The doctor said he was going to let Laura Lou stay just where she was. Evidently, then, Vance concluded, he didn’t think it was so serious. What she wanted was feeding up, warmth, nursing. Vance could get a woman in to help? Oh, yes. . . . And sterilized ice? And fresh milk? . . .
Laura Lou lay back smiling, blissful, a little pink in the hollow of her cheekbones. She had emptied the glass of milk Vance had brought her, and the mild sun streamed in onto her bed. It was a day like April, the ground reeking with a sudden thaw.
Vance followed the doctor out onto the porch, and the two men stood there in silence. On the way Vance had handed to the doctor the sum that was owing him; and the doctor, who was a good fellow, and no doubt saw how things were, had said: “Oh, see here — there’s no sort of hurry . . . .” After that they stood and looked for a while at his mud-spattered Ford, which had dug its way down the lane through the morass of the thaw.
“You’ll be back soon?” Vance asked, wondering how to let the doctor know that there would be no trouble now about paying for his visits.
“Oh, sure — ” said the doctor, who was young and not very articulate. He stamped his feet on the wooden step, and added: “Not that there’s much else to do.”
“You mean she’ll pull round soon, with this tonic?” Vance held the prescription in his hand.
The doctor looked at his Ford, and then at Vance. He had a poor sort of face, not made for emotional emergencies, and seemed to know it. He laid his hand awkwardly on Vance’s shoulder. “If I was sure she’d pull round, I’d have to take her away from here today. I’m not sure — that’s why I’m going to let you keep her.” He turned and went down the steps. From his seat in the car he called out to Vance, who had not moved: “Anyway, I’ll look in tomorrow.”
After the doctor had driven away Vance continued to stand in the same place in the porch. He was trying to piece together the meaning of the words: “That’s why I’m letting you keep her.” Laura Lou had doubtless known that if the doctor had been sent for sooner she would have been packed off to a sanitarium. Now it didn’t matter — and that meant that she was dying, or at least that the doctor thought so. Vance tried to grasp the reality underlying the words, but it slipped out of his hold. He knew very little of the character of tuberculosis, except for its more melodramatic features: fever, hemorrhages and night sweats — the sort of consumption people had in sentimental novels. Of the real disease he had no experience. But he saw that Laura Lou was less ignorant; he had guessed instantly that in her terror of being taken from him she had concealed her condition as long as possible; and he wondered dully if she had understood that the doctor’s permission to her to remain at the bungalow was her death warrant. But even that dark word conveyed little meaning. The doctor’s phrase had acted like some strange corrosive, decomposing Vance’s visible world. He stood in the porch repeating to himself: “Laura Lou, Laura Lou,” as if the name were a magic formula against destruction. He tasted something salt on his lips, and found that the tears were running down his face . . . .
Well, after all, the doctor had to admit the next day that his patient was a good deal better than he had expected. A wonderful rally, he said. . . . Vance, at the foot of the bed, caught a quick flit of fear in Laura Lou’s eyes. The doctor must have caught it too, for he added with his clumsy laugh: “Anyway, I guess this air’s as good as the Adirondacks . . .” and Laura Lou’s head fell back contentedly. . . . After that she seemed to maintain her strength, though without making perceptible progress. The doctor did not come often; he said there was nothing to do beyond nursing and feeding, and Vance could always get hold of him by telephoning from the grocery. . . . The hired woman came regularly, but she could not be persuaded to stay at night, and Vance trembled to think of what might happen if anything went wrong and he had to leave Laura Lou while he rushed out for help. He tried to persuade her to let him get a trained nurse for the night, but the same looks of fear came into her eyes, and she asked if the doctor had said so, and if it meant that she was going to die right off. Vance laughed the question away, and dragged the divan mattress into a corner of the bedroom. That frightened her too, and finally he had to go back to his previous arrangement of sleeping in the living room, and trying to wake himself up at intervals to creep in for a look. But youth and health made him a heavy sleeper; and after vainly trying to force himself to wake at regular intervals he got the hired woman to brew a pot of strong coffee every night before she left, and kept himself awake on that.
