‘Oh, that’s all right.’
It annoyed him that she was so completely undisturbed by his bad temper. Nothing like that could penetrate her nurse’s armour of indulgent indifference. He was a patient—not a man.
He said:
‘Damned interference—all this damned interference …’
She said reprovingly:
‘Now, now, that isn’t very nice.’
‘Nice?’ he demanded. ‘Nice? My God.’
She said calmly: ‘You’ll feel better in the morning.’
He swallowed.
‘You nurses. You nurses! You’re inhuman, that’s what you are!’
‘We know what’s best for you, you see.’
‘That’s what’s so infuriating! About you. About a hospital. About the world. Continual interference! Knowing what’s best for other people. I tried to kill myself. You know that, don’t you?’
She nodded.
‘Nobody’s business but mine whether I threw myself off a bloody cliff or not. I’d finished with life. I was down and out!’
She made a little clicking noise with her tongue. It indicated abstract sympathy. He was a patient. She was soothing him by letting him blow off steam.
‘Why shouldn’t I kill myself if I want to?’ he demanded.
She replied to that quite seriously.
‘Because it’s wrong.’
‘Why is it wrong?’
She looked at him doubtfully. She was not disturbed in her own belief, but she was much too inarticulate to explain her reaction.
‘Well—I mean—it’s wicked to kill yourself. You’ve got to go on living whether you like it or not.’
‘Why have you?’
‘Well, there are other people to consider, aren’t there?’
‘Not in my case. There’s not a soul in the world who’d be the worse for my passing on.’
‘Haven’t you got any relations? No mother or sisters or anything?’
‘No. I had a wife once but she left me—quite right too! She saw I was no good.’
‘But you’ve got friends, surely?’
‘No, I haven’t. I’m not a friendly sort of man. Look here, nurse, I’ll tell you something. I was a happy sort of chap once. Had a good job and a good-looking wife. There was a car accident. My boss was driving the car and I was in it. He wanted me to say he was driving under thirty at the time of the accident. He wasn’t. He was driving nearer fifty. Nobody was killed, nothing like that, he just wanted to be in the right for the insurance people. Well, I wouldn’t say what he wanted. It was a lie. I don’t tell lies.’
The nurse said:
‘Well, I think you were quite right. Quite right.’
‘You do, do you? That pigheadedness of mine cost me my job. My boss was sore. He saw to it that I didn’t get another. My wife got fed up seeing me mooch about unable to get anything to do. She went off with a man who had been my friend. He was doing well and going up in the world. I drifted along, going steadily down. I took to drinking a bit. That didn’t help me to hold down jobs. Finally I came down to hauling—strained my inside—the doctor told me I’d never be strong again. Well, there wasn’t much to live for then. Easiest way, and the cleanest way, was to go right out. My life was no good to myself or anyone else.’
The little nurse murmured:
‘You don’t know that.’
He laughed. He was better-tempered already. Her naïve obstinacy amused him.
‘My dear girl, what use am I to anybody?’
She said confusedly:
‘You don’t know. You may be—someday—’
‘Someday? There won’t be any someday. Next time I shall make sure.’
She shook her head decidedly.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘You won’t kill yourself now.’
‘Why not?’
‘They never do.’
He stared at her. ‘They never do.’ He was one of a class of would-be suicides. Opening his mouth to protest energetically, his innate honesty suddenly stopped him.
Would he do it again? Did he really mean to do it?
He knew suddenly that he didn’t. For no reason. Perhaps the right reason was the one she had given out of her specialized knowledge. Suicides didn’t do it again.
All the more he felt determined to force an admission from her on the ethical side.
‘At any rate I’ve got a right to do what I like with my own life.’
‘No—no, you haven’t.’
‘But why not, my dear girl, why?’
She flushed. She said, her fingers playing with the little gold cross that hung round her neck:
‘You don’t understand. God may need you.’
He stared—taken aback. He did not want to upset her childlike faith. He said mockingly:
‘I suppose that one day I may stop a runaway horse and save a golden-haired child from death—eh? Is that it?’
She shook her head. She said with vehemence and trying to express what was so vivid in her mind and so halting on her tongue:
‘It may be just by being somewhere—not doing anything—just by being at a certain place at a certain time—oh, I can’t say what I mean, but you might just—just walk along a street some day and just by doing that accomplish something terribly important—perhaps even without knowing what it was.’
The red-haired little nurse came from the west coast of Scotland and some of her family had ‘the sight’.
Perhaps, dimly, she saw a picture of a man walking up a road on a night in September and thereby saving a human being from a terrible death …
February 14th
There was only one person in the room and the only sound to be heard was the scratching of that person’s pen as it traced line after line across the paper.
There was no one to read the words that were being traced. If there had been, they would hardly have believed their eyes. For what was being written was a clear, carefully detailed project for murder.
There are times when a body is conscious of a mind controlling it—when it bows obedient to that alien something that controls its actions. There are other times when a mind is conscious of owning and controlling a body and accomplishing its purpose by using that body.
The figure sitting writing was in the last-named state. It was a mind, a cool, controlled intelligence. This mind had only one thought and one purpose—the destruction of another human being. To the end that this purpose might be accomplished, the scheme was being worked out meticulously on paper. Every eventuality, every possibility was being taken into account. The thing had got to be absolutely fool-proof. The scheme, like all good schemes, was not absolutely cut and dried. There were certain alternative actions at certain points. Moreover, since the mind was intelligent, it realized that there must be intelligent provision left for the unforeseen. But the main lines were clear and had been closely