“This is an auto-da-fé,” he muttered once in delirium. “I can see the sparks in the pupils of Sister Hedvig’s eyes. They are roasting me with slow fire because I have doubted the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception.”
And then he smiled his mysterious, derisive, little smile, which was so full of weakness and courage. But in the midst of the smile there came a sudden fit of coughing accompanied by blood and froth between his pale lips, blood on the lace of sheets and pillows. His wound had broken out again. He had another attack of hæmorrhage of the lungs.
Percy’s face grew still paler and thinner. It was as if he had shrunk before the cold breath of Death’s wings. But he was never a coward in his suffering. There was never a trace of panic.
But his weakness was such that Sister Hedvig found no occasion for any anxious, defensive suspicion. She was afraid of life, but he no longer belonged to life, she thought. A dying man she dared to approach. Confronted by death she dared to be woman. Yes, now the shy, severe Sister Hedvig could be quite tender and open. Turning away a little, she could softly stroke his hand as it lay there so white on the eiderdown. Yes, sometimes she gave him little stealthy caresses that had no tomorrow. It was her woman’s soul that lay half suffocated beneath her fear, which now ventured to make little hesitating excursions in the twilight of death.
Thus had Sister Hedvig by the force of circumstances come quite near to one who was the complete opposite to herself. We witness here the strange meeting of two persons, one of whom is sterile from fear and the other from lack of fear. Percy Hill’s life showed a strange blunting of the faculty of fear. He had always lacked the spur to action and to life that fear provides. Hence his dilettantism. He lived on his money without knowing anything about the hard struggle which had brought it together. He loved art without being capable of diving beneath the work itself to the deep disquietude which had created it. He never went beyond the enjoyment of it. His own creative work had only been a form of enjoyment. That is why he had never created anything new. He knew it himself, but he had not the strength to feel any real anguish over it, that anguish which might perhaps in the end have opened the gates to the mysterious creative world.
But now in the face of death this deficiency seemed like a splendid liberation. It is a fact that death does not come to us as a stranger. It grows coarser or more delicate and refined according to our natures. Percy’s death must of course be frail and subtle and with an element of incurable dilettantism.
“You must not think, Sister Hedvig,” he whispered with a little smile of ineradicable irony vanquishing his weakness, “that this is anything very extraordinary to me. There is really not very much that will be lost with me. I have always stood rather well with death. I cannot remember that I have ever fought against it even in the thoughts of my boyhood. My mother was so unnaturally afraid for me that I, by mere reaction, grew more and more indifferent. At first I hoped perhaps a little to get something from my illness. I hoped that the fever and the fine restlessness would yield me something. So much beauty has been born of consumption. Perhaps I still hope. But not so feverishly that it consumes me.” In vain Hedvig told herself that this was false blasphemy. In vain she entrenched herself behind her religious feelings. She felt that he did not lie. To her it seemed monstrous that a person could speak so without lying. An exquisite coolness descended upon her soul. Her own dark fear of life shrank in this unusual light. There were moments of a glorious release of the usual tension within her. She felt something almost resembling gratitude and tenderness. She need not hide anything, nor pretend, nor creep away. All this had no tomorrow. He could not betray her, nor trample upon her. He would soon die.
Thus Hedvig went about prepared to close his eyes, to mourn for him and keep him as a beautiful memory which nobody in the world would know of, or could deprive her of.
Already she was depositing him, the secret treasure of the poor, with Death.
But now the unexpected happened, Percy Hill did not die. On the contrary he began to pick up a little in the spring. In the beginning it almost looked as if he himself had been a little embarrassed and ashamed at this turn of events.
“I have never done what was expected of me,” he said. “I never finished my pictures. And of course, I did not see this thing through either. …”
But there was all the same something new in his tone. These phrases no longer rang true as formerly.
You may have been nearly run over by a tram and it is only afterwards when you are safe on the pavement that you begin to be frightened and feel the threat of death within you. As his temperature fell there rose a new restlessness in Percy Hill. He began anxiously to avoid talking of death. It seemed as if he had been ashamed of his weakness. He did all he could to appear as well as possible. It was only with difficulty that he was kept in bed. He grew impatient at the constant relapses of the early spring into cold and miserable weather. He insisted on going somewhere where there was plenty of sunshine. He had suddenly been seized by a violent zest for life.
Yes, and now Percy Hill felt for the first time a
