Some one knocked at the door.
It was time for the doctor.
The sick man raised himself uncertainly in awe of
the master.
“How have you been to-day?”
“Bad.”
“Well, well,” the doctor said lightly.
They were left alone together.
The man dropped down again with a slowness and awkwardness
that would have seemed ridiculous if it had not been
so sad. The doctor stood between us.
“How has your heart been behaving?”
By an instinct which seemed tragic
to me, they both lowered their voices, and in a low
tone the sick man gave his daily account of the progress
of his malady.
The man of science listened, interrupted,
and nodded his head in approval. He put an end
to the recital by repeating his usual meaningless
assurances, in a raised voice now and with his usual
broad gesture.
“Well, well, I see there’s nothing new.”
He shifted his position and I saw
the patient, his drawn features and wild eyes.
He was all shaken up by this talking about the dreadful
riddle of his illness.
He calmed himself, and began to converse
with the doctor, who let himself down squarely into
a chair, with an affable manner. He started
several topics, then in spite of himself returned to
the sinister thing he carried within him, his disease.
“Disgusting!” he said.
“Bah!” said the doctor, who was blase.
Then he rose.
“Well, till to-morrow!”
“Yes, for the consultation.”
“Yes. Well, good-by!”
The doctor went out, lightly carrying
the burden of misery and cruel memories, the weight
of which he had ceased to feel.
Evidently the consulting physicians
had just finished their examination of the patient
in another room. The door opened, and two doctors
entered.
Their manner seemed to me to be stiff.
One of them was a young man, the other an old man.
They looked at each other. I
tried to penetrate the silence of their eyes and the
night in their heads. The older man stroked his
beard, leaned against the mantelpiece, and stared
at the ground.
“Hopeless,” he said, lowering
his voice, for fear of being overheard by the patient.
The other nodded his head-in
sign of agreement-of complicity, you might
say. Both men fell silent like two guilty children.
Their eyes met again.
“How old is he?”
“Fifty-three.”
“Lucky to live so long,” the young doctor
remarked.
To which the old man retorted philosophically:
“Yes, indeed. But his luck won’t
hold out any longer.”
A silence. The man with the grey beard murmured:
“I detected sarcoma.” He put his
finger on his neck. “Right here.”
The other man nodded-his
head seemed to be nodding continually-and
muttered:
“Yes. There’s no possibility of
operating.”
“Of course not,” said
the old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of
sinister irony. “There’s only one
thing that could remove it-the guillotine.
Besides, the malignant condition has spread.
There is pressure upon the submaxillary and subclavicular
ganglia, and probably the axillary ganglia also.
His respiration, circulation and digestion will soon
be obstructed and strangulation will be rapid.”
He sighed and stood with an unlighted
cigar in his mouth, his face rigid, his arms folded.
The young man sat down, leaning back in his chair,
and tapped the marble mantelpiece with his idle fingers.
“What shall I tell the young woman?”
“Put on a subdued manner and
tell her it is serious, very serious, but no one can
tell, nature is infinitely resourceful.”
“That’s so hackneyed.”
“So much the better,” said the old man.
“But if she insists on knowing?”
“Don’t give in.”
“Shall we not hold out a little hope?
She is so young.”
“No. For that very reason
we mustn’t. She’d become too hopeful.
My boy, never say anything superfluous at such a
time. There’s no use. The only result
is to make them call us ignoramuses and hate us.”
“Does he realise?”
“I do not know. While
I examined him-you heard-I tried
to find out by asking questions. Once I thought
he had no suspicion at all. Then he seemed to
understand his case as well as I did.”
“Sarcoma forms like the human embryo,”
said the younger doctor.
“Yes, like the human embryo,”
the other assented and entered into a long elaboration
of this idea.
“The germ acts on the cell,
as Lancereaux has pointed out, in the same way as
a spermatozoon. It is a micro-organism which
penetrates the tissue, and selects and impregnates
it, sets it vibrating, gives it another life.
But the exciting agent of this intracellular activity,
instead of being the normal germ of life, is a parasite.”
