A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene
"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 onto the verandah 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.
6
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
"You can hardly say it was a happy ending for Querry."
"Wasn't it? Surely he always wanted to go a bit further." The Superior added shyly, "Do you think there was anything between him and Mme. Rycker?"
"No."
"I wondered. Judging from Parkinson's second article he would seem to have been a man with a great capacity—well—for love."
"I'm not so sure of that. Nor was he. He told me once that all his life he had only made use of women, but I think he saw himself always in the hardest possible light. I even wondered sometimes whether he suffered from a kind of frigidity. Like a woman who changes partners constantly in the hope that one day she will experience the true orgasm. He said that he always went through the motions of love efficiently, even towards God in the days when he believed, but then he found that the love wasn't really there for anything except his work, so in the end he gave up the motions. And afterwards, when he couldn't even pretend that what he felt was love, the motives for work failed him. That was like the crisis of a sickness—when the patient has no more interest in life at all. It is then that people sometimes kill themselves, but he was tough, very tough."
"You spoke just now as though he had been cured."
"I really think he was. He'd learned to serve other people, you see, and to laugh. An odd laugh, but it was a laugh all the same. I'm frightened of people who don't laugh."
The Superior said shyly, "I thought perhaps you meant that he was beginning to find his faith again."
"Oh no, not that. Only a reason for living. You try too hard to make a pattern, father."
"But if the pattern's there... you haven't a cheroot have you?"
"No."
The Superior said, "We all analyse motives too much. I said that once to Father Thomas. You remember what Pascal said, that a man who starts looking for God has already found him. The same may be true of love—when we look for it, perhaps we've already found it."
"He was inclined—I only know what he told me himself—to confine his search to a woman's bed."
"It's not so bad a place to look for it. There are a lot of people who only find hate there."
"Like Rycker?"
"We don't know enough about Rycker to condemn him."
"How persistent you are, father. You never let anyone go, do you? You'd like to claim even Querry for your own."
"I haven't noticed that you relax much before a patient dies."
They had reached the dispensary. The lepers sat on the hot cement steps waiting for something to happen. At the new hospital the ladders leant against the roof; and the last work was in progress. The roof-tree had been battered and bent by the storm, but it was held in place still by its strong palm-fibre thongs.
"I see from the accounts," the Superior said, "that you've given up using vitamin tablets. Is that a wise economy?"
"I don't believe the anaemia comes from the D. D. S. treatment. It comes from hookworm. It's cheaper to build lavatories than to buy vitamin tablets. That's our next project. I mean it was to have been. How many patients have turned up today?" he asked the dispenser.
"About sixty."
"Your god must feel a bit disappointed," Doctor Colin said, "when he looks at this world of his."
"When you were a boy they can't have taught you theology very well. God cannot feel disappointment or pain."
"Perhaps that's why I don't care to believe in him." The doctor sat down at the table and drew forward a blank chart. "Number one," he called.
It was a child of three, quite naked, with a little potbelly and a dangling tassel and a finger stuck in the corner of his mouth. The doctor ran his fingers over the skin of the back while the child's mother waited.
"I know that little fellow," the Superior said. "He always came to me for sweets."
"He's infected all right," Doctor Colin said. "Feel the patches here and here. But you needn't worry," he added in a tone of suppressed rage, "we shall be able to cure him in a year or two, and I can promise you that there will be no mutilations."
The End
Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case
(Series: # )