Twilight by Julia Frankau (ready to read books txt) 📕
- Author: Julia Frankau
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“All right, I won’t.” He asked nurse in a low voice, “How much did you give her?”
“A quarter of a.grain, the same as before.” The bleeding had not left off. Benham straightened me amongst the pillows and fed me with ice.
“I shall give her another quarter,” he said abruptly after watching for a few minutes. I smiled gratefully at him. Benham made no comment, but got more hot water. He made the injection carefully enough, but I preferred nurse’s manipulation.
“For Margaret?” I asked him.
“Partly,” he answered. “You will dream tonight.”
“I shall die tonight. I want to die tonight. Give me something to hurry things, be kind. I don’t mind dying, but all this!”
“Don’t. I can’t. Not again. For God’s sake don’t ask me!” There was more than sympathy in his voice. There was agitation, even tears. “You will get better from this.”
“And then worse again, always worse. I want it ended. Give me something.”
“Oh! God! I can’t bear this. Margaret!”
“Don’t call me Margaret. My name is Jane. What is that stuff that criminals take in the dock? Italian poisoners keep it in a ring. I see one now, with pointed beard, melancholy eyes, a great ruby in the ring. Is anything the matter with my eyes? I can’t see.”
“Shut them. Be perfectly quiet. The Italian poisoner will pass.”
“You will give me something?”
“Not this time.”
I must have slept. When I woke he was still there. I was very comfortable and pleased to see him. “Why am I not asleep?”
“You are, but you don’t know it.”
“You won’t tell Ella?”
“Not unless you wish it.”
“I’ve written to her. See it goes.” I heard afterwards he searched for a letter, but could only find four words “Good-morning, Widow Lovegrove…” which held no meaning for him.
“Don’t let me wake again. I want to go.”
“Not yet, not yet…”
There followed another week of morphia dreams and complete content. I was roused with difficulty, and reluctantly, to drink milk from a feeding-cup, to have my temperature taken, my hands and face washed, my sheets changed. There was neither morning nor evening, only these disturbances and Ella’s eyes and voice in the clouded distance, vague yet comforting.
“You will soon be better, your temperature is going down. Don’t speak. Only nod your head. Shall I cable for Dennis?”
I shook it, went on slowly shaking it, I liked the motion, turning from side to side on the pillow, continuing it. Ella, frightened, begged me to leave off, summoned nurse, who took my cheeks gently between her hands. That did not stop it, at least I recollect being angry at the slight compulsion and making up my mind, my poor lost feeble mind that I should do what I liked, that I would never leave off moving my head from side to side.
That night I dreamed of water, great masses of black water, heaving; too deep for sound or foam. Upon them I was borne backwards and forwards until I turned giddy and sick, very cold. The Gates of Silence were beyond, but I was too weak to get there, the bar was between us. I saw the Gates, but could not reach them. The waters were cold and ever rising. Sometimes, submerged, my lips tasted their dank saltness and I knew that my strength was all spent. Soon I should sink deeper. I wished it was over.
Then One came, when I was past help, or hope, drowning in the dark waters, and said:
“Now I will take you with me.” We were going rapidly through air currents, soft warm air-currents and amazing space, a swift journey, over plains and mountains. At last to the North, and there I saw snow-mountains and at the foot the cold sea, frozen and blue, heaving slowly. Swimming in that slow frozen sea, I saw a seal, brown and beautiful, swimming calmly, with happy handsome eyes. They met mine. One who was beside me said:
“That is your sister Julia. See how happy she looks, and content…”
Then everything was gone and I woke up in my quiet bedroom, the fire burning low and Ella in the chair by my side.
“Do you want anything?” She leaned over me for the answer.
“I have just seen Julia.”
She hushed me, tears were in her reddened eyes. Our sister Julia had been dead two years, to our unextinguishable sorrow.
“Don’t cry, she is very happy.”
I told her my dream. She said it was a beautiful dream, and I was to try and sleep again.
“Why are you sitting up?” I asked her.
“It is not late,” was her evasive reply.
Many nights after that I saw her sitting there, I forgot even to ask her why, I was too far gone, or perhaps only selfish. I did not know for a long time whether it was night or day. I always asked the time when I woke, but forgot or did not hear the answer, drank obediently through the feeding-cup, the feeding-cup was always there; enormously large, unnaturally white, holding little or nothing, unsatisfactory. Once I remember I decided upon remaining awake to tell poor Ella how much better I felt.
I told it to Margaret instead, and she had no interest in the news, none at all.
“I knew you were not going to die yet. Not until you had written my story.”
“It seems not to matter,” I answered feebly, “to be small and trivial.”
“Work whilst ye have the light” she quoted. The words were in the room, in the air.
