He could hear the whining voice now - excellent physique, sound as a bell - even all the physic she took couldn't really do her any harm!
They were the same, sisters under the skin, Mrs. Pearstock from Tottenham and Mrs. Forrester of Park Lane Court. You listened and you wrote scratches with your pen on a piece of stiff expensive notepaper, or on a hospital card as the case might be...
God, he was tired of the whole business...
Blue sea, the faint, sweet smell of mimosa, hot dust...
Fifteen years ago. All that was over and done with - yes, done with, thank Heaven! He'd had the courage to break off the whole business -
"Courage?" said a little imp somewhere. "Is that what you call it?"
Well, he'd done the sensible thing, hadn't he? It had been a wrench. Damn it all, it had hurt like hell! But he'd gone through with it, cut loose, come home, and married Gerda.
He'd got a plain secretary and he'd married a plain wife. That was what he wanted, wasn't it? He'd had enough of beauty, hadn't he? He'd seen what someone like Veronica could do with her beauty - seen the effect it had had on every male within range. After Veronica, he'd wanted safety. Safety and peace and devotion and the quiet enduring things of life. He'd wanted, in fact, Gerda! He'd wanted someone who'd take her ideas of life from him, who would accept his decisions and who wouldn't have, for one moment, any ideas of her own.
Who was it who had said that the real tragedy of life was that you got what you wanted?
Angrily he pressed the buzzer on his desk.
He'd deal with Mrs. Forrester.
It took him a quarter of an hour to deal with Mrs. Forrester. Once again it was easy money. Once again he listened, asked questions, reassured, sympathized, infused something of his own healing energy. Once more he wrote out a prescription for an expensive proprietary.
The sickly neurotic woman who had trailed into the room left it with a firmer step, with colour in her cheeks, with a feeling that life might possibly, after all, be worth while...
John Christow leant back in his chair. He was free now - free to go upstairs to join Gerda and the children - free from the preoccupations of illness and suffering for a whole weekend.
But he still felt that strange disinclination to move, that new queer lassitude of the will.
He was tired - tired - tired...
Chapter 4
In the dining room of the flat above the consulting room, Gerda Christow was staring at a joint of mutton.
Should she or should she not send it back to the kitchen to be kept warm?
If John was going to be much longer it would be cold - congealed, and that would be dreadful...
But, on the other hand, the last patient had gone, John would be up in a moment, if she sent it back there would be delay - John was so impatient. "But surely you knew I was just coming..." There would be that tone of suppressed exasperation in his voice that she knew and dreaded. Besides, it would get overcooked, dried up - John hated overcooked meat.
But on the other hand he disliked cold food very much indeed.
At any rate the dish was nice and hot...
Her mind oscillated to and fro and her sense of misery and anxiety deepened.
The whole world had shrunk to a leg of mutton getting cold on a dish.
On the other side of the table her son Terence, aged twelve, said:
"Boracic salts burn with a green flame, sodium salts are yellow."
Gerda looked distractedly across the table at his square freckled face. She had no idea what he was talking about.
"Did you know that, Mother?"
"Know what, dear?"
"About salts."
Gerda's eyes flew distractedly to the salt cellar. Yes, salt and pepper were on the table. That was all right. Last week Lewis had forgotten them and that had annoyed John. There was always something...
"It's one of the chemical tests," said Terence in a dreamy voice. "Jolly interesting, I think."
Zena, aged nine, with a pretty, vacuous face, whimpered:
"I want my dinner. Can't we start, Mother?"
"In a minute, dear; we must wait for Father."
"We could start," said Terence. "Father wouldn't mind. You know how fast he eats."
Gerda shook her head.
Carve the mutton? But she never could remember which was the right side to plunge the knife in. Of course, perhaps Lewis had put it the right way on the dish - but sometimes she didn't - and John was always annoyed if it was done the wrong way. And, Gerda reflected desperately, it always was the wrong way when she did it. Oh, dear, how cold the gravy was getting - a skin was forming on the top of it - she must send it back - but then if John were just coming - and surely he would be coming now -
Her mind went round and round unhappily... like a trapped animal.
