The Dutch patients were a shabby-looking crew and as time went on they grew shabbier. Excluded, like the students before them, from the mournful salon des privés, they consolidated their occupation of the foyer by never leaving it; the private patients, on their way to and from the main entrance, contrived to walk through the foyer as though they were crossing a desert.
Dr. Dubois and his young assistant Dr. Berry (an orphan and former patient of Dr. Dubois who had become devoted both to the man and his methods) attended to all the private patients. Not being able to add to his commitments (which extended far beyond Les Alpes), Dr. Dubois had delegated the care of the Dutch patients exclusively to Dr. Bruneau. The two doctors, therefore, occupied separate consulting-rooms and of all the patients in the sanatorium only Paul plied between them both.
Dr. Bruneau began first to look upon himself as joint Médecin Chef with Dr. Dubois, and then as Médecin Chef in his own right. It seemed to him that Dr. Dubois and his flock of patients were no more than refugees in transit and that they would not be staying beyond the time required to find suitable accommodation elsewhere. Speaking to Paul he would use such phrases as: “When things will be back to normal …”, “When we will be on our own again …” “When I shall be able to fill the rest of the sanatorium with my Dutchmen …” To give greater authority to his fantasy he tended to identify himself more and with his new patients, emulating their manners, the intonation of their voices, their deportment and their dress. Wearing corduroy trousers, sandals, a checked shirt open at the neck and sometimes a dressing-gown, a combination of invalid, pavement artist and out-of-work cowboy, he would spend much of the day and most of the evening in the foyer, where he would watch or join in the current games of poker or marbles or, appending himself modestly to the extremities of a small group (which would instantly swell about his axis), philosophise, exhort, grimace, groan, smoke, cough, King Rat of the Casualty Ward, Fagin’s Recruiting Officer at work among the In-Patients, coq en pâté, Bruneau visibly, audibly, patently and blatantly in his element.
Before the end of three weeks there was trouble; trouble of the usual sort in respect of food and trouble of a different sort arising from Dr. Bruneau’s will to power. The private patients and the Dutchmen received the same cuisine. When private patients complained, M. Halfont told them: “You are paying less money than at the Universel, you cannot expect the same standard of foods. Besides, what we give you is basically more healthy and cures quickest.” When the Dutchmen complained he would reply: “You get the same standard of cuisine as was served in the Universel and a private patient has just told me it is even better. If the private patients are satisfied, how have you the right to complain?” When, inevitably, each group became aware that the other was complaining, he would say to the private patients (with reference to the Dutchmen): “The food is above them, it is too recherché by far, you can tell by looking at them the sort of food they are used to …” or: “Please remember your social status and don’t set these mendicants a bad example by letting them see that you’re dissatisfied.” And to the Dutchmen (referring to the private patients): “When you hear that they are complaining, remember always that they are for the most part moneyed idlers with effeminate tastes and vitiated palates. Don’t be corrupted! If they like to rot their intestines with the pernicious muck served up in three-star restaurants, then that’s their look-out, but for us who are here to get well and to get back to our jobs as soon as possible, it is another matter.” In a word, it was trouble of so routine a nature that, strictly speaking, and in its context, it was barely to be classified as trouble at all.
The situation brought about by Dr. Bruneau’s will to power was somewhat different. Having decided to his own satisfaction that Les Alpes was now a Sana Populaire rather than a private sanatorium, he had applied himself to the compilation of a list of regulations which read as if they had been designed to maintain order in a penal institution. With remarkable ingenuity he had ruled out and proscribed every major and minor consolation of sanatorium life. In future, no wireless; no reading during the cures; no smoking; no drinking; no purchases of supplementary food; no lights on after nine o’clock at night; no talking in the corridors; no visits from friends, relatives or other patients without signed permission. Patients would show a proper respect both to sisters and to doctors. When addressed by sisters they would reply: “Oui, ma sœur …”, “Non, ma sœur … ”, as the case might be, and when addressed by doctors they would stand or, if in bed, lie at attention. Under the heading: READING MATTER: “Reading can play a therapeutic rôle in the recovery of the patient, and patients should endeavour to use their enforced leisure profitably. The reading of textbooks and books potentially of use in the patient’s civil occupation is whole-heartedly recommended, whilst, for diversion, novels of adventurous, humorous or romantic interest are advised. Books of a pessimistic nature, or which reflect a gloomy or morbid view of life, will not, in the best interests of the patient, be tolerated.” Under the heading: COMPORTMENT—SEXUAL. “Sexual activities are strongly discounselled during illness and convalescence. Patients should at all times bear in mind that a single orgasm (male or female) is equivalent, in energy expended, to a five-mile walk over rough country.” The encyclical terminated with the explanation that each of the regulations had been conceived “in the best interests of all patients”, a phrase as many times repeated in the course of the argument as the compiler sensed that a doubt could have existed to the contrary. Had not Dr. Bruneau possessed a typewriter and a rudimentary duplicator it was improbable that this tender child of his fantasy would ever have been delivered into the gross world of fact.
