CHAPTER XVI
It is many weeks since I wrote those words which I thought were to be
my last. I read them over now, and laugh aloud. Life is more
devilishly humorous than I in my most nightmare dreams ever imagined.
Instead of dying at Mentone as I proposed, I am here, at Mustapha
Superieur, still living. And let me tell you the master joke of the
Arch-Jester.
I am going to live.
I am not going to die. I am going to live. I am quite well.
Think of it. Is it farcical, comical, tragical, or what?
This is how it has befallen. The last thing I remember of the old
conditions was Rogers packing my things, and a sudden, awful,
excruciating agony. I lost consciousness, remained for days in a
bemused, stupefied state, which I felt convinced was death, and found
particularly pleasant. At last I woke to a sense of bodily
constriction and discomfort, and to the queer realisation that what I
had taken for the Garden of Prosperpine was my own bedroom, and that
the pale lady whom I had so confidently assumed was she who, crowned
with calm leaves, "gathers all things mortal with cold, immortal
hands" was no other than a blue-and-white-vested hospital nurse.
"What the----" I began.
"Chut!" she said, flitting noiselessly to my side. "You mustn't talk."
And then she poured something down my throat. I lay back, wondering
what it all meant. Presently a grizzled and tanned man, wearing a
narrow black tie, came into the room. His face seemed oddly familiar.
The nurse whispered to him. He came up to the bed, and asked me in
French how I felt.
"I don't know at all," said I.
He laughed. "That's a good sign. Let me see how you are getting on."
He stuck a thermometer in my mouth and held my pulse. These
formalities completed, he turned up the bedclothes and did something
with my body. Only then did I realise that I was tightly bandaged. My
impressions grew clearer, and when he raised his face I recognised the
doctor who had sat on the sofa with Anastasius Papadopoulos.
"Nothing could be better," said he. "Keep quiet, and all will be
well."
"Will you kindly explain?" I asked.
"You've had an operation. Also a narrow escape."
I smiled at him pityingly. "What is the good of taking all this
trouble? Why are you wasting your time?"
He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then he laughed as
the light came to him.
"Oh, I understand! Yes. Your English doctors had told you you were
going to die. That an operation would be fatal--so your good friend
Madame Brandt informed us--but we--/nous autres Francais/--are more
enterprising. Kill or cure. We performed the operation--we didn't kill
you--and here you are--cured."
My heart sickened with a horrible foreboding. A clamminess, such as
others feel at the approach of death, spread over my brow and neck.
"Good God!" I cried, "you are not trying to tell me that I'm going to
live?"
"Why, of course I am!" he exclaimed, brutally delighted. "If nothing
else kills you, you'll live to be a hundred."
"Oh, damn!" said I. "Oh, damn! Oh, damn!" and the tears of physical
weakness poured down my cheeks.
"/Ce sont des droles de gens, les Anglais/!" I heard him whisper to
the nurse before he left the room.
Belonging to a queer folk or not, I found the prospect more and more
dismally appalling according as my mind regained its clarity. It was
the most overwhelming, piteous disappointment I have ever experienced
in my life. I cursed in my whimpering, invalid fashion.
"But don't you want to get well?" asked the wide-eyed nurse.
"Certainly not! I thought I was dead, and I was very happy. I've been
tricked and cheated and fooled," and I dashed my fist against the
counterpane.
"If you go on in this way," said the nurse, "you will commit suicide."
"I don't care!" I cried--and then, they tell me, fainted. My
temperature also ran up, and I became lightheaded again. It was not
until the next day that I recovered my sanity. This time Lola was in
the room with the nurse, and after a while the latter left us
together. Even Lola could not understand my paralysing dismay.
"But think of it, my dear friend," she argued, "just think of it. You
are saved--saved by a miracle. The doctor says you will be stronger
than you have ever been before."
"All the more dreadful will it be," said I. "I had finished with life.
I had got through with it. I don't want a second lifetime. One is
quite enough for any sane human being. Why on earth couldn't they have
let me die?"
