The Inferno Part 16

He calmed himself, and began to converse with the doctor, who let himself down squarely into a chair, with an affable manner. He started several topics, then in spite of himself returned to the sinister thing he carried within him, his disease.

"Disgusting!" he said.

"Bah!" said the doctor, who was blase.

Then he rose.

"Well, till to-morrow!"

"Yes, for the consultation."

"Yes. Well, good-by!"

The doctor went out, lightly carrying the burden of misery and cruel memories, the weight of which he had ceased to feel.

Evidently the consulting physicians had just finished their examination of the patient in another room. The door opened, and two doctors entered.

Their manner seemed to me to be stiff. One of them was a young man, the other an old man.

They looked at each other. I tried to penetrate the silence of their eyes and the night in their heads. The older man stroked his beard, leaned against the mantelpiece, and stared at the ground.

"Hopeless," he said, lowering his voice, for fear of being overheard by the patient.

The other nodded his head--in sign of agreement--of complicity, you might say. Both men fell silent like two guilty children. Their eyes met again.

"How old is he?"

"Fifty-three."

"Lucky to live so long," the young doctor remarked.

To which the old man retorted philosophically:

"Yes, indeed. But his luck won't hold out any longer."

A silence. The man with the grey beard murmured:

"I detected sarcoma." He put his finger on his neck. "Right here."

The other man nodded--his head seemed to be nodding continually--and muttered:

"Yes. There's no possibility of operating."

"Of course not," said the old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. "There's only one thing that could remove it--the guillotine. Besides, the malignant condition has spread. There is pressure upon the submaxillary and subclavicular ganglia, and probably the axillary ganglia also. His respiration, circulation and digestion will soon be obstructed and strangulation will be rapid."

He sighed and stood with an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his face rigid, his arms folded. The young man sat down, leaning back in his chair, and tapped the marble mantelpiece with his idle fingers.

"What shall I tell the young woman?"

"Put on a subdued manner and tell her it is serious, very serious, but no one can tell, nature is infinitely resourceful."

"That's so hackneyed."

"So much the better," said the old man.

"But if she insists on knowing?"

"Don't give in."

"Shall we not hold out a little hope? She is so young."

"No. For that very reason we mustn't. She'd become too hopeful. My boy, never say anything superfluous at such a time. There's no use.

The only result is to make them call us ignoramuses and hate us."

"Does he realise?"

"I do not know. While I examined him--you heard--I tried to find out by asking questions. Once I thought he had no suspicion at all. Then he seemed to understand his case as well as I did."

"Sarcoma forms like the human embryo," said the younger doctor.

"Yes, like the human embryo," the other a.s.sented and entered into a long elaboration of this idea.

"The germ acts on the cell, as Lancereaux has pointed out, in the same way as a spermatozoon. It is a micro-organism which penetrates the tissue, and selects and impregnates it, sets it vibrating, gives it /another life./ But the exciting agent of this intracellular activity, instead of being the normal germ of life, is a parasite."

He went on to describe the process minutely and in highly scientific terms, and ended up by saying:

"The cancerous tissue never achieves full development. It keeps on without ever reaching a limit. Yes, cancer, in the strictest sense of the word, is infinite in our organism."

The young doctor bowed a.s.sent, and then said:

"Perhaps--no doubt--we shall succeed in time in curing all diseases.

Everything can change. We shall find the proper method for preventing what we cannot stop when it has once begun. And it is then only that we shall dare to tell the ravages due to the spread of incurable diseases. Perhaps we shall even succeed in finding cures for certain incurable affections. The remedies have not had time to prove themselves. We shall cure others--that is certain--but we shall not cure him." His voice deepened. Then he asked:

"Is he a Russian or a Greek?"

"I do not know. I see so much into the inside of people that their outsides all look alike to me."

"They are especially alike in their vile pretense of being dissimilar and enemies."

The young man seemed to shudder, as if the idea aroused a kind of pa.s.sion in him. He rose, full of anger, changed.

"Oh," he said, "what a disgraceful spectacle humanity presents. In spite of its fearful wounds, humanity makes war upon humanity. We who deal with the sores afflicting mankind are struck more than others by all the evil men involuntarily inflict upon one another. I am neither a politician nor a propagandist. It is not my business to occupy myself with ideas. I have too much else to do. But sometimes I am moved by a great pity, as lofty as a dream. Sometimes I feel like punishing men, at other times, like going down on my knees to them."

The old doctor smiled sadly at this vehemence, then his smile vanished at the thought of the undeniable outrage.

"Unfortunately you are right. With all the misery we have to suffer, we tear ourselves with our own hands besides--the war of the cla.s.ses, the war of the nations, whether you look at us from afar or from above, we are barbarians and madmen."