Short Stories 1895-1926 (49 page)

By this time, slow though his progress had been, the figure of the pilgrim was almost out of sight; even though the first shoots of the gigantic sun had by now struck his garments, transmuting them to their own colour – that of red and gold. And when the watchman sat down to examine his infinitesimal gift, he gave thanks to his lucky stars that he had not broken into his visitor's confidence with any of the urbanities appropriate to converse between a subject and his king.

For though his faded sight was utterly unable to discern what similitude it bore, or his wits to skip from its fretted surface to the Queen Mother who now had no one but her son for inmost company, he realized that here was a jewel of great price. And he vowed within himself, too, that when the moment came for its presentation, he would do his utmost to secure that Bugghul Dur, his fellow watchman, should then be on duty.

Disillusioned

Disillusioned
1

Whenever Dr Lidgett's visitor paused in his monologue, so serene seemed the quiet in the consulting-room, so gently from its one high window rilled in the light, that these two strangers might have been closeted together in an oasis of everlasting peace. It was afternoon, and a scene of stillest life. The polished writing-table with its worn maroon leather, the cabinet over the chimney-piece, with its surgical instruments, and toy balances, the glass and gilt of the engraved portraits on the walls – everything in the room appeared to have sunken long ago into a reverie oceans deep. Even the faint fume of drugs on the air and the persistent tapping of water in a shallow basin behind the dark-blue screen only intensified the quiet. They were nothing more than a gentle reminder that our human frailty sometimes requires an anaesthetic, and that it is by moments life comes and goes.

‘But I see I am detaining you,' the small yet penetrating voice began again out of the large leather-covered chair. ‘I shouldn't have intruded at such a time.' The quick dark eyes of the stranger under the bony hollows of the brows were fixed on Dr Lidgett – as if he were a lighthouse looked at from a stormy sea. The face was pallid; the fingers twitched restlessly; there was an air of vigilant intelligence on the features – as if the spirit of which they were the mask had for some time been afraid of being frightened, and intent on realizing it when real cause for fear came.

Dr Lidgett sat with his back to the window, his chair turned a little away from the table, his right leg crossed over his left, showing a neat, well-cut boot. He remained perfectly still, his eyes downcast, his well-kept hands resting a little heavily on the arms of his chair. His attitude suggested indeed that to listen like this to what this untimely visitor was saying, and as heedfully and as sympathetically as possible, was, if anything, preferable, perhaps, to listening to nothing, to being, as he had been lately, so noticeably alone.

‘Not at all,' he murmured reassuringly, glancing up at his visitor, ‘please be quite comfortable about that, and go on with what you were telling me. As I say, this is not my usual consulting hour; and as a matter of fact my partner, Dr Herbert Scott, is attending to my patients for the next few days. You would find him this evening at Drayton House – No. no – a little further down the hill. But don't let that concern you now. You were complaining of physical lassitude, general malaise?'

His voice was low and unanimated, but he pronounced his words with precision, his rather full red lips moving beneath his square-cut beard. The eyes of the two of them met for an instant, and the doctor looked away.

‘It's exceedingly kind of you,' his visitor demurred. ‘And – well, that is really my trouble. But, as I was saying, it's not exactly physical. Indeed,' he added, as if in disappointment that there should be so little to tell, ‘there appears to be precious little actually wrong with me; nothing much more, I mean, than what is usual in these days and at my age, I suppose. It is merely this detestable listlessness of mind; this loss of
mental
appetite. And I had a wonderful digestion once!' He smiled at this wintry ghost of a joke. ‘The fact is I can't regain my grip on things. It is as though whatever I do or think or say – or feel for that matter – serves no purpose, is no manner of use – to myself, I mean. And yet, my friends talk to me much as usual. Nobody seems to have noticed anything wrong. They haven't said so. But then we don't, do we? I wonder at times, doctor, if it is not because we daren't. There must be many of us, surely, in much the same state.

‘I am, as I say, a writer, an author by profession. I scribble a good deal for the magazines, fiction chiefly.' The dark eyebrows raised themselves above the intently dark and smallish eyes. ‘As a matter of fact my name is Pritchard,' he explained. ‘You may just possibly have come across it somewhere.'

