The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2)

by André Couvreur

  Lucienne became peremptory. “Go, I tell you, and go to bed. The chambermaid can take care of Ninette. I’ll send for you if I need you before this evening.”

  Left alone, Lucienne prowled around to begin with. She went to the left to put her ear to the door to the corridor, and then to the right, toward the dressing room connecting our two bedrooms. Having not heard any noise she swiftly went into my study.

  “Ségur 102-90, please.”

  The pause was rather prolonged at this early hour, first to obtain the number and then to disturb someone who was still in bed; then came these rapid words: “Come!... Come right away!... No, no, nothing to fear... You’ll only have to push the door; I’ve left it open; close it after you, softly, and go straight into the drawing room... Yes, the drawing room is directly opposite... Hurry...”

  Then she hung up.

  Finally! Perhaps I was about to discover who that mysterious correspondent was. To summon him with such authority, Lucienne must know him very well. He was not, however, a regular visitor to the house, since he did not know its disposition. Nor did I think that he could be the individual who sent the anonymous letters. Lucienne would not have that audacity! No, it was some individual directly interested in the consequences of my death, perhaps the lawyer. And as base, as offensive and as menacing as that intervention might be—a crow already hovering over my cadaver—I preferred it to any other.

  Lucienne came back in, looked at the clock, which had stopped, wound it up, and set it right, checking the time on her wristwatch, which she had taken the astonishing precaution of putting on so early in the morning. She did it rapidly, under the pressure of time. Then she went to pick up my trousers, abandoned on a chair. I thought she was going to tidy them away, but not at all—she rummaged in my pocket and fetched out a bunch of keys, which she slipped into her bosom. She was acting in full possession of her nerves, feeling nothing of the emotion experienced by the most indifferent of women handling the garments worn the previous day by a man no longer alive. I no longer existed for her.

  Had I ever existed?

  A quarter of an hour went by, which she spent in an armchair, meditating. Then a scarcely-perceptible sound in the drawing-room made her sit up. She ran in that direction, closing the door of my study behind her. My hearing, straining, increased In acuity by the services I had demanded of it since the day before, in compensation for my other senses, revealed to me that someone was opening the drawers in my desk. There was nothing in them except manuscripts. My share-certificates, bonds and other important papers were in the double-bottomed drawer of the Louis XVI secrétaire in my bedroom, next to the portrait of Lucienne. She, my confidante in all things, knew the secret of it, and I was astonished that the search had not been directed there first.

  That search having had no result, Ségur 102-90 did not take long to appear. It was a man. More than that: a handsome man. He reminded me of the flashy foreigner who had peered at Lucienne on the night of Die Walküre. He had a youthful vigor, a clean-shaven face tinted by the ardors of the Orient, and abundant, well-disciplined hair: a kind of man that would have pleased anyone, and whom I might have admired too, had he not spoiled those natural gifts by a search for elegance surpassing distinction. His overly garish cravat was secured with an excessively baroque pearl-headed pin. His fingers were covered with cabochons which caught the light of my candles.

  I dare not assert that I frightened him, but I certainly impressed him. He hesitated in the doorway and only recovered his courage in the face of Lucienne’s astonishment.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  “I can’t see...”

  “Don’t let that stop you…” She switched on the electric light.

  Then he came to the foot of my bed.

  “It’s astonishing,” he said. “He bears no resemblance to the portraits in the newspapers.”

  “What newspapers are you talking about, Guy?”

  His name was Guy; the vocable was not belied by the silhouette. It appeared to me that Lucienne had pronounced it in a familiar fashion. But Guy could equally well be a surname.

  “I’m talking about this morning’s papers.”

  “What! Already! They’ve announced it already! But I delayed any communication with the press, in order not to be importunate.”

  “Complete biography and bibliography. Such articles are made in advance, when it’s a matter of someone old. You’re mentioned.”

  “Oh, what do they say about me?”

  “Not much—but for him, eulogies.”

  His pockets were stuffed with morning papers. My wife took possession of them

  “Later, Lulu, later...”

