The condition of man imposes its own limitations: to an estimate of his significance and of the implications of his existence he can bring no more than the fallible and subjective processes of his capacity for conjecture. Isolated, wedged transiently at a point in infinity, careless of what has preceded his life, preoccupied and obsessed by the thoughts of what may succeed it, shackled and blinded by the problems and prejudices arising from it, his readiness to dogmatise will be proportionate to the intensity of his fears and the deficiency of his imagination.
An appetite for faith may be to some extent its justification: it is certainly not its proof—we do not build a fire to prove or disprove the existence of cold, but to keep ourselves warm. A traveller on a perilous journey may draw comfort from the knowledge that he has a pistol in his pocket, though, unknown to himself, his servant has neglected to load it. Like the traveller, we shall only learn whether or not our pistols were loaded when the issue will have transcended speculation; till then we must draw our comfort from whatever we care to believe or disbelieve. Truth, if it exists, will remain unaffected. A starving animal will suck the dug of its dead parent, and a man in extremity can condition himself to believe what he calculates will bring him most consolation.
After Sœur Yvette had cleansed his limbs, Paul had lain for the rest of the day in a state of comatose inactivity, ignoring sisters and doctors, paying no attention to their questions, moving his limbs only when the pressure of their weight became unendurable. Dr. Bruneau came in the early evening, but Paul remained staring up at the ceiling, giving no indication that he was even conscious of his presence. Then Dr. Bruneau and Sœur Yvette left the room, and Paul heard them whispering together outside the door. Suppressing his breathing, he managed to distinguish a phrase of Dr. Bruneau: “There’s no hope. His days are counted.”
“Thy will be done,” he muttered, closing his eyes in thankfulness.
For he was broken. When the induction of the pneumothorax had brought him near to death he had felt no inclination to revise the tenets of his unbelief. But now, in misery and isolation, he had stood for too long on the edge of the abyss; he felt the need to relate himself to some Vital Principle, not in recantation, not in supplication, but in affirmation. “Thy will be done.” The desire of the wheel to turn, of the jewel to be worn, of the apple to be plucked, of the mind to equate Atman with Brahman.
Turning in his bed, twisting his burning feet in search of a cool corner of the sheets, he repeated, brought home upon, each proposition of the Lord’s Prayer—primarily reverting to it because of its accessibility to his mind, sustaining it because it crystallised the amorphous longings of his spirit, cherishing it because it was free of the dogmas inseparable from the religious system associated with it, in which he had been raised.
“Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven …”
Man the peripatetic anthropomorphist, casuistic but enthusiastic interpreter of thaumaturgies, theogonies and theophanies, hastens to establish himself on an eternal basis by postulating a Protoplast and worshipping It. The Protoplast, inconveniently incarnating Itself in human form, short-circuits in a single prayer the whole of Its postulator’s capacity for whining, flattering, cajoling, berating and self-seeking. The postulator gratuitously devotes the succeeding two thousand years to supplying the deficiency.
“Give us this day our daily bread …”
“Our daily bread”—the free request, freely made. The morning toast, the memory-soaked madeleine, the celestial candy-floss which inspirits us to dare the big dipper and the haunted house. How else oil the wheels ad majorem Dei gloriam? Christ did not say: “Give us this day some bread,” but “Give us this day our daily bread.” Not in abjectness but in joyful kinship, hands across the clouds and cards face upwards on the table. For where the children are responsible to the Father, so the Father is responsible for the children, and the labourer is worthy of the rod which beats him.
And Paul now saw the splendid great slices of fresh bread, hygienic but unwrapped, piled high upon a platter in the desert, and the earthen pitcher ball-bellied with the iridescent, blessed blood. And drawing into himself the consubstantial, mystic force from material provision, he repeated:
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”
Infinitely subtle. A reminder to man that if he expects to be forgiven, he must forgive; a reminder to God that a man who has forgiven merits, perhaps, forgiveness.
“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
There seemed little time left for temptation, but from evil, thought Paul, O good God, deliver me! For the Kingdom was God’s, as was the power and the glory and the horror thereof. Nor would God affirm one and deny the other, nor ratiocinate, nor engage in eristic double-talk; for the game and candle, the blood and the wine, the fœtus and the corpse in the allotment were all one, finally, irrevocably, world without end. And facts are facts. Life is hard; belief is harder; total unbelief hardest of all. But too much weeping blinds even the keenest eyes to the Vision of the Presence.
“Monsieur Davenant, it is unhappily necessary to perform a ponction sternale. I will send a chair for you in twenty minutes,” said Dr. Vernet.
