“Just now, my friend, I invoked professional secrecy, legality, the power that binds your devotion and prevents action. Let me now give you other reasons, more human and more logical, in favor of the happiness of your friends.
“Think: what will happen to that amorous young man, full of hope in the future, full of confidence in his fiancée, if you tell him, or if you have someone else tell him: That woman, so pure and so chaste, has been soiled by another, and is bearing in her loins the product of that soiling…?
“He will immediately cry treason, will not believe in your hypothesis of a cataleptic sleep, will search for the sin, for the ignominy…because he is a man. It will be a catastrophe, for him and for her, perhaps suicide.
“And, supposing that he accords some credit to your explanation, will his soul be generous enough to admit the innocence, to marry regardless, to attempt happiness? No, certainly not.
“I’ll go even further. I’ll admit that Monsieur Ponviane, being of a particularly noble essence, has understood the sublime beauty of what he is doing in taking Mademoiselle de Jancy for a wife. What will happen? An impossible existence, my dear Bordier, for the crime will always loom up between the two spouses, extinguishing their joy and their tranquility. The specter of the monstrous act will always loom up in their intoxications, their embraces. The husband, in taking his wife in his arms, will always sense another body between them, and his kisses will not efface the trace of the caresses of the other, the first, Caresco.”
“Caresco!” howled Bordier. “You said Caresco. You think…”
“Did I say Caresco? Forgive me, my boy, my tongue went astray. A bizarre association of ideas made me pronounce that name.”
He stopped for a moment, indecisively. But Bordier had understood that he had had the same presentiment as himself, that the words he had let escape a little while ago had struck him with the same obsession. And now, standing aside from the drama, he returned to the admiration of his master’s pitiless logic, the intelligence of superior deduction that had made him such a remarkable clinician.
“That’s the situation for the young couple,” Dr. Cartaux continued. “But what about the child? Have you thought about the child? What will become of that innocent, repudiated by his father and mother, the product of misfortune and shame? In other cases, when a woman has consciously, amorously, made a child with a first lover, the little being still obtains kisses, tenderness and attentions from her, a cortege of affections that are like the memory, the regeneration of the love accorded to the father. But here! What will become of that defective peg, that burden of ignominy, which blind nature has accorded to the Fatality that inseminated it? Where will it grow up? In what obscure country, under what dubious care? The object of rejection and shame, will it claim the share of growth, or enjoyment—of life, in short—to which it has the right?…for it is not guilty of anything! Can you imagine all the horror, all the injustice of its existence? Can you hear its reproaches, its clamors of revolt against social infamy? What tears, what torments, what anguish!”
“Where are you taking me, Master!” Bordier interjected. “Where are you guiding me?”
“I’m guiding you to this: to the utility, the necessity, of letting that wretch Caresco go ahead.”
“And if she dies?”
“She won’t die. You know how simple the operation is in the hands of that man when he wants to take the trouble—and he will, for his interest and his reputation will demand it.”
“But the woman will be sterile, Master, and that will hurt Georges, who loves his fiancée nobly and would like children! He said as much to me the other day, before my departure, and I sensed that he was putting into that desire for children all the aspirations, all the joy and al the reason of love! Children, he said to me, are the sweet beings in whom one lives again, in whom one is reborn when one dies: children, who make your youth anxious, but who soothe and charm your old age.”
Alas, Bordier had unsuspectingly struck a blow. When he looked up at Dr. Cartaux, he perceived that the savant was weeping.
The sensitive corner of his aged heart, which had not shuddered at the evocation of death, was stirred by that of children. At that moment, he judged all the desolation of his desert and celibate existence, his solitary old age, the slow and dolorous termination of his egotistical life, solely caressed by science, without the generous and consoling urgency of a family.
“Excuse me my friend,” he said. “It’s a moment of weakness, quite excusable in an old man whose morale is depressed by malady. You can’t imagine how much the character weakens in suffering, and suddenly succumbs to the impact of age. Forgive me.”