Sitting back in his consulting room chair, tapping with one hand on the table in front of him, conscious that upstairs lunch must be ready, John Christow was nevertheless unable to force himself to get up...
San Miguel... blue sea... smell of mimosa... a scarlet tritoma upright against green leaves... the hot sun... the dust... that desperation of love and suffering...
He thought, Oh, God, not that. Never that again! That's over...
He wished suddenly that he had never known Veronica, never married Gerda, never met Henrietta...
Mrs. Crabtree, he thought, was worth the lot of them... That had been a bad afternoon last week. He'd been so pleased with the reactions. She could stand .005 by now. And then had come that alarming rise in toxicity and the D.L. reaction had been negative instead of positive.
The old bean had lain there, blue, gasping for breath - peering up at him with malicious, indomitable eyes.
"Making a bit of a guinea pig out of me, ain't you, dearie? Experimenting - that kinder thing."
"We want to get you well," he had said, smiling down at her.
"Up to your tricks, yer mean!" She had grinned suddenly. "I don't mind, bless yer. You carry on, doctor! Someone's got to be first, that's it, ain't it? 'Ad me 'air permed, I did, when I was a kid. It wasn't 'alfa difficult business then! Couldn't get a comb through it. But there - I enjoyed the fun. You can 'ave yer fun with me. I can stand it."
"Feel pretty bad, don't you?" His hand was on her pulse. Vitality passed from him to the panting old woman on the bed.
"Orful, I feel. You're about right! 'Asn't gone according to plan - that's it, isn't it? Never you mind. Don't you lose 'eart. I can stand a lot, I can!"
John Christow said appreciatively:
"You're fine. I wish all my patients were like you."
"I wanter get well... that's why! I wanter get well... Mum, she lived to be eighty-eight - and old grandma was ninety when she popped off. We're long livers in our family, we are."
He had come away miserable, racked with doubt and uncertainty. He'd been so sure he was on the right track. Where had he gone wrong? How diminish the toxicity and keep up the hormone content and at the same time neutralize the pantratin...
He'd been too cock-sure - he'd taken it for granted that he'd circumvented all the snags.
And it was then, on the steps of St. Christopher's, that a sudden desperate weariness had overcome him - a hatred of all this long, slow, wearisome clinical work, and he'd thought of Henrietta. Thought of her suddenly, not as herself, but of her beauty and her freshness, her health and her radiant vitality - and the faint smell of primroses that clung about her hair.
And he had gone to Henrietta straight away, sending a curt telephone message home about being called away. He had strode into the studio and taken Henrietta in his arms, holding her to him with a fierceness that was new in their relationship,
There had been a quick startled wonder in her eyes. She had freed herself from his arms and had made him coffee. And as she moved about the studio she had thrown out desultory questions. Had he come, she asked, straight from the hospital?
He didn't want to talk about the hospital. He wanted to make love to Henrietta and forget that the hospital and Mrs. Crabtree and Ridgeway's Disease and all the rest of the caboodle existed.
But, at first unwillingly, then more fluently, he answered her questions. And presently he was striding up and down, pouring out a spate of technical explanations and surmises. Once or twice he paused, trying to simplify - to explain.
"You see, you have to get a reaction -"
Henrietta said quickly:
"Yes, yes, the D.L. reaction has to be positive. I understand that. Go on."
He said sharply, "How do you know about the D.L. reaction?"
"I got a book -"
"What book? Whose?"
She motioned towards the small book table. He snorted. "Scobell? Scobell's no good. He's fundamentally unsound. Look here, if you want to read - don't -"
She interrupted him.
"I only want to understand some of the terms you use - enough so as to understand you without making you stop to explain everything the whole time. Go on. I'm following you all right."
"Well," he said doubtfully, "remember Scobell's unsound." He went on talking. He talked for two hours and a half. Reviewing the set-backs, analyzing the possibilities, outlining possible theories. He was hardly conscious of Henrietta's presence. And yet, more than once, as he hesitated, her quick intelligence took him a step of the way, seeing, almost before he did, what he was hesitating to advance. He was interested now, and his belief in himself was creeping back. He had been right - the main theory was correct - and there were ways, more ways than one, of combating the toxic symptoms...
