Beware of Pity (26 page)

I was a little uneasy about Edith as I sat opposite her in the carriage. She was still trembling all over, and some violent emotion seemed to be preying on her mind. All at once a sudden sob burst from her throat—but it was a sob of joy. She laughed and cried at the same time. I felt sure that the cunning Gypsy woman had foretold a swift cure for her, and perhaps more besides.

However, even as she sobbed Edith protested impatiently, “Oh, leave me alone, leave me alone.” Even shaken as she was, she seemed to be feeling some entirely new and remarkable pleasure. “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” she kept repeating. “Yes, I know the old woman was out to deceive me, but why can’t I be silly just once in a while? Why not let myself be well and truly deceived?”

It was already late in the evening when we drove in through the castle gate. All the others urged me to stay to supper, but I did not want to. I felt that quite enough, if not too much, had happened. I had been perfectly happy all that long, golden summer’s day; anything more, anything extra could only detract from that. I preferred to go home now down the familiar avenue, my mind soothed by the summer air and the aftermath of the glowing day. I didn’t want to wish for more, just to remember the day with gratitude and think it all over. So I said my goodbyes early. The stars were shining, and I felt as if they were looking down
kindly on me. The breeze blew softly over the fields as light drained away, leaving them dark, and I felt as if it were singing. I was overcome by that pure delight you feel when everything seems good and happy, the world and the people in it, when you could embrace every tree and stroke its bark as if it were the skin of someone you love—when you feel like going into every strange house, sitting down with its unknown inhabitants, and confiding all your feelings to them; when your own chest is too narrow to contain your deep emotions, and you want to share them, let them pour extravagantly out—when you want to give away some of this excess of feeling, to squander it!

When at last I reached the barracks, my batman was waiting outside the door of my room. For the first time (everything today I felt as if for the first time) I noticed what a good-hearted, round, apple-cheeked face this rustic Ruthenian boy had. I must do something to give him pleasure, I thought. Better give him a little money to buy a couple of glasses of beer for himself and his girl. He can go out this evening, and tomorrow, and all week! I was already searching for a silver coin in my pocket. Then he stood to attention and announced, hands smartly down beside the seam of his trousers, “Telegram came for you, Lieutenant Hofmiller, sir.”

A telegram? I immediately had an uncomfortable sensation. Who in the world would want to send me a telegram? Only bad news could seek me out at such speed. I quickly went over to the table. There lay the piece of paper, a sealed rectangle. Reluctantly, I tore it open. There were only a dozen or so words saying, with concise clarity: “Visiting Kekesfalva tomorrow. Must speak to you urgently first. Expect you at five, Tyrolean Wine Bar. Condor.”

I had already once known a state of reeling intoxication switch within a single moment to crystal-clear sobriety. That had been last year, at the goodbye party of a comrade who was marrying the daughter of a very rich north Bohemian manufacturer, and was giving us a lavish evening’s entertainment first. Our good friend was certainly not mean about it—he had whole batteries of bottles brought in, heavy, dark-red claret followed by so much champagne that, depending on our temperament, some of us waxed voluble and others turned sentimental. We hugged each other, we laughed, we ran riot, kicked up a lot of noise and sang heartily. We drank toasts again and again, tipping strong cognac and liqueurs down our throats, we puffed away at pipes and cigars until the overheated bar was enveloped in a kind of blue mist, and so in the end none of us noticed that the sky was growing lighter outside the dull windowpanes. It must have been about three or four in the morning, and most of us couldn’t even sit up straight any more. Lolling over the table, we just looked up with blurred, glazed eyes when a new toast was announced, and if anyone had to go out for a moment he tottered and staggered or stumbled to the door like a full sack. None of us could speak or think clearly.

Then, suddenly, the door was flung open, the Colonel strode in (I shall have more to say about our colonel later), and as only a few of us even noticed or recognised him in all the racket we were making, he marched up to the table and struck its dirty top with his fist, making the plates and glasses clink. Then, in his harshest, most cutting voice, he ordered, “Quiet!”

And instantly, all at once, it was quiet. Even those who had dozed off blinked, and were wide awake. The Colonel briefly informed us that a surprise inspection by the divisional commander was to be expected that morning. He supposed, he
said, that he could count on everything to go impeccably, and he hoped no one would bring shame on the regiment. And now a strange thing happened—all at once every one of us was in full possession of his wits. As if someone had flung open a window, the fumes of alcohol dispersed, our blurred faces changed, responding to the call of duty, everyone pulled himself together, and two minutes later the table, that scene of wild indulgence, was abandoned. We were all wide awake, our minds clear, and we all knew what we had to do. The men were roused, the orderlies got busy, everything was swiftly groomed and polished down to the last pommel on the last saddle, and a few hours later the much-feared inspection took place and went without a hitch.

