A Burnt-Out Case

  "And now, my dear, you'll change into a proper dress," Rycker said.

  Over the whisky he turned again to what he called "Your case". He had now less the manner of a detective than of a counsel who by the nature of his profession is an accomplice after the fact. "Why are you here, Querry?"

  "One must be somewhere."

  "All the same, as I said this morning, no one would expect to find you working in a leproserie."

  "I am not working."

  "When I drove over some weeks ago, the fathers said that you were at the hospital."

  "I was watching the doctor work. I stand around, that's all. There's nothing I can do."

  "It seems a waste of talent."

  "I have no talent."

  Rycker said, "You mustn't despise us poor provincials."

  When they had gone into dinner, and after Rycker had said a short grace, Querry's hostess spoke again. She said, "I hope you will be comfortable," and "Do you care for salad?" Her fair hair was streaked and darkened with sweat and he saw her eyes widen with apprehension when a black-and-white moth, with the wing-spread of a bat, swooped across the table. "You must make yourself at home here," she said, her gaze following the moth as it settled like a piece of lichen on the wall. He wondered whether she had ever felt at home herself. She said, "We don't have many visitors," and he was reminded of a child forced to entertain a caller until her mother returns. She had changed, between the whisky and the dinner, into a cotton frock covered with a pattern of autumnal leaves which was like a memory of Europe.

  "Not visitors like the Querry anyway," Rycker interrupted her. It was as though he had turned off a knob on a radio-set which had been tuned in to a lesson in deportment after he had listened enough. The sound of the voice was shut off the air, but still, behind the shy and wary eyes, the phrases were going on for no one to hear. 'The weather has been a little hot lately, hasn't it? I hope you had a good flight from Europe.'

  Querry said, "Do you like the life here?" The question startled her; perhaps the answer wasn't in her phrase-book. "Oh yes," she said, "yes. It's very interesting," staring over his shoulder through the window to where the boilers stood like modern statues in the floodlit yard; then she shifted her eyes back to the moth on the wall and the gecko pointing at his prey.

  "Fetch that photograph, dear," Rycker said.

  "What photograph?"

  "The photograph of M. Querry."

  She trailed reluctantly out, making a detour to avoid the wall where the moth rested and the lizard pointed, and returned soon with an ancient copy of Time. Querry remembered the ten years younger face upon the cover (the issue had coincided with his first visit to New York). The artist, drawing from a photograph, had romanticised his features. It wasn't the face he saw when he shaved, but a kind of distant cousin. It reflected emotions, thoughts, hopes, profundities that he had certainly expressed to no reporter. The background of the portrait was a building of glass and steel which might have been taken for a concert-hall, or perhaps even for an orangerie, if a great cross planted like a belfry outside the door had not indicated it was a church.

  "So you see," Rycker said, "we know all."

  "I don't remember that the article was very accurate."

  "I suppose the Government—or the Church—have commissioned you to do something out here?"

  "No. I've retired."

  "I thought a man of your kind never retired."

  "Oh, one comes to an end, just as soldiers do and bank-managers."

  When the dinner was over the girl left, like a child after the dessert. "I expect she's gone to write up her journal," Rycker said. "This is a red-letter day for her, meeting the Querry. She'll have plenty to put down in it."

  "Does she find much to write?"

  "I wouldn't know. At the beginning I used to take a quiet look, but she discovered that, and now she locks it up. I expect I teased her a little too much. I remember one entry: 'Letter from mother. Poor Maxime has had five puppies.' It was the day I was decorated by the Governor, but she forgot to put anything about the ceremony."

  "It must be a lonely life at her age."

  "Oh, I don't know. There are a lot of household duties even in the bush. To be quite frank, I think it's a good deal more lonely for me. She's hardly—you can see it for yourself—an intellectual companion. That's one of the disadvantages of marrying a young wife. If I want to talk about things which really interest me, I have to drive over to the fathers. A long way to go for a conversation. Living in the way I do, one has a lot of time to think things over. I'm a good Catholic, I hope, but that doesn't prevent me from having spiritual problems. A lot of people take their religion lightly, but I had six years when I was a young man with the Jesuits. If a novice master had been less unfair you wouldn't have found me here. I gathered from that article in Time that you are a Catholic too."

