A Burnt Out Case (17 page)

When he had drunk his second whisky he said to the doctor, ‘When a smear-test is negative, does it always stay so?’

‘Not always. It’s too early to loose the patient on the world until the tests have been negative – oh, for six months. There are relapses even with our present drugs.’

‘Do they sometimes find it hard to be loosed?’

‘Very often. You see they become attached to their hut and their patch of land, and of course for the burnt-out cases life outside isn’t easy. They carry the stigma of leprosy. People are apt to think once a leper, always a leper.’

‘I begin to find your vocation a little easier to understand. All the same – the fathers believe they have the Christian truth behind them, and it helps them in a place like this. You and I have no such truth. Is the Christian myth that you talked about enough for you?’

‘I want to be on the side of change,’ the doctor said. ‘If I had been born an amoeba who could think, I would have dreamed of the day of the primates. I would have wanted anything I did to contribute to that day. Evolution, as far as we can tell, has lodged itself finally in the brains of man. The ant, the fish, even the ape has gone as far as it can go, but in our brain evolution is moving – my God – at what a speed! I forget how many hundreds of millions of years passed between the dinosaurs and the primates, but in our own lifetime we have seen the change from diesel to jet, the splitting of the atom, the cure of leprosy.’

‘Is change so good?’

‘We can’t avoid it. We are riding a great ninth evolutionary wave. Even the Christian myth is part of the wave, and perhaps, who knows, it may be the most valuable part. Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done. In isolated cases it may have done, in the saints . . . in Christ, if the man really existed.’

‘You can really comfort yourself with all that?’ Querry asked. ‘It sounds like the old song of progress.’

‘The nineteenth century wasn’t as far wrong as we like to believe. We have become cynical about progress because of the terrible things we have seen men do during the last forty years. All the same through trial and error the amoeba did become the ape. There were blind starts and wrong turnings even then, I suppose. Evolution today can produce Hitlers as well as St John of the Cross. I have a small hope, that’s all, a very small hope, that someone they call Christ was the fertile element, looking for a crack in the wall to plant its seed. I think of Christ as an amoeba who took the right turning. I want to be on the side of the progress which survives. I’m no friend of pterodactyls.’

‘But if we are incapable of love?’

‘I’m not sure such a man exists. Love is planted in man now, even uselessly in some cases, like an appendix. Sometimes of course people call it hate.’

‘I haven’t found any trace of it in myself.’

‘Perhaps you are looking for something too big and too important. Or too active.’

‘What you are saying seems to me every bit as superstitious as what the fathers believe.’

‘Who cares? It’s the superstition I live by. There was another superstition – quite unproven – Copernicus had it – that the earth went round the sun. Without that superstition we shouldn’t be in a position now to shoot rockets at the moon. One has to gamble on one’s superstitions. Like Pascal gambled on his.’ He drank his whisky down.

‘Are you a happy man?’ Querry asked.

‘I suppose I am. It’s not a question that I’ve ever asked myself. Does a happy man ever ask it? I go on from day to day.’

‘Swimming on your wave,’ Querry said with envy. ‘Do you never need a woman?’

‘The only one I ever needed,’ the doctor said, ‘is dead.’

‘So that’s why you came out here.’

‘You are wrong,’ Colin said. ‘She’s buried a hundred yards away. She was my wife.’

CHAPTER 2

In the last three months the hospital had made great progress. It was no longer a mere ground-plan looking like the excavation of a Roman villa; the walls had risen; the window-spaces were there waiting for wire nets. It was even possible to estimate the time when the roof would be fixed. The lepers worked more rapidly as the end came in sight. Querry was walking through the building with Father Joseph; they passed through non-existent doors like revenants, into rooms that did not yet exist, into the future operating theatre, the X-ray room, the fire-proof room with the vats of paraffin wax for the palsied hands, into the dispensary, into the two main wards.

‘What will you do,’ Father Joseph said, ‘when this is finished?’

‘What will you, father?’

