Easier to die.
When Janet had taken her departure Claire looked at the clock and found that it was time to start for the hospital. She went out of the station, and, passing a shop for flowers and fruit went in, spent ten shillings in the filling of a reed basket, and, leaving the shop, seated herself in one of the taxis which were standing in readiness outside the great porch. Such carelessness of money was a natural reversion to habit, which came as a consequence of her absorbed mind.
The great hospital looked bare and grim, the smell of iodoform was more repellent than ever, after the sweet scents of the country. Claire knew her way by this time, and ascended by lift to the women’s ward, where Sophie lay. Beside almost every bed one or two visitors were seated, but Sophie was alone. Down the length of the ward Claire caught a glimpse of a recumbent form, and felt a pang at the thought of the many visiting days when her friend had remained alone. With no relations in town, her brother’s family too pressed for means to afford expeditions from the country, Sophie had no hope of seeing a familiar face, and her very attitude bespoke dejection.
Claire walked softly to the further side of the bed, and dangled the basket before the half-covered face, whereupon Sophie pushed back the clothes and sat up, her eyes lighting with joy.
“Claire! You! Oh, you dearly beloved, I thought you were still away! Oh, I am glad—I am glad! I was so dreadfully blue!”
She looked it. Even in the eagerness of welcome her face looked white and drawn, and the pretty pink jacket, Claire’s own gift, seemed to accentuate her pallor. The hands with which she fondled the flowers were surely thinner than they had been ten days before.
“My dear, what munificence! Have you come into a fortune? And fruit underneath! I shall be able to treat the whole ward! When did you come back? Have you had a good time? Are you going on to the farm? It is good of you to come again. It’s—it’s hard being alone when you see the other patients with their own people. The nurses are dears, but they are so rushed, poor things, they haven’t time to stay and talk. And oh, Claire, the days! They’re so wearily long!”
Claire murmured tender exclamations of understanding and pity. A pained conviction that Sophie was no better made her shrink from putting the obvious question; but Sophie did not wait to be asked.
“Oh, Claire,” she cried desperately, “it’s so hard to be patient and to keep on hoping, when there’s no encouragement to hope! I’m not one scrap better after all that has been tried, and I’ve discovered that they did not expect me to be better; the best they seem to hope for is that I may not grow worse! It’s like running at the pitch of one’s speed, and succeeding only in keeping in the same place. And there are other arthritics in this ward!” She shuddered. “When I think that I may become like them! It would be much easier to die.”
“I think it would often seem easier,” Claire agreed sadly, her thoughts turning to Cecil, whose trouble at the moment seemed as heavy as the one before her. “But we can’t be deserters, Sophie. We must stick to our posts, and play the game. When these troubles come, we just have to bear them. There’s no hiding, or running away. There’s only one choice open to us—whether we bear it badly or well.”