Dr. Bruneau duplicated his regulations on a day when Dr. Dubois was presiding over a conference in Paris. In the afternoon, both as a token of his authority and as an opportunity for circulating his regulations (still viscid from their contact with gelatinous matrix), he decided to make a formal round of all the rooms in the sanatorium. News of his projected visit preceded him; some of Dr. Dubois’s patients locked their doors, whilst others vacated their rooms until he had safely left the floor. Where he gained access to patients, he was openly rebuffed and his regulations rejected. Baffled, all but broken, Dr. Bruneau retreated tragically to the consolation of his own kingdom. The next morning duplicated sheets of paper littered the floor of every corridor and drifted about the stairways and landings like autumn leaves.
Paul retained his copy of the regulations in order to show them to Delmuth. “No, no,” said the latter, tossing them back unread. Paul insisted. Delmuth glanced casually at the opening lines; a slow smile spread outwards from his lips and he read on with fascination. “Ho-ho-ho!” he exploded suddenly—he had reached the section headed COMPORTMENT—SEXUAL. He made several attempts to read the passage but each time he was incapacitated by laughter. “Ho!” he bellowed at last, his face pink and shaking. “A five-mile walk over rough country! How he know? Ho-ho-ho! Is not much of a walker, Bruneau! I make two such five-mile walks each day over rough country and when the weather is good—three!” He laughed helplessly, hugged his belly, his breathing coming in little snorts. “Five miles!” he gasped, dropping into the chair. “Why five? Ho-ho-ho! What a fools! Five! Ha-ha! I make my five-mile walk always in half an hour! Is not a bad pace, I think! Ho-ho! Ten miles an hour! Indisputably I am the champion walker of Brisset!” Utter prostration. Delmuth’s arms and legs hung limply over the sides of the chair, only his body working, like that of a gigantic spider giving birth. “Ah!” he said, recovering. “Is right, is quite right. When the country is rough is very hard work!” And between gasps he developed the image, indicating with suggestive motions the uneven surface of rough country with its mounds, dips, declivities, contours and bosky recesses, and declaring how much, nevertheless, he preferred it to flat country. Returning once more to the regulations, he noted with delight that in future he would be required to obtain permission to call on Paul.
“Ho-ho-ho! Dr. Idiot!” he cried, getting to his feet and making a deep bow and flourish in the direction of the imaginary Bruneau, “I humbly beg your gracious authorisation to visit my friend the manic-depressive upstairs in the maid’s bedroom. Ho-ho-ho!” His auto-intoxicated laughter brought Sœur Denise (the new floor sister) into the room, but to her outraged protestation he directed the formulae adumbrated in the regulations, crying, “Oui, ma sœur … Ho-ho-ho! Non, ma sœur … Ha-ha-ha!” and begging her, whenever his breath was sufficient, to accompany him the next time she felt the inclination to take a five-mile walk across-country.
Trips to the lavatory, to the foyer, to the Service Médical: each trip by way of a window-lined corridor, a window-lined landing and culminating in a window-lined room: each window in each corridor, landing and room a single exhibit in the sanatorium’s biannual exhibition of academic winter landscapes. Daylight trips, twilight trips, moonlight trips. Sanatorium windows at night; blue and gold illuminators of the fake fairyland of tinsel and icing sugar; double-paned, blazing portholes in the flanks of the stranded, ice-bound liner; refrigerated peep-holes for the convenience of the meteorologically curious occupants of a building that was tropical within and arctic without. Winter watched from the stalls of the well-insulated theatre; third act of Bohème with real snow to compensate for the absence of music and lovers; story-book winter; rich man’s winter; winter without a single rush of cold air, without the need to button up one’s collar, without the need to increase the weight of one’s clothing by the single addition of a scarf or a pair of woollen gloves.
