The House of Defence. Volume 2

Then, quite suddenly, his mood changed. “I have said abominable things to you both,” he said. “My only excuse is that I am in torments. I beg the forgiveness of both of you.”

Here was the real Thurso again, looking out like a soul in prison, trying to burst through the bars, and there was a dreadful, hopeless pathos about him. Catherine laid her hand on his shoulder.

“Ah, Thurso, of course we forgive you,” she said. “But for God’s sake don’t give up. I suppose you must take this now because of your pain, but say you will go on fighting it again. It’s – it’s damnation, you know.”

He looked at her with agonised eyes.

“I will do my best,” he said. “Now go, please. Make my excuses to the others if I don’t appear at dinner. But I expect I shall; I have two hours yet.”

The women went out together, but before the door was closed they heard the clink of glass.

CHAPTER II

IT was a chill November afternoon in the autumn of the same year, and Catherine was seated at the table in her sitting-room at Thurso House, surrounded by a plentiful litter of letters and telegrams, writing busily, fiercely almost, as if to absorb herself in what she was doing to the exclusion of other thoughts. Her secretary, to whom she had just finished dictating a pile of business correspondence and letters less private than those she was occupying herself with, had just left her, and Catherine had begun to tackle this great heap of letters which she felt she had better answer herself – inquiries, mainly, from personal friends. She knew she had given herself more to do than it was really needful that she should, but what to her mind was needful was that she should be occupied in writing, and leave herself no leisure to think. At present there was nothing to be gained by thinking; she could take no step.

Outside the day was utterly dispiriting; there had been a dense yellow fog all morning, and though it had cleared a little about midday, so that from her window she could see the lilac-bushes of the garden that bordered the Green Park, it hovered still overhead, and though the hour was still not yet three in the afternoon, and her table was in the window, she had to light the shaded electric candle that stood on it to enable her to write. A big fire burned in the open hearth, compounded of logs and coal, that hissed and whistled cheerfully as they blazed, and the room was warm and fragrant. But so dense had been the fog this morning that it had penetrated a little through the joinings of the windows, and a haze, visible now that the electric lights were burning, hung in the atmosphere.

The room where she sat was one of her own private suite, which she had fitted up not long ago for occupation in those numerous flying visits she had to pay to town, when she intended to stop only a day or two and do some necessary business. On these occasions it was not worth while to open the whole house, and so she had established herself here on the third-floor, with just the one sitting-room, and a bedroom and bathroom adjoining. Until half-way through November she had been paying a series of visits at different country houses ever since she came down from Scotland, while Thurso, so she then believed, had been doing the same at other houses. This week they were to have had the first big shoot at their place in Norfolk, but all that had been put off. Ten days ago now she had arrived here for a couple of days’ stay before going down to Norfolk, and had found her husband was in the house. He had been there ever since they came down from Scotland, alone with his valet and a couple of maidservants, one to cook and one to clean, having excused himself from the various houses where he had told her he should be staying, in order to live here in the hell-paradise of opium. Catherine had at once telegraphed for Maud, who was of more use than anybody with her brother, and the two had been here now for ten days. It was just better that they should be with him than that he should be alone; he still occasionally felt ashamed of himself if they were there.

Since last June the habit had gained on him with appalling rapidity, though for a few months he had, as she knew, made frantic, agonising efforts to throw it off. He had seen doctors, he had done apparently all that lay in his power to do. But now it seemed that a sort of atrophy of his will had set in; he no longer actively desired to be a free man again, though sometimes a sort of shame and remorse seemed to visit him; and though his will had been so completely dominated and destroyed by the drug, it had left the calculating, scheming part of his brain untouched, and he had a thousand devices for obtaining it after the chemists with whom he habitually dealt had been warned not to give it him. Indeed, it was ten days now since he made what appeared to be the very last effort of will, when, on Catherine’s appearance here, he had burned the prescription which enabled him to obtain it. But within twenty-four hours he had himself forged it again, and Lord Thurso, calling suddenly at some big pharmacy with a prescription bearing an eminent doctor’s name, was naturally not refused the blue bottle with its red poison label.

