Aaron's Rod, D. H. Lawrence [book recommendations for young adults .TXT] 📗

sullenly—and hated him. Lilly laughed to himself. The sick man was like a dog that is ill but which growls from a deep corner, and will bite if you put your hand in. He was in a state of black depression.

Lilly settled him down for the night, and himself went to bed. Aaron squirmed with heavy, pained limbs, the night through, and slept and had bad dreams. Lilly got up to give him drinks. The din in the market was terrific before dawn, and Aaron suffered bitterly.

In the morning he was worse. The doctor gave him injections against pneumonia.

“You wouldn’t like me to wire to your wife?” said Lilly.

“No,” said Aaron abruptly. “You can send me to the hospital. I’m nothing but a piece of carrion.”

“Carrion!” said Lilly. “Why?”

“I know it. I feel like it.”

“Oh, that’s only the sort of nauseated feeling you get with flu.”

“I’m only fit to be thrown underground, and made an end of. I can’t stand myself—”

He had a ghastly, grey look of self-repulsion.

“It’s the germ that makes you feel like that,” said Lilly. “It poisons the system for a time. But you’ll work it off.”

At evening he was no better, the fever was still high. Yet there were no complications—except that the heart was irregular.

“The one thing I wonder,” said Lilly, “is whether you hadn’t better be moved out of the noise of the market. It’s fearful for you in the early morning.”

“It makes no difference to me,” said Aaron.

The next day he was a little worse, if anything. The doctor knew there was nothing to be done. At evening he gave the patient a calomel pill. It was rather strong, and Aaron had a bad time. His burning, parched, poisoned inside was twisted and torn. Meanwhile carts banged, porters shouted, all the hell of the market went on outside, away down on the cobble setts. But this time the two men did not hear.

“You’ll feel better now,” said Lilly, “after the operation.”

“It’s done me harm,” cried Aaron fretfully. “Send me to the hospital, or you’ll repent it. Get rid of me in time.”

“Nay,” said Lilly. “You get better. Damn it, you’re only one among a million.”

Again over Aaron’s face went the ghastly grimace of self-repulsion.

“My soul’s gone rotten,” he said.

“No,” said Lilly. “Only toxin in the blood.”

Next day the patient seemed worse, and the heart more irregular. He rested badly. So far, Lilly had got a fair night’s rest. Now Aaron was not sleeping, and he seemed to struggle in the bed.

“Keep your courage up, man,” said the doctor sharply. “You give way.”

Aaron looked at him blackly, and did not answer.

In the night Lilly was up time after time. Aaron would slip down on his back, and go semi-conscious. And then he would awake, as if drowning, struggling to move, mentally shouting aloud, yet making no sound for some moments, mentally shouting in frenzy, but unable to stir or make a sound. When at last he got some sort of physical control he cried: “Lift me up! Lift me up!”

Lilly hurried and lifted him up, and he sat panting with a sobbing motion, his eyes gloomy and terrified, more than ever like a criminal who is just being executed. He drank brandy, and was laid down on his side.

“Don’t let me lie on my back,” he said, terrified. “No, I won’t,” said Lilly. Aaron frowned curiously on his nurse. “Mind you don’t let me,” he said, exacting and really terrified.

“No, I won’t let you.”

And now Lilly was continually crossing over and pulling Aaron on to his side, whenever he found him slipped down on his back.

In the morning the doctor was puzzled. Probably it was the toxin in the blood which poisoned the heart. There was no pneumonia. And yet Aaron was clearly growing worse. The doctor agreed to send in a nurse for the coming night.

“What’s the matter with you, man!” he said sharply to his patient. “You give way! You give way! Can’t you pull yourself together?”

But Aaron only became more gloomily withheld, retracting from life. And Lilly began to be really troubled. He got a friend to sit with the patient in the afternoon, whilst he himself went out and arranged to sleep in Aaron’s room, at his lodging.

The next morning, when he came in, he found the patient lying as ever, in a sort of heap in the bed. Nurse had had to lift him up and hold him up again. And now Aaron lay in a sort of semi-stupor of fear, frustrated anger, misery and self-repulsion: a sort of interlocked depression.

The doctor frowned when he came. He talked with the nurse, and wrote another prescription. Then he drew Lilly away to the door.

