She hugged him close, as a mother hugs a child. Nature, she knew then, was nearing exhaustion. All too soon the will that grappled him to life must relax. And then in a moment of frenzy, of desperation, he would kill himself.
It behooved her, as long as was possible, to delay that moment. Friday was already here. And at four o’clock that afternoon Saul Hartz had promised to come to her. Pray Heaven that he did not fail!
As Helen lay in bed, however, listening hour by hour to the chime of the clocks of many neighboring steeples, she was haunted by a fear that the man by her side would not be able to carry on through the day. One stroke of a razor while he shaved, one step in front of an electric train, what could be simpler? His controls were yielding. Of that fact there were many indications. The question was, could he now outlast this all-important day?
Many times she had urged him to take a bromide, but he had not done so. Such things were likely to prove worse than futile. Death was the penalty he inevitably would have to pay; and his mind and will were at one in that, so far as his soul’s welfare was concerned, it was best that death came to him through his instincts working in a natural and unfettered way.
“If one bedevils oneself,” he argued, “with drugs and potions one may lose control of one’s reason altogether. And that will mean a state of aphasia compared with which death is more than kind. Hell is a mental condition. And there is none to equal that of the man who longs for death and yet has not the nerve to ensue it.”
Helen had felt bound to respect this attitude of mind. But dressing now in the wintry dawn of Friday, the question that harrowed her was, Could unaided nature hold him to his course for another four-and-twenty hours?
Immediately their pretense at breakfast was over, they went to a church close by. Here they stayed nearly three hours. And when they emerged from its precincts into the December gloom, they felt far down in their hearts that at the back of everything was still a Friend who was surely helping them to keep their sanity.
As evidence of this strength that had been given them both were able to take a little food. And then for Helen came the facing of the grim problem—How did John propose to spend the afternoon?
She had hoped that he would go down to the House of Commons. But as soon as luncheon was at an end he retired to the room in which he worked. An hour passed and yet he made no sign of going out. Presently the clock struck three; and Helen, no longer able to bear the suspense, came in and found him sitting apathetically at his table, not attempting to write or to read.
Her instinct for the practical showed her now the paramount need of making up his mind for him. She determined to take a strong line.