Laughter in the Dark (19 page)

This recollection had been completed by Margot. Yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or even earlier—she had told him, or rather her voice—why only her voice? Why was it so long since he had really seen her? This bandage. Probably they would soon take it off … What had Margot’s voice told him?

“… If it had not been for the telegraph post, we should have plunged over the parapet and into the precipice. It was appalling. I’ve still a huge bruise on my hip. The car turned a somersault and smashed like an egg. It cost … le car … mille … beaucoup mille marks” (this was meant, apparently, for the nurse). “Albert, what’s the French for twenty thousand?”

“Oh, what does it matter … You are alive!”

“The cyclists were very nice. They helped to gather up all the things. But they couldn’t find the tennis rackets.”

Tennis rackets? Sun on a tennis racket. Why was that so unpleasant? Oh, yes, that nightmare business at Rouginard. He with his gun in his hand. She coming in on rubber soles … Nonsense—all that had been cleared up, everything was all right.… What time was it? When would the bandage be taken off? When could he get up? Had it got into the papers—the German papers?

He turned his head this way and that; the bandage worried him. Also—the discrepancy between his senses. His ears had been absorbing so many impressions all this time, and his eyes none at all. He did not know what the room, or the nurse, or the doctor looked like. And the time? Was it morning? He had had a long, sweet sleep. Probably the window was open, for he heard the clatter of horse hoofs outside; there was also the sound of running water and the clanging note of a pail. Perhaps there was a courtyard with a well and the cool morning shade of plane trees.

He lay for some time motionless, endeavoring to transform the incoherent sound into corresponding shapes and colors. It was the opposite
of trying to imagine the kind of voices which Botticelli’s angels had. Presently he heard Margot’s laugh and then that of the hospital nurse. Apparently they were sitting in the next room. She was teaching Margot to pronounce correctly in French: “Soucoupe, soucoupe”—Margot repeated several times and they both laughed softly.

Feeling that he was doing something absolutely forbidden, Albinus cautiously drew up the bandage and peeped out. But the room still remained quite dark. He could not even see the bluish glimmer of a window or those faint patches of light which come to stay with the walls at night. So it was night after all, not morning, not even early morning. A black moonless night. How deceptive sounds could be. Or were the blinds especially thick?

From the next room came a pleasant rattle of crockery:
“Café aimé toujours, thé nicht toujours”

Albinus fumbled over the bedside table until he felt the little electric lamp. He pressed the switch once, a second time, but the darkness remained there, as if it were too heavy to move. Probably the plug had been taken out. He felt with his fingers for matches and actually found a box. There was only one match inside; he struck
it, heard it sizzle slightly as though it had lit, but he could not see any flame. He threw it away and suddenly smelled a faint odor of sulphur. Strange.

“Margot,” he shouted suddenly, “Margot!”

A sound of rapid footsteps and of a door opening. But nothing changed. How could it be dark behind the door, if they were having coffee there?

“Turn on the light,” he said angrily. “Please, turn on the light.”

“You are a bad boy,” said Margot’s voice. He heard her approaching swiftly and surely through absolute night. “You ought not to touch that bandage.”

“What do you mean? You seem to see me,” he stammered. “How can you see me? Turn on the light, do you hear? At once!”

“
Calmez-vous
. Don’t excite yourself,” said the voice of the nurse.

These sounds, these footsteps and voices seemed to be moving on a different plane. He was here and they were somewhere else, but still, in some unaccountable way, close at hand. Between them and the night which enveloped him was an impenetrable wall. He rubbed his eyelids, turned his head this way and that, jerked himself about, but it was impossible to force a way through this solid darkness which was like a part of himself.

“It can’t be!” said Albinus with the emphasis of despair. “I’m going mad! Open the window, do something!”

“The window is open,” she answered softly.

“Perhaps there is no sun … Margot, perhaps I might see something in very sunny weather. The merest glimmer. Perhaps, with glasses.”

“Lie still, my dear. The sun is shining, it is a glorious morning. Albert, you hurt me.”

