Madeleine’s face filled with astonishment. “Your friend is with Dr. Caresco?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“I’ve met Monsieur Caresco; he spent several days here. Oh, I didn’t like him at all!”
“Really?” said Georges. “I don’t know him. Bordier tells me that he’s very skillful, and that he performs very interesting surgeries. That’s all I know about him.”
“I don’t know any more than you, Georges, but that man doesn’t seem to me to be good.”
She became sad, under the influence of an intimate anguish. She could not explain it, and did not remember anything, but something passed through her mind like an unconscious return to a frightful scene that had once unfolded—and it was a strange thing that the surgeon’s name fell into that conversation of peace and love like a funeral cortege through the midst of a celebration, at the very moment when Madeleine was experiencing the first symptoms of a physiological distress that had been occasioned by an abominable crime.
At any rate, Georges quickly effaced that obscure melancholy with tender kisses; in the woodland pathway, the somber drapery of the dusk turned the ocher of the dead leaves gray.
“It’s six o’clock, my beloved Madeleine,” Georges said. “I’ll leave you in order to go change my clothes, and come back to dine with you. I have just enough time.
Madeleine retained him with her lips. The new kiss was absolute. Madeleine put into it all her love, all her joy and all her glorious confidence. They were marching toward ardent felicities, she innocent and chaste, agitated by a strange awakening of the senses combined with the cerebral exaltation to which superb love gives rise, he already acquainted with women but not blasé, moved like her by a noble, troubling, imperious folly bathed in mystery and force, such as he had never experienced.
They parted at the edge of the wood. She went back slowly along the path, still quivering at her fiancé’s kisses, and also astonished by the strange malaise she had felt.
CHAPTER IX
In the hall of the surgical conference, which was being held in the great amphitheater of the Faculté de Médecine, Armand Caresco was speaking, standing at the small podium garnished with red velvet fringed with gold, from which orators delivered their endeavors to the appreciation of their colleagues.
Beneath the flamboyant gaslight and the glory of the allegorical frontispieces with gilt inscriptions that overhung the stage, the young master finished his lecture, taken from notes that he had scribbled in haste a few hours previously. He turned toward the members of the committee installed in the copious armchairs reserved for them on the stage, at the table covered in green baize, who were listening with interest to the surgeon’s communication. Then, addressing himself specifically to the chairman, an old man whose clean-shaven face was aureoled by abundant white hair, he concluded:
“Evidently, the last word has not been pronounced on this surgery of the liver of which I am the initiator. I believe, however, in the light of the results obtained—results revealed to you in my statistics, and also, thanks to my methods and the instrumentation that I have the honor of submitting to the conference, that it will be possible henceforth, with regarding to the infections of the liver to which I have referred, to set aside the dire expectation, so prejudicial to the life of sufferers, and have recourse to a surgical intervention that is all the more efficacious for having been so rapid.”
He bowed briefly to the chairman, who replied with a similar salute, while the other members of the committee, abstaining from any manifestation, remained impassive. He observed the attitude of Monant, the surgeon at the Lariboisière, who, alone among the scientists seated on the stage, was leaning toward one of his neighbors and speaking to him in a low voice, with slow gestures charges with disapproval. He divined in him the most convinced adversary of a candidature for the following year’s committee. Perhaps someone had repeated to Monant the appreciations that he never ceased to offer publicly on his account.
However, enthusiastic applause burst forth, coming from the crowded floor, and compensating for that muted hostility. While picking up his sheets of paper, his eyes made a tour of the amphitheater. He recognized confusedly certain friendly faces, and also, disseminated among the swarm of applauding hands, the faces of the professors of the Faculté, imprinted with animosity and ill-concealed scorn. He preferred not to pay them any heed, and descended slowly from the podium, sustained by the bravos that the foreign delegates showed upon him and the numerous students who had come running from their lectures to listen to the audacious words of the innovator.