He wiped away his tears, and then murmured: “Yes, children. That would be the one reason, the only...” Then, reconquered by his desire to regulate Bordier’s conduct, to impose on him the most just, and the most humane solution, he went on, firmly: “But is life itself, setting aside the egotistical desire for a pampered old age, worth the trouble of making a gift of it to children? Can one tell oneself, in creating them, that what is happening to me, for instance, will not happen to them? I’ve worked hard since my youth; I’ve consecrated to science in laboratories, to the poor in the hospitals, all the force of my intelligence and my energy. I’ve sometimes had the real sentiment that I was playing a useful role, that I was doing good, that I was good. I didn’t marry, in order not to distract myself from my work, from the glorious goal that I wanted to attain...”
“Yes, you’ve been a saint,” Bordier put in. “A veritable saint.”
“Well, here’s the result. I’m laid low by a frightful malady. Others talk to me about a future life, dangle the shiny recompense of the world beyond the grave before me yes, but I have neither that faith nor that weakness, alas. In any case, my work would have been less noble had it been done in view of some ulterior compensation. And that’s why I say to you, my dear pupil, my child: what good is there is allowing life? What point is there in creating it? I search for general Harmony, Justice, the radiation of a superior organization that ought to be fine and good, but I don’t find them! I invoke the Force of good, and I only encounter hazard, circumstances, the power of Evil with all its derivatives: deceit, hatred, cupidity, cowardice…which let creatures like Caresco triumph!”
He stopped again, overcome by pain. In the pocket of his dressing-gown, with a feverish hand, he felt the bottle of poison, almost forgetting Bordier’s presence, so sharp was his agony.
The latter got up to take his leave, as anguished morally as his master as physically, as desperate and as defeated. “Au revoir, Master,” he said.
“Don’t say au revoir. Say adieu.”
“Why adieu? I’ll come back to see you every day, with your permission.”
“Say adieu, my son,” the poor man repeated, nevertheless. “I might succumb at any moment. You know, a hemorrhage…an accident can happen quickly.”
“Oh no, no, my beloved Master,” Bordier protested. He had taken the savant’s jaundiced hands, and squeezed them in a filial manner, ready to burst into sobs.
“Embrace me, my dear boy!”
That was the limit of their contention. The two men hugged one another, in tears.
Where were those plaints going? Toward what distant shore were they flying? With what mountains of desolation would they collide?
It seemed to them that a frightful laceration was ripping their hearts to shreds, but that, in spite of what the old man had said, those shreds would come together again in time, reconstituting a whole in the Peace of the beyond.
And when he was alone, Dr. Cartaux resumed a calm expression, illuminated by the imminence of deliverance, took the bottle with the red label out of his pocket, and slowly, methodically, counted out the drops into his cup of milk...
Once in the street, Bordier began to wander at random, like a disabled ship, over the waves of the sidewalks. The weather was awful, but it left him indifferent. Squalls of snow were falling, which quickly melted, covering the roadways with a d
irty slush that splashed the feet of the horses.
The mud made him dirty, the rain made him wet; he did not bother to get out of the way of carriages or open his umbrella. He went straight ahead, under an impression of ruination and devastation. A catastrophe erupting at his feet, a conflagration, or the collapse of a house, would have seemed to him, at that moment, a natural, logical thing, by which he would not have been at all astonished.
All the things that the despairing old man had said came back to him, in hasty impacts that hammered his thoughts, without giving him time to reflect on the circumstances that had produced them.
He admitted, at that moment, that he ought not to do anything, that it would have been a betrayal of the sacramental laws of his profession and the principles of honor to reveal the situation, to open his friend’s eyes. He admitted it because his master had said it to him, by virtue of the system of obedience, a vestige of his university education.
Humble human thought, a fragile reed, how small a crease is required to break it! The weakness of understanding, always under the domination of sentiments!
