This, then, is the story of my illness as reported by my wife and as I remember it. On the eleventh day it ended as suddenly as it had begun. My face was now white with illness; my eyes, no longer dilated, were sunken; and, instead of having the strength of ten, I could hardly lift my hands to my head. The fever had burned itself out, and I was alive. That was my first conscious thought. I was rational. I said, “I think it’s over.” Mildred said, “Yes,” and burst into tears. I said, “You can let me go now,” and for a while it seemed doubtful that she would be able to, because she had put the handcuff key away so safely that she could not remember where it was. She found it at last in an empty flower vase.
A period of convalescence and reflection followed. It is easy to reflect when one is ill; there is nothing else to do. Our reserves of food being ample, we just sat around and talked. The ten days of my illness had been notable for the final evacuation of the hotel. As far as we knew, we were now the only people in it.
I was now the most intelligent man in the world. I knew answers that should have been obvious by implication to everyone when the first bomb burst in the New Mexican desert. I had survived the Red Death by a miracle and was therefore even more special, because a lot of people had survived the blast, but so far as I knew, I was the only man to recover from the plague. All that came out of this period of reflection, during which I regained some measure of my strength, was the certainty that what had been wrong with us was nothing but stupidity. We had been too stupid to be afraid, or too afraid to acknowledge our fear.
What I’d feared now happened. Mildred came down with the fever. Her symptoms followed the accepted pattern of dancing and singing, but considering our differences in size (she was under five feet tall and weighed only ninety-three pounds) I could not bring myself to tie her up, with the result that when she turned on me, suddenly leaping like a tiger cat onto my shoulder and sinking her teeth into my neck, I had great difficulty in escaping her. As soon as I got my hands free I threw her down and put the handcuffs on her. Her hands were so small that she wriggled out of them till I succeeded in padding them with a handkerchief. She bit, scratched, and kicked fiercely all the time I was restraining her. Having recovered from the disease, I was “salted,” as we used to say in Africa of horses that had had horse sickness, and so I was able to take better care of her than she had of me. Nor was she hard to handle because she would seize any lure, like a bath towel, that I offered to her, and worry it, which kept her occupied till I could get right up to her— for a woman, like a horse or any other animal, is less dangerous when she is quite close to you. A kick or a blow has to travel to gain strength. Nevertheless, despite all my efforts—my keeping her covered and hand-feeding her— she weakened and died the day that the fever ended, curling up in my arms so that I thought she was just sleeping and did not know she was dead till I put her down.
This description seems somewhat cold and unfeeling, but there is no way of describing such an incident except by understatement. The point was that she had been and now was not. I was almost mad with sadness and loneliness. My brave little companion was gone and her body had to be disposed of. Burial was unthinkable, for no matter how deep I might have buried her, the hunger-crazed dogs would have dug her up. So, collecting furniture from the houses in the neighborhood, I made a great pyre, rested her body on the top of it, and set it ablaze, standing watch over it with a rifle in my hands. Like a Hindu widow, she was burned—utterly destroyed with the household goods of those who had died before her.
It was then that I thought of suicide and, deciding against it, began to take to the bottle. Oddly enough, the dogs were of no help, the wet noses of their sympathy doing nothing to alleviate my sorrow. Some days of this, or weeks—time, which had been getting vaguer, now ceased to exist entirely, because if you are alone there is no time —and then I made my decision to leave a home which no longer held anything but memories. Seeking a place to live, I moved first to the Hotel Pierre because of its proximity to Central Park; and then ten years or so later I moved to this cave in the Chelsea because of the sylvan beauties of its surroundings—its grottoes, pool and springs attracting me profoundly.
Leaving home was a strange sensation. Each thing I looked at had a history. Given by friends, bought, inherited, each thing represented something other than what it was. They were objects certainly, some of them objects of art, but they were also memories. This man and that woman came to the surface of memory; this place and that place; this year and that year. We were in New Orleans then, I thought. We bought those little brass cannons on our honeymoon. We bought this picture in New York, that ivory Buddha in Paris. What was it they said about Buddhas? That you should never use them for anything—not as paperweights or doorstops; you should just have them to look at. This was home, a collection of objects—chairs, tables, beds, chests of drawers, china, silver, pictures, books—that had been integrated into a personality by their possessors—by us. This was home in its final phase; built up slowly, it was now suddenly disintegrated.
Several times I went back to look at the apartment, to walk about in it as I had walked before, to feel the things I had handled in the past. I even collected a few things as souvenirs and took them over to the Pierre. It may have been these minor objects of art, or it may have been the location of my new abode, its convenience to 57th Street, that prompted me to make a collection of the smaller pictures in the art galleries there.
The galleries were intact, no one having bothered to loot them—jewels and gold being the things that attracted the robbers. I got some very lovely things: a Poussin, a Utrillo; I got pictures by Renoir, Ingres, Vermeer, Manet, Monet, Dali, and Winslow Homer. Later on, this picture collecting became a kind of obsession and no doubt helped me to retain my sanity, for I would hunt the more expensive apartments and houses of the city in search of works of art—pictures, bibelots, and books. I took things from museums and libraries, and so created a museum of my own in one of the large reception rooms of the hotel. The catholicity of my taste would no doubt have amazed the late curators of the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art, but I have a very interesting collection to which, even now, I occasionally add an exceptional piece if I run across one. And it is very restful after a day’s hunting in Central Park to drop in and look at the masterpieces of our vanished civilization and reflect upon the marvelous capacity of man for variability.
It is interesting to look back now and see the devices I unknowingly employed to keep going. Had I not been alone, had Mildred lived, there might have been a great excitement in this life once we had got used to it. Even as it was, I grew to enjoy it. I see that today, when the even tenor of my life has been shattered by the sudden appearance of the strangers. Had they been men, I should unquestionably have killed them, but since they were young women I could not. That I could not was not a matter of chivalry, for chivalry needs a social context in which to function. The force that stayed my finger—which was on the trigger—was one much older than chivalry, being the force that had given birth to it. These were young females of my own species. No factor can be more disturbing to any man or animal.