Little Deaths, page 10
I was determined not to interrupt my patient. I shook my head and maintained my silence. He turned again to the window.
‘Well, for six months—more now—I have had this … gift.’ He lowered his voice, not in the manner of one who whispers a secret, but as though he spoke unwillingly.
‘The first vision came on one of those devilish hot mornings one must endure in the tropics. I grew suddenly and unaccountably tired at my desk. I cursed the heat and let my eyes fall shut, then found I could not open them.
‘It was no sleep that gripped me. I felt as though I had swallowed some drug that blinds and paralyses. Then came the dream. But as the sleep was not sleep, so the dream resembled no dream I had ever had. My disembodied consciousness seemed to rise from my drowsing form in the chair and was drawn through rooms and corridors like some wandering ghost or phantom. I had acutely the senses of sight and hearing, but no others. I saw servants, heard distinctly each syllable of their babbling, but felt no heat, or touch, or breath of air.
‘I came to the small private garden behind the house. There was my prim wife, alone with her dying roses. Cynthia was obstinately convinced that she could make an English garden in that hellish climate. She would let no one help her. She said it took English hands to make an English garden.
‘Something odd happened. A boy of fifteen or sixteen, a native, was there. He hadn’t entered, nor had he materialized like some apparition. He was simply there. He stood among the roses as though he had been present all along, unnoticed. He was of the labouring class, barefoot and dressed in nothing but a cloth at his waist. Cynthia looked up from her hopeless pruning.
‘She should have ordered him out. Instead she watched him without saying a word. Finally I noticed what he was about. He was lifting sickly blooms from where they drooped on the bush. But when he released a flower it didn’t fall back. It was like a fakir’s trickery. He appeared to be reviving them with his touch.
Cynthia said nothing—only watched. From time to time he would look up from a flower to glance at her. His appearance was unusual. His eyes were not dark, but some indefinable pale colour, and were framed with long, womanly lashes. His hair was deep black, but instead of being straight, and cropped in the local manner, it was curly and fell in profusion over his forehead and ears. His skin was darker than one saw in our neighbourhood, and he was taller than was usual, particularly considering his youth.
‘As I said, my hearing in this dream was acute. I noticed the sound of Cynthia’s breathing, which had quickened, as though she had just run uphill.
‘The boy left the flowers and came to her. He didn’t make the slightest pretence of bowing. Had I been there in the flesh I should have whipped him myself on the spot. He leaned forward on his tiptoes like a French dancer and whispered in her ear. I was, to my perception, twenty paces away and yet I heard all that he said.’
(Here the colonel repeated the appalling words, a graphically explicit invitation—more a threat, really—to engage with Mrs Burgess in a number of carnal acts and perversions.)
‘Cynthia was holding a trowel. It might have made a good weapon, but I had no expectation of seeing her draw blood. I hoped she might scream, but feared she would fall into a weeping collapse. Her face, and even her forearms, were flushed, a deep pink almost like her favorite China roses.
‘She dropped the trowel on the pebble walkway. I hoped she might raise an alarm. The boy reached out his hand and stroked her cheek. She was silent. His hand dropped to her breast. He stepped closer. Her breathing became shallow and dry. With his other hand he raised her skirts and reached beneath them …’
(I will not here repeat the colonel’s description of the intimate liberties he saw the boy take with his wife.)
‘At this she made, indeed, a little noise, but hardly any. Not enough. Her mouth was open, her eyes glazed. I thought surely that someone would come to rescue her. I myself, I thought, would rise up from my sleep in the chair and fly to the garden. But I found myself powerless to move even my incorporeal self, much less my body.
‘Finally she twisted away from the little beggar. She stepped back from him with a wild look in her eye. Were it possible for a shade to sigh with relief, I should have done so. Run, I thought. Fly! The boy made no move to detain her. Still she did nothing to escape, but only looked around with a frantic expression as if unable to decide in which direction to flee.