  "I've retired," Querry said for the second time.

  "Oh come now, one hardly retires from that."

  The gecko on the wall leapt at the moth, missed and lay motionless again, the tiny paws spread on the wall like ferns.

  "To tell you the truth," Rycker said, "I find those fathers at the leproserie an unsatisfactory lot. They are more interested in electricity and building than in questions of faith. Ever since I heard you were here I've looked forward to a conversation with an intellectual Catholic."

  "I wouldn't call myself that."

  "In the long years I've been out here I've been thrown back on my own thoughts. Some men can manage, I suppose, with clock-golf. I can't. I've read a great deal on the subject of love."

  "Love?"

  "The love of God. Agape not Eros."

  "I'm not qualified to talk about that."

  "You underrate yourself," Rycker replied. He went to the sideboard and fetched a tray of liqueurs, disturbing the gecko who disappeared behind a reproduction of some primitive Flight into Egypt. "A glass of Cointreau," Rycker said, "or would you prefer a Van Der Hum?" Beyond the verandah Querry saw a thin figure in a gold-leafed dress move towards the river. Perhaps out of doors the moths had lost their terror.

  "In the seminary I formed the habit of thinking more than most men," Rycker said. "A faith like ours, when profoundly understood, sets us many problems. For instance—no, it's not a mere instance, I'm jumping to the heart of what really troubles me—I don't believe my wife understands the true nature of Christian marriage."

  Out in the darkness there was a plop-plop-plop. She must be throwing small pieces of wood into the river.

  "It sometimes seems to me," Rycker said, "that she's ignorant of almost everything. I find myself wondering whether the nuns taught her at all. You saw for yourself—she doesn't even cross herself at meals when I say grace. Ignorance, you know, beyond a certain point might even invalidate a marriage in canon law. That's one of the matters I have tried in vain to discuss with the fathers. They would much prefer to talk about turbines. Now you are here..."

  "I'm not competent to discuss it," Querry said. In the moments of silence he could hear the river flooding down.

  "At least you listen. The fathers would already have started talking about the new well they propose to dig. A well, Querry, a well against a human soul." He drank down his Van Der Hum and poured himself another. "They don't realise... just suppose that we weren't properly married, she could leave me at any time, Querry."

  "It's easy to leave what you call a proper marriage, too."

  "No, no. It's much more difficult. There are social pressures—particularly here."

  "If she loves you..."

  "That's no protection. We are men of the world, Querry, you and I. A love like that doesn't last. I tried to teach her the importance of loving God. Because if she loved Him, she wouldn't want to offend Him, would she? And that would be some security. I have tried to get her to pray, but I don't think she knows any prayers except the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. What prayers do you use, Querry?"

  "None—except occasionally, from habit, in a mome
nt of danger." He added sadly, "Then I pray for a brown teddy bear."

  "You are joking, I know that, but this is very serious. Have another Cointreau?"

  "What's really worrying you, Rycker? A man?"

  The girl came back into the light of the lamp which hung at the corner of the verandah. She was carrying a roman policier in the Serie Noire. She gave a whistle that was scarcely audible, but Rycker heard it. "That damn puppy," he said. "She loves her puppy more than she loves God." Perhaps the Van Der Hum affected the logic of his transitions. He said, "I'm not jealous. It's not a man I worry about. She hasn't enough feeling for that. Sometimes she even refuses her duties."

  "What duties?"

  "Her duties to me. Her married duties."

  "I've never thought of those as duties."

  "You know very well the Church does. No one has any right to abstain except by mutual consent."

  "I suppose there may be times when she doesn't want you."

  "Then what am I supposed to do? Have I given up the priesthood for nothing at all?"

  "I wouldn't talk to her too much, if I were you, about loving God," Querry said with reluctance. "She mightn't see a parallel between that and your bed."

