The Necessary Evil

by André Couvreur

  Monsieur Romé left for his meeting. Madame Romé stayed to accompany the surgeon during his visit to Aline and to support the proposal that he was about to put to the young woman. As for Madame Bise, in spite of the gravity of events, she had not given up on her plan to take Caresco to Madeleine’s bedside. So, while Aline’s mother climbed the stairs, she took the surgeon to one side.

  “By the way,” she said, “I believe that won’t be all. My other niece, Madeleine de Jancy, is unwell. I want you to come to see her this morning.”

  “Yes, I know, I know...”

  “How do you know?”

  “The other day, when Mademoiselle de Jancy fainted, I was able to take account of her condition, which isn’t very reassuring.”

  “Well, then?” trumpeted the aunt. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “My God, Madame, you know that I’m bound by professional secrecy. But in sum, as you represent her family, I can’t conceal from you that here’s an abnormal growth in her abdomen, which I can’t easily explain.”

  That was news that the stupid woman had not expected. She was flabbergasted. Her face, as wrinkled as an old apple, was hollowed out by even more wrinkles. Her mobile eyes fluttered more actively. She did not even think about voicing her suspicion, so great was her surprise.”

  “What! A growth! Are you sure?”

  “I’m absolutely sure.”

  “Another operation, then! Too much! What a calamity for the family!”

  “An operation?” said Armand, unable to hide a smile. “Oh no! Not now, anyway.”

  “When, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And he gave her a little lecture, explaining that the growth that was hindering the young woman’s digestive functions, occasioning reflexes, was the cause of her fainting fits. He toyed with the old woman’s emotions, taking pleasure in making a fool of her with misleading explanations, and she listened with approving nods of the head, drinking in the fantastic science that the doctor was imparting, accumulating incomprehensions, aliments for her expansive faculties, which would permit her, later, to give explanations of it in her turn, to make herself look good in the eyes of her entourage, and to influence a decision.

  When he stopped speaking, she said, with a comical gravity: “I think it’s necessary to operate too. The child can’t get married with that, alas. Oh, you’ll have saved the entire family!”

  Armand Caresco made a gesture of negation, protesting strongly. No, no, the growth wasn’t to be removed. He was convinced that it would disappear of its own accord. But Madame Bise grabbed his hand and compressed it violently, with forceful emotion.

  “No! You’ll have saved us all! You must come and see her today, the child—she’s staying in bed, waiting for you.”

  “Today, my dear Madame, is impossible. Tomorrow morning I’m operating on Mademoiselle Romé. Perhaps tomorrow afternoon...”

  They were climbing the stairs. Madame Bise was breathing heavily with emphysema and emotion. Armand Caresco was wondering how he ought to propose the operation to Mademoiselle Romé.

  Very observant of the psychological state of his patients, always on the lookout for sentiments that their frequentation allowed him to perceive, and modifying his attitude in accordance with the nature of those sentiments, he was slightly at a loss in the present case. He was aware of the enormous role that the mental state of subjects plays in the evolution, and even the cure, of maladies, and what suggestion the practitioner is always called upon to exercise on the morale that is subject to the repercussion of physical effects. How many times, moreover, had he not taken advantage of that debility of the soul, that atony of passion, to obtain consent for an operation that had been refused the day before?

  However, he had never had to deal with a fictitious malady—but a malady nevertheless, since the contrariety experienced by Aline had sufficed to contract the ducts of her liver and afflict her with biliary resorption. She had come, out of love for him, to offer herself to his care, but how far would that self-abandonment go? Might not the shock offered to the young woman’s dementia be violent enough to cause her finally to open her eyes and revolt against the scalpel?

  Certainly, antiquity offered even more surprising examples of immolation, and the long list of martyrs, expiring voluntarily for their religion, was proof of the unfathomable aberration of souls led astray by faith, whether that faith was the love of a God or the love of a man. But those sacrifices had occurred in tormented times, when hearts had been subject to the traction of wild predications and promises of future felicity; it could not be the same in this skeptical fin-de-siècle, and Caresco, as he opened the door of the room, was convinced that he would encounter resistance.