Yet busily as Catherine occupied herself with her correspondence, striving, since at the moment she could do nothing for her husband, to engage her mind rather than let it dwell on the hideous realities that were going on, and so vitally concerning her, she was alert for the interruption she expected. For yesterday afternoon Thurso, undermined and weakened as he was by this habit, had had an attack of syncope, and for an hour or two they thought he could not live. But the doctor had pulled him round out of immediate danger, and he had regained a little strength during the last twenty-four hours. Sir James Sanderson had, in fact, just come back for his afternoon visit, and was with him now. He had promised to make his report to Lady Thurso before he left the house. The news of Thurso’s sudden illness had been in the evening papers last night, and had appeared again this morning. She was answering the inquiries of her huge circle of friends.

Her pen went rapidly from the top to the bottom of her sheets, and envelope after envelope was directed and thrown on her pile. Awful as the present moment was, yet, in a sense, now that a crisis like this had come, it was almost more bearable than the hideous growth of the anxieties and torments she had suffered before. For as the habit gained on him, his moral perception, like his will, seemed to wither and vanish. He had conceived wholly baseless suspicions against his wife; he had uttered them to her; he had told her in what relation he believed her to stand towards Villars. Worse even than that, he did not seem to mind it. He had spied on her; he had opened her letters, both those which she received and those which she wrote – in a word, he seemed to hate her, and to delight in his hate. He made long absences, when he was not at his club or in the house, and gave elaborate, palpably false accounts of his movements when he returned. Finally, all sense of decency seemed to have left him, and he had brought to Thurso House, while his wife was in it, a common woman off the street. How it would all end she dared not think. If he lived, it seemed impossible to her that she should go on living with him. What would happen to the children? what would happen to Maud? And the shame, the atrocious shame and publicity that must follow!

But the crisis which had occurred yesterday afternoon, the crisis that concerned life and death, had somewhat mitigated the horror of these things. It had also blunted the acuteness of another question that did not concern her less. Since June last she had known that Villars loved her now just as he had always loved her, and though, since he was a gentleman, to put the matter broadly, he had not traded on her growing disgust at the man who was her husband, it was impossible for her not to know that her lover had moved closer. She had no moral House of Defence to take refuge in – nothing of that nature prevented her letting the man who loved her, the lover whom she was sure now she loved, become in deed what both he and she knew that he was in all else but that. Nothing, except a blind determination, which she often told herself was irrational, that this should not be so, stood in her way. Again and again Thurso had taunted her with a lie; he could not taunt her more if it had been a truth. Indeed, to taunt her, as he had done, with what was not true was more unbearable to her than if it had been. Had Villars been her lover, she almost felt as if she would have hurled that fact in his face. For her actions never ran away with her; she was not in the habit of doing what she was ashamed of afterwards; and certainly if she had taken a step so momentous, so vitally affecting her life, as that of having a lover, she was sure she would not have done so blindly or in any sudden flash of passion. Had she meant to live the double life she would have done so deliberately, and for reasons which seemed to her excellent – namely, that her husband was opium-drenched, and had vilely insulted her; secondly, that she loved Villars; and, thirdly, that she did not think it wicked for her in this position to do so. And yet, though in judging others she had no moral code, she judged herself and made her decision in obedience to some stricter law, though all-unformulated, than she applied to others. She knew she was irrational and inconsistent, but she knew she could not be otherwise.

