The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  A few minutes later the tall mild-mannered Dujardin was conducting us through his laboratories. There was a strange depth about this scientist, both appealing and mystifying.

  “Very interesting, very interesting,” Monsieur Pash kept saying, “but your brand of magic and mine don’t mix.

  I’d better start surveying the windows for repairs.”

  “There’ll be several days of work,” the scientist smiled, “so you needn’t be in any hurry.”

  But Monsieur Pash was impatient to break out some of the dangerous hanging glass that had been poorly boarded up. So our tour was sidetracked in the direction of the damaged windows.

  “These on the south were particularly beautiful,” said Dujardin, “but I’m not sad that they are gone. I want to replace them with some rare types of glass to aid my experiments.”

  We left the architect to his preliminary surveys. But Monsieur Dujardin was eager to show more of his laboratories, and Gaston and I were willing to see.

  We passed through one narrow laboratory room after another. To catch the sunlight to best advantage, these rooms had been tacked onto the house in a zig-zagging chain, enclosing a small open court.

  The scientist led us out into this court, mentioning that we might be interested in seeing some synthetic butterflies.

  “Synthetic!” I gasped. But a nudge from Gaston reminded me to hold my tongue. Too much curiosity wouldn’t become a common workman.

  “What a place! What a place!” Gaston mumbled as we followed the scientist down the sunshiny path. It was the most richly colored flower garden I ever saw—almost luminous. Perhaps the colors were enhanced by the contrast of powdery blue mountain tops which rose above the zig-zagging rooftops—a bit of the Portugal shore peeking over. Everything within the enclosed court was beautiful, fragrant, and serene.

  No, there were a few harsh sounds that intruded—the intermittent hammering and wrenching along a section of broken windows facing the court. The architect had already started work clearing away some of the dangerous hanging glass.

  But the sounds which blended with the beauty of the place were the soft hum of bees and—the low intense voice of Mademoiselle Butterfly herself.

  “Father!” she called. “Come see the new butterfly! He’s unfolding his wings. He’s marvelous!”

  “Really! Come, gentlemen. This will be worth seeing.”

  Mademoiselle Butterfly was kneeling at the foot of a white trellis of rambling roses. At her feet was an outcropping of rock, pink colored and porous, that reminded me of an enlarged chunk of pink taffy candy. On a ridge of this brittle rock sat the newly emerged butterfly.

  “Wait till he opens his wings again,” said the girl, pausing in her fascination long enough to glance at Gaston and me.

  Personally I thought the butterfly far less interesting than the girl, and while she chattered about this latest synthetic insect I mused upon the loveliness of honey-colored hair and a childlike face as ornaments for such a flower garden.

  The butterfly was a flimsy colorless leaf-like creature—until it opened its wings. Then its true colors came into the sunlight—a deep blue edged with silver spots.

  “Can it fly?” said Gaston.

  “It hasn’t yet,” said the girl. “But as soon as its wings stiffen it will try.”

  “You see,” the scientist added, “those little veins through its wings are just now finishing the job of tightening him up. The sticky fluid is passing out of his body through the wing veins.”

  “A glue job, huh?” said Gaston.

  “That’s the general idea,” said Dujardin. “It won’t take long—”

  “Look! He’s going to fly,” Mademoiselle Butterfly exclaimed.

  The shiny little fellow fluttered into the air, and the girl chased after him. Then to my amazement she began to call to him—as if the creature had the power to understand!

  “Wait! Don’t run away from us. We’ve got to be friends, you know.”

  By some strange coincidence the butterfly did turn back when she called. But it seemed intent on giving its wings a fair try and it suddenly darted off on a tangent past the trellis, past me—

  “Come back!” Mademoiselle Butterfly cried. “Don’t go toward that window!”

  It all happened too swiftly for words—the battering of the architect’s hammer—the shuddering of a huge window frame—and then, right above the butterfly, the loosening of a five-foot section of broken glass.

