Well, the memory seems to
be getting rather impaired now, rather weak. What, for instance,
was the name of that parson who preached, just before the Boreal
set out, about the wickedness of any further attempt to reach the
North Pole? I have forgotten! Yet four years ago it was familiar to
me as my own name.
Things which took place before
the voyage seem to be getting a little cloudy in the memory now. I
have sat here, in the loggia of this Cornish villa, to write down
some sort of account of what has happened—God knows why, since no
eye can ever read it—and at the very beginning I cannot remember
the parson's name.
He was a strange sort of man
surely, a Scotchman from Ayrshire, big and gaunt, with tawny hair.
He used to go about London streets in shough and rough-spun
clothes, a plaid flung from one shoulder. Once I saw him in Holborn
with his rather wild stalk, frowning and muttering to himself. He
had no sooner come to London, and opened chapel (I think in Fetter
Lane), than the little room began to be crowded; and when, some
years afterwards, he moved to a big establishment in Kensington,
all sorts of men, even from America and Australia, flocked to hear
the thunderstorms that he talked, though certainly it was not an
age apt to fly into enthusiasms over that species of pulpit
prophets and prophecies. But this particular man undoubtedly did
wake the strong dark feelings that sleep in the heart; his eyes
were very singular and powerful; his voice from a whisper ran
gathering, like snow-balls, and crashed, as I have heard the
pack-ice in commotion far yonder in the North; while his gestures
were as uncouth and gawky as some wild man's of the primitive
ages.
Well, this man—what was his
name?—Macintosh? Mackay? I think—yes, that was it! Mackay. Mackay
saw fit to take offence at the new attempt to reach the Pole in the
Boreal; and for three Sundays, when the preparations were nearing
completion, stormed against it at Kensington.
The excitement of the world with
regard to the North Pole had at this date reached a pitch which can
only be described as fevered, though that word hardly expresses the
strange ecstasy and unrest which prevailed: for the abstract
interest which mankind, in mere desire for knowledge, had always
felt in this unknown region, was now, suddenly, a thousand and a
thousand times intensified by a new, concrete interest—a tremendous
money interest.
And the new zeal had ceased to be
healthy in its tone as the old zeal was: for now the fierce demon
Mammon was making his voice heard in this matter.
Within the ten years preceding
the Boreal expedition, no less than twenty-seven expeditions had
set out, and failed.
The secret of this new rage lay
in the last will and testament of Mr. Charles P. Stickney of
Chicago, that king of faddists, supposed to be the richest
individual who ever lived: he, just ten years before the Boreal
undertaking, had died, bequeathing 175 million dollars to the man,
of whatever nationality, who first reached the Pole.
Such was the actual wording of
the will—'the man who first reached': and from this loose method of
designating the person intended had immediately burst forth a
prolonged heat of controversy in Europe and America as to whether
or no the testator meant the Chief of the first expedition which
reached: but it was finally decided, on the highest legal
authority, that, in any case, the actual wording of the document
held good: and that it was the individual, whatever his station in
the expedition, whose foot first reached the 90th degree of north
latitude, who would have title to the fortune.
At all events, the public ferment
had risen, as I say, to a pitch of positive fever; and as to the
Boreal in particular, the daily progress of her preparations was
minutely discussed in the newspapers, everyone was an authority on
her fitting, and she was in every mouth a bet, a hope, a jest, or a
sneer: for now, at last, it was felt that success was probable. So
this Mackay had an acutely interested audience, if a somewhat
startled, and a somewhat cynical, one.
A truly lion-hearted man this
must have been, after all, to dare proclaim a point-of-view so at
variance with the spirit of his age! One against four hundred
millions, they bent one way, he the opposite, saying that they were
wrong, all wrong! People used to call him 'John the Baptist
Redivivus': and without doubt he did suggest something of that
sort. I suppose that at the time when he had the face to denounce
the Boreal there was not a sovereign on any throne in Europe who,
but for shame, would have been glad of a subordinate post on
board.
On the third Sunday night of his
denunciation I was there in that Kensington chapel, and I heard
him. And the wild talk he talked! He seemed like a man delirious
with inspiration.
The people sat quite spell-bound,
while Mackay's prophesying voice ranged up and down through all the
modulations of thunder, from the hurrying mutter to the reverberant
shock and climax: and those who came to scoff remained to
wonder.