It is probably difficult for those of high and complex moral organisation to appreciate the workings of a nature which, on analysis, seems so rudimentary as hers, and the most rigid sort of moralist may easily say that after all there was extremely little difference between her and people of no morals whatever. But that is where the higher moralist would go astoundingly astray. There are plants so sensitive that they seem to have organic life; there are amœbæ so apparently immobile and unsensitive that to a creature so immensely distant from them in point of organisation as man they may seem to be much lower in the scale of life than the highly sensitive plant. But to the trained biologist the amœbæ are so transcendently higher than the other that he despairs of finding a bridge that can ever link up the two. And in the same way, though Catherine could formulate no moral code at all, and would unhesitatingly let any friend of hers lead any life he pleased, and yet not abate one jot of her friendship, provided only he did not do things which were mean; the fact that when “it came to” in her own case she utterly refused to contemplate doing this, made the classification of her with the moral inorganic an abysmal error. She was far stricter with herself than with others, which shows a moral generosity, and she blindly followed the more difficult way, which shows a faith that is perhaps the finer since it is conscious of no leading.

And, poor soul, she knew but too well that her trials in this respect had not really begun; she had only been told to look at the rack where she was soon to be placed. For Rudolf Villars was her real stand-by in these dark passages in her life. Maud was splendid, too: she felt she could not have got through the days without her; but Maud was a woman, and she was a woman, and Villars was a man. Therefore he could help her in a way that Maud could not. For humankind is created male and female, and those of different sex can and must help each other in a manner impossible for those of the same sex. That is the glory of the world and its shame.

Villars had known about this drug habit on the Sunday he had spent with them in June, for he had seen Thurso by chance when the ecstasy of the dose was on him; and since then, day by day, she owed more to him, till the debt was mounting up into huge figures. And though she knew well that to him the debt was non-existent – he never would add it up, that is to say, and present the bill – it was fearfully existent to her. In payment of it she could only give him one thing – herself; and that she would not. True, he had made no absolutely direct declaration of his love, but in a hundred ways he showed it, and day by day, as she saw, it was getting harder for him to be silent. And what would happen then? She had made her determination. She would have to declare it. That was all … oh yes, that was all.

For the time, however, the acuteness of these perplexities had lost its sharpness, since Thurso’s attack yesterday, and such thoughts, the summary of her inner life for the last two or three months, did not get between her pen and her paper. She had to answer these letters and telegrams inquiring about him, and to regret her unavoidable absence from the various engagements of the next few weeks. She knew, too, that it had become a matter of common knowledge what was the matter with him; she had even talked to certain friends about it, and she had to word her answers carefully. But it was no use any longer to pretend that nothing was wrong; the whole world knew that something was wrong.

But the interruption for which she had been waiting soon came, and Sir James Sanderson was shown in. He looked extraordinarily unlike an eminent doctor, and resembled nothing so much as a captain on some respectable line of steamers. He had a toothbrush of a moustache, a plump, bronzed, and ruddy face, and wore a black frockcoat, with yellow boots and a red tie. He was awkward, cheerful, embarrassed, and nautical, and played golf whenever possible, which was not often, with boyish enthusiasm and remarkable inability. But, incidentally, he had saved more lives and restored more health, which he personally considered of greater importance, than any other two doctors put together.

He shook hands with Catherine, and sat down on a small chair, which broke into fragments beneath his extremely ponderous frame, leaving him couched in splinters on the floor. He said “Damn!” quite distinctly, and struggled to his feet.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” said Catherine. “I hope you are not hurt?”

“Not in the least, but the chair is,” he said. “Yes, I have been with your husband for the last hour.”

He found a more reliable seat.

“Now, be brave,” he said.

Then his wonderful skill in dealing with people, whether the sick or the whole, showed itself. There was dreadful news he had to tell to this beautiful woman, but in spite of the obsoleteness of the phrase “breaking the news,” news could still be prepared for. It was wise to start like that, to say “Be brave,” and then, since he knew he was dealing with a brave woman, to wait for her bracing herself up to it.

“I know I am allowed to smoke a cigarette,” he said, thus securing his moment’s pause, “though it is most unprofessional.”