  I sprang toward the butterfly. It settled on a plant directly below the falling glass. I hurled myself over it, flinging my loosened coat up over my head. Then—crash!

  The glass splattered down over me. A few sharp gashes prickled my body. But I had done it!

  Yes, I had caught myself on hands and knees just in time to save the butterfly from death. As I raised up from the heap of debris, assisted by Gaston and the scientist, the little blue and silver wings fluttered out from under me.

  “Oh—thank you, thank you, Monsieur,” the girl breathed. “You saved his life. I can’t tell you how—”

  She groped for words, and the warmth of her smile was balm to every bleeding little gash over my body.

  “I can’t tell you how much this little fellow means to me.” She held out her hand toward the butterfly. It climbed up to the crook of her arm, seemed to be looking into her face. She spoke to it softly.

  “You’re my friend right from the start, aren’t you, little fellow? Do you know what your name is? It’s Maurice

  “Maurice!” I gasped. Again Gaston nudged me. This was one of the choice times for me to keep quiet.

  The Four Heffles, as the quadruplet of butlers was called, made the architect and his two incognito assistants as comfortable as guests.

  Gaston and I managed to hold up our end of the work, and the repair job moved along to the architect’s satisfaction.

  Within a week my acquaintance with Mademoiselle developed into a deep friendship. My being a workman seemed to make no difference to her; at any rate she welcomed my companionship after work hours. I had evidently made a deep impression by saving that butterfly.

  But above all I puzzled over the profuse affection which she gave to her little insect pets. There were nine of these “synthetic” butterflies—“Maurice” being the ninth.

  One evening as Madeline and I were taking a leisurely swim in the narrows I accosted her about the butterfly’s name.

  “Why Maurice?”

  “After a friend of mine,” she said.

  “A romance?”

  “Disappointments and memories are always romantic,” she said.

  “Are all of your butterflies named after—er—memories?” I asked.

  “You’re very unkind,” she said. “Is it polite to ask a girl, ‘How many men have come to woo you and then run away?’ That’s what you’re asking me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “All that really matters to me is that you didn’t fall in love with any of them.”

  “Perhaps I did, though.”

  “If that were true, they’d never have run away—not unless they were fools.” We were swimming along on our backs, and Madeline pointed up to the steel cable, a black line across the evening sky.

  “That was the beginning of a bridge across to the Portugal shore,” she said. “Can you imagine a person riding across by pulley?”

  “I heard the governor mention something of the kind,” I said.

  She turned to me, her eyes full of questioning. “Then you’ve heard about the—the Test of Dust?”

  I nodded. For a few minutes we swam in silence. Mademoiselle Butterfly was lost in a reverie of far-away thoughts.

  “Living here is like living in a different world,” she said. “Unless you know the mysteries of Nature that Father and I know, it might be hard to understand—”

  “I’d like to try,” I said, and I drew her into my arms and kissed her. She looked up into my eyes, half-frightened, then started to swim away. I overtook her, caught her ha
nd, tried to draw her face close to mine. But she shook her head.

  “The butterflies,” she said.

  I looked up to see three or four of her winged pets fluttering past us. “What about them?”

  “I—somehow I’d rather they wouldn’t see me kissing you,” she said.

  I laughed rather too boisterously. “You’re the most curious person I ever met,” I said. “Do you think those insects have a sense of modesty?”

  “It’s silly, isn’t it?” she laughed childishly. “I don’t know how to explain it, but somehow they’re so much like human friends to me—”

  “Symbols of your memories,” I said rather harshly.

  Her eyelids flashed at me and for an instant I thought I had hurt her. But she said, “They had no right to intrude,” and as she watched them fly back toward the white-brick mansion I took her in my arms again . . .

  That night after dinner Gaston said he wanted to have a talk with me. We sauntered down to the cliff’s edge. Abruptly he said, “I think you and I had better clear out.”

