III
Jane sat in a rocking-chair, drawn closely to her father’s bedside. Beyond the bed, on a little walnut sofa, her mother and Isabel were sitting. At the farther end of the room, in two chairs by the fireside, Robin and Stephen were sharing their quiet vigil.
They were waiting in silence. They had been waiting in silence, just like that, for more than three hours. Dr. Bancroft and Miss Coulter had been in and out. They were talking to each other, now, in the dressing-room beyond the fireplace. Jane could hear their whispering voices very faintly in the silence of the sickroom. A silence otherwise unbroken, save for the occasional staccato whirr of a passing motor on the boulevard in front of the house, and by the slow rhythmic cadence of Mr. Ward’s loud, laboured breathing. It was four o’clock in the morning and the motors passed very infrequently. The breathing went steadily on, however, with a dreadful, mechanical regularity. It assaulted the ear. It filled the quiet room like the roar of a bombardment. One shell fell. Then silence. Then another shell. Then silence. Then another shell.
The night-light was placed so that the bed lay in shadow, but Jane could see her father’s figure very distinctly. His chest rose and fell, mechanically, in his rhythmic struggle for breath. The oxygen tank had been abandoned. It still stood on the floor beneath the bed table. Mr. Ward’s face was white and pinched and drawn and completely weary—weary with the supreme exhaustion of approaching death. It showed no sign of consciousness. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open. His hands lay relaxed on the meticulously ordered sheets.
Jane sat looking at those hands. Old hands, fragile and blue-veined, with a black seal ring upon one little finger. They were still her father’s hands. The approach of death had not altered them as it had the drawn and weary face. The spark of life was in them. They were living hands. The face was terrifying. The face was relaxed, defenceless and beaten. It was no longer her father’s living face. It had lost the spark.
But the breathing continued. The breathing continued in slow, even, raucous gasps. The gasps were terrifying, but not as terrifying as the intervals between them. The intervals seemed endless. Shaken by the dreadful deliberation of that laboured breathing, Jane wondered, terrified, in every interval, if the gasp would come again.
It did, however. It came with the impersonal regularity of a clock tick. Presently the clock would stop. Her father was dying. He would not live through the night. Three days ago he had sat in his leather armchair, in the library downstairs, lightly reassuring Jane on the state of his bronchitis. Tomorrow he would be dead. The roses that Jane had brought to his bedside were still in the vase on the table. The buds had barely reached their prime. Only that morning her father had commented on their ephemeral, creamy bloom. Those roses would outlive him. Life would go on.
Life would go on for Jane without his sustaining presence. Without his tacit sympathy, his love, his watchfulness, his warning, worried glance. He had worried and warned and watched and loved and sympathized over Jane for forty-one years, and now he was dying. He was dying just at the time when Jane felt she could have rewarded his love and sympathy as never before. There was no longer any necessity for worrying and warning and watching over her personal drama. She had grown up. Soon she would grow old. She saw life, now, eye to eye with her father. She, too, had become a spectator. Her children had taken the stage.
Once she had worried him awfully. She had not heeded his warning. She had been swept by the intoxication of her love for Jimmy into indifference, into resentment even, toward that warning and that worry. She had given him a very bad time. Jane regretted that now. But she could not regret her love for Jimmy. With all his tenderness, with all his understanding, her father had not tried to understand that love. He had merely deplored it. “Safety first” was always the parental slogan. Parents invariably deplored everything that threatened their children’s security. Whatever their own experience had been, they desired for the younger generation only the most conventional, the most convenient, kind of happiness.
Her father’s experience. Jane looked at the worn, white face that lay upon the pillow. It told no tales. The spirit was withdrawn from that face into some remote and impenetrable fastness, where it awaited in solitude the last adventure of life. It was oblivious of love, oblivious of care, oblivious of companionship. Stricken suddenly with a sense of the loneliness of death, Jane leaned forward to take her father’s incredibly inert, intolerably touching hand. The fingers were cold. They returned no answering pressure. Jane softly withdrew her hand. She could not reach him.
But was death, as a matter of fact, any more lonely than life? What had Jane ever known about her father’s actual earthly experience? Parents knew little enough of the emotional lives of their children, but children knew nothing of the emotional lives of their parents. The emotional life of a parent was a fantastic thought. In all the forty-one years that they had shared together, Jane had never achieved, she had never even sought to achieve, one single revealing glimpse of the secret stage on which the passionate personal drama of her father’s life had been enacted.
What was that drama? Why had he loved her mother? Had he always loved her? Had there been no other girl before, no other woman after, he had met and married her?
