Titherington took rooms for me in
the better of the two hotels in Ballygore and I went
down there on the day on which he told me I ought
to go. I had as travelling companion a very pleasant
man, the only other occupant of the compartment in
which I was. He was chatty and agreeable at first
and did not so much as mention the general election.
After we passed Drogheda his manner changed.
He became silent, and when I spoke to him answered
snappily. His face got more and more flushed.
At last he asked me to shut the window beside me,
which I did, although I wanted to keep it open.
I noticed that he was wriggling in a curious way which
reminded me of Hilda when her dress was fastened on
with pins. He fumbled about a good deal with
one of his hands which he had thrust inside his waistcoat.
I watched him with great curiosity and discovered
at last that he was taking his temperature with a clinical
thermometer. Each time he took it he sighed and
became more restless and miserable looking than before.
On the 19th of February I developed
a sharp attack of influenza. Titherington flew
to my side at once, which was the thing, of all possible
things, that I most wanted him not to do. He aggravated
my sufferings greatly by speaking as if my condition
were my own fault. I was too feverish to argue
coherently. All I could do was to swear at him
occasionally. No man has any right to be as stupid
as Titherington is. It is utterly ridiculous
to suppose that I should undergo racking pains in
my limbs, a violent headache and extreme general discomfort
if I could possibly avoid it. Titherington ought
to have seen this for himself. He did not.
He scolded me and would, I am sure, have gone on scolding
me until I cried if what he took for a brilliant idea
had not suddenly occurred to him.
“It’s an ill wind,”
he said cheerfully, “which can’t be made
to blow any good. I think I see my way to getting
something out of this miserable collapse of yours.
I’ll call in McMeekin.”
“If McMeekin is a doctor, get
him. He may not be able to do me any good, but
he’ll give orders that I’m to be left quiet
and that’s all I want.”
“McMeekin’s no damned use as a doctor;
but he’ll ”
“Then get some one else. Surely he’s
not the only one there is.”
“There are two others, but they’re
both sure to support you in any case, whereas McMeekin ”
The way Titherington was discussing
my illness annoyed me. I interrupted him and
tried my best to insult him.
“I don’t want to be supported.
I want to be cured. Not that any of them can
do that. I simply can’t and won’t
have another blithering idiot let loose at me.
One’s enough.”
I thought that would outrage Titherington
and drive him from my room. But he made allowances
for my condition and refused to take offence.
“McMeekin,” he said, “sets
up to be a blasted Radical, and is Vittie’s
strongest supporter.”
“In that case send for him at
once. He’ll probably poison me on purpose
and then this will be over.”
“He’s not such an idiot
as to do that. He knows that if anything happened
to you we’d get another candidate.”
Titherington’s tone suggested
that the other candidate would certainly be my superior
and that Vittie’s chances against me were better
than they would be against any one else. I turned
round with a groan and lay with my face to the wall.
Titherington went on talking.
“If you give McMeekin a good
fee,” he said, “say a couple of guineas,
he’ll think twice about taking the chair at Vittie’s
meeting on the twenty-fourth. I don’t see
why he shouldn’t pay you a visit every day from
this to the election, and that, at two guineas a time,
ought to shut his mouth if it doesn’t actually
secure his vote.”
I twisted my neck round and scowled
at Titherington. He left the room without shutting
the door. I spent the next hour in hoping vehemently
that he would get the influenza himself. I would
have gone on hoping this if I had not been interrupted
by the arrival of McMeekin. He did all the usual
things with stéthoscopes and thermometers and
he asked me all the usual offensive questions.
It seemed to me that he spent far more than the usual
time over this revolting ritual. I kept as firm
a grip on my temper as I could and as soon as he had
finished asked him in a perfectly calm and reasonable
tone to be kind enough to put me out of my misery
at once with prussic acid. Instead of doing what
I, asked or making any kind of sane excuse for refusing,
he said he would telegraph to Dublin for a nurse.
She could not, he seemed to think, arrive until the
next day, so he said he would take a bed in the hotel
and look after me himself during the night. This
was more than I, or any one else, could stand.
I saw the necessity for making a determined effort.
“I am,” I said, “perfectly
well. Except for a slight cold in the head which
makes me a bit stupid there’s nothing the matter
with me. I intend to get up at once and go out
canvassing. Would you mind ringing the bell and
asking for some hot water?”
