The Relentless City

by E. F. Benson

Charlie instantly froze into himself.

'I'm afraid that's quite impossible,' he said. 'You're going with Bilton, I suppose.'

'Yes; I rather think he's waiting for me.'

Charlie registered to himself the fact that she had not asked for the doctor's report of him, though Monday was his regular day for being overhauled.

'Never keep people waiting,' he said, and opened a book. Then his better disposition came to his aid.

'I hope it will be possible for you to get a good run,' he said cordially. 'It is horrid, this weather, is it not?'

'Horrid—quite horrid!' she said. 'Well, good-bye; your mother will be out directly.'

He sat there after she had left him, with book open, but not reading. A pale, watery sun, instead of the golden monarch enthroned in cloudless blue, peered like a white plate through the clouds blown up by the south wind, and, instead of a dry and vivifying air, the atmosphere was loaded with moisture, the eaves dripped with the melting snow, and every now and then, with a whisper and a thud, some sheet would detach itself form a house-roof and plunge into the roadway below. Instead of presenting an expanse of crystalline whiteness, the snow-fields were stained and yellowish to the eye; hideous corners of corrugated roofs showed where the coverlet of white had slipped; all the raw discomfort of a thaw was in the air. To Charlie, both owing to his physical condition and his unspoken trouble, the heavy chilliness of the day was peculiarly oppressive; his mother also was detained indoors, and for an hour he was prey to the gloomiest reflections. It was all no use, so lie told himself; since October he had heartily tried with all his power both to get better and to recapture the normal joy of living. But now, as so often happened, he had begun to slip back again; next week no doubt would tell a further tale of hardly-earned ground lost, and week would follow week, and he would slip back and back. Even if he pulled through, even if he became strong again, what was there in life for him worth recovering for? He had thought—deluded himself into thinking—that perhaps Sybil might come to care for him, but with sudden bitter intuition he guessed that he was really no nearer winning her love than he had been before he had been taken ill. Great compassion, the divine womanly instinct to help a man, had brought her out here; the improvement in his health, the successful combating of his disease, was due to that. But it was but a bitter gift she had brought him; it was as if she had brought him through some illness only to give him over to the hangman at the last. And she had not asked about the doctor's report. That seemed to him in his dis-ordered frame of mind to clinch the matter. Instead she had gone off tobogganing with Bilton. True, she had refused him in the autumn, but how many marriages have been prefaced by that?

Charlie shivered slightly, and looked about him for a rug, for the damp of the day made a man chilly, where the dryness of far greater cold would have been but warming and invigorating. But he had not brought one out, and, saying to himself that he would go in to fetch one in a minute, he still sat on, looking for a break in the clouds that encompassed him. But he could not find one; the taste had gone out of the world again.

The Schwester run had been in unexpectedly good order, and Sybil did not get back to the hotel till late in the afternoon. The weather had cleared since noon, and about twilight the curtain of clouds had been dispersed, the south wind had ceased, and the splendid frosty stars again hung embroidered on the velvet of the night. Instead of plunging through the snow, before they reached the hotel their footsteps went crisply on the crackly crust, and the steel runners of their trailing toboggans sang like tea-kettles as they slid over the re-frozen surface. Already her spirits had been high, and, with the increased exhilaration of the air, they rose to nonsense point.