Jeremy Poldark (13 page)

After dark the streets reached their peak of
noise and drunkenness, and Dwight's first intention was not to go out again.
Caroline would be at the ball, but he had no invitation, and in any case no
evening clothes. After supper he sat for a while in his bedroom reading a
medical book, but the wilful Miss Penvenen and her doings kept intervening. She
existed at the corner of his eye, in the depths of his ear, in the back of his
mind. He remembered the rustle of her silk dress like something new and heard
for the first time, he saw the tip of her tongue once when she licked her lips,
he heard her voice, cool and irritating but as unforgettable as a line of
music. Eventually he threw the book on the bed and went down to the taproom
for a couple of drinks, but it was noisy and overcrowded, so, for lack of
something better to do, he decided to stroll up the hill to the tiny hospital,
which was under the charge of a Dr Halliwell. Bodmin was one of the few towns
progressive enough to have such an accommodation mostly, if you were injured,
you died in the street or in your own bed and he thought it might be
interesting to compare this tiny provincial establishment with the great
institutions which flourished in London.

So he just missed Francis, who turned into the
inn after he had left.

Francis asked for him and, on being told he was
out, said that he had been promised a share of his room for the night. The
innkeeper eyed him doubtfully, trying to size him up, impressed by his
gentlemanly speech and bearing which weighed against his muddy tattered
clothes, suspecting he was drunk yet not quite reconciling that with his
fine-drawn expression and resolute speech.

I'm sorry, sur, but twouldn't be for the likes
of me to let one gent into another gent's chamber wi'out a by-your-leave.
Twouldn't be playing-fair, like."

" Nonsense. Dr. Enys invited me. What time
will he be back?"

" I dunno, sur. He didn't say."

Francis put down his saddlebag. "It is a
common custom in times of need to ask two gentlemen to share the same chamber.
And you know it. And we are not strangers but friends. Come, tell me what Dr.
Enys is paying and I'll give you the same."

"That and gladly when Dr. Enys comes
in."

" I am not prepared to wait all the night
for it. Francis took out a purse and from it some gold coins." I'll pay
you my rent now, so that you can't be the loser."

The landlord's eyes boggled. " It's but a
small chamber, your honour, and but a single bed."

“I have no care for the size of the bed."

The landlord stared again and then turned to the
potboy. "Here, Charlie, take this gent up to number six."

Francis paid-his dues and followed the boy up
the creaking stairs. Once in the room and rid of the boy he shut the door and
turned the key. A low narrow chamber with a plain deal table before the empty
fireplace, a single bed by the half shuttered window, two candles flickering,
lifting the shadows beside the bed. He leaned against the door for a minute,
taking in the room, then picked up one of the candles and carried it to the
table. Then he undid his bag, took out a clean shirt, washed himself, put on
the shirt and a clean neck cloth. He sat down at the table, took some sheets of
paper from his bag, and after some thought began to write. All this was
undertaken with deliberation but it was not quite the, deliberation of
drunkenness. He had passed through drunkenness to a deadly sobriety beyond.

For five minutes the room was possessed by a new
quiet made explicit by the single scratching whisper of the pen. Occasionally
there were noises outside, or a burst of laughter would drift up through the
squat walls from the taproom like echoes of a remote world. Just now and then
one of the candle flames would tremble and a flicker of smoke come into being
and detach itself and drift away. He wrote with a concentration which came from
both outward and inner urgency: he was not only writing against the clock but
against some imperative mechanism within himself which told him that the thing
he had to do: could wait no longer.

At length, he signed his name, got-up, went to
his bag again, took out a pistol. It was a single-barrel duelling weapon of the
flintlock type employing a heavy bullet and a light charge of powder. He primed
it and set it on the table beside him. Then he looked round. All was ready. The
silence of the room had become oppressive, it beat in his ears; it echoed the
terror of the final initiative, the last compulsion of mind and muscle to
which all this had been proceeding as a river hurries to the annihilation of
the sea.

He raised the pistol to his head.

The hospital, Dwight found, consisted of a few
rooms on the first floor of a squat building near the assize court. Beneath it
was the Reading -Society; you visited the ground floor to gain a book, the
first floor to lose a leg. He was not fortunate enough to find Dr. Halliwell,
who had not yet returned from a day's shooting, but a stout dropsical woman,
after a brief suspicious argument at the door, showed him round the two wards.

The beds were arranged much on the London
principle, built into the walls, with wooden sides, rather like great drawers
pulled out of, a cabinet, each ward being lit by a single lantern in which a
squat candle steadily burned. The crowds and events of the week had brought;
their crop of accidents and illnesses, so the hospital was fairly full. There
was the usual close and horrid smell. The patients were four in a bed, lying
head to, feet; and there did not seem to have been much attempt to sort them
out according to their various infirmities. Under the lantern a woman who had
had her hand amputated shared a bed with another in the first stages of labour,
and the third in their company, to any trained eye, was plainly dying. She had
a flushed, feverish face, and pale violet blotches on her hands, and her
breathing was halting and strained.

"A dozy found in the streets," said
the stout woman, hitching up her stomach. "Give birth to twin boys a week
past.. She'll be gone afore morning, if you ask me. This other one's been in
labour no more than an hour yet. Tis her father's child, they say, though
she'll say naught. We put 'em in together for company like... This here be the
men's ward."

Dwight did not stay long. He did not know Dr.
Halliwell, and one could never be sure that his visit might not be unwelcome.
When, he got out into the street again he took some grateful breaths of the
night air. It had been raining heavily while he was inside, and more was
blowing up from the west; but, it had not at all damped the spirits of the
revellers, and there were dozens still roistering in the streets. He saw two of
the more respectable merchants being pushed home in wheelbarrows.

