At last all that pain was concentrated in her eyes: it flowed from every corner of her body and gathered there, burning and piercing. But something moved across it now. The images were outside the pain. She shouted again and this time she heard what she shouted, but it was not a scream, only a moan. Someone touched her then, and she became conscious that her eyes were open, that pain was coming into them from without, from a glaring light.
The Matron propped her up and held a cup to her lips.
“My word, you've given us a time,” Clare heard her saying? “Now you'll have to be a bit quieter. I've got another patient to look after, and she's as ill as you are.”
Clare was but too thankful to be able to lie still. It was easier to fight the pain now. Her head and all her limbs still ached, but the mad struggle in her skull had settled down into a ding−dong beat on which she could concentrate, and somehow, by following its rhythm, contrive to endure it.
When she opened her eyes again it was daylight. She had opened them because there were voices near her. She made out the Matron and the Under−matron and a stout white haired man in dark clothes. They began doing things to her, putting something in her mouth, moving her arms up and down. The stout man tapped her legs, and after some time she understood that they were asking her questions. She managed, after several failures, to answer and tell them, yes, she could feel the tapping. That seemed what they wanted to know, and they left her in peace.
The whole of the daylight passed with Clare's mind twining in and out between delirium and consciousness. The images that filled her mind's eye in both states were intermingled: in delirium her visions were reality, and in her waking intervals she thought the figures and faces on which her mind dwelt were dream people. One face above all obsessed her. In her wild tossings in the darkness of pain she knew whose it was, but when her eyes were open it eluded her. She only knew it was the face of a girl with whom she had some connection and some business of vital importance.
There came a period when she lay conscious in a gloaming light. She had been looking for some time at a little glass jar containing a few flowers on the table beside her cot. They were poor little wild flowers—little rounds of yellow on scaly stems without leaves. They seemed most important to her; it seemed essential that they should be there. Then she found that someone was sitting by her in the dusk on the other side of the bed. She tried to turn; someone helped her, and she found that she was looking at Miss Geary. It took her a long time to compose the simple question she wanted to ask, but she managed it:
“What's wrong with me?”
“You've been very ill,” said Miss Geary calmly, “but I think you're getting better now, aren't you?” “Yes,” Clare agreed after a while. “Yes, I am better.”
It was true. The pain in her head had dwindled; her bones had ceased aching, and she could move her eyes without their hurting. She let them travel about the room, pleased that she could use them without pain. They fell on one of the other cots and saw that someone was lying there.
“Who's that?” she asked. “Jennifer Gray,” said Miss Geary.
“Jennifer?” Clare tried to sit up. The girl who was trying to get in at the window must be Jennifer; she must get up and let her in. But before Miss Geary had laid her hand on her she had sunk back again. Of course, the girl at the window was not real, and she could not be Jennifer in any case, because Jennifer was inside, and besides, she recollected quite clearly, the girl at the window had had long fair hair, done in plaits, coiled at her ears, while Jennifer's was short and brown.
She sighed wearily. It would be so good not to have to bother about that other girl. Why could she not go away and leave her alone? She had been trying to get in to her too long.
“How long have I been here?” she asked.
“Why,” said Miss Geary, “two days, I believe. Yes, it was the night before last that you were taken ill. Jennifer was brought in last night. You didn't know anything about that. I came in to see you, but you didn't know me. I was rather worried, you know. I spoke to you, but you only muttered somebody's name over and over.”
“Whose name?” Clare asked. She tried to lift herself again, tried to touch Miss Geary's arm to urge her to hasten with the enlightenment that she so wanted. Miss Geary soothed her with little pats on her hand and restrained her.
“Whose name?” Clare asked again, weakly.
“Why,” said Miss Geary, doubtfully, “I don't think I ought to be tiring you like this. I'm not sure whose name it was. It sounded like Margaret.”
Clare lay too exhausted to speak for a while. But the struggle was over. The strange girl was in now. Perhaps her head would stop aching altogether and that fair−haired girl's business would no longer prevent her from sinking into the deep, tranquil sleep that had been promised her.
Miss Geary had risen. “Is there anything I can get for you?” she asked.
Yes, there might be one way to make sure that the girl did not trouble her any more. It was a great effort for her to find so many words but one by one she shaped and uttered them:
“In my drawer. In my room. Under my hankies. There's a piece of newspaper. Will you bring it me, please?”
Miss Geary did not understand and it had all to be repeated. The strain was so great that Clare had sunk down with closed eyes before she could finish the repetition. She did not know whether Miss Geary had understood or not.
But when it was quite dark she was wakened again by a light on her eyes, and there stood Miss Geary holding out to her a small folded piece of newspaper. Clare looked at the table, but Miss Geary hesitated and finally tucked the paper under Clare's pillow.
“It might blow off the table,” she said.
Clare managed to ask if the window was open.
“Oh yes, only a little. Matron always keeps it a little open.”
That was all right. Clare sank into sleep again reassured. If the window was open and Margaret was here she could go in and out as she pleased without troubling her. Clare, poor, tormented Clare, would be free at last to obey her Master and go quietly to sleep.
She slept, but not the sleep she had resigned herself to. She woke, and with a sense of disappointment which was still strong, though ebbing as her memory began to work, she stared round her at the white walls of the Sanatorium, the enamelled iron bedsteads and the bedside tables. Disillusionment and discontent were her dominant feelings for some time: she was peevishly cross with all the people who, it seemed to her, had lately made glowing promises to her and then meanly cheated her, cajoled and inveigled her into doing things she didn't really want to do and then treacherously left her to bear the consequences.
Her ill−humour with all these people whose names she could not remember persisted, though diminishing, until the Under−matron brought her her breakfast. She was ravenously hungry, and through the act of eating, through seeing and hearing the Under−matron, through sitting up and noticing that her body, her hands and arms and her voice obeyed her, she became convinced that a great alteration had taken place: she was a different person from the one who had been suffering all those miseries, torments and deceptions for half a lifetime. Her head no longer ached; the fever had left her; above all, she could touch and see things and at once perceived their significance. There was nothing interposing between her and reality.
She sat up in bed and used her re−discovered power of reason with increasing excitement. Her thoughts were first to the date. There were only ten days left before the examination for the Oxford Scholarship. She obviously must get well before then. But there was something else of terrible importance that must be done, even before the examination: something connected with another girl. She reasoned quickly now, finding all the events of the last term drop into their proper chronological sequence. The girl she was concerned with could not possibly be the one she had lately dreamed of so much—the one whose blurred picture in the newspaper lay under her pillow now. Margaret Raines was dead.