  "There's a close parallel for a Catholic," Rycker said rapidly. He put up his hand as though he were answering a question before his fellow novices. The bristles of hair between the knuckles were like a row of little moustaches.

  "You seem to be very well up in the subject," Querry said.

  "At the seminary I always came out well in moral theology."

  "I don't fancy you need me then—or the fathers either. You have obviously thought everything out satisfactorily yourself."

  "That goes without saying. But sometimes one needs confirmation and encouragement. You can't imagine, M. Querry, what a relief it is to go over these problems with an educated Catholic."

  "I don't know that I would call myself a Catholic."

  Rycker laughed. "What? The Querry? You can't fool me. You are being too modest. I wonder they haven't made you a count of the Holy Roman Empire—like that Irish singer, what was his name?"

  "I don't know. I am not musical."

  "You should read what they say about you in Time."

  "On matters like that Time isn't necessarily well informed. Would you mind if I went to bed? I'll have to be up early in the morning if I'm to reach the next ferry before dark."

  "Of course. Though I doubt if you'll be able to cross the river tomorrow."

  Rycker followed him along the verandah to his room. The darkness was noisy with frogs, and for a long while after his host had said goodnight and gone, they seemed to croak with Rycker's hollow phrases: grace: sacrament: duty: love, love, love.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I

  "You want to be of use, don't you?" the doctor asked sharply. "You don't want menial jobs just for the sake of menial jobs? You aren't either a masochist or a saint."

  "Rycker promised me that he would tell no one."

  "He kept his word for nearly a month. That's quite an achievement for Rycker. When he came here the other day he only told the Superior in confidence."

  "What did the Superior say?"

  "That he would listen to nothing in confidence outside the confessional."

  The doctor continued to unpack the crate of heavy electrical apparatus which had arrived at last by the Otraco boat. The lock on the dispensary door was too insecure for him to trust the apparatus there, so he unpacked it on the floor of his living-room. One could never be certain of the African's reaction to anything unfamiliar. In Leopoldville six months before, when the first riots broke out, the attack had been directed at the new glass-and-steel hospital intended for African patients. The most monstrous rumours were easily planted and often believed. It was a land where Messiahs died in prison and rose again from the dead: where walls were said to fall at the touch of finger-nails sanctified by a little holy dust. A man whom the doctor had cured of leprosy wrote him a threatening letter once a month; he really believed that he had been turned out of the leproserie, not because he was cured, but because the doctor had personal designs on the half acre of ground on which he used to grow bananas. It only needed someone, in malice or ignorance, to suggest that the new machines were intended to torture the patients and some fools would break into the dispensary and destroy them. Yet in our century you could hardly call them fools. Hola Camp, Sharpeville, and Algiers had justified all possible belief in European cruelty.

  So it was better, the doctor explained, to keep the machines out of sight at home until the new hospital was finished. The floor of his sitting-room was covered with straw from the crates.

  "The position of the power-plugs will have to be decided now." The doctor asked, "Do you know what this is?"

  "No."

  "I've wanted it for so long," the doctor said, touching the metal shape tenderly as a man might stroke the female flank of one of Rodin's bronzes. "Sometimes I despaired. The papers I have had to fill in, the lies I've told. And here at last it is."

  "What does it do?"

  "It measures to one twenty-thousandth of a second the reaction of the nerves. One day we are going to be proud of this leproserie. Of you too and the part you will have played."

  "I told you I've retired."

  "One never retires from a vocation."

  "Oh yes, make no mistake, one does. One comes to an end."

  "What are you here for then? To make love to a black woman?"

  "No. One comes to an end of that too. Possibly sex and a vocation are born and die together. Let me roll bandages or carry buckets. All I want is to pass the time."

  "I thought you wanted to be of use."

  "Listen," Querry said and then fell silent.

  "I am listening."

  "I don't deny my profession once meant a lot to me. So have women. But the use of what I made was never important to me. I wasn't a builder of council-houses or factories. When I made something I made it for my own pleasure."

  "Is that the way you loved women?" the doctor asked, but Querry hardly heard him. He was talking as a hungry man eats.