Put simply, what he said was
this: That there was undoubtedly some sort of Fate, or Doom,
connected with the Poles of the earth in reference to the human
race: that man's continued failure, in spite of continual efforts,
to reach them, abundantly and super-abundantly proved this; and
that this failure constituted a lesson—and a warning—which the race
disregarded at its peril.
The North Pole, he said, was not
so very far away, and the difficulties in the way of reaching it
were not, on the face of them, so very great: human ingenuity had
achieved a thousand things a thousand times more difficult; yet in
spite of over half-a-dozen well-planned efforts in the nineteenth
century, and thirty-one in the twentieth, man had never reached:
always he had been baulked, baulked, by some seeming chance—some
restraining Hand: and herein lay the lesson—herein the warning.
Wonderfully—really wonderfully—like the Tree of Knowledge in Eden,
he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying open and
offered to man—but That persistently veiled and 'forbidden.' It was
as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: 'Not here, my
child; wheresoever you will—but not here.'
But human beings, he said, were
free agents, with power to stop their ears, and turn a callous
consciousness to the whispers and warning indications of Heaven;
and he believed, he said, that the time was now come when man would
find it absolutely in his power to stand on that 90th of latitude,
and plant an impious right foot on the head of the earth—just as it
had been given into the absolute power of Adam to stretch an
impious right hand, and pluck of the Fruit of Knowledge; but, said
he—his voice pealing now into one long proclamation of awful
augury—just as the abuse of that power had been followed in the one
case by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, he
warned the entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God
but a lowering sky, and thundery weather.
The man's frantic earnestness,
authoritative voice, and savage gestures, could not but have their
effect upon all; as for me, I declare, I sat as though a messenger
from Heaven addressed me. But I believe that I had not yet reached
home, when the whole impression of the discourse had passed from me
like water from a duck's back. The Prophet in the twentieth century
was not a success. John Baptist himself, camel-skin and all, would,
have met with only tolerant shrugs. I dismissed Mackay from my mind
with the thought: 'He is behind his age, I suppose.'
But haven't I thought differently
of Mackay since, my God...?
Three weeks—it was about
that—before that Sunday night discourse, I was visited by Clark,
the chief of the coming expedition—a mere visit of friendship. I
had then been established about a year at No. II, Harley Street,
and, though under twenty-five, had, I suppose, as élite a practice
as any doctor in Europe.
Élite—but small. I was able to
maintain my state, and move among the great: but now and again I
would feel the secret pinch of moneylessness. Just about that time,
in fact, I was only saved from considerable embarrassment by the
success of my book, 'Applications of Science to the Arts.'
In the course of conversation
that afternoon, Clark said to me in his light hap-hazard way:
'Do you know what I dreamed about
you last night, Adam Jeffson? I dreamed that you were with us on
the expedition.'
I think he must have seen my
start: on the same night I had myself dreamed the same thing; but
not a word said I about it now. There was a stammer in my tongue
when I answered:
'Who? I?—on the expedition?—I
would not go, if I were asked.'
'Oh, you would.'
'I wouldn't. You forget that I am
about to be married.'
'Well, we need not discuss the
point, as Peters is not going to die,' said he. 'Still, if anything
did happen to him, you know, it is you I should come straight to,
Adam Jeffson.'
'Clark, you jest,' I said: 'I
know really very little of astronomy, or magnetic phenomena.
Besides, I am about to be married....'
'But what about your botany, my
friend? There's what we should be wanting from you: and as for
nautical astronomy, poh, a man with your scientific habit would
pick all that up in no time.'
'You discuss the matter as
gravely as though it were a possibility, Clark,' I said, smiling.
'Such a thought would never enter my head: there is, first of all,
my fiancée——'
'Ah, the all-important Countess,
eh?—Well, but she, as far as I know the lady, would be the first to
force you to go. The chance of stamping one's foot on the North
Pole does not occur to a man every day, my son.'
'Do talk of something else!' I
said. 'There is Peters....'
'Well, of course, there is
Peters. But believe me, the dream I had was so clear——'
'Let me alone with your dreams,
and your Poles!' I laughed.
