Short Stories 1895-1926 (50 page)

Dr Lidgett had watched his patient steadily through this monologue – his alert gestures, his mobile features, his shining eyes. At this pause he recrossed his legs, closed his eyes very gently – much as a lion blinks at sight of a two-legged visitor looking at him through the bars of his cage.

‘It's a story which I should think children particularly would delight in,' he remarked courteously, but with his usual reserve. ‘I should like to have read it. How did it end?'

He made the question sound as free from mere civility as possible, but could not restrain the faint sigh which these last few days had been the completion of every other breath he breathed.

‘Oh the end?' echoed Mr Pritchard a little dejectedly. ‘That is always the difficulty. He begins to preach at the street corner and is shut up for a lunatic and they take his spectacles away and – and so on. It was only a tale. But you see my meaning. The curious thing is that
that
is what we all say about another world. We are haunted by this hope, even this divination of another state or condition of being that is beyond our mortal senses to realize. A place or condition where – well, after death, of course. And yet, I feel, if we are not capable of it here and now, how is the transition to be made? Where shall we find the spectacles? There are some people, of course, who seem never to have needed them – they
are
peace and happiness. But …'

He gazed at the doctor as if he were really and truly in need of enlightenment, and as if even possibly it might be included in the fee. ‘Well, we don't come across wonder-working opticians under every lime-tree in every cathedral town. And supposing, as you suggested, the magic power of the spectacles had been reversed. What scene then would have met our friend's eyes!

‘All I mean is, don't we all have to put up with what we ourselves, each one of us, can get? And the tendency — I remember another tale I read once, by a French writer – at least the name was French. A translation, I think. It was about a philosophical crank whose lifelong hobby had been to transmute knowledge, just as the old philosophers tried to transmute metals. Or rather to focus knowledge so that it became an intrinsic part of himself – as of course all true knowledge is to some extent; a genuine “commonsense” to the “nth” degree; a power of vision; almost, as one might say, another dimension. He sees things first through one aspect of knowledge and then through another in rapid succession, and realizes through a fleeting eternity of change reality's everlasting nothingness or somethingness, whichever way you like to put it.' Mr Pritchard smiled. ‘In the end, my Frenchman decided he would have been a wiser and happier man if he had remained content with his own small natural instincts. He gave the game up – though that perhaps hardly sounds French. I have muddled the story, but that was the gist.'

The doctor nodded, as if in encouragement; but even an unobservant visitor could hardly have helped noticing that his attention and interest had begun to wane, had begun to resume their own natural channel. He had sunk a little lower into his chair, and a faint cloud of ennui or abstraction had settled on his features.

Mr Pritchard sighed. ‘I don't mean, doctor, that that is in any sense my experience. Far from it. It's beyond me!' The animation died out of the pallid face. The wide forehead resumed its customary frown. The little black eyes fixed themselves on the pattern of the surgery carpet. ‘All
my
knowledge only adds to the burden, the realization how helpless I am to contend against this settled conviction of my general uselessness and ineffectiveness. I realize, too, that it is only
my
knowledge, and that that being so, how am I to know that it has any true relation to – any bearing whatsoever on – the facts, on the reality? Please don't suppose that I am pretending to be an expert in anything. I have scarcely more than dabbled in subjects outside my own particular bent. But speaking of the little I have learned, and read, works of science and so on, and taking it for granted that even the novice, the mere man in the street, is free to come to his own conclusions, however partial and inadequate they are bound to be, it seems to me that all that too is nothing more than a general kind of human makebelieve. It is merely what
they –
the experts – think, not regarding what really matters to the very self within but only outside material things.

‘They work away – self-denyingly and modestly, too, for the most part – with their little scales and their instruments, their little scalpels and acids and batteries and retorts and all that paraphernalia. But whatever the result, however amusing and serviceable and ingenious, we all
know
that such evidence is only the secretion or excretion of their own senses. Senses that can tell us only what they are capable of being sensible
of
.

