The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (22 page)

'You shall go by train after all,' said the driver, 'I'm not willing to smash my car for your sake. This is the St Damier line, and you're lucky to have been brought here.'

I was even luckier than he thought for there was a train in a few minutes. The station guard swore I would be at St Damier by nine. That last phase of my journey was the darkest. I was alone in the carriage and a queer torpor had seized me: in spite of my impatience, I was terribly afraid lest I might fall asleep and miss the station. The train stopped often and it was every time a sickening task to find and decipher the station's name. At one stage I experienced the hideous feeling that I had just been jerked awake after dozing heavily for an unknown length of time — and when I looked at my watch it was a quarter past nine. Had I missed it? I was half inclined to use the alarm signal, but then I felt the train was slowing down, and as I leant out of the window, I espied a lighted sign floating past and stopping: St Damier.

A quarter of an hour's stumble through dark lanes and what seemed by its sough to be a pine wood, brought me to the St Damier hospital. I heard a shuffling and wheezing behind the door and a fat old man clad in a thick grey sweater instead of a coat and in worn felt slippers let me in. I entered a kind of office dimly lit by a weak bare electric lamp, which seemed coated with dust on one side. The man looked at me blinking, his bloated face glistening with the slime of sleep, and for some odd reason I spoke at first in a whisper.

'I have come,' I said, 'to see Monsieur Sebastian Knight, K, n, i, g, h, t. Knight. Night.'

He grunted and sat down heavily at a writing desk under the hanging lamp.

'Too late for visitors,' he mumbled as if talking to himself.

'I got a wire,' I said, 'my brother is very ill' — and as I spoke I felt I was trying to imply that there was not the shade of a doubt of Sebastian still being alive.

'What was the name?' he asked with a sigh.

'Knight,' I said. 'It begins with a "K". It is an English name.'

'Foreign names ought to be always replaced by numbers,' muttered the man, 'it would simplify matters. There was a patient who died last night, and he had a name....'

I was struck by the horrible thought that he might be referring to Sebastian.... Was I too late after all?

'Do you mean to say....' I began, but he shook his head and turned the pages of a ledger on his desk.

'No,' he growled, 'the English Monsieur is not dead. K, K, K....'

'K, n, i, g...' I began once again.

'C'est bon, c'est bon,'
he interrupted. 'K, n, K, g... n... I'm not an idiot, you know. Number thirty-six.'

He rang the bell and sank back in his armchair with a yawn. I paced up and down the room in a tremor of uncontrollable impatience. At last a nurse entered and the night-porter pointed at me.

'Number thirty-six,' he said to the nurse.

I followed her down a white passage and up a short flight of stairs. 'How is he?' I could not help asking.

'I don't know,' she said and led me to a second nurse who was sitting at the end of another white passage, the exact copy of the first, and reading a book at a little table.

'A visitor for number thirty-six,' said my guide and slipped away.

'But the English Monsieur is asleep,' said the nurse, a round-faced young woman, with a very small and very shiny nose.

'Is he better?' I asked. 'You see, I'm his brother, and I got a telegram....'

'I think he's a little better,' said the nurse with a smile, which was to me the loveliest smile I could have ever imagined.

'He had a very, very bad heart attack yesterday morning. Now he is asleep.'

'Look here,' I said, handing her a ten or twenty franc coin. 'I'll come tomorrow again, but I'd like to go into his room and wait for a minute there.'

'Oh, but you shouldn't wake him,' she said, smiling again.

'I shan't wake him. I shall just sit near him and stay only a minute.'

'Well, I don't know,' she said. 'You might, of course, peep in here, but you must be very careful.'

She led me to the door, number thirty-six, and we entered a tiny room or closet with a couch; she pushed slightly an inner door which was standing ajar and I peered for a moment into a dark room. At first I could only hear my heart thumping, but then I discerned a quick soft breathing. I strained my eyes; there was a screen or something half round the bed, and anyway it would have been too dark to distinguish Sebastian.

'There,' whispered the nurse. 'I shall leave the door open an inch and you may sit here, on this couch, for a minute.'