  "Your vocation is quite a different one, doctor. You are concerned with people. I wasn't concerned with the people who occupied my space—only with the space."

  "I wouldn't have trusted your plumbing then."

  "A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same to make them comfortable. My interest was in space, light, proportion. New materials interested me only in the effect they might have on those three. Wood, brick, steel, concrete, glass—space seems to alter with what you use to enclose it. Materials are the architect's plot. They are not his motive for work. Only the space and the light and the proportion. The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rubempré in the end?"

  "Two of your churches are famous. Didn't you care what happened inside them—to people?"

  "The acoustics had to be good of course. The high altar had to be visible to all. But people hated them. They said they weren't designed for prayer. They meant that they were not Roman or Gothic or Byzantine. And in a year they had cluttered them up with their cheap plaster saints; they took out my plain windows and put in stained glass dedicated to dead pork-packers who had contributed to diocesan funds, and when they had destroyed my space and my light, they were able to pray again, and they even became proud of what they had spoilt. I became what they called a great Catholic architect, but I built no more churches, doctor."

  "I am not a religious man, I don't know much about these things, but I suppose they had a right to believe their prayers were more important than a work of art."

  "Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle-classes who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

  Sometimes I feel sickened by the word prayer. Rycker used it a great deal. Do you pray, doctor?"

  "I think the last time
I prayed was before my final medical exam. And you?"

  "I gave it up a long time ago. Even in the days when I believed, I seldom prayed. It would have got in the way of work. Before I went to sleep, even if I was with a woman, the last thing I had always to think about was work. Problems which seemed insoluble would often solve themselves in sleep. I had my bedroom next to my office, so that I could spend two minutes in front of the drawing-board the last thing of all. The bed, the bidet, the drawing-board, and then sleep."

  "It sounds a little hard on the woman."

  "Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express. I have no interest in anything any more, doctor. I don't want to sleep with a woman nor design a building."

  "Have you no children?"

  "I once had, but they disappeared into the world a long time ago. We haven't kept in touch. Self-expression eats the father in you, too."

  "So you thought you could just come and die here?"

  "Yes. That was in my mind. But chiefly I wanted to be in an empty place, where no new building or woman would remind me that there was a time when I was alive, with a vocation and a capacity to love—if it was love. The palsied suffer, their nerves feel, but I am one of the mutilated, doctor."

  "Twenty years ago we might have been able to offer you your death, but now we deal only in cures. D. D. S. costs three shillings a year. It's much cheaper than a coffin."

  "Can you cure me?"

  "Perhaps your mutilations haven't gone far enough yet. When a man comes here too late the disease has to burn itself out." The doctor laid a cloth tenderly over his machine. "The other patients are waiting. Do you want to come or would you like to sit here thinking of your own case? It's often the way with the mutilated—they want to retire too, out of sight."

  The air in the hospital lay heavily and sweetly upon them: it was never moved by a fan or a breeze. Querry was conscious of the squalor of the bedding—cleanliness was not important to the leper, only to the healthy. The patients brought their own mattresses which they had probably possessed for a lifetime—rough sacking from which the straw had escaped. The bandaged feet lay in the straw like ill-wrapped packages of meat. On the verandah the walking cases sat out of the sun—if you could call a walking case a man who, when he moved, had to support his huge swollen testicles with both hands. A woman with palsied eye-lids who could not close her eyes or even blink sat in a patch of shade out of the merciless light. A man without fingers nursed a baby on his knee, and another man lay flat on the verandah with one breast long and drooping and teated like a woman's. There was little the doctor could do for any of these; the man with elephantiasis had too weak a heart for an operation, and though he could have sewn up the woman's eye-lids, she had refused to have it done from fear, and as for the baby it would be a leper too in time. Nor could he help those in the first ward who were dying of tuberculosis or the woman who dragged herself between the beds, her legs withered with polio. It had always seemed to the doctor unfair that leprosy did not preclude all other diseases (leprosy was enough for one human being to bear) and yet it was from the other diseases that most of his patients died. He passed on and Querry tagged at his heels, saying nothing.