Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  “They brought him back to the château that same evening, his head swathed in bandages. He didn’t recognize me. I still loved him, and I visited him in his hiding-place. He healed rapidly, but internment has made him fat. The MacBell of the photograph and the MacBell of the Yellow Room are quite dissimilar, to the extent that you didn’t recognize him there, Nicolas…’ ”

  “Emma,” I murmured, “how were you able to caress that madman?”

  “Love has no need of intelligence; on the contrary, I read in a novel that Messalina, who was a very passionate queen, disdained the service of poets.26 MacBell…”

  “Ah! Shut up!”

  “Stupid!” she said, “Since you’re my little man, and you alone.”

  Indeed, I thought. Aloud, I said: “Tell me, though—do you know anything about Klotz? What fate did my uncle have in store for him? You mentioned being sent away, a little while ago.”

  “I’ve always been certain that he was sent away. His attitude when he returned from Germany with Lerne convinced me of it.”

  “Has he a family?”

  “I believe he’s a orphan and a bachelor.”

  “How long did MacBell remain in the laboratory?”

  “About three weeks…or a month.”

  “Was his hair as blond before this setback?” I asked, in pursuit of my old hobby-horse.

  “Of course—what a strange thing to ask!”

  “And Nelly—what did they do to her?”

  “The day after the brawl, I heard her uttering heart-rending howls, presumably because she’d been separated from her master. According to your uncle, when I asked him about it, she was with other dogs in kennels. ‘The right place,’ Lerne added. She hasn’t come out, until the other evening. Perhaps you heard her? Poor Nelly! How quickly she found MacBell! She often howls at night. Her life isn’t a happy one.”

  “Finally,” I said, “what can we conclude? What’s at the bottom of all this? Where’s the truth of it? Do you believe that the madness resulted from the fall?”

  “How do I know? It’s possible—but I suspect that the laboratory contains hideous things, the sight of which would be sufficient to drive you mad. Donovan had never gone into it. He must have witnessed some abomination…”

  I remembered the chimpanzee and the violent impression that its death had made on me. Emma might have been right. The monkey’s fate lent support to her hypothesis. Instead of searching for the key to that particular mystery, though, was it not necessary to go back four years, to the critical phase when so many problems had originated? Was it not necessary to scrutinize the mysterious era in which so many doors had been closed, in order to find the key that would open them all?

  A little foot emerged from the coverlet, white and pink on the yellow silk, like an absurd jewel in its casket. “Good God, Mademoiselle! Do you really walk on that little soft thing, with its toenails painted and polished like Japanese coral? That living and sensitive jewel that a moustache puts to flight? What magnificent imprudence!”

  The foot retired into its large parcel. Nimble and dainty as it was, though, and so tender, it reminded me by contrast of another: the one in the clearing, the macabre shoe-tree whose shoe, I was now convinced, was on the foot of a carcass. All of a sudden, it seemed to me that I was alone in a darkness full of ambushes.

  “Emma! What if we were to leave?”

  She shook her Maenad’s tresses, and declined. “Donovan suggested that to me. No. Lerne has promised me opulence. In addition to that, on the day of your arrival, he swore that he would kill me in the event of deceit or escape. I’ve known for a long time that he’s capable of carrying out the first threat, and I feel sure now that he’d carry out the second…”

  “That’s true—when he introduced us to one another, Emma, you had death in your eyes!”

  “Now,” she continued, “we can conceal our love, but not our flight. No, no—let’s stay here and keep our eyes open. Let’s be prudent, but let’s also make the most of the time.”

  And as time was getting on, we made the most of it.

  The clock was chiming 4:30 p.m. when I left my insatiable mistress to take the road back to Grey-l’Abbaye. Emma was in no condition to bid my goodbye; sighing and stretching like a she-cat, she was nonchalantly dreaming of the amorous isle.

