Rosshalde (17 page)

“Yes, my friend, I'm not very happy about your boy. Haven't you been struck for some time by certain abnormalities, headaches, fatigue, no desire to play, and so on? —Only very recently? And has he been so sensitive for very long? To noise and bright light? To smells? —I see. He disliked the smell of paint in your studio! Yes, that fits in.”

He asked a good many questions and Veraguth answered. Though slightly numb, he was anxiously attentive and felt a secret admiration for the doctor's considerately polite, flawlessly precise manner of speaking.

Then the questions came slowly and singly, and at length there was a long pause, silence hovered in midair like a cloud, broken only by the sharp, high-pitched ticking of the pretty little clock.

Veraguth wiped the perspiration from his forehead. He felt that it was time for him to learn the truth, and conscious of the doctor's stony silence, he was overcome by painful, paralyzing fear. He squirmed as though his shirt collar were choking him, and at last he blurted out: “Is it as bad as all that?”

Raising his sallow, overworked face, the doctor gave him a wan glance and nodded. “Yes, I'm sorry to say. It's bad, Herr Veraguth.”

The doctor did not avert his eyes. Attentively waiting, he saw the painter turn pale and let his hands drop. He saw the lips sag and tremble slightly and the lids droop over the eyes as in a faint. And then he saw the painter's mouth recover its firmness and his eyes kindle with fresh will. Only the deep pallor remained. He saw that the painter was ready to listen.

“What is it, Doctor? You don't have to spare me. Speak up. —You don't think Pierre is going to die?”

The doctor moved his chair a little closer. He spoke very softly, but sharply and distinctly. “That's a question no one can answer. But if I'm not greatly mistaken, your little boy is dangerously ill.”

Veraguth looked into his eyes. “Is he going to die? I want to know if you think he's going to die. Do you understand—I want to know.”

Unconsciously, the painter had stood up and stepped forward almost menacingly. The doctor put his hand on his arm; Veraguth gave a start and immediately sank back into his chair as though ashamed.

“There's no sense in talking like that,” the doctor began. “The decision between life and death doesn't rest with us. Every day we physicians meet with surprises. As long as a patient has breath, we have hope for him. You know that. Or where would we be?”

Veraguth nodded patiently and merely asked: “What is it, then?”

The doctor coughed slightly.

“If I'm not mistaken, it's meningitis.”

Veraguth sat very still and softly repeated the word. Then he stood up and held out his hand to the doctor. “So it's meningitis,” he said, speaking very slowly and cautiously because his lips were trembling as though it was very cold. “Is that ever curable?”

“Everything is curable, Herr Veraguth. One man takes to his bed with a toothache and dies in a few days, another has all the symptoms of the worst disease and gets well.”

“Yes, yes. And gets well! I'll go now, Herr Doktor. You've been to a lot of trouble on my account. In other words, meningitis isn't curable?”

“My dear Herr…”

“Forgive me. Perhaps you have taken care of other children with this meni … with this disease? Yes? You see!… Are those children still alive?”

The doctor was silent.

“Are two of them still alive? Or one?”

There was no answer.

As though vexed, the doctor had turned toward his desk and opened a drawer.

“You musn't give up like that!” he said in a changed tone. “Whether your child will get well, we don't know. He is in danger, and we've got to help him as best we can. We must all of us help him, do you understand, and you too. I need you. —I'll be out to the house again this evening. In any case, I'm giving you this sleeping powder, perhaps you can use it yourself. And now listen to me: the child must have absolute quiet and the most nourishing food. That's the main thing. Will you keep that in mind?”

“Of course. I won't forget.”

“If he has pain or is very restless, lukewarm baths or compresses help. Have you an ice bag? I'll bring you one. You do have ice out there? Good. —We shall go on hoping, Herr Veraguth. It won't do for any of us to lose heart now, we've all got to be at our posts. Agreed?”

Veraguth replied with a gesture that inspired confidence in the doctor. The doctor saw him to the door.

“Would you like to take my carriage? I won't need it until five.”

