FullReads

Now was the time to be hard-boiled, she thought. She knew there were three medals from the war in his jewel box, but she had risked many things herself: tuberculosis among them and one time something worse, though she had not known it and had never quite forgiven the doctor for not telling her.

‘You’ve had a hard time with that, I guess,’ she said lightly as she sponged him.’Won’t it ever heal?’

‘Never. That’s a copper plate.’

‘Well, it’s no excuse for what you’re doing to yourself.’

He bent his great brown eyes on her, shrewd–aloof, confused. He signalled to her, in one second, his Will to Die, and for all her training and experience she knew she could never do anything constructive with him. He stood up, steadying himself on the wash-basin and fixing his eyes on some place just ahead.

‘Now, if I’m going to stay here you’re not going to get at that liquor,’ she said.

Suddenly she knew he wasn’t looking for that. He was looking at the corner where he had thrown the bottle the night before. She stared at his handsome face, weak and defiant–afraid to turn even half-way because she knew that death was in that corner where he was looking. She knew death–she had heard it, smelt its unmistakable odour, but she had never seen it before it entered into anyone, and she knew this man saw it in the corner of his bathroom; that it was standing there looking at him while he spat from a feeble cough and rubbed the result into the braid of his trousers. It shone there crackling for a moment as evidence of the last gesture he ever m
ade.

She tried to express it next day to Mrs Hixson:

‘It’s not like anything you can beat–no matter how hard you try. This one could have twisted my wrists until he strained them and that wouldn’t matter so much to me. It’s just that you can’t really help them and it’s so discouraging–it’s all for nothing.’