He went on thus, advancing, as if into oblivion, insensible to collisions with passers-by, the jostling of the crowd whose members maneuvered around him, smiling, thinking that he was drunk.
It was almost noon. He went past a flamboyant rotisserie, and sniffed the odor of sauces without remembering that his stomach had been empty since the previous evening.
Suddenly, he found himself outside the door of the house in the Avenue Hoche, without knowing how, without having guided his footsteps there, perhaps having been driven toward the house by the same inconceivable force that leads the unknown criminal to the slabs of the Morgue or causes the lover to pass before the threshold of his vanished mistress.
For in his heart, all the life of toil accomplished under that roof, the active hours that he had spent there, the agitations of that laborious hive, the comings and goings of the patients, the urgency of the ants in white head-dresses, the heroically murderous deeds of the director, and the great dilapidations of flesh, and the floods of blood, and the flash of the instruments, and his own personality, so interested in the fermentation of that vat, all seemed to him to be something dead, extinct, already distant.
Mechanically, he rang, opened the door when the bolt was drawn back, and went in.
The cold and empty vault, the view of the garden desolated by winter, the commons dirtied by the rain, complicated his sadness. He climbed the steps of the vestibule, penetrated into the gaudy luxury.
Armand Caresco was just coming out of his consultation room in the company of the student, Berger and three foreign colleagues whom he had invited to lunch at Mathilde’s house. He seemed joyful and amiable, his eternal smile fixed on his lips, his gaze evasive—but the appearance of Bordier transformed his physiognomy, furrowed his brow with a crease of surprise and anger.
Bordier was the enemy returning to the charge when he thought the battle won, the obstacle surging forth unexpectedly, which might transform everything into a rout. Master of himself, however, come what may, he advanced toward him, holding out his hand, limply.
“Why, Bordier—you’re back! You didn’t let me know? And our patient—you’ve abandoned her?”
“She died yesterday evening,” Bordier replied, without taking the extended hand. “She died suddenly. So I came back.”
Caresco’s first thought had been that his aide had been recalled by George Ponviane. Perceiving that that was not the case, he thought that the game was not lost. No, Bordier must not know anything about the plan he had made, which he was about to put into action the following day. Was it not possible, in the circumstances, to get rid of him for one day, to find some machination to take him way during the hours in which he might still be dangerous? Already his inventive mind was working, scheming, imagining a pretext.
“You’ve arrived just in time,” he said. “I’m going to need you again. It’s a matter of taking the train...”
“Not before I say a few words to you,” Bordier replied, with a surge of despair, understanding the new role that the surgeon wanted him to play in the drama.
Caresco excused himself from his guests with a gesture, opened the door to his study and went in first. When they were alone, he went to sit down at his desk, while Bordier remained standing, like a stranger, already frightened by the unconscious impulsion that had brought him here to protest, wondering how he was going to begin the contest—for he sensed its terrible approach, before breaking one or the other; he divined its implacability, the gaze of the bird of prey that was no longer fleeing, imposing a strange dominion over him, penetrating him to the marrow of his bones. Even Caresco’s voice, that musical and humble voice, became dry and metallic, as trenchant as a scalpel.
“What have you to say to me?”
“You know,” he said, in a low voice. “You know better than I do. I’ve been told that you’re going to operate on Mademoiselle de Jancy.”
“Yes, tomorrow. So what?”
“Well, it can’t happen.”
“It can’t happen? Why? Who will prevent me?”
“Me,” said Bordier, very quietly.
“You! You’re insane! You want to prevent me from removing her fibroma?”
“Her fibroma! Wretch! You know very well that she’s pregnant.”
“Well, so what?”
Bordier shivered. He was not even trying to deny it. Accustomed as the man was to expert lies, he was not even trying to color his crime with an appearance of faith; he was displaying all the hideousness of his project, without covering it with the veil of a pretext, impudently, ferociously, as he laid bare secret wounds with the blade of his scalpel.