“No,” said Paul. He had decided during the night to refuse any further treatment.
“No what?”
“No thank you.”
Dr. Vernet sighed apologetically. “My deficiencies of English—we are as usual misunderstanding each other. I said I will perform for you a ponction sternale.”
“Yes,” said Paul. His lips were sticking together, his salivary glands seemed to have stopped secreting.
“Good. A bientôt.”
“No.”
“Pardon?”
“I said ‘No’.”
Dr. Vernet took a deep breath. “Monsieur, you mishear me. I am saying that a ponction sternale is necessary. You think that I lose my time?”
“I am not having any more treatment.”
“This is not treatment, it is a test.”
“I don’t care, I don’t …” In his weakness, Paul’s composure was uncertain. Tomorrow he might be dead—there was no one who cared that he was being tortured out of life, that his heart was being driven to a state of seizure.
“Carry out your test at the post-mortem,” he said.
“Are you out of your mind?” cried Dr. Vernet, his great, white-clad figure, fat with health, towering above the end of the bed. Paul turned away, stared at the wall.
Dr. Vernet leant over, clenched his fists on the bed-rail, then released his grip. “Bon. We will await developments,” he said, and left the room.
“I will tell you the truth,” said Sœur Yvette. And she explained to Paul that Dr. Vernet’s hobby was blood, and that where a ponction sternale was likely to produce an interesting result—even when the result could have no practical application in the case of the patient on whom it was performed—it provided a temptation which he could rarely resist. In refusing it, from whatever motive, Paul had acted wisely. But as for refusing all further treatment! And there were distinct signs that the pus was thinning—just the moment not to give up! Paul must get into the wheel-chair and be taken down to the Service Médical. He must co-operate. The pus must be removed.
“I refuse,” said Paul. Sœur Yvette left the room.
‘It is like this that one dies,’ thought Paul. Lying there, he felt that his body had sunk below the level of his bed, and that his spirit had sunk below the level of his body. So it was that one sank out of life, lower and lower ….
Then he heard Sœur Miriam’s laugh, and the sound of a trolley rattling up the corridor in the direction of his room. The door opened. Dr. Bruneau walked in, nodded, glanced at Paul’s temperature chart, grimaced, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.
“I refuse,” said Paul.
Dr. Bruneau smiled, started to fill a syringe with anæsthetic.
“I will have no more treatment.”
“Chouk, chouk, chouk,” said Sœur Miriam.
Paul drew back in his bed. “Do not come near me,” he said.
Dr. Bruneau slammed the bottle of anæsthetic down on the trolley, smiling no longer. “The window,” he said, waving his hand towards it, “When you’ve had enough of life, jump out! Till then let me do my duty.” And holding a hypodermic in one hand, and pulling the trolley after him with the other, he advanced to the top of Paul’s bed.
Paul trembled involuntarily as Sœur Yvette approached him with a needle. During the day, as well as Dr. Bruneau’s ponction, he had had a blood transfusion; this made the fourteenth injection since morning.
A quick stab in his arm, and barely had he gasped when peace swept up the ramifications of veins and arteries like a tidal bore. He turned face downwards, stretched his arms and legs into cool corners of the bed, his body the boss of a wheel, his arms and legs the spokes.
The complete absence of pressure on any part of his body brought to his attention the fact that now he was suspended several inches above his bed. Then slipping horizontally sideways, he passed across the room and out of the open window, in the wake of his detached and hurrying consciousness.
Ecstasy was when he managed to overtake his consciousness and reconfine it in his body; the sensation precluded vigilance, enabling consciousness to re-detach itself and again precede him.
Four or five times he wrenched the ruling faculty back into his body; then, completely outdistancing him, it soared upwards in a tiny golden shower, whilst his husk relapsed into the basic chemicals of its composition and dispersed in the air.
“A visitor for you,” said Sœur Yvette.
The price of three morphia-induced sleeps was the mental obfuscation which followed each of them: Paul did not recognise Desmond Beale as he walked into the room.
“Mr. Desmond Beale,” Sœur Yvette whispered to Paul.
“I knew him at Cambridge,” Paul whispered back to Sœur Yvette.
“He’s here now.”
“Where?”
Desmond walked to the top of the bed and took Paul’s hand.
“Desmond!” cried, Paul pressing the hand against his forehead. He lay quite still, his eyes closed. Sœur Yvette left the room.
“How did you …” Paul’s voice became indistinct.
“I got a telegram to come immediately.”
“From Vernet?”
“No. Someone called Kibouski.”
“Kubahskoi?”
