Journey by Moonlight

WHEN HE RECOVERED consciousness he was still unable to speak a word of Italian. In a weary, timorous voice, using Hungarian, he asked the nurse the usual questions: where was he, and how had he got there? The nurse being unable to reply, he worked out for himself — it was not very difficult — that he was in hospital. He even remembered the strange feeling he had experienced in the mountains, and grew calmer. All he wanted to know was, what was wrong with him? He felt no pain, just very weak and tired.

Luckily there was in the hospital a doctor who was half English, and who was called to his bed. Mihály had lived in England for many years and the language flowed in his veins, so much so that it did not desert him now, and they could communicate fully.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” said the doctor, “just horrendous exhaustion. What were you doing, to get yourself so tired?”

“Me?” he asked, meditatively. “Nothing. Just living.” And he fell asleep again.

When he woke again he felt a great deal better. The English doctor visited him again, examined him, and informed him there was nothing wrong and he would be able to get up in a few days.

The doctor was interested in Mihály and talked with him a great deal. He was keen to establish the cause of his extreme exhaustion. He gradually became aware how little comfort Mihály took in the thought that he would be well in a few days and would have to leave the hospital.

“Do you have business in Foligno or the area?”

“Not at all. I had no idea there was such a place as Foligno.”

“Where will you go? Back to Hungary?”

“No, no. I’d like to stay in Italy.”

“And what would you want to do here?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Do you have any relations?”

“No, no-one,” said Mihály, and, in his state of nervous debilitation, burst into tears. The tender-hearted doctor felt extremely sorry for this poor abandoned soul and began to treat him with even greater kindness. But Mihály had not wept because he had no relations, just the opposite — because he had so many — and he feared he would not long be able to preserve the solitude he so much enjoyed in the hospital.

He told the doctor that all his life he had longed to be in bed in a hospital. Of course not seriously ill or suffering, but as at present, just lying there in passive and involuntary exhaustion, being nursed, without purpose or desire, far from the normal business of men.

“It’s no use. Italy has everything I ever longed for,” he said.

It became apparent that the doctor shared his love of historical connections. By degrees he came to spend all his free time at Mihály’s bedside, in historical discussions that flitted about lethargically. Mihály learnt a great deal about Angela da Foligno, saint and mystic, the most famous daughter of the town, who was virtually unheard of in Foligno itself. And he came to know a lot about the doctor, since, as with all Englishmen, his family history proved rather colourful. His father had been a naval officer who had caught yellow fever in Singapore, was tormented in his delirium with terrible visions, and on his recovery turned Catholic, thinking that would be the only way he could escape the torments of the devil. His family, a religious one consisting for the most part of Anglican clergymen, rejected him, whereupon he became fiercely anti-British, left the Navy, joined the Italian merchant service, and later married an Italian woman. Richard Ellesley — that was the doctor’s name — had spent his childhood in Italy. From his Italian grandfather they inherited a considerable fortune, and his father had educated the young Ellesley at Harrow and Cambridge. During the war the old man went back into the British Navy, fell at the battle of Skagerrak, the fortune evaporated, and Ellesley had to earn his living as a doctor.

“The only thing I inherited from my father,” he said with a smile, “was the fear of damnation.”

Here the roles were reversed. Mihály lived in terror of a great number of things, but hell was certainly not among them. He had little feeling for the afterlife. So he undertook to cure the doctor. A cure was urgently needed. About every third day the little English doctor would be seized by terrible fear.

The terror was not induced by bad conscience. He was a virtuous and kindly soul, with no obvious cause for self-reproach.

“Then why should you think you’ll be damned?”

“My God, I’ve no idea why I should be damned. It won’t be because of what I am. They’ll just take me.”

“But devils have power only over the wicked.”

“That we can never know. Even the prayer says it. You know: ‘Saint Michael Archangel, defend us in our struggles; be our shield against the wickedness of Satan and his snares. As God commands you, so we humbly beseech you; and you who command the Heavenly Armies, with the strength of the Lord deliver unto eternal damnation Satan and all the evil spirits who lead us into danger’.”