A Burnt Out Case Read Online Free Page A

unfamiliar. It was the condition of survival. Every morning at seven he breakfasted with the fathers. They drifted into their common-room from whatever task they had been engaged on for the last hour, since the chanting had ceased. Father Paul with Brother Philippe was in charge of the dynamo which supplied electricity to the Mission and the leper village; Father Jean had been saying Mass at the nuns’ house; Father Joseph had already started the labourers to work on clearing the ground for the new hospital; Father Thomas, with eyes sunk like stones in the pale clay of his face, swallowed his coffee in a hurry, like a nauseating medicine, and was off to superintend the two schools. Brother Philippe sat silent, taking no part in any conversation: he was older than the fathers, he could speak nothing but Flemish and he had the kind of face which seems worn away by weather and patience. As the faces began to develop features as negatives do in a hypo-bath, Querry separated himself all the more from their company. He was afraid of the questions they might ask, until he began to realize that, like the priests in the seminary on the river, they were going to ask none of any importance. Even the questions they found necessary were phrased like statements – ‘On Sundays a bus calls here at six-thirty if you wish to go to Mass’ – and Querry was not required to answer that he had given up attending Mass more than twenty years before. His absence was never remarked.
    After breakfast he would take a book he had borrowed from the doctor’s small library and go down to the bank of the river. It had widened out in this reach and was nearly a mile across. An old tin barge, rusty with long disuse, enabled him to avoid the ants; and he sat there until the sun, soon after nine, became too high for comfort. Sometimes he read, sometimes he simply watched the steady khaki flow of the stream, which carried little islands of grass and water jacinth endlessly down at the pace of crawling taxis, out of the heart of Africa, towards the far-off sea.
    On the other shore the great trees, with roots above the ground like the ribs of a half-built ship, stood out over the green jungle wall, brown at the top like stale cauliflowers. The cold grey trunks, unbroken by branches, curved a little this way and a little that, giving them a kind of reptilian life. Porcelain-white birds stood on the backs of coffee-coloured cows, and once for a whole hour he watched a family who sat in a pirogue by the bank doing nothing; the mother wore a bright yellow dress, the man, wrinkled like bark, sat bent over a paddle he never used, and a girl with a baby on her lap smiled and smiled like an open piano. When it was too hot to sit any longer in the sunlight he joined the doctor at the hospital or the dispensary, and when that was over half the day had safely gone. He no longer felt nausea from anything he saw, and the bottle of ether was not required. After a month he spoke to the doctor.
    ‘You are very short-handed, aren’t you, for dealing with eight hundred people?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘If I could be of any use to you – I know I am not trained . . .’
    ‘You will be leaving soon, won’t you?’
    ‘I have no plans.’
    ‘Have you any knowledge of electro-therapy?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You could be trained, if you were interested. Six months in Europe.’
    ‘I don’t want to return to Europe,’ Querry said.
    ‘Never?’
    ‘Never. I am afraid to return.’ The phrase sounded in his own ears melodramatic and he tried to withdraw it. ‘I don’t mean afraid. Just for this reason and that.’
    The doctor ran his fingers over the patches on a child’s back. To the unpractised eye the child looked perfectly healthy. ‘This is going to be a bad case,’ Doctor Colin said. ‘Feel this.’
    Querry’s hesitation was no more perceptible than the leprosy. At first his fingers detected nothing, but then they stumbled on places where the child’s skin seemed to