James Hilton: Collected Novels (84 page)

“I am a doctor,” said David quietly.

“You?”

“Yes.”

“No kidding?”

“My name is—”

“Oh, never mind—for heaven’s sake go round and see what’s up. Take him along, Jim.”

Jim led the way through the rows of empty deck chairs, now awaiting their second audience, behind a wooden screen, and eventually to the back of the stage. It was part of David’s experience to be guided by devious routes to strange places, there to take charge of emergencies that occasioned him no real surprise. Only the mildest curiosity inspired him to ask his question again—what had happened to the girl? Was she ill? “It’s only luck if she isn’t dead.”

“Oh?”

“Shut herself in and turned on the gas, mister. What d’you say to that?”

But all David could say to that was a rather surprised: “Gas on the end of a pier?”

“Yes, mister. Gas an’ electric light and water and telephone—all in them pipes. You wouldn’t think it, would you?”

Soon they came upon an excited group of concert artists and Pier officials. Someone was fanning a door backwards and forwards, and there was much eagerness to describe, rather confusingly, what had taken place. The girl, it seemed, had missed her cue for the whirlwind dance business, and nobody had had time to find out the reason for her absence until after the last curtain, when a locked door and a smell of gas were discovered and reported. The door was easily opened with the key of another door; then the girl was found, sprawled over a couch, half-dressed in the costume of her act, unconscious and breathing heavily in the tainted atmosphere. The tap of the radiator had been full on.

David took in the scene professionally, noting the absence of skin discoloration and the comparative steadiness of the pulse. But most of all he noticed that her injured wrist, the one he had attended in Calderbury six months before, was badly swollen.

There came over him at these times a sort of natural dignity, so that when he asked the crowd to disperse and leave him alone in the room, they did so without much demur.

“Nothing to be alarmed about,” he said, reassuringly.

“You mean she’ll pull through?” queried a thin man in evening clothes.

“Yes, shell be all right soon.”

“You really think so?”

“Why, of course.” And he added, almost as if he were speaking to himself: “These walls are only matchboarding—they’re full of draughts. I don’t think anybody could do such a thing here without stopping up the cracks…it’s extraordinary, the way people don’t think of these details…”

“Well, there’s one detail you can think of to save me the trouble, doctor.”

“Yes?”

“As soon as she comes to you can tell her she’s got the sack.”

David looked up inquiringly.

“I’m the manager and I don’t stand for this sort of thing. So you can tell her—see?”

David was still looking up.

“And tell her to clear out before we fetch the police! She could be locked up for this!”

“I wouldn’t fetch the police if I were you,” said David quietly. “It wouldn’t do your show any good.”

The manager banged the door, and David began—artificial respiration, a hypodermic, just the routine procedure. He went to work with his usual precision, yet with something more than his usual awareness of irrelevancies: the little wooden dressing room, even shabbier than the brick one at Calderbury; the spotted mirror; the litter of paints and powders in front of it; an out-of-date trade calendar hanging on the wall; and—after a little while—the sound of piano and voices striking up the opening chorus of the second show. Odd background, odd accompaniment. And since it is often the oddest things that are apt to move one, so, as he looked at her, noting the closed eyes, the slightly parted lips, and the rise and fall of the breath, what touched him most to pity were the soles of her bare feet, hunched under her as she lay, and dirty from contact with the unswept floor boards.

Presently she opened her eyes. They blinked to consciousness as she realized where she was, then focused to new astonishment at the sight of him; while her mouth, trying the German words before she spoke, twisted into a half-smile.

“You?
I must be dreaming! How can it be
you
—
here?”

And he answered, with the foolishness of sheer simplicity: “I come here every Friday.”

“Der kleine doktor am jeden Freitagl”

He sat beside her, rebandaging the wrist, trying to think of German words.

“You must take care. This is bad…Am I hurting you now?”

“Only a little.”

“You should have rested—I told you that…”

“I couldn’t.”

“You mean you danced with your wrist in this condition?”

“Yes—until to-night.”