Lola passed her cool hand over my forehead.
"You mustn't talk like that--Simon," she said, in her deepest and most
caressing voice, using my name somewhat hesitatingly, for the first
time. "You mustn't. A miracle really has been performed. You've been
raised from the dead--like the man in the Gospel----"
"Yes," said I petulantly, "Lazarus. And does the Gospel tell us what
Lazarus really thought of the unwarrantable interference with his
plans? Of course he had to be polite--"
"Oh, don't!" cried, Lola, shocked. In a queer unenlightened way, she
was a religious woman.
"I'm sorry," said I, feeling ashamed of myself.
"If you knew how I have prayed God to make you well," she said. "If I
could have died for you, I would--gladly--gladly----"
"But I wanted to die, my dear Lola," I insisted, with the egotism of
the sick. "I object to this resuscitation. I say it is monstrous that
I should have to start a second lifetime at my age. It's all very well
when you begin at the age of half a minute--but when you begin at
eight-and-thirty years----"
"You have all the wisdom of eight-and-thirty years to start with."
"There is only one thing more disastrous to a man than the wisdom of
thirty-eight years," I declared with mulish inconvincibility, "and
that is the wisdom he may accumulate after that age."
She sighed and abandoned the argument. "We are going to make you well
in spite of yourself," she said.
They, namely, the doctor, the nurse, and Lola, have done their best,
and they have succeeded. But their task has been a hard one. The
patient's will to live is always a great factor in his recovery. My
disgust at having to live has impeded my convalescence, and I fully
believe that it is only Lola's tears and the doctor's frenzied appeals
to me not to destroy the one chance of his life of establishing a
brilliant professional reputation that have made me consent to face
existence again.
As for the doctor, he was pathetically insistent.
"But you must get well!" he gesticulated. "I am going to publish it,
your operation. It will make my fortune. I shall at last be able to
leave this hole of an Algiers and go to Paris! You don't know what
I've done for you! I've performed an operation on you that has never
been performed successfully before. I thought it had been done, but I
found out afterwards my English /confreres/ were right. It hasn't.
I've worked a miracle in surgery, and by my publication will make you
as the subject of it famous for ever. And here you are trying to die
and ruin everything. I ask you--have you no human feelings left?"
At the conclusion of these lectures I would sigh and laugh, and
stretch out a thin hand. He shook it always with a humorous grumpiness
which did me more good than the prospect of acquiring fame in the
annals of the /Ecole de Medicine/.
Here am I, however, cured. I have thrown away the stick with which I
first began to limp about the garden, and I discourage Lola and Rogers
in their efforts to treat me as an invalid. Like the doctor, I have
been longing to escape from "this hole of an Algiers" and its painful
associations, and, when I was able to leave my room, it occurred to me
that the sooner I regained my strength the sooner should I be able to
do so. Since then my recovery has been rapid. The doctor is delighted,
and slaps me on the back, and points me out to Lola and the manager
and the concierge and the hoary old sinner of an Arab who displays his
daggers, and trays, and embroideries on the terrace, as a living
wonder. I believe he would like to put me in a cage and carry me about
with him in Paris on exhibition. But he is reluctantly prepared to
part with me, and has consented to my return in a few days' time, to
England, by the North German Lloyd steamer. He has ordered the sea
voyage as a finishing touch to my cure. Good, deluded man, he thinks
that it is his fortuitous science that has dragged me out of the
Valley of the Shadow and set me in the Garden of Life. Good, deluded
man! He does not realise that he has been merely the tool of the Arch-
Jester. He has no notion of the sardonic joke his knife was chosen to
perpetrate. That naked we should come into the world, and naked we
should go out is a time-honoured pleasantry which, as far as the
latter part of it is concerned, I did my conscientious best to
further; but that we should come into it again naked at the age of
eight-and-thirty is a piece of irony too grim for contemplation. Yet
am I bound to contemplate it. It grins me in the face. Figuratively, I
am naked.
