‘Not at all,’ he murmured reassuringly, glancing up at his visitor, ‘please be quite comfortable about that, and go on with what you were telling me. As I say, this is not my usual consulting hour; and as a matter of fact my partner, Dr Herbert Scott, is attending to my patients for the next few days. You would find him this evening at Drayton House – No. no – a little further down the hill. But don’t let that concern you now. You were complaining of physical lassitude, general malaise?’
His voice was low and unanimated, but he pronounced his words with precision, his rather full red lips moving beneath his square-cut beard. The eyes of the two of them met for an instant, and the doctor looked away.
‘It’s exceedingly kind of you,’ his visitor demurred. ‘And – well, that is really my trouble. But, as I was saying, it’s not exactly physical. Indeed,’ he added, as if in disappointment that there should be so little to tell, ‘there appears to be precious little actually wrong with me; nothing much more, I mean, than what is usual in these days and at my age, I suppose. It is merely this detestable listlessness of mind; this loss of mental appetite. And I had a wonderful digestion once!’ He smiled at this wintry ghost of a joke. ‘The fact is I can’t regain my grip on things. It is as though whatever I do or think or say – or feel for that matter – serves no purpose, is no manner of use – to myself, I mean. And yet, my friends talk to me much as usual. Nobody seems to have noticed anything wrong. They haven’t said so. But then we don’t, do we? I wonder at times, doctor, if it is not because we daren’t. There must be many of us, surely, in much the same state.
‘I am, as I say, a writer, an author by profession. I scribble a good deal for the magazines, fiction chiefly.’ The dark eyebrows raised themselves above the intently dark and smallish eyes. ‘As a matter of fact my name is Pritchard,’ he explained. ‘You may just possibly have come across it somewhere.’
‘I know the name,’ said Dr Lidgett discreetly, ‘but I could not perhaps definitely connect it with anything I have actually read. But then I have little time for reading.’
‘No, no, no, of course not,’ his visitor hastened to reassure him. ‘I didn’t mean that; it was only that nowadays we can hardly help to some extent taking in one another’s washing, so to speak. On the other hand, of course, fiction is read almost solely by women – a sort of stimulant, or sedative perhaps. I mentioned it merely because, I suppose, one’s occupation counts. Not that I claim, thank heaven, to be a victim of the artistic temperament; as a matter of fact I’m not up to that standard. Far from it.’ He smiled again, looking the while more haggard and lifeless than ever.
‘But that’s how I stand. What I mean is this – that, so far as I know, lungs, heart, liver, and all that, are sound enough – as sound at least as one would expect at my age. I was examined not so very long ago either. It’s rather my nerves, my-self, you know. Not that there is anything definitely, organically wrong with my mind, I mean, either, I hope. At least I hope not.’ He smiled – a smile almost lustrous in its intensity. ‘Not at least in the usual meaning of the word.’
Dr Lidgett gazed steadily at this naïve yet receptive and highly-animated face. He too smiled, but as if at such moments it was customary to do so. ‘It is exceedingly unlikely,’ he agreed, ‘that you would have come to me if that had been the case. Not at all. Were you recommended to see me – personally?’
‘No, oh no. I haven’t even that excuse. I was passing; I was walking along the street, not going anywhere in particular, of course; and I caught sight of the brass plate and the lamp. One is foolish perhaps to obey these vague impulses. It isn’t quite fair. But … Somehow it seemed, there’s your chance. I read the names – as I say – and my only fear was that this might be Dr Scott’s. I wanted to see you, Dr Lidgett: I don’t know why. But there, I am only worsening my case,’ he stirred in his chair, groped for his hat, ‘I see I am detaining you. Let me come again another time.’
If Dr Lidgett felt any impatience with so hesitant a visitor, his sober unmoving countenance showed not a trace of it. ‘Please go on: I am anxious to hear,’ he said, though his words sounded as if they were more unwilling than usual to come at the moment’s call. ‘Tell me precisely what these nervous or mental symptoms are. Is your memory fairly good for example – names, dates, words and so on? Do you find it difficult to fix your attention – to concentrate? Have you any worry? Is there any particular thing continually on your mind? Are your thoughts interrupted, I mean, as if without cause?’
