Four days of tension and apprehension amidst the trunks and cases, packed, locked but unlabelled. At one moment Paul would decide categorically to refuse to enter a sanatorium, at another he would make up his mind to request immediate and radical treatment, anything which would conduce to the early restoration of his health. Sometimes his body broke into a sweat when he thought of Dr. Dubois proposing heavy surgical treatment; sometimes it broke into a sweat when he thought of Dr. Dubois telling him that there was nothing more to be done. ‘But it’s always like this,’ he thought helplessly. ‘For two years I have done nothing but wait for medical decisions, for the results of tests, analyses and X-rays, for the outcome of one form of treatment or another.’ Was there any reason for assuming that it would ever change?
He arranged for the development of the films which he had planned to have developed in London—suddenly he found himself in possession of fifty new pictures of Michèle. For two days he looked at nothing else, examining them, studying them with lamps and magnifying glasses, crudely projecting them on to an improvised screen, dozing and sleeping over them until at last the fixed visual image which he possessed of each provided an hallucinated impression of her presence. “I see you with my eyes open or shut,” he wrote to her; “you are here in everything but yourself; I find myself stretching my arm about you and only understanding when it contracts about nothing that in reality you are a thousand miles away.”
When Paul got up on the morning of his second interview with Dr. Dubois, he wondered once again whether he had passed his last night in the châlet. Dr. Dubois received him as impersonally and distantly as on the first occasion—there was no gauging in advance the nature of his impartment. He glanced unhurriedly through the leaves of Paul’s dossier, opened and closed a drawer (without inserting or removing anything), cleaned his rimless spectacles with a special cloth, coughed, and was about to speak when the telephone rang and postponed what he had to say by another five minutes.
“Bien, monsieur,” he said to Paul, the call over but the receiver still in his hand. He replaced the receiver very deliberately on the hook. “It is impossible for me, or for anyone, to assess the condition of your lung—it is obscured on the X-ray plate by the shadows that have been caused by the thickening of the pleura, by your protracted pleurisy and by an extensive bronchiectasis,” he said. He clasped one hand in the other. “Nevertheless a careful comparison of the X-rays taken during the previous year has not revealed any visible evidence of deterioration, and therefore it is not unreasonable to hope that the change in the analysis will prove to be transitory.”
He went on to say that in his view there could be no question of Paul leaving Brisset, but that equally there was no reason for him to enter a sanatorium. He recommended that Paul should take a course of a new antibiotic in tablet form; if the trouble were not extensive there was every hope that no more vigorous form of treatment would be required.
“Then there is a chance that I may be able to leave before the winter?” demanded Paul. Dr. Dubois reflected for a moment. “It is not impossible,” he conceded.
So shifting is the scale by which good and bad fortune are measured that Paul’s relief was no less than that with which, a week ago, he would have received the news that the initial analysis had been an error. He thanked Dr. Dubois as if the latter had been responsible not merely for the diagnosis but also for its leniency. He went straight from the Universel to the nearest chemist’s shop so that he might start the treatment within the hour. He wrote to Michèle to express his confidence in Dr. Dubois and his certainty that he would be joining her before long. He unpacked one of his cases (deliberately not touching the remainder of his luggage in order to maintain the impression that he was on the verge of imminent departure). He settled down to wait.
His reaction of relief sustained him through the first few days, but at last their length and emptiness, the intensity of his loneliness, the uncertainty of his situation, the uneasiness of his sleep and the panic of his wakings prompted little by little a return to that state to which, in whatever circumstances, he all too readily reverted, where hope had no footing and his cerebral pressure was registered by the emergence from his psychic weather house of one or other of the trim, twin figures, dread and despair.
Mme. Anniette continued to visit him and to send her representatives; sometimes he passed an evening with the sergeant and the petit chou, sometimes with Fritz, whose room resembled the refuse dump of a radar station. Delmuth called on him and occasionally stayed for a meal. (“Is a nice walk with æsthetical benefits at the conclusion,” he would explain.)
