The Centre of the Green Read Online Free Page A

could be in them then but a barbiturate? If he were to take more than two—if he were to take the lot…. He fetched the pills from the drawer of his bedside table, opened the little round box, and tipped them into the palm of his hand. There were eleven. If he wanted to, he could take eleven.
    There they were, pink against the pinky brown of his palm. They looked like toys, and seemed to have no weight. He would not take them all. There was no question of that. Thinking about a thing and doing it were two very different matters. But if he were to take—just two, say—it would kill the evening and the night, and nobody could object to that. To kill the evening—not to be bored, not to be by himself, not to be conscious, not to be alive——No, that was false reasoning; not to be alive
for a while
, but to wake up later to a new day, the possibility of some new happening, the possibility of discovering , of just simply knowing what on earth was the point of it all, and why people bothered. He took one of the pills and then another, washing them down with tonic water. Then temptation came. It came as curiosity. Temptation—nothing to do with the lusts of the flesh, just wanting to know, wanting to know what would happen it you took a bite out of that bloody apple, if youswallowed another pill. He put another of the pills on his tongue, and cradled it there on the tip. Then he bit into it. It tasted rather nasty; no wonder they covered them with pink stuff. He drank some more tonic, and took a fourth pill. This was ridiculous. Dangerous. Furtive—a kind of self-abuse in a darkened room. Anyway, the damage was done. After four pills, he’d be very ill indeed , and never able to explain it away. No explanations. Suddenly he crammed all the last seven pills into his mouth at once, swallowing them with difficulty, and feeling each one as a separate bump in his gullet. Then he took his coat and shoes off, lay down on the bed, and fell almost instantly asleep. When he awoke, he was in hospital.
    *
    The long wards were set off at right angles to the hospital corridors, so many feet between each ward. Within the wards the beds faced each other, ranged at right angles to the side walls, so many feet between each bed. The walls were painted white in glossy paint (which reflects the light), and large windows were set in them, so many feet between each window. Each bed within each ward was of the same length, just too short for an unusually tall man. Above each bed was its own reading light, to the right its own locker, resting on each locker, its own pair of earphones, all of them tuned in at the same time to the same programme of the B.B.C., which was sometimes the Home, usually the Light, but never the Third. Each bed had an iron framework painted black, and red blankets, and white sheets. Each had one chair beside it for the use of visitors, who were allowed into the ward during Visiting Hours at the rate of not more than two visitors for each patient. Extra chairs might be brought from the centre of the ward, where they were set symmetrically around the wooden table which always stood there.
    In the ceiling of each ward was a pattern of curtain rails made of polished brass. These allowed the hospital staff to isolate any bed from its fellows by drawing round it a curtain of coarse red cloth. By day such isolation would be complete, but at night, when all the individual reading lights had been switched off and the B.B.C. was silent, a light within the red curtains would allow the wakeful patients of the ward to see in silhouette all that went on inside. It was like the sort of comic turn that Boy Scouts perform at village concerts, when a shadow surge on removes from the belly of a shadow patient such incongruous articles as hacksaws, bicycle chains and long strings of sausages. On his first night in hospital, Charles himself watched such a performance. He watched a man die.
    Sharp-eyed in the dark, the watching patients saw a