Yes, I remember: I pretended to
laugh loud! But my secret heart knew, even then, that one of those
crises was occurring in my life which, from my youth, has made it
the most extraordinary which any creature of earth ever lived. And
I knew that this was so, firstly, because of the two dreams, and
secondly, because, when Clark was gone, and I was drawing on my
gloves to go to see my fiancée, I heard distinctly the old two
Voices talk within me: and One said: 'Go not to see her now!' and
the Other: 'Yes, go, go!'
The two Voices of my life! An
ordinary person reading my words would undoubtedly imagine that I
mean only two ordinary contradictory impulses—or else that I rave:
for what modern man could comprehend how real-seeming were those
voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I heard them contend
within me, with a nearness 'nearer than breathing,' as it says in
the poem, and 'closer than hands and feet.'
About the age of seven it
happened first to me. I was playing one summer evening in a
pine-wood of my father's; half a mile away was a quarry-cliff; and
as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to me, inside of
me: 'Just take a walk toward the cliff'; and as if someone else
said: 'Don't go that way at all'—mere whispers then, which
gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful
contention! I did go toward the cliff: it was steep, thirty feet
high, and I fell. Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my
astonished mother that 'someone had pushed me' over the edge, and
that someone else 'had caught me' at the bottom!
One night, soon after my eleventh
birthday, lying in bed, the thought struck me that my life must be
of great importance to some thing or things which I could not see;
that two Powers, which hated each other, must be continually after
me, one wishing for some reason to kill me, and the other for some
reason to keep me alive, one wishing me to do so and so, and the
other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like other boys, but
a creature separate, special, marked for—something. Already I had
notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and
primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that
stepped; so that such Biblical expressions as 'The Lord spake to
So-and-so, saying' have hardly ever suggested any question in my
mind as to how the Voice was heard: I did not find it so very
difficult to comprehend that originally man had more ears than two;
nor should have been surprised to know that I, in these latter
days, more or less resembled those primeval ones.
But not a creature, except
perhaps my mother, has ever dreamed me what I here state that I
was. I seemed the ordinary youth of my time, bow in my 'Varsity
eight, cramming for exams., dawdling in clubs. When I had to decide
as to a profession, who could have suspected the conflict that
transacted itself in my soul, while my brain was indifferent to the
matter—that agony of strife with which the brawling voices shouted,
the one: 'Be a scientist—a doctor,' and the other: 'Be a lawyer, an
engineer, an artist—be anything but a doctor!'
A doctor I became, and went to
what had grown into the greatest of medical schools—Cambridge; and
there it was that I came across a man, named Scotland, who had a
rather odd view of the world. He had rooms, I remember, in the New
Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally there. He was
always talking about certain 'Black' and 'White Powers, till it
became absurd, and the men used to call him
'black-and-white-mystery-man,' because, one day, when someone said
something about 'the black mystery of the universe,' Scotland
interrupted him with the words: 'the black-and-white
mystery.'
Quite well I remember Scotland
now—the sweetest, gentle soul he was, with a passion for cats, and
Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in stature, with a Roman
nose, continually making the effort to keep his neck straight, and
draw his paunch in. He used to say that the universe was being
frantically contended for by two Powers: a White and a Black; that
the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our
particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got
the best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had
been slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that
finally the Black would win—not everywhere perhaps, but here—and
would carry off, if no other earth, at least this one, for his
prize.
This was Scotland's doctrine,
which he never tired of repeating; and while others heard him with
mere toleration, little could they divine with what agony of inward
interest, I, cynically smiling there, drank in his words. Most
profound, most profound, was the impression they made upon
me.
But I was saying that when Clark
left me, I was drawing on my gloves to go to see my fiancée, the
Countess Clodagh, when I heard the two voices most clearly.
Sometimes the urgency of one or
other impulse is so overpowering, that there is no resisting it:
and it was so then with the one that bid me go.
I had to traverse the distance
between Harley Street and Hanover Square, and all the time it was
as though something shouted at my physical ear: 'Since you go,
breathe no word of the Boreal, and Clark's visit'; and another
shout: 'Tell, tell, hide nothing!'
It seemed to last a month: yet it
was only some minutes before I was in Hanover Square, and Clodagh
in my arms.
She was, in my opinion, the most
superb of creatures, Clodagh—that haughty neck which seemed always
scorning something just behind her left shoulder. Superb! but ah—I
know it now—a godless woman, Clodagh, a bitter heart.