What had her parents really been, when they shared the romance of their early youth? Jane knew how they had looked. She had always known that because of the pictures in the red plush family album downstairs in the rosewood cabinet in the yellow drawing-room. Glossy, matter-of-fact photographs of the early seventies. Her mother at nineteen, in her wedding dress, with its formal pleats and exaggerated bustle of thick white satin and its little frill of sheer white lace that stood up stiffly at the back of her slender neck and framed her young, round face and the preposterous waterfall of her blonde curly hair. Her graceful young figure was elegantly posed on a photographer’s rustic bridge in the fashionable, backbreaking curve of the “Grecian bend.” A charming, artificial figure. A pretty, grave little face. And her father framed in the oval of the opposite page. Her father in the middle twenties. A handsome young man with big dark eyes and a sensitive mouth and the faintest suspicion of a sideburn on his lean young cheeks. A serious young man, with hair just a little too long and a collar just a little too big, and black satin coat lapels that were cut a trifle queerly. How had those two young people made out with marriage? Jane could not really believe they were her parents. She had no sense of the continuity of their personality. They had died young—those two young people. They had not grown up into Mr. and Mrs. John Ward of Pine Street, who had always seemed to Jane, since her earliest memory, so staid, so settled, so more than middle-aged.
“All lives,” her father had said to her before Cicily’s marriage, “are difficult at times.” What had been his difficulties? Jane did not know. The difficulties of Victorian marriages had been mercifully concealed by Victorian reticence from the eyes and ears of Victorian children. But what, for that matter, did Cicily, Jenny, and Steve know of herself and Stephen?
Jane’s eyes wandered from the white face on the pillow to her mother’s dim figure sunk on the walnut sofa beyond the bed. Mrs. Ward was looking at her husband. Her eyes were dull with grief, her face expressionless with fatigue. What did her mother know, Jane wondered, that she and Isabel did not, of the passionate personal drama of her father’s life? What did wives know of husbands, or husbands know of wives? Stephen had absolutely no conception of the thoughts that passed daily through her mind. No knowledge whatever of that vast accumulation of confused impressions and vague convictions and wistful desires that made up the world of revery in which she really lived. Stephen had his world of revery, too, of course. Everyone had. In the first disarming experience of love you tried to share that world. You flung open the door. You offered the key. But somehow, in spite of love, with time and incident the door swung slowly shut again. You never noticed it until you found yourself locked securely in, with the key in your own pocket. You really wondered how it had come to be there. You could not remember just when or why you had stopped saying—everything. But at the end of twenty years of marriage it was astounding to consider the number of things, that somehow, you had never said—
Jane was roused from revery by Isabel’s sudden movement, by her mother’s sharp, stifled exclamation. She stared at her father’s face. The mouth had dropped slightly more open. The chest was motionless. The slow raucous gasps were silenced. The bombardment had ceased.
“Dr. Bancroft! Dr. Bancroft!” cried Isabel shrilly. The doctor appeared instantly in the dressing-room door. He moved quickly to the bedside. Miss Coulter followed him. He took her father’s hand and felt the wrist for a moment in silence. He looked at Mrs. Ward. Robin and Stephen had crossed the room. They stood staring down at Mr. Ward from the foot of the bed. Her mother was crying. Isabel’s arm was around her. They, too, were staring down at Mr. Ward.
Her father was dead, thought Jane dully. Her father had died, as she sat at his bedside thinking abstract thoughts of life—of her own personal problems. How could she have thought such thoughts at such a moment? Lost in the complications presented by her own drama, she had not seen the curtain fall on the last act of her father’s life. She had not sensed the final approach of death. She had been totally unaware of that last, fearfully awaited gasp.
Her mother had risen. Isabel’s arm was still around her. Stephen’s hand was on Jane’s shoulder. She rose slowly from her chair, staring down at the white, pinched face that lay upon the pillow—the face that was not her father’s.
“Come, dear,” said Stephen tenderly. At the sound of his voice Jane felt her eyes fill suddenly with tears. Her father was dead. Stephen’s hand was on her elbow. His touch grew firm and insistent.
“Come, dear,” he said again. He led her to the door. Robin and Isabel were already there. Her mother was weeping in their arms.
“Come, dear,” Robin was saying. Her father was dead, and they were all running away from him. In response to some strange, instinctive recoil, life was retreating from death. They were leaving him to Dr. Bancroft and Miss Coulter.
“I—I want to stay!” cried Jane a little wildly.
“No, dear,” said Stephen protectively, “come.” Somehow, Jane found herself in the darkened hall. Her mother was at her elbow.
“Come, Mamma, dear,” Isabel was saying.
“He’s—dead,” said Mrs. Ward dully.
“Come, dear,” said Isabel insistently, through her tears.
“I’ve—no one—now,” said Mrs. Ward slowly.
Jane suddenly realized that Minnie had joined them. Her face was distorted with weeping.
“You’ve got me,” said Minnie. Competently she drew Mrs. Ward from Isabel’s restraining arm. “You come and lie down in the guestroom,” she said. Mrs. Ward permitted herself to be led away. Jane, in the darkened corridor, looked blankly, tearlessly, at Stephen, Isabel, and Robin. Her father was dead.