Eyeless In Gaza (55 page)

‘D
EAR
A., – I enclose the letter I received this morning from Joan. Read it; it will save me explaining. How could he have done it? That's the question I've been asking myself all the morning; and now I put it to you. How could you? Circumstances may have run over her – like a train, as she says. And that, I know, was my fault. But they couldn't have run over you. You've told me quite enough about yourself and Mary Amberley to make it quite clear that there could be no question in your case of poor Joan's train. Why did you do it? And why did you come here and behave as though nothing had happened? How could you sit there and let me talk about my difficulties with Joan and pretend to be sympathetic, when a couple of evenings before you had been giving her the kisses I wasn't able to give? God knows, I've done all manner of bad and stupid things in the course of my life, told all manner of lies; but I honestly don't think I could have done what you have done. I didn't think anybody could have done it. I suppose I've been living in a sort of fool's paradise all these years, thinking the world was a place where this sort of thing simply couldn't happen. A year ago I might have known how to deal with the discovery that it can happen. Not now. I know that, if I tried, I should just break down into some kind of madness. This last year has strained me more than I knew. I realize now that I'm all broken to pieces inside, and that I've been holding myself together by a continuous effort of will. It's as if a broken statue somehow contrived to hold itself together. And now this has finished it. I can't hold any more. I know if I were to see you now – and it's not because I feel that you've done something you
shouldn't have done; it would be the same with anyone, even my mother – yes, if I were to see anyone who had ever meant anything to me, I should just break down and fall to bits. A statue at one moment, and the next a heap of dust and shapeless fragments. I can't face it. Perhaps I ought to; but I simply can't. I was angry with you when I began to write this letter, I hated you; but now I find I don't hate you any longer. God bless you,

Anthony put the two letters and the torn envelope in his pocket, and, picking up the two stamped envelopes and the candle, made his way downstairs to the sitting-room. Half an hour later, he went to the kitchen, and in the range, which was still smouldering, set fire one by one to all the papers that Brian had left behind him. The two unopened envelopes with their closely folded contents burnt slowly, had to be constantly relighted; but at last it was done. With the poker he broke the charred paper into dust, stirred up the fire to a last flame and drew the round cover back into place. Then he walked out into the garden and down the steps to the road. On the way to the village it suddenly struck him that he would never be able to see Mary again. She would question him, she would worm the truth out of him, and having wormed it out, would proclaim it to the world. Besides, would he even want to see her again now that Brian had . . . He could not bring himself to say the words even to himself. ‘Christ!' he said aloud. At the entrance to the village he halted for a few moments to think what he should say when he knocked up the policeman. ‘My friend's lost . . . My friend has been out all day and . . . I'm worried about my friend . . .' Anything would do; he hurried on, only anxious to get it over.

IT WAS DARK
in the little
rancho
, and from noon till sunset stiflingly hot; then cold all through the night. A partition divided the hut into two compartments; in the middle of the first compartment was a hearth of rough stones, and when the fire was lighted for cooking, the smoke filtered slowly away through the chinks in the windowless wooden walls. The furniture consisted of a stool, two kerosene tins for water, some earthenware cooking-pots, and a stone mortar for grinding maize. On the further side of the partition were a couple of plank beds on trestles. It was on one of these that they laid Mark.

By the following morning he was delirious with fever, and, from the knee, the infection had crept downwards, until the leg was swollen almost to the ankle.

For Anthony, as he sat there in the hot twilight, listening to the mutterings and sudden outcries of this stranger on the bed, there was, for the moment, only one thing to decide. Should he send the
mozo
to fetch a doctor and the necessary drugs from Miajutla? Or should he go himself?

It was a choice of evils. He thought of poor Mark,
abandoned, alone in the hands of these inept and not too well-intentioned savages. But even if he himself were there, what could he do with the resources at his disposal? And suppose the
mozo
were sent and failed to persuade the doctor to come at once, failed to bring the necessary supplies, failed perhaps to return at all. Miajutla, as Mark had said, was in the
pulque
country; there would be oceans of cheap alcohol. Riding hard, he himself could be back again at Mark's bedside in less than thirty hours. A white man with money in his pocket, he would be able to bully and bribe the doctor to bestir himself. Hardly less important, he would know what stores to bring back with him. His mind was made up. He rose, and, going to the door, called to the
mozo
to saddle his mule.