‘I don’t hear voices, or anything of that kind,’ said his visitor. ‘No more, I mean, than one should in doing my particular kind of work. My memory is remarkably good – for what I need. And I can concentrate on what I really want to do. What more do I ask?’
The blank face with which he put this question resembled Grimaldi’s at his most melancholy; it was at the same time so empty, so forlorn and so ineffectual. ‘Literally nothing, doctor, except to say that there is no purpose in what I do. It is lifeless, inert; the bottom’s knocked out of it. No use at all; except, of course, for what it brings in – the merely practical side of it.’
‘Have you – any family?’ enquired the doctor. Indeed he almost blurted the question in his quiet fashion, as if it were one not entirely to his liking, too intrusive and personal.
‘None whatever,’ was the reply. Mr Pritchard in fact looked slightly astonished at being asked anything so commonplace, as if he had been unexpectedly presented with an aspect of life which he had never paused to consider. ‘I live with my mother,’ he said. ‘She is an old lady now. Hale still, but a little deaf, and apt to repeat herself. We spend a great deal of time together. But lately she has not been so well as I could wish. Have you ever repeated that phrase – “failing health” – over to yourself? Tennyson, you know, used to say under his breath “Alfred, Alfred, Alfred” until he became like a shell with the wind in it – empty. But I say instead, “In failing health – in failing health – in failing health” – the meaning intensifies, doctor, the longer you brood on it. But that of course is not what you were asking. Besides, I doubt if any kind of responsibility – wife and children and so on – that kind of thing – would make much difference. I haven’t noticed it in other men. It might even complicate matters, mightn’t it?’ But Dr Lidgett, on his side, appeared not to have considered this problem; and his visitor pressed on.
‘To tell you the honest truth,’ he said, ‘I have come to the end of things. For me, the spirit, the meaning – whatever you like to call it – has vanished, gone clean out of the world, out of what we call reality. At least for me. It’s nothing but a husk; and a dried-up husk at that. It may sound pompous and affected, but, try as I may, I can no longer see any purpose in it all, even if I ever did. You may retort,’ he interrupted himself eagerly – ‘you may retort: “But, then, who does?” But then, you see, there is all the difference between not seeing a purpose in life because you haven’t looked for one; and being sure there is no purpose when you have.
‘Besides, what right have we to assume there is a purpose? What justification? The palaver! I remember not many months ago – I had been in bed for a few days with a chill – I woke up one afternoon and found my eyes fixed on the window – autumn trees, a quiet blue sky, a few late swallows, twilight coming: and at that moment as if in divination I knew there was no purpose. I wanted nothing; so there was nothing to want … A tale told by an idiot – signifying nothing. What if Shakespeare himself meant that?’
Dr Lidgett glanced covertly away from his visitor. Nobody could have gathered from his quiet solemn eyes if he considered even Shakespearean convictions of final validity, or even if he needed any evidence in the matter. Their expression was absent and yet mournful, as if they were fixed on the ghost or spectre of some happy memory never to be retrieved, never to bloom again.
‘It’s difficult to explain these things,’ his visitor was chattering on, almost vivaciously. ‘But I wrote a bit of a story once, with something of that idea
at the back of it – the changing points of view, I mean. It was about a man who buys a pair of spectacles – goggles – greenish glass, copper handles – at a shop tucked away under a row of lime-trees in a little cathedral town. Three steps down; very still and musty-fusty; owl in a glass case; antiques, all sorts; and a funny old shop-keeper with a goatee beard. That kind of thing. He asks the peering old creature if he has any glasses to shield his eyes from the glare outside. The thing’s symbolic, of course. And when the customer goes out of the shop and puts them on, everything in the world is changed.’ Up went the doctor’s visitor’s black eyebrows once more as if in the wildest astonishment at such an original idea: though apparently he was only waiting for a word of encouragement.
‘Changed?’ Dr Lidgett enquired. ‘For the worse?’
‘Oh no, the better! The other, surely, would be rather too much of a problem! I couldn’t tackle that.’