The ‘maid’s bedroom’ (as Delmuth aptly described it) now bounded Paul like a cockleshell and excluded even the concept of infinite space. As he lay staring at the walls he felt that his eyes were props and that no more than the constancy of his gaze prevented the whole structure from crumbling about him. Had it been possible he would have moved again, but as M. Halfont explained somewhat patronisingly:
“Monsieur, what you pay is the cost of the meals and the medical service—the room you get for nudding!” And even paying ‘nudding’ for the room, Paul calculated that, with the cost of his return journey to England, his means would not extend beyond the second or third month of the new year.
By December he realised that Dr. Dubois’s original estimate of how long he would have to remain in the sanatorium had indicated little more than the latter’s misgivings in respect of his patient’s mental condition. This realisation—formulated gradually and in proportion to his capacity to bear it—brought with it no particular sense of disillusion. He acknowledged in retrospect (as at one level of his mind he had acknowledged at the time) that he had demanded to be misled, that he had allowed Dr. Dubois no alternative but to mislead him. In consequence Dr. Dubois’s reassurances had been made involuntarily or, if not involuntarily, had been administered in the spirit with which, for the immediate comfort of their patients, doctors prescribe those medicaments of which the sole function is to reduce a high fever without in any way modifying its course or, subsequently, its outcome.
Nevertheless the substitution of P.A.S. for streptomycin was producing beneficial results and now Dr. Dubois informed Paul that unquestionably he would be completely well by the spring. And since he knew that Paul could not afford to stay at Les Alpes beyond March, he added that it would be necessary for Paul to finish his convalescence in a State sanatorium in England, and he offered to undertake the necessary arrangements with the appropriate authorities. Paul thanked Dr. Dubois for his interest but made no effort to avail himself of it—this was only one problem and it took no particular precedence over any others.
Other problems. Sick, alone, unemployable, on the verge of penury—good, decent, time-honoured, extroverted problems, unrelated to neurosis or introspection; Paul hardly considered them. If he died there would be no problems, if he lived there was one problem and it dwarfed all others. And since he thought no less in terms of living than of dying, this problem exercised him, obsessed him and constituted his major preoccupation. The problem, simple, ineluctable of how, at the first opportunity, he might rejoin Michèle.
The sane, the sensible, the common-sense decision would be to resolve to return to England with the hope that one day, someday, he would be able to rejoin her—such a decision was utterly untenable, his longing for her was too urgent and too intense, it dominated his consciousness and influenced his every thought whilst his body ached with an appetite which hers alone could satisfy.
And interminably thinking of her, he would cede to new levels of despair with the realisation that coextensively with his thoughts so her life was separately evolving, that there were those in whose lives she was an element not of memory but of actuality, that there were shopkeepers, ’bus conductors and passers-by who could come into casual, incidental contact with her, whilst he, who would have considered his life infinitely rich if it had occasionally permitted him to glimpse her from across a street, was confined to the contemplation of three or four claustrophobic walls. And seeing no solution and no possibility of solution, he would inevitably and invariably revert to the one constant in his life, the opinion that he had no valid alternative but to put an end to it.
Delmuth kept his promise. Two or three times a week he brought with him one of the capsules which he obtained from his landlady. Handing Paul a capsule, he would declare: “When I know you have at last enough then for me each visit become an adventure. Or I chance to find you as you are now, or I chance to find the beauty of the sleeping wood, ho-ho-ho!” Paul accepted the capsules non-committally; he felt that any display of eagerness might lead to an immediate suspension of the supply.
At first he suspected one of Delmuth’s practical jokes; what would be more in character than that the latter should empty each capsule and refill it with sherbert, ho-ho-ho! But so far as he could tell, his suspicions were false; in respect of taste, texture and colour, the contents of Delmuth’s capsules were indistinguishable from those which Sœur Rose had originally given him. In this way, gradually, effortlessly, Paul found himself becoming the possessor of a lethal dose of pheno-barbitone.
There were no reservations to be made and Paul made none. He acknowledged at last and with finality that he had no possibility of resolving the one problem which committed him to life, and this being so, then the alternative was inescapable. And accepting explicitly what for some time he had accepted implicitly, his only reaction to the prospect was a diffuse and desperate gratitude that he had the means to accomplish his intentions without recourse to violence. This fact, and the fact that he had very nearly the requisite number of capsules, brought about so marked an improvement in his morale that it provoked favourable comment both from patients and from members of the staff.
The approach of Christmas became dismally apparent through the seasonal, pre-Christmas deterioration in the food (coupled inevitably with outraged protestation from the inexperienced), and through the reappearance (from Emile’s grotto), of all the decorated, dusty horrors, the paper and tinsel gnomes, dwarfs and splendid little men which, like pygmy hostages, brutally seized and summarily executed, would hang suspended in rows along the ceilings of the corridors.
