Patrick White - Happy Valley

When Moriarty, the schoolmaster, took to his bed with asthma he went along to see him. Moriarty had been worse ever since the winter. Now when he took to his bed his wife sent for the doctor to give him an injection, and incidentally herself a little spiritual support.

Dr Halliday, she said, you don’t know what I put up with, living in a place like this. It isn’t the sort of thing I’m used to. Now if Ernest could get away. Yes, I’ll take you in to see him in a minute. As I was saying, if Ernest could get away it would be so much better for us both. Perhaps you could do something, doctor. A doctor’s report might help with the Board. Of course I don’t want to complain myself. But I’m getting a nervous wreck.

She dropped her eyes and sighed, in a way she had when she wanted to impress, but there was something of the basking seal in Mrs Moriarty that made Halliday want to laugh. A pink seal basking on its rock of complacency. Then it made him angry.

I’d better give him that injection, he said.

Mrs Moriarty began to pout, as much as to say, she didn’t expect this, and changing her dress, because she liked the doctor if only he gave her a chance, only she wasn’t going to waste her time blasting a piece of stone. So she got up.

I’ll take you in to see him, she said, pattering, her voice shrugged, her hand already dimpled on a china knob, though with a certain reluctance, as if…Halliday forgot her, Mrs Moriarty withdrawing angry or not, forgot her and went in.

Moriarty was lying in bed, eyes closed. His face was a dirty grey, except for the stubble pushing blackly through, and his lips, which were violet and very thin. His body made a thin ridge under the cotton counterpane that quivered when he tried to breathe. Watching him, Halliday suddenly became conscious of his environment again, that it was summer, a hot arid brown, that the flies were stinging the gauze with a repeated buzz and burring of their wings, that somehow he had been existing for a time apart from this, apart from the reality of Happy Valley, carried bodily out of it by some form of mental levitation. This was Happy Valley now, with Moriarty on a brass bedstead and the wash-basin unemptied from the day before. He went up to the bed and took Moriarty’s pulse.

It was like this and Hilda was right, knowing through some protective instinct that they must make an effort to escape, while he went up and listened to Alys Browne, and here was Moriarty, or Happy Valley, or the embodiment of pain, or Happy Valley instilling pain into the passive object that was Moriarty lying in his bed. When he plunged the needle into Moriarty’s arm there was no sign of acceptance or of rejection, it was as if a surfeit of pain had effected, to its own loss, a kind of anaesthesia. But the flies buzzed. But the roof cracked with the heat. He looked down at Moriarty’s face with an expression of disgust that turned to pity as the body stirred, relaxed, as the tension of the face withdrew.

Looking at Moriarty it was possible to conceive of the intense kind of mystical satisfaction that might arise from the healing of pain, if you were that way inclined, like on the ferry going home when you decided you would be a doctor, it was that attitude which attracted you. It was funny the way you made decisions on ferry-boats, something in the flow of water that made you think you would write a play, you would go to the War, you would become a doctor, or more accurately an instrument of mercy, because you were young at the time and the prospect had the appropriate sheen or became almost abstract in the soothing, escapeful susurration of the water, as the ferry refining thought. Moriarty moved and coughed. Then you became a doctor, a sort of hack, and getting up in the middle of the night or taking a test of water in a beaker divorced the decision from its mystical element, and you became a kind of machine for doing, it was altogether material, and of course it was only because you were young that you imagined you saw an aura round the figure of empirical reality.

How’s it going? he asked.

Moriarty opened his lips, wordless, but with a lessening of tension in his eyes, a freedom of breath in his throat. Looking into Moriarty’s eyes you saw, sitting on the ferry-boat, yourself, and I shall be an instrument, you said, not a hypodermic and adrenalin. The adrenalin working in Moriarty’s body was responsible. Of course it was this, you knew, that unknit nerves. Only it gave you a sudden irrational satisfaction to feel your power, almost in your own hands a power to heal, like a quack, only not. You hadn’t felt like this before. It was different. As if you suddenly saw yourself at one extreme and Happy Valley at the other on a kind of balance, and now you had begun to tip it down, standing in the scales, touching with your hands Moriarty’s arm, as the scale swung with the weight, and you began to feel you had made some considerable onslaught on the battalions of energy cased up in rock and earth with which Happy Valley bludgeoned a hitherto feeble human opposition.

Halliday sat down on the bed. He leant forward slightly and listened to the loosened breathing, watched the gentler rising of the chest.

How long do you think this’ll take? Moriarty suddenly asked.

How long’ll what?

Moriarty tried to sit up. He said:

I can’t spare more than a day or two. I’ve got to get back. Or perhaps they’ll send someone, he said. Perhaps they’ll see I ought to get away. But I oughtn’t to leave the school for more than a day or two.

We’ll have you right pretty soon, Halliday said.

To say something to Moriarty, this poor misery, even if it is just something for something to say, to ease him back on the pillow, and now he has fallen back, taking my word, depending on me, when I can’t offer more than illusory comfort, and it is mostly like this, dealing in illusions in the face of the material, and becoming reconciled to it, until now I want to give Moriarty something else.

It’s good of you, doctor, Moriarty said. My wife wants you to send a report of my health to the Board. I expect she told you. It’s very hard on poor Vic. And of course she deserves more than this. And it’s mostly been like this. I wouldn’t complain for myself, doctor. But it gets me down, her, and the school. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about the school. The inspector tells me the standard of intelligence is very low. Of course that isn’t all my fault, but… You see, there’s nothing I can do. I can only do my best.

There was a dead hum of heat in the room. An intruding fly spun in a brown circle over Moriarty’s head. Halliday reached and swept it away.

But the fact is I’m a failure, Moriarty said. I can’t cope with them. All those children. Sitting there. You don’t know, doctor, how children can hate. Half their life is pure hate. They hate you when they know you’re weak. They hate you when they know you’re strong, because they’re afraid, they think you’re going to make use of your strength. And d’you know, doctor, I–I’m afraid of them, I think.

It upset Halliday to see someone caving in like this. It upset him because there was nothing to do. It was like looking at some private emotional mystery that you had no right to be looking at.

I dare say most of us are afraid, he said. Not of the same things perhaps. We start off being afraid of the dark. Then your fear probably moves its centre to something more tangible. And most of it rises out of a feeling of being alone. Being alone is being afraid. Perhaps one day we’ll all wake up to the fact that we’re all alone, that we’re all afraid, and then it’ll just be too damn silly to go on being afraid.

Moriarty lay there, detached. He was not listening. You could see that.

I’m a failure, he said. You see, I’m a failure, he said.