He went on to describe the process
minutely and in highly scientific terms, and ended
up by saying:
“The cancerous tissue never
achieves full development. It keeps on without
ever reaching a limit. Yes, cancer, in the strictest
sense of the word, is infinite in our organism.”
The young doctor bowed assent, and then said:
“Perhaps-no doubt-we
shall succeed in time in curing all diseases.
Everything can change. We shall find the proper
method for preventing what we cannot stop when it
has once begun. And it is then only that we
shall dare to tell the ravages due to the spread of
incurable diseases. Perhaps we shall even succeed
in finding cures for certain incurable affections.
The remedies have not had time to prove themselves.
We shall cure others-that is certain-but
we shall not cure him.” His voice deepened.
Then he asked:
“Is he a Russian or a Greek?”
“I do not know. I see
so much into the inside of people that their outsides
all look alike to me.”
“They are especially alike in
their vile pretense of being dissimilar and enemies.”
The young man seemed to shudder, as
if the idea aroused a kind of passion in him.
He rose, full of anger, changed.
“Oh,” he said, “what
a disgraceful spectacle humanity presents. In
spite of its fearful wounds, humanity makes war upon
humanity. We who deal with the sores afflicting
mankind are struck more than others by all the evil
men involuntarily inflict upon one another. I
am neither a politician nor a propagandist.
It is not my business to occupy myself with ideas.
I have too much else to do. But sometimes I
am moved by a great pity, as lofty as a dream.
Sometimes I feel like punishing men, at other times,
like going down on my knees to them.”
The old doctor smiled sadly at this
vehemence, then his smile vanished at the thought
of the undeniable outrage.
“Unfortunately you are right.
With all the misery we have to suffer, we tear ourselves
with our own hands besides-the war of the
classes, the war of the nations, whether you look
at us from afar or from above, we are barbarians and
madmen.”
“Why, why,” said the young
doctor, who was getting excited, “why do we
continue to be fools when we recognise our own folly?”
The old practitioner shrugged his
shoulders, as he had a few moments before when they
spoke of incurable diseases.
“The force of tradition, fanned
by interested parties. We are not free, we are
attached to the past. We study what has always
been done, and do it over again-war and
injustice. Some day perhaps humanity will succeed
in ridding itself of the ghost of the past. Let
us hope that some day we shall emerge from this endless
epoch of massacre and misery. What else is there
to do than to hope?”
The old man stopped at this. The young man said:
“To will.”
The other man made a gesture with his hand.
“There is one great general
cause for the world’s ulcer,” the younger
one kept on. “You have said it-servility
to the past, prejudice which prevents us from doing
things differently, according to reason and morality.
The spirit of tradition infects humanity, and its
two frightful manifestations are-”
The old man rose from his chair, as
if about to protest and as if to say, “Don’t
mention them!”
But the young man could not restrain himself any more.
“-inheritance from the past and the
fatherland.”
“Hush!” cried the old
man. “You are treading on ground on which
I cannot follow. I recognise present evils.
I pray with all my heart for the new era. More
than that, I believe in it. But do not speak
that way about two sacred principles.”
“You speak like everybody else,”
said the young man bitterly. “We must
go to the root of the evil, you know we must. You
certainly do.” And he added violently,
“Why do you act as if you did not know it?
If we wish to cure ourselves of oppression and war,
we have a right to attack them by all the means possible-all!-the
principle of inheritance and the cult of the fatherland.”
“No, we haven’t the right,”
exclaimed the old man, who had risen in great agitation
and threw a look at his interlocutor that was hard,
almost savage.
“We have the right!” cried the other.
All at once, the grey head drooped,
and the old man said in a low voice:
“Yes, it is true, we have the
right. I remember one day during the war.
We were standing beside a dying man. No one
knew who he was. He had been found in the debris
of a bombarded ambulance-whether bombarded
purposely or not, the result was the same. His
face had been mutilated beyond recognition.
All you could tell was that he belonged to one or
other of the two armies. He moaned and groaned
and sobbed and shrieked and invented the most appalling
cries. We listened to the sounds that he made
in his agony, trying to find one word, the faintest
accent, that would at least indicate his nationality.
No use. Not a single intelligible sound from
that something like a face quivering on the stretcher.
We looked and listened, until he fell silent.
