The Conscience of the Rich (34 page)

‘Did he tell her?’

‘He told her that she was dangerously ill.’

He had mentioned ‘this affair of the
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’ almost with indifference. I wondered, didn’t he think of connecting it with her illness? She could not have fallen ill at a more critical time; if she had been a stranger, wouldn’t he have said that perhaps it was not entirely a coincidence?

Yet he spoke of ‘this affair of the
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’ as though it did not matter: even when he went on to say:

‘He told her that she was dangerously ill. When she knew that, she asked to see you before tonight. She wants to tell you something in private – it must be the same business. She wants to see you very much, Lewis. Do you mind going in? Can you spare the time? Are you sure it won’t make you late?’

The strain sharpened his courtesy and for an instant he was genuinely worrying about my comfort. On the stairs, going towards Ann’s room, he said: ‘Do what she asks. Do what she asks – whatever it is.’

As he opened the bedroom door he forced his manner to change.

‘Here is Lewis,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t speak for very long. You can let him have his share of the conversation, can’t you?’

Mr March’s wife had once occupied this bedroom, the largest in the house. The bed itself was wide and high, and was overhung by a canopy; it drew my eyes across the great room, to the figure lying still under the clothes.

She was lying on her right side. Her face was flushed and her eyes bright, and her expression was constricted with strain. She gave a short dry cough, which made her give a painful frown. Her breathing was quick and heavy. There was sweat on her upper lip, and what looked to me like a faint rash.

She muttered a greeting to me, and said to Charles: ‘Darling. Will you leave him here a bit?’

‘If you want me to,’ said Charles, standing by her, looking down at her, unwilling to go.

No one spoke for a moment. There was no noise but the gasp of her breathing. Then she said:

‘Please.’

Charles glanced at me, and went out.

When the door closed, she said: ‘Lewis, this isn’t so good for Charles to go through. He’s been here all night. It wasn’t a good night for him. We talked about some things. When I was lucid more or less. It’s the worst thing – Lewis – feeling that you are soon not going to be lucid.’ She had to stop. After a pause she went on: ‘They think there’s a chance I may die, don’t they?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Be honest.’

‘I suppose there’s a chance.’

She stared at me.

‘Somehow I don’t think I shall,’ she said.

She broke out: ‘But there’s one thing I must get settled. I shall feel easier if I get it settled.’

She coughed and paused again.

‘There’s one thing I haven’t talked out with Charles. I can’t rely on thinking it out properly now, can I?’ she said. ‘I mean the showdown over the paper.’

She went on: ‘Some people wouldn’t be sorry if I were finished with.’

Her voice was faint and husky. Suddenly her will shone out, undefeated.

‘I’m not going to back out now,’ she whispered. ‘If I get over this, then I’ll have plenty of time to talk to Charles again. If I don’t, will you give him a message? He’ll understand that I wasn’t ready to back out – the last thing I did–’ She was not quite coherent, but I knew that by ‘backing out’ she meant ruining the
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, reneging on the cause. ‘But tell him, now he must settle it. He can do whatever he likes. The letters are in my steel filing cabinet under H. He’ll find the key in my bag. If Charles decides to stop the paper, he’s only got to send them to Ronald or the chap in the Home Office. The letters are mixed up with some others, they’ll need a bit of organizing. I couldn’t do that now.’

The effort tired her out. She fell asleep, although her body moved without resting. Sometimes she spoke. Once she said, quite clearly, as though continuing the conversation: ‘Charles would have to marry again. Someone who wouldn’t make trouble. And could give him children, of course.’ At other times she called on her father, cried out Charles’ name. Most of the time in her sleep she seemed – although when conscious she had spoken so coolly – tormented by anxiety or sheer fear. Her cries sounded as though she were in a nightmare.

