Collected Novels and Plays (27 page)

It took some time to relay these messages. When at last Mrs. McBride put down the receiver and tiptoed into her patient’s room, she found him stretched on the bed, dressed but for shoes and jacket. His breathing was calm, his pulse regular. She covered his legs with a thin white blanket, then left him to sleep. Care, tempered by her own sense of when to let well enough alone, had Averted the Crisis.

He needed now, she was thinking at half past four, some distraction from the whole business. At the Cottage you reeled beneath a steady onslaught of guests; it could be equally depressing, here on the Island, to have several days go by without more than a telephone call. Lady Good lived twenty miles to the south; even if a car were sent she couldn’t come every day. Not that she cared—fine upright woman!—what people thought, but the distance was too
great, she had her house to run. She and Sir Edward had dined at Weathersome last night; she was expected, alone, for lunch tomorrow. Mrs. McBride, nevertheless, had nearly
resolved to call up Lady Good, tell her a bit of what had happened, and ask if she couldn’t run over casually for a cup of tea, when she heard the distant honk of a horn. Soon a small gray old-fashioned car swung into the drive. It looked familiar, but the nurse couldn’t call to
mind its owner’s name. She saw her clearly in her imagination, an older woman gray and decorous as the car she drove. Mr. Tanning was fond of her, but in the right way for a change. Smiling, Mrs. McBride headed downstairs. This visitor, though paying her first call of the year, wouldn’t stand on ceremony, could be led right up to Mr. Tanning’s bedroom. She was trustworthy, safe; she would sit by his bed and tell him all the Island gossip. Now, what was her name?
Not till she threw open the front door did the nurse find it on her lips. “Why, Mrs. Widman, this is a treat! Come right on up! It’s past time he was awake!”

Irene had a secret terror of water. She could sit watching it for hours, and did, loud in praise of its beauties, but in swimming would never venture beyond her depth. This was curious, because she swam well; but she had always insisted upon
seeing
as far as she could into the sparkling element that upheld her. She refused to swim where the bottom was invisible, or near rocks behind which creatures might be lurking. Even now, leaning over the side of the
sailboat, she peered anxiously at threads of darkness, of light, plunging downward and backward as they moved, her head and shoulders the merest transparency overlaid upon the purplish depths. Her fear was of what might rise up from them and devour her. She had known herself to panic even in swimming pools, to race for the steps kicking, thrashing, while a huge imaginary mouth opened to swallow her up. Certain representations of sea creatures had so terrified her as a child that
Irene would never again open the
Book of Knowledge
, lest she choose the wrong volume and happen on them. In later life this fear didn’t keep her from lying lazy and insolent and gold-brown on a white-hot beach or immersed in pale shallows, or from joining her husband for a sail when she had nothing better to do.

They had met and married during the war. An uncle of Charlie’s, a one-star General and Mr. Tanning’s first cousin, had been having a friendship with Irene, at the time a truly pretty woman. She was so pretty, in fact, that the friendship passed for platonic. You didn’t want anyone to possess those clear tints and delicate ovals—not if you were Charlie Cheek, at least. Transferred to Washington, he had been asked to a large
dinner at which his uncle (like himself, well on the road to alcoholism) had repeated a number of stories so obscene as to have been out of place in an officers’ barracks. In the course of these excruciating moments a gentle blush spread over Irene’s face and throat—a blush that Charlie, already charmed by her good looks, quite failed to interpret. He saw her offended by the turn the conversation had taken, when in truth Irene’s embarrassment came from
having herself told the General a couple of the stories, and her fear that someone would read this fact in her eyes. But Charlie Cheek had been hooked by the gentle blush whose meaning he never fathomed and which, even if he’d been right, would have remained the only proof he was ever to receive of Irene’s refinement. You imagined how easily he had been driven, through the years, into a blind devotion—the blindness simulated whether the devotion was or not. He
had actually stopped drinking for a time, in hopes of pleasing her. As for Irene, she lost all interest in her husband upon learning that he was poor, unambitious and (when sober) a bore—in each respect a far cry from his uncle. By the time he took to the bottle again, Irene couldn’t have cared less. She had long before resumed the only life for which she was fitted. Their marriage, as displayed to the world, was rooted in mendacity and ignorance of one another’s
real nature. Furthermore, left to themselves, the Cheeks showed no mastery of the artifice that made life bearable for many unhappy couples. Charlie, for instance, had never learned to approach a point circuitously. “Irene,” he said when a brisk swelling of the sail caused their eyes to meet, “what was all that to-do last night, about some letter?”