Partly by my own act, and partly with the help of Destiny (the greater
jester than I) I have stripped myself of all these garments of life
which not only enabled me to strut peacock-fashion in the pleasant
places of the world, but also sheltered me from its inclemencies.
I had wealth--not a Rothschild or Vanderbilt fortune but enough to
assure me ease and luxury. I have stripped myself of it. I have but a
beggarly sum remaining at my bankers. Practically I am a pauper.
I had political position. I surrendered it as airily as I had achieved
it; so airily, indeed, that I doubt whether I could regain it even had
I the ambition. For it was a game that I played, sometimes
fascinating, sometimes repugnant to my fastidious sense of honourable
dealing, for which I shall never recapture the mood. Mood depends on
conditions, and conditions, as I am trying to show, are changed.
I had social position. I did not deceive myself as to its value in the
cosmic scheme, but it was one of the pleasant things to which I was
born, just as I was born to good food and wines and unpatched boots
and the morning hot water brought into my bedroom. I liked it. I
suspect that it has fled into eternity with the spirit of Captain
Vauvenarde. The penniless hero of an amazing scandal is not usually
made an idol of by the exclusive aristocracy of Great Britain.
I had a sweet and loyal woman about to marry me. I put Eleanor
Faversham for ever out of my life.
I had the devotion and hero-worship of a lad whom I thought to train
in the paths of honour, love and happiness. In his eyes I suppose I am
an unconscionable villain.
I have stripped myself of everything; and all because the medical
faculty of my country sentenced me to death. I really think the Royal
Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians ought to pay me an indemnity.
And not only have I stripped myself of everything, but I have incurred
an incalculable debt. I owe a woman the infinite debt of her love
which I cannot repay. She sheds it on me hourly with a lavishness
which scares me. But for her tireless devotion, the doctor tells me, I
should not have lived. But for her selfish forbearance, sympathy, and
compassion I should have gone as crazy as Anastasius Papadopoulos. Yet
the burden of my debt lies iceberg cold on my heart. Now that we are
as intimate as man and woman who are still only friends can be, she
has lost the magnetic attraction, that subtle mystery of the woman--
half goddess, half panther--which fascinated me in spite of myself,
and made me jealous of poor young Dale. Now that I can see things in
some perspective, I confess that, had I not been under sentence of
death, and, therefore, profoundly convinced that I was immune from all
such weaknesses of the flesh, I should have realised the temptation of
languorous voice and sinuous limbs, of the frank radiation of the
animal enchanted as it was by elusive gleams of the spiritual, of the
Laisdom--in a word, of all the sexual damnability of a woman which, as
Francois Villon points out, set Sardanapalus to spin among the women,
David to forget the fear of God, Herod to slay the Baptist, and made
Samson lose his sight. Whether I should have yielded to or resisted
the temptation is another matter. Honestly speaking, I think I should
have resisted.
You see, I should still have been engaged to Eleanor Faversham. . . .
But now this somewhat unholy influence is gone from her. She has
lifted me in her strong arms as a mother would lift a brat of ten. She
has patiently suffered my whimsies as if I had been a sick girl. She
has become to me the mere great mothering creature on whom I have
depended for custard and the removal of crumbs and creases from under
my body, and for support to my tottering footsteps. The glamour has
gone from before my eyes. I no longer see her invested in her queer
splendour. . . .
My invalid peevishness, too, has accentuated my sensitiveness to
shades of refinement. There is about Lola a bluffness, a hardihood of
speech, a contempt for the polite word and the pretty conventional
turning of a phrase, a lack of reticence in the expression of ideas
and feelings, which jar, in spite of my gratitude, on my unstrung
nerves. Her ignorance, too, of a thousand things, a knowledge of which
is the birthright of such women as Eleanor Faversham, causes
conversational excursions to end in innumerable blind alleys. I know
that she would give her soul to learn. This she has told me in so many
words, and when, in a delicate way, I try to teach her, she listens
humbly, pathetically, fixing me with her great, gold-flecked eyes,
behind which a deep sadness burns wistfully. Sometimes when I glance
up from my book, I see that her eyes, instead of being bent on hers
have been resting long on my face, and they say as clearly as
articulate speech: "Teach me, love me, use me, do what you will with
me. I am yours, your chattel, your thing, till the end of time."