McMeekin rang the bell, muttering
as he did so something about a temperature of 104
degrees. A redheaded maid with a freckled face
answered the summons. Before I could say anything
to her McMeekin gave orders that a second bed should
be brought into my room and that she, the red-haired,
freckled girl, should sit beside me and not take her
eyes off me for a moment while he went home to get
his bag. I forgot all about Titherington then
and concentrated my remaining strength on a hope that
McMeekin would get the influenza. It is one of
the few diseases which doctors do get. I planned
that when he got it I would search Ireland for red-headed
girls with freckled faces, and pay hundreds of them,
all I could collect in the four provinces, to sit beside
him and not take their eyes off him while I went to
get a bag. My bag, as I arranged, would be fetched
by long sea from Tasmania.
That evening McMeekin and Titherington
both settled down in my bedroom. I was so angry
with them that I could not take in what they said to
each other, though I was dimly conscious that they
were discussing the election. I learned afterward
that McMeekin promised to be present at my meeting
on the 21st in order to hear Lalage speak. I suppose
that the amount of torture he inflicted on me induced
a mood of joyous intoxication in which he would have
promised anything. I lay in bed and did my best,
by breathing hard, to shoot germs from my lungs across
the room at Titherington and McMeekin. Their
talk, which must have lasted about eighteen hours,
was interrupted at last by a tap at the door.
The red-haired girl with a freckled face came in, carrying
a loathsome looking bowl and a spoon which I felt
certain was filthy dirty. McMeekin took them
from her hands and approached me. In spite of
my absolutely sickening disgust, I felt with a ferocious
joy that my opportunity had at last come. McMeekin
tried to persuade me to eat some sticky yellow liquid
out of the bowl. I refused, of course. As
I had foreseen, he began to shovel the stuff into
my mouth with the spoon. Titherington came over
to my bedside. He pretended that he came to hold
me up while McMeekin fed me. In reality he came
to gloat. But I had my revenge. I pawed
McMeekin with my hands and breathed full into his face.
I also clutched Titherington’s coat and pawed
him. After that I felt easier, for I began to
hope that I had thoroughly infected them both.
My recollections of the next day are confused.
Titherington and McMeekin were constantly passing
in and out of the room and at some time or other a
strange woman arrived who paid a deference which struck
me as perfectly ridiculous to McMeekin. To me
she made herself most offensive. I found out
afterward that she was the nurse whom McMeekin had
summoned by telegraph. What she said to McMeekin
or what he said to her I cannot remember. Of
my own actions during the day I can say nothing certainly
except this: I asked McMeekin, not once or twice,
but every time I saw him, how long it took for influenza
to develop its full strength in a man who had thoroughly
imbibed the infection. McMeekin either would not
or could not answer this simple question. He talked
vague nonsense about periods of incubation, whereas
I wanted to know the earliest date at which I might
expect to see him and Titherington stricken down, I
hated McMeekin worse than ever for his dogged stupidity.
The next day McMeekin said I was better,
which showed me that Titherington was right in saying
that he was no damned use as a doctor. I was
very distinctly worse. I was, in fact, so bad
that when the nurse insisted on arranging the bedclothes
I burst into tears and sobbed afterward for many hours.
That ought to have shown her that arranging bedclothes
was particularly bad for me. But she was an utterly
callous woman. She arranged them again at about
eight o’clock and told me to go to sleep.
I had not slept at all since I got the influenza and
I could not sleep then, but I thought it better to
pretend to sleep and I lay as still as I could.
After I had been pretending for a long while, at some
hour in the very middle of the night, Titherington
burst into my room in a noisy way. He was in
evening dress and his shirt front had a broad wrinkle
across it. I have never seen a more unutterably
abhorrent sight than Titherington in evening dress.
The nurse rebuked him for having wakened me, which
showed me that she was a fool as well as a wantonly
cruel woman. I had not been asleep and any nurse
who knew her business would have seen that I was only
pretending. Titherington took no notice of her.
He was bubbling over with something he wanted to say,
and twenty nurses would not have stopped him.
“We had a great meeting,”
he said. “The hall was absolutely packed
and the boys at the back nearly killed a man who wanted
to ask questions.”
“McMeekin, I hope,” I said feebly.