  VIII. Temerity

  I went back along the road to Grey at top speed. The festival was in full swing there and the crowd, in a festive mood, abused me with insults and quips. The clock on the platform showed 5 p.m. I took advantage of the respite to do a little scene-setting, in order that my uncle might fall more readily into the pitfall that he had laid for his own feet by demanding the repair of a mechanism of which I possessed an entire specimen. With a mechanic’s blue overall on my back, and my hands and face dirtied, having taken the tools out of the trunk and strewn them around, I put a dent in the new carburetor with a few gentle hammer-blows and smeared it with grease. A few strokes of a file, drawn randomly across it, completed the task of giving it the rough-hewn appearance of a newly-forged item.

  The train stopped.

  When Lerne touched me on the shoulder, I was exerting myself with feigned efforts to tighten a screw that was already perfectly secure.

  “Nicolas!”

  I turned a coal-heaver’s face to my uncle, as peevish as I could make it. “I’ve just finished,” I muttered. “That was a nasty trick you pulled there! Making people work for no reason!”

  “Is it back in order?”

  “Yes; I’ve just tried it. You can see that the engine’ hot…”

  “Do you want to fit the parts I took away back into the carburetor?”

  “Keep them as a memento of your nice day, uncle. Let’s get in. I’ve been here long enough, myself.

  Frédéric Lerne was uneasy. “No hard feelings, eh, Nicolas?”

  “No hard feelings, uncle.”

  “I have my reasons, you know. Later…”

  “Don’t worry. If you knew me, you’d be less suspicious…but your conduct today is in accord with our agreement. I don’t have any cause for complaint.”

  He made an evasive gesture. “You’re not angry, that’s the main thing. In sum, you understand how things are.”

  Lerne was evidently worried that he had annoyed me and that, if I resolved to leave in the wake of such vexation, I might divulge the existence of important secrets at Fonval, even without being able to tell anyone their exact nature.

  All things considered, the presence in his home of a stranger at liberty was a matter of constant alarm to my uncle. It seemed to me that in his place, obliged to receive a third party because he was related to me, I would certainly have preferred to make him my accomplice as soon as possible, to ensure his discretion.

  After all, I said to myself, why would my uncle not have thought of that? Before the uncertain, and perhaps illusory, date when Lerne will have to initiate me, there will be a long period of torment for him in which he will have to exercise his double role of analyst and policeman. What if I anticipate his plan? He will doubtless hasten joyfully to an instruction as sacred as a confession, which would unite the master and the disciple in the same conspiracy.

  I can’t see why my anticipations would be unwelcome, for, in the two possible circumstances—whether Lerne’s promise to initiate me into his enterprise was or was not given in good faith—the situation has only two possible outcomes: my departure, which might even now have revelatory consequences, or my connivance. Now, Emma and the mystery retain me at the château, so I won’t leave. There remains, therefore, the simulated comedy, which would have the further advantage of enabling me to solve the puzzle. Who else but Lerne will expose it to me, since Emma knows nothing and, if I were to search for it on my own, every problem solved would bring another into view? Wise diplomacy would certainly convince my uncle to make an imminent revelation. That’s all he needs to do—but how can I induce him to do it?

  It’s important to suggest to him that his secrets
won’t frighten me, even if they’re criminal. Thus, it would be wise to represent myself as a resolute man, who is not scandalized by contact with crimes, and who would refrain from denouncing them because he would commit them himself if need be. That’s it—perfect. But how do I pick a crime that Lerne would be capable of perpetrating, which I might declare to be natural, and which I might commit if the opportunity arose? Of course! Make use of his own misdeeds, Nicolas! Admit to him that you know about one of his most reprehensible actions, and that you approve, not merely of that action but also of all others of the same sort, in which you’re ready to aid him! Then, in the face of such a declaration, he’ll loosen up, and you’ll find out everything, ready to make good use of the confidence later, as your own interests dictate! Meanwhile, be cunning; let’s not speak to my uncle unless he’s in a good mood, and if the old shoe doesn’t tell us anything.

