“The doctor left. The nurse settled down to a night of watching. I went to my room. ‘Katy will be back tomorrow,’ I said to myself. ‘Katy will be back tomorrow.’ But which Katy—mine or Henry’s, Beatrice or Miss Floggy’s favorite pupil? Would everything, I wondered, be different now? Would it be possible, after the dung-slide, to feel for her as I had felt before? All that night and the next day the questions tormented me. I was still asking them when, at long last, I heard the taxi turning into the driveway. My Katy or his? A horrible foreboding sickened and paralyzed me. It was a long time before I could force myself to go and meet her. When at last I opened the front door, the luggage was already on the steps and Katy was paying off the driver.
She turned her head. How pale she looked in the light of the porch lamp, how drawn and haggard! But how beautiful! More beautiful than ever—beautiful in a new, heart-rending way, so that I found myself loving her with a passion from which the last traces of impurity had been dissolved by pity and replaced by an ardor of self-sacrifice, a burning desire to help and protect, to lay down life itself in her service. And what about Henry’s soliloquy and the other Katy? What about Miss Floggy and Felicia and the Studies in the Psychology of Sex? So far as my suddenly leaping heart was concerned, they had never existed, or at any rate were totally irrelevant.
“As we entered the hall, Beulah came running out of the kitchen. Katy threw her arms round the old woman’s neck and for a long half minute the two stood there locked in a silent embrace. Then, drawing back a little, Beulah looked up searchingly into the other’s face. And as she looked, the expression of tear-stained rapture gave place to one of deepening anxiety. ‘But it isn’t you,’ she cried. ‘It’s the ghost of you. You’re almost as far gone as he is.’ Katy tried to laugh it off. She was just a bit tired, that was all. The old woman emphatically shook her head. ‘It’s the virtue,’ she said. ‘The virtue’s gone out of you.
Like it went out of our dear Lord when all those sick people kept grabbing hold of him.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Katy. But it was quite true. The virtue had gone out of her. Three weeks at her mother’s bedside had drained her of life. She was empty, a shell animated only by the will. And the will is never enough. The will can’t digest your meals for you, or lower your temperature—much less somebody else’s temperature. ‘Wait till tomorrow,’ Beulah begged, when Katy announced her intention of going up to the sickroom. ‘Get some sleep. You can’t help him now, not in the state you’re in.’ ‘I helped him last time,’ Katy retorted. ‘But last time was different,’ the old woman insisted. ‘Last time you had the virtue; you weren’t a ghost.’ ‘You and your ghosts!’ said Katy with a touch of annoyance; and, turning, she started up the stairs. I followed her.”
“Under his oxygen tent Henry was asleep or in a stupor. A gray stubble covered his chin and cheeks, and in the emaciated face the nose was enormous, like something in a caricature. Then, as we looked at him, the eyelids opened. Katy bent over the transparent window of the tent and called his name. There was no response, no sign in the pale blue eyes that he knew who she was, or even that he had seen her. ‘Henry,’ she repeated, ‘Henry! It’s me. I’ve come back.’ The wavering eyes came to a focus and a moment later there was the faintest dawn of recognition—for a few seconds only; then it faded. The eyes drifted away again, the lips began to move; he had fallen back into the world of his delirium. The miracle had miscarried; Lazarus remained unraised. There was a long silence. Then heavily, hopelessly, ‘I guess I’d better go to bed,’ Katy said at last.”
“And the miracle?” I asked. “Did she pull it off the next morning?”
“How could she? With no virtue, no life in her, nothing but her will and her anxiety. Which is worse, I wonder—being desperately ill yourself, or watching somebody you love being desperately ill? One has to begin by defining the word ‘you.’ I say you’re desperately ill. But do I mean you? Isn’t it, in fact, the new, limited personality created by the fever and the toxins? A personality without intellectual interests, without social obligations, without material concerns.
