介绍:
DEATH AND LOVE
Thomas Crich died slowly, terribly slowly. It seemed impossible to everybody that the thread of life could be drawn out so thin, and yet not break. The sick man lay unutterably weak and spent, kept alive by morphia and by drinks, which he sipped slowly. He was only half conscious—a thin strand of consciousness linking the darkness of death with the light of day. Yet his will was unbroken, he was integral, complete. Only he must have perfect stillness about him.
Any presence but that of the nurses was a strain and an effort to him now. Every morning Gerald went into the room, hoping to find his father passed away at last. Yet always he saw the same transparent face, the same dread dark hair on the waxen forehead, and the awful, inchoate dark eyes, which seemed to be decomposing into formless darkness, having only a tiny grain of vision within them.
And always, as the dark, inchoate eyes turned to him, there passed through Gerald’s bowels a burning stroke of revolt, that seemed to resound through his whole being, threatening to break his mind with its clangour, and making him mad.
Every morning, the son stood there, erect and taut with life, gleaming in his blondness. The gleaming blondness of his strange, imminent being put the father into a fever of fretful irritation. He could not bear to meet the uncanny, downward look of Gerald’s blue eyes. But it was only for a moment. Each on the brink of departure, the father and son looked at each other, then parted.
For a long time Gerald preserved a perfect sang-froid, he remained quite collected. But at last, fear undermined him. He was afraid of some horrible collapse in himself. He had to stay and see this thing through. Some perverse will made him watch his father drawn over the borders of life. And yet, now, every day, the great red-hot stroke of horrified fear through the bowels of the son struck a further inflammation. Gerald went about all day with a tendency to cringe, as if there were the point of a sword of Damocles pricking the nape of his neck.
There was no escape—he was bound up with his father, he had to see him through. And the father’s will never relaxed or yielded to death. It would have to snap when death at last snapped it,—if it did not persist after a physical death. In the same way, the will of the son never yielded. He stood firm and immune, he was outside this death and this dying.
It was a trial by ordeal. Could he stand and see his father slowly dissolve and disappear in death, without once yielding his will, without once relenting before the omnipotence of death. Like a Red Indian undergoing torture, Gerald would experience the whole process of slow death without wincing or flinching. He even triumphed in it. He somehow wanted this death, even forced it. It was as if he himself were dealing the death, even when he most recoiled in horror. Still, he would deal it, he would triumph through death.
But in the stress of this ordeal, Gerald too lost his hold on the outer, daily life. That which was much to him, came to mean nothing. Work, pleasure—it was all left behind. He went on more or less mechanically with his business, but this activity was all extraneous. The real activity was this ghastly wrestling for death in his own soul. And his own will should triumph. Come what might, he would not bow down or submit or acknowledge a master. He had no master in death.
But as the fight went on, and all that he had been and was continued to be destroyed, so that life was a hollow shell all round him, roaring and clattering like the sound of the sea, a noise in which he participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the darkness and fearful space of death, he knew he would have to find reinforcements, otherwise he would collapse inwards upon the great dark void which circled at the centre of his soul. His will held his outer life, his outer mind, his outer being unbroken and unchanged. But the pressure was too great. He would have to find something to make good the equilibrium. Something must come with him into the hollow void of death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without. For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.
In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun. He threw away everything now—he only wanted the relation established with her. He would follow her to the studio, to be near her, to talk to her. He would stand about the room, aimlessly picking up the implements, the lumps of clay, the little figures she had cast—they were whimsical and grotesque—looking at them without perceiving them. And she felt him following her, dogging her heels like a doom. She held away from him, and yet she knew he drew always a little nearer, a little nearer.
“I say,” he said to her one evening, in an odd, unthinking, uncertain way, “won’t you stay to dinner tonight? I wish you would.”
She started slightly. He spoke to her like a man making a request of another man.
“They’ll be expecting me at home,” she said.
“Oh, they won’t mind, will they?” he said. “I should be awfully glad if you’d stay.”
Her long silence gave consent at last.
“I’ll tell Thomas, shall I?” he said.
“I must go almost immediately after dinner,” she said.
It was a dark, cold evening. There was no fire in the drawing-room, they sat in the library. He was mostly silent, absent, and Winifred talked little. But when Gerald did rouse himself, he smiled and was pleasant and ordinary with her. Then there came over him again the long blanks, of which he was not aware.
She was very much attracted by him. He looked so preoccupied, and his strange, blank silences, which she could not read, moved her and made her wonder over him, made her feel reverential towards him.