She let her face make leisurely transitions from blackness to bewilderment, bewilderment to recollection, recollection to wan amusement. “Oh,” she finally said, “that was just foolishness.”

A minute or two went by. Charlie waved to a white man in the stern of a fishing-boat that passed them, quietly sputtering. The man waved back. He was strapped into his chair and held a giant rod. “But what was it all about?” repeated Charlie.

“I’ve told you—nothing,” she answered without petulance, thus closing the incident until a few days later when it became clear that, contrary to Irene’s calculations, Mr. Tanning knew everything. On this future occasion out came her explanations and her petulance, both.

An instant later Irene caught her breath. Not a hundred yards away a dolphin broke water, a large one, brilliantly colored. She had time to see that it was green, mostly, with yellow markings, and to be vaguely disturbed by the combination. Cries of excitement from the fishing-boat made her understand that this handsome fish had been hooked by the white man in the stern. Now his line was ripping through the water as the dolphin headed, or so it seemed to Irene, straight
for her. For protection?—she drew back. She kept sight of it, shining, elongated, inches beneath the surface, but only a soft whistle from Charlie warned her of what came next. A dark fin had almost lazily approached; there followed an abrupt assault, then stillness; a wreath of red foam dispersed. Presently the man in the fishing-boat could be seen holding up the dolphin’s head, still hooked to his line, and mouthing words they couldn’t catch.

“That’s one of the fastest fish in the sea,” said Charlie. “Shark couldn’t ever have got it if it hadn’t been hooked.”

“Oh God,” Irene whispered, terrified. “Let’s go in, huh? I mean it! What if we turned over out here?”

She saw him begin to laugh, protectively, his manhood renewed. You poor fish! thought Irene and smiled in spite of herself.

Shortly before dark a delirium of leaves and pineapples glistened along each post of Mr. Tanning’s bed. Re-entering the room after
accompanying the local doctor downstairs, Mrs. McBride stood gazing at the old man. He was out of pain but restive. The luminol hadn’t taken effect yet. “Think to yourself,” she told him in a lulling voice, “that your toes are going to sleep, then your feet, your ankles. Think that your
calves and your knees and your thighs are relaxing and going to sleep. Say that your stomach is going to sleep, and your lungs and your heart. Get each part of your body to relax, and before you know it you’ll be fast, fast asleep.”

He tried it. She watched his lips form the words: “My toes are going to sleep, my feet—” Then he opened his eyes and started once more, as earlier, before the pains began, to show what was really bothering him. “Ring for Louis,” Mr. Tanning gasped. “I’m getting dressed. Has Mrs. Widman left? How long ago? Tell Marlborough to bring the car around. I’m going to Canecrest. I have to talk something over with Sir
Edward. It can’t wait.”

“Yes, yes, we’ll do that in a little while,” said Mrs. McBride soothingly. She wished the doctor were still at Weathersome, although his blue-black face, tilted in lamplight, had filled her with apprehension. “Think of pleasant things,” she continued, “like your lunch with Lady Good tomorrow. You’ll be having a new grandchild before long, think about that. Think about Francis’s visit. He’ be here within a
month. Say to yourself, ‘My toes are going to sleep, my feet and my ankles …’” She had been told not to give him morphine except in an emergency.

“My toes …” he began, but whimpered. Mrs. McBride saw his whole face tighten against a spasm of pain. In no time the blue and white stripes of the mattress were showing through the sheet his weak tears dampened. “It’s not the pain,” he tried to say. By then the needle glittered in her hand.

“Mrs. McBride—”

“Don’t tire yourself so!” she begged, near weeping herself. The worst was not to understand what had upset him. The new pills? Composing those cables? Mrs. Widman’s call?

“Mrs. McBride, don’t give me morphine!” he cried as she withdrew the needle and dabbed his arm with alcohol. “Tell Marlborough to get the car ready.”

“Yes, yes,” she hummed. “You’ll sleep a little now.”

“I’ll be damned if I go to sleep. I’ve got something to talk over with Ned Good. I’d no more hurt either of them … Call Marlborough ….” Mrs. McBride kept crooning and stroking his hands until he stopped talking. Take Their Minds Off It, she had learned from a textbook on Grief. She rose at last and, as it was quite dark, pulled down the windowshades.

“What did you do?” he asked drowsy.

“Just pulled down the shades. Don’t worry.” He said no more. She tiptoed into the hall and dialed Mrs. Widman’s number. Mrs. Widman was out for dinner—well, that could wait. The nurse next called Lady Good, but in the middle of their conversation heard a cry from her patient. Saying, “I’ll phone you back,” Mrs. McBride hung up and hurried to his side. He was staring about, roused from a kind of waking nightmare
which, over her protests, he insisted on recounting.

He had been gazing (Mr. Tanning said) so intently at the window-shade that it presently seemed a field through which he was walking, a field or valley—the valley of the Shade. Looking down at his body, he had found it clothed in the uniform that, along with certain distant regular explosions, brought back the war in which he and his comrades took part. What comrades? He was walking alone, entirely so, through a field of golden flowers, daisies perhaps, or
daffodils, flowers that grew only here. Stooping to examine one of them—and at the same time sensing the approach from far off of somebody else—he observed its slow and magical change into a golden butterfly. He held his breath, kneeling enchanted there, knowing every flower, as far around as he could see, transformed, fluttering. This, he was aware, had been foretold in a poem his mother had read and explained to him as a little boy. The poem told how caterpillars
became butterflies, and butterflies in turn were changed into the flowers they loved best.

Nervously he looked over his shoulder. There
was
an approaching figure, but still so distant that he turned back to study the wonderful opening and shutting of wings before his eyes. A fearful notion now began to work on him—it was all backwards! The flower had changed into a butterfly, not, as his mother had promised, the other way around! How horrible if then—! and he might have been overheard, for the wings stopped moving,
fell ever so slowly to earth, while what was left fattened and started crawling down the stripped stem. He got to his feet in a panic. The same change was taking place throughout the valley—countless thousands of caterpillars in the place of butterflies. All life had become a process of uncreation. One flower only, between his leggings, hadn’t changed. It was like his own child, or his own life, a small five-petaled golden blossom, slightly crushed. Save my life, he
prayed. Drenched with the task ahead, he looked once more at the approaching figure.

It was that of an old woman dragging behind her a huge oxygen tent. This was to save him. Sunlight fell on her upturned face, she shouted words he couldn’t hear. Looking down, he saw with horror a fat gray caterpillar at the base of his flower and, forgetting that it must on no condition be uprooted, seized the blossom, held it tightly. The stem had snapped. Now the oxygen tent was very near. In the instant before it parted to receive him, he thought he
recognized the old woman. Mother? He whispered timidly. Inside he found violence, churning, a stifling blackness. The flower’s petals, luminous through his fist, began slowly to separate. “It’s no good!” he tried to tell his mother. “Stop! It’s not doing any good!”—as something cold, fat and soft, a worm finally, fastened onto his wrist.

It had only been Mrs. McBride’s finger, counting his pulse. When he was able to speak he tried to tell her about it.

“You mustn’t tire yourself,” she kept saying. “I’ve just talked to Lady Good. She says you’re not to worry. She’ll be up to see you in the morning. Now you go to sleep. Say to yourself, ‘My feet are going to sleep, my
legs and thighs are going to sleep ….’” She paused until his lips began to move, dutifully. “‘My stomach is going to sleep, then my heart, my
shoulders and arms. My fingers, my neck, my tongue. My eyes and my brain are fast asleep.’”

Mr. Tanning’s eyes flew open. “Marlborough,” he said. “The car. Ned …”

“Now hush!” said Mrs. McBride, remembering only then what Lady Good had told her. “There’s no use fretting about going to see Sir Edward—he hasn’t even come home for supper, that’s what Lady Good said five minutes ago on the phone. She’s had no words from him, she’s waiting supper for him—a nice baked fish drying out. So there! Even if you went you wouldn’t find him!”

Before she had finished he was asleep. Her heart went out to his white hair in need of brushing, his wide gentle mouth ajar. Mrs. McBride thanked heaven for having recollected that bit about Sir Edward. Nothing remained now to bother the old man. The voices of nocturnal creatures entered the room, bringing her to herself. She straightened her cap in the bureau mirror. “And
you
,” she scolded, catching her own eye,
“you
haven’t had anything to eat, either! That’s a fine way to Keep up our Strength! I’ve got enough on my hands without having to watch over
you!
”