The New Collected Short Stories (30 page)

He hardened at once. ‘Sentimental, was I? All right, what I’ve got against Woolacott is that he never makes anyone well, which seems a defect in a doctor. I may be wrong.’

‘Yes, you’re wrong,’ said Clesant; the mere repetition of the doctor’s name was steadying him. ‘I’ve been under him for years.’

‘So I should think.’

‘Of course, I’m different, I’m not well, it’s not natural for me to be well, I’m not a fair test, but other people——’

‘Which other people?’

The names of Dr Woolacott’s successful cases escaped him for the moment. They filled the centre of his mind, yet the moment he looked at them they disappeared.

‘Quite so,’ said the other. ‘Woolacott,’ he kept on saying. ‘Woolacott! I’ve my eye on him. What’s life after twenty-five? Impotent, blind, paralytic. What’s life before it unless you’re fit? Woolacott! Even the poor can’t escape. The crying, the limping, the nagging, the medicine-bottles, the running sores – in the cottages too; kind Dr Woolacott won’t let them stop . . . You think I’m mad, but it’s not your own thought you’re thinking: Woolacott stuck it ready diseased into your mind.’

Clesant sighed. He looked at the arms, now folded hard against each other, and longed to feel them around him. He had only to say, ‘Very well, I’ll change doctors,’ and immediately . . . But he never hesitated. Life until 1990 or 2000 retained the prior claim. ‘He keeps people alive,’ he persisted.

‘Alive for what?’

‘And there’s always the marvellously unselfish work he did during the war.’

‘Did he not. I saw him doing it.’

‘Oh – it was in France you knew him?’

‘Was it not. He was at his marvellously unselfish work night and day, and not a single man he touched ever got well. Woolacott dosed, Woolacott inoculated, Woolacott operated, Woolacott spoke a kind word even, and there they were and here they are.’

‘Were you in hospital yourself?’

‘Oh aye, a shell. This hand – ring and all mashed and twisted, the head – hair’s thick enough on it now, but brain stuck out then, so did my guts, I was a butcher’s shop. A perfect case for Woolacott. Up he came with his “Let me patch you up, do let me just patch you up,” oh, patience itself and all that, but I took his measure, I was only a boy then, but I refused.’

‘Can one refuse in a military hospital?’

‘You can refuse anywhere.’

‘I hadn’t realized you’d been wounded. Are you all right now?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ and he resumed his grievances. The pleasant purple-gray suit, the big well-made shoes and soft white collar, all suggested a sensible country lad on his holiday, perhaps on courtship – farmhand or farmer, countrified anyway. Yet with them went this wretched war-obsession, this desire to be revenged on a man who had never wronged him and must have forgotten his existence. ‘He is stronger than I am,’ he said angrily. ‘He can fight alone, I can’t. My great disadvantage 
–
 never could fight alone. I counted on you to help, but you prefer to let me down, you pretended at first you’d join up with me – you’re no good.’

‘Look here, you’ll have to be going. So much talk is fatal for me, I simply mustn’t get overtired. I’ve already far exceeded my allowance, and anyhow I can’t enter into this sort of thing. Can you find your own way out, or shall I ring this bell?’ For inserted into the fabric of the sofa was an electric bell.

‘I’ll go. I know where I’m not wanted. Don’t you worry, you’ll never see me again.’ And he slapped his cap on to his head and swung to the door. The normal life of the house entered the gun-room as he opened it – servants, inmates, talking in the passages, in the hall outside. It disconcerted him, he came back with a complete change of manner, and before ever he spoke Clesant had the sense of an incredible catastrophe moving up towards them both.

‘Is there another way out?’ he inquired anxiously.

‘No, of course not. Go out the way you came in.’

‘I didn’t tell you, but the fact is I’m in trouble.’

‘How dare you, I mustn’t be upset, this is the kind of thing that makes me ill,’ he wailed.

‘I can’t meet those people – they’ve heard of something I did out in France.’

‘What was it?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

In the sinister silence, Clesant’s heart resumed its violent beating, and though the door was now closed voices could be heard through it. They were coming. The stranger rushed at the window and tried to climb out. He plunged about, soiling his freshness, and whimpering, ‘Hide me.’

‘There’s nowhere.’

‘There must be . . .’

‘Only that cupboard,’ said Clesant in a voice not his own.