In just the same way, as soon as I had opened that telegram my dreamy, gentle mood was gone like a shot. Within a second I knew what I had refused to understand for hours and hours on end—all that happy enthusiasm had been nothing but intoxication induced by a lie, and in my weakness, my fatal pity, I was guilty of a deception, or had made myself party to it. I guessed at once that Dr Condor was coming to call me to account for myself. Now I had to pay the price for my own cheerful mood of the last two days—and the exuberant high spirits of the others.

With the punctuality of impatience, and as a result quarter-ofan-hour early, I was standing outside the wine bar at the time he had fixed, and exactly at that time Condor drove up from the station in a carriage and pair. He came straight over to me without further formalities.

“Good to see you here on time. I knew I could rely on you. I think we’d better sit in the same little nook as before. We don’t want anyone overhearing what we have to discuss.”

I could tell that his former almost listless bearing had changed. He marched ahead of me into the inn in a manner that was both energetic and self-controlled, and asked the waitress who came hurrying up for, “A litre of wine—the same as we were drinking the day before yesterday. And then leave us alone; I’ll call if I need you.”

We sat down. Even before the waitress had put our wine down on the table, he began.

“Well, let’s keep this short. I have to hurry, or out at Kekesfalva they’ll suspect us of hatching Heaven knows what conspiracies. I had a hard job preventing the chauffeur from coming to town to drive me straight out there—he was intent on spiriting me away at any price. But now let’s plunge
in medias res
, so that I can put you in the picture.

“Very well—first thing the day before yesterday I received a telegram. ‘Please, dear friend, come as quickly as possible. Expecting you with all imaginable impatience. Most grateful, have every confidence in you. Yours, Kekesfalva.’ I didn’t like the sound of those superlatives. Why so impatient all of a sudden? I examined Edith only a couple of days ago. And why that telegraphic assurance of his confidence and his special gratitude? Well, I assumed there wasn’t really any great urgency, I put the telegram with other correspondence. After all, the old man indulges in such exaggerations quite often. But what came yesterday morning put a different complexion on it—I had an endlessly long letter from Edith, a crazy, ecstatic letter, sent express, saying she had always known that I was the only person on earth who could save her, she couldn’t tell me how
happy she was to think we had reached this stage at last. She was writing, she said, only to assure me that I could rely absolutely on her, she would certainly undertake to do everything I told her, however hard it was. But she wanted to begin the new course of treatment soon, at once, she was burning with impatience. And she repeated that I could expect anything of her, just so long as I began soon. And so on and so forth.

“However, with that remark about new treatment light dawned on me. I realised at once that someone must have been talking either to the old man or his daughter about the method tried by Professor Viennot. Such stories don’t come out of thin air. And that someone, of course, had to be you, Lieutenant Hofmiller.”

I must have made an instinctive movement, for he immediately went on in the same vein.

“No, no discussion of that point, please! I have not made the slightest reference to Professor Viennot’s method in talking to anyone else. It’s your doing alone if they believe at Kekesfalva that everything can now be put right within a few months, as easily as wiping dust away with a cloth. So as I said, let’s spare ourselves any recriminations; we both talked indiscreetly, I to you, and then you at great length to the others. I should have spoken more cautiously to you—after all, the treatment of the sick is not your profession, so how would you know that invalids and their families do not use the same vocabulary as normal folk, that to their ears every ‘perhaps’ instantly becomes a ‘certainly’? Hope has to be administered to them only in carefully measured droplets, or optimism will go to their heads and run away with them.

“But we’ll agree that what’s done is done. Let us draw a line under the subject of responsibility. I didn’t ask you here to read you a lecture. However, now that you have meddled in
my business, I feel in duty bound to explain the state of affairs to you—that’s why I wanted you to come here.”

At this point Condor raised his voice for the first time and looked straight at me. But there was no severity in his gaze. On the contrary—I felt that he was sorry for me. His voice now became milder.

