The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2) Page 15

“Yes, this. With two meters of machine embroidery at a hundred francs each, and ten meters of braid at eight francs, two hundred and eighty francs in all, this is what my petty couturier has made of my old organdie dress! Wouldn’t one think that it came from Fernande et Fernande? Come on, kiss your practical little wife!”

  And I kissed her, at length and deliciously, with gratitude, my practical little wife.

  Yes, probably, Lucienne was at this Ségur 102-90 at the home of a cheap milliner in the neighborhood of the École Militaire. If she hadn’t told me in advance, it was because she wanted to surprise me with her new hat. She expected me to be at work when she came back. She would appear triumphantly: “Look, my darling!”

  But Anna was finally speaking. “It’s me, Madame. Madame will be astonished. Monsieur has just been brought back from the doctor’s... Yes, Monsieur Tornada... No, Madame, not ill, dead!... Died suddenly—it’s an embolism, Jean told me... No, he wasn’t seen; it appears that he collapsed suddenly... It must be his heart, as Madame foresaw, with regard to Monsieur’s palpitations...”

  I had heart trouble, then? It was news to me. Certain excessively rapid beats, it is true, had troubled me at one point. I had even mentioned them to Tornada; but he had reassured me, accusing my nervous system. Obviously, physicians lie, but Tornada was not one of them. He would not, in any case, have made my wife a confidence of something he had hidden from me.

  And then again, I hadn’t died of heart disease, since I was still alive, since I had merely been laid out by an extraordinary injection!

  “Don’t cut me off!” Anna begged. And she continued: “Madame needn’t worry. I’ll take care of everything... Yes... Yes... Oh no, the poor Monsieur didn’t suspect a thing... Madame needn’t hurry; there’s still time for annoyances... No, Madame, no one will go in... Mademoiselle Robin least of all; I’ll be very careful of that one—we know her!... Yes, she’s at the Tuileries with the child... Madame Godsill?... Yes, Madame, I was just about to tell Madame that she telephoned to say that she won’t be able to see Madame today. She has to go Madame-knows-where... Understood, Madame; I’ll phone her... What time is it necessary to say that Madame will call to pick her up?... Seven o’clock—understood.”

  He voice suddenly changed, becoming confused: “Oh! Oh!... Madame is too good!... Madame is overwhelming me!... I would never leave Madame!... Thank you, Madame!”

  And that astonishing dialogue through space—a monologue here, but which revealed to me, without ambiguity, that thoughts of the person speaking at the other end—concluded with a mocking click of the apparatus.

  An astonishing dialogue…not that I felt my confidence in my wife buckling. But my analytical sense offered me four question marks, in the face of which the mind of a novelist—any novelist, even a writer of shopgirl romances—might find pause for thought. In accordance with my method, I arranged the questions in order.

  Why was Lucienne not where she had told me she would be?

  Why did this event, the most important in a loving woman’s life, the death of her husband, not cause her to come running immediately to my side?

  Why had she told me that she was to take tea with Madame Godsill, when Anna’s telephone call, which the latter had undertaken to transmit to Ségur 102-90, did not indicate that the meeting in question was firm arrangement?

  And finally, why was it necessary for Lucienne to go in quest of that Madame Godsill in a place sufficiently mysterious for the chambermaid to judge it prudent not to identify it over the telephone?

  All that was, in truth, no hanging matter, although it cast little light in favor of Lucienne’s perfect innocence. It did, however, establish between Ségur 102-90, Anna, Madame Godsill and my wife a latent complicity relative to facts of which I was ignorant.

  Many other husbands would have moved heaven and earth to penetrate that mystery immediately. Personally, like my ancestor Montaigne, I was obedient to the principle of doubting everything, even the most apparent things. And in any case, to move heaven and earth at that moment, it would have been necessary for me not to be immobilized between earth and heaven. I preferred therefore, for the repose of my soul and the satisfaction of my native indulgence, to content myself which an explanation that did not explain anything at all, but which might, because I was a stranger to it, be connected with the aforesaid four mysterious question marks.

