‘What’s happened?’ I asked him. He looked at me, trembling, and remained silent, lips compressed. I asked again … still he was silent. I could have struck him with my fist once more, but his doglike devotion to her touched me, and I asked no more questions. The little carriage trotted through the crowded street so fast that people scattered, cursing. It left the European quarter near the beach in the lower town and went on into the noisy turmoil of the city’s Chinatown district. At last we reached a narrow, very remote alley … and the carriage stopped outside a low-built house. The place was dirty, with a kind of hunched look about it and a little shop window where a tallow candle stood … one of those places where you would expect to find opium dens or brothels, a thieves’ lair or a receivers’ cellar full of stolen goods. The boy quickly knocked … a voice whispered through a crack in the door, which stood ajar, there were questions and more questions. I could stand it no longer. I leaped up, pushed the door right open, and an old Chinese woman shrank back with a little scream. The boy followed me, led me along the passage … opened another door … another door, leading to a dark room with a foul smell of brandy and clotted blood. Something in the room groaned. I groped my way in …”

 

Once again his voice failed. And what he next uttered was more of a sob than words.

“I … I groped my way in …. And there … there on a dirty mat, doubled up with pain … a groaning piece of human flesh … there she lay …

I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. My eyes weren’t yet used to it … so I only groped about and found … found her hand, hot, burning hot … she had a temperature, a very high one, and I shuddered, for I instantly knew it all … how she had fled here from me, had let some dirty Chinese woman mutilate her, only because she hoped for more silence in that quarter … she had allowed some diabolical witch to murder her rather than trust me … because, deranged as I was, I hadn’t spared her pride, I hadn’t helped her at once … because she feared me more than she feared death.

I shouted for light. The boy ran off; the appalling Chinese woman, her hands trembling, brought a smoking oil lamp. I had to stop myself taking her by her filthy yellow throat as she put the lamp on the table. Its light fell bright and yellow on the tortured body. And suddenly … suddenly all my emotions were gone, all my apathy, my anger, all the impure filth of my accumulated passion … I was nothing but a doctor now, a human being who could understand and feel and help. I had forgotten myself, I was fighting the horror of it with my senses alert and clear … I felt the naked body I had desired in my dreams only as … how can I put it? … as matter, an organism. I did not see her any more, only life defending itself against death, a human being bent double in dreadful agony. Her blood, her hot, holy blood streamed over my hands, but I felt no desire and no horror, I was only a doctor. I saw only her suffering … and I saw …

And I saw at once that barring a miracle, all was lost … the woman’s criminally clumsy hand had injured her, and she had bled half to death … and I had nothing to stop the bleeding in that stinking den, not even clean water. Everything I touched was stiff with dirt …

‘We must go straight to the hospital,’ I said. But no sooner had I spoken than her tortured body reared convulsively.

‘No … no … would rather die … no one must know … no one … home … home …’

I understood. She was fighting now only to keep her secret, to preserve her honour … not to save her life. And—and I obeyed. The boy brought a litter, we placed her in it … and so we carried her home, already like a corpse, limp and feverish, through the night, fending off the frightened servants’ inquiries.