  Aline Romé was still in bed, her ideas misted by morphine. The jaundice, an intense saffron hue, denatured the somber pallor of her complexion, and the blue transparency of her cornea. The icteric tint was accentuated in the eyelids, which, violently circled, were almost black.

  Beside the bed, Madame Romé, her heart drowned by the tears that she was repressing with great difficulty, was holding her daughter’s hand knotted in her own. In a corner, Soeur Cunégonde, who had scented the importance of the event, was displaying the indifference of her acne-scarred face. And all around the invalid, in the luxurious room, was the same spectacle of things, the rectitude of the great floral curtains, the neatness of the tables covered in pharmaceutical bottles, the regular tock-tock of the clock, the muffled footsteps on the soft Oriental carpet.

  When Armand Caresco came in, followed by Madame Bise, Aline’s face became radiant, with a violent afflux of blood beneath her ochreous skin. It was the second time that morning that the surgeon had come to see her; she understood that something decisive was about to happen, and she was quivering all over as she listened to the words emerging from the surgeon’s lips.

  “Mademoiselle, you had a new crisis yesterday, more serious than the preceding ones, and that has given your family, and me, pause for reflection. We don’t want to prolong this poor state of health—which is occasioned, as I’ve told you, by gallstones that had formed in your liver and are interrupting the normal flow of the bile, causing it to spread through your bloodstream instead of passing into the intestines. If these accidents are reproduced, there’s no doubt that it could result in serious consequences. That’s why, with the agreement of your parents and Madame Bise, I’ve come to propose to you a radical remedy, which consists of removing the little stones. The operation is not dangerous, and of short duration. In any case, you won’t feel anything under the artificial sleep, and it will only leave an insignificant scar. What do you think?”

  He had spoken modestly, correctly, without difficult terminology, his gaze turned away, with his nacreous smile. Aline received the shock without flinching. It seemed to her that the proposal that had just been made had had to arrive, quite naturally, when the time came—and the time had come.

  Around her, the people present expected a revolt, some cry of alarm, an explosion of revulsion, or a manifestation of terror before the danger toward which she was being pushed, but there was nothing. At the most, Madame Romé, who would have liked to be able to pass on her life and health through the clutch of her hand, felt a slight tremor.

  Aline turned toward the man she loved the lamentation of her eyes, soiled by jaundice, and her gesture was a confession, an abandonment of herself, like that of a virgin surrendering to the first dolorous approach of the man she adores, like that of a woman of sacred legend immolating herself for Christ, like that of Jeanne d’Arc mounting the pyre. Her gesture was made of glory, of devotion, and of love.

  Her gesture said: “Take me; I sacrifice myself. Do with me what you will. Deflower my beauty with your knife, cut my flesh, take my blood; I am yours, I give myself with joy. The operation is unnecessary and my malady the result of a comedy? What does it matter, since you want me in that fashion? I will lie down on the sacrificial table without recrimination, devotedly, passively, and
I will belong to you thus, for I am your object, your thing, and you will do with me what you will, all that you will!”

  As Armand Caresco was astonished not to receive any response, uncertain of the success of his attempt, he repeated: “Well, what do you think?”

  She replied, softly: “I believe it will be the only means of curing me.”

  Among the women, that simple consent, of which they could not divine the psychology and which they attributed to reason, provoked an emotional flood of words. Madame Romé seized Aline in her arms and covered her with kisses veiled by sobs. Madame Bise abandoned herself to the impetuous evacuation of southern epithets and hosannas of gratitude toward the surgeon. As for Soeur Cunégonde, who tasted the triumph of a work of traction to which she had submitted the young woman since she had arrived in the house, she did not neglect either to offer her felicitations for the consent given, albeit in a more restrained fashion.

