it as a drunk act, and he got by. He could not eat the supper she brought to his dressing room. After a look at his grey face she did not press him. But he would not go to hospital, nor allow her to send for a doctor.
He opened a fresh bottle and took a tumblerful as if it were ghastly medicine, and the shaking that ran through his body lessened. At the end of the second show she bundled him into a cab and took him back to the hotel, where she propped him up in bed with water to hand, and of course the gin. She raced back to the Pantages and made her nine o’clock call by a whisker. In the glory of taking the chilly Edmonton audience by storm she was able to forget his cadaverous eyes, not beseeching her to stay but only staring at her face as if it were the last thing he would see.
Which it was, because when she got home that evening she found him in the elegant bathroom, blind drunk, clinging to the tub with clawed hands. His eyes almost sewn shut, so deep was his refusal to open them. ‘Cannot, no,’ he whispered, when she begged him to look at her. His belly was distended and stiff, and he quaked from time to time—she ran to the house-phone and asked the desk to send for a doctor or a nurse, and ran back to hold him till help came.
But Julius opened his mouth like a fountain’s mouth, and like a fountain, a waterfall of blood poured out. The violent noise of the blood slamming into the bathtub made Bella dizzy. Towels—she reached for a towel and shoved it into Julius’s mouth, but more blood came out, first leaking and soaking and then in a shuddering stream, and the bathtub was filling with it, and another towel, and another. She could not stop it. The blood was a terrible bright dark red.
No, no—the necessity of it remaining inside his body made her eyes swim and blacken, until she took hold of herself. She tried to speak to Julius, saying nothing useful, but just, ‘No, no, don’t, I will hold you—’ To which he made no answer, nor did his eyes ever open.
The doctor took Julius out of her arms and laid him flat on the blood-swimming tiles, and a sigh came out of Julius’s mouth but the doctor said that was just air, that he had already been dead for some time. Because the body cannot live without the blood that fills its caverns and tributaries.
A nurse helped Bella up from the floor and washed her hands and face till water took all that blood away and they put her in a different room, and that was the last of Julius.
Cartwheel
Clover reread Aurora’s letters as she had once read Victor’s. (She read Bella’s, too, but they were so few she had to hoard them, like Madame with her last box of French nougat.) She knew the cast of people in Qu’Appelle and read between the lines when necessary; she was dismayed both by Lewis Ridgeway’s entire absence from the letter, and the news of Aleck Graham.
Dr. Graham has received a telegram reporting his son Aleck ‘wounded, no particulars.’ Dear Mabel spent a day in her room, and another day sitting in the darkened church; then she wrote to Aleck (the first of no doubt a thousand cheerful letters) and went back to her ordinary work.
The Dean has an illuminated War Roll in St Peter’s. All the boys gone from Qu’Appelle and Ft Qu’Appelle and Indian Head. Many of them already dead. This is the news: lists, telegrams, pride in one son’s sacrifice.
Pride holds them up after their sons are gone, Clover thought. So we agree not to take that away. But pride was not helping Madame these days. She crept back and forth to the atelier like a mouse, shrinking within her draperies. Only calm, briefly, when feeding Harriet or playing at puppets with her.
The hospital discharged Victor in April, saying they’d done everything they could; the army invalided him out. His leg was useless; his vision and lungs were compromised from the chlorine attack in 1915, the army doctor told her.
‘He can walk, in a dot-and-carry way—and will regain some strength for walking, but he’ll always need the crutch. He won’t be fit for any regular kind of life,’ he said.
The doctor’s moustache was cut straight across, perhaps with