The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  Wild to solve the riddle, he made another desperate attempt to fix his thoughts. But these haunting resemblances had unnerved him; he could do nothing but worry the question where he had met plaintiff’s counsel. The name hung on the very tip of his tongue; yet would not out. A common, shoddy little man, prematurely bald, with a protruding paunch and a specious eye—he wouldn’t have trusted a fellow with an eye like that farther than he could see him. Most improperly dressed, too; wearing neither wig nor gown, but a suit of a loud, horsey check, the squares of which could have been counted from across a road.

  This get-up it was, which first made it plain to him that the case under trial had some secret connection with himself. Somehow or other he was involved. But each time, just as he thought he was nearing a clue, down would come a kind of fog and blot everything out.

  Through it, he heard what sounded like a scuffle going on. It seemed that the plaintiff was drunk, not in a fit state to give evidence. . . .though surely that was his voice protesting vehemently that he had never been the worse for drink in his life? The two cut-throats in the back seat muttered anew; others joined in; and soon the noise from these innumerable throats had risen to an ominous roar. He found himself shouting with the rest; though only later did he grasp what it was all about: they were calling for the defendant to enter the witness-box. Well, so much the better! Now at last, he would discover the hidden meaning.

  The defendant proved to be an oldish man, with straggly grey hair and whiskers, and a round back: he clambered up the steps to the witness-box, which stood high, like a pulpit, with a palpable effort. This bent back was all that could be seen of him at first, and a very humble back it looked, threadbare and shiny, though brushed meticulously free of dust and dandruff. Surely to goodness, though, he needn’t have worn his oldest suit, the one with the frayed cuffs?. . . .his second-best would have been more the thing. . . .even though the coat did sag at the shoulders. Edging forward in his seat he craned his neck; then half rose, in his determination to see the fellow’s face—and, having caught a single glimpse of it, all but lost his balance and fell, with difficulty restraining a shriek that would have pealed like the whistle of a railway-engine through the court, and have given him away. . . .beyond repair. For it was himself he saw, himself who stood there perched aloft before every eye, holding fast, with veined and wrinkled hands, to the ledge of the dock: himself who now suddenly turned and looked full at him, singling him out from all the rest. His flesh crawled, his hairs separated, while something cold and rapid as a ball of quicksilver ran from top to bottom of his spine.—Two of him? God in heaven! But this was madness. Two of him? The thing was an infamy. . . .devilish. . . .not to be borne. Which was he?

  And yet, coeval with the horror of it, ran an obscene curiosity. So this was what he looked like! This was how he presented himself to his fellow-men. Smothering his first wild fear, he took in, coldly and cruelly, every detail of the perched-up figure, whose poverty-stricken yet sorrily dandified appearance had been the signal for a burst of ribald mirth. He could hear himself laughing at the top of his lungs; especially when, after a painful effort to read a written slip that had been handed to him, his double produced a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, and shakily balanced them on the tip of his long thin nose. Ha, ha! This was good. . . .was very good. Ha, ha! A regular owl!. . . .exactly like an old owl. A zany. A figure of fun.

