Tales of Space and Time
inclining rather to regard the body and them as mental illusions
amenable to contemplation; so Bindon took it to a man of a class he
loathed, a medical man of extraordinary repute and incivility. "We must
go all over you," said the medical man, and did so with the most
disgusting frankness. "Did you ever bring any children into the world?"
asked this gross materialist among other impertinent questions.
"Not that I know of," said Bindon, too amazed to stand upon his dignity.
"Ah!" said the medical man, and proceeded with his punching and
sounding. Medical science in those days was just reaching the beginnings
of precision. "You'd better go right away," said the medical man, "and
make the Euthanasia. The sooner the better."
Bindon gasped. He had been trying not to understand the technical
explanations and anticipations in which the medical man had indulged.
"I say!" he said. "But do you mean to say ... Your science ..."
"Nothing," said the medical man. "A few opiates. The thing is your own
doing, you know, to a certain extent."
"I was sorely tempted in my youth."
"It's not that so much. But you come of a bad stock. Even if you'd have
taken precautions you'd have had bad times to wind up with. The mistake
was getting born. The indiscretions of the parents. And you've shirked
exercise, and so forth."
"I had no one to advise me."
"Medical men are always willing."
"I was a spirited young fellow."
"We won't argue; the mischief's done now. You've lived. We can't start
you again. You ought never to have started at all. Frankly--the
Euthanasia!"
Bindon hated him in silence for a space. Every word of this brutal
expert jarred upon his refinements. He was so gross, so impermeable to
all the subtler issues of being. But it is no good picking a quarrel
with a doctor. "My religious beliefs," he said, "I don't approve of
suicide."
"You've been doing it all your life."
"Well, anyhow, I've come to take a serious view of life now."
"You're bound to, if you go on living. You'll hurt. But for practical
purposes it's late. However, if you mean to do that--perhaps I'd better
mix you a little something. You'll hurt a great deal. These little
twinges ..."
"Twinges!"
"Mere preliminary notices."
"How long can I go on? I mean, before I hurt--really."
"You'll get it hot soon. Perhaps three days."
Bindon tried to argue for an extension of time, and in the midst of his
pleading gasped, put his hand to his side. Suddenly the extraordinary
pathos of his life came to him clear and vivid. "It's hard," he said.
"It's infernally hard! I've been no man's enemy but my own. I've always
treated everybody quite fairly."
The medical man stared at him without any sympathy for some seconds. He
was reflecting how excellent it was that there were no more Bindons to
carry on that line of pathos. He felt quite optimistic. Then he turned
to his telephone and ordered up a prescription from the Central
Pharmacy.
He was interrupted by a voice behind him. "By God!" cried Bindon; "I'll
have her yet."
The physician stared over his shoulder at Bindon's expression, and then
altered the prescription.
So soon as this painful interview was over, Bindon gave way to rage. He
settled that the medical man was not only an unsympathetic brute and
wanting in the first beginnings of a gentleman, but also highly
incompetent; and he went off to four other practitioners in succession,
with a view to the establishment of this intuition. But to guard against
surprises he kept that little prescription in his pocket. With each he
began by expressing his grave doubts of the first doctor's intelligence,
honesty and professional knowledge, and then stated his symptoms,
suppressing only a few more material facts in each case. These were
always subsequently elicited by the doctor. In spite of the welcome
depreciation of another practitioner, none of these eminent specialists
would give Bindon any hope of eluding the anguish and helplessness that
loomed now close upon him. To the last of them he unburthened his mind
of an accumulated disgust with medical science. "After centuries and
centuries," he exclaimed hotly; "and you can do nothing--except admit
your helplessness. I say, 'save me'--and what do you do?"
"No doubt it's hard on you," said the doctor. "But you should have taken
precautions."
"How was I to know?"
"It wasn't our place to run after you," said the medical man, picking a
thread of cotton from his purple sleeve. "Why should we save _you_ in
particular? You see--from one point of view--people with imaginations
and passions like yours have to go--they have to go."
"Go?"
"Die out. It's an eddy."
He was a young man with a serene face. He smiled at Bindon. "We get on
with research, you know; we give advice when people have the sense to
ask for it. And we bide our time."
"Bide your time?"
"We hardly know enough yet to take over the management, you know."
"The management?"
"You needn't be anxious. Science is young yet. It's got to keep on
growing for a few generations. We know enough now to know we don't know
enough yet.... But the time is coming, all the same. _You_ won't see the
time. But, between ourselves, you rich men and party bosses, with your
natural play of the passions and patriotism and religion and so forth,
have made rather a mess of things; haven't you? These Underways! And all
that sort of thing. Some of us have a sort of fancy that in time we may
know enough to take over a little more than the ventilation and drains.
Knowledge keeps on piling up, you know. It keeps on growing. And there's
not the slightest hurry for a generation or so. Some day--some day, men
will live in a different way." He looked at Bindon and meditated.