First Kubahskoi, then Dr. Florent (who had been looking for a suitable post ever since the closure of Les Alpes), then Dr. Vernet left Brisset. Dr. Bruneau, who because of his health could not quit the mountains, remained in charge of the small residue of Dr. Vernet’s patients, none of whom had agreed to accept Dr. Bertin as medical adviser.
At last, reluctantly and with infinite precaution, Paul prised open the lid of his crate and removed half a dozen of his books.
To Mme. Anniette’s dismay Delmuth at last cultivated the habit of calling daily at the châlet. When she caught a glimpse of him through Paul’s window, she would cry: “There’s the werewolf!” (a reference to Delmuth’s manner of eating) and hurriedly leave the room.
Whatever Paul’s state of mind, he did not anticipate Delmuth’s visit with pleasure, whilst Delmuth himself never had any clear idea why he had come and would regularly declare that it was for the last time. Nevertheless when Delmuth failed to arrive at his usual hour, Paul would become ill at ease, even an unwelcome visit being preferable to the prospect of an afternoon’s introspection.
Delmuth’s preoccupation was alternately to reassure or to alarm Paul in respect of his condition. “If Vernet say you not ill, then you not ill,” he would insist, but then a little later he would point contemptuously at Paul’s large bottle of antibiotic tablets and cry: “Why you bother? For you, two stage ten rib thoraco with double drainage top and bottom!”
Paul’s baggage always provoked a reaction. “Unpack!” Delmuth would sometimes cry, aiming a kick at a trunk. “Is now quite clear you have to spend the whole winter in the châlet.” But another time he would approve the fact that the trunks were still packed, for he would declare that it was equally ‘quite clear’ that Dr. Dubois would shortly be sending Paul to a sanatorium.
There were times when Delmuth could not bear to remain in the châlet and would force Paul out for a walk. On these occasions he would speak of his wife (who was shortly to join him in Brisset), of his mistress at home (‘a frivolous and sexual young girls for whom I am the life’) and of his mistress at Brisset, a local shopgirl who received him in a kimono and whom accordingly he had christened ‘Lotus Flower’. “Or a mans is attractive to womens or is not. I am!” he explained.
And when on this subject he would refer to Michèle (of whom he did not approve). “A mans need a wife very much older than himself and not at all pretty.” Had Paul ever really imagined that Michèle would have married him? Had it escaped his notice that she flirted with everyone? “I tell you now in conference,” said Delmuth, “that Michèle was most of all attracted by me, but I make it quite clear from the first that I am too old a monkey to be caught so easily.” And he added complacently: “It cause her much pain, I think. Is why she had to choose you.”
When his wife did arrive, Delmuth brought her to the châlet. Mme Delmuth fulfilled very generously her husband’s two basic requirements in a wife, adding by way of good measure an immense bulk, a limp and a voice like the grinding of a gearbox. From the first encounter she assumed her husband’s ambivalent attitude towards Paul, attacking him for his outlook on life (which he never expressed), for not asserting himself, for not taking up some small manual occupation which would bring him a little money. (It was Delmuth’s constant boast that when necessary he could maintain himself from his bed.)
Sometimes the Delmuths would invite Paul to spend the evening with them in their bare, chilling pension room, where the single assertion of their presence was a large, flat, metal cross which Mme Delmuth had nailed above the bed. When Paul arrived she would straightway expound her views on life, religion and the upbringing of children (“Il faut qu’un enfant aie une crainte, monsieur”) and if she observed her husband on the point of speaking she would eye him malevolently and rebuke him in advance for the folly and presumption of anything he might be about to say.
Paul visited Dr. Dubois fortnightly. He finished first one, then a second, bottle of the tablets, but there was no change in his analysis. The skies grew overcast. “Ah, ça y est,” said Pierre gloomily, taking brooms and brushes out of the wood-shed and putting them in the front porch of the châlet. Within the week Brisset was under the first snow of a new winter.
Winter, that is to say, in Brisset, but autumn anywhere else. “But what is happening?” wrote Michèle. “It is over two months since I left you. Are you no better? Is there no chance of your getting away before the bad weather starts? What does Dr. Dubois say about the future?”