Whereas the loving nurse remains her normal self, with all her memories of past happiness, all her fears for the future, all her worried awareness of a world beyond the four walls of the sickroom. And then there’s the question of death. How do you react to the prospect of death? If you’re sick enough, you reach a point where, however passionately you may be fighting for life, a part of you wouldn’t be at all sorry to die. Anything rather than this misery, this interminably squalid nightmare of finding oneself reduced to a mere lump of suffering matter! ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ But in this case the two are identical.
Liberty equals death equals the pursuit of happiness—but only, of course, for the patient, never for the nurse who loves him. She has no right to the luxury of death, to deliverance, through surrender, from her sickroom-prison. Her business is to go on fighting even when it’s perfectly obvious that the battle is lost; to go on hoping, even when there are no reasons for anything but despair; to go on praying, even when God has manifestly turned against her, even when she knows for certain that He doesn’t exist. She may be sick with grief and foreboding but she must act as though she were cheerful and serenely confident.
She may have lost courage; but she must still inspire it. And meanwhile she’s working and waking beyond the limits of physical endurance. And there’s no respite; she must be constantly there, constantly available, constantly ready to give and give—to go on giving, even when she’s completely bankrupt. Yes, bankrupt,” he repeated. “That’s what Katy was. Absolutely bankrupt, but compelled by circumstances and her own will to go on spending. And, to make matters worse, the spending was fruitless. Henry didn’t get well; he merely refrained from dying. And meanwhile she was killing herself with the long, sustained effort to keep him alive. The days passed—three days, four days, I can’t remember how many. And then came the day I shall never forget. April 23rd, 1923.”
“Shakespeare’s birthday.”
“Mine too.”
“Yours?”
“Not my physical birthday,” Rivers explained. “That’s in October. My spiritual birthday. The day of my emergence from half-baked imbecility into something more nearly resembling the human form. I think,” he added, “we deserve a little more Scotch.”
He refilled our glasses.
“April the twenty-third,” he repeated. “What a day of miseries! Henry had had a bad night and was definitely worse. And when, at lunchtime, Katy’s sister telephoned from Chicago, it was to announce that the end was very close. That evening I had to read a paper before one of the local scientific societies. When I got home at eleven, I found only the nurse. Katy, she told me, was in her room, trying to get a little sleep. There was nothing I could do. I went to bed.
“Two hours later I was startled out of unconsciousness by the groping touch of a hand. The room was pitch dark; but my nostrils immediately recognized the aura of womanhood and orrisroot surrounding the unseen presence. I sat up. ‘Mrs. Maartens?’ (I still called her Mrs. Maartens) The silence was pregnant with tragedy. ‘Is Dr. Maartens worse?’ I asked anxiously. There was no immediate answer, only a movement in the darkness, only the creaking of springs as she sat down on the edge of the bed.
The fringes of the Spanish shawl she had thrown over her shoulders brushed my face; the field of her fragrance enveloped me. Suddenly and with horror, I found myself remembering Henry’s soliliquy. Beatrice had appetites, Laura was a graduate of Miss Floggy’s. What blasphemy, what a hideous desecration! I was overcome by shame, and my shame deepened to an intense, remorseful self-loathing when, breaking the long silence, Katy told me in a flat expressionless voice that there had been another call from Chicago: her mother was dead. I muttered some kind of a condolence. Then the flat voice spoke again. ‘I’ve been trying to go to sleep,’ it said. ‘But I can’t; I’m too tired to sleep.’ There was a sigh of hopeless weariness, then another silence.
“‘Have you ever seen anyone die?’ the voice went on at last. But my military service hadn’t taken me to France, and when my father died, I had been staying at my grandmother’s place. At twenty-eight I knew as little of death as of that other great encroachment of the organic upon the verbal, of experience upon our notions and conventions—the act of love. ‘It’s the cutoffness that’s so terrible,’ I heard her saying. ‘You sit there helplessly, watching the connections being broken, one after the other. The connection with people, the connection with language, the connection with the physical universe. They can’t see