His bold endeavors seduced young intelligences avid for progress. In vain the professors and the hospital surgeons, some by virtue of reason and some out fear of the nascent glory, attempted to stifle the enthusiasm of their pupils beneath the discredit of sane evaluation. It was all the more difficult for them to succeed because Caresco drew in his wake an entire cortege of the obscure, the spoiled and those whose lack of worth, jealousy and disappointed ambitions embittered them against officialdom and colleagues who had achieved important positions by chance, stubborn hard work and protection. He was their man, the triumphant, dazzling exception, thrown in the face of all those who supported the Faculté.
Caresco, with the practicality that dominated him, had quickly understood the benefits that he could extract from the support of unindocrinated colleagues, who were legion. He had been seen speaking at banquets of dosimetrists, homeopaths and other unorthodox societies, lauding the benefits of a medicine in which he did not believe, of whose practices he was scornful, in spite of being so worthy of scorn himself.
That is why, in order not to abandon the line of conduct he had adopted, he never neglected conferences, at which, before numerous assemblies he imposed his personality. Access to the podium at such scientific meetings is open to any physician; a modest fee giving the title of member, anyone can come to them to propound his theories, recount successful operations that are impossible to verify and display statistics that are easy to falsify. The proceedings of the sessions are published by the medical press, and even reproduced in some political or literary periodicals avid for sensational news—and renown is thus extended to the entire world.
Caresco always presented statistics in which mortality was considerable less than those of other conference-members. Those who did not know him marveled; those who had seen him operate, who had observed the surety of his hand, his rapidity, his impetuosity and his brio, without being informed of the consequences of the operations, similarly applauded without hesitation; only colleagues who were too directly in rivalry remained skeptical: the hospital surgeons interested in doubt, or those like Savre and Bordier, who had followed him closely enough to know that deception marched side by side in their man with audacity.
When he had retired from the hemicycle by the special door reserved for members of the congress, he had to submit once again to the ovations of people who were watching out for him in the corridors, and shake hands that were sometimes unknown to him. To all of them he offered the importunity of his pearly smile, the abandonment of his limp hand.
His father, who had swelled the applause from a corner of the amphitheater, ran toward him, but, being in haste to catch up with Professor Stermann of Vienna, who was addressing laudatory gestures to him from a distance, he did not respond to his affectionate advances.
Finally, traversing the courtyard of the Faculté, filled with the carriages of masters and a bustling crowd of curiosity-seekers who got out of his way, while naming him, he reached his own carriage, in order to go to meet Israel. The banker had summoned him. Now, away from the conflict, seized by the indifference of the street, he felt that he had fallen from the height of his pedestal to recommence another battle, with financial embarrassment.
As he climbed up into his coupé he spotted Bordier. He called to him: “Hey! I’ve had a success. Have you see the faces the Parisians are pulling? They’re drooling—take it from me, they’re drooling
. Are you coming with me? I’ll drop you off on the way.”
“Thanks,” Bordier replied, “but I’m waiting for one of my friends, who’s coming to pick me up: Monsieur Ponviane, Mademoiselle de Jancy’s fiancé. We’re going to dine together and then go on to the engagement party, at Madame de Jancy’s. house.”
“I know; I’ve been invited.”
“Will you be coming?”
“No, I don’t think so; I have a lot to do. I want to publish the new edition of my treatise of liver surgery without delay. I’ll be working this evening.”
“Look, here’s Ponviane now.”
Bordier pointed to an elegant victoria, from which his friend, having seen him from a distance, was waving to him. The young man was in evening dress, beneath an elegant winter overcoat belted at the waist.
Instead of drawing away, Caresco remained on the sidewalk, retained by an unhealthy curiosity to make the acquaintance of the man to whom he had caused the most cowardly and infamous damage.
“Well, Bordier, introduce me.”
The spontaneous nature of Georges Ponviane went out to the man, already famous, whom his friend Bordier had praised. He extended his hand forthrightly and, like others, was surprised by the limpness of the hand he gripped.
