“Nothing tonight!” Eldred echoed angrily, glancing at his doctor.

    Apprehensively Miss Cosway glanced at the doctor, too, slightly flushing. “Well, you know what I mean, nothing really important, nothing that cannot be arranged. But tomorrow…”

    “Ah, tomorrow!” echoed Eldred significantly.

    “Jennifer Robinson was coming to tea, and she will be so dreadfully angry.”

    “She does allow her temper a bit too much rope. And she grows arrogant.”

    “Yes. She bullies me when I say you are engaged. She doesn’t think you are! It’s quite absurd.”

    “Absurd!” Eldred frowned.

    “I know,” said Miss Cosway, “but you know what she is! She will go away and describe you somewhere, in a gossip item, as ‘the greatest historian since Froude’!”

    Eldred was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, under the sceptical gaze of his doctor. No engagement tonight!—and merely a publicity interview with a gossip-writer tomorrow! “Am I not supposed to be dining with Sir Christopher Smith tomorrow?” he demanded.

    “No, Dr. Eldred. That is next month.”

    “Ah, next month. Next month it is!” growled Eldred, giving his secretary a rather nasty look.

    “But what can I do about the address you had agreed to give on Monday? The Charterhouse Literary Society.” She was wringing her hands over this unpaid talk to an obscure group. “And there is that Canadian historian.”

    “Canadian historian?”

    “Yes. The one you said had cribbed your last book. His name is Dr. Burnaby Harry. I think you said he had a Chair in the Arctic Circle.”

    Eldred stared fixedly at Miss Cosway, attempting to mesmerize her into silence. “Please do not allow these problems to worry you,” he said, spectacularly relaxing. “Tell everybody—and I mean everybody, to go to hell.”

    Dr. McLachlan beamed frostily upon her. “Excellent advice!” richly and throatily he told her. He then, with a frigid pinch of jauntiness and Scottish gallantry, carried her off, protesting.

    In describing Paul Eldred it is very easy to make him seem a clown and nothing else, and this even without succumbing to the temptation to select what may possibly entertain. His mind was at times blotted out by his frantic vanity, but of course a mind was there. The inferiority feeling of a provincial, it was believed by the wisest of his friends, had rotted his personality and even eroded his intelligence. Jones, his most sceptical friend, had had an unpleasant experience on two occasions. It was not the waspish ferocity of the little feverish ego that darted out on him that surprised him. The subterranean existence of such a spiteful animal he had been dimly aware of. What surprised him was that Eldred no longer troubled to check it, but allowed it to have its way and dart out and bite people. Of course what provoked these sorties had been connected with old Paul’s work. Jones had ventured a criticism of something. But he found that what had begun as a young man’s resolve to run himself, in the Intellectual Stakes—and quite good-humouredly while youthful still—as a “great” something or other, had developed, as time went on, into a pathological self-esteem. It is true, “greatness” had come: which no one was better qualified than what Paul once had been to evaluate. But that Paul was no longer there. “Greatness” corrupts. From that time, after the second of these disagreeable episodes, Jones refrained from all reference to the works of his old friend. But he still respected a certain flickering integrity, and loved the image of his youthful companion which haunted this celebrated ruin.

    Almost regenerated in his present isolation, Eldred even came to look ten years younger. Having climbed out of that Cigar Store Indian, the Great Dr. Eldred, having found, by accident, a place where it was impossible to be that anyhow, he lay in his bed an undressed personality, as it were. The patient-in-bed situation helped. He never had felt so free since he was a schoolboy. He embraced that anonymity he had always dreaded.

    The nurse he had already seen entered.

    “Good afternoon. I am Nurse Tanner. Here is some lunch.”

    A hard-boiled egg, a tea-cup full of tapioca, and a thin grey slice of bread was placed upon the glass table with long chromium-plated legs which straddled the bed. The fare of the anchorite! He beamed quietly on the savage repast. Nurse Tanner interpreted this as sarcasm.

    He ate the egg and was looking at the tapioca when a nun entered with her mouth open, holding a hypodermic syringe. It was obvious she was toothless: her eye-sockets were empty, in the hollows lived her eyes.

    “I am Sister Giles,” she told him, aloofly but aggressively.

    “And I am Paul Eldred,” said he.

    The nun was in a white conventual uniform, the much-pleated skirt needing a dozen petticoats for it to balloon around the nether limbs—or how else could it be so pneumatically expansive and beautifully circular? (This applied to all the massive myriad-pleated skirts in which the nuns discouraged the idea that nuns have legs.) Sister Giles was the nun who had intruded and gazed through his underwear at the window beyond: and for her he was still obviously vitreous.

    Eldred smiled sweetly, Sister Giles’s blank expression was unchanged.

    “Please lie flat on your tummy,” she said.

    Eldred dutifully heeled himself over, pulled down his pyjamas and presented a buttock to Sister Giles, enquiring gently and even a little archly: “Is that all right?”

    “No,” said the nun gazing away, “flat on your face please. It’s no use if you don’t, you know.”

    “I see. That makes it clear at once,” said he understandingly. “The muscles have to be relaxed, haven’t they.”

    Sister Giles rubbed a spot on the buttock with wet cotton-wool.

    “She’s a shy old girl,” he thought. “It is natural. I should be frightfully embarrassed if I were an old monk and had to do this to a lot of worldly matrons.” To her he said gaily over his shoulder: “Novocaine, I can smell it.”