Sitting there – through the window the trees of the square shone green and gold in the sunlight – I could imagine what Charles’ night by the bedside must have been like. As I watched her, fears seemed to be piling upon her like faces in a nightmare. She woke for a few minutes, lucid and controlled again: she said without fuss that she was afraid of dying. But, when she lost consciousness, quite different fears broke out of her. She cried about the hate that others felt for her. She was terrified of them, terrified that they were persecuting her, terrified that she was at their mercy. She tossed about the bed, calling out names, some of which I had never heard, but among them several times that of Mr March; she called out his name in fright, she was trying to get away from an enemy. Then she seemed to be making a speech.

I went down to the drawing-room, where the afternoon sun was streaming in. Mr March and Charles sat there, but neither spoke.

‘How did you leave her, Lewis?’ said Mr March at last.

‘She was asleep,’ I said.

‘How did you think she seemed?’ he went on.

I did not know how to reply.

‘I’ve not seen enough illness to tell,’ I said.

Mr March was fretted with anxiety. His eyes were sombre; he was more restless than Charles.

‘I should like to be reassured that everything within human power is being done. I should like to insist that my practitioner is instructed to obtain further advice apart from the fellow he brought in yesterday.’

Charles did not reply to his father. He said to me: ‘Did she tell you what she wanted to?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’m glad of that,’ said Charles.

‘I shall not be easy,’ said Mr March again, ‘until I am convinced that everything within human power is being done.’

Charles looked at him and said: ‘Leave it to me, that’s all I ask of you.’

Alone

Through each of those days when no one knew whether Ann would live, the sun shone into the great bedroom at Bryanston Square.

It was a warm and glowing autumn, and she lay in the mellow sunshine, not conscious for many minutes together. But I suspected that, while she was conscious, she had made a request to Charles. All of a sudden he gave orders that no one but the nurses was to visit her room, unless he specially asked them. He told his father so, giving no reason. Mr March knew that it was he himself who had to be kept from her sight.

Charles spent most of each night by her bed. After the fourth night, he rang me up and said she had had a long lucid interval, in which she was worried that she had not made herself clear to me. ‘She’s worrying about everything that occurs to her. If I can satisfy her about one thing, there’s another on her mind before she’s stopped thanking me. This
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affair is the worst.’ As he mentioned it, his voice became harsher. ‘I should be grateful if you’d tell her that you understood exactly what she meant.’

When I went into her room that afternoon, however, she scarcely recognized me. Her breathing seemed faster and her skin very hot. The rash on her lip was now full out, and her face was angrily flushed. She coughed and muttered. I waited for some time in the hope she would know me, but, though once she said something, her eyes stared at me unseeing and opaque.

I joined Mr March in the drawing-room, as I had done each day of her illness. He could not bring himself to go to the club; he was deserted, with no one to speak to. He spoke little to me, but we had tea together. He was listening for any movement of the nurses on the stairs so that he could rush outside and ask for the latest news. Occasionally he talked to me, and appeared glad of my presence.

He wanted her to die. He wanted her to die for a practical reason. He believed – he had not discovered the precise situation – that, if she were out of the way, it would not take long to stop the
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. He believed, quite correctly, that the means of stopping it would pass to Charles. His family would be left in peace. He took it for granted that there would be a temporary breach with his son. But nothing would come out. In the end they would be reconciled, and he would be left in peace for the rest of his life.

He knew that he wanted it. He was not an introspective man, but he was a completely candid one. Only a man much more dishonest with himself than Mr March could have resisted realizing what his feelings meant. As soon as he knew she was ill, he imagined what the benefit would be if she were dead. He could no more pretend the desire had not risen within him than he could deny a dream from which he had just woken. It was there.

He was too realistic to cover it with self-deceptions. He could not console himself that he was not the first man to watch a sickbed and find his longings uncomfortable to face. He did not think – how many of us have wished, not even for good or tragic reasons, but simply to make our own lives easier, that someone else, someone whom we may be fond of, should just be blotted out? Mr March would not console himself. He wanted Ann to die, whom his son passionately loved, whom he had himself once come near to loving.