As the doctor said, there was really very little to do; and after a few days Vance tried to get back to work. As soon as he sat down at his desk he was overwhelmed by an uncontrollable longing to plunge again into his novel. Once before — after seeing his grandfather by the river with Floss Delaney — he had been dragged back to life by the need to work his anguish out in words. Now, at this direr turn of his life, he found himself possessed by the same craving, as if his art must be fed by suffering, like some exquisite insatiable animal. . . . But what did all that matter, when the job before him was not novel-writing but inventing blurbs for “Storecraft”? He had already spent a good part of Hayes’s cheque, and he would need more money soon; his business now was to earn it. He clenched his fists and sat brooding over the model “ads” till it was time to carry in the iced milk to Laura Lou. But he had not measured the strength of the force that propelled him. In his nights of unnatural vigil his imagination had acquired a fierce impetus that would not let him rest. Words sang to him like the sirens of Ulysses; sometimes the remembering of a single phrase was like entering into a mighty temple. He knew, as never before, the rapture of great comet flights of thought across the heaven of human conjecture, and the bracing contact of subjects minutely studied, without so much as a glance beyond their borders. Now and then he would stop writing and let his visions sweep him away; then he would return with renewed fervour to the minute scrutiny of his imaginary characters. There was something supernatural and compulsory in this strange alternation between creating and dreaming. Sometimes the fatigue of his nights would overcome him in full activity, and he would drop into a leaden sleep at his desk; and once, when he roused himself, he found his brain echoing with words read long ago, in his early days of study and starvation: “I was swept around all the elements and back again; I saw the sun shining at midnight in purest radiance; GODS OF HEAVEN AND GODS OF HELL I SAW FACE TO FACE AND ADORED THEM . . .” Yes, that was it; gods of heaven and gods of hell . . . and they had mastered him. . . . He got the milk out of the icebox, and carried it in to Laura Lou . . . .
He had forgotten all about Bunty Hayes and the “Storecraft” job. Every moment that he could spare from his wife was given up to his book. And Laura Lou really needed so little nursing. . . . One day the doctor, as he was leaving, stopped in the porch to say: “Isn’t there anybody who could come over and help you? Hasn’t your wife got any family?” The question roused Vance from his heavy dream. He had not yet let Mrs. Tracy know of her daughter’s illness. He explained to the doctor that Laura Lou had a mother and brother out in California, but that he hadn’t sent them word because if he did the mother would be sure to come, and Laura Lou would know that only an alarming report would make her undertake such a journey — and he feared the effect on his wife.
The doctor considered this in his friendly inarticulate way. “Well, I don’t know but what you’re right. I suppose you’re willing to take the responsibility of not letting them know?” he said at length; and on Vance’s saying yes, he drove off without further comment.
The days succeeded each other with a sort of deceptive rapidity: they had the smooth monotonous glide of water before it breaks into a fall. Every hour was alike in its slow passage, yet there did not seem to be enough of them to eke out an ordinary day. After an interval of cold and rain the weather became fine and springlike again, and on the finest days Vance carried Laura Lou into the living room, and she sat there in the sun, wrapped in blankets, and watched him while he wrote.
“Soon I’ll be copying for you again,” she said, with the little smile which showed the line of her pale gums; and he smiled back at her and nodded.
“I guess I’ll do it better than I used to . . . I won’t have to stoop over so,” she continued. He nodded again and put his fingers on his lip; for the doctor had told her not to talk. Then he went on with his writing, and when he turned to look at her again her head had fallen back and she was sleeping, the sun in her hair.
One day she persuaded him to let her stay up longer than usual. She liked to see him writing, she said; and what harm was there, if she sat as still as a mouse and didn’t talk? He could tell the doctor that she didn’t talk. . . . Vance, deep in his work, absently acquiesced. He liked to have her near him while he wrote — he felt as if nothing could go really wrong while he was close to her, and he knew that she felt so too. He no longer believed she was going to die, and he had an idea that she did not believe so either; but neither of them dared to say a word to the other. It was as if they must just sit and hold their breath while the footsteps of the enemy hesitated outside on the threshold.
Vance wrote on as long as the daylight lasted; then he got up to fetch the lamp. The fire had gone out, and he noticed with dismay how cold the room had grown. He called to the woman in the kitchen to bring in some coal. He stood the lamp on the desk, and as the unshaded light fell on Laura Lou’s face he felt a return of fear. She was sleeping quietly, but her face was so bloodless that there seemed to be nothing alive about her but the hair bubbling up with unnatural brilliance from her drawn forehead. “I wonder if it’s true that the hair dies last?” he thought.
When the fire was made up he said: “We’d better get her back to bed,” and while the woman went in to prepare the bed he stooped over Laura Lou and gathered her up. Her eyes opened and rested on his, but with a look of terror and bewilderment. “Who is it?” she exclaimed, and began to struggle in his arms; and as he lowered her to the bed the hemorrhage came. . . . He hurried the woman off to telephone for the doctor, adjuring her to come back as quickly as she could; and when she had gone he tried to remember what he had been told to do if “it” happened, and to stumble through the doing as best he could. By and by the bleeding stopped and he sat down by the bed and waited. The night was so still that he could hear every sound a long way off; but no one came, and as he sat there remembered the frightened fugitive look in the woman’s eyes, and said to himself that she probably did not mean to return. . . . The time dragged on — hours and hours, days and nights, it might have been — and finally he heard the doctor’s motor-horn down the lane. He looked at his watch and saw that it was hardly an hour since the woman had gone for him.
The doctor said there was nothing to do — never had been, anyhow, from the first. In those cases he never bothered peo............