Уилки Коллинз - The Two Destinies

My first attempt satisfied me that there was no reasonable hope, burdened as I now was, of breasting the strong current running toward the mid-river from either bank. I tried it on one side, and I tried it on the other, and gave it up. The one choice left was to let myself drift with her down the stream. Some fifty yards lower, the river took a turn round a promontory of land, on which stood a little inn much frequented by anglers in the season. As we approached the place, I made another attempt (again an attempt in vain) to reach the shore. Our last chance now was to be heard by the people of the inn. I shouted at the full pitch of my voice as we drifted past. The cry was answered. A man put off in a boat. In five minutes more I had her safe on the bank again; and the man and I were carrying her to the inn by the river-side.

The landlady and her servant-girl were equally willing to be of service, and equally ignorant of what they were to do. Fortunately, my medical education made me competent to direct them. A good fire, warm blankets, hot water in bottles, were all at my disposal. I showed the women myself how to ply the work of revival. They persevered, and I persevered; and still there she lay, in her perfect beauty of form, without a sign of life perceptible; there she lay, to all outward appearance, dead by drowning.

A last hope was left—the hope of restoring her (if I could construct the apparatus in time) by the process called “artificial respiration.” I was just endeavoring to tell the landlady what I wanted and was just conscious o f a strange difficulty in expressing myself, when the good woman started back, and looked at me with a scream of terror.

“Good God, sir, you’re bleeding!” she cried. “What’s the matter? Where are you hurt?”

In the moment when she spoke to me I knew what had happened. The old Indian wound (irritated, doubtless, by the violent exertion that I had imposed on myself) had opened again. I struggled against the sudden sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried to tell the people of the inn what to do. It was useless. I dropped to my knees; my head sunk on the bosom of the woman stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath me. The death-in-life that had got her had got me . Lost to the world about us, we lay, with my blood flowing on her, united in our deathly trance.

Where were our spirits at that moment? Were they together and conscious of each other? United by a spiritual bond, undiscovered and unsuspected by us in the flesh, did we two, who had met as strangers on the fatal bridge, know each other again in the trance? You who have loved and lost—you whose one consolation it has been to believe in other worlds than this—can you turn from my questions in contempt? Can you honestly say that they have never been your questions too?

THE morning sunlight shining in at a badly curtained window; a clumsy wooden bed, with big twisted posts that reached to the ceiling; on one side of the bed, my mother’s welcome face; on the other side, an elderly gentleman unremembered by me at that moment—such were the objects that presented themselves to my view, when I first consciously returned to the world that we live in.

“Look, doctor, look! He has come to his senses at last.”

“Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this.” My mother was rejoicing over me on one side of the bed; and the unknown gentleman, addressed as “doctor,” was offering me a spoonful of whisky-and-water on the other. He called it the “elixir of life”; and he bid me remark (speaking in a strong Scotch accent) that he tasted it himself to show he was in earnest.

The stimulant did its good work. My head felt less giddy, my mind became clearer. I could speak collectedly to my mother; I could vaguely recall the more marked events of the previous evening. A minute or two more, and the image of the person in whom those events had all centered became a living image in my memory. I tried to raise myself in the bed; I asked, impatiently, “Where is she?”

The doctor produced another spoonful of the elixir of life, and gravely repeated his first address to me.

“Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this.”

I persisted in repeating my question:

“Where is she?”

The doctor persisted in repeating his formula:

“Take a sup of this.”

I was too weak to contest the matter; I obeyed. My medical attendant nodded across the bed to my mother, and said, “Now, he’ll do.” My mother had some compassion on me. She relieved my anxiety in these plain words:

“The lady has quite recovered, George, thanks to the doctor here.”

I looked at my professional colleague with a new interest. He was the legitimate fountainhead of the information that I was dying to have poured into my mind.

“How did you revive her?” I asked. “Where is she now?”

The doctor held up his hand, warning me to stop.

“We shall do well, sir, if we proceed systematically,” he began, in a very positive manner. “You will understand, that every time you open your mouth, it will be to take a sup of this, and not to speak. I shall tell you, in due course, and the good lady, your mother, will tell you, all that you have any need to know. As I happen to have been first on what you may call the scene of action, it stands in the fit order of things that I should speak first. You will just permit me to mix a little more of the elixir of life, and then, as the poet says, my plain unvarnished tale I shall deliver.”

So he spoke, pronouncing in his strong Scotch accent the most carefully selected English I had ever heard. A hard-headed, square-shouldered, pertinaciously self-willed man—it was plainly useless to contend with him. I turned to my mother’s gentle face for encouragement; and I let my doctor have his own way.

“My name,” he proceeded, “is MacGlue. I had the honor of presenting my respects at your house yonder when you first came to live in this neighborhood. You don’t remember me at present, which is natural enough in the unbalanced condition of your mind, consequent, you will understand (as a professional person yourself) on copious loss of blood.”

There my patience gave way.

“Never mind me!” I interposed. “Tell me about the lady!”

“You have opened your mouth, sir!” cried Mr. MacGlue, severely. “You know the penalty—take a sup of this. I told you we should proceed systematically,” he went on, after he had forced me to submit to the penalty. “Everything in its place, Mr. Germaine—everything in its place. I was speaking of your bodily condition. Well, sir, and how did I discover your bodily condition? Providentially for you I was driving home yesterday evening by the lower road (which is the road by the river bank), and, drawing near to the inn here (they call it a hotel; it’s nothing but an inn), I heard the screeching of the landlady half a mile off. A good woman enough, you will understand, as times go; but a poor creature in any emergency. Keep still, I’m coming to it now. Well, I went in to see if the screeching related to anything wanted in the medical way; and there I found you and the stranger lady in a position which I may truthfully describe as standing in some need of improvement on the score of propriety. Tut! tut! I speak jocosely—you were both in a dead swoon. Having heard what the landlady had to tell me, and having, to the best of my ability, separated history from hysterics in the course of the woman’s narrative, I found myself, as it were, placed between two laws. The law of gallantry, you see, pointed to the lady as the first object of my professional services, while the law of humanity (seeing that you were still bleeding) pointed no less imperatively to you. I am no longer a young man: I left the lady to wait. My word! it was no light matter, Mr. Germaine, to deal with your case, and get you carried up here out of the way. That old wound of yours, sir, is not to be trifled with. I bid you beware how you open it again. The next time you go out for an evening walk and you see a lady in the water, you will do well for your own health to leave her there. What’s that I see? Are you opening your mouth again? Do you want another sup already?”