Eating People is Wrong (35 page)

And Treece, to whom illness had always seemed a cruel and unfair chance that attacked randomly its victims, was now forced into taking the things of sickness into his consciousness for the first
time. And it was a cruel, defeating thing, a betrayal of the human possibility, a canker in the self, that he saw – a betrayal, he came to feel, that was
internal
. It seemed to him as
he surveyed his weakly self that for this he had only himself to blame. It was a facet of his own soul. It was a savage test to have to take, this one, worse than any driving test, and it showed up
one’s weaknesses mercilessly.

V

After Treece had been in hospital for a few days, and Emma, surveying the notices that declared, ‘Professor Treece is unable to teach today’, wondered what had
become of him, she had a telephone call from Viola Masefield. It was to tell her that Treece was in hospital – they had she said, caught up with him at last. She thought that Emma might like
to know, if she hadn’t heard, and might even like to visit him; this was possible the following evening. Admission was by card, absolutely free, and if Emma wanted to go she would post a card
on to her.

At the hospital, the following evening, Emma said, ‘I’m sorry you’re ill.’

‘I never thought I’d end up like this,’ said Treece. ‘Did you?’

‘I did,’ said Emma. ‘To be honest.’

‘I always had such promise,’ said Treece. ‘I was a man of promise until last week. But one has to stop and do something, I suppose, and I did. I was ill. I suppose one thinks
one lives in a state of moral suspension, praise or blame deferred, for ever. It’s only the others who are guilty. Until at last the challenge comes.’

‘But how long have you been ill?’

‘For months, I suppose.’

‘When did you have the first haemorrhage?’

‘Just after the poetry weekend, after I talked to you.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Well,’ said Treece. ‘It wouldn’t really have been fair would it? One can’t use one’s illnesses as a kind of moral lever, and if I had told you, that’s
what I would have done. I would have said, “Look, I need looking after. Won’t you marry me?” I want to say that now. You see how much I need you. I have no one. And when
one’s like this – you need to be tied to something, to have something to bother about getting better for. I hate to be left alone. I feel so depressed. I think I have a fragmented
gestalt
. . .’

‘But, Stuart, this just isn’t a real situation. It’s a distortion. How can one make a pure choice at a time like this? You’re right; it wouldn’t be fair.’

‘No; I knew it wouldn’t be,’ said Treece. ‘But you know, sometimes, just now and then, I don’t
want
to be fair. I can’t say it’s ever
got
me very much. Not that one seeks that: one isn’t like that in order to be self-seeking. But they say: virtue has its own rewards, and I know it does, yet from time to time I feel like
shouting out, just like an angry young man. Well, let’s
see
some of them. You must admit that the rewards of virtue grow less and less as the present society goes on.’

‘But isn’t the proverb: virtue
is
its own reward?’

‘Then it’s too sanctimonious for me,’ said Treece. ‘If one takes delight in virtue, then it ceases to be virtue; it becomes self-seeking. I haven’t even got
that.’

‘I’m sorry, Stuart. I feel very cruel to you. I keep
doing
this. I’m a hideous creature to fall in with. But I must do what’s right. I’m too good at making
other people suffer. I suppose one day I shall have to pay for it. I don’t know how I have the gall to feel, always, so superior. Sometimes I feel so remote from other people that I find it
hard to believe that they really do exist in the way that I do, as subjects rather than objects. All these people here think I’m mad, look, talking like this.’

‘Be careful,’ said Treece. ‘I have to live with them!
You
can go home.’

‘Oh, Stuart,’ said Emma. ‘I’ve been terrible to you. Can one lead a good life in this world? I mean, without doing too much harm, and retiring too much out of it, so that
people you are involved with suffer? I suppose I have an image of some perfect human condition that one day I shall reach by finding someone I wholly and fully love. But what about the people one
meets up to then, and what about the things one does to them?’

‘I suppose everyone thinks his kind of innocence the ideal innocence, and the inside chambers of oneself richer and finer than anyone else’s. I can’t blame you. But you are
involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don’t recognize that, then that’s the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares everyone
else’s fate to some extent.’

‘I think we have a lot in common,’ said Emma. ‘I certainly never thought to hear you say that.’

