Amok and Other Stories Read Free Page A

flooding out … but wait … Yes, I know … I was going to ask you, I wanted to tell you about a certain case, wondering whether you think one has a duty to help … just help, with motives as pure as an angel’s, or whether … Although I fear it will be a long story. Are you sure you’re not tired?”
    “No, not in the least.”
    “Thank you … thank you. Will you have a drink?”
    He had been groping in the dark behind him somewhere. There was a clinking sound: two or three, at any rate several bottles stood ranged there. He offered me a glass of whisky, which I sipped briefly, while he drained his glass in a single draught. For a moment there was silence between us. Then the ship’s bell struck half-past midnight.
     
    “Well then … I’d like to tell you about a case. Suppose that a doctor in a small town … or right out in the country , a doctor who … a doctor who … ” He stopped again, and then suddenly moved his chair closer to mine.
    “This is no good. I must tell you everything directly, from the beginning, or you won’t understand it … no, I can’t put it as a theoretical example, I must tell you the story of my own case. There’ll be no shame about it, I will hide nothing … people strip naked in front of me, after all, and show me their scabs, their urine, their excrement… if someone is to help there can be no beating about the bush, no concealment. So I won’t describe the case of some fictional doctor, I will strip myself naked and say that I … I forgot all shame in that filthy isolation, that accursed country that eats the soul and sucks the marrow from a man’s loins.”
    I must have made a movement of some kind, for he interrupted himself.
    “Ah, you protest … oh, I understand, you are fascinated by India, by its temples and palm trees, all the romance of a two-month visit. Yes, the tropics are magical when you’re travelling through them by rail, road or rickshaw: I felt just the same when I first arrived seven years ago. I had so many dreams, I was going to learn the language and read the sacred texts in the original, I was going to study the diseases, do scientific work, explore the native psyche—as we would put it in European jargon—I was on a mission for humanity and civilisation. Everyone who comes here dreams the same dream. But then a man’s strength ebbs away in this invisible hothouse, the fever strikes deep into him—and we all get the fever, however much quinine we take—he becomes listless, indolent, flabby as a jellyfish. As a European, he is cut off from his true nature, so to speak, when he leaves the big cities for some wretched swamp-ridden station. Sooner or later we all succumb to our weaknesses, some drink, others smoke opium, others again brawl and act like brutes—some kind of folly comes over us all. We long for Europe, we dream of walking down a street again some day, sitting among white people in a well-lit room in a solidly built house, we dream of it year after year, and if a time doescome when we could go on leave we’re too listless to take the chance. A man knows he’s been forgotten back at home, he’s a stranger there, a shell in the sea, anyone can tread on him. So he stays, he degenerates and goes to the bad in these hot, humid jungles. It was a bad day when I sold my services to that filthy place …
    Not that I did it entirely of my own free will. I had studied in Germany, I was a qualified doctor, indeed a good doctor with a post at the big hospital in Leipzig; in some long-forgotten issue of a medical journal a great deal was made of a new injection that I was the first to introduce. And then I had trouble over a woman, I met her in the hospital; she had driven her lover so crazy that he shot her with a revolver, and soon I was as crazy as he had been. She had a cold, proud manner that drove me to distraction —bold domineering women had always had a hold over me, but she tightened that hold until my bones were breaking. I