“Hello, Hilda, is that you?” He could not help his voice being dull and tired.
“David,” she said, “I’ve been trying to get you all the afternoon.”
“Yes?”
“I want to see you, now, at once.”
He hesitated.
“I’m sorry, Hilda, I’m rather tired just now; would you mind very much…”
“You must,” she broke in. “It’s important. Now.”
There was a silence.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I can’t say, oh, I can’t say over the wire.” A pause. “But it’s your wife.”
“What!”
“Yes.”
He stood with the receiver in his hand galvanised out of his tiredness, his inertia, everything.
“Jenny,” he said, as if to himself.
“Yes,” she repeated.
There was another momentary silence, then speaking rapidly, almost incoherently:
“You’ve seen Jenny. Where is she? Tell me, Hilda. Do you know where Jenny is?”
“Yes, I know.” Hilda’s voice came back and stirred him anew.
“Tell me, then. Why can’t you tell me?”
“You must come over,” she answered flatly. “Or if you wish I’ll come over to you. We can’t go on talking over the ’phone.”
“All right, all right,” he agreed quickly. “I’ll be over with you now.”
He hung up the receiver and ran down the stairs which he had ascended so slowly. He hailed a passing taxi-cab in Bull Street and drove in a great hurry to Hilda’s flat. Within seven minutes he was ringing the bell of Hilda’s door.
The maid was out and Hilda let him in herself. He looked at Hilda eagerly, feeling his heart thumping from eagerness and hurry; he searched Hilda’s face.
“Well,” he said quickly. He almost hoped that Jenny might be at Hilda’s flat; perhaps that was Hilda’s reason for asking him to come to the flat.
But Hilda shook her head. Her face was pale and sad as she took him into the room which overlooked the river and he sat down without looking at him.
“What is it, Hilda?” he said. “There’s nothing wrong?”
She sat very still and upright in her severe dark dress with her black hair drawn back from her pale brow and her beautiful pale hands resting in her dark lap. She looked afraid to speak and she was afraid. She said:
“Jenny came to my clinic to-day.”
“She’s ill?” Concern flooded his face.
“Yes, she’s ill.”
“In hospital?”
“Yes, in hospital.”
A silence. All the quick gladness in him changed to quick pain. A lump came in his throat.
“What is it?” he said. “Is Jenny very ill?”
“Yes, she’s rather ill, David, I’m afraid.” And still she did not look at him. “She came to my out-patients’ this afternoon. She doesn’t know how ill she is. But she just came in, asking for me, because she knew of me…”
“But is it serious?” he said anxiously.
“Well, yes… internal trouble…. I suppose in a way it is.”
He stared at Hilda not seeing Hilda but seeing Jenny, poor little Jenny, and there was trouble and a great tenderness in his eyes.
He made an instinctive gesture, exclaiming:
“I’ll go to the hospital now. Don’t let’s waste another minute. Shall you come with me or shall I go myself?”
“Wait,” she said.
He paused half-way to the door. Even her lips were pale now; she was dreadfully distressed. She said:
“I couldn’t get Jenny admitted to St. Elizabeth’s. I did my very utmost, but I couldn’t; there’s something behind it, you see, the cause — Oh! I had to arrange, I had to send her… I had to get her into another hospital… first.”
“What hospital?” he asked.
She looked at him at last. He had to know, some time he had to know, and so she said:
“The Lock Hospital in Canon Street.”
At first he did not understand and he stared at Hilda’s distressed face in a kind of wonder; but only for a few seconds did he stare like that. A cry of pain came out of him, inarticulately.
“I could not help myself,” Hilda said; and she withdrew her eyes because it hurt her to see him suffer. She stared out of the window towards the river which flowed in full stream beneath her. The river flowed silently and there was silence in the room. The silence in the room lasted a long time, lasted until he spoke.
“Will they let me see her?”
“Yes. I can arrange that. I’ll ring up now.” She hesitated, eyes still averted. “Or would you like me to come?”
“No, Hilda,” he muttered. “I’ll go myself.”
He stood there while she used the telephone and spoke to the house surgeon and when she said it was all right he thanked her hurriedly and went out. He felt faint. He thought for a moment that he was going to faint and he hung on to the spiked railings round the block of flats. It was hateful to do this; he was afraid Hilda would be watching from the window and see him, but he could not help himself. A gramophone was playing in one of the bottom flats; it was playing You are my heart’s delight. Everyone was playing and singing that song just now — it was the rage of London. He remembered he had eaten nothing since lunch-time. He thought, I’d better eat something or I shall make a scene at the hospital.
He let go of the cold iron spikes and went along the Embankment to a coffee-stall which was there. The coffee-stall was really a cabmen’s shelter, but the man in charge must have seen that he was ill for he gave him hot coffee and a sandwich.
“How much?” David said.
“Fivepence,” the man said.
While David drank the coffee and ate the sandwich the gramophone tune kept going in his head.
The Lock Hospital. It was not so far from the coffee-stall and a taxi took him there quickly. He sat hunched up in the taxi, which was clean and new with a bunch of yellow paper flowers stuck in a chromium vase. There was a faint lingering of scent in the taxi, scent and cigarette smoke. The yellow paper flowers seemed to exhale a perfume of scent and smoke.
The doorkeeper of the Canon Street Lock Hospital was an old man with spectacles; he was old and slow and in spite of Hilda’s having ’phoned there was some delay. David waited outside the old man’s box while the old man spoke to the ward upon the house telephone. The mosaic floor had a pattern of red and blue and the edges of the floor were curved towards the walls to prevent the accumulation of dust.
The lift whined up slowly and he stood outside the ward. Jenny, his wife, was inside that ward. He heart began to beat with suffocating rapidity. He followed the sister into the ward.
The ward was long and cool and white and on either side were the narrow white beds. Everything was beautifully white and in each beautifully white bed was a woman. You are my heart’s delight the gramophone kept playing, on and on, inside his head.
Jenny. At last it was Jenny, his wife Jenny in the end bed, in the last beautifully white bed of all, behind a beautiful white screen. The known and loved face of his wife Jenny came into his sight among the beautiful and strange imposing whiteness of the ward. His heart turned over inside of him and beat more suffocatingly. He trembled in every part of his body.
“Jenny,” he whispered.
The ward sister took one look at him and left him. The ward sister’s lips were pursed and her hips swaggered.
“Jenny,” he whispered again.
“I thought you’d come,” she said, and she smiled at him faintly with the old questioning and propitiating smile.
His heart broke within him, he could say nothing, he sank into the seat beside the bed. Her eyes hurt him the most, they were like the eyes of a beaten dog. Her cheeks were netted with fine red veins. Her lips were pale. She was still pretty and she did not seem old, but her prettiness was faintly bloated. She had the tragic look of one who has been used.