On the afternoon of the twenty-third of December, after a particularly painful ponction (during the performance of which Dr. Bruneau had been both careless and sarcastic), Paul, returning to his room, opined that he had sufficient capsules for his requirements and that the time had come to avail himself of them. He opened the door. Opposite the window, looking out of it, silhouetted against the hard north light, was a figure so familiar and yet, to his certain knowledge, so surely not there, that, believing himself to be hallucinated, he cried out and staggered back against the door post. The figure turned. Two and a half yards, at most three, separated him from Michèle.
He held her so tightly that she seemed to have disappeared, and seeing no more than the tops of his arms and beyond them the familiar range of mountains he again believed himself to be the victim of an illusion and suddenly pushed her back, secured her at arm’s length, his doubts so explicit that Michèle laughed and said:
“Oui, chéri, tu ne te trompes pas, c’est bien moi!”
And still he looked at her and could not believe that she was really there.
Smelling ether, and inferring from it the treatment which he had just received, she removed his dressing-gown and urged him back to bed. Paul made no resistance, sought only to adjust himself to the astonishing fact of her presence. The door opened. Dr. Bruneau came into the room, stepped back a pace as he recognised Michèle, retrieved his pace like a knitter a dropped stitch, greeted her cordially and enquired whether she had relapsed.
This possible explanation not having occurred to Paul, he looked at her in sudden alarm. Michèle shook her head and laughed—she was only in Brisset on a visit. Dr. Bruneau waved his hands in the air and retorted that everyone was in Brisset on a visit—was her visit medical or social? Michèle explained that her parents had agreed to her spending Christmas in the mountains. She would be returning to Belgium at the beginning of January.
“But it’s December! You shouldn’t have come before March or April,” cried Dr. Bruneau. And he explained enthusiastically that returning to Belgium in ten days’ time she would be unconditioned to the prevailing epidemics and would probably succumb to them. Which room had M. Halfont put her in? Dr. Bruneau took out his note-book and pencil. Michèle replied that she was staying in a pension.
“In a pension!” repeated Dr. Bruneau, his mind orientating itself sluggishly to the concept. “Well,” he conceded, “if you have not relapsed, then it is quite legitimate. Still, take care that you don’t waste your time and your parents’ money. Be your own severest critic and warder. Impose on yourself from the beginning a strict sanatorium régime. Spend the whole of the first three days in bed. The second three days you might well get up for one meal, and after that we will see. And, of course, observe scrupulously the times of the cures, no reading, writing or talking ….”
As the door closed behind Dr. Bruneau, Michèle threw her arms about Paul, and Paul, mentally defying Dr. Bruneau to return pulled her beside him. How had she managed to persuade her parents to let her return to Brisset? When had it been decided? Why, why above all, had he had no word as to her intentions? Paul’s questions succeeded each other so rapidly that they truncated the intervening answers.
For three months, Michèle explained, ever since, in fact, the day of her return to Belgium, she had endeavoured to obtain her parents’ sanction to her passing Christmas in the mountains. But the outcome of her campaign had remained too much in doubt ever to have justified the raising of Paul’s hopes. And she added that in fact only three days had elapsed since her parents had finally given their consent, and that although she could then have informed him of the news by telegram, she had been unable to resist the temptation of arriving suddenly and without warning. It had taken three months to obtain her parents’ consent? Oh, yes! Paul forced Michèle’s head back on to the pillow; her lips parted and her eyes closed; thought temporarily annihilated, Paul crushed her mouth beneath his own.
She left when it was dark (she had yet to unpack and instal herself in her new room), but she returned later in the evening. Paul, unable to eat his supper, awaited her with an excitement which canalised his strength and left him so weak with anticipation that every footstep in the corridor first stopped his heart then doubled its rate. When she opened the door the curtains blew out through the window and her skirt billowed above her knees. Paul stretched out his arms and she ran to him; the frozen surface of her cheeks thawed rapidly against his own.
“It’s cold. Let me close the window.”
“No.”
Michèle struggled, but Paul would not let her go. Suddenly she ceded. Paul drew aside the bedclothes and folded them over her, raising the sheets as high as her neck.
“I love you,” he said, and he repeated the phrase many times, devoutly, religiously. An arm rose in confirmation from between the sheets and curled about his neck. Paul turned on his side, his arm encircling her waist.
