OLIVE left the telephone table and strolled across the bright library to the fire. The sussuration of dragged silk behind her moving gown gave her a queer discomfort; there had been no time to change in the rush; it seemed improper to attend a death-bed in evening dress. And she was intrusive, here, and helpless. Mark’s pain was calm. He would suffer later, at the end of these hours or minutes. The bored, plump doctor came into the library, closed the door and lit a cigarette, joining Olive at the warm hearth.
“He was asking for Miss Walling, just now.”
“Ah? She’s in Philadelphia. She was dining with some friends at the Ritz, there, so we left her.”
The doctor said, “Very sensible,” and blew a smoke ring. Under its dissolution his eyes admired Olive’s shoulders then, the pastel of Gurdy in a black frame on the mantel.
“Tell me,” Olive asked, “how—how far is he conscious?”
“It would be interesting to know. In these collapses we’re not sure. His conscious mind probably asserts itself, now and then. The unconscious—I really can’t say. Still, before you and Mr. Walling came he spoke in Swedish several times. And that’s the unconscious. He forgot his Swedish years ago. Been in this country ever since eighteen sixty-eight. But he spoke Swedish quite correctly and very fast. I’m a Swede. It surprised me.”
“Indeed,” said Olive and shivered before his science, cool, weary, not much interested.
The doctor looked at his watch, murmured, “Twelve thirty,” and tossed his cigarette in the fire. He observed, “But the old gentleman’s in no pain. The reversion’s very interesting. He was talking to some one about Augustin Daly. Very interesting.” The clipped, brisk voice denied the least interest. The doctor went from the library as Olive heard wheels halt outside. This couldn’t be Gurdy. She looked through a window and recognized her maid paying a taxicab driver. The black and yellow taxicab trembled behind a car entirely black and windowless; the undertaker awaited Carlson’s body. Olive drew the curtains across the glass, shook herself and went down to speak with her maid.
“Margot hadn’t come back from her dinner when you came away, Lane?”
“No, m’lady. Such a noosance getting the luggage to the station, down there.... Might I have some tea in your pantry, Mr. Collins?” the woman asked Mark’s butler as Olive turned away. These two would sit in the butler’s pantry drinking tea and discussing deaths. Olive went up the soft stairs and into Carlson’s bedroom behind the library. She entered an immutable group. The two nurses sat in a corner. The doctor examined one of the framed, old photographs that pallidly gleamed on the walls made brown by the lowered light. Mark stood with his hands clutching the white bedfoot. His black seemed to rise supernatural from the floor. He was taller, thinner. He glared at the stretched length of his patron. To Olive the dying man appeared more like an exhumed Pharaoh than ever. The yellow head was unchanged. She had a dizzy, picturesque fancy that his eyes might open, that he might speak in some unknown, sonorous dialect of the Nile. As she dropped a hand beside Mark’s fingers on the rail the old man spoke without breath in a sound of torn fabric yet with an airy, human amusement. “All right, Mister Caz’nove. Don’t git flustered. I’ll tell Miss Morris.”