Finally I could stand it no longer. I stood up and said a civil, “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” came the reply from the darkness, in a hoarse, harsh, rusty voice.
I stumbled forward with some difficulty, over hawsers and past some posts. Then I heard footsteps behind me, hasty and uncertain. It was my companion of a moment ago. I instinctively stopped. He did not come right up to me, and through the darkness I sensed something like anxiety and awkwardness in his gait.
“Forgive me,” he said quickly “if I ask you a favour. I… I…” he stammered, for a moment too embarrassed to go on at once. “I… I have private… very private reasons for staying out of sight… a bereavement… I prefer to avoid company on board. Oh, I didn’t mean you, no, no… I’d just like to ask… well, I would be very much obliged if you wouldn’t mention seeing me here to anyone on board. There are… are private reasons, I might call them, to keep me from mingling with people just now… yes, well, it would put me in an awkward position if you mentioned that someone… here at night… that I…” And he stopped again. I put an end to his confusion at once by assuring him that I would do as he wished. We shook hands. Then I went back to my cabin and slept a heavy, curiously disturbed sleep, troubled by strange images.
I kept my promise, and told no one on board of my strange meeting, although the temptation to do so was great. For on a sea voyage every little thing becomes an event: a sail on the horizon, a dolphin leaping, a new flirtation, a joke made in passing. And I was full of curiosity to know more about the vessel’s unusual passenger. I searched the ship’s list for a name that might be his, I scrutinized other people, wondering if they could be somehow related to him; all day I was a prey to nervous impatience, just waiting for evening and wondering if I would meet him again. Odd psychological states have a positively disquieting power over me; I find tracking down the reasons for them deeply intriguing, and the mere presence of unusual characters can kindle a passionate desire in me to know more about them, a desire not much less strong than a woman’s wish to acquire some possession. The day seemed long and crumbled tediously away between my fingers. I went to bed early, knowing that my curiosity would wake me at midnight.
Sure enough, I woke at the same time as the night before. The two hands on the illuminated dial of my clock covered one another in a single bright line. I quickly left my sultry cabin and climbed up into the even sultrier night.
The stars were shining as they had shone yesterday, casting a diffuse light over the quivering ship, and the Southern Cross blazed high overhead. It was all just the same as yesterday, where days and nights in the tropics resemble each other more than in our latitudes, but I myself did not feel yesterday’s soft, flowing, dreamy sensation of being gently cradled. Something was drawing me on, confusing me, and I knew where it was taking me: to the black hoist by the ship’s side, to see if my mysterious acquaintance was sitting immobile there again. I heard the ship’s bell striking above me, and it urged me on. Step by step, reluctantly yet fascinated, I followed my instincts. I had not yet reached the prow of the ship when something like a red eye suddenly hovered in front of me: the pipe. So he was there.
I instinctively stepped back and stopped. Next moment I would have left again, but there was movement over there in the dark, something rose, took a couple of steps, and suddenly I heard his voice very close to me, civil and melancholy.
“Forgive me,” he said. “You obviously want to sit there again, and I have a feeling that you hesitated when you saw me. Do please sit down, and I’ll go away.”
I made haste to say he was very welcome to stay so far as I was concerned. I had stepped back, I said, only for fear of disturbing him.
“Oh, you won’t disturb me,” he said, with some bitterness. “Far from it, I’m glad to have company for a change. I haven’t spoken a word to anyone for ten days… well, not for years, really, and then it seems so difficult, perhaps because forcing it all back inside myself chokes me. I can’t sit in my cabin any more, in that… that coffin, I can’t bear it, and I can’t bear the company of human beings either because they laugh all day… I can’t endure that now, I hear it in my cabin and stop my ears against it. Of course, they don’t know that I… well, they don’t know that… they don’t know it, and what business is it of theirs, after all, they’re strangers…”
He stopped again, and then very suddenly and hastily said, “But I don’t want to bother you… forgive me for speaking so freely.”
