Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘But that isn’t the way I want to draw,’ said Hurtle.

‘Which way, then?’

‘I want to draw my own way.’

‘They’ll laugh at you if you do. They’ll think you’re either ignorant or pulling their legs.’ Mr Tyndall spoke with conviction as he shaded his own silvery drawing of a hand. ‘Will you mind appearing ridiculous?’

‘No.’ But he could feel himself going red, as he did whenever he told a lie.

He took his pencil, and might have made matters worse by working off his embarrassment on paper, only someone began thumping on the door. It was Mr Shewcroft upholding his rights.

Mr Tyndall looked at his watch. ‘Guilty again!’ he said in his pleasant old man’s voice, which didn’t sound guilty at all.

As for Mr Shewcroft, he never spoke unless he could help it.

Leaving the room, Mr Tyndall seemed to lurch against him with a smile strictly for a colleague; or perhaps it was Mr Shewcroft who lurched against Mr Tyndall. It was almost a collision, with the result that Mr Shewcroft might have lost his balance if he hadn’t found support by attaching himself with three tobacco-stained fingers to the edge of the table; while the guiltless Mr Tyndall cleanly left.

Though a younger man, Mr Shewcroft had retired from being a schoolmaster in favour of coaching private pupils. He was very thin. The skin on his face was large-pored, pock-marked: in some places it looked scarred. Hurtle often wondered whether old Shewcroft knew about the blackheads. He would have liked to give them a squeeze for him. There were mornings when the Latin tutor’s breath smelled like a full ashtray, and worse. He can’t have known and nobody dared tell him about it.

On one occasion Maman had said: ‘He hasn’t disgraced himself. He hasn’t exactly fallen down. But he does look so unsavoury, Harry.’

‘Poor devil!’

‘Yes, we mustn’t be uncharitable.’ Maman immediately altered her voice, because their boy had come into the room, and she was at her letter-writing.

Now this morning Mr Shewcroft looked his most unsavoury for Latin Unseen. His breath came in fiery gusts. Hurtle decided he might succeed better with the blackheads by digging them out with a little watch key; while Mr Shewcroft remained absorbed, not in the Latin Unseen, but in his own thoughts, some of them so painful they were visibly rising to the surface of his bilious eyes.

Hurtle wondered what would happen if his own mumbling voice, stumbling after Caesar, came to a stop. It did. There was the peaceful sound of doves murmuring or digesting.

‘What is the use of Caesar, Mr Shewcroft?’ he dared ask, though very low.

Mr Shewcroft was chewing on something, like a lump of gristle so big and unmanageable it couldn’t be swallowed; nor could it be spat out, though it was only a boy who would see: so his eyes seemed to imply as they bulged to bursting point, the veins in his neck swelling above the yellow rim of his collar.

When at last Mr Shewcroft spoke, his words were the gristle of words. He sort of groaned: ‘For that matter, what’s the use of anything?’

He began to show his brown teeth, to clasp his always clammy fingers with their bitten nails, till you could hear the bones cracking, and the hands were drained white.

‘You’re a boy. You can’t know. Not about injustice. Probably won’t ever.’ He ground it out, while his terrible eyes looked the furniture over. ‘Always be too flush. You won’t need to listen to what they’re saying about you in the next room. They won’t say it, anyway. They’ll be too respectful of your cash. Well, good luck to you!’

He laughed, only his throat had grown too tight to let more than half of it out.

‘If you’re of no importance, even your bootlaces are against you!’

Hurtle looked down, and one of the twisted old bootlaces had been joined in an untidy knot on Mr Shewcroft’s dusty instep.

You were so embarrassed you didn’t know whether to show him the new penknife the present from Father or tell him something or tell him — what? Till you remembered the heart going chuff chuff how you behaved to those who were sick or broke or in any way bashed about you remembered at least how it began in Mumma’s words.

‘Don’t you believe in God, Mr Shewcroft?’

‘Good God! ’

Mr Shewcroft laughed. His face turned green. Then he grew very quiet. He got up and, walking on a curve, his curved body left the room: probably gone to the lavatory.

Hurtle put in time drawing. It was a comfort to watch the drawing grow. Of the great eye. It wasn’t Mr Shewcroft’s eye; it wasn’t his own: or perhaps it was his own, from looking at it so often in the glass. Anyway, there was the Eye. It might have started accusing him if he hadn’t looked over his shoulder to find Lizzie had stuck her head in, looking very pretty in her crisp cap and freckles.

‘Your teacher’s gone,’ she said. ‘Left the front door open. Shickered worse than usual.’

Lizzie’s mouth showed such contempt in the way it formed the word, he could only share her attitude. He laughed back uglily, to let her see he was in the know.

But he kept remembering the knitted, twisted bootlace. He grew troubled, and finally afraid: because Mr Shewcroft didn’t come again to give the lessons.

Maman said: ‘Oh yes, poor man, he won’t come; he’s sick.’

‘But what’s he got?’

It was an afternoon of rain. The windows were plastered with skeins of rain; beyond them in the dark-green garden long wet bending wands were tangling with one another.

‘He won’t come,’ Maman repeated.

He noticed her hair had grey in it, though her face was young, her lips moist. She touched her hair.

‘Shall we play a game?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Rhoda? Find Rhoda. Get out the cards and we’ll play a game of grab. I don’t know where that Miss Gibbons hides poor little Rhoda. I never set eyes on her.’

When Rhoda was found they played, and the reds had never looked so brilliant as now, with rainlight touching them up. He was winning. Rhoda cheated. Nobody cared: it was too wet and Maman soggy in the nose.

Herself a humpbacked queen, Rhoda shot out a card, and asked: ‘Does Mr Shewcroft have a wife?’

‘He was a single man,’ Maman said, looking closely at the cards.

Hurtle almost always won. Cold behind the knees and feeble at the wrists since Maman put Mr Shewcroft in the past, he was full of shame. He dreaded something. Someone would notice his goose-flesh if he didn’t distract their attention.

He laughed, his teeth chattering; he said: ‘Old Shewcroft was too ugly — all those pocks — blackheads. And breath! No one would want to be cuddled by Shewcroft.’

Rhoda shrieked, and made the most of it to cheat.

‘Don’t be vulgar, Hurtle,’ said Maman, though on a sunlit day, and in a pretty dress, she might have enjoyed his funny remarks. ‘It isn’t kind, darling.’ She sniffed at the cards; she said her cold made her look an awful sight.

‘If I was to draw old Shewcroft I’d draw him as a sort of Jack of Clubs. A thin Jack. Jumping off the roof.’

Rhoda giggled very high. ‘Why jumping off the roof?’

‘Because he was a bit mad! ’ He shouted it.

He was winning as usual. It was fortunate at this point, because Maman could pretend not to have heard. Probably only he had heard. Rhoda was grizzling because she had lost.

‘Why does Hurtle always win?’

‘There are more worthwhile ways of succeeding, Rhoda.’ Maman was trying to console her.

While he could only think of escaping from the room. He must.

‘There was a man I knew,’ he began.

To be truthful, there was a man Pa had known, a coalheaver in Foveaux Street, who had cut his own throat for some forgotten reason. There was blood all amongst the coal dust.