The Dawn of Reckoning

by James Hilton

  Ward had gone—was now, no doubt, miles westward over the country-side, passing without heed the black fields and sleeping farmsteads. She could not think or remember anything that had happened; but she could feel—could feel more intensely than she had ever felt before. The spell of his manliness—his manliness that was half boyishness—was still on her, calming her passion and making it sweet and clear.

  The night grew quieter, and the hours lengthened to midnight. She was happy until she heard the harsh hooting of the car in the lane. Philip’s car…Then all her fears swooped down upon her again, more agonisingly after the short respite. She stumbled to her feet and rushed out of the room and up the wide staircase. She would not—could not see him.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XIV

  I

  One Friday at twilight in Bethnal Green, when the streets were crowded with shoppers, and the flaming pageant of the slums was just beginning, a sudden shower smeared all the pavements with a brown and greasy mud. And on this mud, glistening in the rosy light of the naptha-flares, a lady chanced to slip and fall. She picked herself up immediately, smiled, and said that she was not hurt, but the usual kindly crowd gathered round her, asking kindly questions and giving kindly advice, and being, in short, a very kindly nuisance. They noticed, both from her dress and from her voice, that she was comfortably well-to-do; they guessed therefore that only some queer business could have brought her alone to Bethnal Green.

  In her fall she had dropped her handbag, and some money had escaped from it, chiefly coppers. A small boy rescued the hand-bag, and another small boy, assisted by stall-keepers and passers-by of all kinds, began a search for the vagrant coins. Meanwhile, a man wiped the mud off her fur coat with his handkerchief. The crowd became larger and larger, until it was composed chiefly of people who did not know what was the matter.

  She tried to go her way, but the crowd were uncertain whether all her money had been recovered, and when she said that the rest of it, if there were any, did not matter, they seemed incredulous, almost resentful of her nonchalance. “‘Ere’s another penny, missis,” said an unshaven, shabbily-dressed man, thrusting himself forward. She smiled at him, and he gaped back at her. For she was very beautiful.

  But at last a watcher on the fringe of the crowd reported that police were coming. And the crowd, true to the ingrained instinct of generations, prepared to dissolve. “Clear out before they come…Don’t want any trouble…” were the general exclamations, as if anybody could get into trouble for falling down on a greasy pavement. “‘Ere, missis, where d’ you wanter go to?”

  He was a young, dark-haired, and intelligent Jew boy. She answered: “Clay Street…Doctor Ward…Do you know him?”

  “Oh, yers, I know ‘im. You jes’ foller me.”

  She followed him out of the glare of the main highway into a forlorn and dismal side turning, the crowd making way for her and murmuring together in a sombre bedraggled chorus…“She wants Doctor Ward…Doctor Ward…Wot she want ‘im for?…Doctor Ward…Clay Street…”

  After walking a few yards she knew that she had received several bad sprains. But no matter; she followed her guide unswervingly, content that she was nearing her destination at last.

  II

  The streets became darker and more slimy and the occasional lamps paler and sallower; leering gin-palaces and stench-laden fried-fish shops bathed the pavements in sudden arcs of light that emphasised the gloom of the intervals. Her guide led her swiftly from street to street, solemnly and without speaking. And at last he halted in front of an old-fashioned three-storeyed house that opened directly on to the pavement. “‘Ere y’are, m’m. Sh’ll I ring?”

  She nodded, and he gave a tug at the bell-pull that must have been deafening within. She opened her hand-bag and gave him a shilling, and he ran off smiling delightedly. So far so good; she was here at last, and one stage of her necessary adventure was complete.

  The door of the house opened with silent suddenness, and an elderly competent-looking nurse stood on the threshold.

  “Can I see Doctor Ward, please?

  “Have you an appointment?”

  “No, but—”

  “Well, you see, I’m afraid he’s very busy to-night, but perhaps I could help you. Will you come inside?”