When he was dead and we stopped trembling, I had
a flash of comprehension. I understood.
I understood in the depths of my being that man is
more closely knit to man than to his vague compatriots.
“Yes, we have a right to attack
oppression and war, we have a right to. I saw
the truth several times afterward again, but I am an
old man, and I haven’t the strength to stick
to it.”
“My dear sir,” said the
young man, rising, with respect in his voice.
Evidently he was touched.
“Yes, I know, I know,”
the old scientist continued in an outburst of sincerity.
“I know that in spite of all the arguments and
the maze of special cases in which people lose themselves,
the absolute, simple truth remains, that the law by
which some are born rich and others poor and which
maintains a chronic inequality in society is a supreme
injustice. It rests on no better basis than the
law that once created races of slaves. I know
patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment
which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust
the world. I know that neither work nor material
and moral prosperity, nor the noble refinements of
progress, nor the wonders of art, need competition
inspired by hate. In fact, I know that, on the
contrary, these things are destroyed by arms.
I know that the map of a country is composed of conventional
lines and different names, that our innate love of
self leads us closer to those that are like-minded
than to those who belong to the same geographical
group, and we are more truly compatriots of those
who understand and love us and who are on the level
of our own souls, or who suffer the same slavery than
of those whom we meet on the street. The national
groups, the units of the modern world, are what they
are, to be sure. The love we have for our native
land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate,
as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit
of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism,
and militarism. The monstrous distortion of
the patriotic sentiment, which is increasing, is killing
off humanity. Mankind is committing suicide,
and our age is an agony.”
The two men had the same vision and said simultaneously:
“A cancer, a cancer!”
The older scientist grew animated, succumbing to the
evidence.
“I know as well as you do that
posterity will judge severely those who have made
a fetich of the institutions of oppression and have
cultivated and spread the ideas supporting them.
I know that the cure for an abuse does not begin
until we refuse to submit to the cult that consecrates
it. And I, who have devoted myself for half a
century to the great discoveries that have changed
the face of the world, I know that in introducing
an innovation one encounters the hostility of everything
that is.
“I know it is a vice to spend
years and centuries saying of progress, ‘I should
like it, but I do not want it.’ But as
for me, I have too many cares and too much work to
do. And then, as I told you, I am too old.
These ideas are too new for me. A man’s
intelligence is capable of holding only a certain
quantum of new, creative ideas. When that amount
is exhausted, whatever the progress around you may
be, one refuses to see it and help it on. I
am incapable of carrying on a discussion to fruitful
lengths. I am incapable of the audacity of being
logical. I confess to you, my boy, I have not
the strength to be right.”
“My dear doctor,” said
the young man in a tone of reproach, meeting his older
colleague’s sincerity with equal sincerity, “you
have publicly declared your disapproval of the men
who publicly fought the idea of patriotism.
The influence of your name has been used against them.”
The old man straightened himself, and his face coloured.
“I will not stand for our country’s being
endangered.”
I did not recognise him any more.
He dropped from his great thoughts and was no longer
himself. I was discouraged.
“But,” the other put in, “what you
just said-”
“That is not the same thing.
The people you speak of have defied us. They
have declared themselves enemies and so have justified
all outrages in advance.”
“Those who commit outrages against
them commit the crime of ignorance,” said the
young man in a tremulous voice, sustained by a kind
of vision. “They fail to see the superior
logic of things that are in the process of creation.”
He bent over to his companion, and, in a firmer tone,
asked, “How can the thing that is beginning help
being revolutionary? Those who are the first
to cry out are alone, and therefore ignored or despised.
You yourself just said so. But posterity will
remember the vanguard of martyrs. It will hail
those who have cast a doubt on the equivocal word
‘fatherland,’ and will gather them into
the fold of all the innovators who went before them
and who are now universally honoured.”
“Never!” cried the old
man, who listened to this last with a troubled look.
A frown of obstinacy and impatience deepened in his
forehead, and he clenched his fists in hate.
“No, that is not the same thing. Besides,
discussions like this lead nowhere. It would
be better, while we are waiting for the world to do
its duty, for us to do ours and tell this poor woman
the truth.”