‘Why not?’ cried Treece. ‘Haven’t I always? No, perhaps not. Still, one can’t go on being a professional young man all one’s life, even nowadays when being
young counts for so much. But one can’t live as amorphously as this for ever. That’s why people convert to Catholicism, or become party members, or marry. At least they have a sense of
identity and cause and effect. But I’ve never been under the usual compulsions; I haven’t really ever had to settle down; I’ve lived largely outside ordinary responsibilities,
like having to worry about money or property or what will happen to one’s children. I don’t have to guard my actions. Then suddenly I see myself as some ordinary person sees me . . .
like the people in here. I have no real relationships with anyone, though I have this broad and firm faith in human relationships. I contribute nothing at all to them, though. I look for love and
can scarcely find it in me. Everything turns to ashes. I
am
ashes.’

‘It’s a cruel warning,’ said Emma.

‘For you? Of course, it’s different when you’re young,’ said Treece. ‘The young have terrible advantages: they have enthusiasms, vigour, power, new eyes;
they’re never ill and nothing can tie them down for a while.’

‘I’m not that young,’ said Emma.

‘So . . . it’s no good?’

‘We’ll see,’ said Emma. ‘Wait until you’re out and we’ll see.’

When Emma left the hospital she had an appointment with another invalid. Louis Bates had been in hospital at Stratford with pneumonia, and had really rather enjoyed it. He had been for once the
centre of the world; international diplomacy had been nothing, compared with the movements of his fingers and toes. Coming back to University and to his work, he had found the self-conscious and
highly personal state of mind he had developed in hospital slow to subside. Up to now events had existed simply to be reflected on in his bed; this was the point of concentration for the whole of
human experience. It was just like sex, as he imagined it, only longer-lasting.

When she reached his room, uncomfortable and foetid, Louis lay in his bed of convalescence, eating bread and jam. He moved some dirty pyjamas off a chair by the bed and she sat down. He showed
her how, from his window, he could see a house across the road where another student lived. He keeps having his girlfriend in, said Louis, and his bed is just under the window and you can see her
legs kicking in the air. ‘Actually you’re smaller than I am,’ added Louis. ‘You’d probably have to stand on a chair.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Emma. ‘So you watch?’

‘What else can I do?’ asked Louis. ‘All that’s left for me is artistic withdrawal. The truth about the artist is that he takes his tranquillity along with him everywhere
he goes; he is recollecting even as he acts. His acts are of a different sort from other people’s. I envy him, over there.’

‘Why?’ asked Emma.

‘You know why. A man needs a nice woman.’

‘Please, Louis, I thought we’d finished with all that.’

‘I thought you’d bring that up,’ said Louis. ‘I wanted to apologize. You saved my life, too.’

‘I didn’t save your life,’ said Emma.

‘Yes, you did, and I shall never forget it.’

‘Well, I shall,’ said Emma.

‘I shall never forgive myself for the way I behaved.’

‘You will,’ said Emma. ‘Somehow.’

This was dishonest, Emma saw; he was trying to work her into some position in which they were firmly entangled, some vague emotional complex on which he could build, and she determined to resist
with all her might. He began to speak of her as honest and virtuous, and this gave her her chance, and she did a stupid thing: she told him about her affair with Stuart Treece. It was an absurd
cruelty, but then someone had to pay for the moral damage caused, and who could it be but Louis?

VI

As the days wore on Treece found that the objectivity he had always possessed, the faculty he had for seeing himself as an actor in a play by some outsider, the faculty that
looked down upon himself judiciously and thought of
other
ways to behave, began to fail under his current pressure. He ceased to be inquisitive object and began to be suffering subject. This
was happening to him; the pain was his and soon it would be all of him. The experimental character of the whole incident, which had given it an interest for Treece and made it just bearable, now
began to fade. He lay in bed, reading nothing; he fed; he moved his bowels. Moving the bowels was, so to speak, the breath of life for him, the real truth about existence, a dramatization of the
emotional and intellectual processes that preserve us to go on living.

One night, about eleven, when the ward was dark, an emergency case was brought in. Doctors rushed about and telephoned for other doctors, and in the darkness Treece could hear a low, insistent
voice behind the screens asking, over and over again, ‘What did you take? What did you take?’

In the morning the would-be suicide behind the screens was visited by a policeman, and later by a psychiatrist from another hospital, a stout, sleek German who could be heard all over the
ward.

