A Song of Sixpence by A. J. Cronin Page A

and general aplomb, confirmed by scores of instances in which I had seen him carry off a difficult situation without turning a hair, remained absolute and unshakable. Even in his few failures, he had somehow managed to remove the implication of defeat by a final attitude of amused or careless indifference. His two phrases ‘ leave it to me’and ‘I know what I’m doing’, uttered calmly and confidently, had become for me the touchstones of triumphant achievement.
    Mother no longer sang as she went about her work. I failed to understand her constant air of stress. In her worried state she had been driven to confide in Miss Greville and to seek relief in our neighbour’s sympathetic response. Yet as the days slipped past, all was going according to plan. Father certainly did not look ill. His colour, always ruddy, remained good, his eye was bright and he had suffered no loss of appetite. As he had promised, while never affecting the attitudes of invalidism, he was taking care of himself, avoiding the worst of the weather, and taking things easy during long week-ends. If he still coughed, expectorating surreptitiously into the little flask he now carried for that purpose, then in only a short time, a matter of weeks, he would go away—Switzerland, suggested by Miss Greville, was now definitely agreed upon—and be quickly cured. Meanwhile he was persisting with his own herbal remedies, periodically he called upon Mother to massage his chest with olive oil and one evening he came back from the city with a strange appliance, which he introduced to us confidently as a medicated inhaler. This consisted of a metal canister with a spirit lamp beneath and a length of rubber tubing fitted with a mouthpiece above. Water and a special mixture of herbs, supplied with the apparatus, went into the canister, the lamp was lit and when the hot medicated steam hissed out Father faithfully breathed in. And all this, and the rest, was carried out with a sanguine assurance of recovery that would have been comic if, in the light of what followed, it had not proved to be so tragic.
    In later years, when I came to analyse this obstinate folly, the reasons were not far to seek. Father was an ambitious man who constantly took risks. He knew the danger of delaying his cure but, since his business had reached a crucial stage, which if successfully passed would elevate him to a position of real importance, associated, as was later revealed, with his mention of the U.D.L.—letters which, to my youthful mind, assumed a cabalistic significance—he was prepared, in his own phrase, ‘to chance it,’ for all our sakes. There was courage here, yet beyond this natural hardihood the superabundant optimism of his Irish temperament betrayed him into the belief that his gamble must come off. But above all, his conduct could most truly be explained by a strange and characteristic manifestation of the actual malady itself and which, years later, I came to recognize as the spes phthisica , a false and persistent hope, engendered in the nervous system by the toxins of the disease, the false illusion of ultimate cure and complete recovery.
    Father had this to a marked extent and, inevitably, communicated it in varying degree to Mother and me. We were quite unprepared for the calamity that followed.
    The month was March, as far as I remember the second week, and it must have been towards two o’clock in the morning that I awakened. Through persistent mists of sleep I had the dim and unreasoning sensation that Mother was calling me. Suddenly, as I was about to turn over, I heard her voice, very loud, and charged with such a fearful urgency that I immediately sat up.
    â€˜Laurence! Laurence! Come here!’
    I got out of bed. My room was dark but when I opened the door the lights in the hall were on. The door of Father’s bedroom was half open and from within Mother called again. The dread of some terrible disaster held