I lie awake at night and wonder what I shall do with my naked life
sheltered only by the garment of this woman's love, which I have
accepted and cannot repay. I groan aloud when I reflect on the
irremediable mess, hash, bungle I have made of things. Did ever sick
man wake up to such a hopeless welter? Can you be surprised that I
regarded it with dismay? Of course, there is a simple way out of it,
and into the shadowy world which I contemplated so long, at first with
mocking indifference and then with eager longing. A gentleman called
Cato once took it, with considerable aplomb. The means are to my hand.
In my drawer lies the revolver with which the excellent Colonel
Bunnion (long since departed from Mustapha Superieur) armed me against
the banditti of Algiers, and which I forgot to return to him. I could
empty one or more of the six chambers into my person and that would be
the end. But I don't think history records the suicide of any
humorist, however dismal. He knows too well the tricks of the Arch-
Jester's game. Very likely I should merely blow away half my head, and
Destiny would give my good doctor another chance of achieving immortal
fame by glueing it on again. No, I cannot think seriously of suicide
by violent means. Of course, I might follow the example of one
Antonios Polemon, a later Greek sophist, who suffered so dreadfully
from gout that he buried himself alive in the tomb of his ancestors
and starved to death. We have a family vault in Highgate Cemetery, of
which I possess the key. . . . No, I should be bored and cold, and the
coffins would get on my nerves; and besides, there is something
suggestive of smug villadom in the idea of going to die at Highgate.
Lola came up as I was scribbling this on my knees in the garden.
"What are you writing there?"
"I am recasting Hamlet's soliloquy," I replied, "and I feel all the
better for it."
"Here is your egg and brandy."
I swallowed it and handed her back the glass.
"I feel all the better for that, too."
As I sat in the shade of the little stone summer-house within the
Greek portico, she lingered in the blazing sunshine, a figure all
glorious health and supple curves, and the stray brown hairs above the
brown mass gleamed with the gold of a Giotto aureole. She stood, a
duskily glowing, radiant emblem of life against the background of
spring greenery and rioting convolvulus. I drew a full breath and
looked at her as if magnetised. I had the very oddest sensation. She
seemed, in Shakespearean phrase, to rain influence upon me. As if she
read the stirrings of my blood, she smiled and said:
"After all, confess, isn't it good to be alive?"
A thrill of physical well-being swept through me. I leaped to my feet.
"You witch!" I cried. "What are you doing to me?"
"I?" She retreated a step, with a laugh.
"Yes, you. You are casting a spell on me, so that I may eat my words."
"I don't know what you are talking about, but you haven't answered my
question. It /is/ good to be alive."
"Well, it is," I assented, losing all sense of consistency.
She flourished the egg-and-brandy glass. "I'm so glad. Now I know you
are really well, and will face life as you faced death, like the brave
man that you are."
I cried to her to hold. I had not intended to go as far as that. I
confronted death with a smile; I meet life with the wriest of wry
faces. She would have none of my arguments.
"No matter how damnable it is--it's splendid to be alive, just to feel
that you can fight, just to feel that you don't care a damn for any
old thing that can happen, because you're strong and brave. I do want
you to get back all that you've lost, all that you've lost through me,
and you'll do it. I know that you'll do it. You'll just go out and
smash up the silly old world and bring it to your feet. You will,
Simon, won't you? I know you will."
She quivered like an optimistic Cassandra.
"My dear Lola," said I.
I was touched. I took her hand and raised it to my lips, whereat she
flushed like a girl.
"Did you come here to tell me all this?"
"No," she replied simply. "It came all of a sudden, as I was standing
here. I've often wanted to say it. I'm glad I have."
She threw back her head and regarded me a moment with a strange, proud
smile; then turned and walked slowly away, her head brushing the long
scarlet clusters of the pepper trees.