‘I know the name,' said Dr Lidgett discreetly, ‘but I could not perhaps definitely connect it with anything I have actually read. But then I have little time for reading.'

‘No, no, no, of course not,' his visitor hastened to reassure him. ‘I didn't mean that; it was only that nowadays we can hardly help to some extent taking in one another's washing, so to speak. On the other hand, of course, fiction is read almost solely by women – a sort of stimulant, or sedative perhaps. I mentioned it merely because, I suppose, one's occupation
counts
. Not that I claim, thank heaven, to be a victim of the artistic temperament; as a matter of fact I'm not up to that standard. Far from it.' He smiled again, looking the while more haggard and lifeless than ever.

‘But that's how I stand. What I mean is this – that, so far as I know, lungs, heart, liver, and all that, are sound enough – as sound at least as one would expect at my age. I was examined not so very long ago either. It's rather my nerves, my-
self,
you know. Not that there is anything definitely, organically wrong with my mind, I mean, either, I hope. At least I
hope
not.' He smiled – a smile almost lustrous in its intensity. ‘Not at least in the usual meaning of the word.'

Dr Lidgett gazed steadily at this naïve yet receptive and highly-animated face. He too smiled, but as if at such moments it was customary to do so. ‘It is exceedingly unlikely,' he agreed, ‘that you would have come to me if that had been the case. Not at all. Were you recommended to see me – personally?'

‘No, oh no. I haven't even that excuse. I was passing; I was walking along the street, not going anywhere in particular, of course; and I caught sight of the brass plate and the lamp. One is foolish perhaps to obey these vague impulses. It isn't quite fair. But … Somehow it seemed,
there's
your chance. I read the names – as I say – and my only fear was that this might be Dr Scott's. I wanted to see
you,
Dr Lidgett: I don't know why. But there, I am only worsening my case,' he stirred in his chair, groped for his hat, ‘I see I
am
detaining you. Let me come again another time.'

If Dr Lidgett felt any impatience with so hesitant a visitor, his sober unmoving countenance showed not a trace of it. ‘Please go on: I am anxious to hear,' he said, though his words sounded as if they were more unwilling than usual to come at the moment's call. ‘Tell me precisely what these nervous or mental symptoms are. Is your memory fairly good for example – names, dates, words and so on? Do you find it difficult to fix your attention – to concentrate? Have you any worry? Is there any particular thing continually on your mind? Are your thoughts interrupted, I mean, as if without cause?'

‘I don't hear voices, or anything of that kind,' said his visitor. ‘No more, I mean, than one
should
in doing my particular kind of work. My memory is remarkably good – for what I need. And I can concentrate on what I really want to do. What more do I ask?'

The blank face with which he put this question resembled Grimaldi's at his most melancholy; it was at the same time so empty, so forlorn and so ineffectual. ‘Literally nothing, doctor, except to say that there is no purpose in what I do. It is lifeless, inert; the bottom's knocked out of it. No use at all; except, of course, for what it brings in – the merely practical side of it.'

‘Have you – any family?' enquired the doctor. Indeed he almost blurted the question in his quiet fashion, as if it were one not entirely to his liking, too intrusive and personal.

‘None whatever,' was the reply. Mr Pritchard in fact looked slightly astonished at being asked anything so commonplace, as if he had been unexpectedly presented with an aspect of life which he had never paused to consider. ‘I live with my mother,' he said. ‘She is an old lady now. Hale still, but a little deaf, and apt to repeat herself. We spend a great deal of time together. But lately she has not been so well as I could wish. Have you ever repeated that phrase – “failing health” – over to yourself? Tennyson, you know, used to say under his breath “
Alfred, Alfred, Alfred
” until he became like a shell with the wind in it – empty. But I say instead, “In failing health – in failing health – in failing health” – the meaning intensifies, doctor, the longer you brood on it. But that of course is not what you were asking. Besides, I doubt if any kind of responsibility – wife and children and so on – that kind of thing – would make much difference. I haven't noticed it in other men. It might even complicate matters, mightn't it?' But Dr Lidgett, on his side, appeared not to have considered this problem; and his visitor pressed on.

