Chapter XVII Surrender!
On the following Tuesday, when Mark reached Amos Barger’s house, he was told that the surgeon could not see him for a quarter of an hour. Mark followed a manservant into a back dining-room ponderously furnished with mahogany and horsehair. The paper on the wall was hideous in pattern and colour; the wainscoting was grained in imitation of oak; on the square table in the centre of the room lay the comic papers and some society weeklies, amongst them Kosmos and Mayfair. Under the latter was The Bistoury. Mark paced up and down, pausing now and again to look out of a window which commanded a prospect of dingy back-walls and chimney-pots. From the front of the house a charming glimpse of the trees in Cavendish Square redeemed the dull uniformity of the street. Mark had noticed how green was their foliage, recalling the fact that soot is as Mellin’s food to the vegetable world. His fancy seized this fact and played with it. Soot, the most defiling of things, transmuted by some amazing process into a brilliant pigment! What a text for a sermon! Presently Mark approached the book-case—a solid, glazed affair as heavy, doubtless, as the works within. To his surprise, he found the lightest of fiction, and every volume showed signs of use. Barger, he reflected, was a wise man to laugh with Anstey and Frank Stockton, but he ought really to buy some new furniture. Then he remembered that Barger had admitted failure, more or less. Possibly, these grim Penates had been taken at a low valuation from the outgoing tenant. With these fugitive speculations he escaped from his own thoughts and fears.
When he went upstairs the surgeon, while shaking hands, eyed him keenly.
“I am the better for my holiday,” said Mark.
Barger nodded, and pointed to a chair.
“You said in the train I might live to make old bones. Weakness of heart is not a bar to marriage—is it?”
“Very much the contrary,” said the surgeon grimly. “And if you are sound in other respects——”
“I have never known what it is to be really ill,” said Mark eagerly; “and I don’t think I’ve had breakfast in bed since I left Harrow.”
“And not often there—eh? Never shammed at school did you when the first lesson was a bit stiff?”
“The first lesson never was very stiff—to me,” Mark replied.
Barger, with impassive face, began an examination, which lasted longer than Mark expected. At the end Mark said nervously: “The heart is not weaker than it was?”
“Your heart need not cause you any serious anxiety,” said the surgeon slowly.
“Thank God!” exclaimed the young man. “From your face I feared a different verdict.”
“There is other trouble, Mr. Samphire.”
Then Mark smiled pitifully. His premonition of disaster was justified.
“You can speak f-f-frankly,” he stammered.
The surgeon spoke frankly, making plain in his precise phraseology what was and what might be. “You will take another opinion,” he concluded, “but it is not a matter of opinion, but of fact. These,” he pointed to some reagents, “never lie. Doctors do—sometimes.”
“I thank you for not lying to me,” said Mark gravely.
Barger fumbled with his test tubes, and then burst out vehemently:
“Your only chance lies in the most careful diet, a life in the open air; and even then the issue is doubtful.”
“And—marriage?”
“Out of the question.”
“But if I got better? Should I be justified in asking a woman to wait?”
His voice was dry and husky. Barger shook his head. The trouble might be staved off for a time, hut there was always the probability of return.
“You have neglected your body,” he said irritably. “You have defrauded it of all things essential, and it has taken its revenge. Oh, you parsons who think of others, why can’t you see that you would serve the world better if you thought more of yourselves?”
Mark could read the sympathy and pity latent beneath frowns and irritability. He held out his hand. Barger continued:
“You must go to a physician. Yours is not a case for a surgeon. You might try Sir John Drax. He’s a specialist. Shall I write him a note? He lives near here, in Welbeck Street.”
Berger scribbled a few lines, and handed them to Mark.
“See him at once,” he commanded; “suspense is unendurable.”
Mark went his way, so blinded by misery that in crossing the street he barely escaped being run over by a big van. He sprang to one side in obedience to the instinct of self-preservation.
Within half an hour Sir John Drax had confirmed Barger’s diagnosis and prognosis. Then he asked bluntly if his patient had independent means. An affirmative simplified the case. He, too, prescribed fresh air, simple food, and moderate exercise.
“If I stick to my work in Bethnal Green?”
“You will find yourself in Kensal Green.”
“And marriage——?”
“Madness, my dear sir, madness!”
Mark climbed on to the top of the first ’bus which was rolling eastward. As he did so he heard a small boy proclaiming the name of a winner. The name seemed familiar. Then he remembered that it was one of Harry Kirtling’s horses. He could see Kirtling’s square, stalwart body and the handsome sun-tanned face above it. Of all the bitter minutes in his life, this one seemed to be the bitterest.
When he reached the Mission, pressing work distracted his attention for some hours. He did it as thoroughly as usual, wondering what he should write to Betty when he was at liberty to go to his own room. He wondered also that his friends made no comment upon his appearance. Surely he carried scars. A small glass hung in the committee-room where he was sitting. He glanced at it. Outwardly he was unchanged.
Not till the clock struck nine did he find himself alone. He wrote a letter to Betty, a long letter, which he read and destroyed. The next letter was short, curt, cold: he burned this also. A few minutes later, feeling pain in his hands, he discovered that his nails had lacerated the flesh. Then he knew that a fight for life and reason was beginning. The demons were crying “Surrender!” If he died to-night, Betty would be free; if he lingered on for half a dozen years, she might deem herself bond to a dying man. Virility repudiated such a sacrifice.
“O God,” he cried, “let me die to-night!”
