A Burnt Out Case Read Online Free
Author: Graham Greene
attraction. I had to give him a whiff of ether.’
‘I’m not as suspicious of leprophils as you are, doctor. There are people who love and embrace poverty. Is that so bad? Do we have to invent a word ending in phil for them?’
‘The leprophil makes a bad nurse and ends by joining the patients.’
‘But all the same, doctor, you’ve said it yourself, leprosy is a psychological problem. It may be very valuable for the leper to feel loved.’
‘A patient can always detect whether he is loved or whether it is only his leprosy which is loved. I don’t want leprosy loved. I want it eliminated. There are fifteen million cases in the world. We don’t want to waste time with neurotics, father.’
‘I wish you had a little time to waste. You work too hard.’
But Doctor Colin was not listening. He said, ‘You remember that little leproserie in the bush that the nuns ran. When D.D.S. was discovered to be a cure, they were soon reduced to half a dozen patients. Do you know what one of the nuns said to me? “It’s terrible, doctor. Soon we’ll have no lepers at all.” There surely was a leprophil.’
‘Poor woman,’ the Superior said. ‘You don’t see the other side.’
‘What other side?’
‘An old maid, without imagination, anxious to do good, to be of use. There aren’t so many places in the world for people like that. And the practice of her vocation is being taken away from her by the weekly doses of D.D.S. tablets.’
‘I thought you didn’t look for motives.’
‘Oh, mine’s a very superficial reading like your own diagnosis, doctor. But it would be a good thing for all of us if we were even more superficial. There’s no real harm in a superficial judgement, but if I begin to probe into what lies behind that desire to be of use, oh well, I might find some terrible things, and we are all tempted to stop when we reach that point. Yet if we dug farther, who knows? – the terrible too might be only a few skins deep. Anyway it’s safer to make superficial judgements. They can always be shrugged off. Even by the victims.’
‘And Querry? What of him? Superficially speaking, of course.’
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
I
In an unfamiliar region it is always necessary for the stranger to begin at once to construct the familiar, with a photograph perhaps or a row of books if they are all that he has brought with him from the past. Querry had no photographs and no books except his diary. The first morning when he was woken at six by the sound of prayers from the chapel next door, he felt the panic of complete abandonment. He lay on his back listening to the pious chant, and if there had been some magic power in his signet ring, he would have twisted it and asked whatever djinn answered him to be transferred again to that place which for want of a better name he called his home. But magic, if such a thing existed at all, was more likely to lie in the rhythmical and incomprehensible chant next door. It reminded him, like the smell of a medicine, of an illness from which he had long recovered. He blamed himself for not realizing that the area of leprosy was also the area of this other sickness. He had expected doctors and nurses: he had forgotten that he would find priests and nuns.
Deo Gratias was knocking on the door. Querry heard the scrape of his stump as it attempted to raise the latch. A pail of water hung on his wrist like a coat on a cloakroom-knob. Querry had asked Doctor Colin before engaging him whether he suffered pain, and the doctor had reassured him, answering that mutilation was the alternative to pain. It was the palsied with their stiffened fingers and strangled nerves who suffered – suffered almost beyond bearing (you heard them sometimes crying in the night), but the suffering was in some sort a protection against mutilation. Querry did not suffer, lying on his back in bed, flexing his fingers.
And so from the first morning he set himself to build a routine, the familiar within the
‘I’m not as suspicious of leprophils as you are, doctor. There are people who love and embrace poverty. Is that so bad? Do we have to invent a word ending in phil for them?’
‘The leprophil makes a bad nurse and ends by joining the patients.’
‘But all the same, doctor, you’ve said it yourself, leprosy is a psychological problem. It may be very valuable for the leper to feel loved.’
‘A patient can always detect whether he is loved or whether it is only his leprosy which is loved. I don’t want leprosy loved. I want it eliminated. There are fifteen million cases in the world. We don’t want to waste time with neurotics, father.’
‘I wish you had a little time to waste. You work too hard.’
But Doctor Colin was not listening. He said, ‘You remember that little leproserie in the bush that the nuns ran. When D.D.S. was discovered to be a cure, they were soon reduced to half a dozen patients. Do you know what one of the nuns said to me? “It’s terrible, doctor. Soon we’ll have no lepers at all.” There surely was a leprophil.’
‘Poor woman,’ the Superior said. ‘You don’t see the other side.’
‘What other side?’
‘An old maid, without imagination, anxious to do good, to be of use. There aren’t so many places in the world for people like that. And the practice of her vocation is being taken away from her by the weekly doses of D.D.S. tablets.’
‘I thought you didn’t look for motives.’
‘Oh, mine’s a very superficial reading like your own diagnosis, doctor. But it would be a good thing for all of us if we were even more superficial. There’s no real harm in a superficial judgement, but if I begin to probe into what lies behind that desire to be of use, oh well, I might find some terrible things, and we are all tempted to stop when we reach that point. Yet if we dug farther, who knows? – the terrible too might be only a few skins deep. Anyway it’s safer to make superficial judgements. They can always be shrugged off. Even by the victims.’
‘And Querry? What of him? Superficially speaking, of course.’
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
I
In an unfamiliar region it is always necessary for the stranger to begin at once to construct the familiar, with a photograph perhaps or a row of books if they are all that he has brought with him from the past. Querry had no photographs and no books except his diary. The first morning when he was woken at six by the sound of prayers from the chapel next door, he felt the panic of complete abandonment. He lay on his back listening to the pious chant, and if there had been some magic power in his signet ring, he would have twisted it and asked whatever djinn answered him to be transferred again to that place which for want of a better name he called his home. But magic, if such a thing existed at all, was more likely to lie in the rhythmical and incomprehensible chant next door. It reminded him, like the smell of a medicine, of an illness from which he had long recovered. He blamed himself for not realizing that the area of leprosy was also the area of this other sickness. He had expected doctors and nurses: he had forgotten that he would find priests and nuns.
Deo Gratias was knocking on the door. Querry heard the scrape of his stump as it attempted to raise the latch. A pail of water hung on his wrist like a coat on a cloakroom-knob. Querry had asked Doctor Colin before engaging him whether he suffered pain, and the doctor had reassured him, answering that mutilation was the alternative to pain. It was the palsied with their stiffened fingers and strangled nerves who suffered – suffered almost beyond bearing (you heard them sometimes crying in the night), but the suffering was in some sort a protection against mutilation. Querry did not suffer, lying on his back in bed, flexing his fingers.
And so from the first morning he set himself to build a routine, the familiar within the
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