She enjoyed her night and day in bed, entertained by Dickens, rain on the window, Joan in the kitchen singing long dreadful Methodist hymns. She rose much refreshed on Thursday, washed and ironed all the bedroom curtains, and weeded the iris beds in the fresh wind of April while the baby investigated all the possibilities of fresh wet dirt, and discovered the earthworm. On Friday night Edward’s friends came: two married couples, Tom the checkers expert, whom she beat twice and once inadvertently let win, and a little fair woman called Elinor. Elinor, what had she heard, a while ago, about an Elinor? She was pleasant to look at, anyhow, with thick fair hair and a face as quiet as a pool of water. She was looking at Edward. Water in sunlight. O radiance, incredible brightness of the true sun, incredible heights.
“I’m never as good playing the red,” Harriet said, an ungraceful loser. “But I’ll leave you holding the field, Mr. Harris.” And young Tom Harris, appalled at having beaten her, apologised in his Eastern voice till she had to laugh. He so plainly thought her a wonderful old woman, a daughter of the pioneers, if she told him she learned checkers from Chief Joseph he would probably believe it. But all the time her heart’s eye was on Elinor.
No beauty. Timid, often defeated, getting on for thirty. Oh, yes, but patient; a patient woman: owning that passionate, intelligent patience that will wait, wait ten years, not for a lucky break but for the known, foreknown, fulfilment. One of the fortunate ones, who know that there is a point. It takes luck too, Harriet cried inwardly: you might have waited all your life, and let it all go by!—But this one was like Edward, one of the fortunate. They did not push on, they were not restless. They took what came, and when they spoke they were answered. They had seen the high peaks, and tragedy served them. Edward had met his match.
Harriet did not go upstairs before she had chatted a while with Elinor. Each felt the other’s earnest effort to show goodwill, to offer true friendliness; neither could quite accept; yet liking arose. Harriet went upstairs at ten feeling pleased with herself. In her dressing gown she crossed her room to look at the photograph of her husband, a vivid dark face, John Avanti at thirty, when she had first known him. Her heart rose as always to meet the challenge of him. He had changed her utterly, he lived therefore in her; she spoke to him. Well, John, I push on, she said, not aloud. She got into bed, finished Dombey, listened to the soft cheerful sound of voices downstairs, and fell asleep.
She woke in the grey light before sunrise and knew what she had lost. They would go now, within a year or so, the child and the man; all grace, all danger, all fulfilment, leaving her, as John dying had not left her, alone.She need not be impatient any longer. Even that wore out in the end. She had done right, she had done her job. But there was no point to it, for her. All she would need from now on was endurance. She was back down to bedrock, she had come in the end where all her people came. She sat up in bed, grey-haired in the grey light, and wept aloud.
The Water Is Wide
“You here?”
“To see you.”
After a while he said, “Where’s here?” He was lying flat, so could not have much in view but ceiling and the top third of Anna; in any case his eyes looked unfocussed.
“Hospital.”
Another pause. He said something like, “Is it me that’s here?” The words were slurred. He added clearly enough, “It’s not you. You look all right.”
“I am. You’re here. And I’m here. To see you.”
This made him smile. The smile of an adult lying flat on his back resembles the smile of an infant, in that gravity works with it, not against it.
“Can I be told,” he said, “or will the knowledge kill me?”
“If knowledge could kill you, you’d have been dead for years.”
“Am I sick?”
“Do you feel well?”
He turned his head away, the first bodily movement he had made. “I feel ill.” The words were slurred. “Full of drugs, some kind drugs.” The head moved again, restless. “Don’t like it,” he said. He looked straight at her now. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “Anna, I’m cold. I feel cold.” Tears filled the eyes and ran down from them into the greying hair. This happens in cases of human suffering, when the sufferer is lying face up and is middle-aged.
Anna said his name and took his hand. Her hand was somewhat smaller than his, several degrees warmer, and very similar in structure and texture; even the shape of the nails was similar. She held his hand. He held her hand. After some time his hand began to relax.
“Kind drugs,” he said. The eyes were shut now.
He spoke once more; he said either “Wait,” or “Weight.” Anna answered the first, saying, “I will.” Then she thought he had spoken of a weight that lay upon him. She could see the weight in the way he breathed, asleep.
“It’s the drugs,” she said, “he’s asked every time if you could stop giving him the drugs. Could you decrease the dose?”
The doctor said, “Chemotherapy,” and other words, some of which were the names of drugs, ending in zil and ine.
“He says that he can’t sleep, but he can’t wake up either. I think he needs to sleep. And to wake up.”
The doctor said many other words. He said them in so rapid, distinct, and fluent a manner, and with such assurance, that Anna believed them all for at least three hours.
“Is this a loony bin?” Gideon inquired with perfect clarity.
“Mhm.” Anna knitted.
“Thought wards.”
“Oh, it’s all private rooms here. It’s a nice private sort of place. Rest home. Polite. Expensive.”
“Senile, incont… incontinent. Can’t talk. Anna.”
“Mhm?”
“Stroke?”
“No, no.” She put her knitting down on her knee. “You got overtired.”
“Tumor?”
“No. You’re sound as a bell. Only a little cracked. You got tired. You acted funny.”
“What’d I do?” he asked, his eyes brightening.
“Made an awful fool of yourself.”
“Did?”
“Well, you washed all the blackboards. At the Institute. With soap and water.”
“That all?”
“You said it was time to start all over. You made the Dean fetch the soap and buckets.” They both jolted softly with laughter at the same time. “Never mind the rest. You had them all quite busy, believe me.”
They all understood now that his much publicised New Year’s Day letter to the Times, which he had defended with uncharacteristic vehemence, had been a symptom. This was a relief to many people, who had uncomfortably been thinking of the letter as a moral statement. Looking back, everyone at the Institute could now see that Gideon had not been himself for some months. Indeed the change could be traced back three years, to the death of his wife Dorothea of leukemia. He had borne his loss well, of course, but had he not remained somewhat withdrawn—increasingly withdrawn? Only no one had noticed it, because he had been so busy. He had ceased to take vacations at the family cabin up at the lake, and had done a good deal of public speaking in connection with the peace organisation of which he was co-chairman. He had been working much too hard. It was all clear now. Unfortunately it had not become clear until the evening in April when he began a public lecture on the Question of Ethics in Science by gazing at the audience in silence for 35 seconds (approx.: one of the mathematical philosophers present in the audience had begun to time the silence at the point when it became painful, though not yet unendurable), and then, in a slow, soft, rough voice which no one who heard it could forget, announced, “The quantification of Death is now the major problem facing theoretical physicists in the latter half of the Western Hemisphere.” He had then closed his mouth and stood gazing at them.