by Guy Endore
She determined at last to brave the weather to the boulevard beyond where she would either get a cab or take refuge in a café and there drink something hot. Pulling the collar of her astrakhan coat firmly around her neck, she walked out, head bowed against the driving rain. Two steps beyond the door and she had slipped and fallen into a puddle of water. In a trice she was soaked through and through. Kind people helped her up, and found a fiacre for her, so that she was soon home.
For days she lingered between life and death. At last her peasant strength, not totally rubbed off by her long existence in the city, came to her rescue and she grew better. During all of her illness she had yearned wistfully for a sight of the baby. But she had feared that she might infect it in some way and had therefore refused to permit it to be brought into the room. Françoise and Aymar, forbidden now to go near the baby, had to bring her long reports of its doings, reports which they secured from Josephine. The house was divided into two camps which communicated from a distance.
There came a day when she could feel that her illness was definitely behind her. It was a pleasant and true spring day, not such a treacherous one as had brought on her illness. The windows were flung open and the curtains moved in a gentle breeze.
“Today,” she told Françoise and Aymar, “I shall have Bertrand brought in here.”
“It will do you good to see him,” said Françoise with tears in her eyes. “And shall I, too, be allowed to see him, now that you are so well?”
“Of course, of course, my good Françoise. Beast that I am, I had forgotten completely that I deprived you of him. Come, kiss me quick and say that you forgive me. Now go run quick and fetch him.”
At that moment they became aware of a strange noise. A choking, howling, sobbing sound, indescribable in words. Mme Didier and Françoise looked at each other in surprise. Then Françoise dashed out. Aymar asked:
“What the deuce is that?” The noise grew louder, deeper, more resonant and less choked.
Josephine came running back with Françoise. “Madame,” she cried out, “it’s Bertrand! He must be dreadfully ill. Oh, do send for a doctor quick!”
“The doctor will be here soon,” Françoise replied. “That must be he at the door now.” She ran to admit Dr Robyot, who had come to pay his daily visit to Mme Didier.
“I don’t approve of dogs in the houses of my patients,” were his first words, commenting on the sad howls that filled the apartment.
“Oui, monsieur,” said Françoise, trembling in every limb, and ushered him in to Madame’s bedchamber.
“Ah, well, the patient is looking exceptionally well today,” he said cheerfully, taking Madame’s pulse in his hand. “You should get up a little now and exercise a bit. But not too much.”
“I am not the patient today,” said Mme Didier seriously, “but Madame Caillet’s baby, who seems to be suffering terribly. Don’t you hear him?”
The doctor, quite surprised to discover that these dismal sounds came from a baby and not a dog, left at once for the rear chambers with Josephine and returned a short while later. “I can find nothing wrong with the little lad. On the contrary, he seems fit in every way. A little fright or hysteria, perhaps. Did anyone scare him?”
“No,” Josephine asserted. “I know because I am the only one who has been seeing him since Madame here has been ill.”
“Well, I’ll write out a prescription for a soothing dose that will quiet him. And when he wakes up, I suspect he will have quite forgotten about his fright.”
“But that noise is absolutely terrifying, monsieur le docteur,” said Mme Didier.
“He’ll stop just as soon as he gets some of this,” the doctor replied. “Meanwhile, you had better have the doors shut so that you will not be disturbed. Remember, you must be very careful. You have been seriously ill, don’t forget that.”
All doors were thereupon shut tight and only a faint sound managed still to penetrate into Mme Didier’s chamber. Soon even that stopped, for Josephine had returned with the necessary concoction and the baby had fallen into a deep and silent slumber.
Mme Didier arose and sat near the window in an easy chair opposite Aymar. She put her thin hand with its pale, silky skin traversed by blue veins on his knee and said: “You’ve been a good son to me, Aymar. It’s good to be sitting across from you.”
He wanted to say: “Nonsense,” gruffly, as befitted the occasion, but the words were caught in a lump in his throat. After a while he managed to say: “Now take good care of yourself and don’t be off buying silly materials in bad weather anymore.”
In the evening he sat by her bedside and she recalled to him the pranks he used to play when he came out during summers to their country home. A faint noise, growing louder, began to disturb him. Evidently the baby had awakened and began to cry again. Good that all the intervening doors were shut. His aunt was apparently unconscious of the renewed howling of the child. Wishing to make sure that her mind should not stray from her mood of reminiscing, he put leading questions to her:
“I have a dim recollection of something about a hedgehog; what was that?”
“Oh, that was very funny,” she began briskly, and took his hand in hers. “You had always wanted a hedgehog and we would not let you keep one. Then one summer when we came back, we found the house overrun with cockroaches. That was when we had that lazy caretaker and his drunken wife. Do you remember them?”
“Not very well,” he said. “Was I four years old then?”