He had ridden for less than two hours when the miracle happened. Coming round a bend in the track he saw advancing towards him, not fifty yards away, a white man, followed by two Indians, one mounted and one on foot, with a couple of laden baggage-mules. As they drew together, the white man courteously raised his hat. The hair beneath it was light brown, grizzled above the ears, and in the deeply bronzed face the blue eyes were startlingly pale.

‘
Buenas dias, caballero
,' he said.

There was no mistaking the accent. ‘Good-morning,' Anthony replied.

They reined up their beasts alongside one another and began to talk.

‘This is the first word of English I've heard for seven and a half months,' said the stranger. He was an elderly little man, short and spare, but with fine upright carriage that lent him a certain dignity. The face was curiously proportioned, with a short nose and an upper lip unusually long above a wide, tightly shut mouth. A mouth like an inquisitor's. But the inquisitor had forgotten himself and learned to smile; there were the potentialities of laughter in the deep folds of skin
which separated the quiveringly sensitive corners of the mouth from the cheeks. And round the bright enquiring eyes those intricate lines seemed the traces and hieroglyphic symbols of a constantly repeated movement of humorous kindliness. A queer face, Anthony decided, but charming.

‘My name is James Miller,' said the stranger. ‘What's yours?' And when he had been told, ‘Are you travelling alone, Anthony Beavis?' he questioned, addressing the other, Quaker fashion, by both his names.

Anthony told him where he was bound and on what errand. ‘I suppose you don't know anything about doctors in Miajutla,' he concluded.

With a sudden deepening of the hieroglyphs about the eyes, a sudden realization of those potentialities of laughter round the mouth, the little man smiled. ‘I know about doctors
here
,' he said, and tapped himself on the chest. ‘M.D., Edinburgh. And a good supply of
materia medica
on those mules, what's more.' Then, in another tone, ‘Come on,' he said briskly. ‘Let's get back to that poor friend of yours as quick as we can.'

Anthony wheeled his animal round, and side by side the two men set off up the track.

‘Well, Anthony Beavis,' said the doctor, ‘you came to the right address.'

Anthony nodded. ‘Fortunately,' he said, ‘I hadn't been praying, otherwise I'd have had to believe in special providence and miraculous interventions.'

‘And that would never do,' the doctor agreed. ‘Not that anything ever happens by chance, of course. One takes the card the conjuror forces on one – the card which one has oneself made it inevitable that he should force on one. It's a matter of cause and effect.' Then, without a pause, ‘What's your profession?' he asked.

‘I suppose you'd say I was a sociologist. Was one, at any rate.'

‘Indeed! Is that so?' The doctor seemed surprised and pleased. ‘Mine's anthropology,' he went on. ‘Been living with the Lacandones in Chiapas these last months. Nice people when you get to know them. And I've collected a lot of material. Are you married, by the way?'

‘No.'

‘Never been married?'

‘No.'

Dr Miller shook his head. ‘That's bad, Anthony Beavis,' he said. ‘You ought to have been.'

‘What makes you say that?'

‘I can see it in your face. Here, and there.' He touched his lips, his forehead. ‘I was married. For fourteen years. Then my wife died. Blackwater fever it was. We were working in West Africa then. She was qualified too. Knew her job better, in some ways, than I did.' He sighed. ‘You'd have made a good husband, you know. Perhaps you will do, even now. How old are you?'

‘Forty-three.'

‘And look younger. Though I don't like that sallow skin of yours,' he protested with sudden vehemence. ‘Do you suffer much from constipation?'

‘Well, no,' Anthony answered, smiling, and wondered whether it would be agreeable if everybody were to talk to one in this sort of way. A bit tiring, perhaps, to have to treat all the people you met as human beings, every one of them with a right to know all about you; but more interesting than treating them as objects, as mere lumps of meat dumped down beside you in the bus, jostling you on the pavements. ‘Not much,' he qualified.

‘You mean, not manifestly,' said the doctor. ‘Any eczema?'

‘Occasional touches.'

‘And the hair tends to be scurfy.' Dr Miller nodded his own confirmation to this statement. ‘And you get headaches, don't you?'

Anthony had to admit that he sometimes did.

‘And, of course, stiff necks and attacks of lumbago. I know. I know. A few years more and it'll be settled in as sciatica or arthritis.' The doctor was silent for a moment while he looked enquiringly into Anthony's face. ‘Yes, that sallow skin,' he repeated, and shook his head. ‘And the irony, the scepticism, the what's-the-good-of-it-all attitude! Negative really. Everything you think is negative.'