The innkeeper met him with the news of the
unexpected visitor. Dwight had forgotten all about his morning invitation to
Francis, and their encounter this afternoon made him wish he'd never issued it.
- He went up the stairs expecting to find his guest sprawling asleep on the
bed, and his irritation was increased when he found the door locked. He thumped
on it impatiently, hoping his guest was not too drunk to hear. There was no
reply. It was too bad, for there might be no means of waking the man before
morning. The landlord probably would not have another key, even supposing this
one was not blocking the keyhole on the other side;

Dwight thumped again with all his strength. The
dark narrow passage was cobwebbed in every comer, and there were cracks along
the walls where they bulged as if some superior weight was leaning on them from
the other side. A claustrophobe would have shrunk and hurried through before
they collapsed together and trapped him. From one of the wider cracks near the
door 'a black beetle showed up for a moment as if disturbed and resenting the
noise. Suddenly Dwight heard a movement inside the room and the key turn.

With relief he lifted the latch and went in and was
surprised to see the bed empty and unused and Francis walking slowly back to
the table on which the two candles burned.

His irritation going, Dwight laughed a little
awkwardly.

" You'll excuse the noise. I thought you
might be asleep."

Francis did not reply but sat down at the table
and stared at two sheets of paper in front of him. He didn't look as drunk as
when they last met. With mounting surprise Dwight noticed the clean shirt, the
neat neckcloth - and the completely bloodless face.

He said "The landlord told me you'd come. I
thought you might have difficulty. The town is fairly seething." "Yes,"
said Francis.

Aware of some deeper tension within the room
than he had yet penetrated to, Dwight slowly unbuttoned his coat and threw it
off, stood for a moment in his shirt sleeves, uncomfortable, hesitating. The
other man's silence forced him to go on.

"I was sorry for leaving so sharply this
afternoon, but, as I explained, I, had to rejoin a friend: You've supped, I suppose?"

" What? Oh, yes."

" If you're writing a letter go on with
it."

" No."

Silence fell. Dwight stared at the other more
closely.

" What's wrong?"

"Are you a fatalist, Enys?" Francis
brought his brows together in a sudden grimace of nervous resentment. It broke
over his frozen face like a storm. " D'you believe we are masters of
ourselves or merely dance like puppets on strings, having the illusion of
independence? I don't know."

"I'm afraid I'm a little tired for a
'Philosophical discussion. Have you some personal problem before you that puts
the, question more conveniently?"

"Only this" Francis swept the papers
impatiently aside and picked up the pistol they had covered. " Five minutes
ago I tried to shoot myself. The thing misfired. Since then I have been
debating whether I should try again"

A glance showed Dwight that the other man was
not joking. He stared at Francis, trying to find something to say.

"You're a little shocked," Francis
said, and pointed: the pistol at his face and squinted down the barrel, his
finger on the trigger. "Of course it wouldn't have been in the best of
taste to have made use of the hospitality of your chamber for such a purpose - but
none of my own was to be had, and to do it in some dark corner of a street is
faintly vulgar. I'm sorry. Anyway, the thing's not done yet, so you have a
talkative companion for a few moments instead of a silent one"

Dwight stared at him, resisting the impulse to
say or do the obvious things. A wrong move might be fatal. After a long minute
he forced himself to relax, to move across to the ewer and basin by the window
so that his back was towards the other. He began to wash his hands, and found
they were not quite steady. He felt that Francis was closely watching him. -

"I don't understand you," he said at
length. "I don't understand why you could possibly wish to destroy
yourself -and, if you did, why you should ride twenty-five miles to a strange
town to do it."

There was a rustle of papers as if Francis were
putting them together.

"The deceased behaved irrationally before he
died. Is that it? But who behaves rationally even when wanting to stay alive?
If we were thinking brains suspended in fluid, But we're not. We have viscera,
my dear Enys, as you should know; and nerves and blood and things, called
emotions. One can develop a quite unreasoning prejudice against spilling,
one's blood on one's own doorstep. Impulses are hard to put under a slide
rule."

If this was an impulse, then I hope it's
past.";

No, it is not. But now you are here give me your
opinion. What happens to a resolve when you put: the barrel to your head and
pull the trigger and the hammer clicks and nothing takes place? Do you. accept
the jibe, not having had the foresight to buy fresh powder or the intelligence
to realise that powder kept long in this damned Cornish atmosphere gets damp?
Or is it the last humiliation to shirk another try?

Dwight began to dry his hands. "It's the
only sensible course; But you didn't quite answer my question. Why suicide? If
I may say so, you're young, propertied, respected, have a wife and son, safely
got through serious illness, are under no cloud---?'

" Stop," said Francis, " or I
shall weep; for joy."

Dwight half turned, and out of the corner of his
eye saw that the pistol now lay on the table again, a hand resting lightly on it.
"Well, if you were your cousin, I might see a greater reason for all this.
He has lost his only child, is likely to have some sentence tomorrow, failed
last year in an enterprise he put all his heart to.

Francis got, up, pushing the, table aside with a
squeak, stalked' across the room. God damn you, be quiet...."

Dwight set down the towel. "' No--doubt
Ross still has his self-respect. Which you perhaps have lost...."

Francis turned. At close quarters his face was
streaky with dried sweat. "What makes you say that?"

The pistol was a long way away. Dwight felt a
little more confident of being able to deal with this situation.

" I think there must be a loss of
self-respect before suicide can be even thought of.".

“You do, eh?"