‘To tell you the honest truth,' he said, ‘I have come to the end of things. For me, the spirit, the meaning – whatever you like to call it – has vanished, gone clean out of the world, out of what we call reality. At least for me. It's nothing but a husk; and a dried-up husk at that. It may sound pompous and affected, but, try as I may, I can no longer see any purpose in it all, even if I ever did. You may retort,' he interrupted himself eagerly – ‘you may retort: “But, then, who does?” But then, you see, there is all the difference between not seeing a purpose in life because you haven't looked for one; and being sure there is no purpose when you have.

‘Besides, what right have we to assume there
is
a purpose? What justification? The palaver! I remember not many months ago – I had been in bed for a few days with a chill – I woke up one afternoon and found my eyes fixed on the window – autumn trees, a quiet blue sky, a few late swallows, twilight coming: and at that moment as if in divination I
knew
there was no purpose. I wanted nothing; so there was nothing to want … A tale told by an idiot – signifying nothing. What if Shakespeare himself
meant
that?'

Dr Lidgett glanced covertly away from his visitor. Nobody could have gathered from his quiet solemn eyes if he considered even Shakespearean convictions of final validity, or even if he needed any evidence in the matter. Their expression was absent and yet mournful, as if they were fixed on the ghost or spectre of some happy memory never to be retrieved, never to bloom again.

‘It's difficult to explain these things,' his visitor was chattering on, almost vivaciously. ‘But I wrote a bit of a story once, with something of that idea at the back of it – the changing points of view, I mean. It was about a man who buys a pair of spectacles – goggles – greenish glass, copper handles – at a shop tucked away under a row of lime-trees in a little cathedral town. Three steps down; very still and musty-fusty; owl in a glass case; antiques, all sorts; and a funny old shop-keeper with a goatee beard. That kind of thing. He asks the peering old creature if he has any glasses to shield his eyes from the glare outside. The thing's symbolic, of course. And when the customer goes out of the shop and puts them on, everything in the world is changed.' Up went the doctor's visitor's black eyebrows once more as if in the wildest astonishment at such an original idea: though apparently he was only waiting for a word of encouragement.

‘Changed?' Dr Lidgett enquired. ‘For the worse?'

‘Oh no, the better! The other, surely, would be rather too much of a problem! I couldn't tackle that.'

‘I fancied, Mr Pritchard,' the doctor patiently replied, ‘you meant that the man who buys the spectacles was – well …'

‘No, no, quite the reverse,' the visitor ejaculated eagerly. ‘He puts them on in the street. And presto! his whole world is transmogrified. Grand transformation scene: everything around him becomes instantly irradiated with beauty and life and meaning – all that; dancing with happiness and light. Even the shop is an Aladdin's cavern: and the trees outside spread their boughs over him like green tents of enchantment, sighing with mystery and delight. The people in the street – creatures from another planet: Traherne, of course: all
colours
and beautiful forms intensified. They walk as if they had wings – head, shoulder, thigh, like the angels in Isaiah: “Each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly:” – just as if the fellow had been taking hashish or something. He sees a woman, with a basket – going shopping: she is fair as Israfel, wondrous as manna, shining – Botticelli. The buildings are marvellously transmuted, too. Even little common things changed: the dust, the cobwebs, the refuse, the manure in the streets, a sandy cat on a window-sill, the sparrows, a thrush in a cage, singing – “in the silence of morning the song of the bird”.

‘And he goes into the cathedral, in which only the day before he had yawned his way from tomb to tomb, to find it a shrine drenched with loveliness; as if some incomparable artist had spent centuries in cutting the stones, and as if the stones themselves had been quarried from some celestial quarry. There is a faint exquisite blue in the air. He can even hear, like a network of faintly shimmering strings, all the music, the Marbecke and Palestrina, the Bach and the Beethoven and the Purcell and so on, that had floated up and into silence and rest into the fretted roof century after century. I overdid it a little perhaps. You can't help yourself. But that's how my story ran. The spectacles, too, I agree, were a bit mechanical; but then for my part I could never quite stomach the physic trick in
Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde
. But that's how it came; and the story was published all right. In fact I had one or two letters about it. People are very odd.'