Alice in Bed (40 page)

EIGHT
EIGHT

Y
OU DON
'
T FEEL IT AT FIRST, AND YOU CAN
'
T PUT YOUR FINGER
upon it, but as the days go by you unfold it with the
Telegraph
, in the morn. It rises dense from the
Pall Mall Gazette
and the
Evening Standard
in the evening; it creeps through the cracks in the window frames like the fog and envelops you throughout the day.

I asked Henry how it struck him from his wider view. He said he did not think it could be exaggerated. British phariseeism. The way they believe that they alone of human races massacre savages out of pure virtue.

But I really must avoid wide-ranging pontification
à la
Norton.

I am weak and getting weaker for no particular reason. At summer's end this great prostration. Clinging to my little nurse like a drowning creature to a straw. Henry, with his grave grey eyes, summoned from Vallambrosa to my squalid indigestions. Listens so well, like a priest. Holds my hand in silence, later reads to me from Zola's
Thérèse Raquin.
'Tis a cruel fate that he should have my troubles fastened to him like a burr.

“Your nerves are my nerves,” he says. “Your stomach is my stomach. We two are one.” Was there ever such a brother? My tears overflow at his goodness. I have given him endless care and anxiety, but notwithstanding this and the fantastic nature of my troubles, I have never seen an impatient look upon his face.

I think we ought to call in a doctor, Alice.

Oh please, no more Great Men. I shall soldier on by myself, thank you very much.

Has the
Pall Mall Gazette
come yet? The English continue to be upset with Mark Twain over his frivolous treatment of Arthurian legend in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
. They had a little time of being interested in Americans, Henry says, and now they are dreadfully sick of us.

Shall I bring the tea now, Miss? Shall I rearrange your shawls?

The doctors steer clear of the hopeless cases, I believe. I laugh, remembering the one in London who said to Henry, “Your sister will not die but she will never be well.” I said, “Well, doctor, it is nice to hear that I am immortal, anyhow.”

Henry distracts me with tales of London, his friends, the racy exploits of the Prince of Wales and his crowd. He says he saw Stanley Clarke receiving his orders from the Prince, and his manner was precisely that of Smith, Henry's servant, before Henry, and the manner of the Prince was that of kind master. One day he brings along a sympathy note from Grace Norton, written in
such
Nortonese. I must be very unwell for the Ancient Houri of Kirkland Street to write to me.

A cable brings Katherine across the waves on the Umbria, a stormy passage. My Rock of Gibraltar. Shocked by my pallor, my shrinkage of flesh. “Why didn't you say it had got so bad?” I suppose I had to get a little worse in order to lose all conscience about absorbing Kath as my right.

K is better than the
Transcript
for Boston news. The Annex women still must fight Harvard for every crumb, she says. Tells me all the foolish things said by the president, the overseers, reactionary professors, the male sex in general.

Girls have no natural capacity for classical languages. Latin or Greek places too great a strain on the female nervous system.

Philosophy is inimical to the fair sex.

The female mind is unfit to tackle the higher realms of mathematics.

It is a great waste of Harvard's precious resources to teach women, who will never contribute meaningfully to society or the world of ideas.

I ask K, “Didn't you write me that President Eliot told Mrs. Howe and her group that ‘the monotony of women's lives has been greatly exaggerated'?”

“Yes, and the women laughed at him! I wish you could have been there. He looked quite cowed for a few minutes.”

One day K is taken to visit a beautiful old house at Mortlake, a private school to prepare infants for Eton, and she describes to me all the luxuries provided for the pampered young ones. A few days later Nurse goes to the Wadsworth Infirmary, where a friend of hers is nursing. She describes a girl of twelve dying of consumption, so thin and shriveled that she seems only five or six. Her mother is in a madhouse from drink and her father died the week before in a drunken fit, and there she lies trying to smile over some biscuits just given her. There was also a little boy with a crooked spine dying of cancer, and many other unfortunates. This is indeed a land of contrasts.

I expected to get better with Katherine here, but there's no denying that I am weaker, thinner, and yellower every day. I see K's anxious looks, hear her whispering with Nurse when she thinks I am dozing. Why, then, do I feel like a child who has been taken to the seashore? A vast holiday stretches before me all the way to the horizon. I see my footprints in wet sand filling with water, reflecting jagged pieces of sky. What is this joy that overflows my heart?

Worn down by the pathetic pleas of K and H, I finally relent and allow the Primrose Knight to present himself to me again. I refer to Dr. Wilmot, who being a fox-hunter and the treasurer of the local Primrose League, cures me by local color more than by his medicines. After listening attentively to my chest, he pronounces a “severe distress of the heart.” My heart may give out at any moment, he says, or I may linger on for some time.

K and H decide it will be more practical to move me to London, and I see no reason to object. It doesn't really matter
where
I am; I am always on the island of me! Ten days to pack up our household—me, Katherine, Nurse, and little Louisa, formerly under-parlormaid, now our maid-of-all-work—and whisk us away forever from Miss Clarke
and the Mind Cure ladies and the Marie Antoinette wallpaper. Miss Clarke sheds a fountain of tears. “I shouldn't say so, Miss, but there never was nobody like you.” I shall miss her, too, her indefatigable spirit and boundless goodness.

Thus my three and a half lonely years in Leamington draw to a close. In an invalid carriage of the great Western Railroad we travel to dark carboniferous London, and take rooms in the South Kensington Hotel in Queen's Gate Terrace, not far from Henry's flat in De Vere Gardens. A fine hotel, but Australian children run constantly through the corridors, screaming. Apparently Australians do not believe in suppressing the child.

Our little maid Louisa asks, “Is this the Jack the Ripper part of London?”

In this hotel the servants gather in the Steward's Room, and Nurse tells us everything that transpires there. She is allowed to report all mental eccentricities of the Lady's Maid, the Chef, the Steward, the Waiter, et cetera, but the line is rigidly drawn at all gossip about the “lydies.” The Lady's Maid, however, likes to gossip on ladies' shortcomings, and thus a wider social range is opened to us.

Katherine smiles indulgently at the manner in which I turn up and rake the thin soil of Nurse's substance. I tell her that Nurse has just revealed to me those hitherto mysterious but powerful factors in life, a ‘sense of authority' and a ‘sense of your betters,' by letting me know that I possess both.

“Do you mean to say you have a sense of your betters?”

“Oh no, Kath. Apparently I
am
a Better as well as an Authority, whose quoted word carries finality in the arguments of the steward's room. Isn't that wonderful?”

Mrs. Sidgwick comes to call, bearing a volume of verse by a Persian poet called Hafiz Shirazi. His words strike me like lightning. Especially a beautiful poem about
the ten thousand things that do not matter.

“That's it! That's it exactly!” I say to Katherine. “Being so absorbed in the ten thousand things that do not matter, we miss the one thing that does.”

“What is that, darling?”

“
Being
, Katherine. This becomes rather obvious when you are stripped to the bone by illness.”

“Hmm,” she says indulgently, ever tolerant of my “gypsy” ways.

Waves of illumination pass through me now. Some queer magic is afoot. For example, I often come across in my reading just what I'd been thinking about. Yesterday I was remembering a mustard-yellow gown with a bustle I wore to a ball in 1875—only to read in the newspaper a few hours later that the bustle has been declared dead. And my reading so haphazard!

Would you like to hear the
Pall Mall Gazette
?

Only if there is a good murder.

Here is a letter from Fanny Morse. Shall I read it to you now or later?

Fanny encloses a little pamphlet, “How to Help the Poor.” I suppose it is all right for America, but I believe the poor here can improve their lot only by rising up and chopping off some heads.

Harry says people continue to talk about Jack the Ripper, and there is speculation that the killer is a real-life Mr. Hyde, whose consciousness (or part of it) has become inaccessible to himself. Something up William's alley, I should think.

As my dissolution advances, the plan is for me to be carried to H's flat, it being considered unaesthetic here to die in a hotel. Harry, meanwhile, like the buttony-boy, has broken all out in stories. I adore “The Modern Warning,” and feel as if I were the heroine.