    She jabbed in the needle.

    “Thank you,” he said. When she had gone Eldred ate the tapioca. Afterwards he felt a little sick. Nurse Tanner entered, collected the lunch-tray, and suggested a little sleep. She was a stream-lined hospital nurse for whom patients were a species distinct from nurses. She saw him close his eyes with satisfaction and left the room giving him an up stroke in her mental chart. Sleep was just sealing his eyes but the door opened and a nun came in and moved up to the side of the bed. “How do you feel, Dr. Eldred? I am the Matron. Are you comfortable?” She apologized for appearing on the scene so late. As she spoke her hands were interlocked in front, but the two thumbs circled rapidly around each other. All of their faces appeared at the end of a tunnel of white lawn and looked strangely small. This miniature face looked at him along its white tunnel with a painfully placid aloofness while she talked, her thumbs revolving as though a small propeller, perhaps to sustain the smooth flight of her mind in the profane dimension, perhaps to preserve an equilibrium naturally threatened in commerce with the world, which must be an artifice demanding effort. She was a very sensitive educated woman. Undoubtedly it was an effort for her to be normal yet abnormal, to be worldly at the end of a white tunnel, to reintegrate her pre-sanctified personality for the occasion; she moved back into it with stiffness and distaste. Again, the quantity of chat each patient might receive was rigidly rationed. After she had expended, say, a hundred words for a maximum, the interview would not be broken off but would fade out. If the patient said anything further she would not answer as if she had not heard it. She would wheel, in her bulbous voluted skirt of dark blue, like a clockwork figure, and move quickly out of the room. The words were well chosen and sensible, perhaps thanks to the whirling of the thumbs.

    After the Matron’s departure Eldred turned over and thought again of sleep. His eyes were rolling up, his limbs relaxing, his blood was leaving the surface vessels and his mental images were beginning to behave drunkenly when someone entered. It was one of the many stunted female gossoons, Irish nationals, attached to the nurses. Muttering something she thrust her hand violently into the foot of the bed. After a lunge or two she seized the hot water-bottle on which his feet were resting and drew it out of the bed. Next she pushed in a hotter bottle. This taciturn intruder having shuffled out he took up a book and read for a few minutes. The door opened and a startled Irish face appeared. “You rang, sor?” panted this girl. Very sweetly smiling Eldred gently shook his head, adding a musical “No”. “You did not ring!” the girl cried frantically and charged out. Five minutes later the book began to slump down and his eyes to close when Nurse Tanner entered briskly. She put down a slip of paper on the bed-table. “Your signature is required,” she said with her efficient smile. “Ah, yes,” said he, picking up the paper drowsily. “Yes, I think you may administer any anaesthetic you like. Ah yes, and my nearest relative. You want to know that of course.” He signed the printed form, and returned it to the nurse as though she were an autograph-hunter. “You should try and get a little sleep now,” said Nurse Tanner, giving his pillow a push. “A capital notion,” said he with a smile that was a shadowy reminder of his old sardonic self. A most appalling groan, followed by a cry of anguish, came from the neighbouring room. “That woman sounds rather ill,” he observed. “Yes,” said Nurse Tanner as if he had broken some regulation. “She is very ill. She will probably die.” There was a cry from the other side of the thin partition—“Merciful God!” came the distracted voice. The nurse, of a neat dark prettyness, with very dark brown curls, looked very faintly annoyed and carried her neat little body away, self-righteously erect, as if all the good were healthy like herself. Eldred felt that this was much too real a nurse. She was the only discordant note.

    He now knew that however often Nurse Tanner recommended a little sleep, that sleep was out of the question. Up till eight o’clock, when the night staff came on, someone or other was always doing something in his room. The Matron moved in once more, looked at him distantly but tolerantly, asked when his teeth were to be extracted and did he sleep well, and removed herself silently. Tea at four and dining at six were the big events: but a considerable time was taken up in making the bed. He went to sit in the armchair from which he watched the two diminutive Irish helps on opposite sides of the bed swinging the bedclothes and pyramiding the pillows. He became conscious of an incessant hissing sound for which at first he supposed the pipes were responsible. But it was the two girls hissing at one another across the bed. He could not have sworn it was this, for their mouths did not move nor did their expression change and whatever they were doing—if one of them stooped down, for instance, to pick something up—the noise continued. But when they left the noise ceased. They were evidently able to converse with one another almost inaudibly.

    Finally, before the night session, Dr. McLachlan showed up, as stiff and formal as a Prussian Geheimrat, though sitting on the edge of his bed in a frosty familiarity. Eldred reflected how he fitted into the Home. After all, the Matron and he belonged to the same ethos. On his side, the doctor consulted with himself. He had expected a lofty exasperation on the great man’s part with everything, just because it was not the London Clinic. To his surprise he heard criticism of nothing. He had never seen his patient so calm—yes and so happy. He went away pondering this paradox. And just before he left Eldred gave him a slip of paper, on which he had written a message for Miss Cosway, to the effect that for the remainder of his stay he did not wish her to visit him or communicate with him in any way. He wished to be completely alone. This message the doctor was enjoined to deliver by telephone to ROT 5959 the first thing in the morning.

