A Burnt Out Case (26 page)

‘He’s at home. He has nothing to do with this.’

Rycker made for the door. He stood there for a moment as though he were on a stage and had forgotten his exit line. ‘There isn’t a jury that would convict me,’ he said and went out again into the dark and rain. For a moment nobody spoke and then Father Joseph asked them all, ‘What did he mean by that?’

‘We shall laugh at this in the morning,’ Father Jean said.

‘I don’t see the humour of the situation,’ Father Thomas replied.

‘What I mean is it’s a little like one of those Palais Royal farces that one has read . . . The injured husband pops in and out.’

‘I don’t read Palais Royal farces, father.’

‘Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct.’

‘If that is one of the doctrines you teach in moral theology . . .’

‘Nor when he invented moral theology. After all, it was St Thomas Aquinas who said that he made the world in play.’

Brother Philippe said, ‘Excuse me . . .’

‘You are lucky not to have my responsibility, Father Jean. I can’t treat the affair as a Palais Royal farce whatever St Thomas may have written. Where are you going, Brother Philippe?’

‘He said something about a jury, father, and it occurred to me that, well, perhaps he’s carrying a gun. I think I ought to warn . . .’

‘This is too much,’ Father Thomas said. He turned to Parkinson and asked him in English, ‘Has he a gun with him?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. A lot of people are carrying them nowadays, aren’t they? But he wouldn’t have the nerve to use it. I told you, he only wants to seem important.’

‘I think, if you will excuse me, father, I had better go over to Doctor Colin’s,’ Brother Philippe said.

‘Be careful, brother,’ Father Paul said.

‘Oh, I know a great deal about firearms,’ Brother Philippe replied.

V

‘Was that someone shouting?’ Doctor Colin asked.

‘I heard nothing.’ Querry went to the window and looked into the dark. He said, ‘I wish Brother Philippe would get the lights back. It’s time I went home, and I haven’t a torch.’

‘They won’t start the current now. It’s gone ten o’clock.’

‘They’ll want me to go as soon as I can, won’t they? But the boat’s unlikely to be here for at least a week. Perhaps someone can drive me out . . .’

‘I doubt if the road will be passable now after the rain, and there’s more to come.’

‘Then we have a few days, haven’t we, for talking about those mobile units you dream of. But I’m no engineer, doctor. Brother Philippe will be able to help you more than I could ever do.’

‘This is a make-shift life we lead here,’ Doctor Colin said. ‘All I want is a kind of pre-fab on wheels. Something we can fit on to the chassis of a half-ton truck. What did I do with that sheet of paper? There’s an idea I wanted to show you . . .’ The doctor opened the drawer in his desk. Inside was the photograph of a woman. She lay there in wait, unseen by strangers, gathering no dust, always present when the drawer opened.

‘I shall miss this room – wherever I am. You’ve never told me about your wife, doctor. How she came to die.’

‘It was sleeping-sickness. She used to spend a lot of time out in the bush in the early days trying to persuade the lepers to come in for treatment. We didn’t have such effective drugs for sleeping-sickness as we have now. People die too soon.’

‘It was my hope to end up in the same patch of ground as you and she. We would have made an atheist corner between us.’

‘I wonder if you would have qualified for that.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re too troubled by your lack of faith, Querry. You keep on fingering it like a sore you want to get rid of. I am content with the myth; you are not – you have to believe or disbelieve.’

Querry said, ‘Somebody is calling out there. I thought for a moment it was my name . . . But one always seems to hear one’s own name, whatever anyone really calls. It only needs a syllable to be the same. We are such egoists.’

‘You must have had a lot of belief once to miss it the way you do.’

‘I swallowed their myth whole, if you call that a belief. This is my body and this is my blood. Now when I read that passage it seems so obviously symbolic, but how can you expect a lot of poor fishermen to recognize symbols? Only in moments of superstition I remember that I gave up the sacrament before I gave up the belief and the priests would say there was a connection. Rejecting grace Rycker would say. Oh well, I suppose belief is a kind of vocation and most men haven’t room in their brains or hearts for two vocations. If we really believe in something we have no choice, have we, but to go further. Otherwise life slowly whittles the belief away. My architecture stood still. One can’t be a half-believer or a half-architect.’