‘The boy began to turn from her. With a sudden movement she reached out and seized his arm with both hands and began to pull him along the path.
‘They were soon out of sight among the hedges. I strained to follow them but was becalmed there above the garden. I heard the door of the potting shed open. Then, though it immediately closed again, I could hear them inside, every word they said, every sound they made.’
(In his dream Peter Burgess heard his wife produce every wanton noise of uninhibited coupling that his tortured imagination could counterfeit, and use the language of a drover to say things that would make a harlot blush.)
‘All the while they were in there, and it was an impossibly long time, I was trapped in that hell of a garden, listening. The boy seemed inexhaustible, my wife insatiable. He had whispered to her that he was the god of love, and it was with the capacity of a god of love that he performed. Finally there was a long period of silence. After a time I could see Cynthia walking back on the path alone. She drifted through the garden, dishevelled, smiling. She noticed the trowel on the path and stooped to pick it up. A moment later she entered the house by the garden porch.
‘Still I hung there like a dead grouse ripening on a hook. I know not how much time passed. Then, in an instant, I was awake in my chair. I was ready to dash to the garden—odd now to think of leaping from a chair and dashing anywhere—when I heard a rapping at the door and Cynthia put her head in.
‘I’m sure I stared at her wildly, but she didn’t notice. “Peter, remember it’s Mr Phipps and his committee for dinner tonight, so please make up your mind now not to be grumpy or I shall be quite put out.” She was gone before I could say a word. But gone also was the foul dream, for there was my wife—so very, very far from being the wanton—in the flesh and zealous that I should behave myself at dinner with the impossible missionary and his squadron of meddlers.
‘How foolish I was that afternoon. How quickly I banished the pain of that dream. It was as soon as that night that I had further intimations of troubles. As I prepared for bed, I thought it appropriate somehow that if the phantom of my wife had been so eager that afternoon, I should visit Cynthia’s boudoir. I amused myself by imagining that I had been the recipient of a message from Cupid announcing a change in my too well-mannered, too decorous partner. A message of hitherto absent ardour.’
Once again the colonel turned his eye on me, then addressed the window in a voice ever more distant.
‘But it was in myself that the ardour was lacking. This was a thing that had never happened to me. I had been ever a man of … ready passion. But there I found myself as unready as any failing dotard who ever disgraced himself by pretending to the capacities of a bull, only to display the virility of a calf. Cynthia’s bedclothes were not disordered that night, unless by some restlessness of her own.’
He paused as though he had lost his train of thought.
‘Nor have I disordered hers, or any other woman’s, since that day.’
He hesitated, then went on in a voice not much above a whisper.
‘I have lacked both the desire … and the ability.’
With this confession the poor man desired that day’s visit to conclude. I think he felt a certain relief at having so unburdened himself, but was not prepared to, as he must have thought it, shame himself further.
I must look into these matters—read further in the Viennese doktors. How can Peter Burgess look at his wife, who could serve as a painter’s model for a sultry odalisque, and see a ‘presentable girl’ of no particular distinction? In these private pages, and only to emphasize how odd I find his perception, I shall be so bold as to say that even his distorted dream-vision of Cynthia Burgess as a shameless wanton fits, in caricature, his air and appearance better than his waking one. It may be that Herr what’s-his-name is after all correct about sex.
And as to the gain in weight, can it be that the mind can find a way to create flesh without fuel? If so, then how has anyone starved? Or can my patient be so madly resolute to make himself physically into, what he feels his inner self to be (if this speculation of mine be correct) that he is indulging in secret feasts that no one has detected? I must put it to the corporal that we shall entirely satisfy ourselves on this matter. I wish not to engage with demons if my adversary is the pastry baker.
September 23rd, 1911
Still it rains. It seems the music of my nights is ever the rain against the window and the scratch of the pen. But this is London, and I a Londoner, formed by Nature to endure fogs and rain.