    One thing that would not be apt to enter into the doctor’s analysis was the fact of the excessive acuity of Eldred’s time sense. Could he have been carried back in a time machine to the England of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, he would not—as did Erasmus on a first visit—have been disgusted with filthy rush floors, never renewed, but fresh rushes put down on top of the old. The time-sense would have restrained him from finding fault with the backward islanders. His attitude towards the Catholic Home where he found himself was that, to the best of its ability, it was in the Middle Ages. (Which does not mean, it was otherwise than clean and comfortable.) Of course, as to Eldred’s other feelings his doctor could not have divined what they might be. He simply regarded his patient’s attitude as fortunate, but perversely incomprehensible.

    Dr. McLachlan before going checked on the pulse, pulled down his lower eyelid, raised his upper eyelid, and informed himself as to the stool. Lastly he asked him if he had managed to get some sleep. Eldred smiled and shook his head.

    “I think Sister Bridget, that is the night Sister, had better give you something.”

    “Perhaps it would be as well,” the patient agreed. For if the night staff had anything like the vitality of the day staff he would certainly, he reasoned, require a sleeping draught.

    The doctor looked at him sharply. This new docility and quietistic temper (if it was not a pose) began to worry him. He coughed—as if to say Achtung!

    “I expect you are terribly bored, Dr. Eldred,” he observed, as one man of the world to another.

    “Not at all.”

    The doctor brushed the negative lightly aside.

    “Of course you must be. A man like you, always surrounded by people…”

    He got no further, for this galvanized Eldred into automatic action. “Surrounded by people!” he protested, with gently raised eyebrows. No man, alas, is a bona fide recluse to his doctor.

    “Well, you would be, of course, that is what I mean, if you did not employ two secretaries to hold them at arm’s length. I know how many admirers you have, Dr. Eldred. Some of them are my patients. Loaded with engagements as you are, it must be a strange experience to step out of it all, suddenly like this. To be in so uncompromisingly—er—insulated a nursing institution as this is too.”

    “A blissfully strange experience,” Eldred told his dubiously gazing medical adviser, who then approached and gravely checked once more the blood’s faint thump in the wrist. Next morning, he explained, O’Toole the dentist and Dr. Tomlin the anaesthetist, and he himself, would gather well before one o’clock in the operating theatre. He and Eldred would not meet, properly speaking, until later, after the mass-extraction: and at length he left with a throaty Good night.

    It was 8 p.m. Sister Bridget arrived, hypodermic syringe in hand. There was a smile which was a bitter-sweet rictus forever upon her still lovely waxen face. Half heeling over Eldred presented his bared buttock to the nun. “Is that far enough over, Sister, or shall I flatten out?” he enquired. “Ach, no!” she genially dismissed the exactions of the day-sister martinet. “That’s arl that is necessary of course it is.” Hearing the accents of Cork or Clare (John Bull’s Other Island English) he responded with a friendly smile. “Ah,” he thought, “Irish, so with a more elastic and graceful puritanism. No Get on your tummy stuff with her!” But the injection hurt quite a lot—far more than with the day-nun. But Sister Bridget was so kind and had so much beauty that he did not mind if her ministrations caused pain. His temperature came next, and after that she gave him a powder which took effect with great dispatch. It was not until five in the morning that he awoke, and lay listening apparently to a dromedary charging up and down the uncarpeted boards of the corridor. It was Sister Bridget with her long legs, in her ungainly shoes, rushing to and fro in response to the summonses of the distracted patients. The groans, and the agonized protests against the fierce pain, were clearer than ever at this early hour. He lay wondering what this poor woman could have done to be racked in that way. The partition was so thin he could hear her clutching at the bedclothes and grinding her teeth, calling on God in his mercy to spare her these agonies.

    Soon afterwards he had another penicillin injection and Sister Bridget’s tribe of little snub-nosed helpers proved to be quite as agile and officious as Nurse Tanner’s. The lowest in rank of the personnel, the floor-mopper, was also the newspaper girl. Eldred enjoined her under no circumstances to bring a newspaper into the room. She gave him a kind of frightened leer for answer. Then at eight came breakfast, and from then up to noon some gnome or other, or a nun or a nurse, was weaving in and out of the room.

    There was one thing which especially attracted his attention during these four hours. The Matron and Sister Giles both came in twice. Sister Giles as usual wandered in casually as though she had forgotten something and had come in there in order to remember it. But she drifted up to the bed and gazed into his face. He was even able to see that her eyes were blue. This proceeding almost startled him. He said to himself that her face was like that of one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse in a German church. The Matron, on both occasions, seemed to be peering at him very inquisitively. It would be all right, she said—though he did not know exactly what she meant. “Am I pale?” he asked smiling. Her answer was that the Sister would give him something at twelve o’clock. That was always done, she said: over significantly he thought. He considered both these women a little odd.

    At noon Sister Giles strayed purposefully in, and ordered him negligently to go to the operating theatre. “For dope?” he asked, succinctly, like herself. She nodded. “Not here?”—he expressed his surprise. “No,” she said and left the room. (Ah well, he thought, they are wise to put her on in the daytime. I should hate to have her around at night.) He put on his dressing-gown and went out. Hundreds of Hibernian gnomes were charging up and down the corridor, with food, flowers, bedpans, and hot water-bottles. After walking through the territory of two other nurses he came to a stairway. This was to the rear of the building. At the foot was a much broader corridor. A few yards and it terminated in an obviously important and sinister door. There was no stink of ether, which usually announces the proximity of the theatre. But he pushed the door and it was an unmistakable theatre. There was the stage, like a glorified ironing-board, on which a recumbent performer went through his limp and speechless part, except for an imprecation or a dark mutter escaping the drugged body like speech from a corpse (though in this strangest of theatres there are some who consider the Star to be the so-called Man in White). There hung the hooded lamp above the stage to illuminate the performance, with its cold false daylight, often the last light the entranced actor is to see on this earth. This most tragic of all actors is carried in and out of the theatre, if the play is a tragedy, Eldred thought, and not a comedy like his.