Clodagh once confessed to me that
her favourite character in history was Lucrezia Borgia, and when
she saw my horror, immediately added: 'Well, no, I am only joking!'
Such was her duplicity: for I see now that she lived in the
constant effort to hide her heinous heart from me. Yet, now I think
of it, how completely did Clodagh enthral me!
Our proposed marriage was opposed
by both my family and hers: by mine, because her father and
grandfather had died in lunatic asylums; and by hers, because,
forsooth, I was neither a rich nor a noble match. A sister of hers,
much older than herself, had married a common country doctor,
Peters of Taunton, and this so-called mésalliance made the
so-called mésalliance with me doubly detestable in the eyes of her
relatives. But Clodagh's extraordinary passion for me was to be
stemmed neither by their threats nor prayers. What a flame, after
all, was Clodagh! Sometimes she frightened me.
She was at this date no longer
young, being by five years my senior, as also, by five years, the
senior of her nephew, born from the marriage of her sister with
Peters of Taunton. This nephew was Peter Peters, who was to
accompany the Boreal expedition as doctor, botanist, and
meteorological assistant.
On that day of Clark's visit to
me I had not been seated five minutes with Clodagh, when I
said:
'Dr. Clark—ha! ha! ha!—has been
talking to me about the Expedition. He says that if anything
happened to Peters, I should be the first man he would run to. He
has had an absurd dream...'
The consciousness that filled me
as I uttered these words was the wickedness of me—the crooked
wickedness. But I could no more help it than I could fly.
Clodagh was standing at a window
holding a rose at her face. For quite a minute she made no reply. I
saw her sharp-cut, florid face in profile, steadily bent and
smelling. She said presently in her cold, rapid way:
'The man who first plants his
foot on the North Pole will certainly be ennobled. I say nothing of
the many millions... I only wish that I was a man!'
'I don't know that I have any
special ambition that way,' I rejoined. 'I am very happy in my warm
Eden with my Clodagh. I don't like the outer Cold.'
'Don't let me think little of
you!' she answered pettishly.
'Why should you, Clodagh? I am
not bound to desire to go to the North Pole, am I?'
'But you would go, I suppose, if
you could?'
'I might—I—doubt it. There is our
marriage....'
'Marriage indeed! It is the one
thing to transform our marriage from a sneaking difficulty to a ten
times triumphant event.'
'You mean if I personally were
the first to stand at the Pole. But there are many in an
expedition. It is very unlikely that I, personally—'
'For me you will, Adam—' she
began.
'"Will," Clodagh?' I cried. 'You
say "will"? there is not even the slightest shadow of a
probability—!'
'But why? There are still three
weeks before the start. They say...'
She stopped, she stopped.
'They say what?'
Her voice dropped:
'That Peter takes
atropine.'
Ah, I started then. She moved
from the window, sat in a rocking-chair, and turned the leaves of a
book, without reading. We were silent, she and I; I standing,
looking at her, she drawing the thumb across the leaf-edges, and
beginning again, contemplatively. Then she laughed dryly a little—a
dry, mad laugh.
'Why did you start when I said
that?' she asked, reading now at random.
'I! I did not start, Clodagh!
What made you think that I started? I did not start! Who told you,
Clodagh, that Peters takes atropine?'
'He is my nephew: I should know.
But don't look dumbfoundered in that absurd fashion: I have no
intention of poisoning him in order to see you a multimillionaire,
and a Peer of the Realm....'
'My dearest Clodagh!'
'I easily might, however. He will
be here presently. He is bringing Mr. Wilson for the evening.'
(Wilson was going as electrician of the expedition.)
'Clodagh.' I said, 'believe me,
you jest in a manner which does not please me.'
'Do I really?' she answered with
that haughty, stiff half-turn of her throat: 'then I must be more
exquisite. But, thank Heaven, it is only a jest. Women are no
longer admired for doing such things.'
'Ha! ha! ha!—no—no longer
admired, Clodagh! Oh, my good Lord! let us change this
talk....'
But now she could talk of nothing
else. She got from me that afternoon the history of all the Polar
expeditions of late years, how far they reached, by what aids, and
why they failed. Her eyes shone; she listened eagerly. Before this
time, indeed, she had been interested in the Boreal, knew the
details of her outfitting, and was acquainted with several members
of the expedition. But now, suddenly, her mind seemed wholly
possessed, my mention of Clark's visit apparently setting her well
a-burn with the Pole-fever.