‘I fancied, Mr Pritchard,’ the doctor patiently replied, ‘you meant that the man who buys the spectacles was – well …’
‘No, no, quite the reverse,’ the visitor ejaculated eagerly. ‘He puts them on in the street. And presto! his whole world is transmogrified. Grand transformation scene: everything around him becomes instantly irradiated with beauty and life and meaning – all that; dancing with happiness and light. Even the shop is an Aladdin’s cavern: and the trees outside spread their boughs over him like green tents of enchantment, sighing with mystery and delight. The people in the street – creatures from another planet: Traherne, of course: all colours and beautiful forms intensified. They walk as if they had wings – head, shoulder, thigh, like the angels in Isaiah: “Each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly:” – just as if the fellow had been taking hashish or something. He sees a woman, with a basket – going shopping: she is fair as Israfel, wondrous as manna, shining – Botticelli. The buildings are marvellously transmuted, too. Even little common things changed: the dust, the cobwebs, the refuse, the manure in the streets, a sandy cat on a window-sill, the sparrows, a thrush in a cage, singing – “in the silence of morning the song of the bird”.
‘And he goes into the cathedral, in which only the day before he had yawned his way from tomb to tomb, to find it a shrine drenched with loveliness; as if some incomparable artist had spent centuries in cutting the stones, and as if the stones themselves had been quarried from some celestial quarry. There is a faint exquisite blue in the air. He can even hear, like a network of faintly shimmering strings, all the music, the Marbecke and Palestrina, the Bach and the Beethoven and the Purcell and so on, that had floated up and into silence and rest into the fretted roof century after century. I overdid it a little perhaps. You can’t help yourself. But that’s how my story ran. The spectacles, too, I agree, were a bit mechanical; but then for my part I could never quite stomach the physic trick in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But that’s how it came; and the story was published all right. In fact I had one or two letters about it. People are very odd.’
Dr Lidgett had watched his patient steadily through this monologue – his alert gestures, his mobile features, his shining eyes. At this pause he recrossed his legs, closed his eyes very gently – much as a lion blinks at sight of a two-legged visitor looking at him through the bars of his cage.
‘It’s a story which I should think children particularly would delight in,’ he remarked courteously, but with his usual reserve. ‘I should like to have read it. How did it end?’
He made the question sound as free from mere civility as possible, but could not restrain the faint sigh which these last few days had been the completion of every other breath he breathed.
‘Oh the end?’ echoed Mr Pritchard a little dejectedly. ‘That is always the difficulty. He begins to preach at the street corner and is shut up for a lunatic and they take his spectacles away and – and so on. It was only a tale. But you see my meaning. The curious thing is that that is what we all say about another world. We are haunted by this hope, even this divination of another state or condition of being that is beyond our mortal senses to realize. A place or condition where – well, after death, of course. And yet, I feel, if we are not capable of it here and now, how is the transition to be made? Where shall we find the spectacles? There are some people, of course, who seem never to have needed them – they are peace and happiness. But …’
He gazed at the doctor as if he were really and truly in need of enlightenment, and as if even possibly it might be included in the fee. ‘Well, we don’t come across wonder-working opticians under every lime-tree in every cathedral town. And supposing, as you suggested, the magic power of the spectacles had been reversed. What scene then would have met our friend’s eyes!
‘All I mean is, don’t we all have to put up with what we ourselves, each one of us, can get? And the tendency — I remember another tale I read once, by a French writer – at least the name was French. A translation, I think. It was about a philosophical crank whose lifelong hobby had been to transmute knowledge, just as the old philosophers tried to transmute metals. Or rather to focus knowledge so that it became an intrinsic part of himself – as of course all true knowledge is to some extent; a genuine “commonsense” to the “nth” degree; a power of vision; almost, as one might say, another dimension. He sees things first through one aspect of knowledge and then through another in rapid succession, and realizes through a fleeting eternity of change reality’s everlasting nothingness or somethingness, whichever way you like to put it.’ Mr Pritchard smiled. ‘In the end, my Frenchman decided he would have been a wiser and happier man if he had remained content with his own small natural instincts. He gave the game up – though that perhaps hardly sounds French. I have muddled the story, but that was the gist.’