‘Of course it’s for the Superior and the doctor to decide, but I would like to build a place where the mutilated can learn to work – occupational therapy, I suppose they call it at home. The sisters do what they can with individuals, especially the mutilated. No one wants to be a special case. They would learn much quicker in a class where they could joke a bit.’

‘And after that?’

‘There’s always more building to be done for the next twenty years, if only lavatories.’

‘Then there’ll always be something for me to do, father.’

‘An architect like you is wasted on the work we have here. These are only builders’ jobs.’

‘I have become a builder.’

‘Don’t you ever want to see Europe again?’

‘Do you, father?’

‘There’s a big difference between us. Europe is much the same as this for those of our Order – a group of buildings, very like the ones we have here, our rooms aren’t any different, nor the chapel (even the Stations are the same), the same classrooms, the same food, the same clothes, the same kind of faces. But surely to you Europe means more than that – theatres, friends, restaurants, bars, books, shops, the company of your equals – the fruits of fame whatever that means.’

Querry said, ‘I am content here.’

It was nearly time for the midday meal, and they walked back together towards the mission, passing the nuns’ house and the doctor’s and the small shabby cemetery. It was not kept well – the service of the living took up too much of the fathers’ time. Only on All Souls night was the graveyard properly remembered when a lamp or a candle shone on every grave, pagan and Christian. About half the graves had crosses, and they were as simple and uniform as those of the mass dead in a war cemetery. Querry knew now which grave belonged to Mme Colin. It stood crossless and a little apart, but the only reason for the separation was to leave space for Doctor Colin to join her.

‘I hope you’ll find room for me there too,’ Querry said. ‘I won’t rate a cross.’

‘We shall have trouble with Father Thomas over that. He’ll argue that once baptized you are always a Christian.’

‘I would do well to die then before he returns.’

‘Better be quick about it. He will be back sooner than we think.’ Even his brother priests were happier without Father Thomas; it was impossible not to feel a grudging pity for so unattractive a man.

Father Joseph’s warning proved wise too quickly. Absorbed in examining the new hospital they had failed to hear the bell of the Otraco boat. Father Thomas was already ashore with the cardboard box in which he carried all his personal belongings. He stood in the doorway of his room and greeted them as they passed. He had the curious and disquieting air of receiving them like guests.

‘Well, Father Joseph, you see that I am back before my time.’

‘We do see,’ Father Joseph said.

‘Ah, M. Querry, I have something very important to discuss with you.’

‘Yes?’

‘All in good time. Patience. Much has happened while I have been away.’

‘Don’t keep us on tenterhooks,’ Father Joseph said.

‘At lunch, at lunch,’ Father Thomas replied, carrying his cardboard box elevated like a monstrance into his room.

As they passed the next window they could see the Superior standing by his bed. He was pushing a hair-brush, a sponge-bag, and a box of cheroots into his khaki knapsack, a relic of the last war which he carried with him across the world like a memory. He took the cross from his desk and packed it away wrapped in a couple of handkerchiefs. Father Joseph said, ‘I begin to fear the worst.’

The Superior at lunch sat silent and preoccupied. Father Thomas was on his right. He crumbled his bread with the closed face of importance. Only when the meal was over did the Superior speak. He said, ‘Father Thomas has brought me a letter. The Bishop wants me in Luc. I may be away some weeks or even months and I am asking Father Thomas to act for me during my absence. You are the only one, father,’ he added, ‘with the time to look after the accounts.’ It was an apology to the other fathers and a hidden rebuke to the pride which Father Thomas was already beginning to show – he had very little in common with the doubting pitiful figure of a month ago. Perhaps even a temporary promotion could cure a failing vocation.

‘You know you can trust me,’ Father Thomas said.

‘I can trust everyone here. My work is the least important in the place. I can’t build like Father Joseph or look after the dynamos like Brother Philippe.’

‘I will try not to let the school suffer,’ Father Thomas said.

‘I am sure you will succeed, father. You will find that my work will take up very little of your time. A superior is always replaceable.’

The more bare a life is, the more we fear change. The Superior said grace and looked around for his cheroots, but he had already packed them. He accepted a cigarette from Querry, but he wore it as awkwardly as he would have worn a suit of lay clothes. The fathers stood unhappily around unused to departures. Querry felt like a stranger present at some domestic grief.