The passion of her kiss as I tore
myself from her embrace that day I shall not forget. I went home
with a pretty heavy heart.
The house of Dr. Peter Peters was
three doors from mine, on the opposite side of the street. Toward
one that night, his footman ran to knock me up with the news that
Peters was very ill. I hurried to his bed-side, and knew by the
first glance at his deliriums and his staring pupils that he was
poisoned with atropine. Wilson, the electrician, who had passed the
evening with him at Clodagh's in Hanover Square, was there.
'What on earth is the matter?' he
said to me.
'Poisoned,' I answered.
'Good God! what with?'
'Atropine.'
'Good Heavens!'
'Don't be frightened: I think he
will recover.'
'Is that certain?'
'Yes, I think—that is, if he
leaves off taking the drug, Wilson.'
'What! it is he who has poisoned
himself?'
I hesitated, I hesitated. But I
said:
'He is in the habit of taking
atropine, Wilson.'
Three hours I remained there,
and, God knows, toiled hard for his life: and when I left him in
the dark of the fore-day, my mind was at rest: he would
recover.
I slept till 11 A.M., and then
hurried over again to Peters. In the room were my two nurses, and
Clodagh.
My beloved put her forefinger to
her lips, whispering:
'Sh-h-h! he is asleep....'
She came closer to my ear,
saying:
'I heard the news early. I am
come to stay with him, till—the last....'
We looked at each other some
time—eye to eye, steadily, she and I: but mine dropped before
Clodagh's. A word was on my mouth to say, but I said nothing.
The recovery of Peters was not so
steady as I had expected. At the end of the first week he was still
prostrate. It was then that I said to Clodagh:
'Clodagh, your presence at the
bed-side here somehow does not please me. It is so
unnecessary.'
'Unnecessary certainly,' she
replied: 'but I always had a genius for nursing, and a passion for
watching the battles of the body. Since no one objects, why should
you?'
'Ah!... I don't know. This is a
case that I dislike. I have half a mind to throw it to the
devil.'
'Then do so.'
'And you, too—go home, go home,
Clodagh!'
'But why?—if one does no harm. In
these days of "the corruption of the upper classes," and Roman
decadence of everything, shouldn't every innocent whim be
encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the tide? Whims
are the brakes of crimes: and this is mine. I find a sensuous
pleasure, almost a sensual, in dabbling in delicate drugs—like
Helen, for that matter, and Medea, and Calypso, and the great
antique women, who were all excellent chymists. To study the human
ship in a gale, and the slow drama of its foundering—isn't that a
quite thrilling distraction? And I want you to get into the habit
at once of letting me have my little way——'
Now she touched my hair with a
lofty playfulness that soothed me: but even then I looked upon the
rumpled bed, and saw that the man there was really very sick.
I have still a nausea to write
about it! Lucrezia Borgia in her own age may have been heroic: but
Lucrezia in this late century! One could retch up the
heart...
The man grew sick on that bed, I
say. The second week passed, and only ten days remained before the
start of the expedition.
At the end of that second week,
Wilson, the electrician, was one evening sitting by Peter's bedside
when I entered.
At the moment, Clodagh was about
to administer a dose to Peters; but seeing me, she put down the
medicine-glass on the night table, and came toward me; and as she
came, I saw a sight which stabbed me: for Wilson took up the
deposited medicine-glass, elevated it, looked at it, smelled into
it: and he did it with a kind of hurried, light-fingered stealth;
and he did it with an under-look, and a meaningness of expression
which, I thought, proved mistrust....
Meantime, Clark came each day. He
had himself a medical degree, and about this time I called him in
professionally, together with Alleyne of Cavendish Square, to
consultation over Peters. The patient lay in a semi-coma broken by
passionate vomitings, and his condition puzzled us all. I formally
stated that he took atropine—had been originally poisoned by
atropine: but we saw that his present symptoms were not atropine
symptoms, but, it almost seemed, of some other vegetable poison,
which we could not precisely name.
'Mysterious thing,' said Clark to
me, when we were alone.
'I don't understand it,' I
said.
'Who are the two nurses?'
'Oh, highly recommended people of
my own.'
'At any rate, my dream about you
comes true, Jeffson. It is clear that Peters is out of the running
now.'
I shrugged.
