Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [225]
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said. ‘He’s sleeping.’
‘He would be,’ said Dr. Crowther, nodding, as though he had known everything in advance-which indeed he had; for the disease was running its invariable course.
Elinor accompanied him up the stairs. ‘Is it a good sign?’ she asked in a voice that implored a favourable answer.
Dr. Crowther pushed out his lips, cocked his head a little on one side, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well…’ he said non-committally and was silent. He had saved at least five foot-pounds of energy by not explaining that, in meningitis, a phase of depression follows the initial phase of excitement.
The child now dozed away his days in a kind of stupor, suffering no pain (Elinor was thankful for that), but disquietingly unresponsive to what was going on about him, as though he were not fully alive. When he opened his eyes she saw that the pupils were so enormously dilated that there was hardly any iris left. Little Phil’s blue and mischievous regard had turned to expressionless blackness. The light which had caused him such an agony during the first days of his illness no longer troubled him. No longer did he start and tremble at every sound. Indeed, the child did not seem to hear when he was spoken to. Two days passed and then, quite suddenly and with a horrible sinking sense of apprehension, Elinor realized that he was almost completely deaf.
‘Deaf?’ echoed Dr. Crowther, when she told him of her dreadful discovery. ‘Common symptom.’
‘But isn’t there anything to be done about it?’ she asked. The trap was closing on her again, the trap from which she had imagined herself free when that terrible screaming had quieted into silence.
Dr. Crowther shook his head, briskly, but only once each way. He did not speak. A foot-pound saved is a foot-pound gained.
‘But we can’t let him be deaf,’ she said, when the doctor was gone, appealing with a kind of incredulous despair to her husband. ‘We can’t let him be deaf.’ She knew he could do nothing; and yet she hoped. She realized the horror; but she refused to believe in it.
‘But if the doctor says there isn’t anything to be done…’
‘But deaf?’ she kept repeating, questioningly.’deaf, Phil? Deaf?’
‘Perhaps it’ll pass off by itself,’ he suggested consolingly and wondered, as he spoke the words, whether she still imagined that the child would recover.
Early next morning when, in her dressing-gown, she tiptoed upstairs for nurse’s report on the night, she found the child already awake. One eyelid was wide open and the eye, all pupil, was looking straight up at the ceiling; the other was half shut in a permanent wink that imparted to the thin and shrunken little face an expression of ghastly facetiousness.
‘He can’t open it,’ the nurse explained. ‘It’s paralysed.’
Between those long and curly lashes, which she had so often envied him, Elinor could see that the eyeball had rolled away to the exterior corner of the eye and was staring out sideways in a fixed unseeing squint.
‘Why the devil,’ said Cuthbert Arkwright, in the tone of one who has a personal grievance, ‘why the devil doesn’t Quarles come back to London?’ He hoped to extort from him a preface to his new illustrated edition of the Mimes of Herondas.
The rustication, Willie Weaver explained polysyllabically, was not voluntary. ‘His child’s ill,’ he added, uttering his little cough of self-applause; ‘it seems very reluctant, as they would say in Denmark, to absent itself from felicity much longer.’
‘Well, I wish it would hurry up about it,’ grumbled Arkwright. He frowned. ‘Perhaps I’d better try to get hold of someone else for my preface.’
At Gattenden the days had been like the successive stages of an impossibly horrible dream. When he had been deaf for a couple of days, little Phil ceased also to see. The squinting eyes were quite blind. And after nearly a week’s respite there was a sudden recurrence of the pain of the first days; he began to scream. Later he was seized several times with violent attacks of convulsions; it was as though a devil had entered into him and were torturing him from within. Then, one side of his face and half his body became paralysed and the flesh began to waste almost visibly from off his bones, like wax melting away in the heat of some inward and invisible fire. Trapped by her helplessness and by that horrible sense of guilt, which the news of Everard