This morning before I saw the colonel, I sought out Cynthia Burgess. To see the colonel’s ‘plain English girl’ dressed for the bedroom! Perhaps I must look to his eyesight. I think myself a chaste and sober man, but Cynthia Burgess seems to radiate a sensuality that is all but suffocating. I enter her chamber with the innocent intention of discussing her husband’s diet and my eye is drawn to the lace of her gown, my thoughts to the rising bosom beneath it. I say—confess—this to emphasize once more that she is a woman of potent charms, not at all the lassie her husband sees.
I cannot help but muse: what if a man—one who prized his virility, his manliness—brought to his bed a chaste and virginal bride who, within the sanctified bounds of marriage, proved an adept, and an athlete, of lovemaking? What if he found himself overpowered—a Phaëthon at the reins, thinking to drive, and pulled headlong? And if he denied this to himself, recast reality into a form radically altered, but more to his liking, might reality not, banished from his waking hours, find its way into his dreams, to torture him with symbolic representations of the thing that he denies?
But if I am to make such diagnoses, I must move to Vienna. And if I can thus account for dreams, how shall I account for twenty-five stones?
Today I was told of further dreams. Their erotic nature seems lost on the colonel; he narrates them with no passion save that of a man being robbed, as though his goods were being carried off before his eyes. I, however, am not indifferent to the pictures his words paint. How am I to look upon this lady again, now I have these images in my mind?,
‘By the time the second dream came,’ he began, ‘I had noticed my increase in girth. I altered my diet, meaning to wear my clothes tight until I returned to my normal size. From time to time in the afternoons I would go to the window above the rose garden and observe my wife there at her solitary labours. Then one day I found myself in the garden as before, present there as a wandering spirit while my body slept upstairs.
‘The boy appeared. Cynthia noticed him at once and ran to him eagerly.’
(The colonel described in embarrassing detail the shameless fondlings and eager importunings with which his wife greeted her lover. They left his sight and conducted themselves as they had on the first occasion.)
‘The visits became more frequent, and soon were daily. Every day my spirit was trapped in the garden and my body in whatever place the sleep overtook me. All my duties I had delegated. I stayed entirely at home. I had gained over two stone, and changed my wardrobe twice. I had begun to make plans for our return to England.
‘Then one day he came to her in the house. In my disembodied state I saw him walking through the upper hallways. His eye fell on the spot that I seemed to, but did not occupy. He made a careless gesture in my direction and I was drawn irresistibly in his wake until we both, wraith and lover, stood in Cynthia’s bedroom. From that day forth I had to watch as well as listen. And my wife did things willingly, eagerly, that no woman, not even my little heathen of a housegirl, had ever done for me.’
(If the postures and practices described by the colonel were startling in their ingenious wickedness, more shocking still was the matter of Savi, a village girl employed in his house. He had forced her to be his paid concubine, which he explained with no sense of shame or contrition. After telling me of his sinful behaviour with her, he mentioned almost casually that he had had her whipped and turned out of the house for the crime of daring to protest her situation. How am I to listen to him with sympathy?)
‘This then went on week after week until we finally left. I was growing ever fatter, the wife I spied on ever more depraved. I even began to see the dream-Cynthia in her when I was awake. It was as though she were being remade in the image of the wanton I had so intimately observed. It became painful for me to look at her.
‘On the day before we sailed he came to her one last time, this potent boy. I watched them, as always without the power to look away. She, my Cynthia in form, in actions a rutting beast, was bellydown on the bed, clutching wildly at the counterpane in a transport of lust. Her lover, in contrast, was a study in calm. In the past he had been indefatigable but also active and enthusiastic. Now his expression was one of detachment, as if he were performing some routine chore. His eyes were on her body, her helpless contortions, but showed no more passion than might be raised by a view of the frenzied copulation of a pair of insects.
