The Martian: A Novel

by George Du Maurier

At length, one day as Marty and I were playing lawn‑tennis, she suddenly told me that her feet felt as if they were made of lead, and I knew that the terrible thing had come....

I must really pass over the next few months.

In the summer of the following year she could scarcely walk without assistance, and soon she had to go about in a bath‑chair.

Soon, also, she ceased to be conscious when her lower limbs were pinched and pricked till an interval of about a second had elapsed, and this interval increased every month. She had no natural consciousness of her legs and feet whatever unless she saw them, although she could move them still and even get in and out of bed, or in and out of her bath‑chair, without much assistance, so long as she could see her lower limbs. Often she would stumble and fall down, even on a grassy lawn. In the dark she could not control her movements at all.

She was also in constant pain, and her face took on permanently the expression that Barty's often wore when he thought he was going blind in Malines, although, like him in those days, she was always lively and droll, in spite of this heavy misfortune, which seemed to break every heart at Marsfield except her own.

For, alas! Barty Josselin, who has so lightened for us the sorrow of mere bereavement, and made quick‑coming death a little thing—for some of us, indeed, a lovely thing—has not taught us how to bear the sufferings of those we love, the woeful ache of pity for pangs we are powerless to relieve and can only try to share.

Endeavor as I will, I find I cannot tell this part of my story as it should be told; it should be a beautiful story of sweet young feminine fortitude and heroic resignation—an angel's story.

During the four years that Martia's illness lasted the only comfort I could find in life was to be with her—reading to her, teaching her blaze, rowing her on the river, driving her, pushing or dragging her bath‑chair; but, alas! watching her fade day by day.

Strangely enough, she grew to be the tallest of all her sisters, and the most beautiful in the face; she was so wasted and thin she could hardly be said to have had a body or limbs at all.

I think the greatest pleasure she had was to lie and be sung to by Mary or her father, or played to by Roberta, or chatted to about domestic matters by Leah, or read to by me. She took the keenest interest in everything that concerned us all; she lived out of herself entirely, and from day to day, taking short views of life.