‘And look at it! What – I ask you – is the instant's good of this enormous machine we call life – this treadmill, the moment you
question
whether there is any value or truth or purpose or what-not in what it grinds? Look at their chemistry – the beautiful water-tight jargon of it all. Look at their astronomy: their red star this and their green star that, and the waste of space and the curve to it, and their spectral analyses and their orbits, and their rules of thumb and their mileage – their mileage! As if, doctor, my being two or three yards from you now is a fact of the slightest
spiritual
importance! In itself, I mean.'

The doctor quietly eyeing his visitor, nodded once more. But even yet – though the faintest, dying spark of animation, even of remote amusement, had kindled in his quiet blue eye, it was hardly as though he took more than a merely courteous and friendly interest in what, with so much zest and conviction, his patient was
saying
. But that patient, as alert as any practised prima donna or conjurer in ‘sensing' the responsiveness of an audience, had noticed this tiny ray of encouragement, and at once pressed forward.

‘I went out last night: I went out into my garden. It's little more than a square green patch of grass, with a few old trees, an acacia and so on, but pleasant and secluded, and not much overlooked. We make a point of that, oddly enough: not to be overlooked! As if — It has a nice old wall, too – a fragment of flotsam left by the country when it receded from the filthy flood of London. And I looked up into what they call the starry void of space; splinters of light: Aldebaran, the rainy Hyades, the clusters, the nebulae – of the Pleiads, Orion and the rest – annular, elliptic, spiral; you know the delightful jargon. And then the Milky Way – the Milky Way! And Venus there in the west, the goddess of Roman love. And now and then, a gentle, soundless, silver curve of dying light – some meteor candling its way into oblivion. I agree you might call it solemn, beautiful, entrancing; significant, even, if you happened to be a young couple just fallen in love. But – for you and me, doctor! I looked, and my imagination simply refused to respond. The spectacle was there, punctual, brilliant, according to specification – but honestly this particular programme-seller was unable to applaud. It was like strumming on a dumb piano – a fake piano. It meant no more to me than a piece of paper over which some idiot in a moment of ill-temper has flicked a fountain-pen. Reverse the colour-scheme: make the sky silvery-white and the stars black dots. What interpretation should we put upon it then? Something sombre and profound and meaningful, not a doubt of it: and with as much and as little justification. The constellations: a child's scrawls! Doggerel!

‘Oh yes, amusing, romantic enough, if you're that way inclined. And I'm saying nothing against it for those who still happily are tinder to every scientific spark. But' – he shifted wearily in his luxurious chair – ‘well, I went back into the house. As usual my old mother was sitting by the fire stooped up together in her easy chair in her silk shawl – one of those ugly old Victorian horsehair chairs, made for endurance. And I thought suddenly what a long time it had taken to make her old like that. I thought of what she had gone through – I'm not her only child – to come out
there,
like that. I thought I might perhaps have to survive her and grow old too – and only strangers to look after me. She was knitting. I don't know what she was knitting; but her hands are crooked now, and getting clumsy with her needles.

‘I bawled, “It's a fine starry night, Mother.”

‘She said, “Eh, Charles?”

‘I repeated the observation. She said she was glad it was fine. She is an old lady now. Very rarely goes out, you know; so weather hardly matters to her sitting cooped up indoors by the hearth. And upon my word, doctor, as I looked at her – my own mother – I seemed to see Death himself hooped together there in that chair huddling close down to the fire. It was as if the old villain had taken to that device to pass away the time in his old age! – knitting together a winding-sheet for the whole human race; for this complete ridiculous universe. Yet even as I thought it, I felt I was suffocating with remorse – the odiousness of such a feeling about
her
! But no. She wasn't to blame.
We
understand one another: mother and son. There's no need of any sense of proportion in that. One's heart almost breaks at the thought of its own impotence to express, and to comfort, and to tell … Those awful souls one sees in the streets. Awful. Good Lord, doctor, this whole stellar universe of ours may be no more than the bubbles in a bottle of champagne – or soda-water! And we humans the restless maggots in a rotting excretion of the sun. And yet – we go on breeding!'

