♦ LIFE AFTER DEATH ♦
“It’s happened before, I tell you. An obstruction in the windpipe, shock and coma, the premature pronouncement of death. Good Lord, man, it was snowing to beat all hell — and Christmas morning on top of it. Who’s to blame the hangman for maybe rushing things just a bit?”
With the slow, steady persistence of grains accumulating in an inverted hourglass, the voice of reason is beginning to have its effect on Quiddle. Still, he resists. “He dangled twenty minutes, didn’t he?”
“Psssh,” Delp waves his hand contemptuously. “Need I remind you that the human animal is infinitely various, and that what will dispatch one quite neatly may not necessarily, inexorably and in all cases do the trick for another. A Fiji Islander might not last more than five minutes in the waters off Greenland, but what of an Eskimo? Or better yet — take your average greengrocer. He’d go up like a wad of paper if you sent him through a bed of hot coals, and yet the Indies are swarming with fakirs who do it three and four times a day — for a lark. Use your sense, man. Who’s to say that twenty or thirty or even sixty minutes’ hang time is sufficient to choke out a human life without first taking into consideration the vagaries of time and place, weather conditions, the type of knot and quality of rope, the endurance of the individual and any of a thousand other intangibles?”
“I don’t care how you explain it, I still think it’s a miracle that that man in there is alive. Whether it’s the hand of the Almighty or just a ripple of the law of averages, I’ll wager it’s the most extraordinary thing to happen round here since Queen Elizabeth’s handmaid got hit by lightning and sprouted a beard.”
Delp’s eyes have gone cold with exasperation. “Wager away,” he grunts, pulling the pipe from his mouth as if he were unplugging a drain, “but I’ll tell you this — I want that character out of here in a week’s time. Chafe his neck, let some blood, feed him broth — whatever it takes — but get him on his feet and out that door.” Here he pauses to strike a match and suck the yellow flame over the bowl of his pipe. “I have no objection to your parading him around a bit, incidentally. There’s been a lot of folderol about the miracle of modern science and all that, the patients looking on it with a certain degree of awe and so on. Walk him around. I don’t think it would hurt us a bit — if you know what I mean.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The door swings back and scatters light through the little room. In the doorway, Quiddle. A tray in his hands. Pewter mug, golden crust, steam rising from a bowl. “Well, you’re awake then,” he booms in a jaunty, whistling-in-the-churchyard sort of voice.
Ned Rise lies on a pallet in the corner, a dirty blanket pulled up to his neck. The room is dank and windowless: earthen walls, brick floor, deal planks overhead. A cellar of course, crude and unfinished, and yet not without its amenities: a washstand and tub of water, fireplace carved out of the wall, bucket of coal, framed mirror. Beside the door, a tottering rack of clothes and an upended grocer’s basket cluttered with books (medical texts and religious tracts) and the refuse of quotidian life: apple cores, cheese rinds, loose tobacco, the stumps of deceased candles. Someone has painted a window on the far wall and framed it with a fluff of soiled yellow curtain.
“So — how are you feeling?” Quiddle hollers, edging into the room and making motions toward the low table at the foot of the bed.
Ned says nothing. He lies there, unshaven, hair matted, the red rope burn a reproof round his neck. His eyes stick out like swords.
Quiddle sets the tray down with a quick athletic motion and springs back a step or two, keeping his distance, wary, light on his feet. He folds his hands behind his back. “Heh-heh,” he says. And then: “Listen, you do know where you are and all that, don’t you? I mean, this isn’t heaven or anything. You’ve been saved — you’ve lived through it. The hanging I mean.” Quiddle looks down at his shoes. “What I mean is you’re alive, man — alive as the King himself!” He ends with a burst of nervous laughter, as if he’s just told a joke in a tavern.
Ned says nothing. He knows perfectly well what’s happened. He’s had nearly a day and a half to sort it out, savor it, run the emotional gamut from initial bewilderment to religious ecstasy to pure animal joy. Besides, he’s been eavesdropping on the conversation in the hallway.
“Well, listen — if you don’t feel like talking just yet. .”
Ned’s eyes are fixed on Quiddle’s perspiring face. He has made an effort to keep from blinking since his benefactor stepped into the room. And it is an effort. Especially since he’s starving. The smell of the beef broth or oxtail soup or whatever it is has been setting off a whole battery of involuntary responses: a hollow thumping in the pit of the stomach, pursing of the lips, a clenching of the salivary glands. But he’s got to play this for all it’s worth.
“I can understand,” Quiddle says, backing toward the door. “It must be very hard for you. Just rest. You’re all right now. We’ll have you on your feet in a day or two and you can start life over, put it all behind you, make new associations, new—” His voice has become a whisper, soothing, motherly.
An instant later the door pulls shut and Ned falls on the tray like a pack of wolves.
♦ ♦ ♦
For the next several days Ned is led round the hospital in a white smock, nodding at the sick and dying, laying hands on crippled children, patiently exposing himself to the astonished probing fingers of surgeons, physicians and students. His leg hurts like a son of a bitch and his neck feels twisted out of joint, but Quiddle has found him a bottle of laudanum and the barber has been in to scrape his cheeks and powder his hair. Ned knows what’s expected of him. He limps round the corridors like a wounded seraph, the rope burn artfully concealed beneath a white cravat, a fervent messianic look in his eye. Whenever he’s addressed he turns round and raises a sorrowful finger to his throat.
Quiddle’s opinion is that the larynx has been crushed, while Delp insists that there is no evidence of physical damage whatever. After a painstaking examination of Ned’s vocal apparatus, Abernathy is forced to concur with Delp, but suggests that the crux of the problem may be mental rather than physical. In support of his diagnosis he adduces the case of Lucy Minor. Some years back she had been brought to the hospital after an accident in which she was run down by a drunken coachman. The horses bore down on her; she stumbled. When the coach had passed, bystanders rushed to her aid and were astonished to see that she had escaped injury — miraculously the flying hoofs and churning wheels had run wide of her. She was helped to her feet, someone dusted her dress, she was given a glass of brandy — but when she turned to thank the man who’d helped her up, she found that she couldn’t speak. Doctors were baffled. Abernathy himself tried every remedy he could think of, from leeches to hot poultices to binding the throat. He bled her until she blanched. Nothing. Now, twelve years later, Lucy Minor devotes most of her time to charity work with the deaf and dumb. No sound has passed her lips in all that time.
Dr. Maitland, who has been practicing at St. Bartholomew’s for nearly half a century, admits Abernathy’s point, but cites a glaring disparity between the two cases: the fact of constriction. “It’s a simple question of blockage,” he insists, “plain as the nose on your face. Purgatives is what the man needs. Give him a dose or two of croton oil, bleed him twice, and follow it up with an enema of antimony and foxglove.” Runder, a strict Brunonian, has his own theory. “Clearly it’s an asthenic disorder — treat the fellow with alcohol and he’ll be jabbering like a myna inside of a week.” Delp demurs. “He’s a fraud I tell you. I say we let the other patients have a look at him and then boot him out in the street. Or better yet, send him back to the hangman.” Finally, after a debate that consumes two dinner hours, three ribs of beef, eight capons, half a wheel of cheese and fifteen bottles of port, it is decided that Ned Rise’s initial week will be extended to two, and that Abernathy will contact Mrs. Minor in order to have her instruct the patient in the science of communicating by signs. At the end of the two-week period, the patient will be removed from the premises.