    The room was lofty, a large north-lighted cube, filled with the clinical gadgets of surgery. Probably it had been a garden-studio. Once the bearded painter had here attacked his canvas, his fist bristling with brushes: and here a fair Victorian, corsetted like a swollen wasp, giving a little precious gasp of alarm had been overcome by faintness, collapsing like a monstrous toy upon the painter’s throne. The good historian almost smelled the sal volatile or eau de Cologne all Victorian painters would have in readiness, with, as a last resort, scissors to snip the murderous “stays”.

    Sister Giles, as he entered, was stolidly stationed beside the operating table. She at once began propelling it towards the window. She placed it exactly under the window and then turned in his direction, her eyes directed towards the door in the middle distance. “Where,” he asked, looking around for a chair, “shall I sit?” She gave the operating table two slaps. “Get up on this,” she instructed him with impeccable boredom. He walked over, and smiling almost meltingly at the venerable religious dragon, objected “Up there, Sister?” “Yes.” “But I shall roll off.” The nun however administered two absent-minded slaps to the operating table. “You must do as the doctor says,” she told him, in a flat impatient voice; “you have to lie down here.” She tapped to show where and stood looking away. It was not at all easy to mount this high and narrow resting place: once he had done so and stretched himself out, it was intolerably hard, for it was impossible to adjust the body to the hardness without tumbling off. “You must lie on your back.” The old nun was dully peremptory. He smiled. Evidently she did not know who he was. He wished she did, but wriggled upon his back, his rigid body violently protesting. The voice of cold command sounded again. “Roll up your sleeve.” (Ridiculous and incredible, thought he, that Dr. Paul Eldred should find himself cut off from the world, alone in this obscure operating theatre, obeying, as if he were a taxi-driver, this rough old nun.) He rolled the sleeve up and she dug a needle into the arm.

    A beautiful tropical drowsiness immediately began to pour into his brain and invade his limbs, the warmth of a potent obliteration. Ah, the boon of anaesthesia! The board was no longer hard, he was quite indifferent as to whether he fell off or not, death itself would be merely the infinity of his sweet anaesthesia, the putting to sleep of the will. And the nun was a good old fairy nun. All the same, even at that moment, he realized it was far too strong a dose he had been given. The last thing he saw before his head lolled over—and what will was left to him was a will to sleep, there was no resistance—was the Sister pushing a large white screen towards him, such as they screen the dead with in a hospital ward. It grew larger—whiter. He thought “Good old cross-patch!” and that was all he knew for the best part of an hour.

    A very imperfectly functioning consciousness returned to him, numbed and devoid of more feeling than a man would have about a cricket match if he was not interested in cricket, merely regarding it as a handful of white figures slowly changing position on a green field. A cocktail party might have been going on the other side of the screen. The theatre seemed full. Though it was true their hilarity was muted, there was polite mirth. But the atmosphere was electric too. The people the other side of the screen were excited. He felt like the Star actor out of sight of the expectant audience: or the Christian martyr in the echoing pens beneath the amphitheatre. Violently, as it seemed, two men pulled the screen aside, and he began rolling out into the room. He found himself beneath the closely impending hooded circle of the lamp.

    He hardly looked at all the people. Dr. McLachlan came up and whispered in his ear. “You feel quite comfortable?” “Perfectly,” he answered. “Why all the concourse, doctor? What an audience I have got.” McLachlan disregarded this. Eldred was aware of men in white, with white masked faces. One was doubtless the O’Toole, concealing his forceps behind his back; and even McLachlan had been in white. A red-faced man like a doctor, he noticed, was lying across his legs for some reason, as if to get a good look at him. He stared fixedly. Eldred’s head, it seemed, was hemmed in with people but he could only see their stomachs. Two men grasped his left arm. They had rolled up the sleeve and held his arm stiffly out from his side. Why on earth were all these people milling around him? he wondered. It was like being Gulliver, intoxicated perhaps, only mildly curious regarding the antics of his captors. Or images of the Inquisition visited him perforce. The Catholics had never liked his histories, they were all on the Index, it might be that he was about to be ementulated, or blinded. The nuns he saw betrayed this image for they ought to have been monks. Or was it a woman’s Inquisition? The needlessly brutal hands of the two kneeling house-serfs tightened upon his arm, he felt the plunging of a needle. The world stopped where it was for a second or two and then clicked out, like turning off an electric light.

    When he awakened he was in bed and a pleasant girl stood over him, one of the army of nurses’ mutes, but this one had a tongue and a beautifully expressive face.

    “Ah,” he said thickly, “the show is over.”

    She gave him a mug and told him it was to spit the blood in. Hours had passed since the extractions, he learned from the girl. But he still was stupefied. McLachlan hastily entered, his face flushed, no smile. He came over and warned Eldred he had bled too much as if it were his fault. “You must not touch your gums. The bleeding must not go on.” He asked to see his gums. These seemed to give him unexpected pleasure. “Doctors are always surprised if they have not seriously injured you,” was one of Jones’s sayings. But McLachlan’s comment was, “O’Toole has made a good job of it.” It seemed indeed that he had: apparently it was Dr. McLachlan who had been at fault. Since the events in the theatre Eldred had had, in his doctor’s absence, what almost amounted to a dangerous haemorrhage.