  The nurse carefully closed the door behind her and led the way down the dimly-lit hall. “If you’ll come into the surgery—” she began.

  She was obviously misapprehending.

  “But—but I haven’t come as a patient. I’m a friend—a personal friend of the doctor’s, and I want to see him—on—on private business.”

  “Oh, I see.” The nurse glanced at her shrewdly, and went on, if anything, rather less cordially: “The doctor’s very busy to-night. Perhaps you’d prefer to wait in the office. There’ll be callers here, you see. I’ll ring through to the hospital and tell the doctor you’ve come. What name shall I say?

  “Monsell,” came the reply, almost inaudibly. And then, as if to make amends, a shrill repetition: “Monsell. Mrs. Monsell. From Chassingford…Doctor Ward will understand as soon as you give him my name.”

  “Very well,” replied the nurse imperturbably. She led the way into a further room, switched on the light and an electric fire and retired.

  As soon as she was left alone in the room Stella was the cringing prey of all her fears. The room was rather bleak, and the single high-powered electric light in the ceiling added a glare that made the bleakness more terrible. The window was wide open, and a draught of chilly air swept in from outside. The night was almost dark, and through the gloom she could see a wide-tiled courtyard, and on the other side of it the many-storeyed hospital, its tiers of windows glowing more brightly as the darkness deepened. At the further end the glass-roofed operating theatre shone like an immense silver-blue conflagration, dazzling the night with an awful radiance. As the last faint grey of twilight left the sky the radiance blazed more fiercely; it hypnotised her as she gazed at it; it seemed to her the huge malevolent eye of something monstrously evil. A humming was in her ears; she staggered to a chair and sank into it almost fainting.

  But a cool gust of air quickly revived her, and she heard footsteps outside. She hoped—was sure that it was Ward. But when the door opened only the nurse entered. “I’ll pull down the blinds for you,” she said quietly.

  “Did you ring through to the hospital as you said?”

  “Yes. But I couldn’t speak to the doctor. He’s still operating.”

  “Oh, operating?” Something made her shiver.

  “Yes.”

  “A long operation?”

  “Some are.”

  The words, casual and non-committal, chilled her. In the hard white light she saw a ruthlessly competent woman—cold, passionless, almost superb. The woman reminded her of Mrs. Monsell, of Chassingford, of all that was and had been terrible in her recent life.

  Something impelled her to keep up the conversation while the nurse was attending to the blinds “I suppose—I suppose you haven’t any sort of idea how long it will last?

  “What—the operation?

  “Yes.”

  “No, I haven’t. It’s impossible to say.”

  “Is it a bad—a difficult operation?”

  The nurse walked calmly to the door. “All operations are bad,” she said simply. And she added, as if throwing out the information as a half-contemptuous tit-bit for the curious: “It’s a cancer case…A woman, I believe.”

  The door closed again and all was silent. She looked carefully round the room, trying to save her thoughts from panic. It seemed to be a sort of office and store-room combined. Glass-lidded cases of surgical instruments lay on a large table in the middle, and there was a book-case in an alcove, filled with scientific and medical text-books. One corner of the room was tiled, and contained a neat porcelain wash-basin. The walls exhibited nothing but a large map of England and Wales, another of London, and an eye-testing card. She noticed all these details because her mind
was comparing this room with Philip’s study at Chassingford. Comparing, and also contrasting. Philip’s room was luxurious and complicated; it suggested the naturally indolent man who likes to think himself busy. Ward’s room was stark and simple…She worked out the contrast and the comparison until both broke down. She had to do something to occupy her mind…Would Ward never come? Could an operation take so long to perform? How long had she been waiting? Half an hour? A clock somewhere clanged the hour of seven o’clock…Only seven?

  Faintly in the distance came the shrill cries of children playing in the street. The white glare of the room seemed to strain harder and harder until it suddenly burst before her eyes into a cataract of stars. She closed her eyes tightly, and then she could see only the blue blaze of the theatre, clearly as if there had been nothing else in the world.

