I was literally stunned. Nothing else can express what I felt as I listened to those revelations. To such a degree that I could not at first unclench my jaws and the silence between us grew too solid to be broken. How long it lasted I don’t know. What was the old man thinking? He remained motionless in the depths of the armchair, with that air of a broken old puppet which only added to the density of the silence. In the end he turned toward me a questioning, faraway gaze that seemed almost surprised at meeting mine. I found nothing to say except: “I’m stunned.”
He raised a weary hand, and his mouth twitched sideways in a grimace that might possibly be construed as a smile. “Quite so, quite so,” he said, just as he would have said to a child apologizing for being stumped by a difficult passage in Lucretius: Don’t get flustered, take your time, it’ll come.
I stammered something like “How could I have guessed…” or “It’s unimaginable…” to which he replied with rejoinders of the same type, such as “Naturally” or “I quite understand.” I too was slumped deep in my armchair, and the two of us must have looked very much like a pair of discarded marionettes after a show. The first clear thought I was eventually able to express was:
“When exactly did the last relapse occur?”
And as I uttered it I became clearly aware of the anxiety that had stealthily been gnawing at me: wasn’t it my doing, after all?
He said, “Let me see, let me see…” but could not manage to remember. However, by dint of checking his reminiscences, it appeared that the date was definitely prior to her last visit but one when Dorothy and I had had that curious conversation which had been first violent, then pathetic. And that very violence, and equally the pathos, were not at all normal for a woman who was so reserved as a rule, sometimes even to the point of being enigmatic. However, I still could not convince myself that I was quite free from blame.
“Deal as you wish with me,” I said. “I’ll do anything you like. I have a deep affection for Dorothy. If you think that marriage…”
At the same time I was thinking: Ah, never mind Sylva! She is nothing yet. The worst that can happen to her is not to become anything. Whereas Dorothy is a human being to be saved, a woman about to destroy herself, partly through your fault perhaps, because you don’t love her enough. Your duty is to love her: it’s probably the only way of rescuing her.
“Six weeks ago I’d have answered yes,” Dr. Sullivan was saying. “Now I’m wondering; and besides, it’s too late, it would be unreasonable to sacrifice the best years of your young life. I did not dare talk to you about it when maybe there was still time. I’m the only one that’s to blame,” he added, as if he had guessed my thoughts.
He had to start twice to heave himself out of his armchair.
“Shall I come with you?” I quickly suggested.
“What an idea, at this time of night! I won’t be home before one in the morning. I’ve only come to tell you honestly how things stand. Come whenever you can. Perhaps if she sees you, if she consents to see you… oh, I don’t know, I don’t know anything any more. But we must try. Yes, don’t delay too long, after all.”
“I’ll be over tomorrow, if I can. But tell me,” I added, “you don’t seem to have a third cure in mind. Why?” The thought had only just struck me.
He uttered a deep sigh and raised his long, lean arms.
“Who knows if it can still do any good?” he muttered. “The trouble with these cures is that they progressively lose their efficacy. Besides, Dorothy would first have to agree, to consent to undergo it. This doesn’t seem to be the case any more. You can’t imagine the state she’s in. It’s a complete collapse. Come and see for yourself. Thank you. I’ll be expecting you.”
Chapter 23
I AM not quite sure that what prevented me from going to Dunstan’s the very next day, as I had almost promised, was really work on the farm. It is a fact that I had some troubles: a sick cow, the beginnings of a fire in a barn right in the fields. But I could not conceal from myself that those successive delays, those successive excuses, brought me a cowardly relief. I was really frightened at the idea of finding Dorothy in the state which her father had left me imagining.
I was consequently at once surprised and reassured, as well as almost disappointed in a way, by the spectacle that awaited me when at last I showed up at the Sullivans’, on the third day. Dorothy was reading quietly, near her father, by the window. She gave me the same welcome to which I had become accustomed—the calm and mysterious smile. She even impressed me as looking better than the last time. But behind her I saw Dr. Sullivan sadly shake his head, as if to warn me: “Don’t you believe it.”
Dorothy asked me for news of my vixen; she knew about the enormous step forward which Sylva had made and seemed quite engrossed by the story of the apples she had recognized in the still life. Then she said, “I’ll go and make some tea.”
No sooner was she out of the room than I exclaimed cheerfully, “Why, she seems to me—”
“Tut, tut,” the doctor interrupted me. His face expressed the same anxious wistfulness it had shown a moment before. “Don’t trust appearances,” he went on. “Just wait an hour or so, till the effect of the drug begins to wear off.”
I gave a start. “Do you mean that at this moment… ?”
He nodded silently, and continued in the same melancholy tone. “I am powerless to prevent her. I can’t go and search her room.”
“But she seems perfectly normal. Are you sure that…?”
I could never manage to finish my questions, so much did a sort of instinctive reticence make me bite back words that seemed to me unutterable in front of a father—though he uttered them himself without false shame.
“The drug produces strange effects,” he said, “and they vary with the day, the hour, like everything that attacks the psyche. During the war I used to know a colonel in the Indian Army who would get drunk to keep going during his bouts of malaria. He never walked so straight as when he was tight. And he would produce metaphysical theories of which he couldn’t have grasped a word in his normal state. At other times, however, after just a few whiskies, he would leave the room tottering and collapse on his bed where he’d sleep like a log for three hours. Dorothy will sometimes pass two days in a semi-coma, and the next day she holds forth as if she were lecturing at the Royal Society. It’s unpredictable. Or else she talks and walks straight like the colonel, as she does today. But that is not a lasting state; in an hour’s time, she’ll either be prostrate or pour forth incredible rubbish for hours on end.”
“Have you reason to believe that she… every day, I mean really every day… that… she is never sober?”
“I can’t watch over her every minute of the day, but I know unfortunately that she’s got to the stage where she’d be even worse if she went without the stuff. It’s a vicious circle. And it can only get worse.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Tell me, and I’ll do it. Can an emotional shock still produce a beneficial effect? I’ll marry her tomorrow if she consents.”
“I am quite aware that you have already proposed to her; she was deeply moved by it, but still honest enough to refuse. I don’t know what to say. You see before you an old man, a poor old doctor completely outstripped by events. Perhaps I’m counting on your youth, yours and hers, for a miracle to happen.” He gave a poor little smile. “You’ve performed one already, why not a second?”