now he moved to his mother at the hotel and they had their meals in the big dining-room. It was an immense change. Laura had to force him to help himself to the fine food. He writhed on his chair and it looked as if he were eating with a bad conscience.
Laura stayed in bed late in the mornings. Usually she heard no sound from Georg until he came home breathless for lunch. He had been out for a walk, he said. Laura became curious. One morning she awoke early, at eight o’clock, and stole into Georg’s room. It was empty. And he did not return before twelve. When his mother pressed him with questions, he suddenly looked her straight in the eyes and answered vehemently that he had been at Ekbacken. …
Laura smiled a tart little smile and pulled together her kimono which had opened and showed her silk stockings:
“Oh! are you so mad on boats?” she said.
The following day whilst Laura still lay in bed the telephone on her night table rang. It was from the nursing home. The nurse who spoke sounded very serious. The Count was worse and incessantly expressed his wish that the Countess should come to see him.
Laura felt a violent discomfort. She grew cold all over. The thought of the nursing home made her sick. She had not yet been there. She was afraid, mortally afraid of long corridors, temperature curves, the smell of disinfectants, groans, biers. Every fibre of her body shrank back from the serious danger of infection and the nearness of death. But all of a sudden she felt relief, a wonderful relief. Georg! Yes Georg would probably go! With trembling fingers she seized the receiver again:
“Oh! nurse, I should like to come. But I can’t, not today. I am ill in bed myself. I feel most awfully dizzy. But I will send my son.”
After which Laura tied a damp towel round her head and waited for Georg.
When he came in she lay writhing on her pillows and really looked rather ill. She caught hold of his hand and pressed it violently:
“Georg dear, they have rung up from the nursing home. He wants to see me. But I can’t trail myself there. I feel so awfully bad. Will you go there and give him my love, tell him how ill I am.”
Georg stood pale, hating the thought of going to the sick bed of this feared and secretly detested stranger. But he drew himself up. It did not enter his head to say “no” on an occasion like this.
After some hours Georg came back. He had not been able to give any message as the patient was unconscious.
Laura put no questions about the nursing home, what the doctor had said, or how the patient looked. She only heaped her gratitude on Georg and fawned on him like a dog.
She probably felt she might need him again.
The next day the Count was still unconscious and then Laura ventured to be a little bit better and to get up. It was boring to stay in bed, and besides she had a superstitious fear of pretending to be ill—she might really become ill.
On the whole, she thought extraordinarily little of the man whose name she bore. It seemed as if his illness had obliterated all her memories, from the earliest society ones to the latest exquisitely sensual; it seemed as if it had made of him a remote half-hostile stranger.
Several days passed. There was no talk of any visit to the invalid. He could speak to nobody, periods of unconsciousness interchanged with periods of delirium. Laura could no longer keep quiet or sit alone. She had at last made some acquaintances in the hotel, a secretary of the Danish Legation and a young widow whom she had met at the seaside. They in their turn had introduced her to a Russian musician who was passing through. So they were able to have a little game of bridge up in Laura’s sitting room in the evening.
“How is your husband getting on?” said the lady between the bids.
“Oh, I was there today … he is much better. …”
Georg heard these words through the half open door.
Then the telephone in Laura’s bedroom rang. With a sigh she dropped her cards and went in, carefully closing the door to the sitting room. The Russian did not play bridge, but was improvising on the piano.
Once more there was a terrible, pious, insistent voice
