She was rent by the gay laughter. When the matron turned away, she followed her.
"He isn't blind, is he?"
The matron, to whose naturally thin, pinched face worry and anxiety had added a touch of shrewishness, swung round on her.
"I thought you were a medical student. Is there anything about blindness here?" She smote the typed pages. "Of course not!"
The night staff being on duty, she had then fled the ward and mounted up the many stairs to the little room where she now sat, her hands to her eyes. Thank God he was not blind, and thank God she was alone!
But it had all happened a hundred years ago. Well, twenty years at least. In some vague period of folly before the war. Yet, after all, she was only five and twenty. When did it happen? She began an agonized calculation of dates——
She had striven almost successfully to put the miserable episode out of her mind, to regard that period of her life as a phase of a previous existence. Since the war began, carried on the flood-tide of absorbing work, she had had no time to moralize on the past. When it came before her in odd moments, she had sent it packing into the limbo of deformed and hateful things. And now the man with the gay laughter and the distinguished soldier's record had brought it all back, horribly vivid. For the scared moments, it was as though the revolutionary war-years had never been. She saw herself again the Camilla Warrington whom she had sought contemptuously to bury.
Had there been but a musk grain of beauty in that Camilla's story, she would have cherished the fragrance; but it had all been so ignoble and stupid. It had begun with her clever girlhood. The London University matriculation. The first bachelor-of-science degree. John Donovan, the great surgeon, a friend of her parents, had encouraged her ambitions toward a medical career. She became a student at the Royal Free Hospital, of the consulting staff of which John Donovan was a member. For the first few months, all went well. She boarded near by, in Bloomsbury, with a vague sort of aunt and distant cousins, folks of unimpeachable repute. Then, fired by the independent theories and habits of a couple of fellow students, she left the home of dull respectability and joined them in the slatternly bohemia of a Chelsea slum.
Oh, there was excuse for her youthful ardency to know all that there was to be known in the world at once! But if she had used her excellent brains, she would have realized that all that is to be known in the world could not be learned in her new environment. The unholy crew—they called it "The Brotherhood"—into which she plunged consisted of the dregs of a decadent art-world, unclean in person and in ethics. At first, she revolted. But the specious intellectuality of the crew fascinated her. Hitherto, she had seen life purely from the scientific angle. Material cause, material effect. On material life, art but an excrescence. She had been carelessly content to regard it merely as an interpretation of Beauty—to her, almost synonymous with prettiness.
At the various meeting-places of the crew, who talked with the interminability of a Russian Bolshevik, she learned a surprising lot of things about art that had never entered into her philosophy. She learned, or tried to learn—though her intelligence boggled fearfully at it—that the most vital thing in existence was the decomposition of phenomena, into interesting planes. All things in nature were in motion—as a scientific truth, she was inclined to accept the proposition; but the proclaimed fact that the representation of the Lucretian theory of fluidity by pictorial diagrams of intersecting planes was destined to revolutionize human society was beyond her comprehension. Still, it was vastly interesting. They got their plane-system into sculpture, into poetry, in some queer way into sociology.