‘So you can’t stitch through wood?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Have you got any iodine in your bag?’
‘What if I have?’
‘Then paint the cut with iodine. It’ll sting, but that can’t be helped.’
‘Now look,’ the Doctor said, and again he turned as if to go. ‘Let’s not be ridiculous. Let’s get back to the house and then…’
‘Paint-the-cut-with-iodine.’
The Doctor hesitated. He saw Klausner’s hands tightening on the handle of the axe. He decided that his only alternative was to run away fast, and he certainly wasn’t going to do that.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll paint it with iodine.’
He got his black bag which was lying on the grass about ten yards away, opened it and took out a bottle of iodine and some cotton wool. He went up to the tree trunk, uncorked the bottle, tipped some of the iodine on to the cotton wool, bent down and began to dab it into the cut. He kept one eye on Klausner who was standing motionless with the axe in his hands, watching him.
‘Make sure you get it right in.’
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said.
‘Now do the other one – the one just above it!’
The Doctor did as he was told.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘It’s done.’
He straightened up and surveyed his work in a very serious manner. ‘That should do nicely.’
Klausner came closer and gravely examined the two wounds.
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his huge head slowly up and down. ‘Yes, that will do nicely.’ He stepped back a pace. ‘You’ll come and look at them again tomorrow?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘Of course.’
‘And put some more iodine on?’
‘If necessary, yes.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Klausner said, and he nodded his head again and he dropped the axe and all at once he smiled, a wild, excited smile, and quickly the Doctor went over to him and gently he took him by the arm and he said, ‘Come on, we must go now,’ and suddenly they were walking away, the two of them, walking silently, rather hurriedly across the park, over the road, back to the house.
Nunc Dimittis
It is nearly midnight, and I can see that if I don’t make a start with writing this story now, I never shall. All evening I have been sitting here trying to force myself to begin, but the more I have thought about it, the more appalled and ashamed and distressed I have become by the whole thing.
My idea – and I believe it was a good one – was to try, by a process of confession and analysis, to discover a reason or at any rate some justification for my outrageous behaviour towards Janet de Pelagia. I wanted, essentially, to address myself to an imaginary and sympathetic listener, a kind of mythical you, someone gentle and understanding to whom I might tell unashamedly every detail of this unfortunate episode. I can only hope that I am not too upset to make a go of it.
If I am to be quite honest with myself, I suppose I shall have to admit that what is disturbing me most is not so much the sense of my own shame, or even the hurt that I have inflicted upon poor Janet; it is the knowledge that I have made a monstrous fool of myself and that all my friends – if I can still call them that – all those warm and lovable people who used to come so often to my house, must now be regarding me as nothing but a vicious, vengeful old man. Yes, that surely hurts. When I say to you that my friends were my whole life – everything, absolutely everything in it – then perhaps you will begin to understand.
Will you? I doubt it – unless I digress for a minute to tell you roughly the sort of person I am.
Well – let me see. Now that I come to think of it, I suppose I am, after all, a type; a rare one, mark you, but nevertheless a quite definite type – the wealthy, leisurely, middle-aged man of culture, adored (I choose the word carefully) by his many friends for his charm, his money, his air of scholarship, his generosity, and I sincerely hope for himself also. You will find him (this type) only in the big capitals – London, Paris, New York; of that I am certain. The money he has was earned by his dead father whose memory he is inclined to despise. This is not his fault, for there is something in his make-up that compels him secretly to look down upon all people who never had the wit to learn the difference between Rockingham and Spode, Waterford and Venetian, Sheraton and Chippendale, Monet and Manet, or even Pommard and Montrachet.
He is, therefore, a connoisseur, possessing above all things an exquisite taste. His Constables, Boningtons, Lautrecs, Redons, Vuillards, Matthew Smiths are as fine as anything in the Tate; and because they are so fabulous and beautiful they create an atmosphere of suspense around him in the home, something tantalizing, breathtaking, faintly frightening – frightening to think that he has the power and the right, if he feels inclined, to slash, tear, plunge his fist through a superb Dedham Vale, a Mont Saint-Victoire, an Arles cornfield, a Tahiti maiden, a portrait of Madame Cézanne. And from the walls on which these wonders hang there issues a little golden glow of splendour, a subtle emanation of grandeur in which he lives and moves and entertains with a sly nonchalance that is not entirely unpractised.
He is invariably a bachelor, yet he never appears to get entangled with the women who surround him, who love him so dearly. It is just possible – and this you may or may not have noticed – that there is a frustration, a discontent, a regret somewhere inside him. Even a slight aberration.