Outside, the world of Whitechapel roared in derision. All Mark had known of poverty, of vice, of squalor, swelled into a chorus of despair. Here, in the heart of the slums, in an atmosphere tainted by the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands who had perished cursing God and man, he felt that he was choking for fresh air, that the pestilential fumes of every evil place into which he had entered were destroying him.
He sat down limply on the edge of his bed, wondering whether the end would come soon, telling himself that he was dead already. At any rate his work was done; he would leave the Mission on the morrow. The animal instinct to slink off to some lonely spot where none might witness his misery became overpowering. But a letter to Betty must be written first. He crossed to his desk, where Betty’s face smiled out of a silver frame. Gazing at this, he became so absorbed that three sharp taps on the door were unheeded. The Bishop of Poplar entered the room, pausing when he saw the head bent over the table, the thin fingers clutching the silver frame. He closed the door, crossed the room, and laid his hand upon Mark’s shoulder.
“You are in sore trouble.”
Mark started to his feet with an exclamation compounded of fear and surprise.
“You—David——?” he stammered. “What b-brought you here?”
“You shall answer that question yourself,” said Ross gravely.
The men confronted each other. Great as the contrast was between the robust health of the one and the infirmity of the other, a critical eye might have detected a similarity in the two faces—a resemblance the stronger because it was born of the spirit rather than the flesh.
“I was crossing Welbeck Street this afternoon,” said Ross, “when I saw you leave one of the houses. It was in my mind to follow and speak to you, but I was hastening to an appointment for which I was late, and leaving town for Scotland at eight. But it happened that I had noted the number of the house you were leaving, and I looked it up in a directory on the platform at Euston. Mind you, my train was about to start, and I had taken my ticket, but when I found out that you had seen Drax, I guessed what had happened. I let the train go on without me, and came on here. Was it coincidence that led me into Welbeck Street this afternoon, or something more?”
“I am under sentence of death,” said Mark.
“Tell me all about it.” He grasped his friend’s hand.
Mark obeyed. “She has always cared for me,” he concluded, “always, you understand: ever since we were boy and girl. Many want her. Gorgeous insects have buzzed about her, but she flew to a poor drab-coloured moth. And I”—his voice shook—“I had fluttered about in the outer darkness——”
“Was it darkness, Mark?”
“I should have said twilight.”
“Then she was your sun?”
Mark paused before he answered slowly: “God made the sun.”
“You try to slip by me,” replied the other quickly. “Have I misread you? It seemed to me that you had ideals, standards, rules higher than the average, that for you the light shone more clearly, revealing what lay beyond. Was that light the glamour in a woman’s eyes?”
“The light was reflected in her eyes. You press me hard, David. Shall I plead that the light, no matter whence its source, dazzled me. There have been times when I seemed to see the other shore: an enchanted land, so desirable that I wondered why men preferred to linger here. But now”—his voice grew harsh and troubled—“I want this earth. I want to live and love—here.”
“What do you propose to do?” David asked.
“Do?” Mark laughed bitterly. “What can I do, but die—the sooner the better? You are a strong man, David; it is hard for you to stand in my shoes; but if you were I you would surrender.”
“What?”
“Shall I say—everything.”
“You cannot surrender what you have done already, whether good or ill.”
“I have to surrender love,” Mark muttered. “What do you know of that, David?”
“I loved a woman,” Ross replied, “and I love her still, although she is but a memory”—his voice softened—“a memory of what might have been, and what will be. And shall I say that this love has fortified me, because I see it as the reflection of a greater love? The love you talk of surrendering is an imperishable possession.”
Mark said nothing.
Ross continued: “Drax is a great authority, but he does not know, as I know, that you have never given your body a fair chance. Now—my word to you is FIGHT. Fight for life, fight for health, fight to save yourself as you have fought tooth and nail to save others! Again and again I’ve begged you to go to my lodge in Sutherland. Go there with me to-morrow! Drax prescribes fresh air, plain food, complete rest. These may be straws, but clutch them—clutch them! Why, man, I have towed worse wrecks than you into dry dock, and I’ve seen ’em sail out of harbour with every stitch of canvas set staunch and seaworthy craft! Be my guest for six months! Mark, Mark, my dear, good, foolish, gallant Mark—Fight!”
“Thank you, David,” Mark replied. Then the smile which Bagshot knew well lit up the thin haggard face, as he added slowly: “I d-d-don’t think it was c-c-coincidence which led you into Welbeck Street this afternoon.”
Next day Mark went North with David Ross. Before departure he wrote a letter to Betty, which successfully obscured the facts. He feared that Betty might insist upon appointing herself his nurse. And if she came to him, would he have strength to send her away? Once she had spoken shudderingly of a friend married to a hopeless invalid: a poor wretch lingering on, half dead, changing day by day into something unrecognisable in mind and body.
“You have the right,” he wrote, “to demand an explanation, which I must give. I am and shall remain outside that garden into which we strayed last Saturday. What more can I say? Nothing. Try to think of me as a boy who was near and dear to you....”
The letter was filled up with details concerning his work. Reading it, the conclusion was inevitable that the writer had become absorbed in such work. He hinted at the possibility of taking a vow of celibacy.
Betty kissed this letter before she broke the seal, making sure that it was a love-letter. Then she read it, with perceptive faculties blunted by shock. Lady Randolph found her in the Italian garden, staring at the figure of Aphrodite.
“You were right,” she exclaimed passionately. “Mark prefers his work to—me.”
Lady Randolph kissed her.
“I have been a fool,” said Betty, bursting into tears.