The drink gradually did good work. By the end of it she was sufficiently recovered for habit of mind to assert itself.
“God, I must look awful,” she remarked.
It did not seem that anyone but me was likely to be in a position to notice that, but I left it.
She got up and walked over to a mirror.
“I certainly do,” she confirmed. “Where——”
“You might try through there,” I suggested.
Twenty minutes or so passed before she came back. Considering the limited facilities there must have been, she’d made a good job; morale was much restored. She approximated now the film director’s idea of the heroine after a roughhouse, rather than the genuine thing.
“Cigarette?” I inquired as I slid another fortifying glass across.
While the pulling-round process was completing itself we swapped stories. To give her time, I let her have mine first. Then she said:
“I’m damned ashamed of myself. I’m not a bit like that really—like you found me, I mean. In fact, I’m reasonably self-reliant, though you might not think it. But somehow the whole thing had got too big for me. What has happened is bad enough, but the awful prospect ahead suddenly seemed too much to bear, and I panicked. I had got to thinking that perhaps I was the only person left in the whole world who could see. It got me down, and all at once I was frightened and silly; I cracked, and howled like a girl in a Victorian melodrama. I’d never, never have believed it of me.”
“Don’t let it worry you,” I said. “We’ll probably be learning a whole lot of surprising things about ourselves soon.”
“But it does worry me. If I start off by slipping my gears like that——” She left the sentence unfinished.
“I was near enough to panic in that hospital,” I said. “We’re human beings, not calculating machines.”
Her name was Josella Playton. There seemed to be something familiar about that, but I could not place it. Her home was in Dene Road, St. John’s Wood. The district fitted in more or less with my surmises. I remembered Dene Road. Detached, comfortable houses, mostly ugly, but all expensive. Her escape from the general affliction had been no less a matter of luck than mine—well, perhaps more. She had been at a party on that Monday night—a pretty considerable party, it seemed.
“I reckon somebody who thinks that kind of thing funny must have been fooling with the drinks,” she said. “I’ve never felt so ill as I did at the end of it—and I didn’t take a lot.”
Tuesday she recollected as a day of blurred misery and record hangover. About four in the afternoon she had had more than enough of it. She rang the bell and gave instructions that come comets, earthquakes, or the day of judgment itself, she was not to be disturbed. Upon that ultimatum she had taken a strong dose of sleeping draught, which on an empty stomach had worked with the efficiency of a knockout drop.
From then on she had known nothing until this morning, when she had been awakened by her father stumbling into her room.
“Josella,” he was saying, “for God’s sake get Dr. Mayle. Tell him I’ve gone blind—stone blind.”
She had been amazed to see that it was already almost nine o’clock. She got up and dressed hurriedly. The servants had answered neither her father’s bell nor her own. When she went to rouse them she had found to her horror that they, too, were blind.
With the telephone out of order, the only course seemed to be for her to take the car and fetch the doctor herself. The quiet streets and absence of traffic had seemed queer, but she had already driven almost a mile before it came to her what had happened. When she realized, she had all but turned back in panic—but that wasn’t going to do anyone any good. There was still the chance that the doctor might have escaped the malady, whatever it was, just as she herself had. So, with a desperate but waning hope, she had driven on.