“Deal as you wish with me,” I said. “I’ll do anything you like. I have a deep affection for Dorothy. If you think that marriage…”
At the same time I was thinking: Ah, never mind Sylva! She is nothing yet. The worst that can happen to her is not to become anything. Whereas Dorothy is a human being to be saved, a woman about to destroy herself, partly through your fault perhaps, because you don’t love her enough. Your duty is to love her: it’s probably the only way of rescuing her.
“Six weeks ago I’d have answered yes,” Dr. Sullivan was saying. “Now I’m wondering; and besides, it’s too late, it would be unreasonable to sacrifice the best years of your young life. I did not dare talk to you about it when maybe there was still time. I’m the only one that’s to blame,” he added, as if he had guessed my thoughts.
He had to start twice to heave himself out of his armchair.
“Shall I come with you?” I quickly suggested.
“What an idea, at this time of night! I won’t be home before one in the morning. I’ve only come to tell you honestly how things stand. Come whenever you can. Perhaps if she sees you, if she consents to see you… oh, I don’t know, I don’t know anything any more. But we must try. Yes, don’t delay too long, after all.”
“I’ll be over tomorrow, if I can. But tell me,” I added, “you don’t seem to have a third cure in mind. Why?” The thought had only just struck me.
He uttered a deep sigh and raised his long, lean arms.
“Who knows if it can still do any good?” he muttered. “The trouble with these cures is that they progressively lose their efficacy. Besides, Dorothy would first have to agree, to consent to undergo it. This doesn’t seem to be the case any more. You can’t imagine the state she’s in. It’s a complete collapse. Come and see for yourself. Thank you. I’ll be expecting you.”
Chapter 23
I AM not quite sure that what prevented me from going to Dunstan’s the very next day, as I had almost promised, was really work on the farm. It is a fact that I had some troubles: a sick cow, the beginnings of a fire in a barn right in the fields. But I could not conceal from myself that those successive delays, those successive excuses, brought me a cowardly relief. I was really frightened at the idea of finding Dorothy in the state which her father had left me imagining.
I was consequently at once surprised and reassured, as well as almost disappointed in a way, by the spectacle that awaited me when at last I showed up at the Sullivans’, on the third day. Dorothy was reading quietly, near her father, by the window. She gave me the same welcome to which I had become accustomed—the calm and mysterious smile. She even impressed me as looking better than the last time. But behind her I saw Dr. Sullivan sadly shake his head, as if to warn me: “Don’t you believe it.”
Dorothy asked me for news of my vixen; she knew about the enormous step forward which Sylva had made and seemed quite engrossed by the story of the apples she had recognized in the still life. Then she said, “I’ll go and make some tea.”
No sooner was she out of the room than I exclaimed cheerfully, “Why, she seems to me—”
“Tut, tut,” the doctor interrupted me. His face expressed the same anxious wistfulness it had shown a moment before. “Don’t trust appearances,” he went on. “Just wait an hour or so, till the effect of the drug begins to wear off.”
I gave a start. “Do you mean that at this moment… ?”
He nodded silently, and continued in the same melancholy tone. “I am powerless to prevent her. I can’t go and search her room.”
“But she seems perfectly normal. Are you sure that…?”
I could never manage to finish my questions, so much did a sort of instinctive reticence make me bite back words that seemed to me unutterable in front of a father—though he uttered them himself without false shame.
“The drug produces strange effects,” he said, “and they vary with the day, the hour, like everything that attacks the psyche. During the war I used to know a colonel in the Indian Army who would get drunk to keep going during his bouts of malaria. He never walked so straight as when he was tight. And he would produce metaphysical theories of which he couldn’t have grasped a word in his normal state. At other times, however, after just a few whiskies, he would leave the room tottering and collapse on his bed where he’d sleep like a log for three hours. Dorothy will sometimes pass two days in a semi-coma, and the next day she holds forth as if she were lecturing at the Royal Society. It’s unpredictable. Or else she talks and walks straight like the colonel, as she does today. But that is not a lasting state; in an hour’s time, she’ll either be prostrate or pour forth incredible rubbish for hours on end.”
“Have you reason to believe that she… every day, I mean really every day… that… she is never sober?”
“I can’t watch over her every minute of the day, but I know unfortunately that she’s got to the stage where she’d be even worse if she went without the stuff. It’s a vicious circle. And it can only get worse.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Tell me, and I’ll do it. Can an emotional shock still produce a beneficial effect? I’ll marry her tomorrow if she consents.”
“I am quite aware that you have already proposed to her; she was deeply moved by it, but still honest enough to refuse. I don’t know what to say. You see before you an old man, a poor old doctor completely outstripped by events. Perhaps I’m counting on your youth, yours and hers, for a miracle to happen.” He gave a poor little smile. “You’ve performed one already, why not a second?”
“Unfortunately, it was quite beyond me to perform it. It happened all by itself. Do give me your advice, though. Should I show initiative? Be bold and pressing? Or do you think, on the contrary, that a slow, tactful, tenacious persuasiveness—”
But I was not given time to finish, even less to obtain a reply. We heard Dorothy’s footsteps approaching as she came bringing in the tea.
The doctor had left us alone, on the pretext of a patient’s visit. He had scarcely gone when Dorothy forestalled me before I had time to open my mouth.
“I know my father has told you everything. But I don’t know whether, as a result, I feel more humiliated before you or more relieved. Now you know the lot. I warned you, and I don’t have to use any more arguments to make you see that I am not the sort of woman one marries. No!” she cried, for I was about to interrupt her. “Spare me your solicitude. I’ve not yet fallen so low that it would not wound me without doing me the least good. We don’t love each other. What sort of life do you think we would lead together?”
“And you,” I retorted, “spare me your subterfuges! We don’t love each other, you say? Allow me to consider that I know my own feelings at least a little better than you!”
She shook her head.
“The one you love isn’t me any more. And you’re right!” she said more loudly as I was about to protest. “Yes, a thousand times right! Forget what I once held against your vixen. I’ve thought a great deal about it since. Every woman is Galatea or she is nothing; every man is Pygmalion. Man loves his own creature in woman, a creature he has taken centuries to sculpt. Now that she is alive, he is hoist with his own petard, and so is she. But you’ll have pulled her from the clay with your own hands! She’ll become a woman, she’ll become a human being, whereas I… I, on the contrary…”
She broke off, as if she had tripped up. She had gone pale. I rose, threw myself at her knees, tried to take her in my arms, saying:
“I won’t let you… I’ll get you out of it… I’ll die if I don’t!”