The Devourers. Annie Vivanti
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said Mrs. Avory.
"Nor does she," said Edith.
"No one does." And the mother gazed at the laughing, dancing crowd, and wondered if they all had within them the gnawing horror that she knew was shut in her daughter's fragile breast.
"Have you noticed," she said, "that nobody coughs?"
"It is true," said Edith. "Nobody coughs."
After a short silence Mrs. Avory said: "Probably most of them are here for the winter sports."
For a long time she believed this. Young faces with pink cheeks and vivid eyes, and laughter, much laughter, surrounded her. There were balls and concerts, routs and bazaars, and everywhere the vivid eyes, and the pink cheeks, and the laughter. The only strange thing that Mrs. Avory noticed about her new friends was that when she said good-night to them, and shook hands with them, their hands were strange to the touch, and gave her a little shock.
They were not like the hands of other people that one clasps and thinks not of. "Good-night," to one. "What a hot hand!" she would think. "Good-night," to another. "What a cold, moist hand!" Hands of fire, and hands of ice; arid hands, that felt brittle to the touch; humid hands, which made her palms creep; weak, wet hands, from which her own recoiled. Each told their tragic tale. But the faces laughed, and the feet danced, and nobody coughed.
Edith soon stopped coughing, too. The doctor had forbidden it. She coughed in the night, when no one except her mother heard. The months swung past, promising and not fulfilling, but promising again, and Edith went to her fate submissive, with light tread.
One thing only tore at her soul—the longing to see Nancy. Nancy, Nancy, Nancy! She would say the name to herself a hundred times a day, and close her eyes to try and picture the little face, and the tuft of black curls on the top of the buoyant head. Her feverish hands felt vacant and aching for the touch of the soft, warm fingers she had held. Mrs. Avory comforted her. In the spring, or at latest in the summer, Edith should see Nancy again. Edith would be quite well in a month or two if she ate many raw eggs and was brave.
So Edith ate raw eggs and was brave.
Spring climbed up the five thousand feet and reached Davos at the end of May. Fritz Klasen was leaving. He was going back to Leipzig.
"Good-bye, good-bye."
He walked round the verandah at the resting-hour, shaking hands with everyone, saying, "Gute Besserung," and "Auf wiedersehen in Deutschland," to two or three Germans.
When he reached the Russian girl she was asleep. But Edith said: "Good-bye; I am so glad—I am so glad for you!"
When he had passed she saw that the Russian girl's eyes were open, and fixed on her.
"Did you speak?" said Edith.
"No," said the Russian in her strange, empty voice; "I thought."
Edith smiled. "What did you think?"
"I thought, why do you lie?"
Edith sat up, flushing, and her breath went a little shorter. "What?" she said.
Rosalia Antonowa kept her deep eyes on Edith's face.
"You said you were glad that he was going. Perhaps you meant it," she said. "You are here so short a time; but in a year, in two years, or four years, your lips will not be able to say that, and your heart will turn sick when another goes away, and you know that you will never go—never." Her bistre lids closed.
Edith tried to find something comforting to say to her.
"Davos is so beautiful, one ought not to mind. Surely you must love all this blue and white loveliness—the mountains, and the snow, and the sun."
"Oh, the mountains!" murmured Rosalia, with clenched teeth. "The mountains, weighing on my breast, and the snow freezing and choking me, and the sun blazing and blinding me. Oh!"—she raised her thin fist to the towering immensity round her—"oh, this unspeakable, this monstrous prison of death!"
Just then a Belgian girl passed, with pale lips and a tiny waist. She stopped to ask Antonowa how she was.
"Ill," said the Russian curtly.
When the girl had passed she spoke again to Edith. "And you will know what they mean when they ask you how you are. It is not the 'comment ça va?' of the rest of the world. No; here they mean it. They want to know. 'How are you? Are you better? Are you getting better more quickly than I am? Surely you are worse than I am! What! no hæmorrhage for a month? No temperature? That is good.' And then you see the hatred looking out of their eyes."
"Oh, I don't think so," said Edith.
The Russian kept silent for a while; then she said: "Klasen will come back again. He is not cured. The doctor told him not to go. He will soon come back again."
He came back four months later. Edith was pained to see how grey and dull his face looked. Now he would have to stay two or three years more. But he said he did not mind; he was happy.
He had been married a month, and his wife was with him. He introduced his girl-wife to Edith and to Mrs. Avory on the day following his arrival. She was a gentle blonde of nineteen, a blue-blooded flower of German aristocracy, who had married Klasen against her parents' will.
"I shall cure him," she said.
The summer was magnificent. She went out a great deal for long walks and steep climbs, and she sang at all parties and concerts, for she had a lovely young voice, all trills and runs like a lark's. She would sit on the verandah at resting-time beside her husband, and near Edith, for he had his old place again, and then after a while she would kiss his forehead and run off to pay calls, or to practise, or to drive down to Klosters.
Klasen's bright blue eyes would follow her. The Russian from her couch looked at him and read his thoughts. She read: "I married that I might not be alone—alone with my ill and my terror in the night and in the day—but I am still alone. When my wife is with me, and I cough, she says: 'Poor darling!' When in the night I choke and perspire, she turns in her sleep, and says: 'Poor darling!' and goes to sleep again. And I am alone with my ill and my terror."
The Russian girl thought that Klasen's blue eyes burned with something that was not all love.
After a time the girl-wife practised less, and paid fewer calls. She said she had lost weight, and one day with her husband she went to see the doctor.
Yes, there was something—oh, very slight, very slight!—at the apex of the left lung. So a couch was brought out for her on the terrace near her husband, and she rested in the afternoons with a rug tucked round her and a parasol over her head.
Fritz held the little hand with the new wedding-ring still bright upon it. When she coughed he said: "Poor darling!" And he was no more alone. In the day-time they laughed, and were very cheerful; in the night Fritz slept better; but his wife lay awake, and thought of her sister and her two little brothers safely at home with her father and mother in Berlin.
Sometimes holiday-makers and sport-lovers came up to Davos for a fortnight or a month, especially in the winter. Mrs. Avory noticed that they laughed much less than the invalids did. When they hurried through the lounge with their skates and skis, Klasen would say:
"See how they overdo things. They wear themselves out skiing, skating, curling, bobsleighing. Yes," he would add, nodding to his wife and to Edith, "almost everyone who comes here as a sportsman returns here as an invalid."
His little laugh made Edith shiver. Sometimes the girl-wife would bend forward.
"See, Fritz; two more have arrived to-day!"
"Do you think they are tourists?"
"Oh no, no; they are ill." And in the young eyes that gazed upon the new-comers was no sorrow.
The months and the years swung round, and Edith passed along them with light and ever lighter tread. And still and always the longing for Nancy tore at her heart with poisoned teeth. Every hour of her day was bitter with longing for the sound of the childish voice, the touch of the soft, warm hand. She sometimes thought: "If I were dying, Valeria would let Nancy come here to say good-bye." Then again she thought:
"If