  That requires me to reveal to my readers a conjugal flaw of which I would have preferred to leave them ignorant, and which might be deemed prejudicial to the reputation of the academician that I expected to be in three days’ time. A man who seeks the glory of sitting beneath the Cupola ought to pay attention to his familial attachments—but since it is necessary to speak, I shall speak.

  Lucienne had a father.

  Everyone has a father—it is even said that there are favored individuals who have several—but no one in the world has, ever had, or ever will have a father like Lucienne’s. I shall, alas, in the course of this story, have to return to that sad individual, his daughter’s shame and an ulcer to me. I shall therefore not go into detail for the moment. Let it be said simply that Monsieur Joseph Tirolle, my father-in-law—Jojo, as he was scarcely ever known by any title other than that abbreviation, being Jojo to his wife, whom he caused to die of chagrin; Jojo to his daughter, whom he abandoned in infancy and youth; Jojo to dubious financiers; Jojo to the peripateticians of the music hall; Jojo to keepers and taverns and houses of ill repute; Jojo to the universality of merrymakers, night-owls, miscreants, low-lifes, swindlers and inveterate gamblers; Jojo, in brief, to everyone in the world except me, who only wanted to see him once, when it was a matter of asking his permission, by which I mean striking a bargain with him, to marry his daughter—had been caught up in a fraudulent bankruptcy, and that Lucienne had tried to get him out of it…at my expense, needless to say.

  I had already thrown into the gulf of his business affairs, a food-canning factory, a few hundred thousand francs; but sacrifice has its limits, damn it, especially when one knows that it only profits, on the rebound, bookmakers and low women; and Lucienne herself, after so often having implored me on behalf of the author of her days, had ended up forbidding me to provide for her damnable father’s wastage and binges. One ultimate, large-scale bleeding, but the last, and I would hear no more mention of the leech. I had consented, on condition of not getting mixed up in anything; and it was Lucienne who dealt directly with the creditors, without even telling me, as I had asked, what people she saw with that objective or where she met them.

  Of course! Ségur 102-90 was a lawyer’s office, and if Lucienne did not come immediately to fall upon my cadaver, it was because the liquidation was being arranged at that precise moment. My God! As long as chagrin did not trouble her in her transactions! As long as she remained free to stand up to the pack of creditors! Poor dear love, brushed for a moment by my anxiety, of how humbly I would beg her pardon!

  As for that Madame Godsill, whom Lucienne was due to meet and would not be meeting, because the divorcee had been retained “Madame knows where,” could I be offended because she took my wife as a confidante in a hidden liaison from which I had been kept apart? It was not Lucette’s secret, after all, and I would even have criticized her for making me party to it. Madame Godsill, a free woman, not dependent on anyone, had the right to love whomever she wanted to. She was saving face, when so many others advertised cynically; what more could I ask, having written Themis and Venus,37 a poem in which I pleaded for the right to love for women disappointed by an unhappy marriage and liberated by the law? That audacious thesis had, moreover, had a good deal of success; its thirtieth thousand was being advertised—I knew that it had really only sold ten, but that was already quite good.

  So, my reflections also cleared Madame Godsill. But there was still the fourth, Anna, the chambermaid, who was cognizant of a situation of which I had been left in ignorance. Well, on that point too it was necessary for me to accept a necessity. Anna was, in sum, merely an emplo
yee, an instrument, a cog. Indiscretion with her, authorized by Madame Godsill, did not count as with me. Anna knew. Anna had to know. Anna did not exist.

  From whatever angle I envisaged the problem of Ségur 102-90/Godsill, therefore, I found reasons for tranquility therein. I persisted in that optimism until the moment when the anonymous letters came back to haunt me. They might have demolished my entire scaffolding of indulgence if an incident, which happened rapidly and discreetly, and of which I was the immobile recipient, had not deflected the course of my ideas.

  Someone, someone new, a woman—but a woman who was not Anna, the rustle of her skirt not being the same—opened the door to the corridor, stood there momentarily for a second, and then came over to me.