‘The hospital will be finished, perhaps, before I return,’ the Superior said with a certain sadness.

‘We will not put up the roof-tree till you are back,’ Father Joseph replied.

‘No, no, you must promise me to delay nothing. Father Thomas, those are my last instructions. The roof-tree at the earliest moment and plenty of champagne – if you can find a donor – to celebrate.’

For years in their quiet unchanging routine they had been apt to forget that they were men under obedience, but now, suddenly, they were reminded of it. Who knew what was intended for the Superior, what letters might not have passed between the Bishop and the General in Europe? He spoke of returning in a few weeks (the Bishop, he had explained, had summoned him for a consultation), but all of them were aware that he might never return. Decisions might already have been taken elsewhere. They watched him now unobtrusively, with affection, as one might watch a dying man (only Father Thomas was absent: he had already gone to move his papers into the other’s room), and the Superior in turn looked at them and the bleak refectory in which he had spent his best years. It was true what Father Joseph had said. The buildings, wherever he went, would always be very much the same; the refectories would vary as little as colonial airports; but for that very reason a man became more accustomed to the minute differences. There would always be the same coloured reproduction of the Pope’s portrait, but this one had a stain in the corner where the leper who made the frame had spilt the walnut colouring. The chairs too had been fashioned by lepers, who had taken as a model the regulation kind supplied to the junior grade of government officials, a kind you would find in every mission, but one of the chairs had become unique by its unreliability; they had always kept it against the wall since a visiting priest, Father Henri, had tried to imitate a circus trick by balancing on the back. Even the bookcase had an individual weakness: one shelf slanted at an angle, and there were stains upon the wall that reminded each man of something. The stains on a different wall would evoke different pictures. Wherever one went one’s companions would have much the same names (there are not so many saints in common use to choose from), but the new Father Joseph would not be quite the same as the old.

From the river came the summons of the ship’s bell. The Superior took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it as though he wondered how it had come there. Father Joseph said, ‘I think we should have a glass of wine . . .’ He rummaged in the cupboard for a bottle and found one which had been two-thirds finished some weeks ago on the last major feast-day. However there was a thimbleful left for all. ‘
Bon voyage
, father.’ The ship’s bell rang again. Father Thomas came to the door and said, ‘I think you should be off now, father.’

‘Yes. I must fetch my knapsack.’

‘I have it here,’ Father Thomas said.

‘Well then . . .’ The Superior gave one more furtive look at the room: the stained picture, the broken chair, the slanting shelf.

‘A safe return,’ Father Paul said. ‘I will fetch Doctor Colin.’

‘No, no, this is his time for a siesta. M. Querry will explain to him how it is.’

They walked down to the river bank to see the last of him and Father Thomas carried his knapsack. By the gang-plank the Superior took it and slung it over his shoulder with something of a military gesture. He touched Father Thomas on the arm. ‘I think you’ll find the accounts in good order. Leave next month’s as late as you can . . . in case I’m back.’ He hesitated and said with a deprecating smile, ‘Be careful of yourself, Father Thomas. Not too much enthusiasm.’ Then the ship and the river took him away from them.

Father Joseph and Querry returned to the house together. Querry said, ‘Why has he chosen Father Thomas? He has been here a shorter time than any of you.’

‘It is as the Superior said. We all have our proper jobs, and to tell you the truth Father Thomas is the only one who has the least notion of book-keeping.’

Querry lay down on his bed. At this hour of the day the heat made it impossible to work and almost as impossible to sleep except for superficial spells. He thought he was with the Superior on the boat going away, but in his dream the boat took the contrary direction to that of Luc. It went on down the narrowing river into the denser forest, and it was now the Bishop’s boat. A corpse lay in the Bishop’s cabin and the two of them were taking it to Pendélé for burial. It surprised him to think that he had been so misled as to believe that the boat had reached the farthest point of its journey into the interior when it reached the leproserie. Now he was in motion again, going deeper.