Read A Burnt Out Case for Free Online

I.’
    As they drove through the yard of the factory, among the huge boilers abandoned to rust, a smell like stale margarine lay heavily around them. A blast of hot air struck from an open doorway, and the reflection of a furnace billowed into the waning light. ‘To you, of course,’ Rycker said, ‘accustomed to the factories of the West, this must appear a bit ramshackle. Though I can’t remember whether you ever were closely concerned with any factories.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘There were so many spheres in which the Querry led the way.’
    He recurred again and again to the word ‘the’ as though it were a title of nobility.
    ‘The place functions,’ he said as the car bumped among the boilers, ‘it functions in its ugly way. We waste nothing. When we finish with the nut there’s nothing left. Nothing. We’ve crushed out the oil,’ he said with relish rolling the r, ‘and as for the husk – into the furnace with it. We don’t need any other fuel to keep the furnaces alive.’
    They left the two cars in the yard and walked over to the house. ‘Marie, Marie,’ Rycker called, scraping the mud off his shoes, stamping across the veranda. ‘Marie.’
    A girl in blue jeans with a pretty unformed face came quickly round the corner in answer to his call. Querry was on the point of asking ‘Your daughter?’ when Rycker forestalled him. ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘And here, chérie , is the Querry. He tried to deny it, but I told him we had a photograph.’
    ‘I am very glad to meet you,’ she said. ‘We will try to make you comfortable.’ Querry had the impression that she had learnt such occasional speeches by heart from her governess or from a book of etiquette. Now she had said her piece she disappeared as suddenly as she had come; perhaps the school-bell had rung for class.
    ‘Sit down,’ Rycker said. ‘Marie is fixing the drinks. You can see I’ve trained her to know what a man needs.’
    ‘Have you been married long?’
    ‘Two years. I brought her out after my last leave. In a post like this it’s necessary to have a companion. You married?’
    ‘Yes – that is to say I have been married.’
    ‘Of course I know you are thinking that she is very young for me. But I look ahead. If you believe in marriage you have to look to the future. I’ve still got twenty years of – let’s call it active life ahead of me, and what would a woman of thirty be like in twenty years? A man keeps better in the tropics. Don’t you agree?’
    ‘I’ve never thought about it. And I don’t yet know the tropics.’
    ‘There are enough problems without sex I can assure you. St Paul wrote, didn’t he, that it was better to marry than burn. Marie will stay young long enough to save me from the furnace.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I’m only joking. We have to joke, don’t we, about serious things. At the bottom of my heart I believe very profoundly in love.’ He made the claim as some men might claim to believe in fairies.
    The steward came along the veranda carrying a tray and Mme Rycker followed him. Querry took a glass and Mme Rycker stood at his elbow while the steward poised the syphon – a division of duties. ‘Will you tell me how much soda?’ Mme Rycker asked.
    ‘And now, my dear, you’ll change into a proper dress,’ Rycker said.
    Over the whisky he turned again to what he called ‘Your case.’ He had now less the manner of a detective than of a counsel who by the nature of his profession is an accomplice after the fact. ‘Why are you here, Querry?’
    ‘One must be somewhere.’
    ‘All the same, as I said this morning, no one would expect to find you working in a leproserie.’
    ‘I am not working.’
    ‘When I drove over some weeks ago, the fathers said that you were at the hospital.’
    ‘I was watching the doctor work. I stand around, that’s all. There’s nothing I can do.’
    ‘It seems a waste of talent.’
    ‘I have no talent.’
    Rycker said, ‘You mustn’t despise us poor