The doctor drew his hand gently down over his beard. He coughed softly, glancing sidelong at his eloquent patient. ‘Am I to understand,' he said, ‘that you actually saw a physical change in your mother – I mean, that it amounted to anything in the nature of an hallucination?'

‘That's just it,' said his visitor suddenly angling himself up in his chair as if someone had pulled the appropriate wire; ‘that's just it. I
did
so see it: but only of course, with my inward eye. It was so because I saw it so: but I'm not pressing it as scientific evidence. No, doctor, I can manage the hallucinations all right, whenever I want to; and without trespassing too far over the border. In fact I should of course be a pretty poor scribbler of fiction – worse even than I am – if I couldn't.'

‘But they don't persist?' persisted the doctor.

Once more Mr Pritchard's features seemed to collect themselves together into a point of intense vacuity; and Dr Lidgett looked away again. Beyond the surgery window was a patch of red-brick wall on which a young fruittree had been espaliered. It was in scanty leaf now, but though its flowers came punctually to the season, its fruit never ripened, for only the beams of a northwest sun ever peeped into this corner of the doctor's garden. His glance having wandered away from the occupant of his chair rested heavily on its vivid green. This valiant little plum-tree was an old friend of his. He had watched its miracle of revivification recur year after year: had noticed it while he had sat interviewing his patients one after the other, doing his best for them in his own solemn fashion before eagerly returning to that new life of his upstairs. And realizing that it was never likely to bear, he would go out in the evening and pluck a sprig or two of its blossom to bring in for a surprise. It showed greener than ever this particular spring, as if it had taken on an unprecedented verdure, had made the friendliest of efforts, for a particular occasion. And one could hardly blame it if the occasion had suddenly failed, or refused to keep its tryst.

His visitor, having shaken himself free of a momentary absent-mindedness, had followed the direction of the doctor's eyes, and himself gazed a moment at the leafing plum.

‘It's a curious thing,' he said, ‘but my mind – what they call the subconscious, I suppose – seems for some little time past to have been exploring in the very direction of the state into which I have been gradually reduced. One might almost suppose, I mean, that things and events of the outside world are only mere properties in the inward scene – farce or melodrama – in which one is the only
unquestionably
living actor. Not that I am by profession a solipsist! That little tree, there, reminds me, for example, of yet another piece of fiction I managed to write a few months ago. I know I am boring you with all this stuff, Dr Lidgett; but it's only because it seems to me to be symptomatic so to speak; and I suppose even the smallest particular may be of service in arriving at a diagnosis.'

The doctor turned back his head again, shifted his elbows on the arms of the chair, leaned his chin on his fingers, and once more out of his calm settled eyes patiently surveyed his visitor. ‘Certainly,' he said. ‘We usually, you know, have to extract these things for ourselves. It is a help to have them volunteered. What is this other story you were referring to?'

‘Why' – once more Mr Pritchard's pallid face lit up with inward animation and the gesticulations of his small long-fingered hands helped him out – ‘why, in this story, it is Nature herself that dries up. Very gradually, of course. At first, indeed, almost imperceptibly. For a succession of autumns the harvests are slightly but cumulatively less abundant; now in this country, now in that. But steadily and incessantly the general average begins to dwindle all over the world. Then, here and there the deficit becomes acute. At first it is only the important – humanly important things, I mean – cereals, sugar, hops, vines, tea, coffee, and so on, that are noticeably deficient – the irony being that less vital though important things flourish. Rubber, cotton, hemp, for example, continue steady. And new gold and diamond mines are actually discovered. There is a positive glut of coal and petroleum. Transportation from one scene of growing desolation to another therefore remains easy.