One night when he had fallen asleep from sheer fag, drained like an emptied reservoir, RoBards was wakened by her seizure upon his arm. It terrified him from some dream of a lawsuit. He was a moment or two in realizing that it was Patty who had seized him. The lamp had gone out, the dawn was stealing in. She was babbling:
“I can’t stand it any more. Not another day! Oh, God, not another day! Don’t ask me that, dear God!”
He tried to take her out of herself on to his own galled shoulders. He seized her hands and put his face in front of her glazed eyes and cried to her to talk to him and let him help her through this one more Gethsemane.
Her desperate eyes stared past him for a while. Then their blurred gaze slowly focussed upon him. She nodded in recognition and talked to him, not to God:
“I’d ask you to give me a knife or a pistol or something to kill myself with, but I’m afraid. Dr. Chirnside said once that self-murder was a sin, a cowardly sin, and that hell waited for the craven one. Hell would be even worse than this, I suppose, and it would never end—never. Isn’t it funny that God could build hell and keep it burning from eternity to eternity? Why if you were God, and there were only me in hell, you’d weep so many tears they would put out the fires, wouldn’t you? And you’d lift me up in your arms and comfort my poor scorched body. For you love me. But oh, if only somebody would love me enough to kill me. No, I don’t mean that. You would, if I asked you. You’d go to hell for me forever. I know you, Mist’ RoBards—Davie. You would, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t let you, though. No! If hell must be gone through I’d rather be the one. To be there in hell and think of you in heaven feeling sorry for me would help a little.
“But if only some of these burglars that kill strange people would shoot me by accident! If only an earthquake should come or a fire should break out, so that I could be killed honestly! If only—if only—oh, I can’t stand another day, Davie! I just can’t. That’s all there is about it. I can’t.”
Then she forgot her thoughts, her theology, her hopes in the utter absorption of her soul in her body’s torment. She was very busy with being crucified.
RoBards suddenly realized that an opportunity was offered him to cure this unpitied sufferer. A choice that had long been before him was only now disclosed to his clouded soul. He wondered at his long delay in recognizing how simple a remedy there was for the disease called life.