VI.
The basin kept on slipping from the bed. She could see its pattern—reddish flowers and green leaves and curlykews—under the splashings of mustard and water. She felt as if it must slip from her fingers and be broken. When she pressed it tighter to the edge of the mattress the rim struck against Papa's breast.
He lay stretched out on the big yellow birchwood bed. The curtains were drawn back, holding the sour smell of sickness in their fluted folds.
Papa's body made an enormous mound under the green eiderdown. It didn't move. A little fluff of down that had pricked its way through the cover still lay where it had settled; Papa's head still lay where it had dropped; the forefinger still pointed at the fluff of down.
Papa's head was thrown stiffly back on the high pillows; it sank in, weighted with the blood that flushed his face. Around it on the white linen there was a spatter and splash of mustard and water. His beard clung to his chin, soaked in the yellowish stain. He breathed with a loud, grating and groaning noise.
Her ears were so tired with listening to this noise that sometimes they would go to sleep for a minute or two. Then it would wake them suddenly and she would begin to cry again.
You could stop crying if you looked steadily at the little fluff of down.
At each groaning breath it quivered and sank and quivered.
Roddy sat by the dressing-table. He stared, now at his clenched hands, now at his face in the glass, as if he hated it, as if he hated himself.
Mamma was still dressed. She had got up on the bed beside Papa and crouched on the bolster. She had left off crying. Every now and then she stroked his hair with tender, desperate fingers. It struck out between the white ears of the pillow-slip in a thin, pointed crest.
Papa's hair. His poor hair. These alterations of the familiar person, the blood-red flush, the wet, clinging beard, the pointed hair, stirred in her a rising hysteria of pity.
Mamma had given him the mustard and water. She could see the dregs in the tumbler on the night-table, and the brown hen's feather they had tickled his throat with.
They oughtn't to have done it. Dr. Charles would not have let them do it if he had been there. They should have waited. They might have known the choking and the retching would kill him. Catty ought to have known. Somewhere behind his eyes his life was leaking away through the torn net of the blood vessels, bleeding away over his brain, under his hair, under the tender, desperate fingers.
She fixed her eyes on the pattern of the wall-paper. A purplish rose-bud in a white oval on a lavender ground. She clung to it as to some firm, safe centre of being.