An Act in a Backwater

by E. F. Benson

“And now you are going to bed,” said Miss Fortescue. “So I shall be off to my room. Kiss me, my dear, once more.”

She rose as she spoke, and Jeannie, bending from her height, kissed her on the forehead and on the cheeks, and without another word Aunt Em took up her candle and went back to her room.

It was already after midnight and Jeannie undressed quickly and, putting out her illumination of candles, got into bed. How long she lay there without sleeping she did not know, but at last the myriad-voiced rain outside blended indistinguishable into tones she knew, and in her dreams she communed with Jack.

All night long the storm bellowed and flickered about the town, but about four in the morning the guns of heaven were silent, and the rain began to fall less heavily, and when Jeannie woke, soon after six, the room was filled with the transparent aqueous light of a clear dawn. A smell of unutterable cleanliness came in through the open window, and from her bed she saw the last star fade in the dove-coloured sky. Short as had been her sleep, she felt no inclination to lie in bed, and got up and went to the bath-room. A rain-gauge was on the leads outside, and stepping out through the open window she examined it and saw that two inches of rain had fallen in the night. The flowers in the garden-beds, as she had expected, were beaten down and robbed of their petals, and the smaller gravel from the paths had been swept on to the grass in a spreading delta. The stalwart-leaved mulberry had not suffered, and the outline of leaves was cut out with lavishness and clearness against the tenderness of the sky. Above no traces of the overpast tempest lingered: the pale blue of the zenith melted with imperceptible gradation into the dove colour of the horizons on the west and north, in the south-west the pink of the dawn was already growing gilded before the sun imminent to rise. Already, so it seemed to Jeannie, a flush of green had spread over the grass, and the glistening house-roofs, so long dust-ridden, looked clean again. Above all, the intolerable oppression of the air was no more than a sick dream of night, and to be abroad in this exquisite dawn was like coming out of an ill-ventilated tunnel into the coolness of Alpine pastures. Even as she looked a beam of the risen day shot its level arrow and struck the elm-trees in the close, and with the aptest punctuality a thrush scudded out of the bushes below her and poured out a throatful of repeated song. And on the moment a verse from the song of songs chimed in her head. “The rain is over and past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing birds has come.”

She stood looking out over the fair rejuvenated earth, smiling. At last she turned.

“Indeed it has come,” she said.

CHAPTER XVII

Before another week was over the fresh cases of typhoid had ceased. During the three days immediately following the thunder-storm rain had fallen again and again, heavily and all night long. By day the same liquid autumn weather had stretched its length of sunlit creamy hours as the morning on which Jeannie had watched the sunrise over the cleaned earth, but every evening at sunset the thick, desired clouds came trooping out of the south-west, and made night full of the noise of rain. The wells, swiftly fed by the spongy chalk, had filled, the foul water of the polluted springs was no longer drawn on, and the gorging microbe, with its holocaust of victims, Jeannie’s fiend of the garden-scene, found none to drink from his shrine. The first cases which had occurred were hardly out of the doctor’s hands before the epidemic ceased, as suddenly as it had begun, but there was now no lack but rather a plethora of nurses, for typhoid is the nurses’ favourite disease, since in it each case depends so entirely on them, and nothing is dearer to the skilled than responsibility.

This being the case, both Jeannie and Miss Fortescue had, in the fourth week since the epidemic began, given up their places at the hospital. Regular trained nurses were there in abundance, and there was no longer need for them. But to both the sacrifice of giving up their work was far greater than the original risk of taking it up. For several weeks certainly their lives had centred on one thing, the victory over the microbe, and to think only of one thing, even for three weeks of a life, wears a rut in it, and a jolt is necessitated by passing out of the rut.

Jeannie, after the momentous midnight talk with her aunt, had not been encouraged to allude to the subject again, nor had she wished it. That curious flood of confidence had passed by in spate, like the thunder-storm that had raged simultaneously outside, and, like the sediment of gravel which the storm had made on the grass, there lingered in Miss Fortescue’s manner a conscious and expressed reminiscence of what had passed between them. An added tenderness in little things was there, hard to define, but impossible not to appreciate. Both of them, moreover, had something of that quality which is supposed to be confined to the sterner sex, who, when greatly moved, say, “Good-night, old chap,” and all is said.