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During all the long night Dick sat by David's bedside. Earlier in
the evening there had been a consultation; David had suffered a light
stroke, but there was no paralysis, and the prognosis was good. For this
time, at least, David had escaped, but there must be no other time. He
was to be kept quiet and free from worry, his diet was to be carefully
regulated, and with care he still had long years before him.
David slept, his breathing heavy and slow. In the morning there would
be a nurse, but that night Dick, having sent Lucy to bed, himself
kept watch. On the walnut bed lay Doctor David's portly figure, dimly
outlined by the shaded lamp, and on a chair drawn close sat Dick.
He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no untoward
symptoms appeared, as David's sleep seemed to grow easier and more
natural, Dick's thoughts wandered. They went to Elizabeth first, and
then on and on from that starting point, through the years ahead. He saw
the old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for his return; he saw both
their lives united and flowing on together, with children, with small
cares, with the routine of daily living, and behind it all the two of
them, hand in hand.
Then his mind turned on himself. How often in the past ten years it had
done that! He had sat off, with a sort of professional detachment,
and studied his own case. With the entrance into his world of the new
science of psycho-analysis he had made now and then small, not very
sincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his own unconscious devising.
Not very sincere, for with the increase of his own knowledge of the mind
he had learned that behind such conditions as his lay generally,
deeply hidden, the desire to forget. And that behind that there lay,
acknowledged or not, fear.
"But to forget what?" he used to say to David, when the first text-books
on the new science appeared, and he and David were learning the
new terminology, Dick eagerly and David with contemptuous snorts of
derision. "To forget what?"
"You had plenty to forget," David would say, stolidly. "I think this
man's a fool, but at that--you'd had your father's death, for one thing.
And you'd gone pretty close to the edge of eternity yourself. You'd
fought single-handed the worst storm of ten years, you came out of it
with double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that cabin about fifty-six
hours. Forget! You had plenty to forget."