Dr. Dubois said nothing about the future; he limited himself, after each of Paul’s fortnightly examinations, to the single observation: “Pas de changement.” And whilst Paul always hoped that Dr. Dubois would express the opinion that he was better, he was nevertheless reassured to learn that there was no fresh evidence of deterioration. He repeated to himself Glou-Glou’s consolatory maxim: “Etat stationnaire, donc favorable.” “Dubois appears satisfied,” he wrote back to Michèle, “and I am certain I will get away before the end of the year.”
In fact he was certain, though his certainty was the consequence of a decision which six months ago would have appeared unthinkable—but then so would the situation which had prompted it. He had at last adjusted himself to being positive; indeed he now suspected, probably not incorrectly, that he had never been negative, but that earlier analyses had failed to reveal the presence of the bacilli. A new cosmogony had replaced the old. He was positive, but he was not chronically ill. Life was not necessarily over, nor was there any obligation to pass what remained of it in the ward of an institution. There were people who were positive all their lives but who, nevertheless, earned a living, married, reared families. In a word, he had resolved to stay in Brisset until the next analysis and then, irrespective of the result, to go.
To this end he determined to get as fit as possible. He got up early, worked and went for remedial walks with Delmuth. He was grateful for Delmuth’s company on these walks. Everywhere he went, everything he saw, recalled Michèle, and the immediate sense of separation became unendurable when he was alone. The return of the snow intensified these reactions, for it was with the snow that Paul most associated Michèle, and during a few days in which Delmuth had been indisposed he had not had the courage to leave the châlet.
Probably because he was imposing on himself a heavier day he found that he had to rest for longer periods. His cheeks were permanently flushed. “Comme Monsieur Davenant a de belles joues rouges,” cried the petit chou when, one afternoon, at the sergeant’s request, he was taking her photograph. ‘Well, why should it not be a sign of returning health?’ he asked himself. He had had a grave-stone pallor for long enough. When he returned from a walk he would lie on his divan and fall immediately asleep, a peculiar sleep, a sleep from which waking was difficult, which invaded the whole of his body like a general anæsthetic and retained his limbs prisoner after waking so that he would have no alternative but to lie motionless for another hour.
Posters appeared in the village announcing an evening excursion by motor-coach to a town at the bottom of the mountain where there was to be a représentation of Rossini’s Barber of Seville. “Voilà ce qu’il vous faut,” declared Mme. Anniette.
On the day of the opera Paul remained in bed until the late afternoon; he knew that without preparatory rest he would be too tired to enjoy the performance. But the effort of getting up was as considerable as if he had not rested at all, and when he had finished dressing he lay down again on his bed until it was time to leave.
The sense of tiredness diminished as he climbed into the coach and left him completely, replaced by a sensation of anticipatory excitement, as the driver pressed the self-starter, the lights dipped and the ancient vehicle trembled, then nosed cautiously forward. ‘I feel as well as at any time in my life,’ he told himself. But half an hour later, the slow descent still uncompleted, his hand pressed between his head and the vibrating window, he wished only that the performance was over and that the coach was on the way back to Brisset.
The whole of the next day he remained in bed (the coach had arrived back at half-past one). And four days later when he next called on Dr. Dubois his temperature graph had four times infiltrated the red line of the chart. “Mais pourquoi?” demanded Dr. Dubois. He listened in silence to Paul’s explanation, then ordered him to remain in bed until the temperature had returned to normal, and to visit him weekly instead of fortnightly.
The days were rapidly shortening, the snow was falling more thickly. There being no external window to the little bedroom, the light was poor. After deliberation (was it worth it for a day or two?) Paul and Mme. Anniette rearranged the room with the top of the bed protruding through the door of the partition. And to assert the innocuousness of his condition Paul lay during the afternoon on the divan.
“Why, is nearly no fever at all,” cried Delmuth, outraged, at the same time tossing back on to Paul’s bed the temperature chart which he had seized with such enthusiasm. “Wait!” said Paul lightly, though secretly he was not without apprehension—when, since his illness, had a temperature not had sinister implications? “Wait!” echoed Delmuth. “I wait since nearly three month. Please be interesting. Please ravish me with a little spectacle.”