As I watched, his form slowly began to change. His pretty, boyish features were marred by alterations that at first were only slight. He seemed to grow larger. The change accelerated. He became horrid, a devil or monster like the creatures of my dreams at night. His teeth now were fangs, his fingers claws. And yet in this demonic form, swollen and grotesque, could still be traced the likeness of the boy. As my wife writhed and pressed herself back against him, crying out from pleasure, he laid a clawed hand on her twisting buttocks and drew it downward to where her thighs strained and quivered, cutting into the white flesh and leaving four thin trails of blood. She screamed, and thrashed convulsively, more caught in passion than ever before in these couplings, then finally fell unconscious, sprawled naked on the bed. She lay as though dead. The boy, no more a monster, withdrew himself from her, and then was gone. I have never seen him again.’
Colonel Burgess turned to face me, to address me directly.
‘And you, doctor, I see are shocked at my talk of the housegirl.’ He shook his head indignantly. ‘The natives!’ he spat. ‘They’re dirty, these people, and they have no moral sense at all. My gifts of money to that girl were keeping her family from starvation, as she told me repeatedly. She was shameless in her efforts to play upon my sympathy. I can tell you, sir, I was good to her—better than she deserved. I treated her well until she broke faith.’
Although my policy was to say as little as possible, I could not forbear to ask precisely in what manner she had transgressed. The colonel sputtered and swore, became very nearly incoherent. The burden of his angry narrative was that the girl—one can only imagine a helpless and frightened maid—had gone to the leader of a local religious cult with the unhappy story of her situation.
‘But that disloyal and ungrateful wench paid for her faithlessness. She stumbled from our gates naked, clutching her rags, with welts down her back that won’t quickly fade. And the fakir—the little brown beggar had the gall to confront me—he sits in a cell to this day unless some meddling government man has set him loose.’
Colonel Burgess sat in his oversize chair with his jaw set, an expression of stubborn implacability on his bloated features. To his mind he had described a scandalous wrong, not against the villagers he oppressed, but against himself. It is impossible to imagine an attitude more obtusely self-righteous. Equally, it is perhaps not impossible, but difficult, to imagine that his ills stem in any way from a deeply hidden sense of guilt.
But though my patient be contemptible, his history despicable, as his physician, my principal concern is with his recovery. Accordingly, I refrained from taxing him with his infamous behaviour. I kept my expression neutral and waited for him to continue. When he had regained his composure, he went on with his narrative.
‘For the first week of our voyage I was seized by no afternoon dreams. I began to have hope that they had been left behind in that tropical hell.
‘My optimism was unjustified. One day as I dozed in a deck chair, I found myself once more a disembodied observer. I watched Cynthia in the passageway outside our cabin discussing the day’s menu with the black man that brought us our meals. As she spoke, she stared into his eyes. Her voice was most unlike the one I know. It fondled the ear. When she moved closer to the servant, he closed his eyes as though overcome by dizziness. At her command he followed her into her cabin. Unbidden and unwilling, I followed as well.
‘With irresistible caresses she aroused him, though he was at the same time fearful and reticent. She undressed herself and then him. They lay together and practised every lascivious excess that depravity could encourage, ceasing, she most unwillingly, only when the man was spent.’
(As was his usual practice, the colonel was explicit in his descriptions. I am glad today has seen the end of these disturbing recitals.)
‘Every-day thereafter she had her eager nigger, I my unwelcome visions. Yet at meals this same man served us. I have wondered sometimes if I might be watching, not visions, but reality, but his demeanour convinced me, as my wife’s has from that first day, that these dreams are counterfeits. He could not be her daily partner in these lewd tumblings and then humbly pour my wine at dinner with never a glance to betray him. An ignorant darky could never be so subtle. He could lie, of course; all the lower races can, but they lack the intellect for sustained duplicity.’
‘He turned to me. ‘Since I have been under your care, I have had no more of this torture. Now my dreams torment me only at night. And they are but frights and phantoms, menacing images, demonic visages.’ He closed his eyes. ‘The little ones are the worst—hiding, waiting in the mist. They whisper gruesome promises through their small sharp teeth. They taunt me.’ He sneered down at his bulging flesh. ‘I am being fattened, they say, for a horrid feast.’