  “Not on your life,” I said. “I’m just getting acquainted—”

  “You’re behaving like a romantic fool,” he said. “That’s all well enough on the stage, but you’re carrying your game too far. The girl’s in love with you.”

  “Say it again,” I said. “That’s sweet music.”

  “I’ve picked up some of her father’s view, incidentally,” Gaston continued. “He’s not too enthusiastic about the various swordsmen, noblemen, and other assorted aristocrats that have come here to woo her. Temperamentally she’s more likely to fall in love with a workman like you—”

  “So I’m deceiving her, I suppose?”

  “You certainly are,” said Gaston. “Yes—yes.” I threw a handful of stones into the black sea just to work off nervous energy. Deceit had become my game. I hated to think how Gaston might take it if he knew I was deceiving him too.

  I was not a workman, as Madeline thought. I was not the great Raymond Quinton, as Gaston thought. I was simply Louis Ribot, the great Quinton’s substitute. But above all else I was a man in love.

  “I’m mad about her, Gaston,” I said.

  “Even if I don’t know the first thing about this mysterious Nature World of hers—”

  “It’s dangerous,” Gaston snapped. “We’d better get away. There’s a screw loose on this disappearance business. Have you see that cable across the narrows? How could a man cross that?”

  “With a pulley,” I said. “It slopes down—”

  “How does the pulley get back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The way this thing figures out,” said Gaston savagely, “Nine men have come, fallen in love, tried some sort of test, and failed. Each one of them, has been so badly stung, according to the governor, that he has chased off into oblivion the quickest way—by the cable. Tell me, how did they do it? Did the wind blow that pulley back nine times?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to be the tenth escapee?”

  “No.”

  “What makes you so sure? What makes you think you, the great lover of the stage, won’t meet this same defeat? In a few weeks the country will give you up for lost, like Maurice De Brosse. Your admirers will buy some wreaths for you, the papers will publish your obituary—and the Mademoiselle will name a butterfly after you. Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Mademoiselle Butterfly,” I said.

  At that Gaston took time out to uncork a line of profanity—the best gems from many a box-office success. It was disillusioning, he moaned, to discover the great Quinton was such a dolt.

  “Let’s start over,” he said, pleading with me like a broken-hearted father. “You came here to restore your ego. You wanted to prove that that cheap swordsman, Maurice De Brosse, couldn’t nose out the stage’s great lover. All right. She’s fallen for you—”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Rot! What are you doing, rehearsing? I told you—oh, what’s the use.” He tore his hair and started off. But he whirled back on me. “Answer me three questions. Do you trust the governor?”

  “No.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. Do you trust the scientist?”

  “I don’t know . . . What’s your third?”

  “Just where do you think Maurice is?”

  “Maurice the swordsman or Maurice the butterfly?”

  “The swordsman, of course.”

  “Morocco, probably, or Cape Town.”

  “More rot! Do you know what I think? I think he was murdered—he and eight others. Oh, you can laugh. But I’m warning you—”

  Gaston broke off. We could hear footsteps approaching along the cliff path. Out of the near-blackness came Mademoiselle Butterfly, her father, and Governor Revel.

  “Here they are, father,” said the girl. She was wearing her artist’s smock. I knew she had expected to help her father tonight with his sculpturing of insect models. So the governor’s visit had come unexpectedly.

  “I’m showing Governor Revel through the laboratories, messieurs,” Dujardin announced, “and my daughter thought you two might care to join us. No?”

  “No,” said Gaston sharply.

  But I assured them that he was only jesting. Of course we would come, with pleasure.

  Emerging from the darkness into the brightly lighted reception room of the mansion, Gaston and I were careful to follow along at the rear of the party to escape the governor’s notice. Though he had failed to recognize us on our incognito arrival, a few days previous, our disguises were too meager to bear close scrutiny.

  “This way, messieurs,” said Monsieur Dujardin, leading us in the first of the laboratory chambers. There was a slight nervousness in the scientist’s manner, though at the time I thought nothing of it.

