“I quite understand. I won’t have him. Mind that; don’t send him to see me, because I won’t see him. I’d rather put up with you.” I have explained I was beyond convention. He really tried hard to persuade me, urged Dr. Lansdowne’s degrees and qualifications, his seniority. I grew angry in the end.
“Surely I need not have either of you if I don’t want to. I suppose there are other doctors in the neighbourhood.”
He gave me a list of the medical men practising in and about Pineland; it was not at all badly done, he praised everybody yet made me see them clearly. In the end I told him I would choose my own medical attendant when I wanted one.
“Am I dismissed, then?” he asked.
“Have you ever been summoned?” I answered in the same tone.
“Seriously now, I’d like to be of use to you if you’d let me.”
“In order to retain the entrée to the house where the wonderful Margaret moved and had her being?”
“No! Well, perhaps yes, partly. And you are a very attractive woman yourself.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It is quite true. I expect you know it.”
“I’m over forty and ill. I suppose that is what you find attractive, that I am ill?”
“I don’t think so. I hate hysterical women as a rule.”
“Hysterical!”
“With any form of nerve disease.”
“Do you really think I am suffering from nerve disease? From the vapours?” I asked scornfully, thinking for the thousand and first time what a fool the man was.
“You don’t occupy yourself?”
“I’m one of the busiest women on God’s earth.”
“I’ve never seen you doing anything, except sitting at her writing-table with two bone-dry pens set out and some blank paper. And you object to be questioned about your illness, or examined.”
“I hate scientific doctoring. And then you have not inspired me with confidence, you are obsessed with one idea.”
“I can’t help that. From the first you’ve reminded me of Margaret.”
“Oh! damn Margaret Capel, and your infatuation for her! I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel just now. I can’t escape from her, the whole place is full of her. And yet she hasn’t written a thing that will live. I sent to the London Library soon after I came and got all her books. I waded through the lot. Just epigram and paradox, a weak Bernard Shaw in petticoats.”
“I never read a word she wrote,” he answered indifferently. “It was the woman herself. …”
“I am sure. Well, good-bye! I can’t talk any more tonight, I’m tired. Don’t send Dr. Lansdowne. If I want any one I’ll let you know.”
Margaret came to me again that night when the house was quite silent and all the lights out except the red one from the fire. She sat in the easy-chair on the hearthrug, and for the first time I heard her speak. She was very young and feeble-looking, and I told her I was sorry I had been impatient and said “damn” about her.
“But you are all over the place, you know. And I can’t write unless I am alone. I’m always solitary and never alone here; you haunt and obsess me. Can’t you go away? I don’t mean now. I am glad you are here now, and talking. Tell me about Dr. Kennedy. Did you care for him at all? Did you know he was in love with you?”
“Peter Kennedy! No, I never thought about him at all, not until the end. Then he was very kind, or cruel. He did what I asked him. You know why I obsess you, don’t you? It used to be just the same with me when a subject was evolving. You are going to write my story; you will do it better in a way than I could have done it myself, although worse in another. I have left you all the material.”
“Not a word.”
“You haven’t found it yet. I put it together myself, the day Gabriel sent back my letters. You will have my diary and a few notes. …”
“Where?”
“In a drawer in the writing-table. But it is only half there. … You will have to add to it.”
“I see you quite well when I keep my eyes shut. If I open them the room sways and you are not there. Why should I write your life? I am no historian, only a novelist.”
“I know, but you are on the spot, with all the material and local colour. You know Gabriel too; we used to speak about you.”
“He is no admirer of mine.”
“No. He is a great stylist, and you have no sense of style.”
“Nor you of anything else,” I put in rudely, hastily.
“A harsh judgment, characteristic. You are a blunt realist, I should say, hard and a little unwomanly, calling a spade by its ugliest name; but sentimental with pen in hand you really do write abominably sometimes. But you will remind the world of me again. I don’t want to be forgotten. I would rather be misrepresented than forgotten. There are so few geniuses! Keats and I. … Don’t go to sleep.”
I could not help it, however. Several times after that, whenever I remembered something I wished to ask her, and opened dulled eyes, she was not there at all. The chair where she had sat was empty, and the fire had died down to dull ash. I drowsed and dreamed. In my dreams I achieved style, an ambient, exquisite style, and wrote about Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton so glowingly and convincingly that all the world wept for them and wondered, and my sales ran into hundreds of thousands.
“We have always expected great things of this author, but she has transcended our highest expectations. …” The reviews were all on this scale. For the remainder of that night no writer in England was as famous as I. Publishers and literary agents hung round my doorsteps and I rejected marvellous offers. If I had not been so thirsty and my mouth dry, no one could have been happier, but the dryness and thirst woke me continuously, and I execrated Suzanne for having put the water bottle out of my reach, and forgotten to supply me with acid drops. I remember grumbling about it to Margaret.
CHAPTER II
I began the search for those letters the very next day, knowing how absurd it was, as if one were still a child who expected to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I made Suzanne telephone to Dr. Kennedy that I was much better and would prefer he did not call. I really wanted to be alone, to make my search complete, not to be interrupted. If it were not true that I was better, at least I was no worse, only heavy and dull in body and mind, every movement an almost unbearable fatigue. Nevertheless I sat down with determination at the writing-table, intent on opening every drawer and cupboard, calling to Suzanne to help me, on the pretence of wanting white paper to line the drawers, and a duster to clean them. In reality, that she should do the stooping instead of me. But everywhere was emptiness or dust. I crawled to the music room after lunch and tried my luck there, amid the heaped disorderly music, but there too the search proved unavailing. It was no use going downstairs again, so I went to bed, before dinner, passing a white night with red pain points, beyond the reach even of nepenthe. I had counted on seeing Margaret Capel again, getting fuller instructions, but was disappointed in that also.
The next day and many others were equally full and equally empty. I looked in unlikely places until I was tired out; dragging about my worn-out body that had been whipped into a pretence of activity by my driving brain. Dr. Kennedy came and went, talking spasmodically of Margaret Capel, watching me, I thought sometimes, with puzzled enquiring eyes. My family in London was duly informed how well I was, and the good that the rest and solitude were doing me. I felt horribly ill, and