It was on this account that he fretted so continuously. He could not suppress his thoughts: but anything he could do to help her he did with as much intensity as if her life had been precious to him. He had, on the second day, made his ‘practitioners’ bring in the consultant of whom Charles thought most highly; he had sent for the most expensive nurses; he could not have exerted himself more, if this had been Charles ill as a child.

He followed the illness minute by minute. Each time he could get a word with a nurse, he pressed her for the news. They were all astonished, as were the whole March family, by how violently he felt.

Meanwhile, Mr March thought often about death. He thought of her death and his own. He hated the thought of his death with all his robust, turbulent, healthy vigour.

Realistic as he was, he could not face it starkly in his own heart. On the outside, he could appear stoical, he could refer, to the fact, as he did to me several times on those afternoons, that in the nature of things his death must come before long. But, left alone, he did not think of it so.

Death to him meant the silence and the dark. It meant that he, who had been so much alive, would have been annihilated. Other lives would go on, busy, violent and content, ecstatic and anguished, comfortable and full of anxiety, and utterly indifferent to what he had been. Other people would eat in this house, talk in this room, love and get married and have their children, walk through the square, quarrel and come together; and he would be gone from it for ever. Any life, he cried to himself, any life, however stricken with pain, racked by conflict, beaten in all its hopes, is better than the nothingness. It would be better to be a shadow in the darkness, to be able to watch without taking part, than to be struck into that state for which all images are more consoling than the truth – just this world of human beings living out their lives, and oneself not there.

Those thoughts visited him as he waited day by day for news of Ann, never seeing her, forbidden by his son to see her. One afternoon I found him reading the current issue of the
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. He read it word by word. ‘Pernicious nonsense,’ he said. ‘But there is naturally nothing further about my brother Philip.’

Reports of Ann’s illness went round the March family, and the telephone in Bryanston Square rang many times a day. Sir Philip enquired daily: I wondered whether he too faced his thoughts. There were whispers, rumours, hopes, and alarms. So far as I knew, Katherine put through only one call. But Porson rang me up often, sometimes at Bryanston Square and often at night in my own house. ‘How is she?’ his voice came, booming, assertive, drunken, distressed. ‘I insist that she’s always wanted someone to look after her. How is she? You’re not keeping anything from me?’ Each day he sent flowers, more lavish even than Mr March’s. One evening, going home, I thought I saw him watching in the square: but, if it were he, he did not want to be seen, and hurried away out of sight.

Charles paid no attention to any of these incidents. He spoke very little to anyone in the house, and scarcely at all to his father. He was grey with fatigue, so tired that once in the drawing-room he went to sleep in his chair. He was entirely concentrated in Ann. Her sickroom was the only place where he seemed alive.

On the seventh day of her illness, the crisis came. Charles was in the house all that day; his partner had taken charge of his cases for the last forty-eight hours. After tea, Charles came down and said to me, in a hard, uninflected voice: ‘She would like to see you again. I must warn you, she is looking much better. You’ll probably think the danger has gone. That isn’t true.’

Despite his warning, I could not help thinking she was better. She was weak, she could not talk much; but her breathing was quiet now, the fever had gone, and she spoke almost in her ordinary voice.

‘You’ve got it clear, have you? I don’t want to force Charles’ hand. I’ve been worrying whether I made that clear. If anything happens to me, he must make a free choice.’

‘I’ve got it clear,’ I replied.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She gave a friendly matter-of-fact smile and said faintly: ‘I hope it won’t be necessary.’

Charles returned to take me away. He stood by the bedside, looking down at Ann; he made an attempt to smile at her.

With the clumsiness of fatigue, she interleaved her fingers into those of the hand he had rested on her pillow.

‘I’ve been giving Lewis instructions about the
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,’ she whispered. ‘That isn’t finished, you know. Had you forgotten it?’

‘Not quite,’ said Charles. ‘Not quite.’

For two days after, Charles was ravaged by a suspense and apprehension greater than he had yet known. The consultant had been called in again. They thought she had no resilience left. Mr March’s doctor told Charles that no one now could be certain of the end. Then she seemed to be infused by a faint glow of vitality, when they thought it had all gone.