“I … I …” Albinus drew a deep breath which seemed to make his chest swell into some vast monstrous globe full of a whirling roar which presently he let out, lustily, steadily … And when it had all gone, he started filling up again.

H
IS
cuts and bruises healed, his hair grew again, but the terrible sense of this solid black wall remained unchanged. After those paroxysms of deadly horror, when he had howled, flung himself about and tried frantically to tear something away from his eyes, he lapsed into a state of semi-consciousness. Then presently there would loom up once more that unbearable mountain of oppression, which was only comparable with the panic of one who wakes to find himself in his grave.

Gradually, however, these fits became less frequent. For hours on end he lay on his back, silent and motionless, listening to daytime sounds, which seemed to have turned their backs upon him in merry converse with others. Suddenly he would recall that morning at Rouginard—which had really been the beginning of it all—and then he groaned anew. He visualized the sky, blue distances,
light and shade, pink houses dotting a bright green slope, lovely dream-landscapes at which he had gazed so little, so little …

While he was still at that hospital, Margot had read aloud to him a letter from Rex which ran as follows:

“I don’t know, my dear Albinus, what staggered me most—the wrong you did me by your inexplicable and very uncivil departure, or the misfortune which has befallen you. But although you have wounded me deeply, I sympathize with you wholeheartedly in your misfortune, especially when I think of your love for painting and for those beauties of color and line which make sight the prince of all our senses.

“I am traveling today from Paris to England and thence to New York, and it will be some time before I see Germany again. Please convey my friendly greetings to your companion, whose fickle and spoiled nature was presumably the cause of your disloyalty toward me. Alas, she is only constant in relation to herself; but, like so many women, she has a craving to be admired by others, which turns to spite when the man in question, by reason of his plain-spokenness, his repulsive exterior and unnatural inclinations, cannot but excite her ridicule and aversion.

“Believe me, Albinus, I liked you well, more
than I ever showed; but if you had told me in plain terms that my presence had become irksome to you both, I should have prized your frankness highly, and then the happy recollections of our talks about painting, of our rambles in the world of color, would not have been so sadly darkened by the shadow of your faithless flight.”

“Yes, that is the letter of a homosexual,” said Albinus. “But all the same I’m glad he’s gone. Perhaps, Margot, God has punished me for distrusting you, but woe betide you if …”

“If what, Albert? Go on, finish your sentence …”

“No. Nothing. I believe you. Oh, I believe you.”

He was silent, and then he began to make that smothered sound—half moan, half bellow—which was always the beginning of his paroxysms of horror at the darkness surrounding him.

“The prince of all our senses,” he repeated several times in a faltering voice. “Ah, yes, the prince …”

When he had calmed down, Margot said that she was going out to the travel agency. She kissed his cheek and then tripped swiftly along the shady side of the street.

She entered a cool little restaurant and seated herself next to Rex. He was drinking white wine.

“Well,” he asked, “what did the poor beggar say to the letter? Didn’t I word it cutely?”

“Yes. it went down all right. On Wednesday we are leaving for Zurich to see that specialist. Please, see about the tickets. But please take yours in a different carriage—it’s safer.”

“I’m doubtful,” remarked Rex carelessly, “whether they’ll let me have the tickets for nothing.”

Margot smiled tenderly and began taking out notes from her handbag.

“And as a general thing,” added Rex, “it would be much simpler if
I
were the cashier.”

A
LTHOUGH
Albinus had several times—in the depths of a night which employed the bright small-talk of daylight—been for a walk, a pitifully hesitating walk along the scrunching gravel paths of the hospital garden, he proved to be very ill-prepared for the journey to Zurich. At the railway station his head began to swim—and there is no stranger, more helpless sensation than that of a blind man when his head is going round. He was stunned by all the different sounds, footsteps, voices, wheels, viciously sharp and strong things which all seemed to be rushing at him, so that every second was filled with the fear of knocking against something, although Margot was guiding him.

In the train he felt his gorge rise with nausea, because he could not harmonize the clatter and rocking of the carriage with any forward motion, no matter how hard he tried to imagine the landscape
which, surely, was speeding past. And then again, at Zurich, he had to make his way among invisible people and objects—obstacles and angles, which held their breath before hitting him.