He made a bow, and was about to leave, but I urged him to stay. “You’re not bothering me in the least. I’m glad to have a few quiet words with someone up here myself… may I offer you a cigarette?”
He took one, and I lit it. Once again his face moved away from the ship’s black side, flickering in the light of the match, but now he turned it fully to me: his eyes behind his glasses looking inquiringly into my face, avidly and with demented force. A shudder passed through me. I could feel that this man wanted to speak, had to speak. And I knew that I must help him by saying nothing.
We sat down again. He had a second deckchair there, and offered it to me. Our cigarettes glowed, and from the way that the ring of light traced by his in the darkness shook, I could tell that his hand was trembling. But I kept silent, and so did he. Then, suddenly, he asked in a quiet voice, “Are you very tired?”
“No, not at all.”
The voice in the dark hesitated again. “I would like to ask you something… that’s to say, I’d like to tell you something. Oh, I know, I know very well how absurd it is to turn to the first man I meet, but… I’m… I’m in a terrible mental condition, I have reached a point where I absolutely must talk to someone, or it will be the end of me… You’ll understand that when I… well, if I tell you… I mean, I know you can’t help me, but this silence is almost making me ill, and a sick man always looks ridiculous to others…”
Here I interrupted, begging him not to distress himself. He could tell me anything he liked, I said. Naturally I couldn’t promise him anything, but to show willingness is a human duty. If you see someone in trouble, I added, of course it is your duty to help…
“Duty… to show willing… a duty to try to… so you too think it is a man’s duty… yes, his duty to show himself willing to help.”
He repeated it three times. I shuddered at the blunt, grim tone of his repetition. Was the man mad? Was he drunk?
As if I had uttered my suspicions aloud, he suddenly said in quite a different voice, “You may think me mad or drunk. No, I’m not—not yet. Only what you said moved me so… so strangely, because that’s exactly what torments me now, wondering if it’s a duty… a duty…”
He was beginning to stammer again. He broke off for a moment, pulled himself together, and began again.
“The fact is, I am a doctor of medicine, and in that profession we often come upon such cases, such fateful cases… borderline cases, let’s call them, when we don’t know whether or not it is our duty… or rather, when there’s more than one duty involved, not just to another human being but to ourselves too, to the state, to science… yes, of course, we must help, that’s what we are there for… but such maxims are never more than theory. How far should we go with our help? Here are you, a stranger to me, and I’m a stranger to you, and I ask you not to mention seeing me… well, so you don’t say anything, you do that duty… and now I ask you to talk to me because my own silence is killing me, and you say you are ready to listen. Good, but that’s easy… suppose I were to ask you to take hold of me and throw me overboard, though, your willingness to help would be over. The duty has to end somewhere… it ends where we begin thinking of our own lives, our own responsibilities, it has to end somewhere, it has to end… or perhaps for doctors, of all people, it ought not to end? Must a doctor always come to the rescue, be ready to help one and all, just because he has a diploma full of Latin words, must he really throw away his life and water down his own blood if some woman… if someone comes along wanting him to be noble,
helpful, good? Yes, duty ends somewhere… it ends where no more can be done, that’s where it ends…”
He stopped again, and regained control.
“Forgive me, I know I sound agitated… but I’m not drunk, not yet… although I often am, I freely confess it, in this hellish isolation… bear in mind that for seven years I’ve lived almost entirely with the local natives and with animals… you forget how to talk calmly. And then if you do open up, everything comes flooding out… but wait… Yes, I know… I was going to ask you, I wanted to tell you about a certain case, wondering whether you think one has a duty to help… just help, with motives as pure as an angel’s, or whether… Although I fear it will be a long story. Are you sure you’re not tired?”
“No, not in the least.”
“Thank you… thank you. Will you have a drink?”