    The doctor gone, the humane girl continued her ministrations while the rest of the staff were rather (for them) mysteriously aloof. She lifted the veil, too, on the hours during which he had been unconscious. She was much impressed by the excessive bleeding; dish after dish had to be emptied until the doctor was summoned. Eldred had also decorated the wall with some of it. His most serious escapade, however, was connected with the Matron. She and Nurse Tanner were interested spectators of the blood-bath when unexpectedly he began blowing, it seemed, like a sea beast—but blowing blood. He puffed blood all over the spectators. The Matron, dabbing herself with a towel, had beat a hasty retreat followed by Nurse Tanner, who since then had not put in an appearance. Eldred was gravely concerned as he listened to the report of this eyewitness of his bad behaviour, but the girl was discreetly amused. He, of course, could appreciate the comic stimulus to a young mind, but he did not feel certain what the Matron’s reactions would be. Were these people to see him as a boor who blew blood over those who were kind to him he would be deeply mortified. On this score his conscience was soon set at rest. About six o’clock the Matron came in, spotless and unruffled. She began at once to point out how necessary it was to bleed, in order to enable the septic content of the gum to be carried away. What she seemed mainly concerned to do was to white-wash her little doctor. Eldred smiled at her: for while he had been worrying a little at what her reactions might be, she had been preoccupied with what she felt must be his reactions, at the excessive haemorrhage.

    As she spoke of the necessity of much blood Dr. McLachlan appeared and on seeing his patient’s benign expression, he grew very excited and jocular. His wit and gallantry was side-stepped by the Matron as if she were ducking to avoid missiles. She plunged her eyes from one corner of the room to the other, refusing to meet his gallant glance or to give him smile for smile. He attempted to intercept her plunging gaze, piqued at her unresponsiveness; but she flung her head bodily over in the opposite direction, and he quietened down after that. And soon they both departed.

    Eldred found that he was unable to stand. The bed had to be made with him in it, by a couple of dwarfish hissing gnomes. The day’s goings and comings were succeeded by Sister Bridget and relative peace. As he lay there and was able to look back upon what had occurred in the theatre without distraction, he perceived how far from the normal the proceedings had been. They partook unmistakably of the nature of a rite. A blood-sacrifice had been enacted: and it must always be in that spirit that the theatre was used, even if it was only an appendix that was involved. Their theatre was the obsessive emotional centre round which the existence of these secluded women revolved. The peculiar interest he seemed to awaken in the nuns on the morning of the operation, which at the time he was aware of but could not understand, was explained in the light of this analysis. It was his blood that was going to be shed that day, it was he that was about to have an agony.

    Then there seemed to be a theory governing the actions of everybody in this institution that a patient invariably was in a state of the liveliest terror during the hours immediately preceding his operation, however insignificant that might be, and even that he was apt to become dangerous. Sister Giles’s attitude was explained in some degree by these circumstances. The danger, as it was felt, inhering in the terrified victim accounted for the unnecessary potency of the drug administered as a quietener. Actually it had more the effect of knockout drops. Lastly there was the mobilization of all the available man-power to hold down and if necessary to restrain the victim about to be sacrificed. Eldred enquired of the friendly girl (one of a family of converts from the Putney-Wimbledon district) whether patients were always held down in the theatre or whether he had impressed them as a singularly violent type of man. Her answer was that patients on the operating table often kicked and struck out. Once a Sister had been injured by a violent blow in the stomach.

    Of course all this, far from prejudicing Eldred against the Home, merely confirmed him in the view that he was really in a medieval pocket, as it were preserved by means of disciplines and incantations. These good women had evolved a biological mechanism deeply Christian, centering in a sacrifice and an agony. Then death noisily abounded beneath their roof. Eldred discovered that several of the rooms contained relatively poor people, in which respect it differed from Protestant nursing-homes, run strictly for profit. In fact these poor creatures had crawled there to die. It was not easy in the utilitarian England of 1950 to find a place to die in, outside of the poor house, which is the terror of the destitute old. They all believe that the infirm are given a mercy-killing there. Unless you are rich, it is highly inconvenient to die where you live. But death is the element in which these women of course had gone to dwell. They have gone to live next door to death, away from the world which pretends there is no death or which forgets it. They live in saintly proximity to the indestructible regions into which death admits the penitent and impenitent. Their minds steadfastly fixed away from the temporal, at night they lay themselves down in a grave. Souls are always flying past their ears into blessedness or damnation. So, dedicated to the care of the sick, the nuns had no objection to the moribund. On the contrary. Having died to the sensual life themselves, a person in the act of abandoning it, involuntarily, became akin to them; though it was a constant source of astonishment to them with what noisy reluctance their dying patients took the final step and died.

    That morning at dawn an approaching bell tinkled in the corridor and a hurrying tread came to a stop at the door of the neighbouring room. Then through the thin partition came the flat rapid expressionless recitation of prayers for the dying. There was a silence and afterwards the bell hastened away. Considerably later a man’s voice was heard in impassioned supplication, a supplication as old as the catacombs, modulated in such a way as to make it evident it was a text that was being said, not a man speaking. How splendidly that was read! thought Eldred. There was soon a dead silence. The groaning had diminished and at length had stopped. The priest prayed. Then suddenly breaking the silence, his voice was heard laughing heartily, a rather startling sound in the early morning. He was talking with great gusto. Eldred supposed Sister Bridget must be there now.