“For all I know …”
The effort was making Paul sweat. He released Desmond’s hand, impatiently dried his face with a handkerchief.
“Vernet said I could only say ‘Hullo’.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yes. He says your condition is serious, but that if you want to live you’ll pull through.”
Paul opened his eyes. Desmond looked down into the white, crumpled face and shuddered. The stench of the sick-room, of purulence, sweat and urine became overpowering. He turned away.
“How did you get here?”
“Flew. Had a whip round for the ticket. Everyone contributed.”
The door opened and Sœur Yvette came back into the room. She told Desmond that he must leave.
“When can I come back?”
“Tomorrow. If he is strong enough.”
The door opened and shut.
In the late afternoon Sœur Yvette came to give Paul his injections. She said: “My poor Paul, don’t be disappointed, but your visitor has gone. He said he hadn’t enough money to pay for food and lodging.”
“But I’ve got money. I could have——”
“It’s too late now. He left three hours ago.”
A sound of laughter and heavy footsteps. The door burst open. Desmond, his hair disordered, his face bleeding, his jacket in ribbons, staggered into the room.
“I’ve just fallen down a mountain,” he announced, doubling up with laughter.
A bell sounded in the passage. With an exclamation of annoyance, Sœur Yvette went to answer it.
Desmond went over to the wash-basin and stared in the mirror. “You’re drunk!” he exclaimed, pointing severely at his reflection. Then he removed his jacket and stared with interest at his lacerated shirt sleeve.
“That’s what happens if you climb up mountains.”
“Why were you climbing mountains?”
“I didn’t know I was till I fell down one. No objection if I clean myself up?” He peeled off his shirt and vest.
“Sœur Yvette said you’d left.”
“I had. No money, you see.”
“I’ve got enough money.”
“So have I!” Desmond pulled a handful of notes out of his pocket and tossed them in the air.
“But——”
“It’s a long story. Can’t go into it now. But, very briefly, I got in with a drunk in the station buffet at Uhle. He started boasting that he owned the whole of Brisset. I led him on, then challenged him to show me his wallet as proof.”
Desmond stepped out of his trousers and started to rub himself down with a wad of bandages soaked in soapy water.
“But won’t he …”
“No. He was absolutely blind, I tell you. Besides, I gave him lots of it back.” Desmond sprinkled his hair with surgical spirit and rubbed it vigorously into his scalp. Sœur Yvette came back into the room and gave a cry. Desmond raised his hand in a gesture of acknowledgement, then continued with his toilet.
“Dr. Bruneau’s coming. Put your clothes on at once.”
“May I visit Paul this evening?”
“No!”
As the door handle turned, Sœur Yvette threw Paul’s dressing-gown across Desmond’s shoulders. Dr. Bruneau came into the room.
“Bonjour, cher monsieur, we have not yet had the pleasure,” he said, affectionately taking Desmond by the arm. “But it is a rule of the house that new patients remain in bed until they have had their initial examination. Go back to your room now, and I will come and see you almost immediately.” And conducting Desmond to the door and opening it ceremoniously, he bowed him out.
The bedside lamp diffused a luminous, yellow mist about Paul’s head and pillows, intensifying the depth of the shadows like a riverside street-lamp in the fog. Antique, modelled in the shape of an oil lamp (in the way that the earliest motor-cars were designed like carriages), it consisted of a brass column with an enormous leaden base, surmounted by a wide-brimmed china bowl, tinted cream and dun, almost opaque. A fringe, perished and brittle, circumscribed the lower edge of the bowl, trapping and absorbing all lateral rays of light.
The lethargic and heavy flies, which in Les Alpes survived the winter, centred their existence about the lamp, occasionally making excursions into the far corners of the room, then zooming flatly back. They liked to sharpen their feet, stamp, swarm and crawl about the fringe, using it as landing ground and ambulatory; they transformed the surface of the bowl into a viewing screen for their obscene silhouettes, as they buzzed, crashed, fornicated and expired about the electric globe within.
Desmond returned in the early evening. He was still wearing the clothes he had torn in the afternoon, though he had brushed them and some of the larger rents had been drawn together with wide irregular stitches. He walked steadily, spoke deliberately; with his finger tips he kept on prising up the edges of the pieces of sticking plaster on his hands and neck.
“You’re alone?” he said. “No nurses with you? Good!” He came across the room and sat at the foot of Paul’s bed. “They’ve started to persecute me—same old story.” He looked fastidiously at the gnawed sheaths of his finger nails. “Air still a trifle voluptuous,” he commented, inhaling deeply.
“Open the window.”