Catherine’s courage had sunk for a moment, like the mercury in a thermometer exposed to zero, but in that pause she recalled it again. It was that he had been waiting for.

“Lord Thurso has lived through twenty-four hours,” he said, “and immediate danger is really over. The attack he had was enough to kill most people. It has not killed him, and he will not now die of this attack. He may have others, but I don’t see why he should, unless he provokes them himself.”

He flicked the charred end of his cigarette.

“That is the bright side,” he said. “Now we must talk about the other. He came to me in July, you know, and told me about it. Probably he did not tell me all. You must do that, my dear lady. I guess a good deal from what I have seen to-day. I want to know all. Has he lost the power of will, do you think? There is nothing, I may say, that you can tell me which will be worse than what I conjecture.”

Catherine required no further stimulus to enable her to brace herself to this hideous recital, and she began at once, telling Sir James the whole history of the case as far as she knew it. Once only did he interrupt her, and that early in the tale, when she told him that the original cause of Thurso’s taking opium was those frightful attacks of neuralgia to which he was subject. To that Sir James said:

“Quite so. I gave him the authorisation myself.”

Then, month by month, she went through the tragic history; she spoke of that week up in Scotland when he began to take it more frequently, when, too, Maud began to suspect that he was taking it not only for relief of pain, but for the effects of it on his nerves and brain. Then came the stealthy dose in the train, then the scenes at Bray. But as she spoke, though he attended very carefully to all she said, he watched her not for that reason alone. It was not so unlikely, he saw, that he might have another patient on his hands, for it was as much as she could do to get through with what she was saying.

Then the tale became harder of telling: from that day he had seemed to have begun to hate her, and with hate there grew and flourished in his mind ignoble suspicions. He had taken to spying on her, to opening her letters; then came the infamous taunts he had levelled at her, and the final insult. And when she had finished there was silence.

She had spoken quite calmly, arranging and reviewing the events of those hideous months in orderly manner, and stopping only when she could not quite command her voice. And without any long pause after she had done, Sir James went on with what had to be told her.

“The opium habit,” he said, “even when one begins to treat it quite early, is the most difficult thing in the world to cure. Give me ten drunkards who want to get over the habit, and I will very likely cure eight, but give me ten opium-eaters or laudanum-drinkers – for the two, of course, are exactly the same – who are equally desirous to amend, and I may cure one of them. God knows why it is so, Lady Thurso, but this particular drug, this poppy of the fields, binds body and soul in a way that no other habit binds, not alcohol, nor sensualism, nor anything. And your husband’s case has not been taken early. He is completely undermined by it. It is impossible to imagine a more serious case.”

Catherine shifted her chair a little; she was so overwhelmingly tired, now that she had ceased writing, that it was something of an effort to meet the doctor’s eye.

“And now you need your bravery again,” he said. “He might have died any minute during those first six hours after his attack. And, dear lady, it might have been better if he had. It might have saved God knows what suffering and misery to himself and others. Sometimes I think that we doctors do a cruel kindness in snatching poor folk out of death’s jaws. Of course, one cannot, and I do not, say that any case is incurable, because, thank God, miracles still happen. But I cannot see how he can be cured. As he gets stronger from this attack, his craving for the drug will get stronger also; he has already asked for it. Unless you absolutely shut him up he will find means of getting hold of it. He will probably begin with smaller doses, for the poison will have more effect when he is still weak, and he will increase them and increase them until this or something like it happens again. His digestion, too, is in the most feeble condition. I do not suppose he has eaten a pound of nourishing food in the last week.

“No; he has hardly touched it,” said she. “He says it gets in the way. But if we could succeed in keeping him away from the drug by – by any means, would there not be hope?”

The kind old doctor gave a long sigh. He hated this part of his business, and the braver people were, the more cruel he seemed to himself.

