“I’m not quite so childishly frivolous as you seem to imagine,” he said with dignity and bottled anger.
“On the contrary,” she answered, “you’re too adultly serious. You couldn’t manage a child because you’re not enough of a child yourself. You’re like one of those dreadfully grown-up creatures in Shaw’s Methuselah.”
“Naughty father!” repeated little Phil exasperatingly, like a parrot with only one phrase.
Philip’s first impulse was to seize the child out of his mother’s arms, smack him for his impertinence, drive him from the room, and then turn to Elinor and violently “have things out” with her. But a habit of gentlemanly self-control and a dread of scenes made him keep his temper. Instead of healthily breaking out, he made an effort of will and more than ever tightly shut himself in. Preserving his dignity and his unexpressed grievance, he got up and walked through the French window into the garden. Elinor watched his departure. Her impulse was to run after him, take him by the hand, and make peace. But she too checked herself. Philip limped away out of sight. The child continued to whimper. Elinor gave him a little shake.
“Stop, Phil,” she said almost angrily. “That’s enough now. Stop at once.”
The two doctors were examining what to an untrained eye might have seemed the photograph of a typhoon in the Gulf of Siam, of an explosion of black smoke in the midst of clouds, or merely of an ink stain.
“Particularly clear,” said the young radiographer. “Look.” He pointed at the smoke cloud. “There’s a most obvious new growth there, at the pylorus.” He glanced with a certain enquiring deference at his distinguished colleague.
Sir Herbert nodded. “Obvious,” he repeated. He had an oracular manner; what he said, you felt, was always and necessarily true.
“It couldn’t very well be large. Not with the symptoms so far recorded. There’s been no vomiting yet.”
“No vomiting?” explained the radiographer with an almost excessive display of interest and astonishment. “That would explain the smallness.”
“The obstruction’s only slight.”
“It would certainly be worth opening up the abdomen for exploration purposes.”
Sir Herbert made a little pouting grimace and dubiously shook his head. “One has to think of the patient’s age.”
“Quite,” the radiographer made haste to agree.
“He’s older than he seems.”
“Yes, yes. He certainly doesn’t look his age.”
“Well, I must be going,” said Sir Herbert.
The young radiographer darted to the door, handed him his hat and gloves, personally escorted him to the attendant Daimler. Returning to his desk, he glanced again at the black-blotched, grey-cloudy photograph.
“A really remarkably successful exposure,” he said to himself with satisfaction and, turning the picture over, he wrote a few words in pencil on the back.
“J. Bidlake, Esq., Stomach after barium meal. New growth at pylorus, small but v. clear. Photographed …” He looked up at his calendar for the date, recorded it, and put the photograph away in his file for future reference.
The old manservant announced the visitor and retired, closing the door of the studio behind him.
“Well, John,” said Lady Edward, advancing across the room, “how are you? I heard you’d been seedy. Nothing serious, I hope.”
John Bidlake did not even get up to receive her. From the depth of the arm chair in which he had spent the day meditating in terror the themes of disease and death, he held out a hand.
“But, my poor John!” exclaimed Lady Edward sitting down beside him. “You look very low and wretched. What is it?”
John Bidlake shook his head. “God knows,” he said. He had guessed, of course, from Sir Herbert’s vaguely professional words about “slight obstructions in the neighbourhood of the pylorus”; he knew what was the matter. Hadn’t his son Maurice died of the same thing five years ago, in California? He knew; but he would not speak his knowledge. Uttered, the worst was more frightful, more irrevocable. Besides, one should never formulate one’s knowledge of coming evil; for then fate would have, so to speak, a model on which to shape events. There was always a kind of impossible chance that, if one didn’t put one’s foreboding of evil into words, the evil wouldn’t happen. The mysteries of John Bidlake’s personal religion were quite as obscure and paradoxical as any of those in the “theolatrous” orthodoxies which he liked to deride.
“But haven’t you seen a doctor?” Lady Edward’s tone was accusatory; she knew her friend’s strange prejudice against doctors.
“Of course I have,” he answered irritably, knowing that she knew. “Do you take me for a fool? But they’re all charlatans. I went to one with a knighthood. But do you suppose he knew anything more than the others? He just told me in quack jargon what I’d told him in plain words; that I’d got something wrong with my innards. Stupid rogue!” His hatred of Sir Herbert and all doctors had momentarily revived him.
“But he must have told you something,” Lady Edward insisted.
The words brought him back to the thought of that “slight obstruction in the neighbourhood of the pylorus,” of disease and pain and the creeping approach of death. He relapsed into his old misery and terror. “Nothing of significance,” he muttered, averting his face.
“Then perhaps it’s nothing really serious,” Lady Edward comfortingly suggested.
“No, no!” To the old man her lighthearted hopefulness seemed an outrage. He would not put himself into the power of fate by formulating the horrible truth. But at the same time, he wanted to be treated as though the truth had been formulated, treated with a grave commiseration. “It’s bad. It’s very bad,” he insisted.
He was thinking of death; death in the form of a new life growing and growing in his belly, like an embryo in a womb. The one thing fresh and active in his old body, the one thing exuberantly and increasingly alive was death.
All round, on the walls of