The doctor nodded, as if in encouragement; but even an unobservant visitor could hardly have helped noticing that his attention and interest had begun to wane, had begun to resume their own natural channel. He had sunk a little lower into his chair, and a faint cloud of ennui or abstraction had settled on his features.
Mr Pritchard sighed. ‘I don’t mean, doctor, that that is in any sense my experience. Far from it. It’s beyond me!’ The animation died out of the pallid face. The wide forehead resumed its customary frown. The little black eyes fixed themselves on the pattern of the surgery carpet. ‘All my knowledge only adds to the burden, the realization how helpless I am to contend against this settled conviction of my general uselessness and ineffectiveness. I realize, too, that it is only my knowledge, and that that being so, how am I to know that it has any true relation to – any bearing whatsoever on – the facts, on the reality? Please don’t suppose that I am pretending to be an expert in anything. I have scarcely more than dabbled in subjects outside my own particular bent. But speaking of the little I have learned, and read, works of science and so on, and taking it for granted that even the novice, the mere man in the street, is free to come to his own conclusions, however partial and inadequate they are bound to be, it seems to me that all that too is nothing more than a general kind of human makebelieve. It is merely what they – the experts – think, not regarding what really matters to the very self within but only outside material things.
‘They work away – self-denyingly and modestly, too, for the most part – with their little scales and their instruments, their little scalpels and acids and batteries and retorts and all that paraphernalia. But whatever the result, however amusing and serviceable and ingenious, we all know that such evidence is only the secretion or excretion of their own senses. Senses that can tell us only what they are capable of being sensible of.
‘And look at it! What – I ask you – is the instant’s good of this enormous machine we call life – this treadmill, the moment you question whether there is any value or truth or purpose or what-not in what it grinds? Look at their chemistry – the beautiful water-tight jargon of it all. Look at their astronomy: their red star this and their green star that,
and the waste of space and the curve to it, and their spectral analyses and their orbits, and their rules of thumb and their mileage – their mileage! As if, doctor, my being two or three yards from you now is a fact of the slightest spiritual importance! In itself, I mean.’
The doctor quietly eyeing his visitor, nodded once more. But even yet – though the faintest, dying spark of animation, even of remote amusement, had kindled in his quiet blue eye, it was hardly as though he took more than a merely courteous and friendly interest in what, with so much zest and conviction, his patient was saying. But that patient, as alert as any practised prima donna or conjurer in ‘sensing’ the responsiveness of an audience, had noticed this tiny ray of encouragement, and at once pressed forward.
‘I went out last night: I went out into my garden. It’s little more than a square green patch of grass, with a few old trees, an acacia and so on, but pleasant and secluded, and not much overlooked. We make a point of that, oddly enough: not to be overlooked! As if — It has a nice old wall, too – a fragment of flotsam left by the country when it receded from the filthy flood of London. And I looked up into what they call the starry void of space; splinters of light: Aldebaran, the rainy Hyades, the clusters, the nebulae – of the Pleiads, Orion and the rest – annular, elliptic, spiral; you know the delightful jargon. And then the Milky Way – the Milky Way! And Venus there in the west, the goddess of Roman love. And now and then, a gentle, soundless, silver curve of dying light – some meteor candling its way into oblivion. I agree you might call it solemn, beautiful, entrancing; significant, even, if you happened to be a young couple just fallen in love. But – for you and me, doctor! I looked, and my imagination simply refused to respond. The spectacle was there, punctual, brilliant, according to specification – but honestly this particular programme-seller was unable to applaud. It was like strumming on a dumb piano – a fake piano. It meant no more to me than a piece of paper over which some idiot in a moment of ill-temper has flicked a fountain-pen. Reverse the colour-scheme: make the sky silvery-white and the stars black dots. What interpretation should we put upon it then? Something sombre and profound and meaningful, not a doubt of it: and with as much and as little justification. The constellations: a child’s scrawls! Doggerel!
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 43