‘I can’t find it,’ he gasped, thumping stupidly on the panelling.

‘Do it for me. Open it. They’re coming.’

Clesant dragged himself up and across the floor, he opened the cupboard, and the man bundled in and hid, and that was how it ended.

Yes, that’s how it ends, that’s what comes of being kind of handsome strangers and wanting to touch them. Aware of all his weaknesses, Dr Woolacott had warned him against this one. He crawled back to the sofa, where a pain stabbed him through the heart and another struck between the eye. He was going to be ill.

The voices came nearer, and with the cunning of a sufferer he decided what he must do. He must betray his late friend and pretend to have trapped him on purpose in the cupboard, cry ‘Open it . . .’

The voices entered. They spoke of the sounds of a violin. A violin had apparently been heard playing in the great house for the last half-hour, and no one could find out where it was. Playing all sorts of music, gay, grave and passionate. But never completing a theme. Always breaking off. A beautiful instrument. Yet so unsatisfying . . . leaving the hearers much sadder than if it had never performed. What was the use (someone asked) of music like that? Better silence absolute than this aimless disturbance of our peace. The discussion broke off, his distress had been observed, and like a familiar refrain rose up ‘Telephone, nurse, doctor . . .’ Yes, it was coming again – the illness, merely functional, the heart had affected the nerves, the muscles, the brain. He groaned, shrieked, but love died last; as he writhed in convulsions he cried: ‘Don’t go to the cupboard, no one’s there.’

So they went to it. And no one was there. It was as it had always been since his father’s death – shallow, tidy, a few medicine-bottles on the upper shelf, a few cushions stored on the lower.

III

Collapse . . . He fell back into the apparatus of decay without further disaster, and in a few hours any other machinery for life became unreal. It always was like this, increasingly like this, when he was ill. Discomfort and pain brought their compensation, because they were so superbly organized. His bedroom, the anteroom where the night-nurse sat, the bathroom and tiny kitchen, throbbed like a nerve in the corner of the great house, and elsewhere normal life proceeded, people pursued their avocations in channels which did not disturb him.

Delirium . . . The nurse kept coming in, she performed medical incantations and took notes against the doctor’s arrival. She did not make him better, he grew worse, but disease knows its harmonies as well as health, and through its soft advances now rang the promise. ‘You shall live to grow old.’

‘I did something wrong, tell me, what was it?’ It made him happy to abase himself before his disease, nor was this colloquy their first.

‘Intimacy,’ the disease replied.

‘I remember . . . Do not punish me this once, let me live and I will be careful. Oh, save me from him.’

‘No – from yourself. Not from him. He does not exist. He is an illusion, whom you created in the garden because you wanted to feel you were attractive.’

‘I know I am not attractive, I will never excite myself again, but he does exist, I think.’

‘No.’

‘He may be death, but he does exist.’

‘No. He never came into the gun-room. You only wished that he would. He never sat down on the sofa by your side and made love. You handed a pencil, but he never took it, you fell into his arms, but they were not there, it has all been a daydream of the kind forbidden. And when the others came in and opened the cupboard: your muscular and intelligent farmhand, your saviour from Wolverhampton in his Sunday suit – was he there?’

‘No, he was not,’ the boy sobbed.

‘No, he was not,’ came an echo, ‘but perhaps I am here.’

The disease began to crouch and gurgle. There was the sound of a struggle, a spewing sound, a fall. Clesant, not greatly frightened, sat up and peered into the chaos. The nightmare passed, he felt better. Something survived from it, an echo that said ‘Here, here’. And, he not dissenting, bare feet seemed to walk to the little table by his side, and hollow, filled with the dark, a shell of nakedness bent towards him and sighed ‘Here’.

Clesant declined to reply.

‘Here is the end, unless you . . . ‘ Then silence. Then, as if emitted by a machine, the syllables ‘Oh aye’.

Clesant, after thought, put out his hand and touched the bell.

‘I put her to sleep as I passed her, this is my hour, I can do that much . . . ‘ He seemed to gather strength from any recognition of his presence, and to say, ‘Tell my story for me, explain how I got here, pour life into me and I shall live as before when our bodies touched.’ He sighed. ‘Come home with me now, perhaps it is a farm. I have just enough power. Come away with me for an evening to my earthly lodging, easily managed by a . . . the . . . such a visit would be love. Ah, that was the word – love – why they pursued me and still know I am in the house; love was the word they cannot endure, I have remembered it at last.’

