Part 36 (1/2)

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 fas.h.i.+on.

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