Self Condemned (55 page)
T
wo hours later, his head bandaged, René lay in a bed in the Momaco General Hospital. He was staring, with a dull and confused expression, at a young man who sat beside him.
“Nothing,” he said thickly.
“Had she no inherited pre-disposition?
“Please leave me,” René muttered.
“You have nothing you can tell me, Professor?”
“Leave me.”
The
Gazette-Herald
reporter coughed. An intern came up behind him, and bent down, mouth to ear. The reporter rose, coughed, looked at the patient, and moved away on tiptoe. This was the Silent Ward, as they called it, for a thrombosis secured admission for a patient to the White Silence, a place so quiet that, to be any more silent, it would have to be death.
René’s brain was silent too. All that entered it resembling a thought was a painful feeling that he was alone, that he had been removed from life and shut into a white solitude.The white intern was a mechanism. He could not understand the nurses. They had not learned how to speak. Wherever he looked he saw a round spot of light, but soft, as if it belonged wherever it happened to appear. The intern was watching him. He came over, and fixed white spectacles upon his nose.The eyeholes were circles of white muslin. — There can be no proper silence while the eyes are allowed to bang about. Now that the visual turbulence had been cut off, and sight reduced to a white circle, an all-over muting of the consciousness ensued. Even such stimulus as white-coated intern removed, the mind began to dream of white rivers which led nowhere, which developed laterally, until they ended in a limitless white expanse. The constant sense of loneliness ended, in the white silence, as a necessary ingredient of the white silence, which was all that was desired — the negation of the visual; and an aural blank which had more quality than white, was not such a negation, and was as soothing as a caress. But at last consciousness ebbed quietly away, and René lay in a dreamless sleep, alone in this place dedicated to silence, totally removed from life.
It was only very gradually that this remoteness and peace began to be invaded by fragments of the glaring and clanging world outside this muted and spectral seclusion. It was the specialist’s purpose to forbid ingress and access to anything belonging to the passionate universe without, from which René had accidentally been cut off. Everything was done to preserve the salutary aloofness.
But in the graveyard of the senses, one by one, the most brutal memories were resurrected. Before he left the hospital René was in possession of the full burden of consciousness once more. As a first step, about ten days after he had been brought in, the nerve-centres restored to proper functioning, he was removed from the Ward of Silence to a bright and pleasant room. And it was in that room that the struggle began, the struggle as gradually as possible to re-admit to the mind what had been excluded from it: and the re-admission was apt to be anything but gradual, and threatened to disrupt the vessel into which it rushed. For approximately a week he was left alone there, until he was regarded as strong enough to receive visitors: which protective measure left totally out of count the mental visitors who crowded in. The first to enter the room without knocking was, it was natural, Hester. And when the nurse found him sobbing upon the pillow, every effort was made to get rid of this terrible and disturbing visitant. For it was well understood by the doctors who she must be. But there was no expulsion of Hester. She was always there very soon, and obsessed the patient. Sometimes she would be as she was in the days of the Room, of the “vows of hardship.” At others she was the
graffito
woman of the police mortuary. She would enter as he was half-asleep, with her eyes protruding, her head thrust forward, and the deep line of her frown prolonged by a swollen vein bisecting the forehead. The nurse would perhaps appear, to do one of the innumerable, irrelevant things nurses find to do, and he would lie glaring at the wall; and she would go up to the bed and give the pillow an idle poke; and say,
“Te
voilà qui ne dors pas, René.”
But at last they decided to let in the world of flesh and blood, if only to counteract the more dangerous imaginary visitors. McKenzie was the first to arrive, and the only one for a long time. “You have been very ill, René,” he said, “you have had a terrible time. I have made a number of efforts to see you. Is there anything at all I can do? Laura would like to come and see you. Would that be all right?”
René continued to stare at him, even to glare at him, holding his hand tight.
“Do not trouble to talk, René. I know how hard it must be for you. Do not make any effort.”
René tried to smile, and it changed his face into somebody else’s. “I struck my head ... they told you, of course. I suppose there was concussion ... yes, concussion. I have got over it, at least I have got over the concussion. Of course I’m rather shaken you know.”
“I can well imagine.”
“It will be impossible for me to see any people.” His eyes filled with tears. “I must leave here — Momaco, I mean.”
“Why? René, that would be a great pity. Wait a bit. Do not decide anything yet.You are in no state …”
“I have decided,” René said.
“You must go and rest somewhere. It is clear enough that you will not be able to work for some time. They are quite decent people at the university; they will give you sick leave, with pay you know. I will see about that. Allow me to see about that for you.”
René empowered him to do anything, and said he would be most grateful if he would act for him. He gave him a bunch of keys, lifting up one, and saying “the front door”; lifting up another, he said, “the desk.” There was a small address book, that was all he wanted. And then he became very tired. Muttering some apology, he turned his back upon his friend and was almost at once asleep. McKenzie left quietly, and informed the nurse that her patient was asleep. He asked if he might see the doctor who had been dealing with this case.
The next day McKenzie called again, bringing the small address book, mail, and some fruit. He was at once admitted. René had told them that he wished to see no one else. The mail was left with the doctor, to be delivered as and when he saw fit: with the warning that one of the letters was probably from the patient’s dead wife. That day René said even less than the day before. He confided that he thought he would go to a certain place, if there was a vacancy. He would stop there for some time. Perhaps he would stay there a
long
time. It appeared to fatigue him profoundly to talk, even with anyone he knew. Having imparted the above piece of information, as before he presented McKenzie with his back, and rapidly fell asleep.