“It is not light, not very light,” I pleaded.
“There has been no biography of me. How would you like it if it had been you? And all the critics said I would live…”
“Must I stay for that?”
“You promised, you know.”
“Did I? I had forgotten.”
“No, no. You could not forget, not even you. And you will make your readers cry.”
“But if I make myself cry too?”
“Write.”
And I wrote, sick with exhaustion, without conscious volition or the power to stop. I wonder whether any other writer has ever had this experience. I could not stop writing although my arm swelled to an unnatural size and my side ached. I covered ream after ream of paper. I never stopped nor halted for word or thought. I was wearied, aching from head to foot, shaking and even crying with fatigue and the pain in my swollen arm or side, but never ceasing to write, like a galley slave at his oar. Sometimes in swimming semiconsciousness I thought this was my eternal punishment, that because I had swept so much aside that I might write, and yet had written badly, now I must write for ever and for ever, words and scenes and sentences that would be obliterated, that would not stand. I knew in these semiconscious moments that I was writing in water and not in ink. But I was driven on, and on, relentlessly.
HERE is the story I wrote under morphia and in that strange driving stress, set down as well as I can recall it, but seeming now so much less real and distinct. I have not tried to polish, only to remember. There was then no effort after composition, no correction, transposition nor alteration, and neither is there now; nor conscious psychology nor sentiment. The scenes were all set in the house where I lay, and there was no pause in the continuity of the drama. I saw every gesture and heard every word spoken. The letters were and are before me as confirmatory evidence. My own intrusive illness minimised the interest of the circumstances to my immediate surroundings. But to me it seems that the consecutive actuality of the morphia dream or dreams is unusual if not unique, and gives value to the narrative.
I refer to the MS. notes and diary for the beginning of the story, but have had to make several emendations and additions. There were too many epigrams, and the impression the writer wished to convey was only in the intention, and not in the execution. What she left out I have put in. It should be easy to separate my work from hers. And she carried her story very little way. From the beginning of the letters the autobiography stopped. It started abruptly, and ended in the same way.
There were trial titles in the MS. notes. “Between the Nisi and the Absolute “competed in favour with “The Love Story of a Woman of Genius.”
Margaret Belinda Rysam was the daughter of a New Yorker on the up-grade. Her father began to make money when she was a baby and never left off, even to take breath, until she was between thirteen and fourteen. Then his wife died, not of a broken heart, but of her appetites fed to repletion, and an overwhelming desire for further provender. Her poor mouth, so much larger than her stomach, was always open. He piled a great house on Fifth Avenue into it and a bewilderment of furniture, modern old Masters and antiquities, also pearls and other jewellery. She never shut it, although later there were a country house to digest and some freak entertainments, a multiplicity of reporters and a few disappointments. The really “right people “were difficult to secure, the nearly “right people “were dust and ashes. A continental tour was to follow and a London season. … Before they started she died of a surfeit which the doctors called by some other name and operated upon, expensively.
In the pause of the hushed house and the funeral Edgar B. Rysam began to think that perhaps he had made sufficient money. He really grieved for that poor open mouth and those upturned grasping hands, realising that it was to overfill them that he had worked. He gave up his office and found the days empty, discovered his young daughter, and, nearly to her undoing, filled them with her. During her mother’s life she had been left to the happy seclusion of nursery or schoolroom; subsidiary to the maelstrom of gold-dispensing. Now she had more governesses and tutors than could be fitted into the hurrying hours, and became easily aware of her importance, that she was the adored and only child of a widowed millionaire. Forced into concentrating her entire attention upon herself she discovered a remarkable personality. Bent at first on astonishing her surroundings she succeeded in astonishing herself. She found that she acquired knowledge with infinite ease and had a multiplicity of minor talents. She wrote verses and essays, sang, and played on various instruments. Highly paid governesses and tutors exclaimed and proclaimed. The words prodigy, and genius, pursued and illuminated her. At the age of sixteen no subject seemed to her so interesting as the consideration of her own psychology.
Nothing could have saved her at this juncture but what actually occurred. For she had no incentive to concentration, and every battle was won before it was fought. To be was almost sufficient. To do, superfluous, almost arrogant.
Edgar B. Rysam had, however, forgotten to safeguard his resources. That is to say, his fortune was invested in railroad bonds and stocks. In the great railway panic of 1893 prices came tumbling down and public confidence fell with them. Edgar B. in alarm, for he had forgotten the ways of railway magnates and financiers, sold out and lost half his capital. He reopened his office, and by dint of buying and selling at the wrong time, rid himself of another quarter. When he woke to his position, and retired for the second time, he had only sufficient means to be considered a rich man away from his native land. The sale of the mansion in Fifth Avenue, the country house, and the yacht damned
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