  “Lulu! Personally, I called her Lucette. I had found that rhyme with Ninette, in order that they should be connected on my lips as well as in my heart. But he said “Lulu,” marking a further degree of familiarity. I was deeply offended. I had already observed that in a man, a wound inflicted on self-esteem is as sharp as the attaint of love itself, when it is not greater. This time, I could observe it in myself.

  Under that influence, my distress collapsed into anger. I surmounted it, however, by advising myself to wait for a definitive enlightenment. Nothing, in sum, had demonstrated as yet that this individual was the thief of my honor. A blood relationship might exist between that woman and Guy, of which I had been left ignorant, in order that I might not recoil before the indignity of the family at the moment of our marriage. Had not the father, Jojo, led a mysterious extramarital existence, varied and probably prolific?

  Yes, that was one consideration more of my customary indulgence. I hoped to be able to attach Guy, Lulu and Jojo to the same dishonorable stock.

  But three comments in a low voice disillusioned me definitively.

  “Well, you have no reason to be jealous now.”

  “Yes, still.”

  “Of a dead man who was never anything to me but an honorary husband?”

  “That’s what you say…but women are sensitive to the reputation of their husbands…and often, when you left me to go back to him, oh Lulu, how I suffered!”

  “Are you going to start again? How disagreeable you are, Guy! Come on, my darling, we have better things to do. Let’s hurry—we won’t be able to come back. The child’s notary will learn about the decease this morning, and it won’t take him long to put the seals on, as he doesn’t like me much...”

  “You’re right, my Lulu.”

  A superfluous pronoun. I knew enough now. Guy, Ségur 102-90, was the hero of the anonymous letters. Everything that was about to follow his visit could only enlighten me as to the morality of the individual—and hers. My pen hesitates to trace it...

  Equipped with the keys that his Lulu—no, I shall no longer write “my Lucienne” now—the keys that his Lulu, as I say, had taken from her cleavage, he went to the Louis XVI secrétaire where I deposited my valuables and business documents, opened it, and commenced to strip it methodically of everything it contained. No piece of paper escaped him. He scanned them rapidly, and then rejected them, shrugging his shoulders. What was he looking for? I was innocent enough still to ask?

  He fell upon a large, voluminous, sealed envelope virgin of any inscription, in which I had gathered together sacred memories of Emeline: letters, portraits and faded flowers. In order to conserve them I had been forced to resist Lucienne’s caprice; she wanted them destroyed.

  “Is this it, perchance, Lulu?”

  “No, I know what’s in that. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Things of his first wife’s. Look in the secret drawer.

  She released the spring that opened the hidden compartment herself. He plunged his hand into it avidly, and brought out a wad of banknotes, the product of a payment that I had not yet had time to take to the bank.

  “Twenty lovely bills!” he counted, joyfully. “Does he make so much money with his literature?”

  “Oh no—that sum comes from the sale of some land. T
he books, you know...”

  He nodded, and shrugged his shoulders. Then, lightly, he said: “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m wondering. Do you think, Guy, that I could entrust them to you? It might not be noticed that they’re missing from the inheritance.”

  “There might be bills to pay…and then, you have so many personal expenses, my poor Lulu!”

  “That’s true. Anyway, I don’t have any scruples—he was so niggardly.”

  The man pocketed the money, and my disgust was total. In matters of money, my probity was scrupulous. A sou weighed upon me as much as a louis, when it belonged to someone else. I was able to be generous without being wasteful, and Lucienne knew that better than anyone. I was niggardly!

  While I chewed over my resentment, they finished their work.

  “Nothing—absolutely nothing!” complained the handsome Guy. “Aren’t there any other places where he might have put them? Doesn’t he have a safety-deposit box at the bank?”

  “Yes, in fact.”

  “We’ll call in there this afternoon, before your errands. Let’s hope I find something there. Otherwise.…” he terminated his sentence with a gesture of distress—and Lucienne was manifesting a similar anxiety.

  But they pricked up their ears. Someone had come into the drawing room. They hastened to put the papers back and close the desk. The man kept the key.

  They were just finishing when a discreet knock on the door to the corridor alarmed Lucienne.

