Several hours later Paul was awoken by the morning light. An instant of panic, a shudder, instinctive as the movement with which a dog shakes itself free of water after a swim, and then the painful down-gearing which checks the course of the undisciplined waking mind.
John Cotterell was still sleeping; his face was turned away from Paul, his one visible ear looked like an oyster. Paul glanced at his watch—it was just after seven.
He looked about the room, impersonal, traumatically bright in the sun: the wash-stand, the white-painted doors of the built in cupboard, the smell of disinfectant from the polish on the linoleum. His eyes lingered on the only familiar objects—the anguished paraphernalia of baggage, shabby fibre and battered leather, mute but lucid witnesses to the state of his fortunes. Soon they would all be emptied and stored away; pledges to be redeemed not by money but by time.
By the side of Paul’s bed lay a thermometer case, and opening it, he examined its contents. It was a continental thermometer, a flat glass tube marked in centigrade, its scale rising from 35° to 42°; normal was indicated by a red line at 37°.
Footsteps in the passage; guiltily, clumsy in his haste Paul replaced the thermometer. Then the double doors were thrown apart. As John Cotterell opened his eyes, a young nurse entered, propelled more by the force of her energy than by the locomotive power of her legs. She announced herself in English, rapidly and without ceremony. She was Sœur Jeanne; she was in charge of this, the second, floor. Then, having demanded of each his name she made two impatient ticks with a ball-pointed pen on a typewritten list.
“Now,” she said. “Now …” There followed a concise and practised résumé of the first day’s routine. Patients, unless instructed to the contrary, took their own temperatures twice daily—once on waking, once at six o’clock in the evening—and immediately recorded the results on their temperature charts. Breakfast was served in the salle à manger at eight o’clock prompt. (“You get there late and you have no breakfast. Next time you get there at the right time.”) After breakfast, patients undressed and got back into bed. Later in the day medical examinations would take place, when all questions would be answered. Was that all quite clear? Sœur Jeanne closed the windows and left the room as briskly as she had entered it.
John Cotterell put his thermometer in his mouth, and Paul self-consciously followed his example; it was some ten years since he had taken his temperature. He wondered vaguely whether the instrument would now take its revenge for so protracted a period of neglect. At the end of exactly two minutes he jerked it from his mouth; to his astonishment the mercury had barely reached the red line. “Why, it’s sub-normal, it’s only 36.9,” he cried; he then noticed that John Cotterell still retained his thermometer in his mouth. “I keep it in for ten minutes,” explained the latter indistinctly, opening his lips, but keeping his teeth clenched upon the glass tube.
With great satisfaction Paul marked his temperature chart with a dot fully one division below the red line. Perhaps he was really not so ill after all; perhaps after two or three months of rest he would be able to return to England. In his imagination he already saw himself packing his cases, reserving his tickets, saying goodbye to the doctors …. John Cotterell removed the thermometer from his mouth. “Exactly 36.3°,” he announced.
Paul was amazed. “But that must be terribly sub-normal,” he objected.
“Not for a morning temperature. It goes up as the day wears on.”
“But why do you keep it in your mouth for ten minutes?”
“For T.B. ten minutes is the minimum. Two minutes gives only a very approximate result.”
Further discussion was prevented by the opening of the door, which admitted Mr. James, his uniform well brushed, his buttons gleaming. “What, Oxford and Cambridge still in bed! Come on out of it, it’s time for breakfast. If you’re not ready in a quarter of an hour, I’m goin’ in with the other boys, so get a ruddy move on.”
When at last John and Paul arrived in the dining-room, the British party was already seated. It was an enormous room, nearly two hundred feet long, and one whole side comprised a single window overlooking the Arve valley. Vast imitation marble columns and pilasters sprouted from the variegated mosaic of the floor, terminating in a splay of plaster cartouches at their incidence with a vaulted, whitewashed ceiling. The three walls were painted respectively shades of pale yellow, chocolate and red. The room had been divided into two sections: the first was filled with a number of separate tables which were all unoccupied (these were reserved for the private patients who breakfasted in bed), and the second contained three long trestle tables, at the end of one of which the students were seated. John and Paul exchanged nods with their former travelling companions, and Mr. James, drawing up his sleeve, stared ostentatiously at his chromium wristwatch.
“You’re late, but if you can manage to find an empty place you can sit in it,” he said with high sarcasm.
They sat down at the table. In the centre of a paper tablecloth was a basket filled with thick slices of nearly black bread, whilst on each plate were three shavings of butter twisted into coquilles, and a spoonful of jam. The coffee was thin and sweetened.