“I’m very glad to meet you, Doctor. People I know speak highly of you, and...”
He suspended the sentence; he had been about to add that everyone thought well of him, but he remembered his fiancée’s aversion.
In any case, Caresco replied: “I’m equally glad, Monsieur, to offer you my congratulations. I’ve had the honor of being close to Mademoiselle de Jancy and I retain the fondest memory of her.”
I’ve had the honor of being close…the phrase emerged by chance from his lips seemed to him to be full of a diabolical implication. He found a very particular savor in the cold irony with which, in his inner tribunal, he accompanied his sins. Superior to others by virtue of his lack of scruples, his dead or stillborn conscience, he experienced a kind of keen satisfaction in spicing his wickedness with an atrocious joke.
Did Georges Ponviane have a prescience of the danger that the frequentation of that man would offer? Was he alerted by the indefinable interior voice aroused by the proximity or the abandonment? Was it, as in so many others, simply the physical repulsion of a gaze that turned away, a hand that did not exert pressure? Or was he subject to the after-influence of the woman he loved, who was like his good angel? At any rate, he suddenly felt the impulse of his heart die away.
“Au revoir, Doctor, we’re pressed for time!”
And, followed by Bordier, he climbed into his carriage, while Caresco, surprised by that retreat, climbed into his own.
The evening being sufficiently mild to permit the victoria to travel with its awning down, under a splendid sky, the two friends experienced a visual blossoming. Georges put his arm around Bordier’s shoulder; a fraternal embrace united them, enabling them to admire, without saying a word, the animation of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, along which the carriage was taking them, and the joyous animation of the student quarter in the early dusk.
Lamplighters, with their long lances over their shoulders, were setting the streets ablaze. Twenty-year-old madcaps, were filling the sidewalks with their cries, their merriment and their pursuits. Other students, more serious, with briefcases under their arms, were hastening to their lodgings. Couples passed by, offering heart-warming little collages. In the roadway, private carriages, fiacres and trams crossed paths, coachmen cursing, in a rumbling ride that was always rising and never ebbed. Cyclists of both sexes were like birds gliding gracefully at ground level through the multiple encumbrances of the intense life of the great artery.
The victoria sped on, causing the marvels of the autumnal panorama, of the Parisian evening, which is a second day within the day, to fly past the eyes of the friends in rapid succession. And all of that society, that swell of carriages and omnibuses, denuded trees and sidewalks cluttered with multicolored kiosks—and the gas-jets ignited in the reflectors, and the violent flamboyance of the shop-fronts and posters, and, further on, higher up, the sovereign perspective of the sky overtaken by the dark blue twilight, already pierced by the scintillation of stars, with the ironic bloom of the moon looking down on the houses—threw a veil woven of melancholy over their souls, as if they were admiring the décor of a dream. And they did not speak, both thinking the same things, their artistic sentiments whipped by the same astonishment.
At Bordier’s home, two places had been set for the cold dinner served by the domestic. The conversation was banal and general; the presence of the maidservant was not conducive to confidences. In the young physician’s bedroom, however, where cigarettes were lit, while Bordier changed his clothes in his friend’s presence, Georges said to him: “You seem a trifle sad this evening, my friends. Is something worrying you?”
“Worrying…no, not exactly—but I’m profoundly disgusted with the life I’m leading.”
“Come on! Your black ideas are getting a grip on you again!”
“No. Three months ago, before I was employed by Caresco, when I complained about my profession, the difficulties of the life, the back-breaking stages, night visits, the improper methods of certain colleagues, I thought it was the truth—but after a good night’s sleep, the wheels greased by ardor, I set off again with a certain pride in honest labor and services rendered to suffering humanity, as one says in funeral orations. But now…!
