Simon the Jester Part 36

CHAPTER XVI

It is many weeks since I wrote those words which I thought were to be my last. I read them over now, and laugh aloud. Life is more devilishly humorous than I in my most nightmare dreams ever imagined. Instead of dying at Mentone as I proposed, I am here, at Mustapha Superieur, still living. And let me tell you the master joke of the Arch-Jester.

I am going to live.

I am not going to die. I am going to live. I am quite well.

Think of it. Is it farcical, comical, tragical, or what?

This is how it has befallen. The last thing I remember of the old conditions was Rogers packing my things, and a sudden, awful, excruciating agony. I lost consciousness, remained for days in a bemused, stupefied state, which I felt convinced was death, and found particularly pleasant. At last I woke to a sense of bodily constriction and discomfort, and to the queer realisation that what I had taken for the Garden of Prosperpine was my own bedroom, and that the pale lady whom I had so confidently a.s.sumed was she who, crowned with calm leaves, "gathers all things mortal with cold, immortal hands" was no other than a blue-and-white-vested hospital nurse.

"What the----" I began.

"Chut!" she said, flitting noiselessly to my side. "You mustn't talk."

And then she poured something down my throat. I lay back, wondering what it all meant. Presently a grizzled and tanned man, wearing a narrow black tie, came into the room. His face seemed oddly familiar. The nurse whispered to him. He came up to the bed, and asked me in French how I felt.

"I don't know at all," said I.

He laughed. "That's a good sign. Let me see how you are getting on."

He stuck a thermometer in my mouth and held my pulse. These formalities completed, he turned up the bedclothes and did something with my body.

Only then did I realise that I was tightly bandaged. My impressions grew clearer, and when he raised his face I recognised the doctor who had sat on the sofa with Anastasius Papadopoulos.

"Nothing could be better," said he. "Keep quiet, and all will be well."

"Will you kindly explain?" I asked.

"You've had an operation. Also a narrow escape."

I smiled at him pityingly. "What is the good of taking all this trouble?

Why are you wasting your time?"

He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then he laughed as the light came to him.

"Oh, I understand! Yes. Your English doctors had told you you were going to die. That an operation would be fatal--so your good friend Madame Brandt informed us--but we--_nous autres Francais_--are more enterprising. Kill or cure. We performed the operation--we didn't kill you--and here you are--cured."

My heart sickened with a horrible foreboding. A clamminess, such as others feel at the approach of death, spread over my brow and neck.

"Good G.o.d!" I cried, "you are not trying to tell me that I'm going to live?"

"Why, of course I am!" he exclaimed, brutally delighted. "If nothing else kills you, you'll live to be a hundred."

"Oh, d.a.m.n!" said I. "Oh, d.a.m.n! Oh, d.a.m.n!" and the tears of physical weakness poured down my cheeks.

"_Ce sont des droles de gens, les Anglais_!" I heard him whisper to the nurse before he left the room.

Belonging to a queer folk or not, I found the prospect more and more dismally appalling according as my mind regained its clarity. It was the most overwhelming, piteous disappointment I have ever experienced in my life. I cursed in my whimpering, invalid fashion.

"But don't you want to get well?" asked the wide-eyed nurse.

"Certainly not! I thought I was dead, and I was very happy. I've been tricked and cheated and fooled," and I dashed my fist against the counterpane.

"If you go on in this way," said the nurse, "you will commit suicide."

"I don't care!" I cried--and then, they tell me, fainted. My temperature also ran up, and I became lightheaded again. It was not until the next day that I recovered my sanity. This time Lola was in the room with the nurse, and after a while the latter left us together. Even Lola could not understand my paralysing dismay.

"But think of it, my dear friend," she argued, "just think of it. You are saved--saved by a miracle. The doctor says you will be stronger than you have ever been before."

"All the more dreadful will it be," said I. "I had finished with life.

I had got through with it. I don't want a second lifetime. One is quite enough for any sane human being. Why on earth couldn't they have let me die?"

Lola pa.s.sed her cool hand over my forehead.

"You mustn't talk like that--Simon," she said, in her deepest and most caressing voice, using my name somewhat hesitatingly, for the first time. "You mustn't. A miracle really has been performed. You've been raised from the dead--like the man in the Gospel----"

"Yes," said I petulantly, "Lazarus. And does the Gospel tell us what Lazarus really thought of the unwarrantable interference with his plans?