  Then, abruptly, his laughter died in his throat. For hark!. . . .what was this?. . . .what the. . . .! God above! he was pleading now—pleading? nay, grovelling!—begging abjectly for mercy. He whined: “Me Lud, if the case goes against me I’m a ruined man. And he has got his knife in me, me Lud!. . . .he’s made up his mind to ruin me. A hard man. . . .a cruel man!. . . .if ever there was one. Oh, spare me, me Lud!. . . .have pity on my poor wife and my two little children!” The blood surged to his head, and roared in neck and temples till he thought they would burst. Never!. . . .no, never in all his days had he sought either pity or mercy. And never, no matter what his plight, would he sink so low. The despicable sniveller! The unmanly craven!. . . .he disowned him—loathed him—spat at him in spirit: his whole being swam in hatred. But even as, pale with fury, he joined in the hyæna-like howl against clemency that was raised, a small voice whispered in his ear that his time was running short. He must get out of this place. . . .must escape. . . .save himself. . . .from the wrath to come. Be up and away, head high, leaving his ghost to wring its hands. . . .and wail. . . .and implore. Long since he had lifted his hat to his face, where he held it as if murmuring a prayer. But it was no longer the broad-brimmed wideawake he had brought with him into court; it had turned into a tall beaver belltopper, of a mode at least twenty years old, and too narrow to conceal his face. He tossed it from him as, frantic with the one desire, he pushed and struggled to get out, treading on people’s feet, crushing past their knees—oh! was there no end to their number, or to the rows of seats through which he had to fight his way?. . . .his legs growing heavier and heavier, more incapable of motion. And then. . . .just when he thought he was safe. . . .he heard his own name spoken: heard it said aloud, not once but many times, and, damnation take it! by none other than old Muir the laryngologist, that pitiful old fossil, that infernal old busybody, dead long since, who it seemed had been in court throughout the proceedings and now recognised him, and stood pointing at him. Again a shout rose in unison, but this time it was his name they called, and therewith they were up and on his heels, and the hue and cry had begun in earnest. He fled down Little Bourke Street, and round and up Little Collins Street, running like a hare, but with steadily failing strength, drawing sobbing breaths that hurt like blows; but holding his left hand fast to his breast-pocket, where he had the knife concealed. His ears rang with that most terrifying of mortal sounds: the wolf-like howl of a mob that chases human game and sees its prey escaping it. For he was escaping; he would have got clean away if, of a sudden, Mary and the children had not stood before him. In a row. . . .a third child, too. He out with his knife. . . .now he knew what it was for! But a shrill scream stayed his hand. . . .who screamed? who screamed?. . . .and with such stridency. Mary. . . .it could only be Mary who would so deliberately foul his chances. For this one second’s delay was his undoing. Some one dashed up behind and got him by the shoulder, and was bearing him down, and shaking, shaking, shaking. . . .while a fierce voice shrieked in his ear: “Richard!. . . .oh, Richard, do wake up! You’ll terrify the children. Oh, what dreadful dream have you been having?”

  And it was broad daylight, the mill-whistle in full blast, and he sitting up in bed shouting, and drenched in sweat. The night was over, a new day begun, in which had to be faced, not the lurid phantasmagoria of a dream-world that faded at a touch, but the stern, bare horrors of reality, from which there was no awakening.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The facts of the case, brought to light by vigorous action on Mary’s part, were these. The boy had been removed to the Oakworth hospital, where he was to be examined. Only when this was done could the surgeon in charge say whether there was any possibility of correcting the malunion, by re-breaking and re-setting the limb; or whether the patient would have to remain in his present degree of shortness. He hoped to let them know in about three days’ time. It might, of course, be less.

  “There’s nothing for it; we must have patience,” said Mary grimly and with determination, as she re-folded the telegram and laid it back on the table.

  Patience? Yes, yes; that went without saying; and Mahony continued to feign busyness with pencil and paper till the door had shut behind her.

  Alone, he fell limply back in his chair. So this was it. . . .this was what it had come to! His fate had passed out of his own keeping. Another—a man his junior by several years—would sit in judgment on him, decide whether or no he was competent to continue practising the profession to which he had given up the best years of his life. In the course of the next three days.—Three days. What
were three days?. . . .in a lifetime of fifty years. A flea-bite; a single tick of time’s clock. An infinitesimal fragment chipped off time’s plenty, and for the most part squandered unthinkingly. In the ecstasy of happiness—or to the prisoner condemned to mount the scaffold—a breath, a flash of light, gone even as it came.—Three days! To one on the rack to learn whether or no he was to be found guilty of professional negligence, with its concomitants of a court of law, publicity, disgrace; to such a one, three days were as unthinkable as infinity: a chain of hours of torture, each a lifetime in itself.

  For long he sat motionless, wooden as the furniture around him; sat and stared at the whitewashed walls till he felt that, if he did not get out from between them, they might end by closing in on him and crushing him. Pushing back his chair he rose and left the house, heading in the direction of the railway station: never again would he cross the Lagoon path to show his face in the township. From the station he struck off on a bush track. This was heavy with mud; for it had rained in torrents towards morning: the hammering of the downpour on the iron roof no doubt accounted for some of the sinister noises of which his dream had been full. Now, the day was fine: a cool breeze swung the drooping leaves; the cloudless sky had deepened to its rich winter blue. But to him the very freshness and beauty of the morning seemed a mockery, the blue sky cruel as a pall. For there was a blackness under his lids, which gave the lie to all he saw.

  He trudged on, with the sole idea of somehow getting through the day. . . .of killing time. And as he went he mused ironically, on the shifts mortals were put to, the ruses they employed, to rid themselves of this precious commodity, which alone stood between them and an open grave.