‘Are you saying that you’ve ceased to be even a half?’

‘Perhaps I hadn’t a strong enough vocation in either, and the kind of life I lived killed them both. It needs a very strong vocation to withstand success. The popular priest and the popular architect – their talents can be killed easily by disgust.’

‘Disgust?’

‘Disgust of praise. How it nauseates, doctor, by its stupidity. The very people who ruined my churches were loudest afterwards in their praise of what I’d built. The books they have written about my work, the pious motives they’ve attributed to me – they were enough to sicken me of the drawing-board. It needed more faith than I possessed to withstand all that. The praise of priests and pious people – the Ryckers of the world.’

‘Most men seem to put up with success comfortably enough. But you came here.’

‘I think I’m cured of pretty well everything, even disgust. I’ve been happy here.’

‘Yes, you were learning to use your fingers pretty well, in spite of the mutilation. Only one sore seems to remain, and you rub it all the time.’

‘You are wrong, doctor. Sometimes you talk like Father Thomas.’

‘Querry,’ a voice unmistakably called. ‘Querry.’

‘Rycker,’ Querry said. ‘He must have followed his wife here. I hope to God the sisters didn’t let him in to see her. I’d better go and talk . . .’

‘Let him cool off first.’

‘I’ve got to make him see reason.’

‘Then wait till morning. You can’t see reason at night.’

‘Querry. Querry. Where are you, Querry?’

‘What a grotesque situation it is,’ Querry said. ‘That this should happen to me. The innocent adulterer. That’s not a bad title for a comedy.’ His mouth moved in the effort of a smile. ‘Lend me the lamp.’

‘You’d do much better to keep out of it, Querry.’

‘I must do something. He’s making so much noise . . . It will only add to what Father Thomas calls the scandal.’

The doctor reluctantly followed him out. The storm had come full circle and was beating up towards them again, from across the river. ‘Rycker,’ Querry called, holding the lamp up, ‘I’m here.’ Somebody came running towards them, but when he reached the area of light, they saw that it was Brother Philippe. ‘Please go back into the house,’ Brother Philippe said, ‘and shut the door. We think that Rycker may be carrying a gun.’

‘He wouldn’t be mad enough to use it,’ Querry said.

‘All the same . . . to avoid unpleasantness . . .’

‘Unpleasantness . . . you have a wonderful capacity, Brother Philippe, for understatement.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Never mind. I’ll take your advice and hide under Doctor Colin’s bed.’

He had walked a few steps back when Rycker’s voice said, ‘Stop. Stop where you are.’ The man came unsteadily out of the dark. He said in a tone of trivial complaint, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

‘Well, here I am.’

All three looked where Rycker’s right hand was hidden in his pocket.

‘I’ve got to talk to you, Querry.’

‘Then talk, and when you’ve finished, I’d like a word too with you.’ Silence followed. A dog barked somewhere in the leproserie. Lightning lit them all like a flash-bulb.

‘I’m waiting, Rycker.’

‘You – you renegade.’

‘Are we here for a religious argument? I’ll admit you know much more than I do about the love of God.’

Rycker’s reply was partly buried under the heavy fall of the thunder. The last sentence stuck out like a pair of legs from beneath the rubble.

‘. . . persuade me what she wrote meant nothing, and all the time you must have known there was a child coming.’

‘Your child. Not mine.’

‘Prove it. You’d better prove it.’

‘It’s difficult to prove a negative, Rycker. Of course, the doctor can make a test of my blood, but you’ll have to wait six months for the . . .’

‘How dare you laugh at me?’

‘I’m not laughing at you, Rycker. Your wife has done us both an injury. I’d call her a liar if I thought she even knew what a lie was. She thinks the truth is anything that will protect her or send her home to her nursery.’

‘You sleep with her and then you insult her. You’re a coward, Querry.’

‘Perhaps I am.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps. Nothing that I can say would ever anger
the
Querry, would it? He’s so infernally important, how could he care what the mere manager of a palm-oil factory – I’ve got an immortal soul as much as you, Querry.’

‘I don’t make any claims to one. You can be God’s important man, Rycker, for all I care. I’m not
the
Querry to anyone but you. Certainly not to myself.’

