Lalage's Lovers Part 21

"Yes. It's becoming a perfect epidemic in the district. I have forty cases on my list."

"If Vittie's got it," I said, "there's no reason in the world why I should get up."

McMeekin is a singularly stupid man. He did not see what I meant. I had to explain myself.

"The only object I should have in getting up," I said, speaking very slowly and distinctly, "would be to prevent Vittie going round the const.i.tuency when I couldn't be after him. Now that he's down himself he can't do anything more than I can; so I may just as well stay where I am."

Even then McMeekin failed to catch my point.

"You'll have to get up some time or other," he said. "You may just as well start to-day."

When he had left the room I appealed to the nurse.

"Did you ever," I said, "hear a more inane remark than that? In the first place I have pretty well made up my mind never to get up again. It isn't worth while for all the good I ever get by being up. In the second place it's ridiculous to say that because one has to do a thing sometime one may as well do it at once. You have to be buried sometime, but you wouldn't like it if McMeekin told you that you might just as well be buried to-day."

I hold that this was a perfectly sound argument which knocked the bottom out of McMeekin's absurd statement, but it did not convince the nurse.

As I might have known beforehand she was in league with McMeekin.

Instead of agreeing with me that the man was a fool, she smiled at me in that particularly trying way called bright and cheery.

"But wouldn't it be nice to sit up for a little?" she said.

"No, it wouldn't."

"It would be a change for you, and you'd sleep better afterward."

"I've got on capitally without sleep for nearly a week and I don't see any use in reacquiring a habit, a wasteful habit, which I've succeeded in breaking."

She said something about the doctor's orders.

"The doctor," I replied, "did not give any orders. He gave permission, which is a very different thing."

I spent some time in explaining the difference between an order and a permission. I used simple ill.u.s.trations and made my meaning so plain that no one could possibly have missed it. The nurse, instead of admitting that I had convinced her, went out of the room. She came back again with a cupful of beef tea which she offered me with another bright smile. If I were not a man with a very high sense of the courtesy due to women I should have taken the cup and thrown it at her head. It is, I think, very much to my credit that I drank the beef tea and then did nothing worse than turn my face to the wall.

At two o'clock she got my dressing gown and somewhat ostentatiously spread it out on a chair in front of the fire. I lay still and said nothing, though I saw that she still clung to the idea of getting me out of bed. Then she rang the bell and made the red-haired girl bring a dilapidated armchair into the room. She pummelled its cushions with her fists for some time and then put a pillow on it. This showed me that she fully expected to succeed in making me sit up. I was perfectly determined to stay where I was. I pretended to go to sleep and even went the length of snoring in a long-drawn, satisfied kind of way. She came over and looked at me. I very slightly opened the corner of one eye and saw by the expression of her face that she did not believe I was really asleep. I prepared for the final struggle by gripping the bedclothes tightly with both hands and poking my feet between the bars at the bottom of the bed.

At three o'clock she had me seated in the armchair, clothed in my dressing gown, with a rug wrapped round my legs. I was tingling with suppressed rage and flushed with a feeling of degradation. I intended, as soon as I regained my self control, to say some really nasty things to her. Before I had made up my mind which of several possible remarks she would dislike most, t.i.therington came into the room. The nurse does not like t.i.therington. She has never liked him since the day that he kept her outside the door while we drank champagne. She always smoothes her ap.r.o.n with both hands when she sees him, which is a sign that she would like to do him a bodily injury if she could. On this occasion, alter smoothing her ap.r.o.n and shoving a protruding hair pin into the back of her hair, she marched out of the room.

"McMeekin tells me," I said to t.i.therington, "that Vittie has got the influenza. Is it true?"

"He says he has," said t.i.therington, with strong emphasis on the word "says."

"Then I wish you'd go round and offer him the use of my nurse. I don't want her."

"He has two aunts, and besides----"

I was not going to allow Vittie's aunts to stand in my way. I interrupted t.i.therington with an argument which I felt sure he would appreciate.

"He may have twenty aunts," I said; "that's not my point. What I'm thinking of is the excellent effect it will produce in the const.i.tuency if I publicly sacrifice myself by handing over my nurse to my political opponent. The amount of electioneering capital which could be made out of an act of heroism of that kind--why, it would catch the popular imagination more than if I jumped into a mill race to save Vittie from a runaway horse, and everybody knows that if you can bring off a spoof of that sort an election is as good as won."

t.i.therington growled.

"All the papers would have it," I said. "Even the Nationalists would be obliged to admit that I'd done a particularly n.o.ble thing." "I don't believe Vittie has the influenza."

"McMeekin said so."

"It would be just like Vittie," said t.i.therington, "to pretend he had it so as to get an excuse for calling in McMeekin. He knows McMeekin has been wobbling ever since you got ill."

This silenced me. If Vittie is crafty enough to devise such a complicated scheme-for bribing McMeekin without bringing himself within the meshes of the Corrupt Practices Act he is certainly too wise to allow himself to be subjected to my nurse.

"Anyway," said t.i.therington, "it's not Vittie's influenza I came here to talk about."

"Have you got the key of your bag with you?"

t.i.therington was in a bad temper, but he allowed himself to grin. He went down on his hands and knees and dragged the bag from its hiding place under the bed.

We opened two half bottles, but although t.i.therington drank a great deal more than his share he remained morose.

"That girl," he said, "is playing old hookey with the const.i.tuency. I won't be answerable for the consequences unless she's stopped at once."

"I suppose you're speaking about Miss Beresford?"

"Instead of talking rot about woman's suffrage," said t.i.therington savagely, "and ragging Vittie, which is what we brought her here for, she's going round calling everybody a liar. And it won't do. I tell you it won't do at all."

"You said it was a good speech," I reminded him.

"I shouldn't have minded that speech. It's what she's been at since then. She spent all day yesterday and the whole of this morning going round from house to house ga.s.sing about the way n.o.body in political life ever speaks the truth. She has a lot of young fools worked up to such a state that I can scarcely show my face in the streets, and I hear that they mobbed a man up at the railway station who came down to support O'Donoghue. He deserved it, of course, but it's impossible to say who they'll attack next. Half the town is going about with yards of white ribbon pinned on to them."

"What on earth for?"

"Some foolery. It's the badge of some blasted society she's started.

There's A.S.P.L. on the ribbons."

"I told you at the start," I said, "that the letters A.S.P.L. couldn't stand for votes for women, but you would have it that they did."

"She has the whole town placarded with notices of a meeting she's going to hold to-morrow night. We can't possibly have that, you know."

"Well, why don't you stop her?"

"Stop her! I've done every d.a.m.ned thing I could to stop her. I went round to her this morning and told her you'd sign any pledge she liked about woman's suffrage if she'd only clear out of this and go to Belfast. She as good as told me to my face that she wouldn't give a tinker's curse for any pledge I had a hand in giving. My own impression is that she doesn't care if she never got a vote, or any other woman either. All she wants is to turn the place into a bear garden and spoil the whole election. I've come here to tell you plain that if you don't interfere I'll wash my hands of the whole affair."

"Don't do that," I said. "Think of the position I'd be in if you deserted me."

"Then stop her."

"I would. I would stop her at once if I hadn't got the influenza. You see yourself the state I'm in. The nurse wouldn't let me do it even if McMeekin agreed."

"d.a.m.n the nurse!"