    This patient died three days later, Eldred assisting through the partition, at the rite of extreme unction. He stared at the ceiling as there were sounds that must be the confession. Almost simultaneously, through the partition behind the head of his bed a poor woman violently entered upon the last stage of some painful disease. He was told nothing could be done for her, and several times she embarrassed Dr. McLachlan by her yells. It was her habit to scream with pain for a while, but otherwise she was relatively quiet. Eldred assumed they gave her a drug, she was at peace for such long intervals.

    As Eldred was not a strong man it was some days before he could even take a few steps. But Dr. McLachlan was visibly elated. He took all the credit for Eldred’s surviving his bad doctoring.

    On his side the patient was well pleased with his physician. For had he not introduced him to a community of expert recluses, who daily demonstrated for him an immemorial technique, enabling you to give the impression that you are a mile away, when in fact only separated by a yard or so from another person. Eldred began to practise under the bedclothes, twirling his thumbs while he chatted with Nurse Tanner, as an aid to self-abstraction.

    One evening patient and doctor, as usual, engaged in a little frivolous speculation: Eldred imparted, in the first place, how vastly he esteemed the nuns and the good work for which they were responsible. He went on:

    “When these execrable monopolists, the socialists, have abolished by taxation all the other clinics and nursing-homes outside the state-hospital system, the Catholic clinics will still be there. They will be the last refuge of free medicine. One will still be able to be ill like a gentleman, thanks to them.”

    “There is the Masonic Hospital,” McLachlan observed. “That is outside the National Health Service too.”

    “Is it indeed?” Eldred looked up quickly. “How did they manage that?”

    “Some influential Freemasons went to see the Health Minister, who quite likes influential vermin! It is a wonderfully well-appointed hospital—the best in England in fact—and particularly difficult to get into.”

    “For non-Masons.”

    “No, for Masons!” bleakly the little doctor laughed. “Patients of mine who are Masons have been unable to get in, though I tried very hard for them. Were they indignant!”

    “Ah!” Eldred seemed to be interested.

    “Then I believe—I am not sure about this though—that the Labour Hospital has been left outside the National Health Service.”

    “What is that? I suppose a hospital for members of the Labour Party.”

    “I do not know.”

    “In the Welfare State there must be privilege!” By a hairsbreadth the patient escaped a belly-jeer.

    The Matron entered.

    “How are you tonight, Dr. Eldred?” she enquired.

    “Feeling much better,” he told her. “Much better. Oh, Sister, there was something I had to say. I think you should all make a novena to your patron saint for me.”

    As he was speaking her expression changed in no way, but before he had finished she had turned away and quickly left the room.

    “I fear I offended her,” Eldred observed.

    “No. Evidently what you said reminded her of something. She is very forgetful.”

    “She misunderstood me, I think,” Eldred explained. “What I was about to say was this: I propose to write a short history of the order to which she belongs. That was why, I meant, they should make a novena for me, or some other suitable devotion. For I shall need all their prayers.”

    “Oh, I see,” McLachlan laughed distantly. He went over gravely and sought information of the clockwork in the patient’s wrist, taking out of his waistcoat pocket a massive professional man’s gold watch. Eldred, smiling, lay quite still. This was always McLachlan’s procedure when his patient said anything he did not like. And he had not liked the request for the novena any more than had the Matron.

    For the rest, as Eldred lay there, day after day, during the maddening hospital routine of cleaning, nourishing, evacuating, and he steadily refused to look at a book or much more a newspaper, he immersed himself in a luxurious barrenness. Was he not buried alive? He was buried deeper, hour by hour, by these Irish dwarfs, hissing as they worked. Would he ever be so happy in any other mode of existence? Since the days when first his ambition began to impose its idiot disciplines, he had known no relief. Here he had found it. The hissing dwarf that solemnly scrubbed his face, and the grinning one that tickled his feet, were all the company he ever wanted.

    Often he spoke to the friendly girl of her conversion, and that of her parents. He wished to peer into her mind and discover how conversion affected the thinking of the Movie-bred twentieth-century young: an injection of the medieval into one of Hollywood’s spiritual brood. But it was the nuns who were of course his principal study, from the immovable Matron to the gay but equally evasive Sister Bridget. “Ah, God bless ye!” she would say with fervour after he had said he would send her a gold crucifix he had seen in one of Rotting Hill’s antique shops. But she was not to be bribed into departing from edification of Irish gaiety. There was no other mode.

    His first opportunity of trying out the techniques he was acquiring occurred about seven days after the haemorrhage. Still decidedly unsteady (and, according to his habit, exploiting his infirmity) he was dragging himself back from the bathroom, most theatrically the Invalid. A familiar figure suddenly appeared, and he heard himself greeted in a vaguely familiar voice, in tones of deep surprise.

    “Dr. Eldred! A nursing-home is the last place I should have expected to find you, sir. Nothing serious I hope?”

    The reporter whose face he had last seen, and fled from, a week ago in Rotting Gardens stood blocking the corridor. What was he doing here, the rat? Running someone to earth. His was the least welcome of visages: Eldred put on his usual mask for reporters; namely, suggesting that the stench of an exposed cesspool had suddenly reached his arching nostrils and curled lip, but that stoically he was smiling it off.

