The Collector

Dream. Extraordinary.

Walking in the Ash Grove at L. I look up through the trees. I see an aeroplane in the blue sky. I know it will crash. Later I see where it has crashed. I am frightened to go on. A girl walks towards me. Minny? I can’t see. She is in peculiar Greek clothes—drapery. White. In sunshine through the still trees. Seems to know me but I do not know her (not Minny). Never close. I want to be close. With her. I wake up.

If I die, no one will ever know.

It puts me in a fever. I can’t write.

(Night.) No pity. No God.

I shouted at him and he went mad. I was too weak to stop him. Bound and gagged me and took his beastly photographs.

I don’t mind the pain. The humiliation.

I did what he wanted. To get it over.

I don’t mind for myself any more.

But oh God the beastliness of it all.

I’m crying I’m crying I can’t write.

I will not give in.

I will not give in.

I can’t sleep. I’m going mad. Have to have the light on. Wild dreams. I think people are here. D. Minny.

It’s pneumonia.

He must get a doctor.

It is murder.

I can’t write it down. Words are useless.

(He’s come.) He won’t listen. I’ve begged him. I’ve said it’s murder. So weak. Temperature 102. I’ve been sick.

Nothing about last night, him or me.

Did it happen? Fever. I get delirious.

If only I knew what I have done.

Useless useless.

I won’t die I won’t die.

Dear dear G.P . . . this

Oh God oh God do not let me die.

God do not let me die.

Do not let me die.

3

WHAT I am trying to say is that it all came unexpected.

It started off badly because when I went down at half past seven I saw her lying by the screen, she’d knocked it over in falling, and I knelt by her and her hands were like ice, but she was breathing, it was a kind of rasping sigh, very quick, and when I lifted her back to bed she came to, she must have fainted in the night when she’d gone behind the screen. She was cold all over, she began to shiver terribly, and then to sweat more and she was delirious, she kept on saying, get the doctor, get the doctor, please get the doctor (sometimes it was general practitioner—G.P . . . G.P. she kept on, over and over again, like a rhyme), it wasn’t her ordinary voice but what they call sing-song, and she didn’t seem to be able to fix her eyes on me. She was silent a while, and then it was “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” only the words were all slurred like she was drunk and she stopped in the middle. Twice she called Minny Minny like she thought she was in the next room (it was her sister), and then she started to mumble a lot of names and words, all mixed up with bits of sentence. Then it was she wanted to get up and I had to stop her. She really struggled. I kept on talking to her and she would stop a minute, but so soon as I went away to look after the tea or something she was off again. Well, I held her up to try to help her to drink the tea but it made her cough, she turned her head away, she didn’t want it. I forgot to say she had nasty yellow pimples one corner of her lips. And she didn’t smell fresh and clean like before.

In the end I got her to take a double dose of the pills, it said on the packet not to exceed the stated dose, but I heard once you ought to take twice what they said, they were scared to make it too strong for legal reasons.

I must have gone down four or five times that morning, I was that worried. She was awake but said she wanted nothing, she knew what was what, she shook her head anyhow. At lunch she drank a little tea and then went off to sleep and I sat out in the outer room. Well, the next time I switched on her light it was about five she was awake. She looked weak, very flushed, but she seemed to know where she was all right and who I was, her eyes followed me quite normally and I thought she was past the worse, the crisis as they call it.

She had a bit more tea and then she made me help her behind the screen, she could just about walk and so I left her a few minutes and came back and helped her back. She lay awhile in bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, she had difficulty in getting her breath as usual and I was going to go away, but she made me stop.

She started to talk in a low hoarse voice, quite normal mentally, though. She said, “I’ve got pneumonia. You must get a doctor.”

I said, you’re over the worse, you look much better.

“I must have penicillin or something.” Then she began to cough, and she couldn’t breathe and she certainly sweated terribly.

Then she wanted to know what had happened in the night and the morning and I told her.

“Terrible nightmares,” she said. Well, I said I’d stay with her all night and that she looked better and she asked me if I was sure she looked better and I said she was. I wanted her to be better by then, so I suppose I was seeing things.