I think that was the most dreadful day I ever remember. She told me again and again how ill I looked until I was goaded into a sort of depressed frenzy, and said I couldn’t possibly look as ill as she. We both had beef-tea in the middle of the morning, and to my horror, when it was brought, it was brought not by Raikes, my man who is as indispensable to this house as is the carburetter to a motor-car (for it won’t run without), but by an Awful Thing that I never saw before. In answer to an inquiry, I was told that Raikes felt very ill, and had asked the Awful Thing to bring us our beef-tea instead of him. So I sent her back to Raikes with a thermometer that he was to be so good as to put under his tongue for one minute, and then return. It came back recording 102 degrees. I gave the Awful Thing the thermometer to wash, and she instantly dropped it on the floor. It was, of course, broken into twenty million fragments, but I remembered that, though I was a worm, I was a Christian worm, and said: ‘Never mind. Please tell Raikes that he is to go to bed instantly.’ I then picked up the twenty million fragments, and cut myself severely. I said ‘Damn!’ quite softly.
Helen winced, which was merely intended to annoy me, and it succeeded admirably.
So there we sat exactly like that awful picture called ‘Les Frileux,’ in which an old man and an old woman sit apart under a leafless tree. The ground is covered with the dead leaves. Soon they will die, too.
It is impossible to depict the dreariness of that morning. Outside a sort of jaundiced day showed the soupy mud that flooded Sloane Street, through which motor-buses, which once I thought so fine, splashed their way. A few sordid people under umbrellas bobbed by the windows, and as the darkness increased a man with a long stick began to turn up the lamps. Then it instantly got rather lighter, and another man (not the same one) with another long stick came and turned them down again. Upon which Egyptian darkness settled down over the town, and I must suppose that the first man had caught the influenza, for he never turned them up any more.
Helen was not reading; she was sitting by the fire looking mournfully at the coals. This would not do at all, and in the intervals of a paroxysm of coughing I asked:
‘How is Legs this morning?’
‘Worse,’ said Helen.
I took up the Daily Telegraph, and read the list of the people who were dead. I knew one of them slightly. Then my cut finger began to bleed again, which reminded me of the Awful Thing.
‘Servants are so ridiculous and tiresome,’ I said. ‘I should think your maid might have found time to bring up our beef-tea, instead of that dreadful girl. I don’t know where you get your servants from.’
‘Barton went to bed yesterday with influenza,’ said Helen wheezily. ‘She is very feverish—worse than Legs.’