  Then I heard a low voice, trembling with a quasi-religious emotion, murmuring: “Oh my God! My God! Is it possible?”

  The unknown woman went around my bed and stopped again. Her silhouette, placed against the daylight, dissipated the little exterior light that I received through my closed eyelids. She stood there, without moving, no longer saying anything but breathing noisily, for a good three minutes.

  I had sustained in another of my successful works, The Sylphes, that the soul emits fluids—yes, invisible forces comparable to electricity or radium—and I unraveled, by virtue of the psychophysical phenomenon in question, an exceedingly passionate intrigue. Well, in the present circumstance I had a confirmation of what I had advanced in my literature, for veritable mental fluids reached me from that unknown visitor, which, immediately perceived by me, filled me with an irrational sympathy for the stranger.

  That was not an effect of mediumship, or any of those pretended communications between the living and the dead, which are only the inventions of unhinged brains, and which, in any case, could not enter into play with the false corpse that I was. No, I was receiving, probably by the transmission of thought, the homage of a soul that was attached to me, and, although I would have remained insensible to it in my normal state, it is probable that my cataleptic state, by increasing my sensitivity, permitted me to gather it.

  The effluvia were soon attenuated. The unknown woman’s nervous system must have relaxed. The shadow of her body descended, leaning over me, and I perceived on my hand, which as placed on the edge of the bed, the beneficent dew of silent tears.

  Then she withdrew, as discreetly as she had entered.

  Who was that woman?

  It was not Lucienne; my love would have revealed her to me.

  Chapter III

  I was abandoned for a while longer. My clock chimed eight times. I was astonished. The precipitation of events had contracted time. And my wife had not yet come in.

  Finally! A bustle in the direction of the hallway, precipitate footsteps in the corridor, the irruption of several people into my room, and my beloved threw herself upon me! She uttered heart-rending cries, hugged me, caressed my face with her still-gloved hands. She called me the most tender names, cursed destiny, begging it to recall me to life, in order that she would not remain alone, abandoned, resolved to die soon in order to follow me.

  In truth, I did not feel any tears upon my face mingled with these noisy lamentations, but the most profound despairs often dispense with tears and everyone manifests them in their own way, sometimes I accordance with their professional imprints. Having been in the theater before becoming my wife, a former winner of the first prize for tragedy at the Conservatoire, it was not surprising that Lucienne gave a dramatic physiognomy to her grief and expressed with emphasis what others might have drowned in silence. No matter; I shivered at her tone, intoxicated myself with her outbursts, judged her still the sovereign attachment of my aging days, and cursed the eccentric Tornada, the provoker of her torture.

  Well, would you believe it? He was there, the monster! He had had the audacity, having met my wife at the door, to follow her into my room, and was coldly observing his baleful work!

  He drew her away from my body, made her sit down, and consoled her.

  “Come, come, darling, you mustn’t get into such a state! Calm down, damn it. He’s dead, that’s agreed, but it will pass. You’re young, you’re beautiful; you have the whole future ahead of you. You won’t have any trouble finding a less wearisome man, more worthy of your young years.”

  “Not like him, Doctor—I loved him so much!”

  “That’s understood, but one doesn’t love only once in one’s life.”

  “As I loved him, yes, Doctor.”

  “You’ll see…”

  “You’re right, Doctor,” said a third voice, which was that of Madame Godsill; I recognized its piping modulating. “You’re right, a husband will turn up, and she’ll be able, at her age, to remake her life. But it’s not something to talk about now.”

  “Yes, it will all work out in the end,” confirmed a fourth voice, with a southern accent—that of my concierge.

  “Madame never thinks about herself,” sighed Anna.

  All those people were being very kind to Lucienne, but their encouragements only resulted in redoubling her despair. I feared that she was going to have an attack of nerves; she was subject to them.

  I had already consulted Tornada on the matter, who had told me that the remedy only depended on me, but that I was a little too long in the tooth to procure it for her. The man never lost an opportunity to remind me of my maturity, as if to underline publicly the inequality of our ages.

