Anthony, who had been holding the gangrened leg, straightened himself up, and, looking round, saw the ring of brown faces and the glitter of all those black, blank eyes. At the sight he found his growing apprehension abruptly transformed into uncontrollable anger.
‘Go away!’ he shouted in English, and advanced towards them, waving his arms. ‘Away, you little beasts, away!’
The children retreated, but slowly, reluctantly, with the manifest intention of returning the moment he should turn his back.
Anthony made a quick dart and caught one small boy by the arm.
‘Little beast!’
He shook the child violently, then, carried away by an irresistible impulse to inflict pain, gave him a cuff over the head that sent the big hat flying between the trees.
Uttering no cry, the child ran away after its companions. Anthony made a last menacing gesture in their direction, then turned and walked back towards the centre of the clearing. He had not taken more than a few steps when a stone, well aimed, caught him full between the shoulders. He swung round furiously, exploding into such obscenities as he had not uttered since he was at school.
Dr Miller, who was washing his hands at the table, looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘The little devils are throwing stones.’
‘Serve you right,’ said the doctor unsympathetically. ‘Leave them alone, and come and do your duty.’
The unfamiliarly clerical and military word startled him into the uncomfortable realization that he had been behaving like a fool. Worse than a fool. With the realization of his discreditable folly came the impulse to justify it. It was in a tone of pained indignation that he spoke. ‘You’re not going to let them look on, are you?’
‘How am I to prevent them looking on, if they want to?’ asked the doctor, drying his hands as he spoke. ‘And now, Anthony Beavis,’ he went on sternly, ‘pull yourself together. This is going to be difficult enough anyhow, without your being hysterical.’
Silenced and, because he was ashamed of himself, angry with Miller, Anthony washed his hands and put on the clean shirt which had to do duty as overall.
‘Now,’ said the doctor, and stepped forward. ‘We must begin by draining the leg of blood.’
‘The’ leg, not ‘his’ leg, Anthony was thinking, as he stood beside the doctor, looking down on the man sleeping on the bed. Something impersonal, belonging to nobody in particular. The leg. But Mark’s face, Mark’s sleeping face, now so incredibly calm, so smooth, in spite of the emaciation, as though this death-like stupor had drawn a new skin across the flayed and twisted muscles – this could never be merely ‘the’ face. It was ‘his’, his for all its unlikeness to that contemptuous, suffering mask through which at ordinary times Mark looked out at the world. All the more genuinely his, perhaps, just because of that unlikeness. He remembered suddenly what Mark had said to him, beside the Mediterranean, only four months before, when he had woken to see those eyes, now shut, but then wide open and bright with derision, sardonically examining him through the mosquito net. Perhaps one really is what one seems to be in sleep. Innocence and peace – the mind’s essence, and all the rest mere accident.
‘Take his foot,’ Dr Miller ordered, ‘and lift the leg as nearly vertical as you can.’
Anthony did as he was told. Raised in this grotesque way, the horribly swollen and discoloured leg seemed more impersonal, more a mere thing than ever. The stink of mortified flesh was in his nostrils. From behind them, among the trees, a voice said something incomprehensible; there was a snicker of laughter.
‘Now leave the foot to the mozo and stand by here.’ Anthony obeyed, and smelt again the resin of the forest. ‘Hold that bottle for me.’
There was an astonished murmur of ‘Amarillo!’ as the doctor painted the thigh with flavine. Anthony looked again at his friend’s face; it remained undisturbed in its serenity. Essentially still and pure. The leg with its black dead flesh; the saw there in the bowl of permanganate solution, the knives and forceps; the fascinated children peering out of the forest – all were somehow irrelevant to the essential Mark.
‘Now the chloroform,’ said Dr Miller. ‘And the cotton wool. I’ll show you how to use it. Then you’ll have to go on by yourself.’
He opened the bottle, and the smell of pine trees in the sunshine was overlaid by a rasping and nauseating sweetness.
‘There, do you see the trick?’ asked the doctor. ‘Like that. Go on with that. I’ll tell you when to stop. I’ve got to put on the tourniquet.’
There were no birds in the trees, hardly, even, any insects. The wood was deathly still. This sunny clearing was a little island of speech and movement in an ocean of silence. And at the centre of that island lay another silence, intenser, more complete than the silence of the forest.
The tourniquet was in place. Dr Miller ordered the mozo to lower the grotesquely hoisted leg. He pulled up a stool to the bedside, sat down, then rose again and, as he washed his hands for the last time, explained to Anthony that he would have to operate sitting down. The bed was too low for him to be able to stand. Taking his seat once more, he dipped into the bowl of permanganate for a scalpel.
At the sight of those broad flaps of skin turned back, like the peel of a huge banana, but from a red and bleeding fruit, Anthony was seized with a horrible sensation of nausea. The saliva came pouring into his mouth and he had to keep swallowing and swallowing to get rid of it. Involuntarily, he gave vent to a retching cough.
‘Steady now,’ said the doctor without looking up. With an artery forceps, he secured the end of an oozing vessel.
‘Think of it scientifically.’ He made another sweeping cut through the red flesh. ‘And if you must be sick,’ he went on with sudden asperity, ‘for God’s sake go and do it quickly!’ Then, in another tone – the tone of the professor who demonstrates an interesting point to his students, ‘One has to cut back the nerves a long way,’ he said. ‘There’s a tremendous retraction as the tissues heal up. Anyhow,’ he added, ‘he’ll probably have to have a re-amputation at home. It won’t be a beautiful stump, I’m afraid.’
Calm and at peace, innocent of all craving, all malice, all ambition – it was the face of one who has made himself free, one for whom there are no more bars or chains, no more sepulchres under a stone, and on whom the birdlime no longer sticks. The face of one who has made himself free . . . But in fact, Anthony reflected, in fact he had had his freedom forced upon him by this evil-smelling vapour. Was it possible to be one’s own liberator? There were snares; but also there was a way of walking out of them. Prisons; but they could be opened. And if the torture-chambers could never be abolished, perhaps the tortures could be made to seem irrelevant. As completely irrelevant as now to Mark this sound of sawing, as this revolting rasp and squeak of the steel teeth biting into the bone, of the steel blade rubbing back and forth in the deepening groove. Mark lay there serene, almost smiling.
CHAPTER L
Christmas Day 1934
GOD – A PERSON or not a person? Quien sabe? Only revelation can decide such metaphysical questions. And revelation isn’t playing the game – is equivalent to pulling three aces of trumps from up your sleeve.
Of more significance is the practical question. Which gives a man more power to realize goodness – belief in a personal or an impersonal God? Answer: it depends. Some minds work one way, some another. Mine, as it happens, finds no need, indeed, finds it impossible to think of the world in terms of personality. Patanjali says you may believe in a personal God, or not, according to taste. The psychological results will be the same in either case.
For those whose nature demands personality as a source of energy, but who find it impossible to believe that the universe is run by a person in any sense of the word that we can possibly understand – what’s the right policy? In most cases, they reject any practice which might be called religious. But this is throwing away the baby with the bath water. The desired relationship with a personality can be historical, not ontological. A contact, not with somebody existing at present as manager of the universe, but with somebody known to have existed at some time in the past. The Imitation of Christ (or of any other historical character) is just as effective if the model be regarded as having existed there, then, as it is if the model be conceived as existing here, now. And meditation on goodness, communication with goodness, contemplation of goodness are demonstrably effective means of realizing goodness in life, even when that which is meditated on, communicated with and contemplated, is not a person, but a general mind, or even an ideal supposed to exist only in human minds.
The fundamental problem is practical – to work out systems of psychological