    “What are you doing here?” he enquired of the reporter, rather in the manner of Sister Giles.

    “Well, Dr. Eldred, that was precisely what I asked you just now?”

    “I am just resting,” he growled, the old manner returning. “I am just resting here for a short while. Yes, just resting. I was absolutely worn out, you know.” And he squinted up at the other sideways, his head lolling forward.

    The reporter expressed deep sympathy and confided that sometimes he “felt rotten” himself.

    “Yes, you feel rotten,” Eldred said heavily, “because of the rottenness of your life. But my life is rotten too.”

    The reporter expressed hilarious scepticism.

    “No,” Eldred heavily insisted, “rotten!” But he had become more lumbering and Johnsonian every moment. Though his frame lacked flesh, he felt bulky in his voluminous dressing-gown, so had started rolling from side to side as Boswell described his Master as prone to do. Alas, affecting to be a bigger man than he was, at least in girth, he was overtaken by the weakness ensuing from his loss of blood: at the end of a long roll to larboard he almost fell over. The wall of the corridor saved him but he fell heavily against it. He shook off the reporter’s helping hand.

    “My life,” he growled angrily, “has been rotten. I am taking up the monastic life as soon as I leave here.”

    “You are becoming a monk, Dr. Eldred!” cried the reporter, dancing with delight.

    “Perhaps a friar. It may be a friar.”

    “A friar!”

    “One of a mendicant order, yes.”

    “Would you beg in the streets, Dr. Eldred?”

    “That would be where I should beg.”

    And he crawled away dramatically, bumping the walls.

    The following evening Dr. McLachlan entered with a newspaper beneath his arm. In his fruitiest, throatiest “social” voice, and with his frostiest smile, he said, advancing airily—“I see, Dr. Eldred, that you are proposing to become a friar when you leave here.” He opened the paper and read: “If we are approached in Piccadilly by a gaunt austere figure in the dress of a Franciscan friar, and solicited for alms, that will be the great historian Dr. Eldred. He shuns the world as other men shun a contagious disease. But now, he tells your reporter, he is going a step farther. He can no longer tolerate even that degree of worldly contact; he spurns the comforts of his home in Rotting Gardens—he asserts, indeed, that he is tired of Rotting Hill and of our rotting life as well!”

    The doctor placed the open paper on his patient’s bed. There was the headline:

    GREAT HISTORIAN TO BECOME A MONK.

    Eldred shrank away from the shouting headline, pushing the newspaper away from him with horror. He whispered hoarsely: “That vile Fleet Street garbage fly I met in the corridor! Will you remove that yellow rag! I shall be sick. My stomach is not so strong as it was.”

    “Yes, but I suppose you did say something to the fellow, didn’t you!” The doctor, for once outraged by that humbug which he had learnt to expect of Eldred, registered disapproval in his unlaughing eye.

    “I told him that he stank!” Eldred shouted almost. Then dropping his voice dramatically: “But I said I stank too. I—do—stink.”

    Dr. McLachlan coughed.

    “I suppose I said something to him, to get rid of him. They are a pest, they poison my life with their lies.”

    The doctor looked very sceptical indeed, as he watched his theatrically writhing patient, but he said no more.

    Eldred had now been sixteen days in the nursing-home. The Matron, the nurse, and everybody else had When is he going written plainly upon their faces. But he showed no sign whatever of moving. There was nothing to prevent his going except his disinclination to take up his own life again where he had left it to have a lot of teeth extracted. In the end they were obliged practically to push him out. His doctor gave the first push, humorously of course.

    “If you wish to enter upon a monastic life,” McLachlan told him jocularly, “this is not the place for that. This is a nunnery.”

    He packed and left, but only after many representations had been made to him, to the effect that (1) he had now recovered and had even been seen running up the stairs; and (2) a queue of sick people was waiting for his room, and one was in a dying condition. So he had said farewell to Sister Bridget and Sister Giles, and to the Matron, with great emotion, and, after a convalescence was back in Rotting Gardens. The house had been redecorated inside and out. Black was the predominant colour.

    Miss Cosway sat in her office as usual. She was dressed in what amounted to a black uniform. She looked very despondent. Black did not suit her, she considered; formerly she had shown a taste for gayish frocks. Also she liked the bustle of life. But the bustle of life had ebbed from Rotting Gardens. As Eldred no longer spent the major part of the day writing letters and telephoning, letters had stopped pouring in at the letter-box. As to the telephone, it sometimes stood there silent for hours together. For that reason Miss Cosway jumped slightly as it now burst into life, with its loud cross bell. The call was from Evan Jones. Miss Cosway said “Oh, yes” as she heard the name. She was disappointed. Naturally she took her tone from her employer, who exhibited a submissive weariness when anyone was announced, but added a kind brave smile when it was Evan Jones. However, after a short absence from the telephone she informed Jones austerely that the doctor would see him at six the following day.

    The tall figure in shabby black that entered Eldred’s study punctually at six was far more monastic in appearance than Eldred could ever manage to look, with his leathery lawyer’s face, though this would not be for want of trying.

    The visitor sat down in the same chair as upon his earlier visit, when he had expounded the risks inherent in commerce with Doctors (M.D.).

    “You appear to have escaped injury,” he observed. “At least physical.”

    “Ah, yes, that was only an affair of teeth. Just a little dental show, doctors in secondary roles.”