“No. I like it. It smells like a vapour-heated garbage dump. Better than the filthy pure air outside. Are you better?”
“No.”
“How could you be? I’m talking like a fool. Truth is, I’m drunk again, though I don’t think it’s obvious, in point of fact. I’m rather worried in case any of those bloody nurses come up here again.” He stopped talking, his attention caught by a gross and slothful fly crawling towards him across the counterpane. Opening an empty match box he trapped it inside and closed the tray. There was a subdued buzzing, then silence. Cautiously he reopened the box, but the fly made no effort to escape. “Christ, even the bloody flies here have lost the will to live,” he cried, throwing the box at the window with such force that he fell off the bed. “I’m pissed,” he said, getting up, “thoroughly, legitimately, one hundred-per-cent pissed. I’d better put my head in cold water.” He staggered across the room, pulled open his collar and lowered his head into the wash-basin. “That’s better, that’s much better,” spluttering, scattering water, spitting. “It’s infallible, never fails.” He tripped over a chair and fell full length. “Christ, I’ll have the whole bloody regiment up here in a minute. Oh God, I’m a fool, I’m a fool.” He got to his feet, staggered to Paul’s bed.
“Look,” he said, “you lie there and you don’t say or do a damn thing. Why don’t you get the hell out of here?” He pulled a flask from his pocket and sucked at it. “I had messages for you. Now I’ve forgotten the lot. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps it does, though. Christ!” He drank again from the flask, then rubbed his lips with the back of his hand. “I want to cheer you up—that’s what I’ve come for. But you won’t cheer up. Here, take a drink.” And he thrust the flask at Paul.
“You won’t talk and you won’t cheer up and you won’t drink,” he continued. “It’s all quite clear. Not that I blame you at all, in point of fact. Of course, I really don’t know what I’m saying. Why am I talking like this? Oh Christ! Oh Christ!” He banged his fist against his forehead, tears coming suddenly to his eyes. “I’m wrecking everything, I’m abusing you, I’m making everything ten times worse than before I came. It’s typical—I’m not fit to live. Jesus!” He lowered his forehead into his hands and sobbed. Abruptly the sobbing stopped. He raised his head.
“I’m here to cheer you up …”
Shaking with laughter, he got up from the bed and started to pace the room.
“Cheer up, old man. Ha-ha-ha! I’m here to help you to cheer up!” he chuckled.
Paul watched him. Outside the area illuminated by the lamp, the extremities of the room could not be seen for the shadows; for long periods Desmond would disappear into them, and then Paul would believe himself to be alone.
Suddenly Desmond threw open a window. The wind tore into the room, and the curtains swelled and tried to free themselves, looking like the rumps of giant birds clamped and held captive by the necks.
Paul drifted in and out of sleep. At times it seemed that Desmond was hovering over him, swollen to the proportions of a barrage balloon; at other times he appeared so small and so far away that until he moved he was indistinguishable from the pattern on the wall-paper. His voice gave no indication of where he was standing; hearing it in one corner, Paul would turn his eyes in that direction. Waving and gesticulating, casting great shadows, Desmond would then emerge from the opposite corner, his face sharp and exsanguineous in the yellow light.
His mood was changing. A series of ecstatic projects had replaced the earlier entreaties and admonitions. When he sensed that Paul was no longer listening, he seized the end of the bed and shook it until Paul’s teeth chattered, crying: “Wake up, wake up! By God, it will be wonderful!”
Suddenly, in his enthusiasm, he tried to force his flask between Paul’s lips. Paul coughed. Blood stained the neck of the flask. Desmond dropped it with a scream and ran out into the passage.
“Monsieur Beale!” It was Sœur Yvette’s voice.
“Come quickly! He’s bleeding to death!”
“I told you you weren’t to come back.”
“The tourniquets! Get out the tourniquets!”
Sœur Yvette, followed closely by Desmond, hurried into the room. As she went over to Paul’s bed, Desmond twisted a towel into a turban and placed it on his head. “Voilà un turc!” he cried.
“Leave at once or I’ll send for Dr. Vernet,” said Sœur Yvette as she reassured herself that all was well with Paul.
“Leave at once or I’ll send for Dr. Vernet!” mimicked Desmond.
As Sœur Yvette turned about, Desmond tossed aside the towel, seized the waste-paper basket and inverted it on his head. “One more of a hundred impenetrable disguises!” he declared. Sœur Yvette strode across to him and jerked the basket away, leaving a mousse of rubbish, torn-up paper and apple peel on Desmond’s hair.
“You’ve broken my nose! A doctor! A doctor!”