  “If anyone sees you, you’re from the Funeral Directors,” she said pushing the scoundrel into my study. She had addressed him as tu. If they did that in moments of peril, they must do it on other occasions too. But what did it matter now? Anything I could have suspected had certainly been surpassed by the reality.

  “Who is it?” Lucienne asked, through the door.

  “It’s Madame’s father,” said the chambermaid, from outside.

  “Have him come in.”

  Lucienne swiftly went past my bed again and recalled her accomplice. “It’s Papa. I’ll introduce you.”

  Well! It was now a family matter. My mortal disappointment, my beautiful love brutally scythed down and debased, vanished before the fantasy of a reunion by which I would certainly have been amused if I had not been its center of gravity. I no longer had anything to glean here of those amiable psychological notations that I transcribed so amorously in my works; I was confronting a caricaturish unleashing of the basest instincts: the dance of the coins grafted on to the dance of the dead.

  But let me introduce the new actor in that macabre buffoonery. It is my father-in-law, Monsieur Joseph Tirolle: Jojo, since it is necessary to call him by his nickname. The bright electric light, which Lucienne had not had the presence of mind or the decency to extinguish, displayed him to me from head to foot.

  I find once again, in all his adulterated, crapulous pungency, the only man whom, once in my life, my fists had humiliated. He is stooped beneath the burden of forty years of aperitifs. His hair, dry white at the roots and greenish yellow at the tips, is, by virtue of a prodigious adherence, swept stylishly over the forehead. From his round face, with a terracotta complexion—cooked, as the humorists might write—bursts a copious and rubicund nose. His bulbous eyelids shrink his sunken eyes. His distended cheeks sag over his excessively high collar, fortunately masking its wear and tear. He has a mildewed head, but his frock-coat is dapper, his waistcoat is fancy, his trousers are creased with an iron and white gaiters cover the cracks in his varnished shoes. He is holding, in a hand agitated by a spasmodic tremor, a new boater with a broad red brim. He is the joyful Jojo, hilarious and abject. He is Lucienne’s creator.

  He is undeniably that. Camped beneath the portrait of his daughter, I find in his bloated, corrupted face, feature for feature, Lucienne’s angelic mask: the same eyes, and the same crease of the lips are manifest beneath the deformation. Oh, if only I had known him before her! I would not have married, Tornada would not have had to inject me.

  From what vile alcove had he emerged, or from what low dive? What insipid reek of alcohol or patchouli—which, as I could not breathe, I could not define—was he diversifying over my mortuary candles? I don’t know; but he was radiating filthy sensuality.

  He was gripped nevertheless by my funerary décor.

  “How little one is, after all!” he exhaled, with the compassion that one owes to a brother in humanity who has died without knowing the splendors of crapulousness.

  Only then did he perceive the presence of a stranger. He nodded his head. Ségur 102-90 riposted in identical fashion.

  “I’m forgetting to introduce you,” Lucienne said. “Monsieur Guy Prinjard; Monsieur Joseph Tirolle, my father.”

  The two men saluted one another again.

  “Monsieur is a family member?” Jojo enquired.

  “No, simply a friend.”

  “A friend of…?” Jojo probed, designating me.

  “No, a friend of mine.”

  “Ah! Good…delighted to meet you, Monsieur, in such sad circumstances.”

  A warm handshake sealed their sympathy over my mortal remains.

  I was searching. The name Guy Prinjard did not strike a chord in my memory, even in literature—but so many unfortunates have, in our era, been bitten by the epistolary tarantula that one would need the brain of an encyclopedist to file them all away.

  Confident in his daughter’s friend, Jojo let himself go. “How very unfortunate she is, Monsieur, poor Sisi”—a third abbreviation, of which I was also ignorant—“widowed at her age! What will become of her? It’s hard, when one loves comfort, and has acquired the habit of taking it for granted! I raised her in silk; will it be necessary now for her to put on cotton and no longer be able to help her old father, who sacrificed so much for her? Tell me, Monsieur, whether it wouldn’t have disgusted you to deliver such a beautiful child to an individual like him?” But a gleam traversed his eyes. “Let’s see—I hope, at least, that you’ve made arrangements for him to leave you a crust of bread for your old age? Under what regime were you married?”

