_ Then she was lying in bed in a small room, obscure because it was
heavily curtained; the light came through the inner pair of
curtains of ecru lace, with a beautiful soft silvery quality. A
man was standing by the side of the bed--not Chirac.
"Now, madame," he said to her, with kind firmness, and speaking
with a charming exaggerated purity of the vowels. "You have the
mucous fever. I have had it myself. You will be forced to take
baths, very frequently. I must ask you to reconcile yourself to
that, to be good."
She did not reply. It did not occur to her to reply. But she
certainly thought that this doctor--he was probably a doctor--was
overestimating her case. She felt better than she had felt for two
days. Still, she did not desire to move, nor was she in the least
anxious as to her surroundings. She lay quiet.
A woman in a rather coquettish deshabille watched over her with
expert skill.
Later, Sophia seemed to be revisiting the sea on whose waves the
cab had swum; but now she was under the sea, in a watery gulf,
terribly deep; and the sounds of the world came to her through the
water, sudden and strange. Hands seized her and forced her from
the subaqueous grotto where she had hidden into new alarms. And
she briefly perceived that there was a large bath by the side of
the bed, and that she was being pushed into it. The water was icy
cold. After that her outlook upon things was for a time clearer
and more precise. She knew from fragments of talk which she heard
that she was put into the cold bath by her bed every three hours,
night and day, and that she remained in it for ten minutes.
Always, before the bath, she had to drink a glass of wine, and
sometimes another glass while she was in the bath. Beyond this
wine, and occasionally a cup of soup, she took nothing, had no
wish to take anything. She grew perfectly accustomed to these
extraordinary habits of life, to this merging of night and day
into one monotonous and endless repetition of the same rite amid
the same circumstances on exactly the same spot. Then followed a
period during which she objected to being constantly wakened up
for this annoying immersion. And she fought against it even in her
dreams. Long days seemed to pass when she could not be sure
whether she had been put into the bath or not, when all external
phenomena were disconcertingly interwoven with matters which she
knew to be merely fanciful. And then she was overwhelmed by the
hopeless gravity of her state. She felt that her state was
desperate. She felt that she was dying. Her unhappiness was
extreme, not because she was dying, but because the veils of sense
were so puzzling, so exasperating, and because her exhausted body
was so vitiated, in every fibre, by disease. She was perfectly
aware that she was going to die. She cried aloud for a pair of
scissors. She wanted to cut off her hair, and to send part of it
to Constance and part of it to her mother, in separate packages.
She insisted upon separate packages. Nobody would give her a pair
of scissors. She implored, meekly, haughtily, furiously, but
nobody would satisfy her. It seemed to her shocking that all her
hair should go with her into her coffin while Constance and her
mother had nothing by which to remember her, no tangible souvenir
of her beauty. Then she fought for the scissors. She clutched at
some one--always through those baffling veils--who was putting her
into the bath by the bedside, and fought frantically. It appeared
to her that this some one was the rather stout woman who had
supped at Sylvain's with the quarrelsome Englishman, four years
ago. She could not rid herself of this singular conceit, though
she knew it to be absurd. ...
A long time afterwards--it seemed like a century--she did actually
and unmistakably see the woman sitting by her bed, and the woman
was crying.
"Why are you crying?" Sophia asked wonderingly.
And the other, younger, woman, who was standing at the foot of the
bed, replied:
"You do well to ask! It is you who have hurt her, in your
delirium, when you so madly demanded the scissors."
The stout woman smiled with the tears on her cheeks; but Sophia
wept, from remorse. The stout woman looked old, worn, and untidy.
The other one was much younger. Sophia did not trouble to inquire
from them who they were.
That little conversation formed a brief interlude in the delirium,
which overtook her again and distorted everything. She forgot,
however, that she was destined to die.
One day her brain cleared. She could be sure that she had gone to
sleep in the morning and not wakened till the evening. Hence she
had not been put into the bath.
"Have I had my baths?" she questioned.
It was the doctor who faced her.
"No," he said, "the baths are finished."
She knew from his face that she was out of danger. Moreover, she
was conscious of a new feeling in her body, as though the fount of
physical energy within her, long interrupted, had recommenced to
flow--but very slowly, a trickling. It was a rebirth. She was not
glad, but her body itself was glad; her body had an existence of
its own.
She was now often left by herself in the bedroom. To the right of
the foot of the bed was a piano in walnut, and to the left a
chimney-piece with a large mirror. She wanted to look at herself
in the mirror. But it was a very long way off. She tried to sit
up, and could not. She hoped that one day she would be able to get
as far as the mirror. She said not a word about this to either of
the two women.
Often they would sit in the bedroom and talk without ceasing.
Sophia learnt that the stout woman was named Foucault, and the
other Laurence. Sometimes Laurence would address Madame Foucault
as Aimee, but usually she was more formal. Madame Foucault always
called the other Laurence.
Sophia's curiosity stirred and awoke. But she could not obtain any
very exact information as to where she was, except that the house
was in the Rue Breda, off the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette. She
recollected vaguely that the reputation of the street was
sinister. It appeared that, on the day when she had gone out with
Chirac, the upper part of the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette was closed
for repairs--(this she remembered)--and that the cabman had turned
up the Rue Breda in order to make a detour, and that it was just
opposite to the house of Madame Foucault that she had lost
consciousness. Madame Foucault happened to be getting into a cab
at the moment; but she had told Chirac nevertheless to carry
Sophia into the house, and a policeman had helped. Then, when the
doctor came, it was discovered that she could not be moved, save
to a hospital, and both Madame Foucault and Laurence were
determined that no friend of Chirac's should be committed to the
horrors of a Paris hospital. Madame Foucault had suffered in one
as a patient, and Laurence had been a nurse in another. ...
Chirac was now away. The women talked loosely of a war.
"How kind you have been!" murmured Sophia, with humid eyes.
But they silenced her with gestures. She was not to talk. They
seemed to have nothing further to tell her. They said Chirac would
be returning perhaps soon, and that she could talk to him.
Evidently they both held Chirac in affection. They said often that
he was a charming boy.
Bit by bit Sophia comprehended the length and the seriousness of
her illness, and the immense devotion of the two women, and the
terrific disturbance of their lives, and her own debility. She saw
that the women were strongly attached to her, and she could not
understand why, as she had never done anything for them, whereas
they had done everything for her. She had not learnt that benefits
rendered, not benefits received, are the cause of such
attachments.
All the time she was plotting, and gathering her strength to
disobey orders and get as far as the mirror. Her preliminary
studies and her preparations were as elaborate as those of a
prisoner arranging to escape from a fortress. The first attempt
was a failure. The second succeeded. Though she could not stand
without support, she managed by clinging to the bed to reach a
chair, and to push the chair in front of her until it approached
the mirror. The enterprise was exciting and terrific. Then she saw
a face in the glass: white, incredibly emaciated, with great,
wild, staring eyes; and the shoulders were bent as though with
age. It was a painful, almost a horrible sight. It frightened her,
so that in her alarm she recoiled from it. Not attending
sufficiently to the chair, she sank to the ground. She could not
pick herself up, and she was caught there, miserably, by her
angered jailers. The vision of her face taught her more
efficiently than anything else the gravity of her adventure. As
the women lifted her inert, repentant mass into the bed, she
reflected, "How queer my life is!" It seemed to her that she ought
to have been trimming hats in the showroom instead of being in
that curtained, mysterious, Parisian interior. _