She lit a small blue-shaded lamp and left me alone. I had a stupid impulse to draw my cigarette case out of my pocket. My hands still shook, but I felt happy. He was alive. He was peacefully asleep. So it was his heart — was it? — that had let him down.... The same as his mother. He was better, there was hope. I would get all the heart specialists in the world to have him saved. His presence in the next room, the faint sound of breathing, gave me a sense of security, of peace, of wonderful relaxation. And as I sat there and listened, and clasped my hands, I thought of all the years that had passed, of our short, rare meetings and I knew that now, as soon as he could listen to me, I should tell him that whether he liked it or not I would never be far from him any more. The strange dream I had had, the belief in some momentous truth he would impart to me before dying — now seemed vague, abstract, as if it had been drowned in some warm flow of simpler, more human emotion, in the wave of love I felt for the man who was sleeping beyond that half-opened door. How had we managed to drift apart? Why had I always been so silly and sullen, and shy during our short interviews in Paris? I would go away presently and spend the night in the hotel, or perhaps they could give me a room at the hospital — just until I could see him? For a moment it seemed to me that the faint rhythm of the sleeper's breath had been suspended, that he had awaked and made a light clamping sound, before sinking again into sleep: now the rhythm continued, so low that I could hardly distinguish it from my own breath, as I sat and listened. Oh, I would tell him thousands of things — I would talk to him about
The Prismatic Bezel
and
Success,
and
The Funny Mountain,
and
Albinos in Black,
and
The Back of the Moon,
and
Lost Property,
and
The Doubtful Asphodel
— all these books that I knew as well as if I had written them myself. And he would talk, too. How little I knew of his life I But now I was learning something every instant. That door standing slightly ajar was the best link imaginable. That gentle breathing was telling me more of Sebastian than I had ever known before. If I could have smoked, my happiness would have been perfect. A spring clanked in the couch as I shifted my position slightly, and I was afraid that it might have disturbed his sleep. But no: the soft sound was there, following a thin trail which seemed to skirt time itself, now dipping into a hollow, now appearing again — steadily travelling across a landscape formed of the symbols of silence — darkness, and curtains, and a glow of blue light at my elbow.

Presently I got up and tiptoed out into the corridor.

'I hope,' the nurse said, 'you did not disturb him? It is good that he sleeps.'

'Tell me,' I asked, 'when does Doctor Starov come?'

'Doctor who?' she said. 'Oh, the Russian doctor.
Non, c'est le docteur Guinet qui le soigne.
You'll find him here tomorrow morning.'

'You see,' I said, 'I'd like to spend the night somewhere here. Do you think that perhaps....'

'You could see Doctor Guinet even now,' continued the nurse in her quiet pleasant voice. 'He lives next door. So you are the brother, are you? And tomorrow his mother is coming from England, n'est-ce pas?'

'Oh, no,' I said, 'his mother died years ago. And tell me, how is he during the day, does he talk? does he suffer?'

She frowned and looked at me queerly.

'But...' she said. 'I don't understand.... What is your name, please?'

'Right,' I said. 'I haven't explained. We are half-brothers, really. My name is [I mentioned my name].'

'Oh-la-la!' she exclaimed getting very red in the face, 'Mon Dieu! The Russian gentleman died yesterday, and you've been visiting Monsieur Kegan....

So I did not see Sebastian after all, or at least I did not see him alive. But those few minutes I spent listening to what I thought was his breathing changed my life as completely as it would have been changed, had Sebastian spoken to me before dying. Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being — not a constant state — that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus — I am Sebastian Knight. I feel as if I were impersonating him on a lighted stage, with the people he knew coming and going — the dim figures of the few friends he had, the scholar, and the poet, and the painter — smoothly and noiselessly paying their graceful tribute; and here is Goodman, the flat-footed buffoon, with his dicky hanging out of his waistcoat; and there — the pale radiance of Clare's inclined head, as she is led away weeping by a friendly maiden. They moved round Sebastian — round me who am acting Sebastian — and the old conjuror waits in the wings with his hidden rabbit: and Nina sits on a table in the brightest corner of the stage, with a wineglass of fuchsined water, under a painted palm. And then the masquerade draws to a close. The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her grave) — but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.