“It is strange …” he began, but the drift of his thoughts was too amorphous for concise expression. Strange that out of the worst experience of his life all that had been most precious in his life had developed (and that to have forgone the first would have been to have forgone the second). Strange that only when he had finally renounced hope, that hope (the infinitely extravagant and improbable hope that one day, suddenly, without warning, Michèle should walk into his room), had been realised. Strange that twenty-four hours earlier in this same desperate bed and staring at the same torn curtains and at the same dust patterns on the ceiling, he had believed (as firmly as he had ever believed anything) that he would never see her again.
The supper trays were collected. The night sister made her rounds. Paul and Michèle went on talking till, to their astonishment, the church clock struck ten (the hour at which all visitors had to leave the sanatorium, and the doors were locked).
Michèle got hurriedly to her feet. She said:
“There is something I had to tell you. It will have to wait till tomorrow.”
“Something to tell me! What?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
Sudden panic. “Tell me now. You must tell me now.”
“I can’t.” Michèle leant over to kiss Paul on the forehead, but he caught her arms. They looked at each other. Paul thought:
“She has met someone else. She has come here to break it to me gently. She is going to tell me that when she leaves Brisset, she will never be able to see me again.” He released her arms, felt he had no longer the strength to hold them.
“Oh, it’s not that,” she said.
“Not what?” he stared dejectedly down at the bed.
“Not what you are thinking,” she said, laughing and she threw her arms about him. Paul held her tightly.
“There isn’t someone else?”
“Of course there isn’t.”
“Then what is it you have to tell me?”
“It’s nothing bad. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“Tell me now.”
“I can’t. There’s not time.”
“Then it is awful.”
“It isn’t awful.”
“Please tell me.”
“Tomorrow. I must go. I’ll have to ring for Sœur Rose to let me out.”
Michèle embraced Paul quickly and left the room.
Paul remained several minutes without moving, then extinguished the light. “What is it she has to tell me?” he wondered. He found that when his head was in a certain position on the pillow and when he breathed very carefully he could just detect the faint, fresh odour which he associated with Michèle’s body; when he breathed more deeply, it was gone.
At midnight he was still awake. He got up, remade his bed, washed carefully all over, discreetly averting his gaze from the slit-eyed, crumple-faced creature in the mirror. Back in bed he endeavoured to empty his mind of the day’s events, but it was like trying to wring dry a sponge whilst it was still immersed in water. At times he drifted into sleep, but at the very point or pivot he would swing back with the question: “Is it really true that she is in Brisset?” or “Would I really have killed myself if she had not come?” Dialogues with Michèle. Dialogues with Delmuth. Dr. Vernet, Dr. Bruneau, M. Halfont, Emile, gesticulating and shouting, closed in about his bed.
At last, in a heavy sweat, he turned on his bedside lamp and, believing himself to be in a high fever, took his temperature; it was several divisions below normal. Three o’clock in the morning. Sacrifices would have to be made if the next day were not to be intolerable.
‘Trial run,’ he said to himself as he staggered out of bed and extracted from his hidden cache of capsules a single, shining cylinder.
Paul woke with the entry of the balding femme de chambre. Too drugged to move, he watched her mutely from his pillow. She set down the breakfast tray on the bedside table. “My friend makes me wear garters instead of suspenders. Men are queer, aren’t they?” she said flipping up her skirts and giving a little laugh. For the security of his stomach, Paul synchronised a blink. “He says he wants me to wear transparent underwear, but there I put my foot down. ‘I’ll be dressed or undressed but not a bit of both,’ I tell him. Still he knows what he likes, and that’s something. And they say your friend has come back so that will be nice for you, too.”
During the course of the morning patients whom Paul knew only by sight, but whom Michèle had known formerly at the Universel, called on him in search of confirmation of the rumour that she had returned. And when at last Michèle arrived, she was not alone, having encountered one former acquaintance in the foyer, a second in the lift and a third in the passage on the way to Paul’s room. More arrived and it was in vain that Paul protested the smallness of his room and the fact that if his neighbour were disturbed by the noise he would undoubtedly complain to the duty sister.
What had she been doing? they demanded. Whom had she seen? Had she spent the whole time in Belgium? Would she be staying in Brisset for the remainder of the winter? Had she had news of this one and of that one? Michèle, her ski-trousered legs over the side of the chair, answered such questions as appealed to her. The interrogation ended with the arrival of the lunch trolleys.
As soon as they were alone Paul embraced Michèle and straightway begged her to set his mind at rest in respect of what she had refused to tell him the previous evening. The request took Michèle by surprise. She replied that they had many things to talk about which were of far greater importance. Besides it was lunch-time and she must not be late on the first day at her pension. Paul seized her wrist and demanded that she should tell him.