  Monsieur Pash joined us, and the six of us proceeded through the maze of rooms, the architect and the governor following close after the scientist; Gaston and I accompanying Madeline.

  So this was Mademoiselle Butterfly’s world! I tingled to the fingertips with interest. Mystery upon mystery unfolded before us. All of us asked questions—even Gaston. He must have forgotten his silly suspicions about murders.

  In one room Gaston picked up what appeared to be a high-powered flash lantern. He was surprised to discover that it was already on. He turned it to cast a dim amber beam across his face.

  Dujardin warned him gently. “I wouldn’t take too much of that beam if I were you—unless you want to grow.”

  “Shorty could use a little more size,” Monsieur Pash laughed.

  “That beam is working on those tadpoles, to hasten their development,” said Dujardin. He replaced the amber flash-lantern. Its sickly glow bathed the dark and slimy inmates of the little glass aquarium. “There’s much waiting to be done in the way of ray experimentation. The powers of this particular lantern, which I’ve just completed after two years of crude trial and error, are still largely an unknown quantity—”

  “Unknown to your fellow scientists?” the governor asked, “or—”

  “Unknown even to me. You’ve heard something of my theories before, governor,” said Dujardin, “and you know that my basic hypothesis, which caused my fellow scientists to establish me in this fine sunlighted laboratory, is the hypothesis that men and guinea pigs and earthworms and hyenas are all cousins.”

  “Hyenas—that’s good,” said the governor, laughing pompously. “I’ve known plenty of human hyenas in my lifetime.”

  “Underlying my theory,” the scientist continued, “is the indisputable fact that all life, plant or animal, thrives upon water, earth, air, and sunlight. A man forgets that he is actually a water-dwelling animal, encased in a crust of skin. But when our friend here—” he pointed to me, “suffered some minor glass cuts the other day, I demonstrated to him that he is a cousin, far-removed, to the minutiae that swarm the seas.”

  I h
alf-resented the comparison until I noticed how enthralled Madeline was. She smiled at me as if I were one of nature’s wonders, and I must have swelled with pride. Gaston made a sour face.

  By far the most extravagant idea—and the scientist admitted it was highly hypothetical—was his contention that every specialized form of life, such as a human being, or a frog, or a hyena, contained the capacity to retreat through its stages of development, back to the point of separation from other forms of life . . . and having retreated, it might be made to re-develop along new lines.

  Again the governor broke in with his bumptious humor. He knew some brutes of politicians that proved the point. They had backslid, he snorted, and then gone and turned hyena.

  “And I’ve known some jackasses, too!” Governor Revel laughed uproariously and slapped the scientist on the back. “A great idea, Dujardin. Human hyenas, jackasses, and what about a chameleon or two? You know—the little lizards that change color so they won’t be seen against their background?”

  “What about them?” said Dujardin embarrassedly.

  “Maybe we’ve got a couple of them among us, eh? Turn on some brighter lights, Dujardin, and let’s have a look.”

  “Oh-oh,” Gaston whispered. “Our game’s up.”

  Dujardin must have known this was coming. His nervousness had betrayed it. Madeline, however, wore an expression of puzzlement. The architect was a perfect blank. But, obviously enough, Governor Revel had come here to expose us.

  “Well, well, well!” the governor exclaimed, gazing at Gaston and me under the full light. “My old friends, the actors! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gaston, the celebrated comedian, and Raymond Quinton, the most famous lover of the French stage!” Gaston and I did the only thing we could do under the circumstances. We locked arms and took a deep bow.

  “Guilty!” said Gaston. And I added, “At your service.”

  “I told you so.” Governor Revel gave the scientist a wink. “My chauffeur caught their identity the day they arrived, but I needed time to be convinced.” He turned his victorious smile on Gaston and me. “Well, my friends, you are again most welcome to the island of Fraise. And what, pray tell, brings you here incognito?”