Voss was dozing and waking. The grey light upon which he floated was marvellously soft, and flaking like ashes, with the consequence that he was most grateful to all concerned, and looked up once in an effort to convey his appreciation, when the old man, or woman, bent over him. For in the grey light, it transpired that the figure was that of a woman, whose breasts hung like bags of empty skin above the white man’s face.
Realizing his mistake, the prisoner mumbled an apology as the ashy figure resumed its vigil. It was unnecessary, however, for their understanding of each other had begun to grow. While the woman sat looking down at her knees, the greyish skin was slowly revived, until her full, white, immaculate body became the shining source of all light.
By its radiance, he did finally recognize her face, and would have gone to her, if it had been possible, but it was not; his body was worn out.
Instead, she came to him, and at once he was flooded with light and memory. As she lay beside him, his boyhood slipped from him in a rustling of water and a rough towel. A steady summer had possessed them. Leaves were in her lips, that he bit off, and from her breasts the full, silky, milky buds. They were holding each other’s heads and looking into them, as remorselessly as children looking at secrets, and seeing all too clearly. But, unlike children, they were confronted to recognize their own faults.
So they were growing together, and loving. No sore was so scrofulous on his body that she would not touch it with her kindness. He would kiss her wounds, even the deepest ones, that he had inflicted himself and left to suppurate.
Given time, the man and woman might have healed each other. That time is not given was their one sadness. But time itself is a wound that will not heal up.
‘What is this, Laura?’ he asked, touching the roots of her hair, at the temples. ‘The blood is still running.’
But her reply was slipping from him.
And he fell back into the morning.
An old, thin blackfellow, seated on the floor of the twig hut, watching the white man, and swatting the early flies, creaked to his feet soon after this. Stepping over the form of the boy, who was still stretched across the entrance, he went outside.
*
After a fearful night, Mrs Bonner insisted that Jim Prentice go and fetch Dr Kilwinning.
‘For such good as it may do.’
Her husband said:
‘We would have done better to stick to the simple young fellow we had in the beginning, rather than waste our money upon this nincompoop in cuffs.’
Each wondered who was to blame, but it could not be laid at anybody’s door at that early hour.
‘He is very highly spoken of,’ sighed Mrs Bonner, who was wearing all her rings, as ladies do at a shipwreck or a fire, for this was the disaster of her orderly and uneventful life.
‘Silly women will speak highly of a doctor if they like the cut of his coat,’ complained the merchant. ‘There is nothing so fetching to some, as a tight, black, bull’s back.’
‘Mr Bonner!’ his wife protested, although she could enjoy an indelicacy.
His shanks were very white and thin by that light, but his calves were still imperious, and the festoons of the nightshirt, between his legs as he sat, were of an early, pearly grey, and the very best quality material.
Because he had been her husband, the old woman felt sadly moved.
‘There are times,’ she said, ‘when you say the unkindest things.’
Some of his strength was restored with her words, and he cleared his thick, thonged throat, and declared:
‘I will tell Jim to bring the doctor over in the brougham, so that there need be no fuss about harnessing other horses at this hour. Some people can make difficulties. And fetching the doctor’s man out. It is a different matter if the horse is not required, nor the man.’
Mrs Bonner was blowing her nose, of which the pores had been somewhat enlarged by the hour and emotion.
Now also, she glanced towards her niece’s sick-bed. If she did this less frequently, it was because her courage failed her. She had become intimidated by the mysteries with which her house was filled.
However, by the time the groom had fetched Dr Kilwinning, and driven him through the shiny shrubs, and deposited him under the solid sandstone portico, the master and mistress were neatly dressed, and appeared to be in full possession.
The doctor himself was remarkably neat, and particularly about his full, well-cut, black back, which Mrs Bonner determined in future not to notice.
He was carrying a little cardboard box.
‘I propose to let some blood,’ he explained. ‘Now. Although I had intended waiting until this evening.’
The old couple drew in their breath.
Nor would Mrs Bonner consent to look at those naked leeches, lolling upon the moist grass, in their little box.
As the day promised scorching heat, they had already drawn the curtains over the sun, so that the young woman’s face was sculptured by shadow as well as suffering. But for a painful breathing, she might not have been present in her greenish flesh, for she did not appear directly aware of anything that was taking place. She allowed the doctor to arrange the leeches as if it were one of the more usual acts of daily life, and only when it was done did she seem concerned for the ash, which, she said, the wind was blowing into their faces from off the almost extinguished fires.
Once she roused herself, and asked:
‘Shall I be weakened, Doctor, by losing blood?’
The doctor pursed his mouth, and answered to humour her:
‘On the contrary, you should be strengthened.’
‘If that is the truth,’ she said. ‘Because I need all my strength. But people have a habit of making truth suit the occasion.’
And later on:
‘I think I love truth best of all.’ Pausing. ‘That is not strictly true, you know. We can never be quite truthful.’
All the time the leeches were filling, until they could no longer twitch their tails. Mrs Bonner was petrified, both by words that she did not understand, and by the medusa-head that uttered them.
Laura Trevelyan said:
‘Dear Christ, now at last I understand your suffering.’
The doctor frowned, not because his patient’s conclusion approached close to blasphemy, but because he was of a worldly nature. Although he attended Church, both for professional reasons and to please his rather fashionable wife, the expression of faith outside its frame of organized devotion, scandalized, even frightened this established man.
‘You see,’ he whispered to Mrs Bonner, ‘how the leeches have filled?’
‘I prefer not to look,’ she replied, and had to shudder.
Laura’s head — for all that remained of her seemed to have become concentrated in the head — was struggling with the simplicity of a great idea.
When she opened her eyes and said:
‘How important it is to understand the three stages. Of God into man. Man. And man returning into God. Do you find, Doctor, there are certain beliefs a clergyman may explain to one from childhood onward, without one’s understanding, except in theory, until suddenly, almost in spite of reason, they are made clear. Here, suddenly, in this room, of which I imagined I knew all the corners, I understand!’
The doctor was prepared to speak firmly, but saw, to his relief, that she did not require an answer.
‘Dear God,’ she cried, gasping for breath, ‘it is so easy.’
Beyond the curtains the day was now blazing, and the woman in the bed was burning with a similar light.
‘Except,’ she said, distorting her mouth with an irony which intensified the compassion that she felt, and was now compelled to express, ‘except that man is so shoddy, so contemptible, greedy, jealous, stubborn, ignorant. Who will love him when I am gone? I only pray that God will.