“No. McMeekin was on the
platform mind that now on the
platform. I gave him a hint beforehand that we
were thinking of calling in another man if you didn’t
improve. He simply bounded on to the platform
after that. It’ll be an uncommonly nasty
jar for Vittie. The speaking wasn’t up
to much, most of it; but I wish you’d heard the
cheers when I apologized for your absence and told
them you were ill in bed. It would have done
you good. I wouldn’t give tuppence for Vittie’s
chances of getting a dozen votes in this part of the
division. We had two temperance secretaries,
damned asses, to propose votes of thanks.”
“For my influenza?”
“You’re getting better,”
said Titherington, “not a doubt of it. I’ll
send you round a dozen of champagne to-morrow, proper
stuff, and by the time you’ve swallowed it you’ll
be chirrupping like a grasshopper.”
“I’m not getting better,
and that brute McMeekin wouldn’t let me look
at champagne. He gives me gruel and a vile slop
he calls beef tea.”
“If he doesn’t give you
something to buck you up,” said Titherington,
“I’ll set Miss Beresford on him. She’ll
make him hop.”
The mention of Lalage reminded me
that the meeting was the occasion of her first speech.
I found myself beginning to take a
slight interest in what Titherington was saying.
It did not really matter to me how things had gone,
for I knew that I was going to die almost at once.
But even with that prospect before me I wanted to
hear how Lalage’s maiden speech had been received.
“Did Miss Beresford speak at the meeting?”
I asked.
The nurse came over to my bed and
insisted on slipping her thermometer under my arm.
It was a useless and insulting thing to do, but I bore
it in silence because I wanted to hear about Lalage’s
speech. Titherington did not answer at once,
and when he did it was in an unsatisfactory way.
“Oh, she spoke all right,” he said.
“You may just as well tell me the truth.”
“The speech was a good speech,
I’ll not deny that, a thundering good speech.”
The nurse came at me again and retrieved
her abominable thermometer. She twisted it about
in the light of the lamp and then whispered to Titherington.
“Don’t shuffle,”
I said to him. “I can see perfectly well
that you’re keeping something back from me.
Did McMeekin insult Miss Beresford in any way?
For if he did ”
“Not at all,” said Titherington.
“But I’ve been talking long enough.
I’ll tell you all the rest to-morrow.”
Without giving me a chance of protesting
he left the room. I felt that I was going to
break down again; but I restrained myself and told
the nurse plainly what I thought of her.
“I don’t know,”
I said, “whether it is in accordance with the
etiquette of your profession to thwart the wishes
of a dying man, but that’s what you’ve
just done. You know perfectly well that I shall
not be alive to-morrow morning and you could see that
the only thing I really wanted was to hear something
about the meeting. Even a murderer is given some
indulgence on the morning of his execution. But
just because I have, through no fault of my own, contracted
a disease which neither you nor McMeekin know how
to cure, I am not allowed to ask a simple question.
You may think, I have no doubt you do think, that you
have acted with firmness and tact. In reality
you have been guilty of blood-curdling cruelty of
a kind probably unmatched in the annals of the Spanish
Inquisition.”
I think my words produced a good deal
of effect on her. She did not attempt to make
any answer; but she covered up my shoulder with the
bedclothes. I shook them off again at once and
scowled at her with such bitterness that she left
my bedside and sat down near the fire. I saw
that she was watching me, so again pretended to go
to sleep.
McMeekin came to see me next morning,
and had the effrontery to repeat the statement that
I was better. I was not, and I told him so distinctly.
After he was gone Titherington came with a large bag
in his hand. He sent the nurse out of the room
and unpacked the bag. He took out of it a dozen
small bottles of champagne. He locked the door
and then we drank one of the bottles between us.
Titherington used my medicine glass. I had the
tumbler off the wash-hand-stand. The nurse knocked
at the door before we had finished. But Titherington,
with a rudeness which made me really like him, again
told her to go away because we were talking business.
After I had drunk the champagne I began to feel that
McMeekin might have been right after all. I was
slightly better. Titherington put the empty bottle
in the pocket of his overcoat and packed up the eleven
full bottles in the bag again. He locked the
bag and then pushed it as far as he could under my
bed with his foot. He knew, just as well as I
did, that either the nurse or McMeekin would steal
the champagne if they saw it lying about.
“Now,” he said, “you’re not
feeling so chippy.”
“No, I’m not. Tell me about Miss
Beresford’s speech.”
“It began well,” said
Titherington. “It began infernally well.