  At the present moment, I could have slapped him. All the more so when he insisted: “Believe me, I’m your friend. I know what an admirable wife you were, the faithful companion, the unique interpreter of a man who was reputed to have talent, the talent that leads more surely to the Académie than genius. But think: the streets are full of them, men of that sort! You won’t have any difficulty fishing up another poet, if you’re determined to find a Pindar! Poets of his sort one can pick up by the spadeful. Come on, calm down, don’t wave your arms like that. They’re very fine, your arms, you’re going to hurt them and then ask me for a lotion to heal your scratches. I’d have to write you a prescription, and I hate writing. I prefer cutting! Will you please not distress yourself so! What a torpedo!”38

  He then addressed himself to Anna: “Go fetch me some vinegar and cold water, so that I can splash it on her face.”

  Lucienne was very devoted to her face; she worked on it every time she passed a mirror. When there was no mirror nearby she had recourse to a pocket mirror and patted her hair in front of it for a long time, repaired her face powder and enlivened her lipstick, careful of her feminine beauty—which I respected and encouraged. So, the idea that Tornada was about to disturb her make-up had a more powerful effect on her than any remonstrance. She immediately calmed down and asked: “How did it happen, Doctor?”

  “As I’ve warned you on several occasions, darling.”

  “You had, indeed, warned me that he had a weak heart, Doctor—but from that to such a rapid, terrifying end! You told me, too, that I had a fragility of that sort. Is that true?”

  “In your case, my diagnosis only pertained to the moral point of view, and then, I was joking, knowing that you were bound to virtue by the love you had for old Étienne. Well, this is what happened: I was ausculating him…yes, I had just finished ausculating him, when he suddenly collapsed, felled by an ictus.”

  “An ictus?”

  “It’s a little clot of blood, which causes a blockage in the brain, and kills you in a matter of seconds.”

  I could not understood why that explanation, the language of a medical student in the amphitheater, did not immediately suggest to Lucienne that my decease was merely a practical joke. One does not express oneself thus before a dead man. But my wife was familiar with my friend’s vulgar manners, and knew that, for him, every human being was merely matter for dissection. I will add, to ward off the surprise of my readers in advance, who might have difficulty subsequently in understanding a lack of respect for my remains and the cynical display of base passions in my mortuary
chamber, that the company moving around me was exceptional. I do not have to deplore that, since I obtained some particularly salutary information therefrom—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  At any rate, Tornada’s jesting manner awakened my wife’s suspicions. “You’re certain that he’s dead?”

  “As sure as I am that you’re admirably alive.

  “It’s not a faint?”

  “No—it’ll be a long time before he comes out of it.”

  “I can’t, therefore, retain any hope?”

  “None.”

  “How unhappy I am!”

  I thought that she was about to renew her lamentations, but she no longer had the strength. “If only I could weep!” she sighed.

  “Don’t try. Great dolors are American—by which I mean that they’re dry. Pure extra-dry, great dolors. One can drink them...” He must have laughed then, for a kind of clucking, unique to him, accompanied that absurd metaphor. He suppressed it and went on: “It’s necessary to think about the funeral now. That will be a useful diversion for you. What are you going to do with him? Do you have a resting-place in mind?”

  “I don’t know Doctor. I haven’t thought about it. Perhaps sending him back to his birthplace?”

  “Back to his village? Not in this life! Not in this death, rather. Étienne Montabert belongs to Paris!”

  “It’s said that there’s no more room in the cemeteries.”

  “Indeed, the physicians have done their work well of late; the housing crisis is also prevalent among corpses. But by stirring a little on behalf of that great man, who is stirring no longer, we’ll end up finding him a little basement with a lease ad aeternum—or, to put it another way, a concession. That would have the additional advantage that, if you remain a widow, you could be buried there too. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Don’t take the trouble, Doctor.”

  “It’s no trouble—it’s a pleasure. I intend to take my part of your burdens, darling. No, no, don’t protest. Until the moment when he’s in the hands of the gravediggers, I won’t abandon you. We’ll begin with his outfit. Of course, that’s going to be a bother, because it’s been a long wait, and...”