He had been groping in the dark behind him somewhere. There was a clinking sound: two or three, at any rate several bottles stood ranged there. He offered me a glass of whisky, which I sipped briefly, while he drained his glass in a single draught. For a moment there was silence between us. Then the ship’s bell struck half-past midnight.
“Well then… I’d like to tell you about a case. Suppose that a doctor in a small town… or right out in the country, a doctor who… a doctor who…” He stopped again, and then suddenly moved his chair closer to mine.
“This is no good. I must tell you everything directly, from the beginning, or you won’t understand it… no, I can’t put it as a theoretical example, I must tell you the story of my own case. There’ll be no shame about it, I will hide nothing… people strip naked in front of me, after all, and show me their scabs, their urine, their excrement… if someone is to help there can be no beating about the bush, no concealment. So I won’t describe the case of some fictional doctor, I will strip myself naked and say that I… I forgot all shame in that filthy isolation, that accursed country that eats the soul and sucks the marrow from a man’s loins.”
I must have made a movement of some kind, for he interrupted himself.
“Ah, you protest… oh, I understand, you are fascinated by India, by its temples and palm trees, all the romance of a two-month visit. Yes, the tropics are magical when you’re travelling through them by rail, road or rickshaw: I felt just the same when I first arrived seven years ago. I had so many dreams, I was going to learn the language and read the sacred texts in the original, I was going to study the diseases, do scientific work, explore the native psyche—as we would put it in European jargon—I was on a mission for humanity and civilisation. Everyone who comes here dreams the same dream. But then a man’s strength ebbs away in this invisible hothouse, the fever strikes deep into him—and we all get the fever, however much quinine we take—he becomes listless, indolent, flabby as a jellyfish. As a European, he is cut off from his true nature, so to speak, when he leaves the big cities for some wretched swamp-ridden station. Sooner or later we all succumb to our weaknesses, some drink, others smoke opium, others again brawl and act like brutes—some kind of folly comes over us all. We long for Europe, we dream of walking down a street again some day, sitting among white people in a well-lit room in a solidly built house, we dream of it year after year, and if a time does come when we could go on leave we’re too listless to take the chance. A man knows he’s been forgotten back at home, he’s a stranger there, a shell in the sea, anyone can tread on him. So he stays, he degenerates and goes to the bad in these hot, humid jungles. It was a bad day when I sold my services to that filthy place…
Not that I did it entirely of my own free will. I had studied in Germany, I was a qualified doctor, indeed a good doctor with a post at the big hospital in Leipzig; in some long-forgotten issue of a medical journal a great deal was made of a new injection that I was the first to introduce. And then I had trouble over a woman, I met her in the hospital; she had driven her lover so crazy that he shot her with a revolver, and soon I was as crazy as he had been. She had a cold, proud manner that drove me to distraction—bold domineering women had always had a hold over me, but she tightened that hold until my bones were breaking. I did what she wanted, I—well, why not say it? It’s eight years ago now—I dipped into the hospital funds for her, and when it came out all hell was let loose. An uncle of mine covered up for me when I was dismissed, but my career was over. It was then that I heard the Dutch government was recruiting doctors for the colonies, offering a lump sum in payment. Well, I understood at once the kind of job it would be if they were offering payment like that. For I knew that the crosses on graves in the fever-zone plantations grow three times as fast as at home, but when you’re young you think fever and death affect only others. However, I had little choice; I went to Rotterdam, signed up for ten years, and was given a big bundle of banknotes. I sent half home to my uncle, and as for the other half, a woman in the harbour district got it out of me, just because she was so like the vicious cat I’d loved. I sailed away from Europe without money, without even a watch, without illusions, and I wasn’t particularly sorry to leave harbour. And then I sat on deck like you, like everyone, and saw the Southern Cross and the palm trees, and my heart rose. Ah, forests, isolation, silence, I dreamed! Well—I’d soon had enough of isolation. I wasn’t stationed in Batavia or Surabaya, in a city with other people and clubs, golf, books and newspapers, instead I went to—well, the name doesn’t matter—to one of the district stations, two days’ journey from the nearest town. A couple of tedious, desiccated officials and a few half-castes were all the society I had, apart from that, nothing for miles around but jungle, plantations, thickets and swamps.
