"Heart stopped," he said weakly. "Been giving me trouble. Nothing the matter with it. Just flutters and slows down. This time it stopped. Had to get up and jog it on the stairs. That's why I have to sleep upstairs. Been warned."
"I'll send for a doctor," Mary cried.
"Doctor—hell!" Rod's strength was coming back. The blood pounded in his temples. He could breathe, speak without effort, although weakly. "I've had the best men in Paris and London at me. They don't know what's the matter. They say there's nothing the matter. Heart's organically perfect but functionally weak."
He repeated it ironically to himself, that phrase of the medical men—when he had got back to normal and was able slowly to ascend the stairs with her help—repeated it silently while Mary sat wrapped in a bathrobe, looking at him with troubled, anxious eyes.
He made light of it. It was nothing much. Very soon he would be quite all right. He had been warned that he might have a recurrence, and that he must when possible be on an upper floor when he slept, because to move jarringly was imperative and he would not have strength to climb. He stepped heavily from step to step and so joggled his circulation back to normal. But that would soon wear off. She was not to worry.
Thus he lied gently to ease her mind. He did not want to die like that. He did not want death in any form to overtake him. No. The possibility was sufficient to stir him deeply. He had seen death at his elbow a hundred times in four years. He had done his part, expecting that soon or late his turn would come. It was part of the game. Life came to have little significance to men whose occupation was destroying life and being themselves destroyed. It would have been a simple matter to die in action; merely a moment of surprise, of incredulity, then oblivion.
He had escaped death; he had escaped marring. Suffering he could not escape, nor the sight of suffering that wrung him as deeply as his own. He had never been able to steel himself against the sights and sounds of pain. He had never been able to look indifferently on other men's agony. And he had grown indifferent to death. Men are seldom afraid to die, to risk death. Yet with the acceptance of death as an imminent chance there still flourishes the deep, instinctive desire to live.
Rod wanted to live more than he had ever wanted to before. He had come through the storm of war to this haven where he knew there was for him peace and security and affection beyond most men's lot.
Yet it was touch and go. The nervous man, the keenly strung, sensitive man, the thoroughbred will fight; he can die on his nerve. But there is a breaking strain beyond which he cannot endure. Before the continual impact of pain, death, horror and disgust, the sight and knowledge of merciless destruction, of blind and calculated killing, of flesh and blood ground up and poured into a bottomless pit to narrow a salient or test a military theory, Rod had sometimes wondered if something in his heart would burst; if something in his brain would crack from that inner ache, a quivering sensitiveness that drew his nerves tight as fiddle-strings, a going on by sheer will, with his heart burning in hatred of the bloody muddle that engulfed him and his fellows. His heart had been strained until it weakened somewhere. That was all. He had not known what it was that changed the nervous heart into a weak heart. Some time before the Armistice he noticed the difference,—a slowing-down under excitement instead of a quickening of his pulse. A feeling of discomfort at night. A desire to get up, to walk about, to fight off a weakening sensation.
Then the Armistice. And a night in a Paris hotel when he was a dead man if it had not been for that imperative command of a mind that willed a body to defy dissolution. He had stirred somehow that sluggish heart into beating again, and he had called a doctor. Later he consulted specialists.