Sœur Yvette grasped his elbow and guided him out of the room and down the passage.
“He went quite quietly at last,” she said as she returned to give Paul his fourth evening injection of morphia. “But he is, I’m afraid, becoming too much trouble. This time I must report him to Doctor Vernet, and he will not be allowed to come back into the sanatorium.”
Paul made no reply; his eyes were on the needle as it penetrated the wasted pin-cushion of his upper arm. Deeper, deeper, then, with the depression of the plunger, the subcutaneous, peace-disseminating stab. Vision fragmenting, the room’s light and darkness interwoven like strands in a fabric.
Quickly now, quickly to recapture and hold sensation. Groaning slightly with the fiercer pain of pain transmuted into pleasure, he turned on his stomach, stretched out his arms and waited for the take-off. A preliminary, prelusive tensing of the muscles; cigarettes out, safety belts on; a shudder throughout his frame. Then independently, seeking its own ecstasy in the contact of the cold night air upon its feverish surface, a foot slipped out from between the sheets. Error. The truant foot was now the focal point of sensation. Angrily, undrugging his senses by deliberate action, he dragged the foot back between the sheets.
He now attempted to redistribute his weight by contracting the muscles of his abdomen, arching his hips and resting them upon his clenched fists. The hollow beneath his body should aid buoyancy. Abruptly his limbs grew unbearably heavy; the effort of withdrawing his imprisoned hands left him gasping. His position now restricted his breathing, but when he tried to turn over he found that his arms were too cramped to aid the manœuvre. Feeling that he was suffocating, he twisted, wriggled and rocked until at last he was lying on his back.
As he regained his breath, he noted how the exact outline of the window, and of its leaded panes, was projected on to the curtains by the moon; when a slight breeze stirred the curtain folds, moonlight swept across the wall beside him like a tide. The sound of the wind brought with it an echo of the sea, the stirring of pebbles, the crackling of dry sand newly saturated.
Paul dismissed these images before they possessed him; there was no sand, no sea, only light on the wall and the wind rustling the curtains. To enforce his control over his senses, he raised himself slightly on his pillow. The curtains blew wide apart. On the patch of wall now illuminated he saw an immense bat, wings extended. The curtains fell back. The room was again in total darkness.
He lay motionless. There was no sound. Had he again been the victim of his imagination and the light? One of the curtains stirred sufficiently to reveal an enormous wing. Another wait in complete darkness, eyes straining, body tensed; the next flutter illuminated—the size of two furry hands clasped in prayer—the whole body of the bat.
Clouds passed across the moon and the outline of the window faded from the curtains. What should he do? If he moved, turned on the light, then the great creature would soar up and down the room, crash into the walls, the curtains, himself …. The curtains flapped wide and at the same moment the moon shone so brightly through the window that Paul could easily distinguish the design of the wallpaper. And with a wing-span of a yard, revealed in every detail, was the bat.
He must think clearly, must not panic. What was it that people feared from bats? Bats entangled in the hair. Bats covered with vermin? The teeth? Was it the teeth? The wings wrapped about one’s head, the claws fixed in one’s mouth, the teeth poised before one’s eyes ….
The curtains blew wide apart—the bat was crawling across the wall towards him. He gave a cry, pressed the bell for the night nurse, covered his face with his hands.
Silence. Fearfully he withdrew his fingers from his eyes. The curtain rustled. Paul saw that the bat had returned to its original position. Staring at it, conscious of what his act must precipitate, he clicked on the light.
The wall was bare. Where he had seen the body of the bat there were two electric light points. He watched them. They were squat, sinister, but essentially static.
Then he remembered with dismay that he had rung for the night nurse. The warning light above his door would be shining. It could only be cancelled from outside. He must get to the door before she would have time to reach the passage.
He pulled back the sheets and lowered his feet to the freezing oilcloth. As soon as he tried to stand, however, he fell backwards on to the bed, his heart beating so rapidly that he did not dare move.
Then, easing himself down the bed, he climbed on to a chair and dragged himself across the room, pulling himself from one piece of furniture to the next. He reached the door and opened it. The corridor was empty. Neither the warning light above the door nor the floor indicator at the top of the passage was shining.
He returned to his bed in the same manner, his heart beating so painfully that he had to lower his chest to his knees. What would be the consequences of all his acts of folly? When he turned out the light, he saw that the bat had again taken up its position on the wall. He fell asleep and woke in the morning with the sun shining on his closed eyelids. But on opening his eyes he found that it was not yet dawn—the centre light and the light by his bedside had been shining all night.