“I know, my dear Lieutenant Hofmiller, that what I have to tell you now will touch a very painful spot. But as I have indicated, this is no time for soft sentimentality. I told you that on reading that report in the medical journal I wrote straight to Professor Viennot, asking for more information—I think that is all I said to you. Well, his reply came yesterday, by the same post as Edith’s emotional screed. At first sight what he said sounds positive. Viennot has indeed had remarkable success with that patient of his, and several others. But unfortunately—and here’s the rub—his method cannot be used in our case. Those he cured had disorders of the spinal cord resulting from tubercular infections—I’ll spare you the medical details—where the motor nerves can be restored to their full function by changing the place on which pressure is exerted. In Edith’s case her central nervous system is affected, so that Professor Viennot’s procedures—lying motionless in a kind of metal corset, irradiation with sun-rays at the same time, his particular system of exercises—are ruled out from the start. In our case, I am very, very sorry to say, his methods are impracticable. Making the poor child endure all these elaborate procedures would probably mean tormenting her unnecessarily. Well—it was my duty to tell you that. Now you know the true state of affairs, and you can see how thoughtlessly you captivated the poor girl with the hope of being able to dance and run about again in a few months’ time. No one would ever have heard such a foolish claim from me. However,
now that you have promised over-hastily to bring the moon and the stars down from the sky for the Kekesfalvas, they will believe you and no one else, and rightly so. After all, it was you who reassured them.”

I felt my fingers stiffen. Subconsciously I had been expecting all this ever since the moment when I saw the telegram lying on the table, and yet as Condor explained the situation with implacable objectivity I felt as if I had been hit on the head with a blunt hatchet. I instinctively went on the defensive. I didn’t want to shoulder the whole responsibility myself. But what I finally managed to say sounded like the stammering of a schoolboy caught out doing wrong.

“But how did I … I mean, I only acted for the best. If I told Kekesfalva anything it was only out of … out of …”

“I know, I know,” Condor interrupted me. “And of course he wormed it out of you, made you tell him, his desperate insistence can wear down anyone’s defences. Yes, I know, I know you did it only out of pity, that’s to say you weakened with the best and most creditable of intentions. But—I think I have warned you already—pity is a double-edged weapon. If you don’t know how to handle it you had better not touch it, and above all you must steel your heart against it. Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don’t get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison. The first few injections do the patient good, they are soothing, they relieve pain. But the organism, body and mind alike, has a fatal and mysterious ability to adjust, and just as the nerves crave more and more morphine, the mind wants more and more pity, more in the end than anyone can give. In both contingencies, there is a point when the inevitable moment comes where you
have to say ‘No’, never mind whether patients hate you more for that final refusal than if you had never helped them at all. My dear Lieutenant, pity must be kept well under control, or it will do more harm than any amount of indifference—we doctors know that, judges know it, bailiffs and pawnbrokers know it. If they were all to give way to pity the world would grind to a halt—it’s a dangerous thing, pity, a dangerous thing! You can see for yourself what your weakness has done in this case.”

“Yes … but one can’t … one can’t simply leave another human being in despair … after all, there was nothing wrong with my trying to—”

But Condor suddenly spoke forcefully “Oh yes, there was—there was a great deal wrong with it! Responsibility, damn it, think of the responsibility of fooling someone else with your pity! A grown man should stop to think how far he plans to go when he meddles with something—not play about with other people’s feelings! Admittedly you played with the feelings of those good folk for the kindest and most compassionate reasons, but in this world it makes no difference whether you hit hard or hesitantly, it all depends what you ultimately do, it depends on the final result. Pity—yes, that’s all very well. But there are two kinds of pity. One, the weak-minded, sentimental sort is really just the heart’s impatience to rid itself as quickly as possible of the painful experience of being moved by another person’s suffering. It is a not a case of real sympathy, of feeling
with
the sufferer, but a way of defending yourself against the sufferer’s pain. The other kind, the only one that counts, is unsentimental but creative. It knows its own mind, and is determined to stand by the sufferer, patiently suffering too to the last of its strength and even beyond. Only when you go all the way to the end, the bitter end, only when you have that
patience, can you really help people. Only if you are ready to sacrifice yourself, only then!”

There was a note of bitterness in his voice. Involuntarily, I remembered what Kekesfalva had told me—that Condor had married a blind woman whom he couldn’t cure more or less as a penance, and instead of being grateful she nagged him. But now he was placing his hand warmly, almost affectionately, on my arm.