What bandit blood was running in his veins? What soul of terror and horror made him reveal himself, so contradictory, so possessed with harmful violence? What frightful reasons did he have for confessing his act so brutally, without excusing it? Was it money? Had he arrived at the phase of madness whose premonitory symptoms Bordier had observed several times, in which he became unconsciously criminal, accomplishing evil for the joy of evil?
Evocations of the Salpêtrière, of howling and grimacing lunatics, tragic masks with wild eyes, twisted bodies, panting against the grilles, parading in frightful sarabands, passed through Bordier’s mind. He looked at the surgeon. Did not the features, screwed up by implacable fury, offer the contractions of mental imbalance? Did not the decomposed mouth, raised in the corners by two hateful creases, the almost-fused eyebrows, the forehead streaked by two violent lines, and the eyes, most of all, the eyes with metallic glints, declare that reason had fled that head?
Yes, he was mad—mad! And it was necessary to talk to him like a man gone astray who could still be returned to the right path, who was not yet insensible to the manifestations of the light.
So Bordier pushed his anger back into the utmost depths of his being, and prepared arguments franked with common sense.
“Come on,” he said, “think about what you’re doing. You’re not denying Mademoiselle de Jancy’s condition; you’re not retrenching behind a diagnosis that might have been an error; but you’re proposing, deliberately and consciously, to perform an operation that, if it were divulged, would bring you directly to the Court of Assizes? But consider what a fall that would be for you, how you would lose in a quarter of an hour the fruit of ten years hard work! Even supposing that you pleaded error before a jury, and were acquitted, could you still resume your profession? Think of the blow that you’re about to inflict on yourself, which is all the more idiotic because you have no need of the operation, either for your reputation or your fortune. For those, I think, are the only two motives that could make you do it, aren’t they? The only possible motives?”
He was about to continue his reasoning in that extinct tone, without persuasion and without embellishment, when Caresco suddenly relaxed his expression, and said, with a smile imprinted with disdainful irony: “Come on, my poor Bordier, you’ve b
een babbling for ten minutes about impossible circumstances. Who do you think is going to denounce my…error, if it were admitted that I’m making an error?”
“Me!” exclaimed Bordier. “Me!”
“You! Get away—you’re bound by professional secrecy.”
“And what if I prove that your error is a crime?” said the young man, advancing toward him, menacing him with his tall stature, while the other remained bent over his desk, without raising his eyes.
“A crime? What do you mean?”
“What if I prove,” Bordier continued, increasingly excited, “that you’re about to operate on that young woman to obliterate the traces of an abominable crime accomplished by you while she was unconscious!”
This time, Caresco looked up, his eyes full of surprise. His surprise came from knowing that he had been discovered, and yet the expression in his eyes interrupted his adversary’s momentum.
Bordier stopped dead. What was he going to say? Was he not about to accuse the surgeon on the basis of deductions that derived, in sum, from mere suppositions? Had he been there when Caresco had acted? Had he heard evidence from a witness to the scene? No, he was making the accusation on the basis of a personal impression, perhaps influenced by hatred of the man and the brutality of the action—but he had no conclusive proof.
And his entire strategy crumbled and collapsed, in the absolute impossibility of continuing to make allegations without foundations.
Was he about to implore now, to attempt to find a fiber of emotion to set in vibration? No, everything slid over that ferociously walled heart, without any fissure to let sentiment through.
In any case, to conclude the conversation, Caresco stood up in his turn, cold and determined.
“My fried,” he said, “I don’t have time to listen to you. I have people waiting for me. You’ve been traveling all night; I expect that your mind is as fatigued as your body. Go get some rest. Tomorrow, you’ll have thought about the error of your diagnosis and you’ll come of your own accord to offer me your collaboration. Then again, remember that I’m cut out for the game, that I have all the trumps in my hand and that when someone gets in my way, I make arrangements to get rid of them.”
The Necessary Evil Page 28