  I reasoned thus as I was driving Lerne to Fonval. The satiation of my desire impoverished my thinking; I thought my mind was calm and clear, but I was very tired. It was obvious; under the powerful influence of the surroundings, Lerne’s unproven crimes preoccupied me more than anything else, and I imagined them to be detestable and countless. I forgot that his surreptitiously-plotted work, shielded from duplication, might really have an industrial aim. Impatient as I was to satisfy my curiosity, and relaxed by the satiation of my lust, that strategy seemed to me to be cleverly conceived. I had no sense of the enormity of the fictitious confession that I would have to make before obtaining anything in exchange.

  More reflection would have indicated the danger I was running, but adverse fortune dictated that my uncle, satisfied by my replies and content that I “understood how things were” affected an entirely unexpected joviality. No opportunity more appropriate to my plan was ever likely to present itself…

  Stupidly, I seized it.

  As usual, enthused by the motor car, my uncle had me execute various maneuvers as I went through the labyrinth, and it was while describing these curves that I had been deliberating.

  “Colossal, Nicolas!” he said. “I repeat, this automobile is prodigious! A beast—a veritable organic creature…perhaps the least imperfect! Who knows the heights to which progress might take it? A spark of life therein, a little more spontaneity, a scrap of brain…and you’d have the finest creature on Earth! Yes, finer than us, in a sense—for, remember what I told you: it’s perfectible and immortal, virtues of which human physical being is pitifully deprived.

  “Everybody renews itself almost entirely, Nicolas. Your hair, for example”—why the Devil was he always talking about hair?—“isn’t the same as the hair you had last year, but it grows back older, thinner and less dark. The automobile, on the other hand, changes its parts at will, and is rejuvenated every time, with an entirely new heart, fresh bones, designed with greater ingenuity or resistance than the original organs. In 1000 years, therefore, a Jeannot27 vehicle—an automobile, never having stopped improving—will be just as young as it is today, if it is regenerated on a regular basis, piece by piece.

  “And don’t say: ‘It won’t be the same, since all its parts will have been replaced.’ If you raise that objection, Nicolas, what must you think of a human being who, in that race to death that we call life, is subject to transformations just as radical, but in a decadent fashion? You would therefore have to conclude, strangely: ‘The old person who dies is no longer the one who was born. The one who has just been born, and cannot last forever, will not die—or, at least, will not die all at once, but progressively, scattered by the four winds of Heaven as organic dust, over a long period during which another will slowly form in the same location, which is that of the body. This other person, whose birth is imperceptible, develops in every one of us without our being aware of it, as the earlier one subsides. The new person supplants the old day by day, modified incessantly at the behest of the dying and recreated cells of which it is the sum—and is the one who will be seen to die.’

  “Such would be your conclusion, which anyone would judge accurate; and the latter would add: ‘It’s true that the mind seems to persist, immutable in the midst of all these evolutions; nevertheless, that isn’t proven; for if the traits of the infant generally linger in those of the old person, the mind is sometimes altered to the point that we can no longer recognize it as our own. Then again, can the elements of the brain not renew themselves, molecule by molecule, without thought being interrupted, in the same way that one may change the elements of an electric pile without the generation of electricity being interrupted?’

  “At the end of the day, though, what does the question of personality in extremis matter to the human being?28 And what use would it be to imperishable automobiles—in which humans direct, like a demiurge, the development of the individual and the evolution of the species—to retain a tedious identity through the phases of their reformation? That’s arrant nonsense! Would they be any more admirable for it, these colossi of iron that are almost alive already?

  “I tell you, Nicolas, that if, by some miracle, the automobile were to become independent, man might as well pack his bags. His era would be approaching its end. After him, the automobile would be the monarch of the world, as the mammoth reigned before him.”

  “Yes,” I said, distractedly, absorbed by my own speculations, “but that sovereign would still depend on a human constructor.”

  “A fine argument! Are we the slaves of the animals and the plants that sustain our construction with their flesh and their tissue?” My uncle was so pleased with his paradoxes that he shouted them out, wriggling in his seat and waving his arms in the air frantically, as if he were grabbing handfuls of ideas therefrom. “In truth, nephew, what a splendid decision you made in bringing this motor car! It has cheered me up no end! You must teach me how to drive this animal. I’ll be the mahout of the mammoth to come, eh? Ha ha ha!”

