A Burnt-Out Case

  "Let's go," Querry said.

  At the top of the ladder the captain greeted them. He said, "So you are still here, Querry. It is a pleasure to see you again." He spoke in a low voice; he might have been exchanging a confidence. In the saloon the beer was already uncapped and awaiting them. The captain shut the door and for the first time raised his voice. He said, "Drink up quickly, Doctor Colin. I have a patient for you."

  "One of the crew?"

  "Not one of the crew," the captain said, raising his glass. "A real passenger. I've only had two real passengers in two years, first there was M. Querry and now this man. A passenger who pays, not a father."

  "Who is he?"

  "He comes from the great world," the captain said, echoing Colin's phrase. "It has been difficult for me. He speaks no Flemish and very little French, and that made it yet more complicated when he went down with fever. I am very glad to be here," he said and seemed about to lapse into his more usual silence.

  "Why has he come?" the Superior asked.

  "How do I know? I tell you—he speaks no French."

  "Is he a doctor?"

  "He is certainly not a doctor or he wouldn't be so frightened of a little fever."

  "Perhaps I should see him right away," Colin said. "What language does he speak?"

  "English. I tried him in Latin," the captain said. "I even tried him in Greek, but it was no good."

  "I can speak English," Querry said with reluctance.

  "How is his fever?" Colin asked.

  "This is the worst day. Tomorrow it will be better. I said to him, Finitum est,' but I think he believed that I meant he was dying."

  "Where did you pick him up?"

  "At Luc. He had some kind of introduction to the Bishop—from Rycker, I think. He had missed the Otraco boat."

  Colin and Querry went down the narrow deck to the Bishop's cabin. Hanging at the end of the deck was the misshapen lifebelt looking like a dried eel, the steaming shower, the lavatory with the broken door, and beside it the kitchen-table and the hutch where two rabbits munched in the dark; nothing, except presumably the rabbits, had changed. Colin opened the cabin-door, and there was the photograph of the church under snow, but in the rumpled bed which Querry had somehow imagined would still bear, like a hare's form, his own impression, lay the naked body of a very fat man. His neck as he lay on his back was forced into three ridges like gutters and the sweat filled them and drained round the curve of his head on to the pillow.

  "I suppose we'll have to take him ashore," Colin said. "If there's a spare room at the fathers'." On the table stood a Rolleiflex-camera and a portable Remington, and inserted in the typewriter was a sheet of paper on which the man had begun to type. When Querry brought the candle closer he could read one sentence in English: "The eternal forest broods along the banks unchanged since Stanley and his little band". It petered out without punctuation. Colin lifted the man's wrist and felt his pulse. He said, "The captain's right. He'll be up in a few days. This sleep marks the end."

  "Then why not leave him here?" Querry said. "Do you know him?"

  "I've never seen him before."

  "I thought you sounded afraid," Colin said. "We can hardly ship him back if he's paid his passage here."

  The man woke as Colin dropped his wrist. "Are you the doctor?" he asked in English.

  "Yes. My name is Doctor Colin."

  "I'm Parkinson," the man said firmly as though he were the sole survivor of a whole tribe of Parkinsons. "Am I dying?"

  "He wants to know if he is dying," Querry translated. Colin said, "You will be all right in a few days."

  "It's bloody hot," Parkinson said. He looked at Querry. "Thank God there's someone here at last who speaks English." He turned his head towards the Remington and said, "The white man's grave."

  "Your geography's wrong. This is not West Africa," Querry corrected him with dry dislike.

  "They won't know the bloody difference," Parkinson said.

  "And Stanley never came this way," Querry went on, without attempting to disguise his antagonism.

  "Oh yes he did. This river's the Congo, isn't it?"

  "No. You left the Congo a week ago after Luc."

  The man said again ambiguously, "They won't know the bloody difference. My head's splitting."

  "He's complaining about his head," Querry told Colin.

  "Tell him I'll give him something when we've taken him ashore. Ask him if he can walk as far as the fathers'. He would be a terrible weight to carry."