“You’re not to be worried or angry if I do tell you,” she said.
“No,” said Paul, his earlier apprehensions returning.
“It’s just … It’s just …”
“Just what?”
Michèle took a deep breath. “Just that my mother knows everything.”
“Your mother knows everything!”
“Everything!”
“You mean she knows that we are lovers?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?” cried Paul, sitting up in agitation.
“That I was never to see you again,” said Michèle laughing. She leant over and kissed Paul. “No, don’t look like that. Of course she didn’t say that I was never to see you again.” And because Paul’s expression still remained strained she added: “If she had said I was never to see you again, how would I be sitting here now? I’ll tell you just what she did say this afternoon. But it wasn’t bad. I promise you it wasn’t bad.” And with a little laugh she eluded the sweep of Paul’s arms, waved to him from the door, impetuously ran forward and kissed him again, then left.
And at tea time she sat at the head of Paul’s bed and told him exactly what had happened. She said that it had been quite apparent from the day of her return that her mother had divined the situation, or rather had divined the existence of a situation. Whilst she had refrained from posing any direct questions, it had been impossible for her not to draw certain conclusions from the regular arrival of Paul’s letters; from Michèle’s reiterated demands to be allowed to spend Christmas in Brisset; from the fact that Michèle avoided her former friends and refused to make new ones.
When finally Paul had relapsed and Michèle had received no reply to her letters, she had no longer been able to dissemble her anxiety and unhappiness and at last her mother had taken her aside and had said:
“Mon petit, je ne veux rien savoir sur ce qui ne me regarde pas, mais ton malheur me fait peur pour ta pauvre petite santé.”
Michèle, relieved to abandon an attitude which she considered unworthy (it was the first time she had concealed anything from her mother), relieved, above all, to have someone in whom to confide, had related the whole story of her relationship with Paul, and at the end her mother had commented:
“Je le savais déjà tout.”
Paul listened intently and anxiously to Michèle’s narration, interrupting it only to demand more precise details after which he would say hurriedly: “Go on. Go on.” And when Michèle had finished he interrogated her in respect of her mother’s subsequent reactions and Michèle said that in the main her mother had shown sympathy and understanding.
As Paul lay down to sleep, it seemed to him that Michèle’s mother’s attitude was far more propitious than he had ever dared hope. Perhaps, he thought drowsily, perhaps all would not necessarily end ill. Perhaps sustained pessimism was no less a deceiver than sustained optimism. Perhaps …
It was an unusual train of thought for Paul and it exercised his subconscious mind during the night and woke with him on Christmas morning. Why, he wondered, did he dissipate all his psychic energy in anxiety and division? Why did he not employ it in resolving to be well, in doing and thinking only that which would conduce to his being well, in believing firmly and inevitably that before long he must be well? It was in this curiously amenable and regenerate state of mind that, two hours later, Dr. Dubois found him.
He shook Paul firmly by the hand, wished him the compliments of the season and said: “My Christmas present to you is a clean pleura!” And as documentation he handed Paul a slip of paper from the laboratory on which was marked the most recent analysis of pleural fluid: B.K. –. Paul smiled involuntarily. Encouraged, Dr. Dubois continued: “And my New Year’s present to you will be its consolidation.” He went on to explain that in order to ensure this consolidation it would be necessary to continue with the daily inter-pleural injections of P.A.S. for several weeks. Thereafter it would be possible to resume the maintenance of his pneumothorax. He ended by declaring: “For you, Monsieur Davenant, the New Year will be a very good New Year indeed.”
Timely Christmas present! To Michèle both its nature and the day of its delivery came as the vindication of all her hopes and prayers. Paul felt like a gambler who has placed all he possessed on a single number and has seen it come up. Plans; projects; suddenly everything seemed possible.
It being Christmas Day, there were no cures and no medical rounds. In the late afternoon Mme. Anniette called to deliver her good wishes. Her delight, when she heard the news, rekindled Paul’s and Michèle’s delight, so that by the time she left they were both again as excited as they had been in the morning.
For the first time for several months it seemed that all auguries were set fair.
On Boxing Day morning, Michèle arrived late, and when she did arrive she was in tears, looked humiliated and hunted, refused to explain to Paul what had happened, would not turn in his direction, went straight across the room and stared out of the window. Then as Paul took her hand and she dropped to his side and lowered her face against his chest, she said that she should never have returned; that she had had no illusions as to the nature of her reception, that only her love had rendered her so insensitive and foolhardy as to come back to a place where, through no fault of her own, she was subject to insults and abuse.