  “Mademoiselle is so reasonable! You’ll see, my dear, how we shall all look after you.”

  And there was almost a celebration in their hearts. It seemed that the operation was already accomplished, that the great act had been consummated; they no longer felt the anguish behind that false urgency. The gray light falling from the large windows impregnated them with a kind of lukewarm gaiety, illuminating contented faces.

  The surgeon took advantage of the moment to announce that the operation would be carried out the next day and then left, satisfied, followed by the thankful gaze of the young woman, while Soeur Cunégonde stayed in the room, to continue to warm imaginations by recounting the daily miracles that her young master performed, while attenuating, by the obsession with success and the promise of the prayers of her entire community, the horror of the blood that was about to flow.

  Madame Bise, utterly joyful, was no longer thinking, for the moment, about Madeleine, her other niece, who was in bed, dolorously waiting for the surgeon’s visit.

  In the room where General de Rion was, who had undergone his operation a week before, Armand Caresco encountered Bordier, who was changing the dressing. The consequences of the operation had been admirably straightforward, with no fever and no pain, and the old man admitted that if it were not for the reaction of the chloroform and the ennui of being confined to bed, he would willingly be butchered again. He was experiencing real amelioration, which caused him to believe in a complete success, exciting the hope of a return to activity and a long and vigorous old age, exempt from the cacochymy and procrastinations resulting from his hypertrophied prostate. He was deluding himself with images of a gilded old age, of rides through the Bois de Boulogne, and even a courtesan, once a month. When his benefactor entered, he glorified him.

  Bordier removed from the groin region the small bandages that were hiding the collodion-soaked cotton wool.

  “Pardon me, General, if I hurt you.”

  “Get on with it, damn it,” grumbled the deep voice. “I’ve commanded in Africa, I know what’s what. Then again, here, I have nothing to say. I’m a conscript; I obey. Aah!”

  Bordier has just unstuck the last morsel of cotton wool, uncovered the precise neatness of the cut. One after the other, he extracted the horsehair stitches that were sealing the wound. He lifted the stitches with forceps and then cut them with a precise snip of the scissors.

  “You’re cured, General,” Caresco said.

  The old man howled with joy, and wanted to get up immediately. It was necessary to threaten him with a relapse to keep him in bed.

  Armand Caresco took Bordier out on to the landing.

  “The Romé girl is scheduled for tomorrow,” he told him.

  “Mademoiselle Romé? What are you going to do, then?”

  “I don’t know exactly—an exploration. I wouldn’t be astonished if there were a calculus obstructing the bile duct or the cystic duct. By reason of the persistence of the symptoms, I think it useful, in order to avoid complications that are always to be feared, to go in and see...”

  Bordier searched for the truth in Caresco’s gaze, but the eyes fled. The frightful suspicion that had already tortured him several times recurred; what Savre had said returned to obsess his judgment; he glimpsed an atrocity. At first he tried to resist, attempting to convince Caresco that they could wait, that no serious symptoms demanded an operation, and that they might be dealing with a simple inflammation of the bile duct that would disappear of its own accord, as had been observed many a time.

  “But she had a violent hepatic colic yesterday!” said Caresco.

  “A hepatic colic?” Bordier repeated. “Are you sure?”

  “Soeur Cunégonde affirms it, and I judged it appropriate to give her an injection of morphine, but how do we know that our judgment is sufficiently sound?”

  They continued the discussion in technical terms. The surgeon was irritated that his lead was not being followed by his collaborator, by running into the objections of pure reason. His voice inflated with a hiss of anger, and a veritable conflict, almost hateful, compounded out of a determination to triumph on one side and a convinced resistance on the other, was engaged in a corner of the landing. But Madame Savoie, who emerged from her son’s room, came to put an end to the argument. She was pale and pretty, clad in a blue morning-dress, and her appearance brought something akin to a ray of sunshine into the tempest.

  Caresco went to meet her and took her by the hand. “Well, Madame, how is your boy? Did he have a good night?”