“I’ve got something to tell you all, a little bit of information that I managed to pick up last night,” said Mr. James. His voice dropped mysteriously and then stopped altogether as a garçon approached the table with another basket of bread.
“What is it?” asked John MacAllister with interest.
“Keep your mouth shut, Scottie,” hissed Mr. James as he watched out of the corner of his eye until the garçon was beyond earshot. “Couldn’t you wait till he’d gone?” he demanded chidingly. He gave the offending MacAllister a look of displeasure, then, leaning forward in his chair, he whispered: “If you want to know, I’ve found out that there are other students expected here—foreign students!” Mr. James sat back, the better to watch the effect of his pronouncement.
“For God’s sake!” cried Angus Gray. “We knew that before we’d set foot out of England!” John Cotterell, who had been drinking his coffee during Mr. James’s impartment, swallowed wrongly and started to splutter. Mr. James looked at him austerely. “When my son grows up, I won’t send him to Oxford!”
“Did you think you were telling us something we didn’t know?” insisted Angus Gray, rapping on the table with a teaspoon, his thick eyebrows twitching.
“Never you mind. You can now treat it as official,” said Mr. James loftily.
“But it was official all the time,” roared Angus Gray.
“Now don’t shout. You’re not in Glasgow.”
“When you say foreign students, where do you imply they come from?” demanded John Cotterell, who had regained his breath.
“What do you mean, where do I imply they come from? From abroad, of course.”
“And where do you come from?”
“Oh, shut up, Oxford, you’re getting on my nerves.”
“Don’t you realise that here it’s you who’s the foreigner?”
Mr. James was at last thoroughly piqued. “Me a foreigner! Are you cracked?” And pulling his elusive passport out of his pocket, he thrust it under John Cotterell’s nose. “British passport,” he pronounced distinctly and witheringly, syllable by syllable, as though addressing a retarded child. “I suppose they teach you to read at Oxford?”
“And the French are foreigners!”
“For Christ’s sake! Of course they are!”
“Language!” murmured David Bean.
“Language yourself! You lot would make a bloody saint blaspheme.”
“A bloody saint! St. James of St. James’s Bloody Park!” commented William Davis.
“St. James of St. James’s Palace!” cried John MacAllister.
“St. James of England!” shouted John Cotterell, getting to his feet. “One hundred-per-cent, home-produced, home-killed, British saint. Holy giblets, tripes and offal on sale at your registered butcher.” He leant over and snatched the handkerchief out of Mr. James’s breast pocket. “One pure and inviolate nose-rag guaranteed to have been worn by St. James on the day of his martyrdom—certified cure-all to those who touch it and have the true faith. Protects against King’s Evil, the sweating sickness, divers humours, all distempers and the common cold.”
Everyone was laughing and attempting to touch the handkerchief which John Cotterell was flicking backwards and forwards above the table. Mr. James, with an unusually adroit movement, shot out his hand and retrieved it.
“All right, all right, you lot, you can laugh—now that I’ve got you here.” And before this remark could provoke fresh merriment, he added: “Anyhow, you won’t have the chance to laugh at me much longer. I’m off back this afternoon.”
The idea of Mr. James leaving, and of his leaving, necessarily, alone, brought the true nature of the situation into sudden relief. Up to this moment it had been obscured by the prominence of many incidental details—the journey, the new associations, the strangeness of the surroundings; it had been very much as though one were still in the services, and had been posted to a new and rather eccentric unit. When Mr. James left, this tenuous sense of security would leave with him; it was a sobering thought.
And before the students dispersed to return to their rooms, William Davis said that he for one would miss Mr. James, and as everyone else immediately expressed agreement with this view, Mr. James became mollified. “I’d be the last,” he said, “to resent a joke at my expense, and by and large I don’t mind admitting that I’ll be sorry to go. You’ve been a hell of a bloody handful all the way, but I’ve had worse lads to deal with in the past, and I expect I’ll have worse again in the future.”
Once back in his room, Paul undressed, put on his pyjamas and climbed into bed. During the meal his breathing had caused him uneasiness, and he had not spoken for fear of precipitating an attack of coughing. As soon as he lay down the attack came, and it lasted several minutes. The colour mounted in his cheeks and his eyes watered, but when it was all over, and his bronchial tubes were cleared, he felt impregnated by that sense of permanent alleviation, (so false, and so often the experience of consumptives) attendant upon the temporary resumption of unrestricted breathing.
“I suppose,” he said at last to John Cotterell, “you were also pretty ill to start with.”
“Not really. I had the good luck to get diagnosed very early.”
“But you told me last night that you had already spent six months in a sanatorium.”
John Cotterell laughed. “Six months with this illness is not a very long time.”