“But it must have been terribly painful—the vibration—”

“It was driving me mad.”

“But, my dear girl—why on earth—why—was
that
why—you tried to—”

She shook her head.

“Then why?”

“Just—that there was nothing else.”

“Nichts anders?”

“Nothing except night after night—like this.”

“Couldn’t you go back to your own country?”

She shook her head again.

“You have no parents there—no relatives—no friends?”

“No one.”

“Is that why you are unhappy?”

All at once tears began to roll down her cheeks, streaking the grease paint; she did not make a sound, and there was no movement but that of the tears. Neither did David move, but his stillness and silence had compassion.

After a pause she smiled. He asked the reason and took to his heart a schoolboy translation of her answer: “Because I am so glad you didn’t tell me not to cry…and I knew you wouldn’t…”

A doctor is so familiar with most of the things that can happen to minds and bodies that little can startle him. He learns to divide his effort into separate compartments, so that while attending to one patient he does not think of the last or of the next. Moreover, he can leave the operating table or the bedside, switching off his attention, as it were, whenever he feels he has done all he can; and this judgment he can reach unfettered, since there are others to humanize it after he has gone.

Little of which applied to David’s position in a girl’s dressing room at the back of the pavilion on Sandmouth Pier. He did not know what more he could do, yet he did not feel he could say good-night and leave her. There was much he could have explained but for the language obstacle, at least an ease he could have given to the leave-taking. And while he was thus hesitating and wondering, a man arrived with an envelope which the girl opened; it contained a week’s wages and notice of summary dismissal. She showed it, smiling wryly as she did so; then, with a shrug, she began to change out of her costume into ordinary clothes. She had no shyness.

“You see, I must go now. They will not have me any more,”

“But
where
will you go?”

“Away from here. Somewhere. I don’t know.”

He could see she was anxious to leave before the second show ended, and he thought this was a good thing if she could manage to do it. He helped her to dress, therefore, and when she was ready they left together through a back door. Nobody seemed to notice them.

“The cold air will help you,” David said, as they began to walk along the Pier towards the shore. He had to take her arm because she staggered a little. He noted that it was half-past nine; he had missed the last train to Calderbury. That meant staying overnight and taking the first train in the morning.

It was a clear night, full of stars; the chain of lights round the curve of the bay glittered across the intervening sea; the Pier lights at intervals threw moving shadows across her face. She could not walk without clinging to him for support, as he soon realized, especially when a cool wind rose into flurries. She was feeling now the full effects of the strain she had undergone, and in her touch was something remote and slumberous, as if half her consciousness were still far away, ready to respond only to a call that followed it as far. David kept silent for a long while, unwilling to disturb, even by expressing it, a sympathy which he felt was real between them. In a distant way he thought it strange that he should thus be pacing Sandmouth Pier at night, but he found it familiar that someone near him should be needing help, should fear a future. There was a sense in which he too had fear, though less personally; just that it often seemed to him that the injustice of the world could only lead to some vast and doomful reckoning. Even in the microcosm of Calderbury he felt this whenever he climbed rickety stairs to attend illness that fresh air or good food could have prevented. Something must happen some day to such a precarious social balance; cathedral bells would not always ring upon an acquiescent world. He never spoke of this, because it was in essence a mystic feeling, beyond any words in which he could convey it to anyone he had ever met. Yet with this girl he had a curious awareness that communication was possible, that the very urgency of the moment formed a link between her own hot despair and his own cool foreboding. He began to talk in a mixture of English and German. “You’re not really tired of life. You’re tired of pain and loneliness and hopelessness. You don’t really want to die. The time to die is when you have something to die for—the time to be tired of life is when life is tired of you…” And so he talked, stumbling over the words, yet with a deeper sureness that was like the breaking in of a new instrument by a virtuoso. She clung to him then with far more than her uninjured arm, till at last a physical drowsiness conquered and he knew that she was almost asleep as she walked.