She stood up and, without by your leave or with your
leave, said that all politicians were damned liars.”
“Damned?”
“Well, bloody,” said Titherington,
with the air of a man who makes a concession.
“Was Hilda there?”
“She was, cheering like mad, the same as the
rest of us.”
“I’m sorry for that.
Hilda is, or was, a nice, innocent girl. Her mother
won’t like her hearing that sort of language.”
“Bloody wasn’t the word
she used,” said Titherington, “but she
gave us all the impression that it was what she meant!”
“Go on.”
“Of course I thought, in fact
we all thought, that she was referring to Vittie and
O’Donoghue, especially Vittie. The boys
at the back of the hall, who hate Vittie worse than
the devil, nearly raised the roof off with the way
they shouted. I could see that McMeekin didn’t
half like it. He’s rather given himself
away by supporting Vittie. Well, as long as the
cheering went on Miss Beresford stood and smiled at
them. She’s a remarkably well set up girl
so the boys went on cheering just for the pleasure
of looking at her. When they couldn’t cheer
any more she started off to prove what she said.
She began with O’Donoghue and she got in on
him. She had a list as long as your arm of the
whoppers he and the rest of that pack of blackguards
are perpetually ramming down people’s throats.
Home Rule, you know, and all that sort of blasted rot.
Then she took the skin off Vittie for about ten minutes.
Man, but it would have done you good to hear her.
The most innocent sort of remark Vittie ever made
in his life she got a twist on it so that it came out
a regular howling lie. She finished him off by
saying that Ananias and Sapphira were a gentleman
and a lady compared to the ordinary Liberal, because
they had the decency to drop down dead when they’d
finished, whereas Vittie’s friends simply went
on and told more. By that time there wasn’t
one in the hall could do more than croak, they’d
got so hoarse with all the cheering. I might
have been in a bath myself with the way the sweat
was running off me, hot sweat.”
Titherington paused, for the nurse
knocked at the door again. This time he got up
and let her in. Then he went on with his story.
“The next minute,” he said, “it
was frozen on me.”
“The sweat?”
Titherington nodded.
“Go on,” I said.
“She went on all right.
You’ll hardly believe it, but when she’d
finished with O’Donoghue and Vittie she went
on to ”
“Me, I suppose.”
“No. Me,” said Titherington.
“She said she didn’t blame you in the
least because she didn’t think you had sense
enough to lie like a real politician, and that those
two letters about the Temperance Question ”
“She’d got ahold of those?”
“They were in the papers, of
course, and she said I’d written them.
Well, for just half a minute I wasn’t quite sure
whether the boys were going to rush the platform or
not. There wouldn’t have been much left
of Miss Beresford if they had. But she’s
a damned good-looking girl. That saved her.
Instead of mobbing her every man in the place started
to laugh. I tell you there were fellows there
with stitches in their sides from laughing so that
they’d have given a five-pound note to be able
to stop. But they couldn’t. Every
time they looked at me and saw me sitting there with
a kind of a cast-iron grin on my face and
every time they looked at the two temperance secretaries
who were gaping like stuck pigs, they started off
laughing again. Charlie Sanderson, the butcher,
who’s a stoutish kind of man, tumbled off his
chair and might have broken his neck. I never
saw such a scene in my life.”
I saw the nurse poking about to find
her thermometer. Titherington saw her too and
knew what was coming.
“It was all well enough for
once,” he said, “but we can’t have
it again.”
“How do you propose to stop it?” I asked.
“My idea,” said Titherington,
“is that you should see her and explain to her
that we’ve had enough of that sort of thing and
that for the future she’d better stick entirely
to Vittie.”
I am always glad to see Lalage.
Nothing, even in my miserable condition, would have
pleased me better than a visit from her, But I am not
prepared at any time to explain things to her, especially
when the explanation is meant to influence her action.
I am particularly unfitted for the task when I am
in a state of convalescence. I interrupted Titherington.
“Nurse,” I said, “have
you got that thermometer? I’m nearly sure
my temperature is up again.”
Titherington scowled, but he knew
he was helpless. As he left the room he stopped
for a moment and turned to me. “What beats
me about the whole performance,” he said, “is
that she never said a single word about woman’s
suffrage from start to finish. I never met one
of that lot before who could keep off the subject
for as much as ten minutes at a time even in private
conversation.”