The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [94]
Chapter Three
1
THE bank manager took a sip of feed water and exclaimed with more than professional warmth, ‘How glad you must be to have Mrs Scobie back well in time for Christmas.’
‘Christmas is a long way off still,’ Scobie said.
‘Time flies when the rains are over,’ the bank manager went on with his novel cheerfulness. Scobie had never before heard in his voice this note of optimism. He remembered the stork-like figure pacing to and fro, pausing at the medical books, so many hundred times a day.
‘I came along...’ Scobie began.
‘About your life insurance - or an overdraft, would it be?’
‘Well, it wasn’t either this time.’
‘You know I’ll always be glad to help you, Scobie, whatever it is.’ How quietly Robinson sat at his desk. Scobie said with wonder, ‘Have you given up your daily exercise?’
‘Ah, that was all stuff and nonsense,’ the manager said. ‘I had read too many books.’
‘I wanted to look in your medical encyclopaedia,’ Scobie explained.
‘You’d do much better to see a doctor,’ Robinson surprisingly advised him. ‘It’s a doctor who’s put me right, not the books. The tune I would have wasted ... I tell you, Scobie, the new young fellow they’ve got at the Argyll Hospital’s the best man they’ve sent to this colony since they discovered it.’
‘And he’s put you right?’
‘Go and see him. His name’s Travis. Tell him I sent you’
‘All the same, if I could just have a look...’
‘You’ll find it on the shelf. I keep ‘em there still because they look important. A bank manager has to be a reading man. People expect him to have solid books around.’
‘I’m glad your stomach’s cured.’
The manager took another sip of water. He said, ‘I’m not bothering about it any more. The truth of the matter is, Scobie, I’m...’
Scobie looked through the encyclopaedia for the word Angina and now he read on: CHARACTER OF THE PAIN. This is usually described as being ‘gripping’, ‘as though the chest were in a vice’. The pain is situated in the middle of the chest and under the sternum. It may run down either arm perhaps more commonly the left, or up into the neck or down into the abdomen. It lasts a few seconds, or at the most a minute or so. THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE PATIENT. This is characteristic. He holds himself absolutely still in whatever circumstances he may find himself.... Scobie’s eye passed rapidly down the cross-headings : CAUSE OF THE PAIN. TREATMENT. TERMINATION OF THE DISEASE. Then he put the book back on the shelf. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps I’ll drop in on your Dr Travis. I’d rather see him than Dr Sykes. I hope he cheers me up as he’s done you.’
‘Well, my case,’ the manager said evasively, ‘had peculiar features.’
‘Mine looks straightforward enough.’
‘You seem pretty well.’
‘Oh, I’m all right - bar a bit of pain now and then and sleeping badly.’
‘Your responsibilities do that for you.’
‘Perhaps.’
It seemed to Scobie that he had sowed enough - against what harvest? He couldn’t himself have told. He said goodbye and went out into the dazzling street. He carried his helmet and let the sun strike vertically down upon his thin greying hair. He offered himself for punishment all the way to the police station and was rejected. It had seemed to him these last three weeks that the damned must be in a special category; like the young men destined for some unhealthy foreign post in a trading company, they were reserved from their humdrum fellows, protected from the daily task, preserved carefully at special desks, so that the worst might happen later. Nothing now ever seemed to go wrong. The sun would not strike, the Colonial Secretary asked him to dinner ... He felt rejected by misfortune.