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

a great deal. Do you pray, doctor?’
    ‘I think the last time I prayed was before my final medical exam. And you?’
    ‘I gave it up a long time ago. Even in the days when I believed, I seldom prayed. It would have got in the way of work. Before I went to sleep, even if I was with a woman, the last thing I had always to think about was work. Problems which seemed insoluble would often solve themselves in sleep. I had my bedroom next to my office, so that I could spend two minutes in front of the drawing-board the last thing of all. The bed, the bidet, the drawing-board, and then sleep.’
    ‘It sounds a little hard on the woman.’
    ‘Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express. I have no interest in anything any more, doctor. I don’t want to sleep with a woman nor design a building.’
    ‘Have you no children?’
    ‘I once had, but they disappeared into the world a long time ago. We haven’t kept in touch. Self-expression eats the father in you too.’
    ‘So you thought you could just come and die here?’
    ‘Yes. That was in my mind. But chiefly I wanted to be in an empty place, where no new building or woman would remind me that there was a time when I was alive, with a vocation and a capacity to love – if it was love. The palsied suffer, their nerves feel, but I am one of the mutilated, doctor.’
    ‘Twenty years ago we might have been able to offer you your death, but now we deal only in cures. D.D.S. costs three shillings a year. It’s much cheaper than a coffin.’
    ‘Can you cure me?’
    ‘Perhaps your mutilations haven’t gone far enough yet. When a man comes here too late the disease has to burn itself out.’ The doctor laid a cloth tenderly over his machine. ‘The other patients are waiting. Do you want to come or would you like to sit here thinking of your own case? It’s often the way with the mutilated – they want to retire too, out of sight.’
    The air in the hospital lay heavily and sweetly upon them: it was never moved by a fan or a breeze. Querry was conscious of the squalor of the bedding – cleanliness was not important to the leper, only to the healthy. The patients brought their own mattresses which they had probably possessed for a lifetime – rough sacking from which the straw had escaped. The bandaged feet lay in the straw like ill-wrapped packages of meat. On the veranda the walking cases sat out of the sun – if you could call a walking case a man who, when he moved, had to support his huge swollen testicles with both hands. A woman with palsied eyelids who could not close her eyes or even blink sat in a patch of shade out of the merciless light. A man without fingers nursed a baby on his knee, and another man lay flat on the veranda with one breast long and drooping and teated like a woman’s. There was little the doctor could do for any of these; the man with elephantiasis had too weak a heart for an operation, and though he could have sewn up the woman’s eyelids, she had refused to have it done from fear, and as for the baby it would be a leper too in time. Nor could he help those in the first ward who were dying of tuberculosis or the woman who dragged herself between the beds, her legs withered with polio. It had always seemed to the doctor unfair that leprosy did not preclude all other diseases (leprosy was enough for one human being to bear), and yet it was from the other diseases that most of his patients died. He passed on and Querry tagged at his heels, saying nothing.
    In the mud kitchen at the back of one of the lepers’ houses an old man sat in the dark on an ancient deck-chair. He made an effort to rise when the doctor crossed the yard, but his legs wouldn’t support him and he made a gesture of courteous apology. ‘High blood pressure,’ the doctor said softly. ‘No hope. He has come to his kitchen to die.’ His legs were as thin as a child’s and he