He was getting closer. The chair was no longer an entire chair; its top was too far up overhead now. The circle of vision, straight before him, level with the floor, showed its four legs, and the shoes under it, and part of the seat. The rest was lost in the blurred mists of height.
Then the seat went too, just the legs now remained, and he was getting very near. Perhaps near enough already to reach it with his arm, if he extended that full before him along the floor.
He tried it, and it just fell short. Not more than six inches remained between his straining fingertips and the one particular leg he was aiming them for. Six inches was so little to bridge.
He writhed, he wriggled. He gained an inch. The edge of the flower pattern told him that. But the chair, teasing him, tantalizing him, thefted the inch from him somehow. It still stood six inches away. He had gained one at one end, it had stolen it back at the other.
Again he gained an inch. Again the chair cheated him out of it, replaced it at the opposite end.
But this was madness, this was hallucination. It had begun to laugh at him, and chairs don't laugh.
He strained his arm down to its uttermost sinews, from fingerpad all the way back to socket. He swallowed up the six inches, at the price of years of his life. And this time it jerked back, abruptly. And there was another six inches, a new six inches, still between them.
Then through his blinding tears, he saw at last that there were one pair of shoes too many. Four instead of two. His own, under the chair, and hers, off to the side, unnoticed until now. She must have opened the door so deftly that he had not heard it.
She was arched over above him, from the side. One hand holding her skirts clear, to keep them from betraying her presence until the last possible moment. The other hand, to the back of the chair, had been keeping that from him, unnoticeably, each time he'd thought he'd reached it.
The jest must have been good. Her laughter came out, full-bodied, irrepressible, above him. Then she tried to check it, bite it back, for decency's sake, if nothing else.
"What did you want, your clothes? Why didn't you ask me?" she said mockingly. "You can have no possible use for them, my dear. You're not well enough."
And taking the chair in hand more fully this time, before his broken-hearted eyes swept it all the way back against the wall, a whole yard or two at once this time, hopeless of attainment ever.
But the trousers bedded on the seat fell off somehow, and in falling were kinder to him than she was, they fell upon his extended hand and let themselves be gripped, caught fast by it.
Now she bent to take them from him, and a brief, unequal contest of strength locked the two of them for a moment.
"They are no good to you, my dear," she said with the amusement one shows to a wilful child. "Come, let them be. What can you do with them?"
She drew them away from him little by little, plucked them from his bitterly clinging fingers by main strength at last.
Then when she had him back in bed again, she gave him a smile that burned, that seared, though it was only a sweet, harmless, solicitous thing, and the door closed after her.
Within its luminous halo the chair stood, ebony wood and apricot plush. All the way across the room, leagues away.
63
She came in later in the day and sat by him, cool and crisp of attire, pretty as a picture, a veritable Florence Nightingale, soothing, comforting him, ministering to his wants in every way. In every way but one.
"Poor Lou. Do you suffer much?"
He resolutely refused to admit it. "I'll be all right," he panted. "I've never been ill a day in my life. This will pass."
She dropped her eyes demurely. She sighed in comfortable agreement. "Yes, this will soon pass," she conceded with equanimity.
The image of a contented kitten that has just had a saucer of milk crossed his mind for a moment, for some strange reason; disappeared again into the oblivion from which it had come.
She fanned him with a palm-leaf fan. She brought a basin, and with a moist cloth gently laved and cooled his agonized brow and his heaving chest, each silken stroke lighter than a butterfly's wing.
"Would you like a cup of tea?"
He turned his head sharply aside, revolted.
"Would you like me to read to you? It may take your mind off your distress."
She went below and brought up a book they had there, of poems, and in dulcet, lulling cadences read to him from Keats.
"O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?"
And stopped to innocently inquire: "What does that mean, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'? The sound is beautiful but the words have no sense. Are all poems like that ?"
He put hands over ears and turned his head away, excruciated.
"No more," he pleaded. "I can stand no more. I beg you."
She closed the book. She looked surprised. "I was only trying to entertain you."
When water alone would no longer quench his ravening, everincreasing thirst, she went out and with great difficulty obtained a pail of cracked ice at a fishmonger's, and bringing it back, gave it to him piece by piece to chew and crunch between his teeth.
In every way she ministered to him. In every way but one.
"Get a doctor," he besought her at last. "I cannot fight this out alone. I must have help."
She kept her seat. "Shall we not wait another day? Is this my stouthearted Lou? Tomorrow, perhaps, you will be so much better that--"
He clawed at her garments in mute appeal, until she drew back a little, to keep them from being disarranged. His face formed in weazened lines of weeping. "Tomorrow I shall be dead. Oh, Bonny, I cannot face the night. This fire in my vitals-- If you love me, if you love me--a doctor."
She went at last. She was gone from the room a half-hour. She came back to it again, her shawl and bonnet on, and took them off. She was alone.
"You didn't--?" He died a little.
"He cannot come before tomorrow. He is coming then. I described to him what your symptoms were. He said there is no cause for alarm. It is a torm of--of colic, and it must run its course. He prescribed what we are to do until he sees you-- Come, now, be calm--"
His eyes were on her, bright with fever and despair.
He whispered at last: "I did not hear the front door close after you.
She gave him a quick look, but her answer flowed unimpeded.
"I left it ajar behind me, to save time when I returned. After all, I'd left you alone in the house. Surely--" Then she said, "You saw my bonnet on me just now, did you not?"
He didn't answer further. All his ravaged mind could keep repeating was:
I didn't hear the door close after her.
And then at last, slowly but at last, he knew.
Dawn, another dawn, a second one since this had begun, came creeping through the window, and with it a measure of tensile strength. Strength carefully hoarded a few grains at a time for this supreme effort that faced him now. Strength that was not as strength had used to be, of the body; strength that was of the spirit alone. The spirit, the will to live, to be saved; self-combustive, selfconsuming, breathing purest oxygen of its own essence. And when that was gone, no more to replace it, ever.
Though nothing had moved yet but the lids of his eyes, this was the beginning of a journey. A long journey.
For a while he let his body lie inert, as it was. To begin it too soon would be to court interruption and discovery.
There; her step had sounded in the hall, she was coming out of her room. His lids dropped over his eyes, concealing them.
The door opened and he knew she was looking at him. His face wanted to cringe, but he held it steady.