Mr. Sutcliffe had got up; he had come closer.
She was playing the Presto agitato. It flowed smoothly under her fingers, at an incredible pace, with an incredible certainty.
Something seemed to be happening over there, outside the place where she heard the music. Martha came in and whispered to the Doctor. The Doctor whispered to Roddy. Roddy started up and they went out together.
She thought: “Papa again.” But she was too happy to care. Nothing mattered so long as she could listen to herself playing the “Moonlight Sonata.”
Under the music she was aware of Miss Kendal stooping over her, pressing her shoulder, saying something. She stood up. Everybody was standing up, looking frightened.
Outside, in the hall, she saw Catty, crying. She went past her over the open threshold where the snow lay like a light. She couldn’t stay to find her snowshoes and her coat.
The track across the Green struck hard and cold under her slippers. The tickling and trickling of the snow felt like the play of cold light fingers on her skin. Her fear was a body inside her body; it ached and dragged, stone cold and still.
VI
The basin kept on slipping from the bed. She could see its pattern—reddish flowers and green leaves and curlykews—under the splashings of mustard and water. She felt as if it must slip from her fingers and be broken. When she pressed it tighter to the edge of the mattress the rim struck against Papa’s breast.
He lay stretched out on the big yellow birchwood bed. The curtains were drawn back, holding the sour smell of sickness in their fluted folds.
Papa’s body made an enormous mound under the green eiderdown. It didn’t move. A little fluff of down that had pricked its way through the cover still lay where it had settled; Papa’s head still lay where it had dropped; the forefinger still pointed at the fluff of down.
Papa’s head was thrown stiffly back on the high pillows; it sank in, weighted with the blood that flushed his face. Around it on the white linen there was a spatter and splash of mustard and water. His beard clung to his chin, soaked in the yellowish stain. He breathed with a loud, grating and groaning noise.
Her ears were so tired with listening to this noise that sometimes they would go to sleep for a minute or two. Then it would wake them suddenly and she would begin to cry again.
You could stop crying if you looked steadily at the little fluff of down. At each groaning breath it quivered and sank and quivered.
Roddy sat by the dressing-table. He stared, now at his clenched hands, now at his face in the glass, as if he hated it, as if he hated himself.
Mamma was still dressed. She had got up on the bed beside Papa and crouched on the bolster. She had left off crying. Every now and then she stroked his hair with tender, desperate fingers. It struck out between the white ears of the pillow-slip in a thin, pointed crest.
Papa’s hair. His poor hair. These alterations of the familiar person, the bloodred flush, the wet, clinging beard, the pointed hair, stirred in her a rising hysteria of pity.
Mamma had given him the mustard and water. She could see the dregs in the tumbler on the night-table, and the brown hen’s feather they had tickled his throat with.
They oughtn’t to have done it. Dr. Charles would not have let them do it if he had been there. They should have waited. They might have known the choking and the retching would kill him. Catty ought to have known. Somewhere behind his eyes his life was leaking away through the torn net of the blood vessels, bleeding away over his brain, under his hair, under the tender, desperate fingers.
She fixed her eyes on the pattern of the wallpaper. A purplish rosebud in a white oval on a lavender ground. She clung to it as to some firm, safe centre of being.
VII
The first day. The first evening.
She went on hushed feet down the passage to let Dan in. The squeak of the latch picked at her taut nerves.
She was glad of the cold air that rushed into the shut-up, soundless house, the sweet, cold air that hung about Dan’s face and tingled in the curling frieze of his overcoat.
She took him into the lighted dining-room where Roddy and Mamma waited for him. The callous fire crackled and spurted brightness. The table was set for Dan’s supper.
Dan knew that Papa was dead. He betrayed his knowledge by the cramped stare of his heavy, gentle eyes and by the shamed, furtive movements of his hands towards the fire. But that was all. His senses were still uncontaminated by their knowledge. He had not seen Papa. He had not heard him.
“What was it?”
“Apoplexy.”
His eyes widened. Innocent, vague eyes that didn’t see.
Their minds fastened on Dan, to get immunity for themselves out of his unconsciousness. As long as they could keep him downstairs, in his innocence, their misery receded from them a little way.
But Mamma would not have it so. She looked at Dan. Her eyes were dull and had no more thought in them. Her mouth quivered. They knew that she was going to say something. Their thread of safety tightened. In another minute it would snap.
“Would you like to see him?” she said.
They waited for Dan to come down from the room. He would not be the same Dan. He would have seen the white sheet raised by the high mound of the body and by the stiff, upturned feet, and he would have lifted the handkerchief from the face. He would be like them, and his consciousness would put a sharper edge on theirs. He would be afraid to look at them, as they were afraid to look at each other, because of what