  She must have dozed from time to time, for the chiming of the quarters seemed to follow closely upon each other, awakening her with a spasm of pain and recollection. Eight o’clock came, and then half-past, and then a quarter to nine…

  Once she went to the window and dared to pull aside the blind. The theatre was still ablaze…

  Then she went back to her chair and fell half-asleep again—a sleep full of fears and spectres and strange torturing phantoms. She dreamed that she saw the blue blaze coming nearer to her, that at last its walls opened and admitted her inside it, that she lay stretched out on the table beneath the grim pitiless light. And Ward was above her, dissecting not her body, but her soul.

  A sharp sound awakened her. To her self-conscious senses it was like the roar of doom. The door opened, not silently this time, but with such force as a tornado might have made.

  III

  The first thing she noticed was the extraordinary size of him. The small room made him seem monstrous, and his surgeon’s overalls, once spotlessly white, but now stained and crumpled, added even a touch of the sinister.

  He came into the room with bent shoulders and huge sombre strides, his long arms hanging down like those of a gorilla. His face was smeared and streaked with perspiration, and even his close-cropped hair looked dishevelled. But it was his eyes that she noticed most of all. There was a terrible tragic tiredness in them, a strained sullen glare that never once left the ground as he entered. He did not see her, did not seem to see anything. But he banged the door ferociously, took off his soiled overalls, and strode over to the wash-basin.

  “I’ve come,” she said.

  It was only then that he looked up and saw her.

  “Good God!” he exclaimed under his breath.

  He had already turned on the hot water in the basin and was holding his hands under the tap. He withdrew them now, dripping and steaming, and gazed at her in wild astonishment.

  “What have you come for?”

  His voice was almost brutal in its directness. She did not flinch under it, but spoke out bravely as if it were the sort of treatment she had expected. “I came here because I couldn’t bear to be anywhere else.”

  “What d’you mean?

  “Exactly what I have said.”

  “Come here.”

  She approached him with a simplicity that suggested both meekness and defiance. She reached barely up to the level of his stooping shoulders, but there was no flinching of the serene stare that her eyes bestowed.

  “‘Why couldn’t—couldn’t you bear to—to be anywhere else?”

  “Because you can help me and nobody else can.”

  “Nobody?”

  “No.”

  He seized a towel and wiped his still dripping hands. “That’s queer…I mean—it sounds a queer thing to say…” He crumpled the towel into a heap and flung it to the farthest corner of the room. “Now then—”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked quietly. “Kill me?”

  “Kill you? And why should I do that?”

  “I don’t know. But you told me once that you were afraid of getting drunk in case you killed somebody. And you look drunk now.”

  “Do I? Well, you needn’t worry. I’m not going to kill you. But I’m going to—I want to—Come here—don’t go away.”

  “I haven’t moved yet.”

  “Why not? Aren’t you afraid?”

  “No. I’m interested.”

  “Interested? In what?”

  “In what you’re going to do.”

  “What d’you think I’m going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” And with her voice still calm, though her eyes were all but overflowing with tears, she added: “And I don’t care either.”

  He suddenly put his two hands on her shoulders. “You poor little wild, foreign thing! What does all this seem to you—all this?” He waved one hand vaguely about him. “What does it seem like—Bethnal Green after Chassingford—poverty after plenty—hardness after luxury? Don’t you feel strange?”

  “No stranger than I feel anywhere else in England.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve told you the truth. Are we to have an argument? If so, I’d like to sit down. I’m tired.”

  His eyes lit with a sudden vivid brightness. “No, you can’t sit down. Not yet…See?…Kiss me…Go on. Kiss me…Do you mind?”

  His voice was a strange incongruous mingling of the embarrassed and the peremptory. But the light in his eyes was blazing more fiercely than ever.

  “I don’t mind anything.”