“It isn’t! Then how long do you think that I will be here?”
“I’m afraid that it’s very difficult to say.”
“But how long could it be?” insisted Paul.
“There isn’t really a time limit. It all depends on what happens.”
“I see.” Paul was silent a moment. Then: “Well, I suppose there is one compensation. I mean that in the last six months you must have got through a great deal of work.”
“In actual fact not awfully much. Of course I intended to do a lot at the outset, but somehow one tends to drift. If you want to work you’ve really got to set yourself a minimum each day, and get it done however you are feeling.”
“That’s what I shall do,” said Paul with decision.
And he gave the impression of being about to start that very moment, so much so that John laughed again. “You can take a holiday today, I think. Besides, there will be a number of interruptions; there’s sure to be a medical examination, and then probably X-rays. Tell me, is there very much wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” replied Paul guardedly. “I hope not. But then I know nothing at all about … about T.B.”
“How did you find out that you were ill?”
“It was like this …” said Paul. And there followed a story which adhered to an all too familiar pattern. After leaving the Army he had suffered from a fatigue which at last had forced him to restrict his activities at the university. In so far as he had sought any explanation, he had believed it to be partly due to leading a sedentary life, partly due to the fact that the Cambridge climate was so relaxing.
At the end of a year he had started to feel physically ill, and he had paid a visit to a G.P., who, after a medical examination, had pronounced him completely fit. “Tired? Well of course, and who isn’t? Perhaps with a Conservative Government, and a little red meat …” A second doctor, consulted some months later, gave him a tonic, and a third, at an interval of a few more months, prescribed a course of benzedrine. A fourth doctor, after examining him cursorily, regarded him through half-closed eyes and spoke darkly of psychosomatic disorders and of the almost universal need for analysis. Here Paul had left the matter until, nearly a year later, bordering upon a state of complete collapse, he had felt once more impelled to seek medical advice. He was about to describe the outcome of his final consultation when there came a crash at the door, and in burst all the remaining members of the British party.
“Quiet, please, gentlemen,” said John Cotterell, raising one hand. “The Captain is just summarising the diagnostic capacities of Cambridgeshire G.P.s. Up to the time of going to press four of them have pronounced him physically fit, though one has prescribed a change of Government, the second a tonic, the third a course of benzedrine and the fourth psychoanalysis. New readers now start here—on you go, Paul.”
Paul looked in confusion at his friends, who had seated themselves either on his or on John Cotterell’s bed, and who, by their silence, invited him to continue with his story. “But there’s really nothing more to tell,” he said.
“Get on with it, man, and don’t blather,” said Angus Gray. John MacAllister added that he did not wish to miss an opportunity of studying the methods of those prodigies of science who practised south of the Border.
“Well, I’d finished really. I was only going to tell John what finally happened ….” said Paul.
“What did finally happen?” demanded William Davis.
“Oh, something utterly ridiculous. I couldn’t——”
“Get on, man, we can’t wait all day,” said Angus Gray testily.
So Paul described how one day, feeling too ill to work, he had left the library and had walked disconsolately along the Cambridge streets. Passing a house with a brass plate bearing the name ‘Dr. Thompson’, he had given in to a sudden impulse and had knocked at the door. He had been shown straight into Dr. Thompson’s consulting-room.
Once seated, and having introduced himself, Paul had recounted his story. He had described the progressive intensification of what had started merely as a malaise: he had dwelt in detail of each symptom. Then he had summarised briefly the findings of the doctors he had so far consulted. Dr. Thompson had listened with attention and had only interrupted to pose a pertinent question or to request a more exact definition of some particular aspect of the narrative.
Then: “And this has been going on for more than two years?”
“Yes.”
“And not only do you feel no better, but you feel progressively worse.”
“Yes. Very much worse.”
“Then it seems to me that indubitably there is something wrong.”
A silence.
“Then what should I do? What do you advise?”
“What should you do? Well, you tell me that you have already consulted four doctors …. I don’t know …. Probably you ought to consult a fifth.”
“A fifth!”
“Yes.”
“But——Well, I mean——” A pause. “But you’re a doctor …”
“Yes—of economics. Now, if there is anything you want to ask me about my own subject, I——”
At this point Paul’s listeners broke into such a roar of laughter that Sœur Jeanne, who had been passing in the corridor, came running into the room.
“Mon Dieu, les Anglais!” she cried indignantly. “What are you all doing here? Do you not know that it is the morning cure and that you should all be in bed? If Dr. Vernet comes along and finds you you will not laugh, that I promise you.” And ferociously she bustled the still laughing students back into their rooms.