A Burnt Out Case (21 page)

‘Because people could only see the reward, and the punishment was invisible, he got the reputation of being a very good man. Sometimes people were a little perplexed that such a good man should have enjoyed quite so many women – it was, on the surface anyway, disloyal to the King who had made quite other rules. But they learnt in time to explain it; they said he had a great capacity for love and love had always been regarded by them as the highest of virtues. Love indeed was the greatest reward even the King could give, all the greater because it was more invisible than such little material rewards as money and success and membership of the Academy. Even the man himself began to believe that he loved a great deal better than all the so-called good people who obviously could not be so good if you knew all (you had only to look at the punishments they received – poverty, children dying, losing both legs in a railway accident, and the like). It was quite a shock to him when he discovered one day that he didn’t love at all.’

‘How did he discover that?’

‘It was the first of several important discoveries which he made about that time. Did I tell you that he was a very clever man, much cleverer than the people around him? Even as a boy he had discovered all by himself about the King. Of course there were his parents’ stories, but they proved nothing. They might have been old wives’ tales. They loved the King, they said, but he went one better. He proved that the King existed by historical, logical, philosophical and etymological methods. His parents told him that was a waste of time: they knew: they had seen the King. “Where?” “In our hearts of course.” He laughed at them for their simplicity and their superstition. How could the King possibly be in their hearts when he was able to prove that he had never stirred from the city a hundred miles away? His King existed objectively and there was no other King but his.’

‘I don’t like parables much, and I don’t like your hero.’

‘He doesn’t like himself much, and that’s why he’s never spoken before – except in this way.’

‘What you said about “no other king but his” reminds me a little of my husband.’

‘You mustn’t accuse a story-teller of introducing real characters.’

‘When are you going to reach a climax? Has it a happy ending? I don’t want to stay awake otherwise. Why don’t you describe some of the women?’

‘You are like so many critics. You want me to write your own sort of story.’

‘Have you read
Manon Lescaut
?’

‘Years ago.’

‘We all loved it at the convent. Of course it was strictly forbidden. It was passed from hand to hand, and I pasted the cover of Lejeune’s
History of the Wars of Religion
on it. I have it still.’

‘You must let me finish my story.’

‘Oh well,’ she said with resignation, leaning back against the pillows, ‘if you must.’

‘I have told you about my hero’s first discovery. His second came much later when he realized that he was not born to be an artist at all: only a very clever jeweller. He made one gold jewel in the shape of an ostrich egg: it was all enamel and gold and when you opened it you found inside a little gold figure sitting at a table and a little gold and enamel egg on the table, and when you opened that there was a little figure sitting at a table and a little gold and enamel egg and when you opened that . . . I needn’t go on. Everyone said he was a master-technician, but he was highly praised too for the seriousness of his subject-matter because on the top of each egg there was a gold cross set with chips of precious stones in honour of the King. The trouble was that he wore himself out with the ingenuity of his design, and suddenly when he was making the contents of the final egg with an optic glass – that was what they called magnifying glasses in the old days in which this story is set, for of course it contains no reference to our time and no likeness to any living character . . .’ He took another long drink of whisky; he couldn’t remember how long it was since he had experienced the odd elation he was feeling now. He said, ‘What am I saying? I think I am a little drunk. The whisky doesn’t usually affect me in this way.’

‘Something about an egg,’ her sleepy voice replied from under the sheet.

‘Oh yes, the second discovery.’ It was, he began to think, a sad story, so that it was hard to understand this sense of freedom and release, like that of a prisoner who at last ‘comes clean’, admitting everything to his inquisitor. Was this the reward perhaps which came sometimes to a writer? ‘I have told all: you can hang me now.’ ‘What did you say?’

‘The last egg.’

‘Oh yes, that was it. Suddenly our hero realized how bored he was – he never wanted to turn his hand any more to mounting any jewel at all. He was finished with his profession – he had come to an end of it. Nothing could ever be so ingenious as what he had done already, or more useless, and he could never hear any praise higher than what he had received. He knew what the damned fools could do with their praise.’