It was tolerable at first. I pursued all kinds of studies; once, when the vice-resident was on a journey of inspection, had a motor accident and broke a leg, I operated on him without assistants, and there was a lot of talk about it. I collected native poisons and weapons, I turned my attention to a hundred little things to keep my mind alert. But that lasted only as long as the strength of Europe was still active in me, and then I dried up. The few Europeans on the station bored me, I stopped mixing with them, I drank and I dreamed. I had only two more years to go before I’d be free, with a pension, and could go back to Europe and begin life again. I wasn’t really doing anything but waiting; I lay low and waited. And that’s what I would be doing today if she… if it hadn’t happened.”
The voice in the darkness stopped. The pipe had stopped glowing too. It was so quiet that all of a sudden I could hear the water foaming as it broke against the keel, and the dull, distant throbbing of the engines. I would have liked to light a cigarette, but I was afraid of the bright flash of the lit match and its reflection in his face. He remained silent for a long time. I didn’t know if he had finished what he had to say, or was dozing, or had fallen asleep, so profound was his silence.
Then the ship’s bell struck a single powerful note: one o’clock. He started. I heard his glass clink again. His hand was obviously feeling around for the whisky. A shot gurgled quietly into his glass, and then the voice suddenly began again, but now it seemed tenser and more passionate.
“So… wait a moment… so yes, there I was, sitting in my damned cobweb, I’d been crouching motionless as a spider in its web for months. It was just after the rainy season. Rain had poured down on the roof for weeks on end, not a human being had come along, no European, I’d been stuck there in the house day after day with my yellow-skinned women and my good whisky. I was feeling very ‘down’ at the time, homesick for Europe. If I read a novel describing clean streets and white women my fingers began to tremble. I can’t really describe the condition to you, but it’s like a tropical disease, a raging, feverish, yet helpless nostalgia that sometimes comes over a man. So there I was, sitting over an atlas, I think, dreaming of journeys. Then there’s a hammering at the door. My boy is there and one of the women, eyes wide with amazement. They make dramatic gestures: there’s a woman here, they say, a lady, a white woman.
I jump up in surprise. I didn’t hear a carriage or
a car approaching. A white woman, here in this wilderness?
I am about to go down the steps, but then I pull myself together. A glance in the mirror, and I hastily tidy myself up a little. I am nervous, restless, I have ominous forebodings, for I know no one in the world who would be coming to visit me out of friendship. At last I go down.
The lady is waiting in the hall, and hastily comes to meet me. A thick motoring veil hides her face. I am about to greet her, but she is quick to get her word in first. ‘Good day, doctor,’ she says in fluent English—slightly too fluent, as if she had learnt her speech by heart in advance. ‘Do forgive me for descending on you like this, but we have just been visiting the station, our car is over there’—here a thought flashes through my mind: why didn’t she drive up to the house?—‘And then I remembered that you live here. I’ve heard so much about you—you worked miracles for the vice-resident, his leg is perfectly all right now, he can play golf as well as ever. Oh yes, imagine all of us in the city are still talking about it, we’d happily dispense with our own cross-grained surgeon and the other doctors if you would only come to us instead. Now, why do you never go to the city? You live like a yogi here…’
And so she chatters on, faster and faster, without letting me get a word in. Her loquacity is nervous and agitated, and makes me uneasy. Why is she talking so much, I ask myself, why doesn’t she introduce herself, why doesn’t she put that veil back? Is she feverish? Is she ill? Is she mad? I feel increasingly nervous, aware that I look ridiculous, standing silently in front of her while her flood of chatter sweeps over me. At last she slows down slightly, and I am able to ask her upstairs. She signs to the boy to stay where he is, and goes up the stairs ahead of me.