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 blasé.
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."