  Then, abruptly, he stopped, and uttering an exclamation swung round and made for home. It might, of course, be less. Who knew, who knew? By this time it was just possible that another telegram had arrived, and that he was tormenting himself needlessly. Was he not omitting to allow for the fellow-feeling of a brother medico, who, suspecting something of what he was enduring, might hasten to put him out of suspense? (How his own heart would have bled for such a one!) And so he pushed forward, covering the way back in half the time, and only dropping his speed as he neared the gate. For the children sat at lessons in the dining-room, and three pairs of eyes looked up on his approach. At the front door he paused to dry his forehead, before stepping into the passage where the life-giving message might await him. But the tray on the hall-table was empty; empty, too, the table in the surgery. His heart, which had been palpitating wildly, sank to normal; and simultaneously an immense lassitude overcame him. But without a moment’s hesitation he turned on his heel and went out again. . . .with stealthy, cat-like tread. The last thing he wanted to do was to attract Mary’s attention.

  He retraced his steps. But now so tired was he that every hundred yards or so he found himself obliged to sit down, in order to get strength to proceed. But not for long: there was a demon in him that would not let him rest; which drove him up and on till, in the end, he was seized and spun by a fit of the old vertigo, and had to throw his arms round a tree-trunk to keep from falling. “Drunk again!. . . .drunk again.”

  He was done for. . . .played out. Home he dragged once more, sitting by the wayside when the giddy fits took him, or holding fast to the palings of a fence. It was one o’clock and dinner-time when he reached the house. Well! in any case, he would not have dared to absent himself from the table. (Oh God, on such a day to have been free and unobserved!)

  But he had over-rated his powers of endurance. The children’s prating, Mary’s worried glances in his direction, the clatter of the dishes, Zara’s megrims: all this, the ordinary humdrum of a meal, proved more than his sick nerves could bear. His usual weary boredom with the ritual of eating turned to loathing: of every word that was said, every movement of fork to mouth, of the very crockery on the table. Half-way through, he tossed his napkin from him, pushed his chair back, and broke from the room.

  To go out again was beyond him. Entering the surgery, he took his courage in both hands; and, not with his nerves alone, but with every muscle at a strain, braced himself to meet the slow torture that awaited him, the refined torture of physical inaction; the trail of which may be as surely blood-streaked as that from an open wound. With his brain on fire, his body bound to the rack, he sat and watched the hands of the clock crawl from one to two, from two to three and three to four; and the ticking of the pendulum, and the beat of his own pulses, combined to form a rhythm—a conflicting rhythm—which well-nigh drove him crazy. As the afternoon advanced, however, there came moments when, with his head bedded on his arms, he lapsed into a kind of coma; never so deeply though, but what his mind leapt into awareness at the smallest sound without. And all through, whether he waked or slept, something in him, inarticulate as a banshee, never ceased to weep and lament. . . .to wail without words, weep without tears.

  Later on, a new torture threatened; and this was the coming blast of the mill-whistle. For a full hour beforehand he sat anticipating it: sat with fingers stiffly interlocked, temples a-hammer, waiting for the moment when it should set in. Nor was this all. As the minute-hand ticked the last hour away, stark terror seized him lest, when the screech began, he, too, should not be able to help shrieking; but should be forced to let out, along with it, in one harsh and piercing cry, the repressed, abominable agony of the afternoon. At two minutes to the hour he was on his feet, going round the table like a maddened animal, wringing his hands and moaning under his breath: it is too much. . . .I am not strong enough. . . .my God, I implore Thee, let this cup pass! And now, so sick and dazed with fear was he, that he could no longer distinguish between the murderous din that was about to break loose, and the catastrophe that had befallen his life. When, finally, the hour struck, the whistle discharged, and the air was all one brazen clamour, he broke down and wept, the tears dripping off his face. But no sound escaped him.

  Supper time.—He wanted none; was not hungry; asked only to be left in peace. And since Mary, desperate, too, after her own fashion, could not make up her mind to this, but came again and yet again, bringing the lamp, bringing food to tempt him, he savagely turned the key in the lock.

  Thereafter, all was still: the quiet of night descended on the house. Here, in this blissful silence, he took his decision. Numbed to the heart though he was—over the shrilling of the siren something in him had cracked, had broken—he knew what he had to do. Another day like this, and he would not be answerable for himself. There was an end to everything. . . .and his end had come.

