The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

She arranged the bedclothes about him, and though she had been so glib, she could not now speak at once.

“There, then; you’ll go to sleep, won’t you, now you know that,” she said. “But to think of you worrying here all these hours!”

Madge was, of course, told by Nurse James what happened before she saw Evelyn again, for that diplomatist came to her room very early next morning, and informed her of it all. She acquiesced in it, as she would have acquiesced in anything that in the opinion of nurse or doctor conduced to his recovery, and for the next day or two his progress was speedy and uninterrupted. He had faced the first shock, that he was blind, with a courage that was really heroic, and except for that hour when he held himself in front of it, purposing and meaning to realise once and for all exactly what it implied, he exercised wonderful self-control in not letting himself brood over it. This was the easier because that second fear, the roots of which went so much deeper than the other, had proved to be groundless. Terrible as was his plight, the knowledge that it might have been so much more terrible was ever in his mind, casting its light into the places that he had thought were of an impenetrable darkness.

But in this balance and adjustment of the human soul to the anguish with which circumstance and fate visit it, the mechanism of its infliction is wonderfully contrived, so that it shall not snap under the strain. The Angel of Pain, we must suppose, sits by, with the screws and levers of the rack under its control; it loosens one, as Evelyn’s dread about disfigurement had been loosened for the present at any rate, since it was, perhaps, more than he could stand (and the Angel of Pain, with the relentless hands but the tender eye and pitying mouth, had not finished with him yet) but it tightens another; the fact of his blindness had been screwed down very tight. Then as the racked sinews and tortured nerves began to writhe and agonise less, another little torture was added. It was but a small thing compared to the others, and though it had been there all the time, neither Madge nor he had noticed it at first. But now when he was weary with pain, it was like a fly that kept buzzing and settling on his face, while his hands were bound, so that he could not brush it off. It had seemed but fear of the imagination at first, but gradually to both of them, as he recovered so well, and the future as well as the present began to make itself felt again, it became terribly real. It was simply this: What was to happen to them? How among other things were their doctor’s and nurse’s bills to be paid? And how, after that, were they going to live?

For several days each suffered the buzzing, flittings and alightings of this without speaking of it to the other, since each believed that the other had not yet thought of it. But one afternoon they had been talking of that hot August month in London, with their childish tales of Ellesdee, and the curious fact that if you only make a game out of a privation, the privation ceases and the game becomes entrancingly real. Evelyn had laughed over this.

“We shall have heaps of games in the future,” he had said unthinkingly, and stopped rather abruptly. In the silence that followed he heard Madge just stir in her chair; an assent had dropped from her lips, but she had said no more, and it was clear to them both that their thoughts had met. Then Evelyn spoke.

“Madge, has it ever occurred to you what we are going to do?” he said. “How we are going to live, I mean?”

“Yes, dear, I have thought about it a good deal. I didn’t speak of it, since I hoped you wouldn’t begin to think about it yet.”

“There were forty-three pounds?” he said; “from which you have to subtract our railway fares.”

“Yes, dear,” she said almost inaudibly.