  “There was no contract, Papa, as you know. He told me that he’d arrange all that later.”

  “Promises…has he kept them in a will?”

  “I don’t know; we’ve just been searching everywhere for it, Guy and I. We haven’t found anything.”

  “So, you’ll inherit…?”

  “A quarter; that’s all the law allow me.”

  “It’s unjust! It’s frightful! What will become of you?”

  Catastrophe was hovering over the trio. Cadavers, fortunately, cannot betray their hilarity. Mine was, in any case, attenuated by the remorse of having confided to my notary a testament that favored Lucienne at the expense of Ninette. Oh, my Ninette, my treasure, my purity, oh, Emeline’s Ninette, it was for this odious couple that I had dispossessed you! Oh, how rapidly, once resuscitated, I would run to my notary and tear up that insane document! Oh, how I would sweep the street, throwing that venal creature, that greedy lover and that filthy Jojo out on to the sidewalk.

  It is certain that the prestige of the dead is greatly dependent on the material advantages they leave to the living. Seeing himself dispossessed of them, Jojo immediately lost all respect. He replaced the scarlet-beribboned boater on his head in a cavalier fashion and his voice swelled.

  “In that case, then, it’s the kid who gets the three-quarters! But that’s sickening! Is there no justice in the world?” He addressed himself to Guy. “And to think, Monsieur, that I, Joseph Tirolle, ruined myself trying to make his money work for him. He was a partner in my food-canning business—a superb business, Monsieur! Twenty-five thousand profit per year, if he hadn’t backed out! Sardines, mackerel, even whiting—yes, Monsieur, smoked whiting, an invention of my own, nice fish that embalm the mouth and salt you at the same time, which promotes, naturally, the consumption of white wine, a product of our France, doubling the national interest in consequence. Well, he was a partner
in that business with me, and I slaved away beyond belief in order to make it work. And he’s left nothing to my daughter, that profiteer! He played a dirty trick on me, an honest industrialist! Ask. Monsieur, ask what I am in the squares of Paris!”

  “Oh, shut up, Papa,” Lucienne cut in. “You’re screeching like a polecat—the servants will hear you. There’s nothing to be done. Let’s think about it.”

  “That’s right, Sisi, let’s think about it.”

  “Thinking about it was a matter of wondering what might be saved from the wreckage. In order to reflect, Jojo took off his boater again and tapped the wisps of hair on his forehead. Lucienne clasped her hands over her stomach, as I was doing at present, but they lacked an effigy of Satan to clutch. As for the handsome Guy, he fiddled with his cabochons.

  Jojo unclenched his jaw. “You have jewelry?”

  “Some…a pearl necklace, rings, a diamond brooch, two pendants.”

  “Give them to me…”

  “Oh no, Papa. I know you! It ought to be Monsieur Prinjard who…but then, as they come, for the most part, from his first wife and it’s known that they exist, I wonder whether the inheritance...”

  “What did he give you, of your own.”

  “The pearl necklace, an emerald, a sapphire...”

  “Isn’t that your property?”

  “The law doesn’t understand it that way! But don’t worry; I’ll be able to set aside what belongs to me. As for taking away anything else…oh, if we lived in a house…but we don’t. It’s necessary, then, to think about the collections.”

  “The old books,” Guy suggested.

  “The tapestries and the rugs would fetch good prices,” Jojo declared, gravely.

  All three raised their heads toward an admirable piece of tapestry that decorated a panel in my room. It was a unique piece, incomplete and longer than it was broad, but which perpetuated from the fourteenth century the incomparable art of the manufacturers of Arras, applied to the translation of designs by the Florentine painter Taddeo Gaddi. I had acquired it recently, at the sale of the famous Blumayer collection, and considered that I had got an excellent bargain in only paying fifty thousand francs for it. It was worth three times that. Were they thinking of stealing it from me, then? I shuddered in advance, at the idea of the other inestimable Beauvais and Gobelins that decorated my study.