In a few days he got up, for the making of the bed, and a week later than that he gave signs of a rather more normal condition of mind. What was occurring beneath this frozen surface was a series of painful readjustments, followed, as was the case with McKenzie’s visit, by sleep. He slept a great deal of the time, the doctors saw to that. Meanwhile he had written one letter: upon the envelope was the following name and address:
Father Moody, S.M.,
Registrar,
College of the Sacred Heart,
Niagara, Ont.
and to this letter a reply had been received at the hospital, but was in the keeping of the doctor, as was the mail from the apartment.
Neither to doctor nor to nurse, any more than to McKenzie, did René utter a word upon the subject of his wife’s death. He continued to refuse to see anyone. Mr. Furber, for instance, greatly excited by the banner headlines
SUICIDE OF COLLEGE
PROFESSOR’S WIFE
, and the tittle-tattle scraped together by the reporters, made frenzied attempts to be admitted “for a few brief moments” to see René. But René became hysterical at the idea of seeing Mr. Furber, so that would-be visitor was permanently banned.
The Hester he saw at present was a living and moving one, one that he had loved, a witty, at times malicious one; but one who had become as much part of his physical being as if they had been born twins, physically fused — or better, one might say, for physical amalgamation would be unpleasant, identical twins. It had been a fearful estrangement between them when she made a return to England a supreme issue, a life or death issue. She still, in death, spoke of England. But all he spoke to her about was forgiveness. Could he ever be forgiven? No, forgiveness was of course impossible. Once or twice he thought he must get back to England, and if he should ask her forgiveness
there
, then the sweet face would smile as if to say, “You have returned! We could not
both
return! But you found your way back. That proves that there really was love in you for me.” And he several times started to plan a return to England — to England and to penury. The phantom was tenderer when England was in his mind: when he was thinking of all the profound advantages England had over any other English-speaking country.
At the time this communion of the dead and the living started, it was only the decapitated Hester who was present to him. His impulse in the police mortuary to seize and to carry off her head was realized in the imagination. In trembling horror he grasped the decapitated head, and pressed her dear face against his. And then the lifeless lips moved and grew warm. With amazement, and soon with delight, he felt the warming lips glueing themselves against his. His entire body responded, for she was no longer merely a head. Love had brought her to life again. He imagined, in a sort of delirium, this miracle. Never again did she return as Hester decapitated and legless. But that fearful reality was always present, somewhere, out of sight, never out of mind. He always knew that fundamentally and irreparably she was the
graffito
woman of the police mortuary, and only in memory something else. Attempting always to conjure this horror, he implored Hester to keep together — to be her old self. And so he went on from day to day, in the mental reality of his daydream, secured by his hospital seclusion. He did his best to preserve this delusion; he felt that if it stopped he would then be compelled to face the overpowering reality. So it was an escape device.
The reason played no part at any time in his subterranean adjustments in the hospital.To
think
was impossible.The implacable severed head, and the blood-stained severed legs on the one hand, and then the neurotic collapse in which his head injury had left him, made the continued exclusion of the reason imperative.
Then one day, when he was physically much stronger, the doctor came in and handed him his mail. The psychiatrist sat by the side of the bed while he opened the letters. First was a personal letter from the chancellor, expressing his sorrow at the terrible misfortune which had overtaken René; next one from the registrar, informing him that it was the hope of the university board that René would absent himself from duty for as long as was necessary for the complete restoration of his health, his fees to be paid during that period uncurtailed.There was a most charming letter from Trevelyan, expressive of a genuine appreciation of the stricken professor. Next several letters from Canadian well-wishers, Alice Price and the père Price for example. Then came the last two letters.
There was the not very beautifully engraved envelope announcing the
College of the Sacred Heart
. The letter within, in the crabbed peasant fist of Father Moody, was cordial in the extreme.The personality of the rubicund priest, who had visited him a year or so earlier, and offered him a course of lectures, if he had the time to give them at Sacred Heart College, was visible in every awkward scratch of the pen and crudely friendly word.The Father Superior, to whom Father Moody had spoken, had expressed himself as delighted if Professor Harding could come right away.
Last was the letter from Hester. He looked at the envelope, looked up at the doctor, who smiled encouragingly, and opened it quickly. He read — whitening as he did so.
Almost at once he put the letter down, still holding it with his hands. “This,” he told the doctor, “is a communication from my dead wife.”
“Indeed,” said the doctor.
“Yes,” he answered. “She has written me. I think I will read it when I am alone.”
The doctor stood up. “Well, I will leave you.” He passed through the door, and took up a position behind it, from which he was able to observe the patient. He did not have to wait. René lifted the letter again, and as he began to read, he was softly laughing.
XXXII
THE COLLEGE OF THE
SACRED HEART
T
he College of the Sacred Heart, shortened for familiar use to “Sacred Heart College,” was a Catholic seminary. The college buildings were, in part, originally a fort. A cloistered square had been contrived in the heart of the fort building; and all round this square were the long corridors, off which, upstairs and downstairs, were the cells of the priests, the college offices, the chapel, and the refectory. The lecture rooms were in a large building in the rear, and also the dormitories of the seminarians; behind that was the playing field; and behind that was the home farm. On this the priests and seminarians worked. Since most of them were the sons of Irish dirt farmers, the farm work was carried out expertly. It was not irksome to anybody, and the priests took it in turns to work there, regarding it as a useful and pleasurable form of outdoor exercise.
About three months after he had left the hospital, René sat, one afternoon, at the window of his cell. He was dressed in a cassock: he still wore his beard. It was a warm afternoon, and his cassock was open. The college was situated in the wine country of Canada, bordering the United States. The roar of Niagara sounded sleepily, like the sound of the ocean not far away. The window of his cell faced towards the river, which was the water of Lake Erie concentrating itself to plunge down at Niagara, as one of the most famous waterfalls in the world, though the slowly moving water of the River Niagara had nothing ominous about it, and, except for the roar as you approached the precipice, a man might slide over the top without at all realizing what was about to occur.