Abrupt change of plans: Seeing no glimmer of improvement in me—indeed, quite the opposite—Katherine has found us a house in Campden Hill, all covered with Virginia creeper. A cook, a Mrs. Thompson, comes with the lease, and on spring afternoons we hear the rooks in Lord Holland's park. A glimpse of sky and feathery green and Katherine laboring with a hoe and a spade in our scraplet of a garden, planting American seeds sent over by Fanny Morse. I wonder if they will take root in English soil.

Louisa tells K, “You have to be happy when you're young because afterwards you
never can be
. Because then you will be married and how can you be happy with a man at your back all the time?” Nurse
and Cook are engaged in a religious war over Louisa's soul. Anglican Nurse gives her a bonnet; Baptismal Cook retaliates with an apron. “She keeps talking about Our Maker,” Nurse explains to me, “and that is Chapel, not Church.” Meanwhile, upstairs, the cold Unitarian fish (Kath) and the votary of natural religion (your humble servant) look on in amusement. Mrs. Thompson's taste for tawdry jewelry is distressing to behold.

Nurse takes me to the window. Carries me, really. I stick my head out and drink in a long draught of spring. Golden daffodils, swelling twiggery of old trees, relentless housecleaning of rooks, gradations of light, the mystery of birth in the air. I hope as the season advances I may occasionally be carried by my slaveys through the tangled bloom.

A great peace wells up in me these days. Whence does it come?

Please, the curtain, half-way. Yes, like that, exactly.

Sometimes I think I am reliving my life in reverse. Like unwinding a string that has been wound around your finger. One year undone and then the next, and the next, each with a rush of memories like the debris of an exploding planet. And I am not
doing
anything! I only observe.

Is that the teakettle shrieking?

So many things pass though me now, weightless. The skies of Newport. Commonwealth Avenue with its mall of spindly trees. The stone gargoyles in Paris, with their lapping tongues and bulging eyes. The year Father was dying. Harry sleeping in Father's study, keeping the accounts, I keeping house. Reading together in the evenings, both of us unspeakably bereft. H. asking what I thought of his stories, seeming to value my poor opinion.

Calling cards on a silver tray. Lady someone.
Shall I say you are too ill, Alice?

Yes, too ill.

A draft slips through the cracks in the window frame. I freeze at the first chill even under five blankets. For the others it is warm, Nurse all flushed. How subjective the world is, as William points out in his Psychology. Rain splashes like hail against the glass. Later the sun comes out and rainbows shimmer everywhere.

Although K's venturings into the world are sadly curtailed by my unbridled demands, she did go out yesterday to see “The Dancing Girl” with Mrs. Clough. In the play, a wicked duke rehearses his villainies and says how much better are the lower orders than such as he, whereupon Mrs. C. exclaims, “I am so sorry to hear him say that; it is hard enough as it is to keep people in their place, and it does them a great deal of harm to hear that sort of talk.”

As I am still wasting away, K and H feel moved to call in Sir Andrew Clarke, another great man. Physician to Mr. Gladstone no less! Arriving late, he announces himself as “the late Dr. Clarke.” It is the same joke he made to an acquaintance of Katherine's seven years ago. Imagine making the same pun for seven years!

My heart troubles me now, I tell the good doctor, skipping beats and sometimes kicking me in the chest like a mule. I also suffer pains, alternately stabbing, burning or grinding, around my ribcage and clavicle. The pains are getting worse, as is the sense of suffocation. Dr. Clarke listens and palpates and then informs me—on May 31st, in the year of our lord 1891—that I have a tumor of the breast. He has me feel it: a stony lima bean under the skin. He says I may die in a week or so, or I may live some months. Or possibly the tumor is not malignant at all.

All things come to her who waits! My aspirations may have been eccentric but I can't complain now that they have not been brilliantly fulfilled. Farewell to hysteria and nervous hyperaesthesia, to spinal neurosis and suppressed gout. The late Dr. Clarke seems shocked I am not more dismayed, probably assumes my queerness springs from being American. But what a relief after all this time to suffer from something real! Dr. Clarke says the pain and distress of the breath is a sign. It will cease to be painful near the end.

In the evening the shadow of a huge moth darkens the pages of my book. For a minute I think it is the angel of death. Katherine tells me I cry out in my sleep, sometimes speak long passages. I tell her I wish she'd take notes; I might learn something from my subliminal.