  "Walk!" Parkinson exclaimed. He twisted his head and the sweat-gutters drained on to the pillow. "Do you want to kill me? It would be a bloody good story, wouldn't it, for everyone but me. Parkinson buried where Stanley once..."

  "Stanley was never here," Querry said.

  "I don't care whether he was or not. Why keep bringing it up? I'm bloody hot. There ought to be a fan. If the chap here is a doctor, why can't he take me to a proper hospital?"

  "I doubt if you'd like the hospital we have," Querry said. "It's for lepers."

  "Then I'll stay where I am."

  "The boat returns to Luc tomorrow."

  Parkinson said, "I can't understand what the doctor says. Is he a good doctor? Can I trust him?"

  "Yes, he's a good doctor."

  "But they never tell the patient, do they?" Parkinson said. "My old man died thinking he only had a duodenal ulcer."

  "You are not dying. You have got a touch of malaria, that's all. You are over the worst. It would be much easier for all of us if you'd walk ashore. Unless you want to return to Luc."

  "When I start a job," Parkinson said obscurely, "I finish a job." He wiped his neck dry with his fingers. "My legs are like butter," he said. "I must have lost a couple of stone. It's the strain on the heart I'm afraid of."

  "It's no use," Querry told Colin. "We'll have to have him carried."

  "I will see what can be done," Colin said and left them. When they were alone, Parkinson said, "Can you use a camera?"

  "Of course."

  "With a flash bulb?"

  "Yes."

  He said, "Would you do me a favour and take some pictures of me carried ashore? Get as much atmosphere in as you can—you know the kind of thing, black faces gathered round looking worried and sympathetic."

  "Why should they be worried?"

  "You can easily fix that," Parkinson said. "They'll be worried enough anyway in case they drop me—and they won't know the difference."

  "What do you want the picture for?"

  "It's the kind of thing they like to have. You can't mistrust a photograph, or so people think. Do you know, since you came into the cabin and I could talk again, I've been feeling better? I'm not sweating so much, am I? And my head..." He twisted it tentatively and gave a groan again. "Oh well, if I hadn't had this malaria, I daresay I'd have had to invent it. It gives the right touch."

  "I wouldn't talk so much if I were you."

  "I'm bloody glad the boat-trip's over, I can tell you that."

  "Why have you come here?"

  "Do you know a man called Querry?" Parkinson said.

  The man had struggled round onto his side. The reflection from the candle shone back from the dribbles and pools of sweat so that the face appeared like a too-travelled road after rain. Querry knew for certain he had never seen the man before, and yet he remembered how Doctor Colin had said to him, "The great world comes to us."

  "Why do you want Querry?" he asked.

  "It's my job to want him," Parkinson said. He groaned again. "It's no bloody picnic this. You wouldn't lie to me, would you, about the doctor? And what he said?"

  "No."

  "It's my heart, as I told you. Two stone in a week. This too too solid flesh is surely melting. Shall I tell you a secret? The daredevil Parkinson is sometimes damned afraid of death."

  "Who are you?" Querry asked. The man turned his face away with irritable indifference and closed his eyes. Soon he was asleep again.

  He was still asleep when th
ey carried him off the boat wrapped in a piece of tarpaulin like a dead body about to be committed to the deep. It needed six men to lift him and they got in each other's way, so that once as they struggled up the bank, a man slipped and fell. Querry was in time to prevent the body falling. The head rammed his chest and the smell of hair-oil poisoned the night. He wasn't used to supporting such a weight and he was breathless and sweating as they got the body over the rise and came on Father Thomas standing there holding a hurricane-lamp. Another African took Querry's place and Querry walked behind at Father Thomas's side. Father Thomas said, "You shouldn't have done that—a weight like that, in this heat—it's rash at your age. Who is he?"

  "I don't know. A stranger."