They left the Pier and threaded through the crowds on the still frequented Promenade. He led her to her lodgings, an apartment house dingy even for a back street in a seaside town. He imagined that would be the end of their meeting, but at the house there was a surprise. By some lightning spread of gossip, the landlady had learned of happenings at the Pier Pavilion, with the result that she stood truculently in the front hall, hips firm and lips tightened. “I’ll have no sooicides in my house!” came her immediate greeting, as David helped the girl up the flight of steps to the porch. “No turning the gas on here and blowing us all up while we’re in our beds! Here’s your bag—you can take it and go! And if that’s your gentleman friend I hope he knows all about you!”

David didn’t know what to do, and he was a little upset, as he always was by scenes outside the realm of pathology. He could pacify a frenzy within the walls of Midchester County Asylum, but he shrank from the less tolerable madness of those whom the world called sane. He could think of nothing but to take the girl away immediately, which meant to walk to the cab stand at the corner and drive somewhere; but of course the cabman wanted an address, and the only one that occurred to him on the spur of the moment was the Victoria Hotel, where he intended to stay himself, and where he had occasionally stayed before. So they drove there, the girl by this time so desperately tired that she could hardly stand up in the hotel lobby. The clerk, recognizing David but not quite sure of his name, appraised his companion curiously, wondering if she had drunk too much and if she were his wife. It was all rather odd, but none of his business; but he thought it odder still when, on being presented with the register for signature, David had to question the girl before he wrote her name. Then he wrote “Leni Krafft.” He asked for two single rooms, and the clerk allotted them on the same floor. Then the doctor asked for a trunk call to Calderbury and the clerk overheard him explaining why he couldn’t return home that night. But (or so at any rate he said afterwards) the clerk suspected that the doctor might not be giving the right explanation.

David did not sleep well. He was puzzled and a little perturbed. He knew that in the morning he could not simply pay the two bills together, say good-bye, and never see the girl again. There comes a degree of contact where one cannot, without injury, untwist the fateful into the casual. He knew she had hardly any money. He knew she had no friends. He knew she had no job, and could not get one till her wrist had mended, and that she spoke only a few words of English. He knew her state of mind, and what it had so recently led her to attempt. He alone knew all these things about her. And he knew other things from experience, for there were folks in Calderbury, happy enough now, who at one time would have put an end to themselves but for his patient soothing of ruffled minds. It wasn’t that he ever argued much or was noisily cheerful; it was something that came to him instinctively out of his own feeling for the terror and beauty of life, something harmonious where all else made discord. And he had also the professional interest that every doctor takes in his patient, a desire to finish a job and pass on to another job. It was hard to know what to do in a case like this, but he well knew that to do nothing at all would be impossible for him.

In the morning they breakfasted together in a room that faced blue seas and a sunny sky. She looked much better, having slept off most of the ill-effects of the night before; but there was still in her face the set of some profoundly tragic experience. He talked during the meal as if no problems had to be encountered, but afterwards he told her that he would lend her money which she could repay when she got another theatre job. “Sandmouth’s a good place to recuperate for a few weeks—by that time your wrist ought to be better. Find some quiet lodgings where you can take things easily, then next Friday I’ll call and see how you’re getting on. I come here, as I told you, every Friday.”

“You are so kind…If everyone were as kind as you…”

Something in the little crushed smile she gave him as she said this made him reply: “I believe you’re still worrying. Tell me what it is. Perhaps I can help you.”

“No…no more…”

“All right. I’ll see you again next Friday.”

“You are so kind,” she repeated, evading the question he had hinted. But he was not really very curious.

After breakfast they found a comfortable boarding house, the sort that announced itself as a private hotel, in a street leading off the Promenade. She left her bag there and paid a week’s rent in advance, for which she had money enough of her own. Then they shook hands, and she gave him the little crushed smile again, and he went off to the station to catch the morning train. He was in Calderbury by noon. It irked him to cram all his visits into half a day, but he felt some compensating satisfaction in having done one of those things he ought to have done; even more, he felt he could now put the matter completely out of his mind for a week.