" For
Christine--for whom he had never been able to buy so much as a bunch of
flowers.)
"I--I don't know."
"You see, I heard what you said."
(What had he said? He tried to remember. No. 10. Better dead. Yes, of
course that was it. He couldn't go back on that. His mind seemed to
strain and stagger under the challenge like a half-dead horse under the
whip.)
"She didn't hear me, anyway."
"I want to know--was it just--just a sort of pose--or did you mean it?"
"It was true."
"That doesn't seem to me to matter. It was a beastly thing to have
thought--beastlier to have said----"
He stopped short, as though she had struck him across the face. For an
instant he was blind with pain, but afterwards he steadied, grew deadly
cool and clear-headed. There was a constant movement in the corridor and
he turned abruptly, almost with authority, into an empty operating
theatre. Instinctively he had chosen his ground. Here was symbolized
everything that he trusted and believed in--a cool, dispassionate
seeking, the ruthless cutting out of waste. Yet in the half-light the
place surrounded them both with a ghostly, almost sinister unreality.
Its stark immaculateness lay like a chill, ironic hand on their distress.
It made mock of their unhappiness. It divested them of their humanity.
The nauseating sweetness that still lingered in the sterilized air was
like incense offered up on the grotesque sacrificial altar that stood
bare and brutal beneath the glass-domed roof.
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