“No, thank you. I'll walk.”

He went down the street, which was as deserted as before. The joyless piano practicing was still pouring from the open window. He looked at his watch. Only half an hour had passed. Slowly he went on, street after street, by a circuitous route that took him through half the city. He dreaded to leave it. Here in this poor, stupid heap of houses, medicine-smell and sickness, affliction and fear and death were at home, a hundred dismal languishing streets helped to bear every burden, one was not alone. But out there, it seemed to him, under the trees and clear sky, amid the singing of scythes and the chirping of crickets, the thought of all that must be much more terrible, more meaningless, more desperate.

It was evening when he arrived home, dusty and dead tired. The doctor had called, but Frau Adele was calm and seemed to know nothing.

At dinner Veraguth spoke about horses with Albert. At every turn he thought of something to say, and Albert joined in. They saw that Papa was very tired, nothing more. But he kept thinking with almost scornful bitterness: I could have death in my eyes, they would never notice! This is my wife and this is my son! And Pierre is dying! And these thoughts circled dismally through his head while his wooden tongue formed words that were of no interest to anyone. But then came a new thought: So much the better! This way I shall drink my suffering to the last bitter drop. I shall sit here dissembling, and see my poor little boy die. And if I'm still alive after that, there will be nothing more to bind me, nothing more that can hurt me; then I will go and never lie again as long as I live, never again believe in a love, never again procrastinate and be cowardly … Then I will live and act and go forward, there will be no peace and no inertia.

With dark delight he felt the suffering burn in his heart, wild and unbearable, but pure and great, a feeling such as he had never known before, and in the presence of the divine flame he saw his small, dismal, disingenuous and misshapen life dwindle into insignificance, unworthy of so much as a thought or even of blame.

In that frame of mind, he sat for an hour in the child's half-darkened sickroom and spent a burning sleepless night in his bed, giving himself with fervor to his devouring grief, desiring nothing and hoping for nothing, as though wishing to be consumed by this fire and burned clean down to the last quivering fiber. He understood that this had to be, that he must relinquish his dearest and best and purest possession, and see it die.

Chapter Sixteen

P
IERRE WAS SUFFERING
and his father sat with him almost all day. The child had a constant headache; he breathed rapidly, and every breath was a brief, anguished moan. At times his little thin body was shaken with brief tremors or stiffened and arched. Then for a long while he lay perfectly still, and at length he was overcome by a convulsive yawning. Then he slept for an hour, and when he woke, the same regular, plaintive sigh resumed with every breath.

He did not hear what was said to him and when they raised him almost by force and put food into his mouth, he ate it with mechanical indifference. The curtains were closed tight and in the dim light Veraguth sat for a long while bent watchfully over the child, observing with freezing heart how one delicate sweet trait after another vanished from the child's lovely familiar face and was gone. What remained was a pale, prematurely aged face, a gruesome mask with simplified features, in which nothing could be read but pain and disgust and profound horror.

At times, when the child dozed off, the father saw the disfigured face soften and recover a trace of its lost charm, and then he stared fixedly, with all the thirsting fervor of his love, once again and then again to imprint this dying loveliness on his mind. Then it seemed to him that he had never in all his life known what love was, never until these watchful moments.

For a long time Frau Adele had suspected nothing; Veraguth's tenseness and strange remoteness had struck her only gradually and in the end aroused her suspicions, but it was days before she gained an intimation of the truth. One evening as he was leaving Pierre's room she took him aside and said brusquely, in an offended, bitter tone: “Well, what is the matter with Pierre? What is it? I see that you know something.”

He looked at her as though from far off, and said with dry lips: “I don't know, child. He's very sick. Can't you see that?”

“I do see. And I want to know what it is! You treat him almost as if he were dying—you and the doctor. What has he told you?”

“He told me it was bad and that we must take very good care of him. It's some sort of inflammation in his poor little head. We'll ask the doctor to tell us more tomorrow.”