  Mary, stealing back to remind him that it was close on midnight, found him stooped over a tableful of books and papers. “Don’t wait for me. I’m busy. . . .shall be some time yet.”

  Relieved beyond the telling to find his door no longer shut against her, and him thus normally employed, she put her arm round his shoulders and laid her head against his. “But not too late, Richard. You must be so tired.” Herself she felt sick and dizzy with anxiety, with fatigue. It was not only what had happened, but the way Richard was taking it. . . .his secrecy. . . .his morbid self-communing. God help him!. . . .help them all.

  Desperately Mahony fought down the impulse to throw off her hampering arm, to cry out, to her face, the truth: go away. . . .go away! I have done with you! And no sooner had the bedroom door shut behind her than he brushed aside his brazen pretence at work—it would have deceived no one but Mary—and fell to making the few necessary preparations. Chief of these was the detaching of a couple of keys from his bunch of keys, and laying them in a conspicuous place. After which he sat and waited, for what he thought a reasonable time, cold as a stone with fear lest she, somehow sensing his intention, should come back to hinder him. But nothing happened; and cautiously unlatching the door, he listened out into the passage. Not a mouse stirred. Now was the time! Opening the French window he stepped on to the verandah. But it had begun to rain again; a soft, steady rain; and some obscu
re instinct drove him back to get his greatcoat. This hung in the passage; and had to be fetched in jerks—a series of jerks and pauses. But at last he had it, and could creep up the yard and out of the back gate.

  His idea was, to get as far from the house as possible. . . .perhaps even to follow the bush track he had been on that morning. (That morning only? It seemed more like a century ago.) But the night was pitch dark: more than once he caught his foot, tripped and stumbled. So, groping his way along outside the palings of the fence, and the fence of the mill yard, he skirted these, and doubled back on the Lagoon. To the right of the pond stood a clump of fir-trees, shading the ruins of what had once been an arbour. It was for these trees he made: an instinctive urge for shelter again carrying the day.

  Arrived there, he flung himself at full length on the wet and slimy ground. (No need now, to take thought for tic or rheumatism, or the other bodily ills that had plagued him.) And for a time he did no more than lie and exult in the relief this knowledge brought him—this sense of freedom from all things human. Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the strangle-coils in which money and money-making had wound him, nor Mary’s inroads on his life, nor the deadening responsibilities of fatherhood. Now, at long last, he was answerable to himself alone.

  But gradually this feeling died away, and an extraordinary lucidity took its place. And in his new clearness of vision he saw that his bloodiest struggle that day had been, not with the thing itself, but with what hid it from him. Which was Time. He had set up Time as his bugbear, made of it an implacable foe, solely to hinder his mind from reaching out to what lay beyond. That, he could not face and live. He saw it now, and was dying of it: dying of a mortal wound to the most vital part of him—his pride. . . .his black Irish pride. That he, who had held himself so fastidiously aloof from men, should be forced down into the market-place, there to suffer an intolerable notoriety; to know his name on people’s lips. . . .see it dragged through the mud of the daily press. . . .himself branded as a bungler, a botcher! God! no: the mere imagining of it nauseated him. Dead, infinitely better dead, and out of it all! Life and its savagery put off, like a garment that had served its turn. Then, let tongues wag as they might, he would not be there to hear. In comparison, his death by his own hand would make small stir. A day’s excitement, and he would pass forever into limbo; take his place among those pale ghosts of whose earth-life every trace is lost. None would miss him, or mourn his passing—thanks to his own noli me tangere attitude towards the rest of mankind. For there had been no real love in him: never a feeler thrown out to his fellow-men. Such sympathy as he felt, he had been too backward to show: had given of it only in thought, and from afar. Pride, again!—oh! rightly was a pride like his reckoned among the seven capital sins. For what was it, but an iron determination to live untouched and untrammelled. . . .to preserve one’s liberty, of body and of mind, at the expense of all human sentiment. To be sufficient unto oneself, asking neither help nor regard, and spending none. A fierce, Lucifer-like inhibition. Yes, this. . . .but more besides. Pride also meant the shuddering withdrawal of oneself, because of a rawness. . . .a skinlessness. . . .on which the touch of any rough hand could cause agony; even the chance contacts of everyday prove a source of exquisite discomfort.