‘Why you take all these aspirins?’ There was an inaudible reply, and the psychiatrist laughed. ‘Toothache? I will promise you, you will not have toothache again for ten more
years. You were anxious. You were depressed. Why? Was it about the world in general? About your own personal state? Did you want to kill yourself or just make a big demonstration? It says here you
left a note. Did you know you would be found so quick? You must answer me, now, or I can do nothing at all for you. I am your friend.’ The weak voice spoke again. ‘You haven’t any
friends at
all
? I do not believe. Now, tell me, why did you not cut your throat? That would have been quicker, yes? Why not? I am afraid aspirins are not a good way. Did you know this? You
must tell me these things. I am here to help you. Very well, I do not think this is a very difficult case. I think we understand him from what he does not say. Now, tell me, when you go down the
street you hear these voices, yes? They are muttering obscenities, yes?’

‘No,’ cried the voice, audible for the first time. ‘No voices.’

‘But surely you hear some voices occasionally? I am a psychiatrist. I do not think I’m mistaken . . .’ ‘You are,’ said the voice.

The psychiatrist ended his horrifying bravura and went away; and later in the morning the screens about the new patient were removed. There, in a crib bed with iron bars at either side, with the
rubber end of a stomach pump coming from his nose and plastered to the side of his face, was Louis Bates. Treece looked and looked again, and was sure. He asked a nurse and was confirmed. He tried
to attract Bates’s attention, but he was now sleeping. He was woken for his lunch, but would eat nothing and reverted to sleep again. In the afternoon Treece himself fell asleep for two
hours, and when he was woken for his tea the top bed was empty and Louis Bates was gone. He called a nurse and asked where the patient had been taken. ‘He’s been moved to another
hospital,’ said the nurse. ‘Which?’ asked Treece. ‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ said the nurse.

In the evening Emma came, and he told her about Bates. But she knew, and she knew something that Treece suspected but could not learn: that Bates had been moved to a mental hospital. He had been
in such a hospital before, the sister had told them.

‘It’s terrible; it’s all my fault,’ said Emma, and she began to cry. ‘Think of him locked away in there, for how long? Perhaps for ever.’

‘We’ll get him out,’ said Treece confidently, though here what could he do? ‘It might be better for him too in one respect; he may not have to stand trial.’

‘Trial?’ cried Emma. ‘What for?’

‘Attempted suicide.’

‘Do they try people for that?’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘But that’s shocking,’ said Emma. ‘Doesn’t it shock you?’ Treece said that it did. ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Emma. ‘This is a free
country. Surely you can do what you like with your own life?’

‘No, that’s simply not true; you can’t,’ said Treece. ‘I think it’s legally assumed that every sane person must want to continue living, and therefore suicide
is considered as an aberration, and one punishable by law.’

‘It was all my fault,’ said Emma tearfully.

‘Why was it all your fault?’

‘I made him do it. I went to see him. I told him what he was, how people saw him. I told him about us, you and me, what we did. I said he was other people’s scapegoat, you know, a
whipping-boy, the one they spanked when the prince was naughty so that wrong shouldn’t go unpunished. I was absurd. I said all artists were like that. I said he should be pleased, not sorry.
I said artists were the ones who felt the malice and frenzy of the universe for all the rest of us, and that it was in a sense a favour as well as a cruelty. I told him perhaps he was lucky. He
didn’t have to live with his own crimes. He simply suffered for other people’s. You know the poem: “See the scapegoat, happy beast, From every personal sin released.” I told
him that.’ She put her head down on the bed and cried. ‘And then I gave him some money. His clothes were ruined when he was in the river. I gave him twenty pounds and told him to buy a
suit. I said it was the least the world could do for him, at least if the world made its artists suffer then there ought to be a levy. At least the whipping-boy got
paid
, and fed, and
clothed.’ She stopped and looked at Treece. ‘I never thought he’d do
this
. You see, I couldn’t love him; people couldn’t. There were other women like me who
thought this. I respected him, but not, you know, really love. And he had to know, really, or he would never have gone right. I said how much I respected him. I said it was only the uncommitted
ones who could see the real tragedy and the real horror and the real excellence too. The others might hang on for a while, but they sell out in the end. And it’s for them that the rebels
sacrifice themselves.’ She looked at Treece again and hoped he would absolve her. He listened and could not. It was his wound, as well, that the knife was being twisted in.