  He seized her in both his strong ape-like arms and nearly crushed the life out of her. Her body winced with the sudden sharp pain of it, but her eyes were still unflinching. She offered her lips simply and calmly, without either eagerness or reluctance. Only when his mouth pressed down upon hers did she give way, and then because the power of his body was beginning to overwhelm her. She felt a sudden slackening of resistance in her knees; she knew then that he was holding her from falling.

  But it was only in his body that there was fierceness. At the moment that his lips touched hers the light in his eyes changed to one of almost frightened calm. “Oh, you beauty—you beauty!” he whispered, and his voice was like a shy boy’s. “You wild little thing—why shouldn’t I love you—why shouldn’t I?”

  He stayed on her lips for seconds—minutes, it seemed—and then, very slowly, he pushed her away from him.

  He was silent. She sat down in a chair with her eyes still fixed on him. He walked to the wash-basin and turned off the tap, which had been running all the time. “I’m sorry,” he said, gruffly. Then, with an odd little gesture, he straightened his hair, rolled up his sleeves, and began to wash..

  She could not see his face, but every now and then she caught the reflection of it in a small mirror on the wall above the basin. There was nothing that she could interpret.

  He suddenly swung round. “I’m sorry…I can’t say more, can I?”

  She did not answer immediately, simply because she could not think of anything to say. But her silence seemed to make him furiously angry.

  “If you will come and see me on an evening like this…” he went on roughly, seizing a clean towel from a cupboard and banging the door.

  “After all, if you’d been paddling about inside a cancerous stomach for two hours and a half, you’d feel the lure of something strong—and—and pure—and—and clean—”

  “You overlook one thing,” she said quietly.

  “Well?”

  She answered, still with her eyes fixed on his: “That I’m not complaining…And now since we’ve settled that, may I tell you what I came to tell you?”

  He did not answer, but she went on without waiting: “I’m going to leave Philip…That’s what I came to tell you.”

  IV

  He seemed stupefied. He sat down heavily in a chair and closed his eyes. It was only then that she lost all her fear of him, for she saw the marks of the strain he had endured, and she was sorry. A quiet, infinite motherliness crept into her feeling for him, but it was a different motherliness from the kind she had felt for Philip. There was no pity in it, but the deeper
stauncher comradeship of strength.

  He opened his eyes and set his lips in a grim purposeful severity. “Now, tell me,” he said, without preamble. “What’s all this about leaving Philip?”

  The second storm was threatening.

  “I am going to leave him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because to stay with him would drive me mad.”

  “No?” He seemed vaguely protestant. Then, after a pause, he went on: “Please tell me exactly what you mean.”

  “I mean just what I say. I’m miserable. And if I stay at Chassingford with Philip I shall go mad.”

  “But—but why?”

  His persistent question seemed to irritate her. “Isn’t that plain enough? Don’t you believe me? Or do you think I’m mad already?”

  He leaned forward and spoke to her very earnestly. “I want you to be very calm and tell me just what is the matter,” he said.

  She lowered her voice to a whisper.

  “Yes, I’ll tell you. But first of all, let me tell you this. He’s been watching us—you and me. He’s been watching us for weeks and months. Ever since he was ill, and you came to the flat at Kensington. Ever since you came home from the expedition. Ever since that election when we were both working for him. Maybe, for all I know, ever since that afternoon we first met by the riverside at Cambridge. He’s been watching us every minute of the time. And he says queer things to me when we’re alone, because he wants me to give myself away. He-frightens me by following me about the house and—and hiding and—and doing strange things. And he tells me, with his eyes as well as with curious half-meaning words, that he knows—he knows—”

  “Knows?” The storm had broken. “Knows, you say? What does he know? What is there to know? What have we done? What are we guilty of?”

  She answered with level melancholy: “He knows, if we don’t. He knows far more than we give him credit for. He’s clever. He’s got the sort of cleverness that nobody realizes. Nobody except me. And that’s because I feel.”