He looked at me sharply. “If only she’d help herself, lift a finger to help herself! That’s what beats a man. Doesn’t lift one finger, she doesn’t.”
“Oh!” I said, trying to look reasonable. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, accommodate myself to the idea of Iris dying. “I suppose this is the crisis, is it, Masters?”
The rough great-coat gave one vindictive flounce, filled the room. “Crisis! The way you people talk of crisis this and crisis that! Hear a word once and stick to it through life! ‘When does the crisis pass?’ There is no ‘crisis’ in most of these infernal things. Malaria, pneumonia, a few others—yes, crisis, know where you are. But in these things the patient just continues ill, two, three, four weeks, might live, might not. Lysis, not crisis. Crisis!”
“Sorry. Lysis....”
“Oh, here!” He suddenly began fumbling in an ancient pocket-book, from which he extracted a small folded piece of paper. “Might interest you,” he muttered.
Scrawled in pencil across the slip of paper were what looked like two names. That indecipherable scrawl! At last I made out the two names: Hilary’s and mine.
“She said, should either of these two happen somehow to hear I am ill and call, just be nice to them, please. Her very words....”
“Oh!” I said. And I went on staring at the slip of paper. It was a rather grubby slip of paper. And those two scrawled names were like a faint cry of loneliness.
“Known her for years,” Masters was muttering. “Nice! First tells me not to tell any one, then to be ‘nice’ to you two....”
I gave him back the slip of paper. I don’t know why, and now I wish I hadn’t. I would like to have it now, beside that fiver. “Nice, fivers are....” Thoughtful Iris! She knew her friends, she did. Lying lonely here ... and having an afterthought about Hilary—and me! “If they should somehow happen to hear and call.” Poor Guy hadn’t a mention. She wasn’t for putting any strain on Guy’s lawfulness. But why lawfulness? I looked at Conrad Masters.