She leaned against the bookcase, reaching up with one hand to grasp the folds of the green curtain above her. She said nothing and he stood there patiently; his face was gray and his eyes looked inflamed. His hands were trembling slightly, but he kept control of himself and on his face there was a sort of smile, a strange shadow of resignation, patience, and politeness.

Slowly she came over to him. She put her hand on his arm and seemed unsteady in the knees. Very softly she whispered: “Do you think he's going to die?”

Veraguth still had the weak foolish smile on his lips, but quick little tears were running down his face. He only nodded feebly, and when she slumped down and lost her hold, he lifted her up and helped her to a chair.

“We can't know for sure,” he said slowly and awkwardly, as though repeating with disgust an old lesson with which he had long ago lost patience. “We mustn't lose heart.”

“We mustn't lose heart,” he repeated mechanically after a time, when her strength had returned and she was sitting up straight again.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you're right.” And again after a pause: “It can't be! It can't be!”

And suddenly she stood up, there was life in her eyes and her face was full of understanding and grief. “You're not coming back, are you?” she said aloud. “I know. You're going to leave us.”

He saw clearly that this was a moment which permitted of no falsehood. And so he said quickly and tonelessly: “Yes.”

She rocked her head as though she had to think very hard and was unable to take it all in. But what she now said was not a product of reflection; it flowed unconsciously from the black, hopeless affliction of the moment, from weariness and discouragement, and most of all from an obscure need to make amends for something and to do a kindness to someone still accessible to kindness.

“That's what I thought,” she said. “But listen to me, Johann. Pierre mustn't die. Everything mustn't collapse now all at once! And do you know … there's something else I want to tell you: if he gets well, you may have him. Do you hear me? He shall stay with you.”

Veraguth did not understand immediately. Only gradually did he grasp what she had said and realize that what they had fought over, what had made him hesitate and suffer for years, had been granted him now that it was too late.

It struck him as unspeakably absurd, not only that he should now suddenly have what had so long been denied him, but even more, that Pierre should become his at the very moment when he was doomed to die. Now, to him, the child would die doubly! It was insane, it was ridiculous! It was so grotesque and absurd that he was almost on the point of bursting into bitter laughter.

But, beyond a doubt, she meant it seriously. It was clear that she did not fully believe Pierre must die. It was a kindness, it was an enormous sacrifice which some obscure good impulse drove her to make in the painful confusion of the moment. He saw how she was suffering, how pale she was, and what an effort it cost her to stand on her feet. He must not show that he took her sacrifice, her strange belated generosity, as a deadly mockery.

Already she was waiting uneasily for a word from him. Why didn't he say something? Didn't he believe her? Or had he become so estranged that he was unwilling to accept anything from her, not even this, the greatest sacrifice she could make him?

Her face began to tremble with disappointment, and then at last he regained control of himself. He took her hand, bent over, touched it with his cool lips, and said: “Thank you.”

Then an idea came to him and in a warmer tone he added: “But now I want to help take care of Pierre. Let me sit up with him at night.”

“We shall take turns,” she said firmly.

That night Pierre was very quiet. On the table a little night lamp was left burning; its feeble light did not fill the room but lost itself halfway to the door in a brown twilight. For a long while Veraguth listened to the boy's breathing, then he lay down on the narrow divan that he had had moved into the room.

At about two in the morning Frau Adele awoke, struck a light, and arose. She threw on her dressing gown and, holding a candle, went to Pierre's room. She found everything quiet. Pierre's eyelashes flickered slightly as the light grazed his face, but he did not awaken. And on the divan her husband lay asleep, fully dressed and half curled up.

She let the light fall on his face as well, and stood over him for a few minutes. And she saw his face shorn of pretense, with all its wrinkles and gray hair, its sagging cheeks and sunken eyes.

“He too has grown old,” she thought with a feeling of mingled pity and satisfaction, and felt tempted to stroke the disheveled hair. But she did not. She left the room without a sound. When she came back in the morning, he had long been sitting awake and attentive at Pierre's bedside. His mouth and the glance with which he greeted her were again firm with the resolution and secret strength which for some days now had enveloped him like armor.