‘Please come to the mission, M. Rycker,’ Brother Philippe pleaded. ‘We’ll put up a bed for you there. We shall all of us feel better after a night’s sleep. And a cold shower in the morning,’ he added, and as though to illustrate his words, a waterfall of rain suddenly descended on them. Querry made an odd awkward sound which the doctor by now had learned to interpret as a laugh, and Rycker fired twice. The lamp fell with Querry and smashed; the burning wick flared up once under the deluge of rain, lighting an open mouth and a pair of surprised eyes, and then went out.

The doctor plumped down on his knees in the mud and felt for Querry’s body. Rycker’s voice said, ‘He laughed at me. How dare he laugh at me?’ The doctor said to Brother Philippe, ‘I have his head. Can you find his legs? We’ve got to get him inside.’ He called to Rycker, ‘Put down that gun, you fool, and help!’

‘Not at Rycker,’ Querry said. The doctor leant down closer: he could hardly hear him. He said, ‘Don’t speak. We are going to lift you now. You’ll be all right.’

Querry said, ‘Laughing at myself.’

They carried him on to the veranda and laid him down out of the rain. Rycker fetched a cushion for his head. He said, ‘He shouldn’t have laughed.’

‘He doesn’t laugh easily,’ the doctor said, and again there was a noise that resembled a distorted laugh.

‘Absurd,’ Querry said, ‘this is absurd or else . . .’ but what alternative, philosophical or psychological, he had in mind they never knew.

VI

The Superior had returned a few days after the funeral, and he visited the cemetery with Doctor Colin. They had buried Querry not far from Mme Colin’s grave, but with enough space left for the doctor in due course. Under the special circumstances Father Thomas had given way in the matter of the cross – only a piece of hard wood from the forest was stuck up there, carved with Querry’s name and dates. Nor had there been a Catholic ceremony, though Father Joseph had said unofficially a prayer at the grave. Someone – it was probably Deo Gratias – had put an old jam-pot beside the mound filled with twigs and plants curiously twined. It looked more like an offering to Nzambe than a funeral wreath. Father Thomas would have thrown it away, but Father Joseph dissuaded him.

‘It’s a very ambiguous offering,’ Father Thomas protested, ‘for a Christian cemetery.’

‘He was an ambiguous man,’ Father Joseph replied.

Parkinson had procured in Luc a formal wreath which was labelled ‘From three million readers of the
Post
. Nature I loved and next to Nature Art. Robert Browning.’ He had photographed it for future use, but with unexpected modesty he refused to be taken beside it.

The Superior said to Colin, ‘I can’t help regretting that I wasn’t here. I might have been able to control Rycker.’

‘Something was bound to happen sooner or later,’ Colin said. ‘They would never have let him alone.’

‘Who do you mean by “they”?’

‘The fools, the interfering fools, they exist everywhere, don’t they? He had been cured of all but his success; but you can’t cure success, any more than I can give my
mutilés
back their fingers and toes. I return them to the town, and people look at them in the stores and watch them in the street and draw the attention of others to them as they pass. Success is like that too – a mutilation of the natural man. Are you coming my way?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the dispensary. Surely we’ve wasted enough time on the dead.’

‘I’ll come a little way with you.’ The Superior felt in the pocket of his soutane for a cheroot, but there wasn’t one there.

‘Did you see Rycker before you left Luc?’ Colin asked.

‘Of course. They’ve made him quite comfortable at the prison. He has been to confession and he intends to go to communion every morning. He’s working very hard at Garrigou-Lagrange. And of course he’s quite a hero in Luc. M. Parkinson has already telegraphed an interview with him and the metropolitan journalists will soon begin to pour in. I believe M. Parkinson’s article was headed “Death of a Hermit. The Saint who Failed.” Of course, the result of the trial is a foregone conclusion.’

‘Acquittal?’

‘Naturally.
Le crime passionnel
. Everybody will have got what they wanted – it’s really quite a happy ending, isn’t it? Rycker feels he has become important both to God and man. He even spoke to me about the possibility of the Belgian College at Rome and an annulment. I didn’t encourage him. Mme Rycker will soon be free to go home and she will keep the child. M. Parkinson has a much better story than he had ever hoped to find. I’m glad, by the way, that Querry never read his second article.’