A Burnt Out Case (18 page)

The scrape of a chair woke him. He thought it was the ship’s bottom grinding across a snag in the river. He opened his eyes and saw Father Thomas sitting by his bedside.

‘I had not meant to wake you,’ Father Thomas said.

‘I was only half asleep.’

‘I have brought you messages from a friend of yours,’ Father Thomas said.

‘I have no friends in Africa except those I have made here.’

‘You have more friends than you know. My message is from M. Rycker.’

‘Rycker is no friend of mine.’

‘I know he is a little impetuous, but he is a man with a great admiration for you. He feels, from something his wife has said, that he was perhaps wrong to speak of you to the English journalist.’

‘His wife has more sense than he has then.’

‘Luckily it has all turned out for the best,’ Father Thomas said, ‘and we owe it to M. Rycker.’

‘The best?’

‘He has written about you and all of us here in the most splendid fashion.’

‘Already?’

‘He telegraphed his first article from Luc. M. Rycker helped him at the post office. He made it a condition that he should read the article first – M. Rycker, of course, would never have allowed anything damaging to us to pass. He has written a real appreciation of your work. It has already been translated in
Paris Dimanche
.’

‘That rag?’

‘It reaches a very wide public,’ Father Thomas said.

‘A scandal-sheet.’

‘All the more creditable then that your message should appear there.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about – I have no message.’ He turned impatiently away from Father Thomas’s searching and insinuating gaze and lay facing the wall. He heard the rustle of paper – Father Thomas was drawing something from the pocket of his soutane. He said, ‘Let me read a little bit of it to you. I assure you that it will give you great pleasure. The article is called: “An Architect of Souls. The Hermit of the Congo.”’

‘What nauseating rubbish. I tell you, father, nothing that man could write would interest me.’

‘You are really much too harsh. I am only sorry I had no time to show it to the Superior. He makes a slight mistake about the name of the Order, but you can hardly expect anything different from an Englishman. Listen to the way he ends. “When a famous French statesman once retired into the depths of the country, to avoid the burden of office, it was said that the world made a path to his door”.’

‘He can get nothing right,’ Querry said. ‘Nothing. It was an author, not a statesman. And the author was American, not French.’

‘These are trifles,’ Father Thomas said rebukingly. ‘Listen to this. “The whole Catholic world has been discussing the mysterious disappearance of the great architect Querry. Querry whose range of achievement extended from the latest cathedral in the United States, a palace of glass and steel, to a little white Dominican chapel on the Côte d’Azur . . .”’

‘Now he’s confusing me with that amateur, Matisse,’ Querry said.

‘Never mind small details.’

‘I hope for your sake that the gospels are more accurate in small details than Parkinson.’

‘“Querry has not been seen for a long while in his usual haunts. I have tracked him all the way from his favourite restaurant, l’Epaule de Mouton . . .”’

‘This is absurd. Does he think I’m a gourmandizing tourist?’

‘“To the heart of Africa. Near the spot where Stanley once pitched his camp among the savage tribes, I at last came on Querry . . .”’ Father Thomas looked up. He said, ‘It is here that he writes a great many gracious things about our work. “Selfless . . . devoted . . . in the white robes of their blameless lives.” Really, you know, he does have a certain sense of style.

‘“What is it that has induced the great Querry to abandon a career that brought him honour and riches to give up his life to serving the world’s untouchables? I was in no position to ask him that when suddenly I found that my quest had ended. Unconscious and burning with fever, I was carried on shore from my pirogue, the frail bark in which I had penetrated what Joseph Conrad called the Heart of Darkness, by a few faithful natives who had followed me down the great river with the same fidelity their grandfathers had shown to Stanley.”’

‘He can’t keep Stanley out of it,’ Querry said. ‘There have been many others in Central Africa, but I suppose the English would never have heard of them.’

‘“I woke to find Querry’s hand upon my pulse and Querry’s eyes gazing into mine. Then I sensed the great mystery.”’