Mme. Delmuth too came to the châlet; sometimes on parting Delmuth would encounter the other arriving. She would sit at the end of the bed, her bulk preventing Paul from stretching his legs, causing the mattress to sag and creating such havoc with the bed-clothes as to suggest that they had not been made for a month. “You did not thank God for your health when you had it: by what right do you complain now that He has taken it away?” she would demand. And since Paul rarely replied (in any case, he knew that to talk increased his temperature), she would continue: “Throw yourself at His feet, implore His pardon and meekly accept His punishment, knowing that whatever its severity it will be less than your deserts.”
The snow was not yet thick enough for a sledge; Paul, wrapped in rugs and blankets, paid his next visit to Dr. Dubois by horse and cart. Dr. Dubois expressed concern at the persistency of his temperature. “You must remain in bed. There can be no question of getting up until it is normal.”
The same evening his temperature increased appreciably, a consequence, Paul thought, of the journey to the Universel. (He always found an empiric reason for each variation—a heavy meal, too many blankets, a troubled sleep.) Nor did it descend during the night.
‘This is it,’ thought Paul, acknowledging at last that which up to the present he had refused even to fear. Mme. Anniette brought the breakfast, lit the oil-stove, and as usual asked his temperature, but he did not reply, only asking her not to make up the bed.
During the subsequent days he relaxed all occupation, no longer attempting to read, no longer leaving his bed to lie on his divan, but subordinating everything to the taking of his temperature. And as this was undoubtedly affected by movement and by speech, he would lie for hours in the same position, feigning sleep or replying in whispered monosyllables when anyone called on him.
The course of his temperature graph (which was also the graph of his mental state) was erratic and diabolic, sometimes conceding him a whole day of hope, revealing its duplicity by a heady upward dash in the latter half of the afternoon, sometimes damning the day from its inception. He consulted his pulse no less than his thermometer, counting and correlating at last so automatically that at one moment he found that he was timing the tolling of the church bell.
On his next visit to Dr. Dubois, the latter shook his head and commented that the situation had now become unsatisfactory. If his temperature had not become stabilised by the end of the week, Paul would have to enter the Universel.
On the way back in the cart Paul determined that his temperature would become stabilised, but when he took it that evening it had risen by nine divisions. ‘It is because I had to go to the Universel; otherwise it would have been no higher than yesterday,’ he thought in despair.
In the morning he awoke shivering and in confusion, having dreamed that he had passed the night in an army hut with a leaking roof and that his bedding had been soaked: an experience which he had had as a recruit. Then he saw that his pyjamas and sheets were drenched and that his whole body was running with sweat. He took his temperature and consulted it after two minutes; the reading demonstrated that the period of speculation was at an end, that his day need no longer be spent in frenzied and ceaseless recourse to his thermometer.
Mme. Anniette changed his bedding, at the same time reluctantly insisting that she should get into touch with Dr. Dubois. Paul requested her not to do so but to wait one more day, not through any hope of amelioration, but in order that he might adjust himself to what he now acknowledged was inevitable.
Mme. Anniette had brought with her a letter from Michèle. The sight of her writing on the envelope caused him such an intensity of emotion (he was once more possessed by the certainty that he would never see her again) that he shut it away in the drawer of his table de nuit.
He could not eat, his fever made it difficult for him to lie still, but nevertheless each hour which he still contrived to pass in the châlet appeared an hour of respite. Delmuth called. “Is, I think, the last time we meet together here,” he declared, eyeing Paul appraisingly. “I shall be here a few more days,” insisted Paul. Delmuth shook his head. “Is over,” he said, with finality.
In the evening his fever decreased and he took a little nourishment. Again he felt the awful stirring of hope, again began to associate his condition with his having left the châlet the previous day. ‘If I am no worse tomorrow I shall not get into touch with Dr. Dubois,’ he resolved.
He opened Michèle’s letter and was comforted by what he read. ‘Perhaps even yet it will finish well,’ he reflected as he settled down for the night. Michèle’s letter, the diminution of his fever, a new change of bed-clothes and pyjamas, induced a sudden feeling of well-being; he drifted easily with the current between the parallel banks of waking and sleeping.
