“I’m glad it was not anything serious,” said Mr. Hancock gravely, turning to the scatter of letters on his table. He was glad. And his kind sympathy was not being fooled. Sarah was always being ill. It was worth a lie to drag her out into the light of his sympathy. A breath of true life, born from a lie.
The incident was at an end, safely through. He was satisfied and believing, gone on into his day. She gathered up his appointment book from under his nose. He was using it, making entries. But he knew this small tyranny was her real apology, a curse for the trouble she had been obliged to give him. While he sat bereft as she took in the items of his day, their silent everyday conversation was knitted up once more. She was there, not failing him. He knew she would always be there as long as he should really need her. She restored the book to its place and stood at his side affectionately watching him tackle his task, detached, aware of her affection, secure in its independence.
They were so utterly far apart, foreigners in each other’s worlds. Irreconcilable.... But for all these years she had had daily before her eyes the spectacle of his life work; the way and the cost of his undeviating, unsparing work. It must surely be a small comfort to him that there had been an understanding witness to the shapely building of his life....
Understanding speech she could never have, with anyone ... except the Taylors, and she was as incompletely in their world as in his. The joy of being with him was the absence of the need for speech. She whisked herself to the door and went out shutting it behind her with a little slam, a last fling of holiday freedom, her communication to him of the store of joy she had brought back, the ease with which she was shouldering her more and more methodical, irrelevant work....
There was nothing to pay. Then the moment over the telegram had been a revelation....
“You ought to see the Grahams. Stay another day and see the Grahams.”
I might have wired asking for another day. Impossible. The day would have been spoilt by the discomfort of knowing him thinking me ungrateful and insatiable.... Only being able to say when I came back that I waited to see a man dying of cancer. He would have thought that morbid. The minute the telegram was sent the feeling of guilt passed away. Whilst Hypo was chuckling over it at the top of the stairs there was nothing and no one. Only the feeling of having broken through and stepped forward into space. Strong happiness. All the next day was in space; a day taken out of life; standing by itself.
Mr. Graham was old-fashioned ... and modern too. He seemed to have come from so far back, to see backwards, understanding, and to see ahead the things he had always known. Serene and interested, in absolutely everything. As much in the tiny story of the threepenny-bit as in anything else, making it seem worth telling, making me able to tell it. Seeing everything as real. Really finding life marvellous in the way no one else seemed to do.... Ill as he was he looked up my trains, carefully and thoughtfully.... The horror and fear of death was taken away from me while I watched him.... Perhaps he had always felt that the marvellousness of there being such a thing as life was the answer to everything.... And now that he was dying knew it more completely?
They were both so serene. Everybody was lifted by being with them into that part of life that goes on behind the life that seems to be being lived....
All the time it was as if they had witnessed that past fortnight and made it immaterial ... a part of the immaterial story of life....