‘Do you really enjoy this stuff?’ Querry asked. He sat up impatiently on his bed.

‘I have read many lives of saints that were far worse written,’ Father Thomas said. ‘Style is not everything. The man’s intentions are sound. Perhaps you are not the best judge. He goes on, “It was from Querry’s lips that I learned the meaning of the mystery. Though Querry spoke to me as perhaps he had never spoken to another human soul, with a burning remorse for a past as colourful and cavalier as that St Francis once led in the dark alleys of the city by the Arno . . .” I wish I had been there,’ Father Thomas said wistfully, ‘when you spoke of that. I’m leaving out the next bit which deals mainly with the lepers. He seems to have noticed only the mutilated – a pity since it gives a rather too sombre impression of our home here.’ Father Thomas, as the acting Superior, was already taking a more favourable view of the mission than he had a month before.

‘Here is where he reaches what he calls the heart of the matter. “It was from Querry’s most intimate friend, André Rycker, the manager of a palm-oil plantation, that I learned the secret. It is perhaps typical of Querry that what he keeps humbly hidden from the priests for whom he works he is ready to disclose to this planter – the last person you would expect to find on terms of close friendship with the great architect. ‘You want to know what makes him tick?’ M. Rycker said to me. ‘I am sure that it is love, a completely selfless love without the barrier of colour or class. I have never known a man more deeply instructed in faith. I have sat at this very table late into the night discussing the nature of divine love with the great Querry.’ So the two strange halves of Querry meet – to me Querry had spoken of the women he had loved in the world of Europe, and to his obscure friend, in his factory in the bush, he had spoken of his love of God. The world in this atomic day has need of saints. When a famous French statesman once retired into the depths of the country, to avoid the burden of office, it was said that the world made a path to his door. It is unlikely that the world which discovered the way to Schweitzer at Lambarene will fail to seek out the hermit of the Congo.” I think he might have left out the reference to St Francis,’ Father Thomas said, ‘it might be misunderstood.’

‘What lies the man does tell,’ Querry exclaimed. He got up from his bed and stood near his drawing-board and the stretched sheet of blueprint. He said, ‘I won’t allow that man . . .’

‘He is a journalist, of course,’ Father Thomas said. ‘These are just professional exaggerations.’

‘I don’t mean Parkinson. It’s his job. I mean Rycker. I have never spoken to Rycker about Love or God.’

‘He told me that he once had an interesting discussion with you.’

‘Never. There was no discussion. All the talking, I assure you, was done by him.’

Father Thomas looked down at the newspaper cutting. He said, ‘There’s to be a second article, it appears, in a week’s time. It says here, “Next Sunday. A Saint’s Past. Redemption by Suffering. The Leper Lost in the Jungle.” That will be Deo Gratias I imagine,’ Father Thomas said. ‘There’s also a photograph of the Englishman talking to Rycker.’

‘Give it to me.’ Querry tore the paper into pieces and dropped them on the floor. He said, ‘Is the road open?’

‘It was when I left Luc. Why?’

‘I’m going to take a truck then.’

‘Where to?’

‘To have a word with Rycker. Can’t you see, father, that I must silence him? This mustn’t go on. I’m fighting for my life.’

‘Your life?’

‘My life here. It’s all I have.’ He sat wearily down on the bed. He said, ‘I’ve come a long way. There’s nowhere else for me to go if I leave here.’

Father Thomas said, ‘For a good man fame is always a problem.’

‘But, father, I’m not a good man. Can’t you believe me? Must you too twist everything like Rycker and that man? I had no good motive in coming here. I am looking after myself as I have always done, but surely even a selfish man has the right to a little happiness?’

‘You have a truly wonderful quality of humility,’ Father Thomas said.

