Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

“I will accept whether my poor man comes or not,” I told him, feeling fearfully excited.

“You come too, Astley,” said Dr. H. “Let us give our fair companion a joint Anglo-American escort.”

Mr. A. blew out a thoughtful-looking stream of smoke, shrugged and said, “So be it.”

I left the table at once. I needed quietness to think of all the new strange things I had heard. Maybe my cracked knob is to blame but I feel less happy since Dr. H. explained there is nothing wrong with the world which the Anglo-Saxons are not curing with fire and sword. Before now I thought everyone I met was part of the same friendly family, even when a hurt one acted like our snappish bitch. Why did you not teach me politics, God?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

At this point Baxter’s voice faltered into silence and I saw him struggling to overcome a very deep emotion.

“Read the next six pages for yourself,” he said suddenly, and passed them over. I give the pages here as they were given to me:

They are printed by a photogravure process which exactly reproduces the blurring caused by tear stains, but does not show the pressure of pen strokes which often ripped right through the paper.

“A catastrophic reversion to an earlier phase with a brisk recovery at the end,” I said. “What do the scrawls mean, Baxter? Here — take them back. Only you can decipher them.”

Baxter sighed and in a steady, uninflected voice told me, “They say, no no no no no no no no no, help blind baby, poor little girl help help both, trampled no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no where my daughter, no help for blind babies poor little girls I am glad I bit Mr. Astley.”

Baxter then laid the letter down, pulled out a handkerchief, folded it into a cushion (his handkerchiefs were a quarter the size of a bed-sheet) and pushed his face into it. For a moment I feared he was trying to smother himself, then muffled eruptions showed he was using it to absorb glandular evacuations. When he removed it his eyes were extra bright.

“What then?” I asked impatiently. “What then? Does the next entry explain all that?”

“No, but what happened emerges eventually. The remaining entries are written weeks or months after her romance with Harry Astley—“

“ROMANCE!” I screamed—

“Calm yourself, McCandless. On her side it was a Platonic affair. That it helped her mental growth is shown in the writing which suddenly becomes small, regular and upright; in her spelling which rapidly conforms to the standard dictionaries; in the separation between her entries, where a straight horizontal line replaces the playful row of stars. But her growth appears most clearly in the quality of her reflections. From now onward these blend the spiritual insights of an oriental sage with the analytical acuteness of David Hume and Adam Smith. Attend!”

Thinking has maddened me for weeks. My one relief has been argument with Harry Astley. He says I will only find peace by embracing his bitter wisdom — and him. I want neither — except as enemies. He says cruelty to the helpless will never end because the healthy live by trampling these down. I say if this is true we must stop living so. He has given me books which he says prove this is impossible: Malthus’ Essay on Population, Darwin’s Origin of Species and Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. They make my head ache. I was changing the dressing on his hand today when he told me his wife had died a year ago, then said, “You are not legally married to Wedderburn, are you?”

“How clever of you to guess, Mr. Astley.”

“Please call me Harry.”

His hand is almost healed though the thumb is very stiff — my teeth have left a circular scar where they nearly met in the ball of it. He said thoughtfully, “That mark will be with me for ever.”

“I am afraid so, Harry.”

“May I regard it as an engagement ring? Will you marry me?”

“No, Harry. I am engaged to another.”

He asked about my fiancé so I told him of Candle. When I had finished fixing the new bandage he said he knew many women of rank and title, the Duchess of Sutherland and Princess Louise of Connaught among them, but I was the purest aristocrat he had met.

Dr. Hooker has left the boat in Morocco without saying good-bye or asking for his New Testament. He lent it to me so I could find peace in Jesus, but there is none. Jesus was as maddened by all-over cruelty and coldness as I am. He too must have hated discovering he had to make people better all by himself. He had one advantage over me — he could do miracles. I asked Dr. Hooker how Jesus would have treated my starving little daughter with the blind baby.

“Jesus made the blind to see,” said poor Dr. Hooker, looking uncomfortable.

“What would Jesus have done for them if he could NOT have made them see?” I asked. “Would he have hurried past like a bad Samaritan?”

I think that was why he left the Cut-use-off this afternoon. He does not want to live like Jesus, but unlike Harry Astley dare not say so.

Astley, Hooker, Wedder, all made miserable by one cracked Bell. The damage to Wedder was done after I returned from Alexandria. I rushed into our cabin and wed wed wed wed him, wedding and wedding and wedding until he begged me not to, said he could give no more but he could and did — it was the only thing which stopped me thinking about what I had seen. I sickened him of weddings, sickened myself too and in the end the thoughts still came back. I brooded for days without saying a word to him. Last night my silly man burst into tears, begged to be forgiven.

“For what?” says I. It seems he did not believe my tears and brooding were caused by the sight of beggars in Alexandria — he thought I was sulking because he had driven me to prostitution in Germany. I laughed out loud and told him I had done no such thing; that the money I had got for us was his own, taken when he fell asleep on the night when he won so much. At first he could not believe me, then he scowled straight ahead for a long time muttering “MY money! MY money!” I tried to cheer him up by starting to wed us again but he yelled “I SHALL NOT SERVE” and turned upside-down and the wrong way round with his back toward me and feet on the pillow. And all night long I heard the little whisper, “My money. My money,” coming from the bottom of the bunk.