“No,” he said; “I think he would probably go off his head without it. One can’t tell, but I should fear that. You see, it is not the time for me to keep anything from you. And you are bearing it splendidly: you are bearing it in the way we are meant to bear these terrors of life. We may get white with pain, as you did just now, we may feel sick with the anguish of it all, but we ought still to be able to clench our teeth and not cry out. And, do you know, that is such a sound policy. Being brave carries its dividends quicker than any investment I know. For every effort of the sort that we make strengthens us, exactly as gymnastics strengthen our muscles.”

Something in this arrested her attention very strongly; for the moment she was led away from the thought of Thurso to another matter that concerned her quite as vitally. She turned round to him again.

“Do you mean that if – if we resist anything our powers of resistance are increased?” she asked. “Resistance seems to tire me, to make me less able to make an effort.”

Sir James took this in also; his eye, trained to observe obscurities, saw that for the moment she was not thinking of her husband.

“Temporarily it tires you,” he said, “just as exercise does. But you are really the stronger for it. The opposite holds, too, as you and I and poor Lord Thurso know very well; not to resist, to yield, weakens our power of resistance. The body is built up and made strong by effort, and so, I am sure, is the soul.”

She thought over that for a space of silence, noting down in her mind how it concerned that of which the doctor knew nothing.

“Tell me all you fear about Thurso,” she said. “I want to know what you think the end will be, and when, since I gather that, as far as you know, you regard him as incurable. I want to hear from you, quietly and fully, what I must bring myself to expect, the thoughts which I have got to get used to.”

“I have told you the worst,” he said, “and I think you understand it. But, more in detail, it will be this: He will be very weak for a few days, and will, of course, be in bed. But I fully expect that his recovery from this attack will be rapid, because he will be properly fed, and not allowed to make the smallest exertion, but chiefly because opium, which was the direct cause of it, will be cut off. As he gets stronger the craving will get stronger.”

“Then, you advise – ”

“I advise nothing till I see how he pulls round. What I most fear is that his whole will-power, his very capability to form a resolution, has been atrophied, made ineffective, by this drug. He – I am telling you all my worst fears, of course, because this is not a time to buoy you up with false hopes – he is, I fear, from what you tell me, incapable of resistance. That is the real and fatal danger. Now, is there any motive, any thought, or aim, or desire that was his, which we can make use of, on which, so to speak, we can prop up and train the will-power, which is lying like a creeper that has been torn from its supports? His devotion to you, for example? His love for his children?”

Catherine turned on him a perfectly hopeless look, and shook her head. The waters of Marah were in that gesture.

The doctor spoke again, gently, tenderly.

“Then, who has the most influence over him?” he asked.

“Oh, Maud,” said she – “his sister, you know I have no doubt whatever about that. I think,” she added quietly – “I think he hates me.”

She spoke quite quietly, as if stating the most commonplace of facts, and the very simplicity of the words were intensely pathetic to the kind man. But they were best passed over without comment.

“Then, may I consult with her before I go,” he said, “as to anything she can suggest which can appeal to him, support him? He is drowning, he must drown as far as purely medical skill can help him, and we want – do we not? – to throw any sort of life-buoy to him which may keep him afloat.”

“Hypnotism? That sort of thing?” she asked.

“I do not think it possible that hypnotism or suggestion can help him,” he said. “There must be something to hypnotise, something to suggest to, and that something is will-power. One cannot say it is wholly destroyed, because I suppose that would mean death, but it is in so feeble and impotent a state that I know of nothing which can touch it.”

Though Catherine had taken all this very quietly, her quietude was partly that of someone who is stunned, and now her mind recurred, as she recovered herself, to one of those sentences which, so to speak, had dealt the blow.

“You mean that only a miracle can restore him?” she said.

“Yes, but I believe in miracles,” said he, “though, unfortunately, you cannot produce a miracle as you can produce a bottle of medicine.”

Catherine got up.

“How strange that you should say that!” she said. “Because Maud believes in them, as you do, but she thinks them most accessible. Only she no longer calls them miracles – she calls them Christian Science!”