“Now, my work is less onerous, more rewarding, more regular; a certain consideration reflects on me from my collaboration with the famous surgeon; imbeciles even envy me; nothing would be easier for me than to make useful contacts among the people who frequent the house in the Avenue Hoche; in sum, in Caresco’s wake I might go on to wealth and honors…and yet...
“And yet I detest the role that the man is making me play. My dear Georges, I’m the accomplice of atrocities…veritable crimes. This morning, again, a child died during an operation. Yesterday, two women died out of six who underwent operations. The day before yesterday, and the day before that…what do I know? I can no longer tell you how many. And I assist in these deaths, I collaborate with these cadavers. There! I disgust myself!”
Ponviane burst out laughing. He knew the nervous susceptibility of Bordier’s character. He believed that he was under the impression of one of the periods of demoralization to which he had seen him subject before, probably caused by that morning’s accident—a straw fire all the more lively because it is so brief. Had he not often witnessed the exhalation of those atonal moments, and had to combat the depressions of that child-like heart with humorous philosophy? This time, once again, he adopted the strategy of steering that easily-manageable skiff toward badinage.
“Come on, you big baby! It’s sheer chance, those fatalities. Any industry...”
“My profession isn’t an industry.”
“I agree. Let’s say practice. Any practice is fatally exposed to produce hitches. How many times, in our cotton-mills, do we have to eject whole batches of unsuccessful thread? There are profits and losses. Do you think you can never fail? That would be too good. Then again, viewing things from the most elevated viewpoint, it isn’t desirable.”
Bordier was knotting a cravat in front of the mirror. He turned to Georges, bewildered.
“Why is that?” he asked.
Although it was not in Georges’ mild and reserved sentimental complexion to have recourse to macabre jokes, and the dark humor of medical students did not suit his refined character at all—especially in the period of amorous tenderness that the melancholy grace of his fiancée had brought out in him, inundating him with an incomparable delicacy and giving him a veritable nobility of ideas and speech—he nevertheless directed his wit toward a brutal theory often expressed in the wards of large hospitals, in order to change his friend’s mood.
“It’s obvious,” he went on. “You know full well that your work as a destroyer is useful to society. Don’t
you think that when you, a Charles IX of cripples, have made a Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of all these wretches, instead of patching them up sufficiently to allow them to reproduce creatures condemned in advance, and to disseminate the seeds of their maladies in agglomerations of people, that you’ve protected Society against a danger all the more terrible because nothing can be done to combat it? No, my friend, continue your liberating work: kill! Kill!—or, at least, is you let them live, suppress their genital organs. They’d have the resource of singing in the Sixtine Chapel.”
Bordier straightened his face and shrugged his shoulders before his friend’s puerile humor. He put on an elegant dinner-jacket.
“And then,” Georges concluded, throwing his cigarette butt into the fireplace, “you won’t bore us this evening with your black ideas. This evening ought to be an hour of enlightenment for you, a reflection of my intoxication, for this evening I’m introducing you to my fiancée. Come on, you great fool. Put on a good winter coat. You won’t be back before eight o’clock in the morning. Are you coming?”
And he dragged him to Madame de Jancy’s house, having almost recomforted him, turned him like a glove with a few facile jokes, by reason of the influence he exercised over that accessible soul, that weak and disabled character, like a rudderless ship drifting with every current.
Madame de Jancy lived with her daughter in a luxurious house in the Rue Pierre-Charron, the aristocratic artery that extends from the Champs-Élysées to the Trocadéro. That evening, a festival animation filled the vicinity of the house, extending to the threshold of the dwelling. The coaching entrance, wide open and bathed in electric light, gave access to private carriages. Muffled couples and diamond-decked ladies emerged from them to climb the steps to the vestibule, decked with foliage. The brightly colored ball-gowns made a violent contrast with the somber furs of their cavaliers. In the street, idlers and passers-by, servants and belated delivery-boys, formed groups, commenting and watching the shuttered façade, whose windows allowed a little of the joy of the interior to filter through.
The Necessary Evil Page 14