“Oh, come on, don’t be afraid,” said Margot irritably. “I’m leading you. Now stop. We are just going to get into the taxi. Now lift your foot. Can’t you be a little less timid? Really, you might be a two-year-old.”

The professor, a famous oculist, made a thorough examination of Albinus’ eyes. He had a soft unctuous voice so that Albinus pictured him as an old man with a clean-shaven priestlike face, although in reality, he was still fairly young and sported a bristly moustache. He repeated what Albinus for the most part already knew: that the optic nerves had been damaged at the point of their intersection in the brain. Possibly this contusion might heal; possibly complete atrophy might ensue—the chances were obscurely even. But in any case, in the patient’s present condition, a thorough rest was the most important thing. A sanatorium in the mountains would be perfect. “And then we shall see,” said the professor.

“Shall we see?” repeated Albinus, with a melancholy smile.

The idea of a sanatorium did not appeal to
Margot. An old Irish couple whom they met in the hotel offered to let them a small chalet just above a fashionable mountain resort. She consulted Rex and then (leaving Albinus with a hired nurse) traveled in his company to see what the place was like. It turned out to be quite nice: a small two-storied cottage with clean little rooms and a cup for holy water affixed to every door.

Rex found its position to his liking: all alone, high upon a slope amid dense black fir trees, and only a quarter of an hour’s downhill walk to the village and the hotels. He chose for himself the sunniest room in the upper story. A cook was engaged in the village. Rex talked to her very impressively:

“We are offering you such high wages,” he said, “because you’ll be in the service of a man who is blinded as the result of a violent mental shock. I’m the doctor in charge of him, but in view of his state of mind he must
not
know that a doctor is living in the house with him as well as his niece. If, therefore, you breathe the slightest hint, direct or indirect, as to my presence—addressing me, for instance, in his hearing, you’ll be responsible in the eyes of the law for all the consequences of interrupting the progress of his recovery, and such conduct is, I believe, very severely punished in Switzerland. Moreover, I advise
you not to come near my patient, or indeed to engage in any sort of conversation with him. He is subject to fits of the most violent insanity. You may be interested to know that he has already seriously injured one old woman (much like you in many respects, though not so attractive) by stamping on her face. Somehow, I should not care for such a thing to happen again. And most important of all, if you gossip about things in the village with the result that people become curious, my patient might, in his present condition, smash up everything in the house, beginning with your head. Do you get me?”

The woman was so terrified that she almost refused this extraordinarily well-paid post, and made up her mind to accept it only when Rex assured her that she would not see the blind man, his niece serving him, and that he was quite peaceable if left undisturbed. He also made arrangements with her that no butcher’s boy or washer woman should ever be allowed to penetrate the grounds. This done, Margot traveled back to fetch Albinus, while Rex moved into the house. He brought with him all the luggage, decided how the rooms were to be allotted and arranged that every superfluous breakable object should be removed. Then he went to his room and whistled
tunefully as he fastened some rather improper pen-and-ink drawings to the wall.

Toward five o’clock he looked through a pair of field glasses and saw, far below, a hired motorcar approaching. Margot in a brilliant red jumper skipped out and helped Albinus to alight. With hunched shoulders, in dark spectacles, he looked like an owl. The car turned round and disappeared behind a thickly wooded bend.

Margot took the meek, clumsy man by the arm, and he climbed the footpath holding his stick in front of him. They vanished behind some fir trees, reappeared, vanished again and at length emerged upon the little garden terrace where the gloomy cook (who, incidentally, was already whole-heartedly devoted to Rex) went timorously to meet them and, trying not to look at the dangerous lunatic, relieved Margot of her attaché case.

Rex, meanwhile, leaned out of the window and made droll gestures of greeting to Margot: he pressed his hand to his heart and flung out his arms jerkily—it was a capital imitation of Punch—all this of course in dumb show, though he could have squeaked remarkably in more favorable circumstances. Margot smiled up at him and entered the house, still leading Albinus by the arm.