Then Clesant spoke, sighing in his turn. ‘I don’t even know what is real, so how can I know what is love? Unless it is excitement, and of that I am afraid. Do not love me, whatever you are; at all events this is my life and no one shall disturb it; a little sleep followed by a little pain.’

And his speech evoked strength. More powerfully the other answered now, giving instances and arguments, throwing into sentences the glow they had borne during daylight. Clesant was drawn into a struggle, but whether to reach or elude the hovering presence he did not know. There was always a barrier either way, always his own nature. He began calling for people to come, and the adversary, waxing lovely and powerful, struck them dead before they could waken and help. His household perished, the whole earth was thinning, one instant more, and he would be alone with his ghost – and then through the walls of the house he saw the lights of a car rushing across the park.

It was Dr Woolacott at last.

Instantly the spell broke, the dead revived, and went downstairs to receive life’s universal lord; and he – he was left with a human being who had somehow trespassed and been caught, and blundered over the furniture in the dark, bruising his defenceless body, and whispering, ‘Hide me.’

And Clesant took pity on him again, and lifted the clothes of the bed, and they hid.

Voices approached, a great company, Dr Woolacott leading his army. They touched, their limbs intertwined, they gripped and grew mad with delight, yet through it all sounded the tramp of that army.

‘They are coming.’

‘They will part us.’

‘Clesant, shall I take you away from all this?’

‘Have you still the power?’

‘Yes, until Woolacott sees me.’

‘Oh, what is your name?’

‘I have none.’

‘Where is your home?’

‘Woolacott calls it the grave.’

‘Shall I be with you in it?’

‘I can promise you that. We shall be together for ever and ever, we shall never be ill, and never grow old.’

‘Take me.’

They entwined more closely, their lips touched never to part, and then something gashed him where life had concentrated, and Dr Woolacott, arriving too late, found him dead on the floor.

The doctor examined the room carefully. It presented its usual appearance, yet it reminded him of another place. Dimly, from France, came the vision of a hospital ward, dimly the sound of his own voice saying to a mutilated recruit, ‘Do let me patch you up, oh but you must just let me patch you up . . .’

I

NIGHT

Love had been born somewhere in the forest, of what quality only the future could decide. Trivial or immortal, it had been born to two human bodies as a midnight cry. Impossible to tell whence the cry had come, so dark was the forest. Or into what worlds it would echo, so vast was the forest. Love had been born for good or evil, for a long life or a short.

There was hidden among the undergrowth of that wild region a small native hut. Here, after the cry had died away, a light was kindled. It shone upon the pagan limbs and the golden ruffles hair of a young man. He, calm and dignified, raised the wick of a lamp which had been beaten down flat, he smiled, lit it, and his surroundings trembled back into his sight. The hut lay against the roots of an aged tree, which undulated over its floor and surged at one place into a natural couch, a sort of throne, where the young man’s quilt had been spread. A stream sang outside, a firefly relit its lamp also. A remote, a romantic spot . . . lovely, lovable . . . and then he caught sight of a book on the floor, and he dropped beside it with a dramatic moan as if it was a corpse and he the murderer. For the book in question was his Holy Bible. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not——’ a scarlet flower hid the next word, flowers were everywhere, even round his own neck. Losing his dignity, he sobbed ‘Oh, what have I done?’ and not daring to answer the question he hurled the flowers through the door of the hut and the Bible after them, then rushed to retrieve the latter in an agony of grotesque remorse. All had fallen into the stream, all were carried away by the song. Darkness and beauty, darkness and beauty. ‘Only one end to this,’ he thought. And he scuttled back for his pistol. But the pistol was not with him, for he was negligent in his arrangements and had left it over with the servants at the further side of the great tree; and the servants, awoken from slumber, took alarm at his talk of firearms. In spite of all he could say, they concluded that an attack was impending from the neighbouring village, which had already proved unfriendly, and they implored their young master not to resist, but to hide in the brushwood until dawn and slip away as soon as the forest paths were visible. Contrary to. his orders, they began packing, and next morning he was riding away from the enchanted hut, and descending the watershed into the next valley. Looking back at the huge and enigmatic masses of the trees, he prayed them to keep his unspeakable secret, to conceal it even from God, and he felt in his unhinged state that they had the power to do this, and that they were not ordinary trees.