He stood silent a moment, twisting the flower from his coat by the stem and staring at the blank wall with haggard abstraction. “Even I can say to-night, Archie,” he brought out slowly,
“‘As in my dream I dreamed it,
As in my will it was.’
Now, doctor, you may leave me. I’m beautifully drunk, but not with anything that ever grew in France.”
The doctor rose. Fred tossed his flower out of the window behind him and came toward the door. “I say,” he called, “have you a date with anybody?”
The doctor paused, his hand on the knob. “With Thea, you mean? Yes. I’m to go to her at four this afternoon—if you haven’t paralyzed me.”
“Well, you won’t eat me, will you, if I break in and send up my card? She’ll probably turn me down cold, but that won’t hurt my feelings. If she ducks me, you tell her for me, that to spite me now she’d have to cut off more than she can spare. Good-night, Archie.”
VI
It was late on the morning after the night she sang Elsa, when Thea Kronborg stirred uneasily in her bed. The room was darkened by two sets of window shades, and the day outside was thick and cloudy. She turned and tried to recapture unconsciousness, knowing that she would not be able to do so. She dreaded waking stale and disappointed after a great effort. The first thing that came was always the sense of the futility of such endeavor, and of the absurdity of trying too hard. Up to a certain point, say eighty degrees, artistic endeavor could be fat and comfortable, methodical and prudent. But if you went further than that, if you drew yourself up toward ninety degrees, you parted with your defenses and left yourself exposed to mischance. The legend was that in those upper reaches you might be divine; but you were much likelier to be ridiculous. Your public wanted just about eighty degrees; if you gave it more it blew its nose and put a crimp in you. In the morning, especially, it seemed to her very probable that whatever struggled above the good average was not quite sound. Certainly very little of that superfluous ardor, which cost so dear, ever got across the footlights. These misgivings waited to pounce upon her when she wakened. They hovered about her bed like vultures.
She reached under her pillow for her handkerchief, without opening her eyes. She had a shadowy memory that there was to be something unusual, that this day held more disquieting possibilities than days commonly held. There was something she dreaded; what was it? Oh, yes, Dr. Archie was to come at four.
A reality like Dr. Archie, poking up out of the past, reminded one of disappointments and losses, of a freedom that was no more: reminded her of blue, golden mornings long ago, when she used to waken with a burst of joy at recovering her precious self and her precious world; when she never lay on her pillows at eleven o’clock like something the waves had washed up. After all, why had he come? It had been so long, and so much had happened. The things she had lost, he would miss readily enough. What she had gained, he would scarcely perceive. He, and all that he recalled, lived for her as memories. In sleep, and in hours of illness or exhaustion, she went back to them and held them to her heart. But they were better as memories. They had nothing to do with the struggle that made up her actual life. She felt drearily that she was not flexible enough to be the person her old friend expected her to be, the person she herself wished to be with him.