Paul listened incredulously. Who had dared to insult and abuse her? Michèle shook her head and her teeth seized about her lower lip. She said that it was no use, that there was nothing to be done.
“You will see whether there is nothing to be done!” cried Paul. A sudden suspicion occurred to him. “It’s Delmuth. Delmuth has been getting at you!”
“No.”
“Then who? Who?”
When she whispered: “Monsieur Halfont and Emile,” Paul cried: “My God!” and threw aside the bed-clothes. She restrained him from getting up. “Don’t,” she said. “My father owes them money.” And as she said this she turned away her head as though she feared that what she had yet to say must provoke in Paul an equally antagonistic reaction. “He’ll pay them back as soon as he can,” she went on desperately. “People owe him money. He isn’t dishonest. He isn’t trying to get something without paying.”
And Michèle, her gaze lowered, recounted how, unknown to herself, unknown even to her mother, her father had been unable to pay her sanatorium bills. They had accumulated. Somehow he had managed to obtain credit but when the time had come for settlement he had been unable to discharge more than a fraction of his overall liability. Legal proceedings had only been averted by his undertaking to pay the balance in a series of monthly instalments.
Then Michèle went on to describe how, coming into the foyer just after the end of the cure de silence, she had encountered M. Halfont and that in front of the Dutch patients and at the top of his voice he had declared her father to be both a thief and a liar. Seeing that his intention was to humiliate her publicly, she had tried to get away, but crying: “Ah, non, mademoiselle!” he had blocked her exit. He wished her to know, he had continued, that it had been on his own responsibility that her father had been granted credit, and it had all but resulted in his losing his job.
Michèle had attempted to explain, to apologise, but M. Halfont had turned on his heel; his place had immediately been taken by Emile. In a voice no lower and no more accommodating than his master’s, he had declared that he, too, had a large bill outstanding and that he was not disposed to wait for settlement until such time as her father had concluded his instalments to the Société. In a word, if the bill were not paid within twenty-four hours he would put the matter into the hands of the police.
“The police!” repeated Paul, too distracted by each development in the narrative to consider that which had preceded it. What was to be done? Would Emile proffer a charge? What would be its outcome? His mind registered a variety of possibilities, then was overwhelmed by the full consciousness of all the injuries to which Michèle had been subjected. His fists clenched and unclenched. His face became scarlet. That they had dared … That they had dared … “By God!” he cried suddenly, jumping from his bed, “by God, I swear they’ll never speak to you like that again.”
His anger bore him half-way down the corridor with Michèle hanging on to his arm. “Let me go! Let me go!” he repeated, trying to shake himself free. Some patients came out of their rooms and stared curiously at them both. Paul dragged forward a few more paces, then stopped, his wind broken, his heart palpitating, the fluid lapping against the inside of his chest. “Having your first quarrel!” called out one of the patients. There was some laughter. Paul looked up furiously. “Come back,” begged Michèle, taking his hand. There was more laughter as Paul turned and followed her back into his room.
He collapsed into his armchair, exhausted by the demonstration and by its overt futility. Thus Michèle was insulted with impunity—there was no redress and nothing to be done. As he stared desperately at the opposite wall, Michèle attempted to comfort him as though it were he who had suffered the injury. This realisation provoked an instantaneous resurgence of his anger. “It’s not finished,” he said thickly, “they will not get away with this.” The revenge of the poor and impotent—dreams and curses. “They will not get away with this,” he repeated. Then suddenly he demanded: “How much do you owe Emile?” Michèle hesitated, then handed Paul a piece of paper covered with Emile’s calculations.
“Twenty-five thousand francs,” murmured Paul, examining the total. Then he cried: “But fifteen thousand francs have been paid.”
Michèle nodded. She turned away.
“But——”
“I paid it! I paid it before I came up.”
“You paid it!”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. It’s all the money for my stay.” Michèle controlled her voice with an effort. As the expression on Paul’s face changed from incredulity to dismay, she added: “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got my return ticket. And I can pay most of my expenses up to tonight.” She got up from the bed where she had been sitting.
“What do you mean?” cried Paul in alarm.
“I must catch the evening train back to Belgium.”
“Michèle!”
Michèle went suddenly over to the door as if she were going to leave that very minute. Paul jumped up and seized her.