‘So what?’

‘He went to a house number 49 in a street called the rue des Remparts where his mistress had kept an apartment ever since she left her husband. Her name was Marie like yours. There was a crowd outside. He found the doctor and the police there because an hour before she had killed herself.’

‘How ghastly.’

‘Not for him. A long time ago he had got to the end of pleasure just as now he had got to the end of work, although it is true he went on practising pleasure as a retired dancer continues to rehearse daily at the bar, because he has spent all his mornings that way and it never occurs to him to stop. So our hero felt only relief: the bar had been broken, he wouldn’t bother, he thought, to obtain another. Although, of course, after a month or two he did. However it was too late then – the morning-habit had been broken and he never took it up again with quite the same zeal.’

‘It’s a very unpleasant fairy story,’ the voice said. He couldn’t see her face because the sheet was pulled over it. He paid no attention to her criticism.

‘I tell you it isn’t easy leaving a profession any more than you would find it easy leaving a husband. In both cases people talk a lot to you about duty. People came to him to demand eggs with crosses (it was his duty to the King and the King’s followers). It almost seemed from the fuss they made that no one else was capable of making eggs or crosses. To try and discourage them and show them how his mind had changed, he did cut a few more stones as frivolously as he knew how, exquisite little toads for women to wear in their navels – navel-jewels became quite a fashion for a time. He even fashioned little soft golden coats of mail, with one hollow stone like a knowing eye at the top, with which men might clothe their special parts – they came to be known for some reason as Letters of Marque and for a while they too were quite fashionable as gifts. (You know how difficult it is for a woman to find anything to give a man at Christmas.) So our hero received yet more money and praise, but what vexed him most was that even these trifles were now regarded as seriously as his eggs and crosses had been. He was the King’s jeweller and nothing could alter that. People declared that he was a moralist and that these were serious satires on the age – in the end the idea rather spoilt the sale of the letters, as you can imagine. A man hardly wants to wear a moral satire in that place, and women were chary of touching a moral satire in the way they had liked touching a soft jewelled responsive coat.

‘However the fact that his jewels ceased to be popular with people in general only made him more popular with the connoisseurs who distrust popular success. They began to write books about his art; especially those who claimed to know and love the King wrote about him. The books all said much the same thing, and when our hero had read one he had read them all. There was nearly always a chapter called “The Toad in the Hole: the Art of Fallen Man”, or else there was one called “From Easter Egg to Letters of Marque, the Jeweller of Original Sin”.’

‘Why do you keep on calling him a jeweller?’ the voice said from under the sheet. ‘You know very well he was an architect.’

‘I warned you not to attach real characters to my story. You’ll be identifying yourself with the other Marie next. Although, thank God, you’re not the kind to kill yourself.’

‘You’d be surprised what I could do,’ she said. ‘Your story isn’t a bit like
Manon Lescaut
, but it’s pretty miserable all the same.’

‘What none of these people knew was that one day our hero had made a startling discovery – he no longer believed all those arguments historical, philosophical, logical, and etymological that he had worked out for the existence of the King. There was left only a memory of the King who had lived in his parents’ heart and not in any particular place. Unfortunately his heart was not the same as the one his parents shared: it was calloused with pride and success, and it had learned to beat only with pride when a building . . .’

‘You said building.’

‘When a jewel was completed or when a woman cried under him, “
donne, donne, donne
”.’ He looked at the whisky in the bottle: it wasn’t worth preserving the little that remained; he emptied it into his glass and he didn’t bother to add water.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘he had deceived himself, just as much as he had deceived the others. He had believed quite sincerely that when he loved his work he was loving the King and that when he made love to a woman he was at least imitating in a faulty way the King’s love for his people. The King after all had so loved the world that he had sent a bull and a shower of gold and a son . . .’

‘You are getting it all confused,’ the girl said.