  Father Thomas said, "Perhaps a man can be judged by his rashness." The glow of the Superior's cheroot approached them through the dark. "You won't find much rashness here," Father Thomas went angrily on. "Bricks and mortar and the monthly bills—that's what we think about. Not the Samaritan on the road to Jericho."

  "Nor do I. I just took a hand for a few minutes, that's all."

  "We could all learn from you," Father Thomas said, taking Querry's arm above the elbow as though he were an old man who needed the support of a disciple.

  The Superior overtook them. He said, "I don't know where we are going to put him. We haven't a room free."

  "Let him share mine. There's room for the two of us," Father Thomas said, and he squeezed Querry's arm as if he wished to convey to him, 'I at least have learnt your lesson. I am not as my brothers are.'

  CHAPTER THREE

  I

  Doctor Colin had before him a card which carried the outline-drawing of a man. He had made the drawing himself; the cards he had ordered in Luc because he despaired of obtaining any like them from home. The trouble was they cost too little; the invoices had fallen like fine dust through the official tray that sifted his requests for aid. There was nobody on the lower levels of the Ministry at home with authority to allow an expenditure of six hundred francs, and nobody with courage enough to worry a senior officer with such a paltry demand. Now whenever he used the charts he felt irritated by his own bad drawings. He ran his fingers over a patient's back and detected a new thickening of the skin below the left shoulder-blade. He drew the shading on his chart and called "Next." Perhaps he might have forestalled that patch if the new hospital had been finished and the new apparatus installed for taking the temperature of the skin. 'It is not a case of what I have done,' he thought, 'but what I am going to do.' This optimistic phrase had an ironic meaning for Doctor Colin.

  When he first came to this country, there was an old Greek shopkeeper living in Luc—a man in his late seventies who was famous for his reticence. A few years before he had married a young African woman who could neither read nor write. People wondered what kind of contact they could have, at his age, with his reticence and her ignorance. One day he saw his African clerk bedding her down at the back of the warehouse behind some sacks of coffee. He said nothing at all, but next day he went to the bank and took out his savings. Most of the savings he put in an envelope and posted in at the door of the local orphanage which was always chock-a-block with unwanted half-castes. The rest he took with him up the hill behind the courthouse to a garage which sold ancient cars, and there he bought the cheapest car they could sell him. It was so old and so cheap that even the manager, perhaps because he too was a Greek, had scruples. The car could only be trusted to start on top of a hill, but the old man said that didn't matter. It was his ambition to drive a car once before he died—his whim if you liked to call it that. So they showed him how to put it into gear and how to accelerate, and shoving behind they gave him a good running start. He rode down to the square in Luc where his store was situated and began hooting as soon as he got there. People stopped to look at the strange sight of the old man driving his first car, and as he passed the store his clerk came out to see the fun. The old man drove all round the square a second time—he couldn't have stopped the car anyway because it would not start on the flat. Round he came with his clerk waving in the doorway to encourage him, then he twisted the wheel, trod down on the accelerator and drove straight over his clerk into the store, where the car came to the final halt of all time up against the cash register. Then he got out of the car, and leaving it just as it was, he went into his parlour and waited for the police to arrive. The clerk was not dead, but both his legs were crushed and the pelvis was broken and he wouldn't be any good for a woman ever again. Presently the Commissioner of Police walked in. He was a young man and this was his first case and the Greek was highly respected in Luc. "What have you done?" he demanded when he came into the parlour. "It is not a case of what have I done," the old man said, "but of what I am going to do," and he took a gun from under the cushion and shot himself through the head. Doctor Colin since those days had often found comfort in the careful sentence of the old Greek storekeeper.

  He called again, "Next." It was a day of extreme heat and humidity and the patients were languid and few. It had never ceased to surprise the doctor how human beings never became acclimatised to their own country; an African suffered from the heat like any European, just as a Swede he once knew suffered from the long winter night as though she had been born in a southern land. The man who now came to stand before the doctor would not meet his eyes. On the chart he was given the name of Attention, but now any attention he had was certainly elsewhere.

  "Trouble again like the other night?" the doctor asked.

