“It is really a most admirable arrangement,” he said heartily.
“And last year I had a bicycle accident. I was brought back here with a very showy arm; in a cab. Poor Mrs. Bailey fainted. It was not at all serious. But they gave me their best room, the one behind this, for weeks and waited upon me most beautifully, and mind you they did not expect any compensation, they knew I could not afford it.”
“An injury that should disable for so many weeks shall not have been a light one.”
“That was the doctor. You see it was Saturday. It was more than an hour before they could find anyone at all, and then they found a small surgeon in Gower Street. He stitched up my arm with a rusty darning needle taken from Mrs. Bailey’s workbasket just as it was. I told him I had some carbolic in my room; but he said Nevorr mind that. I’m not one of yrr faddists, and bound it all up and I came down to dinner. I had just come back from the first week of my holiday; bicycling in Buckinghamshire, perfect, I never felt so well in my life. I was going to Paris the next day.”
“That was indeed most unfortunate.”
“Well I don’t know. I was going with a woman I did not really know. I meant to go, and she had been thinking of going and knew Paris and where to stay cheaply and suggested we should join forces. A sort of marriage of convenience. I was not really disappointed. I was relieved; though awfully sorry to fail her. But everyone was so kind I was simply astonished. I spent the evening on the sofa in the dining-room; and they all sat quietly about near me. One man, a Swede, who had only just arrived, sat on the end of the sofa and told Swedish folk stories in a quiet motherly voice, and turned out afterwards to be the noisiest, jolliest, most screamingly funny man we have ever had here. About eleven o’clock I felt faint and we discovered that my arm must have broken out again some time before. Two of the men rushed off to find a doctor and brought an extraordinary little old retired surgeon with white hair and trembling hands. He wheezed and puffed and bound me up afresh and went away refusing a fee. I wanted some milk, and the Swede went out at midnight and found some somewhere. … I come back with at least one cow or I come not at all. … Of course a week later I had stitch abscesses.”
“But this man was a criminal.”
“Yes wasn’t it abominable. Poor man. The two doctors who saw my arm later said that many limbs have been lost for less. He counted on my being in such good health. He told Mrs. Bailey I was in splendid health. But he sent in a big bill.”
“I sincerely trust you did not pay this.”
“I sent him a description of his operation, told him the result and said that my friends considered that I ought to prosecute him.”
“Certainly it was your duty.”
“I don’t know. I hate cornering people. It would not have made him different and I am no better than he is.”
“That is a most extraordinary point of view.”
“I was sorry afterwards that I had written like that.”
“Why?”
“Because he threw himself into Dublin Harbour a year later. He must have been in fearful difficulties.”
“No excuse for criminal neglect.”
“The most wonderful thing in the accident itself,” pursued Miriam firmly, grasping her midnight freedom and gazing into the pattern her determination that for another few minutes no one should come up to interrupt, “was being so near to death.” She glanced up to gauge the effect of her improvisation. The moment she was now intent upon had not been “wonderful.” She would not be able to substantiate it; she had never thought it through. It lay ahead now for exploration if he wished, ready to reveal its quality to her for the first time … he was sitting hunched against the wall with his hands driven into his pockets, waiting without resistance, with an intentness equal to her own … she returned gratefully to her carpet. “It was a skid,” she said feeling the oily slither of her front tyre. “I fell with my elbow and head between the horses’ heels and the wheel of a dray. The back-thrown hoof of the near horse caught the inner side of my arm, and for a long long time I saw the grey steel rim of the huge wheel approaching my head. It was strained back with all my force, my elbow pressing the ground, but I thought it could not miss me. There was a moment of absolute calm; indifference almost. It came after a feeling of hatred and yet pity for the wheel. It was so awful, wet glittering grey, and relentless; and stupid, it could not help going on.”
“This was indeed a most remarkable psychological experience. It happens rarely to be so near death with full consciousness. But this absence of fear must be in you a personal idiosyncracy.”
“But I was afraid. The thing is that you don’t go on feeling afraid. Do you see?”
“I hear what you say. But while there is the chance of life the instinct of self-preservation is so strong” …
“But that is the surprise; the tumult in your body, something surging up and doing things without thinking.”
“Instinctive nervous reaction.”
“But there is something else. In the moment you are sure you are going to be killed, death changes. You wait, for the moment after.”
“That is an illusion, the strength of life in you that cannot, midst good health, accept death. But tell me; your arm was certainly broken?” His gently breathed question took away the sting of his statement.
“No. The wheel went over it just above the bend of the elbow. I did not feel it, and got up feeling only a
