“Sister Hedvig,” the young doctor said, “is a very interesting case. As a matter of fact she cannot look a healthy man full in the eyes. But all the same she at once chose the male division in the hospital. She simply had to go there, she was really incapable of doing her duty to the women patients. What else is that but a case of timid, wounded, sickly eroticism slinking away to sick people. She feels a secret relief in seeing men suffer and die. She sacrifices them to Eros—probably by a religious perversion of her feelings.”
Thus spoke the young doctor and did not observe his own involuntary confession of having looked very deep into Sister Hedvig’s eyes.
Perhaps there was something in what he said after all. Though Laura had probably said the truest word. The fundamental fact in Sister Hedvig’s nature was still fear. And this fear had not, as in Peter’s case, spread over the surface in the shape of pretended good nature and a magnificent tissue of lies. No, in Hedvig it grew inwards in the dark. And this growth she felt as an ever-present gnawing ache in her inmost being. In the end this dark groping fear had become so much a part of her that every glimpse of happiness, liberty, spaciousness only seemed to her a mockery. But her suffering was terrible just because of its indefiniteness, its formlessness and its teeming darkness. Under these circumstances she must have felt every really definite cause for fear as a sort of relief, a release. He who sees, need not brood. That was why the sick bed and the death bed held such a strange attraction for her. That was why her expression would sometimes reveal such curious relief in the presence of the most awful struggles. That was why she closed the eyes of the dead with such pale and still solemnity. She herself interpreted it as the brief precious peace of heart before God after service and sacrifice. During her training as a nurse Sister Hedvig had turned more and more away from the world and relapsed into religious gloom. She walked about like a living protest against every form of levity and vanity.
And now she stood on a cold and clear September day by Percy’s bed at Hill Villa.
Percy stared at her dark eyes and pale cheeks. It was really an unusual pallor. One did not know whether she burned or froze.