Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [234]
Outwardly Elinor was very calm, silent and efficient. When Nurse Butler complained that the meals brought up to the sickroom got very cold on the way (and might she have Indian tea, as China didn’t agree with her digestion?), she ordered Lipton and arranged, in spite of Dobbs’s passionate objections, that lunch and dinner should be brought up in the water-heated breakfast dishes. All that Dr. Crowther telegraphically ordered her to do, she did, punctually, except to take more rest. Even Nurse Butler had grudgingly to admit that she was thorough and methodical. But she backed up the doctor, partly because she wanted to rule alone and undisputed in the sickroom and partly disinterestedly, for Elinor’s own sake. That calmness, she could see, was the result of effort; it was the rigidity of extreme tension. Philip and Mrs. Bidlake were no less insistent that she should rest; but Elinor would not listen to them.
‘But I’m perfectly all right,’ she protested, denying the evidence of her pallor and of those dark circles round her eyes.
She would have liked, if it had been humanly possible, never to eat or sleep at all. With Everard dead and the child in torture before her eyes, eating and sleeping seemed almost cynical. But the very possession of a body is a cynical comment on the soul and all its ways. It is a piece of cynicism, however, which the soul must accept, whether it likes it or no. Elinor duly went to bed at eleven and came down to meals—if only that she might have strength to endure yet more unhappiness. To suffer was the only thing she could do; she wanted to suffer as much and intensely as she could.
‘Well, how’s the boy?’ her father would ask perfunctorily, over his chicken-broth, when they met at lunch. And when she had given some vague reply, he would hastily pass on to another topic.
John Bidlake had steadily refused, throughout his grandchild’s illness, to come near the sickroom. He had always hated the spectacle of suffering and disease, of anything that might remind him of the pain and death he so agonizingly dreaded for himself. And in this case he had a special reason for terror. For, with that talent for inventing private superstitions which had always distinguished him, he had secretly decided that his own fate was bound up with the child’s. If the child recovered, so would he. If not… Once formulated, the superstition could not be disregarded. ‘It’s absurd,’ he tried to assure himself. ‘It’s utterly senseless and idiotic.’ But every unfavourable bulletin from the nursery made him shudder. To have entered the room might have been to discover, quite gratuitously, the most horrible confirmation of his forebodings. And perhaps (who knows?) the child’s sufferings might in some mysterious way infect himself. He did not even wish to hear of the boy. Except for that single brief enquiry at lunch-time, he never alluded to him and whenever someone else spoke of him, he either changed the subject of conversation (surreptitiously touching wood as he did so) or else withdrew out of earshot. After a few days the others learned to understand and respect his weakness. Moved by that sentiment which decrees that condemned criminals shall be treated with a special kindness, they were careful, in his presence, to avoid any allusion to what was happening upstairs.
Philip, meanwhile, hovered uneasily about the house. From time to time he went up to the nursery; but after having made an always vain attempt to persuade Elinor to come away, he would go down again in a few minutes.
He could not have borne to sit there for long at a time. The futility of Elinor’s helpless vigil appalled him; he had at all times a dread of doing nothing and in circumstances like these a