He tried the door, found it unlocked, and, going in, lighted the lamp. Then he brought Ann to the couch. He could see her distinctly now, and his heart contracted as he looked at her; the limpness of her body and the waxen immobility of her face were terrifying, an inertia as complete as death. She was slipping away, and he did not know how to call her back.
As long as Baird had been fighting his way along through the night, he had been hopeful. But that vacant house!... If he went for help, Ann would die while he was gone; there was no doctor within four miles. If his ignorance struggled with that persistent unconsciousness, he might blunder fatally. He felt desperate.
XXXIII
FROM DESPAIR TO HOPE
Baird had sat for an hour with his fingers on Ann's wrist; from twelve o'clock until the living-room clock struck one. He had made his decision. As he had expressed it to himself, "I'll stand by my job."
Once, in South America, he and a companion had worked over a man who was dying from exhaustion. They had administered stimulants and had wrapped the man in hot blankets. Baird had ransacked the living-room and the kitchen, had come upon the family supply of simple remedies, among them a bottle of spirits of camphor, and, in the cedar chest beneath the stairs, had found a feather-bed laid away for the summer. He had built a fire in the kitchen stove and had heated water.
Baird had set to work then upon Ann's cold limp body, had taken off her shoes and stockings and had chafed her icy feet with hot water and camphor. He had opened her dress and had rubbed her chest and her arms and her hands with it. Then he had wrapped her closely in the feather-bed, and, lastly, he had tried to make her swallow a little of the mixture.
Though he had worked quickly, it had taken time, a lifetime of effort and of waiting, it had seemed to Baird, before even a slight warmth had crept into her body. When his fingers discovered a throb in her wrists, Baird was uplifted; he sprang from despair to hope. When her chest began gently to lift and fall, he climbed to the height of gratitude.
For an hour he had sat almost motionless, feeling life grow beneath his fingers, watching the ghastly white in Ann's face change to a more life-like hue. It seemed to him that the life in her was trying to answer to the life in him, that each throb of his heart transmitted a little and still a little more of its bounding vitality to her, and, gradually, a curious certainty had taken possession of Baird: that through his finger-tips he was pouring his superabundant strength into Ann's limp body, while with all his force he was willing her to live.