Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

I got up from the table, pushing my untasted plate away from me. "I am going across to the Rectory to see how she is now."

"Now, Reggie, don't be silly and make yourself ill by eating no lunch. If you make yourself ill it won't make Fay any better, as two blacks never make a white."

"It is all my fault that she is ill. If I hadn't been such an arrant fool her cold wouldn't have got to this pitch," I said savagely.

Annabel looked at me with the placidity which had soothed me all my life. "You needn't blame yourself, Reggie, you really needn't. I wish to goodness I'd never mentioned that walk! It might have been wiser it you had taken Frank instead of Fay, perhaps, and would have been equally cheerful for you; but if Fay herself didn't suggest it, I don't see that you were called upon to think of it. When I was Fay's age I was quite capable of taking care of my own colds, and so ought she to be. Though I must say in my young days young people had more stamina than they have now, and wouldn't have thought of letting a cold fly to their lungs in this hurried fashion. In my time a cold began in the head and went down to the throat, and then on to the chest, and only got to the lungs as a last resort—and not that, unless it was neglected. The ordinary cold never went to the lungs at all."

Again I felt that Annabel was blaming Fay for allowing herself to have been so rapidly overrun by the invading enemy; so, as I could not bear to hear my darling blamed without standing up for her, and as I likewise couldn't bear to stand up against Annabel for anybody, I went out of the room, banging the door behind me.

Then followed an unspeakable time of heart-rending anxiety. The pneumonia spread, and all the efforts of Jeffson and of a consultant from London to stop it proved unavailing. I found myself face to face with the crushing and incredible blow of the death of a dear one who was younger than myself. The passing onwards of our beloved must always be a sorrow to us; but if they are older than ourselves, the sorrow seems more or less a natural one. But when they are our juniors—and especially when they are considerably our juniors—the agony becomes unnatural, even monstrous. It is against nature for the young ones to be taken and the old ones to be left: an anguish unbearable save to those blessed souls who have grasped the great truth that death, after all, is only a semicolon—not a full stop.

To me, during those dreadful days of Fay's illness, the sun seemed to be turned into darkness and the moon into blood; there was no light anywhere, and I realised that if her sun went down while it was yet day, there would be nothing henceforth for me but dreary twilight until the dawn of the resurrection morning. Of course I prayed, but the heavens were as brass above me: none answered, nor were there any that regarded, and my soul went down into the darkness and the shadow of death.

"Let us send for Mr. Henderson," I said to Arthur, as soon as I knew how ill my darling was. "If he saved Frank, he could save her."

But Arthur shook his head. "I thought of that, and telephoned for him to come. But I find he has gone on a trip to the Holy Land, and will not be back for weeks and weeks. If he started back at once, he would not be here in time to do anything for Fay, and besides, they do not know exactly where to find him."

So that hope was extinguished.