Anthony laughed; but laughed to hide a certain disquiet. This being on human terms with everyone you met could be a bit embarrassing.

‘Oh, don't imagine I'm criticizing!' cried the doctor, and there was a note of genuine compunction in his voice.

Anthony went on laughing, unconvincingly.

‘Don't get it into your head that I'm blaming you in any way.'

Stretching out a hand, he patted Anthony affectionately on the shoulder. ‘We're all of us what we are; and when it comes to turning ourselves into what we ought to be – well, it isn't easy. No, it isn't easy, Anthony Beavis. How can you expect to think in anything but a negative way, when you've got chronic intestinal poisoning? Had it from birth, I guess. Inherited it. And at the same time stooping, as you do. Slumped down on your mule like that – it's awful. Pressing down on the vertebrae like a ton of bricks. One can almost hear the poor things grinding together. And when the spine's in that state, what happens to the rest of the machine? It's frightful to think of.'

‘And yet,' said Anthony, feeling a little piqued by this remorseless enumeration of his physical defects, ‘I'm still alive. I'm here to tell the tale.'

‘
Somebody's
here to tell the tale,' the doctor answered. ‘But is he the one you'd like him to be?'

Anthony did not answer, only smiled uncomfortably.

‘And even that somebody won't be telling the tale much longer, if you're not careful. I'm serious,' he insisted. ‘Perfectly serious. You've got to change if you want to go on existing. And if it's a matter of changing – why, you need all the help you can get, from God's to the doctor's. I tell you this because I like you,' he explained. ‘I think you're worth changing.'

‘Thank you,' said Anthony, smiling this time with pleasure.

‘Speaking as a doctor, I'd suggest a course of colonic irrigation to start with.'

‘And speaking for God,' said Anthony, allowing his pleasure to overflow in good-humoured mockery, ‘a course of prayer and fasting.'

‘No, not fasting,' the doctor protested very seriously, ‘not fasting. Only a proper diet. No butcher's meat; it's poison, so far as you're concerned. And no milk; it'll only blow you up with wind. Take it in the form of cheese and butter; never liquid. And a minimum of eggs. And, of course, only one heavy meal a day. You don't need half the stuff you're eating. As for prayer . . .' He sighed and wrinkled his forehead into a pensive frown. ‘I've never really liked it, you know. Not what's ordinarily meant by prayer, at any rate. All that asking for special favours and guidances and forgivenesses – I've always found that it tends to make one egotistical, preoccupied with one's own ridiculous self-important little personality. When you pray in the ordinary way, you're merely rubbing yourself into yourself. You return to your own vomit, if you see what I mean. Whereas what we're all looking for is some way of getting beyond our own vomit.'

Some way, Anthony was thinking, of getting beyond the books, beyond the perfumed and resilient flesh of women, beyond fear and sloth, beyond the painful but secretly flattering vision of the world as menagerie and asylum.

‘Beyond this piddling, twopenny-halfpenny personality,'
said the doctor, ‘with all its wretched little virtues and vices, all its silly cravings and silly pretensions. But, if you're not careful, prayer just confirms you in the bad habit of being personal. I tell you, I've observed it clinically, and it seems to have much the same effect on people as butcher's meat. Prayer makes you more yourself, more separate. Just as a rump-steak does. Look at the correlation between religion and diet. Christians eat meat, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco; and Christianity exalts personality, insists on the value of petitionary prayer, teaches that God feels anger and approves the persecution of heretics. It's the same with the Jews and the Moslems. Kosher and an indignant Jehovah. Mutton and beef – and personal survival among the houris, avenging Allah and holy wars. Now look at the Buddhists. Vegetables and water. And what's their philosophy? They don't exalt personality; they try to transcend it. They don't imagine that God can be angry; when they're unenlightened, they think he's compassionate, and when they're enlightened, they think he doesn't exist, except as an impersonal mind of the universe. Hence they don't offer petitionary prayer; they meditate – or, in other words, try to merge their own minds in the universal mind. Finally, they don't believe in special providences for individuals; they believe in a moral order, where every event has its cause and produces its effect – where the card's forced upon you by the conjuror, but only because your previous actions have forced the conjuror to force it upon you. What worlds away from Jehovah and God the Father and everlasting, individual souls! The fact is, of course, that we think as we eat. I eat like a Buddhist, because I find it keeps me well and happy; and the result is that I think like a Buddhist – and, thinking like a Buddhist, I'm confirmed in my determination to eat like one.'