Of course he had to be polite--"

"Oh, don't!" cried, Lola, shocked. In a queer unenlightened way, she was a religious woman.

"I'm sorry," said I, feeling ashamed of myself.

"If you knew how I have prayed G.o.d to make you well," she said. "If I could have died for you, I would--gladly--gladly----"

"But I wanted to die, my dear Lola," I insisted, with the egotism of the sick. "I object to this resuscitation. I say it is monstrous that I should have to start a second lifetime at my age. It's all very well when you begin at the age of half a minute--but when you begin at eight-and-thirty years----"

"You have all the wisdom of eight-and-thirty years to start with."

"There is only one thing more disastrous to a man than the wisdom of thirty-eight years," I declared with mulish inconvincibility, "and that is the wisdom he may acc.u.mulate after that age."

She sighed and abandoned the argument. "We are going to make you well in spite of yourself," she said.

They, namely, the doctor, the nurse, and Lola, have done their best, and they have succeeded. But their task has been a hard one. The patient's will to live is always a great factor in his recovery. My disgust at having to live has impeded my convalescence, and I fully believe that it is only Lola's tears and the doctor's frenzied appeals to me not to destroy the one chance of his life of establishing a brilliant professional reputation that have made me consent to face existence again.

As for the doctor, he was pathetically insistent.

"But you must get well!" he gesticulated. "I am going to publish it, your operation. It will make my fortune. I shall at last be able to leave this hole of an Algiers and go to Paris! You don't know what I've done for you! I've performed an operation on you that has never been performed successfully before. I thought it had been done, but I found out afterwards my English _confreres_ were right. It hasn't. I've worked a miracle in surgery, and by my publication will make you as the subject of it famous for ever. And here you are trying to die and ruin everything. I ask you--have you no human feelings left?"

At the conclusion of these lectures I would sigh and laugh, and stretch out a thin hand. He shook it always with a humorous grumpiness which did me more good than the prospect of acquiring fame in the annals of the _Ecole de Medicine_.

Here am I, however, cured. I have thrown away the stick with which I first began to limp about the garden, and I discourage Lola and Rogers in their efforts to treat me as an invalid. Like the doctor, I have been longing to escape from "this hole of an Algiers" and its painful a.s.sociations, and, when I was able to leave my room, it occurred to me that the sooner I regained my strength the sooner should I be able to do so. Since then my recovery has been rapid. The doctor is delighted, and slaps me on the back, and points me out to Lola and the manager and the concierge and the h.o.a.ry old sinner of an Arab who displays his daggers, and trays, and embroideries on the terrace, as a living wonder. I believe he would like to put me in a cage and carry me about with him in Paris on exhibition. But he is reluctantly prepared to part with me, and has consented to my return in a few days' time, to England, by the North German Lloyd steamer. He has ordered the sea voyage as a finishing touch to my cure. Good, deluded man, he thinks that it is his fortuitous science that has dragged me out of the Valley of the Shadow and set me in the Garden of Life. Good, deluded man! He does not realise that he has been merely the tool of the Arch-Jester. He has no notion of the sardonic joke his knife was chosen to perpetrate. That naked we should come into the world, and naked we should go out is a time-honoured pleasantry which, as far as the latter part of it is concerned, I did my conscientious best to further; but that we should come into it again naked at the age of eight-and-thirty is a piece of irony too grim for contemplation. Yet am I bound to contemplate it. It grins me in the face. Figuratively, I am naked.

Partly by my own act, and partly with the help of Destiny (the greater jester than I) I have stripped myself of all these garments of life which not only enabled me to strut peac.o.c.k-fashion in the pleasant places of the world, but also sheltered me from its inclemencies.

I had wealth--not a Rothschild or Vanderbilt fortune but enough to a.s.sure me ease and luxury. I have stripped myself of it. I have but a beggarly sum remaining at my bankers. Practically I am a pauper.

I had political position. I surrendered it as airily as I had achieved it; so airily, indeed, that I doubt whether I could regain it even had I the ambition. For it was a game that I played, sometimes fascinating, sometimes repugnant to my fastidious sense of honourable dealing, for which I shall never recapture the mood. Mood depends on conditions, and conditions, as I am trying to show, are changed.

I had social position. I did not deceive myself as to its value in the cosmic scheme, but it was one of the pleasant things to which I was born, just as I was born to good food and wines and unpatched boots and the morning hot water brought into my bedroom. I liked it. I suspect that it has fled into eternity with the spirit of Captain Vauvenarde.