It became a race. He almost stopped eating and drinking and she kept at his side a cup of tea into which she slipped a beaten egg and a little sugar. He drank this slowly, a sip now and then, and so sustained his life.
By summer they both saw he could not win. One morning he was struggling to get out of bed. His nightshirt fell away from his neck, hollowed into triangular cavities. His ears looked enormous, his eyes were sick.
“Clem,” she cried. “You’ve got to think of me for once.” It was her last appeal.
“Don’t I think of you, hon?”
The strength was gone even from his voice. It sounded empty and ghostlike.
“You aren’t getting up,” she said. “You’re staying right there until I can get Doctor Wood.”
He sank back on the pillow, trying to smile. “You’ve got me — down,” he whispered.
She made haste then to the telephone, and found the doctor at his breakfast.
“I’ll come as soon as I—”
“No, you’ll come now,” she shrieked. “You’ll come right now, without one moment’s delay! I think he’s dying.”
She flew back to the bedside, the wide old-fashioned double bed where they had slept side by side in the years since she had given up everything to be his wife. He was lying just as she had left him but when she came in he opened his eyes drowsily and smiled.
“The doctor is coming right over, Clem. Don’t go to sleep.”
“No — I don’t want to.”
They stayed in silence for a moment, she holding one of his bony hands between hers. No use wasting his strength in talk!
But he began to talk. “Hon — the formula as far as I’ve gone—”
“Please, Clem.”
“Let me tell you — it’s all written down on that little pad in the upper right hand pigeonhole of my old desk. Hon — if I can’t finish it—”
“Of course you can finish it, Clem. You just won’t rest long enough. I’m going to take you to California, that’s what I’m going to do. …”
She was talking to keep him quiet and he knew it. As soon as she paused he began again.
“I think I’ve made a mistake using the dried milk, hon. There’ll be people in China, for instance, who won’t like the taste of milk. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. I ought to have, growing up in China—”
He stopped suddenly and looked at her in terror. “Hon — hon—” He was gasping.
“Clem, what is it?”
“The most awful pain here—” He locked his hands across his belly, and sweat burst from him and poured down his face.
“Oh, Clem, what shall I—”
But it was not necessary for her to do anything. He dropped away into unconsciousness.
Three hours later in the hospital in Dayton, Dr. Wood came out of the operating room. Henrietta had been sitting motionless for more than an hour, refusing to expect either good or ill. Her years with Clem, being his shadow, had taught her how to wait, not thinking, not impatient, letting her mind busy itself with the surface her eyes presented to her, the people coming and going, the bowl of flowers on the table, the branches of a tree outside the window.
“I imagine you are half prepared for what I must tell you, Mrs. Miller,” Dr. Wood said.
He was a kindly middle-aged man, so obviously a small-town doctor that anybody could have guessed what he was. His strength was in knowing what he did not know and when he had seen Clem’s ash-white face upon the pillow this morning he had simply said briskly, “We’ll get this fellow straight to the city hospital,” and had sent for the ambulance.
While it screamed its way through the roads to Dayton he had sat beside Clem, with Henrietta near, and had said nothing at all. In the hospital he had taken Clem immediately into the operating room, and had stayed with him while a young surgeon operated.
“I have not prepared myself,” Henrietta said quietly. “I have only waited.”
“He has no stomach left,” Dr. Wood said gently. This strong woman’s face looking at his made him feel that it was no use holding back one iota of truth. “He should have been operated on long ago. An old condition, he’s a worrier, of course — and it’s turned suddenly malignant.”
“Not a worrier, exactly,” Henrietta murmured. Her heart had stopped beating for a long tight moment and now began again very hard. “He simply takes the whole world as his own responsibility. He starves with every hungry man, woman, and child, he crucifies himself every day.”
“Too bad,” Dr. Wood said. “That sort of thing is no use, you know. One man can’t do it all. I suppose you told him so often enough.”
“No, thank God, I never did,” Henrietta got up.
“They won’t want you just now—”
“I’ll just go anyway,” Henrietta said. “They can’t keep me away from him.”
She did not stop to ask how long Clem would live. However long it was, she would stay with him and never leave him, not for a night, not for an hour, never at all. She walked into the door from which Dr. Wood had come, and nobody stopped her. …
Clem lived for not quite a week. She was not sure that he knew she was there all the time but she stayed with him just the same. He might come to himself in spite of what the doctors and nurses said.
“It’s really impossible, Mrs. Miller,” the night nurse said. “He’s so drugged, you know, to keep him from pain. He must have suffered terribly for a long time.”
“He never said he did,” Henrietta replied. Was it possible that Clem had suffered without telling her? It was possible. He would have been afraid that she would stop him before his work was done, in that fearful race he was running. How could she not have seen it? She had seen it, of course, in the tightness in his look, his staying himself to lean upon his hands on the table, hanging upon his shoulders as though they were a rack — a cross, she told herself. She kept thinking of Clem upon a cross. Plenty of people thought him a fool, a fanatic, and so he was, to them. But she knew his heart. He could not be other than what he was. He had been shaped by his parents, from their simple minds and tender hearts, from their believing faith, their fantastic folly, their awful death. The hunger of his own childhood he had made into the hunger of the world.
“Hon,” he had often said, and she would hear those words in whatever realm his soul must dwell, “Hon, you can’t preach to people until you’ve fed them. I’ll feed them and let others do the preaching.”
It was like him to choose the harder part. Anybody could preach.
“You must eat something, Mrs. Miller,” they said to her.
So she ate whatever it was they brought, as much as she could, at least. Clem would want her to eat, and if he could drag himself out of the darkness where he slept he would tell her, “You eat, now, hon.”
They fed him through his veins. There was nothing left of his stomach. “The surgeon could scarcely sew it together again,” the nurse told her. “It was like a piece of rotted rubber. How he ever kept up!”
“He always had strength from somewhere,” Henrietta said.
“Didn’t you know?” the nurse inquired. She told the other nurses that Mrs. Miller was a queer, heavy sort of woman. You didn’t know what she was thinking about.
“I never felt I could interfere with him,” Henrietta said.
“Stupid,” the nurse told the others, for wouldn’t a sensible woman have made a man get himself examined, if she cared about him? She might have saved his life.
“I suppose I could have saved his life,” Henrietta said slowly. “But I understood him so well. I knew there were things he cared for much more than life. So I couldn’t interfere.”