'I now formally invite you to
join the expedition,' said Clark: 'do you consent?'
I shrugged again.
'Well, if that means consent,' he
said, 'let me remind you that you have only eight days, and all the
world to do in them.'
This conversation occurred in the
dining-room of Peters' house: and as we passed through the door, I
saw Clodagh gliding down the passage outside—rapidly—away from
us.
Not a word I said to her that day
about Clark's invitation. Yet I asked myself repeatedly: Did she
not know of it? Had she not listened, and heard?
However that was, about midnight,
to my great surprise, Peters opened his eyes, and smiled. By noon
the next day, his fine vitality, which so fitted him for an Arctic
expedition, had re-asserted itself. He was then leaning on an
elbow, talking to Wilson, and except his pallor, and strong
stomach-pains, there was now hardly a trace of his late approach to
death. For the pains I prescribed some quarter-grain tablets of
sulphate of morphia, and went away.
Now, David Wilson and I never
greatly loved each other, and that very day he brought about a
painful situation as between Peters and me, by telling Peters that
I had taken his place in the expedition. Peters, a touchy fellow,
at once dictated a letter of protest to Clark; and Clark sent
Peters' letter to me, marked with a big note of interrogation in
blue pencil.
Now, all Peters' preparations
were made, mine not; and he had six days in which to recover
himself. I therefore wrote to Clark, saying that the changed
circumstances of course annulled my acceptance of his offer, though
I had already incurred the inconvenience of negotiating with a
locum tenens.
This decided it: Peters was to
go, I stay. The fifth day before the departure dawned. It was a
Friday, the 15th June. Peters was now in an arm-chair. He was
cheerful, but with a fevered pulse, and still the stomach-pains. I
was giving him three quarter-grains of morphia a day. That Friday
night, at 11 P.M., I visited him, and found Clodagh there, talking
to him. Peters was smoking a cigar.
'Ah,' Clodagh said, 'I was
waiting for you, Adam. I didn't know whether I was to inject
anything to-night. Is it Yes or No?'
'What do you think, Peters?' I
said: 'any more pains?'
'Well, perhaps you had better
give us another quarter,' he answered: 'there's still some trouble
in the tummy off and on.'
'A quarter-grain, then, Clodagh,
'I said.
As she opened the syringe-box,
she remarked with a pout:
'Our patient has been naughty! He
has taken some more atropine.'
I became angry at once.
'Peters,' I cried, 'you know you
have no right to be doing things like that without consulting me!
Do that once more, and I swear I have nothing further to do with
you!'
'Rubbish,' said Peters: 'why all
this unnecessary heat? It was a mere flea-bite. I felt that I
needed it.'
'He injected it with his own
hand...' remarked Clodagh.
She was now standing at the
mantel-piece, having lifted the syringe-box from the night-table,
taken from its velvet lining both the syringe and the vial
containing the morphia tablets, and gone to the mantel-piece to
melt one of the tablets in a little of the distilled water there.
Her back was turned upon us, and she was a long time. I was
standing; Peters in his arm-chair, smoking. Clodagh then began to
talk about a Charity Bazaar which she had visited that
afternoon.
She was long, she was long. The
crazy thought passed through some dim region of my soul: 'Why is
she so long?'
'Ah, that was a pain!' went
Peters: 'never mind the bazaar, aunt—think of the morphia.'
Suddenly an irresistible impulse
seized me—to rush upon her, to dash syringe, tabloids, glass, and
all, from her hands. I must have obeyed it—I was on the tip-top
point of obeying—my body already leant prone: but at that instant a
voice at the opened door behind me said:
'Well, how is everything?'
It was Wilson, the electrician,
who stood there. With lightning swiftness I remembered an
under-look of mistrust which I had once seen on his face. Oh, well,
I would not, and could not!—she was my love—I stood like
marble...
Clodagh went to meet Wilson with
frank right hand, in the left being the fragile glass containing
the injection. My eyes were fastened on her face: it was full of
reassurance, of free innocence. I said to myself: 'I must surely be
mad!'
An ordinary chat began, while
Clodagh turned up Peters' sleeve, and, kneeling there, injected his
fore-arm. As she rose, laughing at something said by Wilson, the
drug-glass dropped from her hand, and her heel, by an apparent
accident, trod on it. She put the syringe among a number of others
on the mantel-piece.