§ 2
Florrie, now thoroughly alarmed, and sincerely anxious to make amends for her previous truculence, got her back to bed somehow and sent for a doctor. Dr. McPherson motored from Bockley to see her, and found her temperature somewhat dangerously high. From Florrie he learned how Catherine had come in the day before, after half-wading through the snow and slush from the tram terminus. She had caught a chill. Knowing that she was something of a celebrity and in receipt of a considerable salary, he did not tell her how her own foolishness had been the cause of it. He announced his intention of sending a nurse to look after her, left detailed instructions with Florrie as to how to act until the nurse came, and said that he would himself come again later in the evening. Downstairs Florrie told him how she had found her mistress in the drawing-room, sobbing in front of the piano.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered impatiently, “of course—that is all what one might expect.... You should not have left her....”
And he drove off in his car down the winding gravel lane that led to the High Road. Florrie was offended. After all, it was through obeying her mistress that she had been compelled to leave her. She was aware that she was being treated unjustly, and it gave her an air of conscious martyrdom....
She went back to Catherine’s bedroom. The breakfast things, untouched and forgotten, had to be cleared away. The coffee was nearly cold, but she warmed it up on the gas ring in the kitchen and drank it herself. Some of the cold and leathery buttered toast she ate herself; the rest she threw into the snow-covered garden for the birds.... Every time she passed the bed she glanced pityingly at the huddled figure and the mass of flame-coloured hair that straggled over the pillow. Her expression said plainly enough: I have been ill-treated and misunderstood, but I bear no malice. You shall see what an unselfish creature I am.... And another of her reflections was expressed some time later when she was talking to Minnie Walker, one of the barmaids at the High Wood Hotel. “She ’as got nice ’air,” she told Minnie. “Pity ’er fice ain’t so nice ... but I wish I got ’er ‘air, I do, reely....”
Morning passed into afternoon, and nothing altered in the view from the bedroom window of “Elm Cottage.” The sky was still uniformly grey, the trees like black and white etchings, the lawn in the front garden a patch of dazzling white, broken only by the double track of a bird’s footmarks. A fire was burning in the fireplace, and as the heat rose to the roof the snow above began to thaw and slide down off the gutters like a thunderous avalanche. In time the lawn was littered with the falling spray of these successive cataclysms, and the steady drip, drip of the gutters showed that what had not fallen was thawing fast.... The flames on the top of the red coal fluttered idly like blue wings when the wind swept down the chimney: something reminded Catherine of those distant childhood days of hers in Kitchener Road, when she had watched the flames on long winter evenings and listened to them as they said: Lappappappap.... They were saying it now in odd moments and their voices linked her to the scenes and incidents of her childhood.... Florrie was rocking herself in a chair by the fire and reading a paper-backed novel by Charles Garvice. There was another paper-backed novel by Charles Garvice on the floor beside her. She had a great red face and large eyes. Occasionally as she read her mouth would open and remain so for moments at a time. She skipped a good deal of the descriptive matter. Every few minutes she yawned noisily and drew herself a little closer to the fire. The clock downstairs struck three.... Far away Catherine could hear the purr of trams along the High Road. The room began to darken. At first she thought it was getting night-time, but she realized that it was scarcely the hour for that. Then she looked at the window. The window was dirty: she could scarcely see the trees of the Forest at all. She stared hard at the window.... No: it was not dirt. She could see what it was now: it had started snowing again. The dark outline of the Forest was only vaguely grey behind the slanting flakes, and as she listened she could hear it swishing—softly—all around and about her—on the roof, on the window-sill, on the lawn beneath, over all the miles of trees and grassland, swishing like a soft brush, yet loudly enough to deaden the sound of the trams on the High Road. And he had said: “I expect there will be some more skating to-night if it doesn’t snow.” But it was snowing now. There would be no skating. It did seem a pity. So many people would be disappointed....
Then a film passed over her eyes, and when it lifted the blind was drawn in front of the window and one of the electric lights by the fireplace was glowing.... There was a different person in the room with her: a thin, red-lipped, white-faced woman in nurse’s uniform: she also was rocking herself in front of the fire, and reading a paper-backed novel by Charles Garvice. Catherine watched her for a long while, and she did not move save to turn over the pages. She had brown hair and a mole on her right cheek. She was wearing Catherine’s bedroom slippers. That curiously trivial thing annoyed Catherine intensely.
All at once Catherine reached out a hand from beneath the clothes and pressed the electric light switch that dangled above the pillow. Three clusters of light in various parts of the room burst into yellow brilliance. The nurse started violently, put down her book and approached the bedside.
“Good evening ...” she began softly, and pressed back the switch so that the lights disappeared.
Catherine felt herself burning with suppressed fury. What right had this strange woman to turn out the lights if she wished them to be lit? What right had she? Who was mistress in her own house? With trembling fingers she reached again for the switch and pressed it. The lights reappeared. She kept her fingers tightly clasped round the switch. But a cold hand laid itself on the top of hers and she had to leave go. Then she saw the nurse take the switch and hang it over the top of a picture far out of anybody’s reach, unless a chair were used to stand on....
She lay there on the bed, panting with indignation. She had been insulted, deliberately, calculatingly, and in her own house.... And the nurse went back to the fireplace and resumed the paper-backed novel by Charles Garvice....