PART SIX

CHAPTER I

I

Marie Rycker stopped her reading of
The Imitation of Christ
as soon as she saw that her husband was asleep, but she was afraid to move in case she might wake him, and of course there was always the possibility of a trap. She could imagine how he would reproach her, ‘Could you not watch by me one hour?’ for her husband was not afraid to carry imitation to great lengths. The hollow face was turned away from her so that she could not see his eyes. She thought that so long as he was ill she need not tell him her news, for one had no duty to give such unwelcome news as hers to a sick man. Through the net of the window there blew in the smell of stale margarine which she would always associate with marriage, and from where she sat she could see the corner of the engine-house, where they were feeding the ovens with the husks.

She felt ashamed of her fear and boredom and nausea. She had been bred a
colon
and she knew very well that this was not how a
colon
ought to behave. Her father had represented the same company as her husband, in a different, a roving capacity, but because his wife was delicate he had sent her home to Europe before his child’s birth. Her mother had fought to stay with him, for she was a true
colon
, and in her turn the daughter of a
colon
. The word spoken in Europe so disparagingly was a badge of honour to them. Even in Europe on leave they lived in groups, went to the same restaurants and café-bars kept by former
colons
and took villas for the season at the same watering-places. Wives waited among the potted palms for their husbands to return from the land of palms; they played bridge and read aloud to each other their husbands’ letters, which contained the gossip of the colony. The letters bore bright postage stamps of beasts and birds and flowers and the postmarks of exotic places. Marie began to collect them at six, but she always preserved the envelopes and the postmarks as well, so that she had to keep them in a box instead of an album. One of the postmarks was Luc. She did not foresee that one day she would begin to know Luc better than she knew the rue de Namur.

With the tenderness that came from a sense of guilt she wiped Rycker’s face with a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne, even at the risk of waking him. She knew that she was a false
colon
. It was like betraying one’s country – all the worse because one’s country was so remote and so maligned.

One of the labourers came out of the shed to make water against the wall. When he turned back he saw her watching him and they stared across the few yards at each other, but they were like people watching with telescopes over an immense distance. She remembered a breakfast, with the pale European sun on the water outside and bathers going in for an early dip, and her father teaching her the Mongo for ‘bread’ and ‘coffee’ and ‘jam’. They were still the only three words in Mongo that she knew. But it was not enough to say coffee and bread and jam to the man outside. They had no means of communication: she couldn’t even curse him, as her father or her husband could have done, in words that he understood. He turned and went into the shed and again she felt the loneliness of her treachery to this country of
colons
. She wanted to apologize to her old father at home; she couldn’t blame him for the postmarks and the stamps. Her mother had yearned to remain with him. She had not realized how unfortunate her weakness was. Rycker opened his eyes and said, ‘What time is it?’

‘I think it’s about three o’clock.’

He was asleep again before he could have heard her reply, and she sat on. In the yard a lorry backed towards the shed. It was piled high with nuts for the presses and the ovens; they were like dried and withered heads, the product of a savage massacre. She tried to read, but
The Imitation of Christ
could not hold her attention. Once a month she received a copy of
Marie-Chantal
, but she had to read the serial in secret when Rycker was occupied, for he despised what he called women’s fiction and spoke critically of daydreams. What other resources had she than dreams? They were a form of hope, but she hid them from him as a member of the Resistance used to hide his pill of cyanide. She refused to believe that this was the end, growing old in solitude with her husband and the smell of margarine and the black faces and the scrap-metal, in the heat and the humidity. She awaited day by day some radio signal which would announce the hour of liberation. Sometimes she thought that there were no lengths to which she would not go for the sake of liberation.

Marie-Chantal
came by surface-mail; it was always two months out of date, but that hardly mattered, since the serial story, as much as any piece of literature, had eternal values. In the story she was reading now a girl in the Salle Privée at Monte Carlo had placed 12,000 francs, the last money she had in the world, upon the figure 17, but a hand had reached over her shoulder while the ball ran and shifted her tokens to 19. Then the 19 socket caught the ball and she turned to see who her benefactor could be . . . but she would have to wait another three weeks before she discovered his identity. He was approaching her now down the West African coast, by mail-boat, but even when he arrived at Matadi, there was still the long river-journey ahead of him. The dogs began barking in the yard and Rycker woke.