Persistent sounds from the other side of the wall wove in and out of his consciousness; he was aware of them, then not aware of them, then aware of them once again. Then suddenly he was wide awake. There was a muffled laugh and the creaking of a bed. But the next room was empty. Then he remembered that two days previously the sergeant had changed rooms and was now his neighbour.
He tried to settle down, but the sound of another laugh jerked him back from the edge of sleep. He lay very still. Again the creaking of the bed, then the unmistakable cackle of the petit chou, followed by more laughter, which resolved itself into a whispering which rose and fell to the distinct and unremitting accompaniment of a hand patting bare flesh.
Paul sandwiched his head between the pillows, but this did little to muffle the sounds. Then the whispering dropped to a murmur, and then there was silence. Paul, very relieved, took a deep breath and fell asleep almost instantly. A little later he was woken by more laughter, and at the same time he became aware that his fever was returning. A series of alarm-clock cackles from the petit chou, the hoarse, indulgent laugh of the sergeant and the resumption of the terrible patting. Paul again thrust his head between the pillows, but withdrew it, stifling, a few moments later. He wiped his face and forehead. He knew that only sleep would arrest his rising fever which, if unchecked, would in its turn preclude the possibility of sleep. Resolutely he reclosed his eyes and kept them closed.
His feet were burning. He moved them to the other side of the bed, and when, again too hot, he moved them back, he found that the sheets were moist and clinging. The noise of the love-making continued. ‘God,’ thought Paul, ‘it will go on all night!’
A new hazard—the contents of his stomach were rising to his throat, and the effort to keep them down was leaving his runaway fever without course or rider. From next door the character of the sounds indicated development. The sergeant (owing to his restricted breathing) and the petit chou (either equally broken in wind or else in moronic emulation) were emitting alternate, raucous gasps which, with the metallic grinding of the bed springs, sounded like an ancient steam train setting out on its last journey.
Paul’s whole body broke into a heavy sweat and, swearing, he tore off his pyjamas. He groped for the towels and knocked over the stand. An interruption, two gasps long, as the sergeant and the petit chou each retained a single breath, then uninhibited resumption. Paul pulled a towel from the floor and started to wrap it about his middle, when, like claws dividing tissue, pain tore his chest. He remained rigid till it had subsided, then lay back on the pillow. A new exudation formed about his thighs and seeped into sheets and blankets. “Christ!” he muttered, raising a sweating hand to a sweating forehead.
His fever bounded forward, relating him organically to the train now flat out across open country. The volume increased, the rhythm became swifter. Paul was now on the running-board, now stoking, now swinging great boulders of coal from the open tender. More fuel. More fuel. Flames leapt backwards from the furnace, searing, roasting his naked arms and chest.
A climacteric cataract of cries, the train over the edge into the river and the furnace out. Paul lay still. His body had taken over and every pore was vomiting.
Paul had woken in his vomit. As he had sat up a familiar movement in his chest had shown it to be full of fluid. He had renounced all further resistance, succumbing to the comatic element of a high fever, lying waiting for the sledge which would soon be taking him away, not caring what would happen, taking consolation from the knowledge that at least his destination was the Universel and not Les Alpes, that in having severed his connection with Vernet he had at the same time cut loose from Bruneau, Halfont and Emile.
He speculated briefly on whether he might be given Michèle’s old room, whether the chef would make any concessions to his vegetarian diet, whether he was going to live or die, but then his mind relapsed, he re-emerged into his boyhood, recalling the sequence of the shops in the street in which he had lived, the names and faces of the boys at his first preparatory school, the collections of objects he had made, the cigar-box which he had filled with two rows of cut-out transfer butterflies transfixed with pins and which had brought on him such contumely for not having resorted to killing-bottle and net.
He heard the arrival of the sledge. In came Dr. Bruneau. “Come on. Get ready. You’re not so sick you can’t get out of bed.” Paul stared at him uncomprehendingly. Dr. Bruneau pulled back the bed-clothes.
“I’m Dr. Dubois’s patient,” Paul whispered.
“That remains to be seen. The Universel closed down yesterday and the Société has reopened Les Alpes. For the time being I am looking after all those who are patients of Dr. Vernet. Now come along—I can’t wait all day.”