And then, suddenly, he was tired out. He'd got it all clear now. He'd get on to it tomorrow morning. He'd ring up Neill, tell him to combine the two solutions and try that. Yes - try that. By God, he wasn't going to be beaten!
"I'm tired," he said abruptly. "My God, I'm tired." And he had flung himself down and slept - slept like the dead.
He had wakened to find Henrietta smiling at him in the morning light and making tea and he had smiled back at her.
"Not at all according to plan," he said.
"Does it matter?"
"No. No. You are rather a nice person, Henrietta." His eyes went to the bookcase. "If you're interested in this sort of thing, I'll get you the proper stuff to read."
"I'm not interested in this sort of thing. I'm interested in you, John."
"You can't read Scobell." He took up the offending volume. "The man's a charlatan."
And she had laughed. He could not understand why his strictures on Scobell amused her so.
But that was what, every now and then, startled him about Henrietta. The sudden revelation, disconcerting to him, that she was able to laugh at him...
He wasn't used to it. Gerda took him in deadly earnest. And Veronica had never thought about anything but herself. But Henrietta had a trick of throwing her head back, of looking at him through half-closed eyes, with a sudden, tender, half-mocking little smile, as though she were saying: "Let me have a good look at this funny person called John... Let me get a long way away and look at him..."
It was, he thought, very much the same as the way she screwed up her eyes to look at her work - or a picture. It was - damn it all - it was detached. He didn't want Henrietta to be detached. He wanted Henrietta to think only of him, never to let her mind stray away from him.
("Just what you object to in Gerda, in fact," said his private imp, bobbing up again.)
The truth of it was that he was completely illogical. He didn't know what he wanted.
(I want to go home... What an absurd, what a ridiculous phrase. It didn't mean anything.)
In an hour or so at any rate he'd be driving out of London - forgetting about sick people with their faint, sour, "wrong" smell... sniffing wood smoke and pines and soft wet Autumn leaves... The very motion of the car would be soothing - that smooth, effortless increase of speed...
But it wouldn't, he reflected suddenly, be at all like that because owing to a slightly strained wrist, Gerda would have to drive, and Gerda, God help her, had never been able to begin to drive a car! Every time she changed gear, he would sit silent, grinding his teeth together, managing not to say anything because he knew, by bitter experience, that when he did say anything Gerda became immediately worse. Curious that no one had ever been able to teach Gerda to change gear - not even Henrietta. He'd turned her over to Henrietta thinking that Henrietta's enthusiasm might do better than his own irritability.
For Henrietta loved cars. She spoke of cars with the lyrical intensity that other people gave to Spring, or the first snowdrop.
"Isn't he a beauty, John? Doesn't he just purr along? (For Henrietta's cars were always masculine.) He'll do Bale Hill in third - not straining at all - quite effortlessly. Listen to the even way he ticks over."
Until he had burst out suddenly and furiously:
"Don't you think, Henrietta, you could pay some attention to me and forget the damned car for a minute or two!"
He was always ashamed of these outbursts.
He never knew when they would come upon him out of a blue sky.
It was the same thing over her work. He realized that her work was good. He admired it - and hated it - at the same time.
The most furious quarrel he had had with her had arisen over that.
Gerda had said to him one day:
"Henrietta has asked me to sit for her."
"What?" His astonishment had not, if he came to think of it, been flattering. "You?"
"Yes, I'm going over to the studio tomorrow."
"What on earth does she want you for?"
No, he hadn't been very polite about it. But luckily Gerda hadn't realized that fact. She had looked pleased about it. He suspected Henrietta of one of those insincere kindnesses of hers - Gerda, perhaps, had hinted that she would like to be modelled. Something of that kind.
Then, about ten days later, Gerda had shown him triumphantly a small plaster statuette.
It was a pretty thing - technically skilful like all of Henrietta's work. It idealized Gerda - and Gerda herself was clearly pleased about it.