  With delicate sad gestures, fatigued by sleepless nights, the mother replied that the scamp had not sleep well, constantly shaken by dreams, prey to a painful agitation since he had quit his own bedroom to take possession of the room in the sanitarium. It distressed the mother to see her child, ordinarily so placid and mild, suddenly become anxious and nervous. Was it necessary to operate in those conditions, and would he have the strength to support the frightful shock?

  “Certainly, certainly!” Caresco replied, fearing an offensive return by Dr. Varon, the family doctor. “It would even be dangerous to wait longer than tomorrow. Anyway, I’ll come in with you.”

  They disappeared into the child’s room. Abandoned on the landing, Bordier was not tempted to follow Caresco. A nausea was rising within him at the constant comedy, the path toward wrongdoing along which he felt unwillingly led.

  In the six months that he had been collaborating with the surgeon, he admitted, he had lost the concern for human life that had griped him before, that had made of him, during his time as a local physician, a heroic fighter against disease. A kind of indifference to events was beginning to numb him; unsuccessful interventions did not disturb him as much; he was relaxing into an indolence, a macabre apathy, and felt that he was clad in a straitjacket of egotism that paralyzed his intentions of revolt.

  Was he going to participate tomorrow, again, in actions that he thought blameworthy, lending his aid to two operations he judged unnecessary? The change of tack caused him anguish, held him, bitter and uncertain, in the place where Armand Caresco had just abandoned him, in the lukewarm and dolorous solitude of the sumptuous stairway.

  Finally, his work being concluded, he went down the stairs, thoughtfully, giving himself until the end of the day to make up his mind and decide to send the surgeon his resignation. He would resume the beneficent and glorious work of the most obscure physician, return to install himself in the quarter he had abandoned, where clients were still waiting for him. His daily bread would be more difficult to earn, but he would eat it with a better heart, with less tormenting regret.

  His bicycle was waiting for him in the entrance courtyard. Anticipating an hour of liberty, he had brought it on that cold, crisp morning, in order to go for a ride in the Bois before lunch. He sat astride it, almost content, relieved of a burden of anxiety.

  All along the Avenue Hoche, to the Barrière de l’Étoile, and further still, as far as the Porte Dauphine, on the open road, whipped by the morning chill, he yielded to a pedaling full of forgetfulness and hope, and finally, ha
ving reached the pathways of the Bois, in the white profundity of the frost-covered trees, he flew, gripped by the intoxication of space, on the dear steel bird.

  Blessed little machine! How, thanks to her, he was able calm his nerves, chase away the clouds of frightful sadness that afflicted his heart, in the enjoyment of his favorite exercise, forgetting all the miseries and abominations that rolled in bitter waves behind him, over the roads of the giant city!

  CHAPTER XIV

  Armand Caresco had not failed to detect a nascent hostility in Bordier. He suspected that his assistant’s retreat was guided by scruples that he judged, in his own implacable heart, to be of an inferior order. Infusorial delicacies, he thought; those who wanted to be the kings of the day, to triumph in this fin-de-siècle corrupted by money, dissociated by egotism, lucre and enjoyment, ought not to succumb to such weaknesses of character.

  Would he, the young master, have achieved such renown, such surgical authority, if he had stopped to listen to the echo of miserable murmurs of conscience, if he had allowed himself to be vanquished by remorse, if he had not gone on, coldly self-composed, continuing his tragic route, indifferent to the groans of the dying, the sobbing of families, the muttered prayers before rigid corpses by the tremulous light of two candles?

  No; Bordier was a weakling, a humble individual, destined to mark time, inadequate to the kind of collaboration that was required of him. When would he find what he had never encountered, another self, as ferociously audacious, endowed with as violent an initiative, not recoiling before the means necessary to arrive at an envisaged goal? How far, in the company of such an aide, might he be able to take the surgical science to which he had already contributed so much, by means of his young and glorious talent, taking it out of the beaten track in which it was marching on the spot?