    “Dentists are not greatly to be feared. They can break your jaw. That is all.”

    “They cannot do much more than break your jaw. My dentist was the O’Toole. He left my jaw intact. But then I did not tread on the tail of his coat.”

    “Good.”

    “Yes.”

    There was a silence, during which they both looked at one another. In each case their thoughts were uncomplimentary. Jones noticed that the Buddha had been removed. In its place was a large engraving of a Madonna. He turned away his head, watched by Eldred. He then found himself looking at a Descent from the Cross.

    “Are you,” he enquired, “for Grasmere or for Ambleside?”

    With a smile of hawk-like sweetness, of an overbearing and superior douceur, his head inclined as if condescending to a child, Eldred said: “What is that, Evan? What is Grasmere?”

    The visitor shrugged his shoulder.

    “Grasmere? I see you have not read what has happened in connection with the centenary of Wordsworth’s death.”

    “Has there been a centenary?”

    “You are so out of the world! The newspapers have been splashing it as if it were a child-murder by an erotic homicide. You see the people of Grasmere, and those of Ambleside, both claim that the authentic Wordsworth Shrine is their town (or is it village). Celebrations have gone on simultaneously in both places, with mutual recriminations and denunciations, in which members of parliament and archbishops have been involved. It is, I imagine, a matter of the first importance to the hotel-keepers, lodging-house keepers, garage-proprietors, caterers, and tradesmen of the rival communities. It is a case of a shy little ‘violet by a mossy stone half-hidden from the eye’ no more. Yet it had to hide behind the mossy stone in the first instance… just as ‘trade follows the Flag’.”

    “I suppose so,” said Eldred politely, twirling his thumbs and gazing at his visitor as if the latter had been vitreous and as if glassiness bored him. He, of course, had read the newspaper reports of the Wordsworth Centenary disturbance and, while he read, had speculated as to whether the people of Rotting Hill would be the victors when it came to his centenary. He would put his money on the Rotters, though his birthplace would no doubt put up a good fight and do all they could to attract pilgrims: though his birthplace was frankly a repulsive spot and he doubted whether more than a few hundred devotees would collect there. It was such problems as these that he was turning over in his mind when his visitor began speaking again. He then listened, twirling his thumbs at top speed.

    “It is generally agreed, I suppose, that Wordsworth was one of those men who outlive their genius. As a young man he preferred human liberty as understood by the men of the French Revolution to the hypocritical liberties of the Anglo-Saxon middle class.”

    “Rubbish.”

    “I beg your pardon? A commonplace or a conventional man outliving a bit of vision—for the great visionaries see ‘the light that never was’ to the end—a worldly person who has been visited by some muse in error, naturally exploits this visitation for ever afterwards, like some little businessman. When the age of poetry was over the prosy old moralist naturally proceeded to exploit his dead self just as one hundred years later the Grasmerites and Amblesiders are doing, who follow his example to the letter. ‘Greatness’ is at times a sweet racket. Some are the pioneers of the racket growing up around their dead virtue. They build their own Shrine—when their genius has departed. A Shrine-builder of this sort always builds a sham or phoney Shrine. Victor Hugo, for instance, was really all Shrine. It would not be fair to mention Tolstoy in the same breath with Wordsworth…”

    “Have you ever read Wordsworth?” Eldred said tonelessly, looking away. But his visitor understood that unwittingly he had been treading on someone’s toes—or perhaps trespassing on someone’s Shrine!

    “Yes.” Jones nodded. “I read him last night.” Then he changed the subject: only his choice of a subject was unfortunate. He spoke, and in somewhat partisan terms, of the Crusade to Prevent a Third World War. Eldred grew more and more remote, until at one moment Jones actually registered the sensation of being alone in the room.

    It had not taken this very observant visitor long to realize that Paul was pretending to be a new Paul. He would, he felt certain, have given a fruity belly-jeer at a certain moment, packed with insult, had he not superannuated his abdominal Jeer, which was a revolutionary step. It had not been lost on him, either, that Eldred had been conducting himself as though his visitor had been a large piece of animated glass. Needless to say the twirling of the thumbs had been remarked and marvelled at: he had attempted to assign a cause—unsuccessfully. What impressed him most forcibly, however, was that Paul Eldred was elsewhere (realizing of course that it was in all probability a deliberate absence): successfully self-abstracted.

    Eldred had acquired so skilfully what he interpreted as the nun’s technique of self-abstraction, that everyone he came in contact with now felt he was not really there, or uncomfortably remote. Evan Jones found it so oppressive that his stay was an unusually short one. As was his custom he rather abruptly rose. For a moment he stood looking down on his oldest friend, not unaffectionately.

    “Paul, are you becoming a monk, as the newspapers say you are?”

    “No,” Eldred answered carelessly. “That is just a silly lie.”

    “Whose?” was all that Evan Jones said, as he moved towards the door, in a tone that indicated he did not expect an answer. As he descended the steps of 27 Rotting Gardens he communed with himself almost thinking aloud: “I can take old Paul neat, I can take him with soda, I can take him with tonic, orange, or lime, and I can even take him, and often have, with vinegar. I fear I cannot take him with holy water. That is an innovation against which my stomach rebels.” A fire-engine rushed across Rotting Gardens. It brought instant relief, it released something which had got obstructed somewhere within, and Jones’s eyes shone again. “Thank Beelzebub there is a fire somewhere!” was what he thought as, smiling, he stepped briskly away.