The Doctor's Verdict
進行性の難聴と診断される。彼は絶望を越えて創作への逃避を決意する。
The physician's rooms smelled of camphor and old paper, and the light fell grey through the blinds.
Doctor Hesse examined Reyner's ears with instruments that were cold and precise and utterly without pity.
He asked the composer to repeat words spoken softly from across the shadowed room.
Reyner heard perhaps half of them, and guessed the rest with the skill of long practice.
The doctor wrote for a while in a small notebook, his pen scratching in the silence.
"The condition is ," he said at last, in the level voice of a man reading a map.
"The loss will advance, gradually in some years, more swiftly in others, but it will advance."
He spoke of nerves and membranes and pressures, of a mechanism failing beyond any repair.
Each word was accurate, , and entirely useless to the man who sat before him.
Reyner listened to his described as calmly as one might describe the weather.
"How long," he asked, "before I hear nothing at all of the world outside me?"
The doctor would not promise a number, for honest men do not sell false comfort.
"Some keep a little hearing for years," he said. "Others lose it in a single season."
Outside, carriages passed and children called to one another in the bright ordinary street.
Reyner realised that this ordinary noise was a country he was slowly being exiled from.
He thought of the symphony still unfinished on his desk, its fourth movement a blank field.
If sound was leaving him, then he must write everything down before the door swung shut.
A strange, fierce rose in him, stronger than the grief pressing on his chest.
He would not spend his last hearing years weeping in waiting rooms and consulting specialists.
He would spend them at the desk, racing the silence with ink and staves and will.
"Thank you, Doctor," he said, rising, "you have told me exactly what I needed to know."
Hesse looked at him with the respect one gives to a man walking calmly toward fire.
"Rest your ears," the doctor advised. "Avoid loud halls. Protect what little time remains to you."
Reyner almost laughed, for rest was the one medicine he had no intention of taking.
He stepped into the street where the noise of the city broke over him like a wave.
He drank in every and cry, storing them as a traveller stores water for the desert.
Then he walked home quickly, already hearing in his mind the movement he had not yet written.