Love
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 16
He went to Scotland, and she stayed in London. She was inexorable. It was as if his soft, enveloping pillow had turned into a rock. She lied at last—how avoid lying, sooner or later, when one was married?—so as to get rid of him, for he was insisting on taking rooms for them both at the sea near Chickover, where she could be within reach of Virginia and yet not away from him. Driven into this corner what could she do but lie? It is what one does in corners, she thought, excusing herself. She told him Virginia was probably coming up to London to have her baby in a nursing home, and that was why she couldn’t go away.
He went off puzzled and unhappy, and his unhappiness filled her with secret joy. What balm to her spirit, which had lately been so anxious, to see all these unmistakable symptoms of devoted love in him. And she pictured his return in September, and herself at the station to meet him, changed, young, able to do everything with him, a fit mate for him at last.
‘You’ll never, never know how much I love you,’ she said, her arms round his neck when she said good-bye.
‘It looks like it, doesn’t it,’ he said gloomily.
‘Exactly like it,’ she laughed. She was always laughing now, just as she used always to be laughing at their very first meetings.
‘I can’t make it out,’ he said, looking down at her upturned face. ‘You’re sending me away. Suppose I meet that girl up there—Miss Wickford, or that other one who looked like a shark—I should comfort myself.’
Even that only made her laugh. ‘Do, Chris darling,’ she said, patting his face. ‘And then come back and tell me all about it.’
She was changed. He went away extremely miserable, and Lewes’s talk—that talk he had thirsted for when he thought he wasn’t going to get it—seemed like just so much gritty drivel.
Left alone in London Catherine gave herself up entirely to the treatment. Twice a week she went to Portland Place and suffered, —for it hurt, though Dr. Sanguesa told her through the nurse that it didn’t. They laid her on a table, and a great machine was lowered to within a hair’s breadth of her bare skin, her eyes were bandaged, and crackling things—she couldn’t see what, but they sounded like sparks and felt like little bright stabbing knives—were let loose on her for half an hour at a stretch, first on one side of her and then on the other. When this was over she was injected with some mysterious fluid, and then went home completely exhausted.
All day afterwards she lay on her sofa, and Mrs. Mitcham brought her trays of nourishing food. She read and slept. She went to bed at nine o’clock. She did nothing to her face after Christopher had gone, and Mrs. Mitcham, looking at her and seeing her so persistently yellow, asked her with growing concern if she felt quite well.
After the fourth treatment she was to begin and see a difference. How anxiously she scanned herself in the glass. Nothing. And her body felt exactly as her face looked, —amazingly weary.
‘It takes longer with some people,’ said the nurse, when Catherine commented on this on her fifth visit. ‘There was one lady came here who noticed nothing at all till just before the end, and then you should have seen her. Why, she skipped out of that door. And sixty, if a day.’
‘Perhaps I’m not old enough,’ said Catherine. ‘All the people you tell me about are sixty or seventy.’
She was sitting on the sofa of the Rose du Barri boudoir being dressed. She was too tired to stand up. Those crackles, going on for half an hour, were a great strain on her endurance. They didn’t hurt enough to make her cry out, but enough to make her need all her determination not to.
The nurse laughed. ‘Well, we are depressed to-day, aren’t we,’ she said brightly. ‘People do get like that about half-way through—the slow ones, I mean, who don’t react at once as some do. You’ll see. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
The next time she came the nurse flung up both hands on seeing her. ‘Why, aren’t you looking well this morning!’ she cried.
Catherine hurried to the glass. ‘Am I?’ she said, staring at herself.
‘Such a change,’ said the nurse with every sign of pleasure. ‘I was sure it would begin soon. Now you’ll see it going on more and more quickly every day.’
‘Shall I?’ said Catherine, scrutinising the face in the glass.
For the life of her she could see no difference. She said so. The nurse laughed at her.
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