‘But when he discovered there was no such King as the one he had believed in, he realized too that anything that he had ever done must have been done for love of himself. How could there be any point any longer in making jewels or making love for his own solitary pleasure? Perhaps he had reached the end of his sex and the end of his vocation before he made his discovery about the King or perhaps that discovery brought about the end of everything? I wouldn’t know, but I’m told that there were moments when he wondered if his unbelief were not after all a final and conclusive proof of the King’s existence. This total vacancy might be his punishment for the rules he had wilfully broken. It was even possible that this was what people meant by pain. The problem was complicated to the point of absurdity, and he began to envy his parents’ simple and uncomplex heart, in which they had always believed that the King lived – and not in the cold palace as big as St Peter’s a hundred miles away.’

‘So then?’

‘I told you, didn’t I, that it’s just as difficult to leave a profession as to leave a husband. If you left your husband there would be acres and acres of daylight you wouldn’t know how to cross, and acres of darkness as well, and of course there would always be telephone calls and the kind inquiries of friends and the chance paragraphs in the newspapers. But that part of the story has no real interest.’

‘So he took a credit card . . .’ she said.

The whisky was finished. He said, ‘I’ve kept you awake.’

‘I wish you’d told me a romantic story. All the same it took my mind off things.’ She giggled under the sheet. ‘I could almost say to him, couldn’t I, that we’d spent the night together. Do you think that he’d divorce me? I suppose not. The Church won’t allow divorce. The Church says, the Church orders . . .’

‘Are you really so unhappy?’ He got no reply. To the young sleep comes as quickly as day to the tropical town. He opened the door very quietly and went out into the passage that was still dark with one all-night globe palely burning. Some late-sleeper or early-riser closed a door five rooms away: a flush choked and swallowed in the silence. He sat on his bed. It was the hour of coolness. He thought: the King is dead, long live the King. Perhaps he had found here a country and a life.

CHAPTER 2

I

Querry was out early to do as many as he could of the doctor’s errands before the day became too hot. There was no sign of Marie Rycker at breakfast, and no sound over the partition of their rooms. At the cathedral he collected the letters which had been waiting for the next boat – he was glad to find that not one of them was addressed to him.
Toute à toi
had made her one gesture towards his unknown region, and he hoped for her sake that it had been a gesture of duty and convention and not of love, for in that case his silence would do her no further hurt.

By midday he was feeling parched and finding himself not far from the wharf he went down to the river and up the gang-plank of the Bishop’s boat to see whether the captain were on board. He hesitated a moment at the foot of the ladder surprised by his own action. It was the first time for a long while that he had voluntarily made a move towards companionship. He remembered how fearful he had been when he last set foot on board and the light was burning in the cabin. The crew had piled logs on the pontoons ready for another voyage, and a woman was hanging her washing between the companion-way and the boiler; he called ‘Captain’, as he climbed the ladder, but the priest who sat at the saloon-table going through the bills of lading was a stranger to him.

‘May I come in?’

‘I think I know who you are. You must be M. Querry. Shall we open a bottle of beer?’

Querry asked after the former captain. ‘He has been sent to teach moral theology,’ his successor said, ‘at Wakanga.’

‘Was he sorry to go?’

‘He was delighted. The river-life did not appeal to him.’

‘To you it does?’

‘I don’t know yet. This is my first voyage. It is a change from canon law. We start tomorrow.’

‘To the leproserie?’

‘We shall end there. A week. Ten days. I’m not sure yet about the cargo.’

Querry when he left the boat felt that he had aroused no curiosity. The captain had not even asked him about the new hospital. Perhaps
Paris-Dimanche
had done its worst; there was nothing more that Rycker or Parkinson could inflict on him. It was as though he were on the verge of acceptance into a new country; like a refugee he watched the consul lift his pen to fill in the final details of his visa. But the refugee remains apprehensive to the last; he has had too many experiences of the sudden afterthought, the fresh question or requirement, the strange official who comes into the room carrying another file. A man was in the hotel bar, drinking below the man in the moon and the chains of mauve paper; it was Parkinson.