A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

because the doctor had personal designs on the half acre of ground on which he used to grow bananas. It only needed someone, in malice or ignorance, to suggest that the new machines were intended to torture the patients and some fools would break into the dispensary and destroy them. Yet in our century you could hardly call them fools. Hola Camp, Sharpeville, and Algiers had justified all possible belief in European cruelty.
    So it was better, the doctor explained, to keep the machines out of sight at home until the new hospital was finished. The floor of his sitting-room was covered with straw from the crates.
    ‘The position of the power-plugs will have to be decided now.’ The doctor asked, ‘Do you know what this is?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I’ve wanted it for so long,’ the doctor said, touching the metal shape tenderly as a man might stroke the female flank of one of Rodin’s bronzes. ‘Sometimes I despaired. The papers I have had to fill in, the lies I’ve told. And here at last it is .’
    ‘What does it do?’
    ‘It measures to one twenty-thousandth of a second the reaction of the nerves. One day we are going to be proud of this leproserie. Of you too and the part you will have played.’
    ‘I told you I’ve retired.’
    ‘One never retires from a vocation.’
    ‘Oh yes, make no mistake, one does. One comes to an end.’
    ‘What are you here for then? To make love to a black woman?’
    ‘No. One comes to an end of that too. Possibly sex and a vocation are born and die together. Let me roll bandages or carry buckets. All I want is to pass the time.’
    ‘I thought you wanted to be of use.’
    ‘Listen,’ Querry said and then fell silent.
    ‘I am listening.’
    ‘I don’t deny my profession once meant a lot to me. So have women. But the use of what I made was never important to me. I wasn’t a builder of council houses or factories. When I made something I made it for my own pleasure.’
    ‘Is that the way you loved women?’ the doctor asked, but Querry hardly heard him. He was talking as a hungry man eats.
    ‘Your vocation is quite a different one, doctor. You are concerned with people. I wasn’t concerned with the people who occupied my space – only with the space.’
    ‘I wouldn’t have trusted your plumbing then.’
    ‘A writer doesn’t write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same to make them comfortable. My interest was in space, light, proportion. New materials interested me only in the effect they might have on those three. Wood, brick, steel, concrete, glass – space seems to alter with what you use to enclose it. Materials are the architect’s plot. They are not his motive for work. Only the space and the light and the proportion. The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rubempré in the end?’
    ‘Two of your churches are famous. Didn’t you care what happened inside them – to people?’
    ‘The acoustics had to be good of course. The high altar had to be visible to all. But people hated them. They said they weren’t designed for prayer. They meant that they were not Roman or Gothic or Byzantine. And in a year they had cluttered them up with their cheap plaster saints; they took out my plain windows and put in stained glass dedicated to dead pork-packers who had contributed to diocesan funds, and when they had destroyed my space and my light, they were able to pray again, and they even became proud of what they had spoilt. I became what they called a great Catholic architect, but I built no more churches, doctor.’
    ‘I am not a religious man, I don’t know much about these things, but I suppose they had a right to believe their prayers were more important than a work of art.’
    ‘Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It’s only the middle-classes who demand to pray in suitable surroundings. Sometimes I feel sickened by the word prayer. Rycker used it