For the second time within the hour Paul applied himself to stemming her tears. The money, he assured her, was of no account—he had more than sufficient to pay for the remainder of her stay. As for the treatment to which she had been subjected, that was a different matter. He swore that whatever happened he would force apologies from M. Halfont and Emile, that never again would they dare to insult her. But stay she must. If she attempted to leave, then he would follow her.
He made her sit down again on the bed and he dropped to his knees beside her. She protested against his being on his knees; he changed the balance of his weight from his knees to the balls of his feet. Michèle lowered her head, and, as he pressed his face to hers, her tears trickled down his cheeks. “I love you,” he said, repeating the phrase fervently and as often as she tried to get up, whilst each time he consolidated the grip he had taken about her arms. And when he said, “I love you,” the ‘love’ he felt extended to every facet of the ‘you’, its object. Loving her, he loved her for being poor, for her inexpensive clothes, for her father who could not meet his liabilities, for the insults and abuse which she had suffered. He loved her for her courage, for her lack of pretensions, for the tears which in the past he had made her shed. He loved her because in the base metal of his life she was the single vein of ore, all which, in retrospect, represented its sole value, all which, on the point of death, could constitute his grief on relinquishing it.
Paul did not let Michèle leave until she had promised to give up all idea of returning to Belgium. And when she had gone, his fury took him a dozen times about his room and then down to M. Halfont’s office. M. Halfont’s reaction was virtuous, indignant and conciliatory. He had nothing whatsoever against Michèle, she was une fille charmante, he was delighted that she was back and whenever he saw her he experienced a mixture of pride and admiration—“pride, monsieur, because it was us who have re-established her, admiration because without her courage re-establishment could never have taken place.” If he had spoken severely to Michèle, then he had made it clear that his severity was directed not against her but against her father. As for Emile—well, he could not answer for him. But he was satisfied, he did not doubt, etc., etc.
Emile’s attitude was one of wistful reproach (fifteen of the twenty-five thousand francs now in his pocket-book and the balance in the offing). “Like everyone,” he said, “I was seduced by the charm of her smile. Those were my very words to her; I said: ‘Like everyone I was seduced by the charm of your smile.’” He paused to seduce Paul with the charm of his own smile—a man all too human, betrayed into folly by his native compassion, unworldliness and susceptibility to beauty in distress. “And of course,” he continued, “I would never have resorted to the police—it was all only my little way of bringing to her notice that the matter was serious. Besides, I know that you are both très liés; you don’t really think that I would have taken any action without first discussing it with you ….” The smile, compound of nostalgia, tenderness and understanding, overflowed like boiling syrup.
Paul, wishing to hear (and to see) no more, tossed a ten-thousand-franc note on to the counter and turned away. Emile called him back: “The new supply of Players is in. Would you like a packet?” “No,” said Paul. “Then would you like a packet and a mirror?” Emile’s look grew insinuating; he winked and guffawed. “Come here. I show you,” he said. The mirror adroitly applied to the front of the packet—the primary female sexual characteristic revealed. It was a gesture of reconciliation and of masculine solidarity.
As soon as the cure de silence was over, Paul listened for Michèle’s footsteps in the corridor. By the end of the afternoon she had still not arrived. Feeling suddenly uneasy, Paul hurried down to the telephone booth; her pension was not on the telephone. He returned to his room. The duty sister knocked at the door and delivered an envelope in Michèle’s handwriting.
She could not, Michèle had written, accept any of the little which remained of Paul’s money. Nor could she face the prospect of further humiliation. Accordingly she had reserved a seat on the night train to Brussels. She——
Paul read no more. He rang through to Emile on the house telephone. The seven-thirty train from Brisset connected with the night train for Brussels. Paul looked at his watch. It was nearly six.
Shirts, vests, pullovers—which first and in what order? Numbed, nervous fingers pressed metal buttons into reluctant button-holes. Before the mirror the surrealist resurrection of some sort of soldier, pyjama trouser-ends protruding below those of his battle-dress. A few minutes later he was unsteadily negotiating the snow-covered streets.
The building—low, squat, humble. He looked about him uncertainly, then instinct took him up a single flight of uncarpeted stairs to a room at the end of the passage. He opened the door. She was lying, fully-dressed, on her unmade bed, and her suitcases, packed but open, were strewn about the floor. She jumped up, white-faced, but he silenced her cry with his lips and pulled her back on to the bed. Several minutes later he went over to the window and drew the shutters, then returned in semi-darkness to the bed. “The door,” she murmured almost inaudibly. He recrossed the room and silently turned the key.