  The man looked over the doctor's shoulder as if someone he feared were approaching and said, "Yes." His eyes were heavy and bloodshot; he pushed his shoulders forward on either side of his sunken chest as though they were the corners of a book he was trying to close.

  "It will be over soon," the doctor said. "You must be patient."

  "I am afraid," the man said in his own tongue. "Please when night comes let them bind my hands."

  "Is it as bad as that?"

  "Yes. I am afraid for my boy. He sleeps beside me."

  The D. D. S. tablets were not a simple cure. Reactions from the drug were sometimes terrible. When it was only a question of pain in the nerves you could treat a patient with cortisone, but in a few cases a kind of madness came over the mind in the hours of darkness. The man said, "I am afraid of killing my boy."

  The doctor said, "This will pass. One more night, that's all. Remember you have just to hold on. Can you read the time?"

  "Yes."

  "I will give you a clock that shines so that you can read it in the dark. The trouble will start at eight o'clock. At eleven o'clock you will feel worse. Don't struggle. If we tie your hands you will struggle. Just look at the clock. At one you will feel very bad, but then it will begin to pass. At three you will feel no worse than you do now, and after that less and less—the madness will go. Just look at the clock and remember what I say. Will you do that?"

  "Yes."

  "Before dark I will bring you the clock."

  "My child..."

  "Don't worry about your child. I will tell the sisters to look after him till the madness has gone. You must just watch the clock. As the hands move the madness will move too. And at five the clock will ring a bell. You can sleep then. Your madness will have gone. It won't come back."

  He tried to speak with conviction, but he felt the heat blurring his intonation. When the man had gone he felt that something had been dragged out of him and thrown away. He said to the dispenser, "I can't see anyone today."

  "There are only six more."

  "Am I the only one who must not feel the heat?" But he felt some of the shame of a deserter as he walked away from his tiny segment of the world's battlefield.

  Perhaps it was shame that led his steps towards another patient. As he passed Querry's room he saw him busied at his drawing-board; he went on and came to Father Thomas's room. Father Thomas too had taken the morning off—his schools like the dispensary would have been all but emptied by the heat. Parkinson sat
on the only chair, wearing the bottom of his pyjamas: the cord looked as if it were tied insecurely round an egg. Father Thomas was talking excitedly, as Colin entered, in what even the doctor recognised to be very odd English. He heard the name "Querry." There was hardly space to stand between the two beds.

  "Well," Colin said, "you see, M. Parkinson, you are not dead. One doesn't die of a small fever."

  "What's he saying?" Parkinson asked Father Thomas. "I'm tired of not understanding. What was the good of the Norman Conquest if we don't speak the same language now?"

  "Why has he come here, Father Thomas? Have you found that out?"

  "He is asking me a great many questions about Querry."

  "Why? 'What business is it of his?"

  "He told me that he had come here specially to talk to him."

  "Then he would have done better to have gone back with the boat because Querry won't talk."

  "Querry, that's right, Querry," Parkinson said. "It's stupid of him to pretend to hide away. No one really wants to hide from Montagu Parkinson. Aren't I the end of every man's desire? Quote. Swinburne."

  "What have you told him, father?"

  Father Thomas said defensively, "I've done no more than confirm what Rycker told him."

  "Rycker! Then he's been listening to a pack of lies."

  "Is the story of Deo Gratias a lie? Is the new hospital a lie? I hope that I have been able to put the story in the right context, that's all."

  "What is the right context?"

  "The Catholic context," Father Thomas replied.

  The Remington portable had been set up on Father Thomas's table beside the crucifix. On the other side of the crucifix, like the second thief, the Rolleiflex hung by its strap from a nail. Dr. Colin looked at the typewritten sheet upon the table. He could read English more easily than he could speak it. He read the heading: 'The Recluse of the Great River,' then looked accusingly at Father Thomas. "Do you know what this is about?"

  "It is the story of Querry," Father Thomas said.

  "This nonsense!"