Bella Donna. Robert Hichens
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said, after a minute of silence, "what do you make of it?"
She had a very attractive voice, not caressingly but carelessly seductive; a voice that suggested a creature both warm and lazy, that would, perhaps, leave many things to chance, but that might at a moment grip closely, and retain, what chance threw in her way.
"Please tell me your symptoms," the Doctor replied.
"But you tell me first—do I look ill?"
She fixed her eyes steadily upon him.
"What is the real reason why this woman has come to me?"
The thought flashed through the Doctor's mind as his eyes met hers, and he seemed to divine some strange under-reason lurking far down in her shrewd mind, almost to catch a glimpse of it ere it sank away into complete obscurity.
"Certain diseases," he said slowly, "stamp themselves unmistakably upon the faces of those who are suffering from them."
"Is any one of them stamped upon mine?"
"No."
She moved, as if settling herself more comfortably in her chair.
"Shall I put your parasol down?" he asked, stretching out his hand.
"No, thanks. I like holding it."
"I'm afraid you must tell me what are your symptoms."
"I feel a sort of general malaise."
"Is it a physical malaise?"
"Why not?" she said, almost sharply.
She smiled, as if in pity at her own childishness, and added immediately:
"I can't say that I suffer actual physical pain. But without that one may not feel particularly well."
"Perhaps your nervous system is out of order."
"I suppose every day you have silly women coming to you full of complaints but without the ghost of a malady?"
"You must not ask me to condemn my patients. And not only women are silly in that way."
He thought of Sir Henry Grebe, and of his own prescription.
"I had better examine you. Then I can tell you more about yourself."
While he spoke, he felt as if he were being examined by her. Never before had he experienced this curious sensation, almost of self-consciousness, with any patient.
"Oh, no," she said, "I don't want to be examined. I know my heart and my lungs and so on are sound enough."
"At any rate, allow me to feel your pulse."
"And look at my tongue, perhaps!"
She laughed, but she pulled off her glove and extended her hand to him. He put his fingers on her wrist, and looked at his watch. Her skin was cool. Her pulse beat regularly and strongly. From her, a message to his lightly touching fingers, flowed surely determination, self-possession, hardihood, even combativeness. As he felt her pulse he understood the defiance of her life.
"Your pulse is good," he said, dropping her hand.
During the short time he had touched her, he seemed to have learnt a great deal about her.
And she—how much had she learnt about him?
He found himself wondering in a fashion unorthodox in a doctor.
"Mrs. Chepstow," he said, speaking rather brusquely, "I wish you would kindly explain to me exactly why you have come here to-day. If you don't feel ill, why waste your time with a doctor? I am sure you are not a woman to run about seeking what you have."
"You mean health! But—I don't feel as I used to feel. Formerly I was a very strong woman, so strong that I often felt as if I were safe from unhappiness, real unhappiness. For Schopenhauer was right, I suppose, and if one's health is perfect, one rises above what are called misfortunes. And, you know, I have had great misfortunes."
"Yes?"
"You must know that."
"Yes."
"I didn't really mind them—not enormously. Even when I was what I suppose nice people called 'ruined'—after my divorce—I was quite able to enjoy life and its pleasures, eating and drinking, travelling, yachting, riding, motoring, theatre-going, gambling, and all that sort of thing. People who are being universally condemned, or pitied, are often having a quite splendid time, you know."
"Just as people who are universally envied are often miserable."
"Exactly. But of late I have begun to—well, to feel different."
"In what way exactly?"
"To feel that my health is no longer perfect enough to defend me against—I might call it ennui."
"Yes?"
"Or I might call it depression, melancholy, in fact. Now I don't want—I simply will not be the victim of depression, as so many women are. Do you realise how frightfully women—many women—suffer secretly from depression when they—when they begin to find out that they are not going to remain eternally young?"
"I realize it, certainly."
"I will not be the victim of that depression, because it ruins one's appearance and destroys one's power. I am thirty-eight."
Her large blue eyes met the Doctor's eyes steadily.
"Yes?"
"In England nowadays that isn't considered anything. In England, if one has perfect health, one may pass for a charming and attractive woman till one is at least fifty, or even more. But to seem young when one is getting on, one must feel young. Now, I no longer feel young. I am positive feeling young is a question of physical health. I believe almost everything one feels is a question of physical health. Mystics, people who believe in metempsychosis, in the progress upward and immortality of the soul, idealists—they would cry out against me as a rank materialist. But you are a doctor, and know the empire of the body. Am I not right? Isn't almost everything one feels an emanation from one's molecules, or whatever they are called? Isn't it an echo of the chorus of one's atoms?"
"No doubt the state of the body affects the state of the mind."
"How cautious you are!"
A rather contemptuous smile flickered over her too red lips.
"And really you must be in absolute antagonism with the priests, the Christian Scientists, with all the cranks and the self-deceivers who put soul above matter, who pretend that soul is independent of matter. Why, only the other day I was reading about the psychophysical investigations with the pneumograph and the galvanometer, and I'm certain that—" Suddenly she checked herself. "But that's beside the question. I've told you what I mean, what I think, that health triumphs over nearly everything."
"You seem to be very convinced, a very sincere materialist."
"And you?"
"Despite the discoveries of science, I think there are still depths of mystery in man."
"Woman included?"
"Oh, dear, yes! But to return to your condition."
"Ah!"
She glanced at a watch on her wrist.
"Your day of work, ends—?"
"At six, as a rule."
"I mustn't keep you. The truth is this. I am losing my zest for life, and because I am losing my zest, I am losing my power over life. I am beginning to feel weary, melancholy, sometimes apprehensive."
"Of what?"
"Middle age, I suppose, and the ending of all things."
"And you want me to prescribe against melancholy?"
"Why not? What is a doctor for?