The Fire and the Wood by R.C. Hutchinson

Author:R.C. Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448213399
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

The curve of reactions indicated that the post-injection crisis should occur, on this occasion, from the time of injection plus twenty-seven hours. That meant, approximately, at midnight on the night following.

She was still sleeping then; she had spent most of that day in what looked like natural sleep, drowsy and contented. Her temperature was up, but only a little above the normal for the day’s last reading. There was no sweating yet. From some cause, of the kind which buckles the mathematics of research, the febrile reaction was being delayed.

A little after twelve, Josef went down to his own room and took off his shoes and collar for an hour’s rest. It had always been the worst part of attending Minna, these times when there was nothing for him to do; when he only sat, as if on the heights above a harbour, and watched the ship with all his possessions fighting through violent seas. And now the ship was out again, bearing himself as well as his ambitions; the newfound core of his existence, the fresh warm springs that soothed his tiredness, were all at hazard there. He had hardly left her through the day, dreading to be out of sight at any moment when she might want him. Stale-mouthed, he had sat with the little broken chair grooving his flesh while the shadow of the window-frame passed across the bed from one wall to the other; until, with darkness shutting a lid upon the room, the walls had leaned together like coffin sides against the streak of paleness where her face was, until there was only the broken, mournful noise of her breathing, and the cold fingers that he held. With the light switched on another day had seemed to begin, yellow and hungry. His eyes grew watery, his ears created fearful sounds for themselves. Time loitering, the angles of the room, the familiarity of walls and shadows, had become like creases in his clothes, rubbing a soreness on his sensibility. His loneliness took no relief from the deaf and silent figure there. The edge of anxiety pressed deeper, he had to move away.

There was half a bottle of milk in his cupboard, and he thought of making coffee; but it meant getting out a cup and spoon, finding some matches, and he was too tired for all that. Not really hungry now: he had had a piece of liver-sausage for breakfast, and had learnt in childhood to keep his stomach stretched on a memory. There should be biscuits somewhere—somewhere on the writing-desk—but he couldn’t find them. Someone had been in here, shifting his things. That poor cabbage-pated old Spühler woman, he supposed … He put a chair on the bed and arranged the back of it under his legs to give a certain discomfort: he didn’t want to sleep soundly. But he was fairly confident that a cry from above would wake him.

He began going back to his earliest acquaintance with Minna and tried to see her as she had appeared then.

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