  When this outburst of hilarity occurred I had just finished my own reasoning, and it was the laughter that decided my immediate—and imprudent—attack. “How amusing you are, uncle! I’m delighted by your cheerfulness—I recognize you again. Why aren’t you like this all the time, instead of mistrusting me—the person who, on the contrary, merits your full confidence?”

  “But you know full well,” said Lerne, “that I’ve committed myself to telling you when the time is right.”

  “Why not right away, uncle?” And I recklessly launched into my blunder. “Come on! We’re cut from the same cloth, you and I. You don’t know me at all. Nothing astonishes me. I know more about it than you think. Well, uncle, know this: I share your opinions; I admire your actions!”

  Slightly surprised, Lerne began to laugh. “And what is it that you know?”

  “I know that one can’t rely on the present law to take care of one’s own affairs. Has someone wronged you? It’s safer to get rid of him oneself, and imprisonment, in such a case, is legitimate even though it remains illegal. One fortuitous incident has convinced me of this. In brief, uncle, if I were named Frédéric Lerne, Monsieur MacBell would not have got off so easily. You don’t know me, I tell you.”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s news!” The professor’s tone, however, made me conscious of my gaffe. He defended himself in a manner that I thought hypocritical. “What an imagination! Are you really the rogue you claim to be? So much the worse, then. As for me, nephew, that’s not my way. MacBell is mad, but that’s nothing to do with me! It’s regrettable that you’ve discovered him—it’s a sad spectacle. The poor man! Me, imprison him? What nonsense, Nicolas! What will you say next? It’s as well, however, that you mentioned it to me; it has opened my eyes. Appearances are, indeed, against me. I was waiting for an improvement in the invalid’s state of mind before informing his relatives, in order that they might be less affected by a less obvious illness…but no! To hesitate further would be too dangerous; my own safety requires it. At the risk of causing them more grief, I must inform them! I’ll write to them this evening to tell them that they must
come to fetch him. Poor Donovan! His departure, I hope, will dispel your shameful presumptions. They sadden me greatly, Nicolas…”

  I experienced a considerable confusion. Was I mistaken? Had Emma lied? Or did Lerne want to allay my suspicions? In either event, I had made a bad error; whether he was an honest man or a scoundrel, Lerne would hold me accountable for having accused him, falsely or otherwise. It was a defeat, and the only reward I had was a new doubt, with respect to Emma.

  “In any case, uncle, I swear to you that chance alone led me to discover MacBell…”

  “If chance leads you to discover other reasons to slander me,” Lerne replied, harshly, “don’t neglect to inform me; I’ll clear myself without delay. Nevertheless, the strict observance of your promises would prevent you from assisting any chance that would enable you to discover madmen…or madwomen.”

  We had arrived at Fonval. “Nicolas,” said Lerne, in a softer tone, “I feel a great affection for you. I wish you well—so obey me, my boy!”

  He wants to soft-soap me, I thought. He’s wooing me. Beware!

  “Obey me,” he continued, in a honeyed tone, “and help me out in the meantime, by your patience. Intelligent as you are, you must understand that nuance! The day isn’t far off, if I’m not mistaken, when I’ll be able to tell you everything. You’ll see the great thing of which I’ve dreamed, nephew, a part of which I’m saving for you…

  “In the meantime, since you know about the MacBell business—here, this is testimony to the faith for which I ask—come with me to visit him. We’ll decide whether he’s sufficiently well to cope with the journey and the crossing.”

  After a brief hesitation, I followed him to the Yellow Room.

  At the sight of him, the madman arched his back and retreated into a corner, growling all the while, his pose fearful and his eyes resentful.

  Lerne pushed me in front of him. I was afraid he was going to imprison me.

  “Take his hands. Bring him into the middle of the room.”