“What’s the matter with the fellow?” he said. “Can’t you rouse his spirit? He seems to be sulking himself out of life. He’ll drop out quite suddenly, you know, if he goes on like this. Can’t you rouse him up?”

“I think it depresses him partly that his bowels won’t work. It frightens him. He’s never been ill in his life before,” said Lilly.

“His bowels won’t work if he lets all his spirit go, like an animal dying of the sulks,” said the doctor impatiently. “He might go off quite suddenly—dead before you can turn round—”

Lilly was properly troubled. Yet he did not quite know what to do. It was early afternoon, and the sun was shining into the room. There were daffodils and anemones in a jar, and freezias and violets. Down below in the market were two stalls of golden and blue flowers, gay.

“The flowers are lovely in the spring sunshine,” said Lilly. “I wish I were in the country, don’t you? As soon as you are better we’ll go. It’s been a terrible cold, wet spring. But now it’s going to be nice. Do you like being in the country?”

“Yes,” said Aaron.

He was thinking of his garden. He loved it. Never in his life had he been away from a garden before.

“Make haste and get better, and we’ll go.”

“Where?” said Aaron.

“Hampshire. Or Berkshire. Or perhaps you’d like to go home? Would you?”

Aaron lay still, and did not answer.

“Perhaps you want to, and you don’t want to,” said Lilly. “You can please yourself, anyhow.”

There was no getting anything definite out of the sick man—his soul seemed stuck, as if it would not move.

Suddenly Lilly rose and went to the dressing-table.

“I’m going to rub you with oil,” he said. “I’m going to rub you as mothers do their babies whose bowels don’t work.”

Aaron frowned slightly as he glanced at the dark, self-possessed face of the little man.

“What’s the good of that?” he said irritably. “I’d rather be left alone.”

“Then you won’t be.”

Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen with oil, using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man’s lower body—the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted. Then Aaron was covered up again, and Lilly sat down in fatigue to look at his patient.

He saw a change. The spark had come back into the sick eyes, and the faint trace of a smile, faintly luminous, into the face. Aaron was regaining himself. But Lilly said nothing. He watched his patient fall into a proper sleep.

And he sat and watched him sleep. And he thought to himself: “I wonder why I do it. I wonder why I bother with him. . . . Jim ought to have taught me my lesson. As soon as this man’s really better he’ll punch me in the wind, metaphorically if not actually, for having interfered with him. And Tanny would say, he was quite right to do it. She says I want power over them. What if I do? They don’t care how much power the mob has over them, the nation, Lloyd George and Northcliffe and the police and money. They’ll yield themselves up to that sort of power quickly enough, and immolate themselves pro bono publico by the million. And what’s the bonum publicum but a mob power? Why can’t they submit to a bit of healthy individual authority? The fool would die, without me: just as that fool Jim will die in hysterics one day. Why does he last so long!

“Tanny’s the same. She does nothing really but resist me: my authority, or my influence, or just ME. At the bottom of her heart she just blindly and persistently opposes me. God knows what it is she opposes: just me myself. She thinks I want her to submit to me. So I do, in a measure natural to our two selves. Somewhere, she ought to submit to me. But they all prefer to kick against the pricks. Not that THEY get many pricks. I get them. Damn them all, why don’t I leave them alone? They only grin and feel triumphant when they’ve insulted one and punched one in the wind.

“This Aaron will do just the same. I like him, and he ought to like me. And he’ll be another Jim: he WILL like me, if he can knock the wind out of me. A lot of little Stavrogins coming up to whisper affectionately, and biting one’s ear.

“But anyhow I can soon see the last of this chap: and him the last of all the rest. I’ll be damned for ever if I see their Jims and Roberts and Julias and Scotts any more. Let them dance round their insipid hell-broth. Thin tack it is.

“There’s a whole world besides this little gang of Europeans. Except, dear God, that they’ve exterminated all the peoples worth knowing. I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for—they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics—even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers—the American races— and the South Sea Islanders—the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn’t frightened. All the rest are craven— Europeans, Asiatics, Africans—everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob. How I hate them: the mass-bullies, the individual Judases.

“Well, if one will be a Jesus he must expect his Judas. That’s why Abraham Lincoln gets shot. A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable.