This was as much as she ever said.
“I’d say she didn’t give a hoot for him,” the nurse told the others, “except anybody can see the way she sits there that she’s dying with him. There won’t be anything alive in her after he’s gone.”
Clem died at two o’clock one night. He never came back to consciousness. Henrietta would not allow it. Dr. Wood came several times a day and that evening he was there about ten o’clock, and he told her that Clem would not live through the night.
“If you want me to, Mrs. Miller, I can leave off the hypodermic and he’ll come back to himself enough to know you, maybe.”
“In pain?”
“I’m afraid so.”
No use bringing Clem back in pain; that would be selfish. One moment was nothing in comparison to the years that she had lived with him and the years that she must live without him. She shook her head. The doctor gave the hypodermic himself and went away.
Clem died quietly. She knew the instant of his going. She had sat in her usual place, not stirring, had refused at midnight a cup of beef broth the nurse brought in and took away again. Soon after midnight she felt the sense of approaching death as clearly as though she too must partake of it. With every moment that passed she felt a strange oppression growing upon her. At two o’clock it was there, and she knew it. Her flesh received the blow, her heart the arrest. His hand lay in hers, light and cold, and she leaned upon the bed, her face near his. No use touching his lips. A kiss was no communication now. Better to remember the living acts of love that once had been between them than to take into her endless memory the last unanswered gift. He had been a perfect lover, not frequent, never pressing, but sweet and courteous to her. Direct and sometimes brusque he had been in daily life, too busy to think of her often, and yet she knew he kept her always with him as he kept his own soul. Yet there were the rare times, the hours when he made love to her, each perfect because he won her anew, never persuading, leading and never compelling, flesh meeting and always more than flesh — and when it was over his tender gratitude.
“Thanks, hon. You make love very sweet.”
She would never hear those words again! She had not thought of that. The tears which had not come came now, slow and hot.
“I’m afraid it’s the last, Mrs. Miller,” the nurse said. She was standing at the other side of the bed, her fingers on Clem’s pulse.
Henrietta stood up. Her heart was beating so fast again that she was dizzy. Her knees were trembling.
“Could you just — turn away — a minute—”
The nurse turned her head and bit her lip. However often they died, it was always terrific. You couldn’t get used to it.
Henrietta bent over Clem and laid her cheek against his. She put her lips to his ear and said very clearly, reaching with all her heart into the space between the stars:
“Thank you, my dearest. You’ve made love very sweet.”
It was the last time in her life that she ever spoke the word, love. She buried it with him, like a flower.
After Clem was dead, there was nothing to do but keep on until what he had wanted to do was done. This was all she had. Now that he was gone, it was astonishing how little else was left. Even his face seemed to fade from her mind. There had been few hours indeed when he had been hers undivided. Most of their companionship, and she now felt their only real companionship, had been when he talked to her about his work, his plans, and finally his dream, his obsession.
Clem had been her only lover, the only man who had ever asked her to marry him, the only man she could have married. Her alien childhood had shaped her. She was far past middle age now, a woman remote and alone. Bump remained nearer to her than any human creature, and he was kind enough, but always anxious and now aghast at the burden that Clem’s death had left upon him. He said the markets had to be sold and Henrietta agreed. She had no heart for the big business they had become and without Clem’s idealistic genius, there was nothing to hold them together.
It was not difficult to sell. In each of the huge self-serving concerns there was a man, usually the one Clem had put in charge, who was willing to buy her out. Her terms were absurdly low and she put no limit on the time for payment. For a while she tried to stipulate that Clem’s ideas were to be kept, that people were to have food cheaper there than they could buy it elsewhere. This too she was compelled to give up. It took genius to be so daring, and she found none. To Bump she simply gave the market in Dayton, and after some thought she gave him, too, her house, when after six months she made up her mind to go to New York with Berkhardt Feld, the famous German food chemist.
This aged scientist had left Germany secretly one day when he saw Hitler strutting like a pouter pigeon before a dazed mass of humanity who were anxiously willing to worship anything. Fortunately he was quite alone. He and his wife had been childless, a fact for which he never ceased to thank God when he understood what was happening to Germany, and then his wife had died. He had mourned her desperately, for he was a lonely man and Rachel had been his family and his friend. When he saw Hitler he stopped grieving and became glad that she was dead. It was easy to pack his personal belongings into a kerchief, hide in a pair of woolen socks the formula that represented his life work, and in his oldest clothes to take to the road and the border. People had not reached the point yet of killing any Jew they met and he saw contempt rather than madness in the careless glances cast at him as he went. He had money enough to get him over the border, and in France he found royalties from his last scientific work, The Analysis of the Chemistry of Food in Relation to Human Character.
From Paris he had gone to London, had been restless there because it was still too near Germany, and friends had got him to New York. Here, gratefully, he sank into the swarm of various humanity and spent almost nothing while he worked in the laboratory of a man who was a chemist for a general food company, a man named Bryan Holt who knew Berkhardt Feld as a genius. He found a room for the old man in a clean, cheap boardinghouse and gave him a desk and a small wage as his assistant. If they ever discovered anything together he would be generous and divide the profit that came from it. Since he belonged to the company, however, it was not likely that such profits would be enormous. Dr. Feld cared nothing for money, except that he would not owe anyone a penny. He paid his way carefully and did without what he could not buy.
Henrietta had found Dr. Feld first through finding among Clem’s papers a letter which he had written to Bryan Holt, trying, as Henrietta could see, to get the young scientist to help him devise a food cheap and nourishing that could serve as a stopgap until people became sensible enough, as Clem put it, to see that everybody got food free. There had been no time for an answer. Clem had died the week after he had written this letter. Ah, but in the letter she found her treasure, the voice of Clem, the words which she had longed to hear and yet which he did not speak to her because she had not allowed him to come back in pain. Here was the reward for her love, when she had denied even her crying heart. Clem knew he was dying, long before she had been compelled to believe it, and he had written to the young scientist:
“I am in some haste for I am struck with a mortal disease and may die any time. This does not matter. I have been very lucky. I have discovered a basic truth in my lifetime and so it will not die with me. What I have spent my life to prove will be proved because it is truth. Though I lie in my grave, this is my victory.”
Clem victorious! Of course he was, for who could destroy his truth? Here was the command she knew and prepared as of old to obey.