"There'll be a lot of dying out before that day can come."
Bindon attempted to point out to this young man how silly and irrelevant
such talk was to a sick man like himself, how impertinent and uncivil it
was to him, an older man occupying a position in the official world of
extraordinary power and influence. He insisted that a doctor was paid to
cure people--he laid great stress on "_paid_"--and had no business to
glance even for a moment at "those other questions." "But we do," said
the young man, insisting upon facts, and Bindon lost his temper.
His indignation carried him home. That these incompetent impostors, who
were unable to save the life of a really influential man like himself,
should dream of some day robbing the legitimate property owners of
social control, of inflicting one knew not what tyranny upon the world.
Curse science! He fumed over the intolerable prospect for some time, and
then the pain returned, and he recalled the made-up prescription of the
first doctor, still happily in his pocket. He took a dose forthwith.
It calmed and soothed him greatly, and he could sit down in his most
comfortable chair beside his library (of phonographic records), and
think over the altered aspect of affairs. His indignation passed, his
anger and his passion crumbled under the subtle attack of that
prescription, pathos became his sole ruler. He stared about him, at his
magnificent and voluptuously appointed apartment, at his statuary and
discreetly veiled pictures, and all the evidences of a cultivated and
elegant wickedness; he touched a stud and the sad pipings of Tristan's
shepherd filled the air. His eye wandered from one object to another.
They were costly and gross and florid--but they were his. They presented
in concrete form his ideals, his conceptions of beauty and desire, his
idea of all that is precious in life. And now--he must leave it all like
a common man. He was, he felt, a slender and delicate flame, burning
out. So must all life flame up and pass, he thought. His eyes filled
with tears.
Then it came into his head that he was alone. Nobody cared for him,
nobody needed him! at any moment he might begin to hurt vividly. He
might even howl. Nobody would mind. According to all the doctors he
would have excellent reason for howling in a day or so. It recalled what
his spiritual adviser had said of the decline of faith and fidelity, the
degeneration of the age. He beheld himself as a pathetic proof of this;
he, the subtle, able, important, voluptuous, cynical, complex Bindon,
possibly howling, and not one faithful simple creature in all the world
to howl in sympathy. Not one faithful simple soul was there--no shepherd
to pipe to him! Had all such faithful simple creatures vanished from
this harsh and urgent earth? He wondered whether the horrid vulgar crowd
that perpetually went about the city could possibly know what he thought
of them. If they did he felt sure _some_ would try to earn a better
opinion. Surely the world went from bad to worse. It was becoming
impossible for Bindons. Perhaps some day ... He was quite sure that the
one thing he had needed in life was sympathy. For a time he regretted
that he left no sonnets--no enigmatical pictures or something of that
sort behind him to carry on his being until at last the sympathetic
mind should come....
It seemed incredible to him that this that came was extinction. Yet his
sympathetic spiritual guide was in this matter annoyingly figurative and
vague. Curse science! It had undermined all faith--all hope. To go out,
to vanish from theatre and street, from office and dining-place, from
the dear eyes of womankind. And not to be missed! On the whole to leave
the world happier!
He reflected that he had never worn his heart upon his sleeve. Had he
after all been _too_ unsympathetic? Few people could suspect how subtly
profound he really was beneath the mask of that cynical gaiety of his.
They would not understand the loss they had suffered. Elizabeth, for
example, had not suspected....
He had reserved that. His thoughts having come to Elizabeth gravitated
about her for some time. How _little_ Elizabeth understood him!
That thought became intolerable. Before all other things he must set
that right. He realised that there was still something for him to do in
life, his struggle against Elizabeth was even yet not over. He could
never overcome her now, as he had hoped and prayed. But he might still
impress her!
From that idea he expanded. He might impress her profoundly--he might
impress her so that she should for evermore regret her treatment of him.
The thing that she must realise before everything else was his
magnanimity. His magnanimity! Yes! he had loved her with amazing
greatness of heart. He had not seen it so clearly before--but of course
he was going to leave her all his property. He saw it instantly, as a
thing determined and inevitable. She would think how good he was, how
spaciously generous; surrounded by all that makes life tolerable from
his hand, she would recall with infinite regret her scorn and coldness.
And when she sought expression for that regret, she would find that
occasion gone forever, she should be met by a locked door, by a
disdainful stillness, by a white dead face. He closed his eyes and
remained for a space imagining himself that white dead face.
From that he passed to other aspects of the matter, but his
determination was assured. He meditated elaborately before he took
action, for the drug he had taken inclined him to a lethargic and
dignified melancholy. In certain respects he modified details. If he
left all his property to Elizabeth it would include the voluptuously
appointed room he occupied, and for many reasons he did not care to
leave that to her. On the other hand, it had to be left to some one. In
his clogged condition this worried him extremely.
In the end he decided to leave it to the sympathetic exponent of the
fashionable religious cult, whose conversation had been so pleasing in