The Creators Part 56

"What of?"

"Of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face it."

"You've nerve enough for anything."

"You don't know me. I'm an utter coward. I can't face things. Especially the thing I'm afraid of."

"What is it? Tell me." He leaned nearer to her, and she almost whispered.

"I'm afraid of his having a fit--epilepsy. He _might_ have it."

"He might. But he won't. You mustn't think of it."

"I'm always thinking of it. And the most--the most awful thing is that--I'm afraid of _seeing_ it."

She bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to an unpardonable shame.

"Poor child. Of course you are," said Prothero. "We're all afraid of something. I'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood."

"You?"

"I."

"Oh--but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it."

"Wouldn't I?"

"No. Or you couldn't go and be a doctor. Why," she asked suddenly, "did you?"

"_Because_ I was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way.

My father was a country doctor--a surgeon. One day he sent me into his surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me--I was a boy about fifteen at the time--to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?"

"You fainted?--You were ill on the spot?"

"No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away."

A slight tremor pa.s.sed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for the vibration of some spiritual recoil.

"What do you say to that?"

"I don't say anything."

"My father said I was a d.a.m.ned coward, and my mother said I was a hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."

"They might have known," she said.

"They might have known what?"

"That you were different."

"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that I _was_ a man--that I wasn't different after all."

"Well--you proved it."

"If I did my father never knew it."

"And your mother?" she said softly.

"I believe she knew."

"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"

"I never let her know, really, how different I was."

"You kept it to yourself?"

"It was the only way to keep it."

"Your genius?"

"If you choose to call it that."

"The thing," she said, "that made you different."

"You see," he said, "they didn't understand that _that_ was where I was most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."

"You couldn't lose it."

"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in Bombay; and it went again."

She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of something more than it.

"You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and there's the terror--_the_ most awful terror there is--of never getting back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of it without seeing it--seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else matters. Nothing else is."

She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.

"And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the other part remains where it got to."

"I see."

Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit surer than she was now.

No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself that he put to the test.

And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them, he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his soul and its exultant, processional vision of G.o.d.

"The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'm _still_ afraid of the sight of blood."