“Well, I don’t mean to be harsh. Your feelings got the better of you—it can happen to anyone. But now to business. After all, I didn’t ask you here to discuss psychology with you; we have practical matters on hand. Naturally it’s necessary for us to act in concert—we can’t have you going behind my back and interfering with my intentions a second time. So listen. I am afraid I have to conclude from that letter of Edith’s that our friends have fallen hopelessly prey to the delusion that all her complex disorders can be wiped away as if with a sponge, by means of that course of treatment which, as we know, will not do her any good. Although that folly has gone dangerously deep, there’s no option but to operate on it at once, cut it right out—and the sooner the better for all concerned. Of course it will be an unpleasant shock. The truth is always bitter medicine, but a delusion like that can’t be allowed to go further. You may take it from me that I shall attack it as gently as possible.

“And now to you. Of course the most comfortable thing for me would be to lay all the blame on you, to say you misunderstood me, you were exaggerating, or imagining things. I won’t do that; I’d rather take it all on myself. Only, and I will tell you this to your face, I can’t leave you out of the business entirely. You know that old man and his dogged persistence. If I were to explain to him a hundred times, and show him Professor
Viennot’s letter, he would still be protesting, ‘But you promised Lieutenant Hofmiller … and Lieutenant Hofmiller said … ’ He would be citing you the whole time to pretend to himself, and me, that in spite of everything there was still some kind of hope. Without you to back me up I’ll never convince him. Illusions can’t be shaken off as easily as you shake the quicksilver down in a thermometer. Once you have one of those disorders so cruelly called incurable, you clutch at any straw for hope, see it as a solid plank and then make it a whole house. But such castles in the air are very bad for the sick, and it is my duty as a doctor to demolish them as quickly as I can before high hopes take up residence there. We must strike hard, without losing any time.”

Condor stopped. He was obviously waiting for me to agree. But I dared not meet his gaze; images of yesterday, driven by my thudding heartbeat, were racing past my mind’s eye. Our cheerful drive through the summer countryside, the sick girl’s face glowing with sun and happiness. The way she petted the little foals and sat enthroned like a queen at the wedding party, the way the old man’s tears kept running down into his laughing, trembling mouth. To think of destroying all that with a single blow! To turn a girl so wonderfully transformed, plucked out of her despair, back into what she had been before, to thrust her away into all the hells of impatience with a word! No, I knew I could never put my hand to that task. So I said, hesitantly, “But wouldn’t it be better to … ” and then my voice faltered again before his searching gaze.

“Better to do what?” he asked sharply.

“I was only wondering whether … whether it wouldn’t be better to wait before making that revelation … at least for a few days, because … because yesterday I had the impression that her heart was already so set on that treatment … I mean
really
set on it … and that now she would have what you called the … the psychological strength … I mean that she’d be able to draw on herself to do much more if … if she was only left believing for a while that this new course of treatment, which she expects to do so much, would cure her in the end. You … you didn’t see, you … you can’t imagine the effect just hearing about it had on her. I really did get the impression that she was able to move much better at once … and I wonder whether that shouldn’t be allowed to take full effect. Of course,” I said, my voice failing because I could tell that Condor was looking up at me in surprise, “of course I don’t really understand these things …”

Condor was still looking at me. Then he growled, “Well, who’d have thought it? Saul among the prophets! You seem to have acquired a thorough grounding in these subjects—you even remembered the part about the psychological powers! And your clinical observations into the bargain—without knowing it I seem to have picked up an assistant and adviser! As it happens,” he went on, thoughtfully scratching his head with his nervous hand, “what you say is not so stupid—forgive me, I mean, of course, medically stupid. It’s strange, really strange—when I read that ecstatic letter from Edith I wondered myself, for a minute, whether now that you had persuaded her a cure was coming her way in seven-league boots, that passionate belief of hers should not be exploited … Not bad thinking at all, colleague! It would be child’s play to stage the whole thing—I’d send her off to a spa in the Engadine valley in Switzerland where a friend of mine is a doctor, we’d leave her in the happy belief that she was having the new treatment whereas it would really still be the old one. At first the effect probably
would
be excellent, and we would get floods of enthusiastic, grateful letters.
The illusion, the change of air, the change of scene, her strong investment of energy, all that would indeed help enormously and reinforce the deception. After all, two weeks in the Engadine valley would probably be very stimulating even to you and me. But my dear Lieutenant Hofmiller, as a doctor I have to think not only of the beginning of a treatment but also of its progress, and above all of the final outcome. I have to take into account the setback that would inevitably—yes, inevitably—come as the result of such wildly exaggerated hopes. I’m a chess player, even in my medical profession, I play a patient game, I must not turn into a gambler, least of all when someone else has put down the stake and must pay.”