But he was very kind. He gave her the best things at the table, he had a bottle of slightly sweet, delicious golden wine brought out for dinner, knowing she would prefer it to the burgundy. She felt herself esteemed, needed almost.
As they took coffee in the library, there was a soft, very soft knocking at the door. He started, and called “Come in.” The timbre of his voice, like something vibrating at high pitch, unnerved Gudrun. A nurse in white entered, half hovering in the doorway like a shadow. She was very good-looking, but strangely enough, shy and self-mistrusting.
“The doctor would like to speak to you, Mr Crich,” she said, in her low, discreet voice.
“The doctor!” he said, starting up. “Where is he?”
“He is in the dining-room.”
“Tell him I’m coming.”
He drank up his coffee, and followed the nurse, who had dissolved like a shadow.
“Which nurse was that?” asked Gudrun.
“Miss Inglis—I like her best,” replied Winifred.
After a while Gerald came back, looking absorbed by his own thoughts, and having some of that tension and abstraction which is seen in a slightly drunken man. He did not say what the doctor had wanted him for, but stood before the fire, with his hands behind his back, and his face open and as if rapt. Not that he was really thinking—he was only arrested in pure suspense inside himself, and thoughts wafted through his mind without order.
“I must go now and see Mama,” said Winifred, “and see Dadda before he goes to sleep.”
She bade them both good-night.
Gudrun also rose to take her leave.
“You needn’t go yet, need you?” said Gerald, glancing quickly at the clock. “It is early yet. I’ll walk down with you when you go. Sit down, don’t hurry away.”
Gudrun sat down, as if, absent as he was, his will had power over her. She felt almost mesmerised. He was strange to her, something unknown. What was he thinking, what was he feeling, as he stood there so rapt, saying nothing? He kept her—she could feel that. He would not let her go. She watched him in humble submissiveness.
“Had the doctor anything new to tell you?” she asked, softly, at length, with that gentle, timid sympathy which touched a keen fibre in his heart. He lifted his eyebrows with a negligent, indifferent expression.
“No—nothing new,” he replied, as if the question were quite casual, trivial. “He says the pulse is very weak indeed, very intermittent—but that doesn’t necessarily mean much, you know.”
He looked down at her. Her eyes were dark and soft and unfolded, with a stricken look that roused him.
“No,” she murmured at length. “I don’t understand anything about these things.”
“Just as well not,” he said. “I say, won’t you have a cigarette?—do!” He quickly fetched the box, and held her a light. Then he stood before her on the hearth again.
“No,” he said, “we’ve never had much illness in the house, either—not till father.” He seemed to meditate a while. Then looking down at her, with strangely communicative blue eyes, that filled her with dread, he continued: “It’s something you don’t reckon with, you know, till it is there. And then you realise that it was there all the time—it was always there—you understand what I mean?—the possibility of this incurable illness, this slow death.”
He moved his feet uneasily on the marble hearth, and put his cigarette to his mouth, looking up at the ceiling.
“I know,” murmured Gudrun: “it is dreadful.”
He smoked without knowing. Then he took the cigarette from his lips, bared his teeth, and putting the tip of his tongue between his teeth spat off a grain of tobacco, turning slightly aside, like a man who is alone, or who is lost in thought.
“I don’t know what the effect actually is, on one,” he said, and again he looked down at her. Her eyes were dark and stricken with knowledge, looking into his. He saw her submerged, and he turned aside his face. “But I absolutely am not the same. There’s nothing left, if you understand what I mean. You seem to be clutching at the void—and at the same time you are void yourself. And so you don’t know what to do.”
“No,” she murmured. A heavy thrill ran down her nerves, heavy, almost pleasure, almost pain. “What can be done?” she added.
He turned, and flipped the ash from his cigarette on to the great marble hearth-stones, that lay bare in the room, without fender or bar.
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” he replied. “But I do think you’ve got to find some way of resolving the situation—not because you want to, but because you’ve got to, otherwise you’re done. The whole of everything, and yourself included, is just on the point of caving in, and you are just holding it up with your hands. Well, it’s a situation that obviously can’t continue. You can’t stand holding the roof up with your hands, for ever. You know that sooner or later you’ll have to let go. Do you understand what I mean? And so something’s got to be done, or there’s a universal collapse—as far as you yourself are concerned.”
He shifted slightly on the hearth, crunching a cinder under his heel. He looked down at it. Gudrun was aware of the beautiful old marble panels of the fireplace, swelling softly carved, round him and above him. She
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