‘So you think you would like to come to my clinic, madame?’
She, who has appeared oblivious of the talk, reacts unexpectedly to the direct question. Her eyes open wide, a kind of contortion appears on her face as though she might weep or even strike a blow if she had the strength. She pulls herself up on the sofa, clenches her hands, and her voice too is unexpectedly strong as she answers:
‘No, I never wanted to come. I was forced — brought here against my will.’
She cannot help the intense hostility in her tone, which is the result of hysteria, of complete emotional exhaustion, perhaps of despair: it is aimed at her own neurosis and at a whole chain of events which have gone before — not at the man who now speaks to her with a smile. But he, because they are foreigners and strangers to one another, and because they belong besides to ethnological groups fundamentally unsympathetic, he is a little stung, a little displeased. However, he continues to smile as he says with unchanging smoothness:
‘Perhaps you will rest here for a few minutes. There are one or two things I must discuss with monsieur.’
Left alone, the young woman lapses into a state of complete quiescence, her fair hair spread on the brown cushion. She does not move, she hardly appears to breathe; only at long intervals a deep, broken sigh comes from her painted lips, her grey, distracted, unfocused eyes open wide and gaze at the pleasant room like the eyes of a lost person, a person who has lost his memory, or has been incomprehensibly taken prisoner in a strange land.
The two men are absent rather a long time, at least half an hour, but she does not notice. It would be all the same to her if they stayed away the whole morning: drugs and exhaustion have destroyed her appreciation of time. She is not alseep, but neither is she truly awake. Vague fantasies, most of them unpleasant, occupy her submerged brain.
Presently the big man returns with a nurse. The doctor sends a message that he has been called away but will visit his new patient later in the morning. Supported by the two others, the young woman slowly traverses a wide corridor. Now there are signs of life in the building. A few patients, accompanied by an attendant, are returning from the gymnasium. Some of them look curiously at the blonde victim, soon to be their companion, who does not return their gaze: most likely she does not see them. The man with her is clearly uneasy, frowning and biting his nails, and seeking security in talk with the tranquil, matter-of-fact nurse in her white overall.
Now they are in a bedroom. The nurse goes in search of the luggage. The other woman, her last physical force depleted by the recent exertion, droops on the edge of the bed, less than half present: only a kind of mechanical masochism still keeps her upright. Her companion, without knowing why, is irritated by this posture.
‘Why don’t you lie down comfortably?’ he asks her, repressing annoyance and keeping his voice low.
She does not answer, but something — perhaps it is the sight of the white clouds that now, like choir-boys, like seraphs, are moving across the sky in ordered procession — moves her to take his hand.
‘I’ll get better now… Everything will be all right, won’t it?’ she says, incoherent, seeking from him some reassurance which is not in his power to give.
He stirs awkwardly, scowling and biting the nails of his free hand.
‘Yes… of course… you’ll get better…’ He only wants to be free, to be gone — anywhere, out of this situation so intolerable to his irresponsible heart. But suddenly he bends down and kisses her on the cheek. She is surprised out of her trance, touched, grateful, encouraged; for a second she feels almost her old self. Even now, at the last moment, she will save everything; she will walk, and they will go out together into the sun. She starts to speak, to stand up, but he disengages himself and goes to the door.
‘You’re going away?’ she asks, disappointed. He mutters something, looking aside. ‘But you’ll come back soon?’
‘Yes, of course. When you’re in bed.’
He goes out of the room. She sits on the edge of the bed, suspended, almost lifeless, the brief animation, departed, leaving her emptier than before.
All at once she hears the engine of a car being started outside. From where she is sitting she can see through the window, covered with iron scrolls, a sweep of the drive where a car is beginning to move. Her eyes recognize that it is the car in which they drove from the town, but her brain draws no conclusion from this. Suddenly she sees in the back seat the man who accompanied her. But even now she feels only bewilderment, stupefaction. What does it mean? Why is he in the car? His suitcase lies on the seat at his side, and for some reason the sight of this bag, which she herself gave him years before, convinces her of the truth.
‘He’s leaving me here. He’s going away… Without telling me… Without even a word. When he kissed me it was good-bye.’
Some final desperate reserve of nervous energy enables her to run to the door. ‘I must go to him — I must stop him — he can’t leave me like this!’ she cries out to the empty room. The door is locked on the outside. She twists the handle and beats on the glass panel. The glass is unbreakable and an iron bar would do no more than splinter it. Nevertheless she continues to beat weakly upon it with her two hands while tears run down her distorted face.
An attendant passing along the corridor glances with a startled look at the convulsed face with its wild, lost, streaming eyes, and then hurries off in search of someone in authority.
VI
It is early in the morning in one of the bedrooms of the foreign clinic. The empty room has the indefinably forlorn air of a place just deserted by its usual occupant. The door into the passage stands open, there is a tray with disarranged breakfast things on a table beside the bed. The room is quite large and has a parquet floor and well-proportioned furniture of pale wood: although one would not call it luxurious, it is certainly comfortable and pleasant. All the same, there is something a little odd, a little disquieting, about it. It would be difficult to locate the source of this impression; perhaps the circumstance that there is not a single hook anywhere, that all planes are bare and smooth, and that the electric light is protected by a wire screen, has something to do with it. The big window, too, is covered by a grille of wrought iron work which, though it is ornamental, somehow suggests a utilitarian purpose. Just now the room is cool, even chilly, in spite of the fact that it is midsummer. There is a thick white mountain mist out of doors.
A young peasant girl in an overall hurries in from the passage, carries away the breakfast tray, and then returns with an armful of cleaning utensils. She is nineteen or twenty years old, big, robust, rather bony, with an unbeautiful large-nosed face and brown hair scraped back from her forehead. All her movements are clumsy but vigorous. She kneels down on the floor, scoops a dollop of some thick, grease-like substance out of a tin, and begins to polish the boards energetically. As she works she quietly hums to herself a long, tuneless national song. All her life she has worked hard, she is full of unbounded energy, it pleases her to see the smooth wood shine like water under her cloth; she is happy.
Soon the floor is polished as if for a ball, but still there is the bed to make, the furniture to attend to. She washes her hands at the basin and dries them on her special cloth before putting the bed in order: then goes over to dust the dressing-table, looking with unenvious curiosity at the decorative boxes of powder and cream, the scent in its slender flask.
Before she has finished, the occupant of the room returns from her bath. She is about ten years older than the peasant girl, of whom she is the antithesis in every way; the two might serve as examples of opposite products of society. The newcomer is exceedingly slim and decorative in a sophisticated way. Her long, smoothly curving, heavy blonde hair, her full cyclamen-coloured gown that trails on the floor, give her a somewhat romantic appearance which is not negatived by her unhappy eyes, nor by her face of assumed hardness, of assumed indifference, which does not conceal desolation.