“Within a month or two of five, I think. Oh, yes, I recall now distinctly when you had your fifth birthday. It was that very summer. But let me tell you about the hedgehog. You had been bothering your mother for a pet hedgehog. God only knows where you conceived the notion. Anyhow when we came out to our house and found the place just crawling away with bugs, you claimed that hedgehogs would eat them all up. Of course we didn’t believe you, but you were so insistent. But if we hadn’t sent it out into the garden again, I think the cockroaches would have eaten it up, for certainly it never touched a single one of them. Yes, I remember, too, that…”
His mind was so busy listening to the weird howling of the baby that for a moment he was unaware that his aunt had suddenly ceased talking. Then he wondered quickly: Had she finally heard it too? It was a ghastly sound, more like the baying of a moonstruck dog on a lonely farm than the crying of a human baby. No, she hadn’t heard, she was asleep. He had scarcely thought this when a great fear came over him. A fear so mad that he rose in horror from his chair. His hand, which his aunt had been holding, slipped readily out of her grasp. He stood thus for a second not knowing what to do, then he ran out.
In the hall near the kitchen he came upon Josephine. “I was just going to give him another dose when he stopped all of himself. He’s all right now. I don’t know what to make of it, monsieur. I only hope he didn’t wake Madame from her sleep.”
“No,” he said dully. “Madame is dead.”
Chapter Five
In his unofficial defense of Sergeant Bertrand, Aymar Galliez devotes very little space to a matter which, had his intentions been otherwise, he would have undoubtedly expanded to greater length.
It appears that during the worst days of her illness, his aunt had called in her notaire and drawn up her will. Therein she left all her property to her nephew Aymar, with two provisos, firstly, that he was to continue to take care of Françoise and Josephine and the little Bertrand. The other proviso was that he study for the Church and prepare himself to take orders.
The scene of the reading of the will is easy to reconstruct. Mme Didier’s notary was Le Pelletier, a man as yet unknown but soon destined to make himself widely hated and loved. He was indeed acquainted with Aymar, whom he had encountered in various radical groups.* Le Pelletier was outwardly a man of little prepossession, short, swarthy, he was as if crumpled up, soiled and thrown into the gutter by some vindictive force. He was an argument for that often repeated but unproven statement that revolutionaries are furnish
ed by those whom fate has mistreated, the failures in life and love. Le Pelletier devoted little of his time to his profession and most of it to the Bibliothèque Nationale where he was gathering material for his two-volume history and eulogy of the Reign of Terror, a work which when published, at a time when the French Revolution was highly unpopular, aroused wide comment and procured for him the glory of a prison sentence.
After he had finished reading the will to Aymar, he leaned forward and leered: “So you will be a priest, hm?”
Aymar was shocked. “How could my aunt have been so cruel?” were his first words. “She knew my tastes.”
Maître Le Pelletier rubbed his permanently furrowed forehead and suggested slyly: “There might be ways of getting around it.”
“How?” said Aymar keenly.
“Time limit, for example,” Le Pelletier opined.
“Time limit?”
“Yes. What good is a will that sets no time limit? You may, for example, draw out your studies for the priesthood until doomsday. And if you should come to die and wish to make a will of your own, who can stop you? You were simply unable to fulfill the demands of your aunt in your natural lifetime, and you may dispose of your fortune as you choose.”
“This is annoying,” Aymar complained. “I hate such deceit. Especially a deceit which I shall have to practice for years. It’s a consolation to know that I shan’t live very long.”
“Come, pull yourself together,” Le Pelletier urged. “After all, what does it amount to? You’ll soon forget all about it. The only thing you cannot do is marry. But even for that there might be a way, and that might be the best course at that. You simply declare that you cannot follow the provisions of your aunt’s will and thereupon you inherit as next of kin with no will to saddle you.”
Aymar was thinking what his friends who knew his former violent pronouncements against clericalism would say when they discovered that he had joined the clergy. He wouldn’t be there then, but he would carry the shame to his dying day.
“You don’t have me to thank that the will isn’t worse than it is,” said M Le Pelletier. “True to my profession I warned your aunt that it was useless to make out a will that specified no forfeiture for violation of its provisions. She refused to consider the possibility that you might not care to follow her last wishes. ‘He will do what I want him to do,’ she asserted. The whole thing was most irregular and charming. You are really free to do as you please.”
Le Pelletier’s words stung Aymar as if they had been meant as reproaches. With the funeral still vivid in his mind, he found his eyes wet with tears at the thought that his good aunt had been unwilling to provide for any punishment. But how could he, who was turning more and more to the uncompromising radicalism of Blanqui, force himself into a seminary? It was unthinkable!
No, not so unthinkable at that. He recollected that but recently as he was reading an article by Blanqui in which the latter attacked the mysticism promulgated by the clergy, claiming that they did so only in order to maintain the lower classes the better in subjection to their masters, he had been annoyed. “You don’t know everything,” he had exclaimed and flung the paper away.
You don’t know everything? Why, that phrase was the beginning and the end of mysticism.
“What do you think of religion?” he asked Le Pelletier.
“Moi? Je m’en fous pas mal,” was Le Pelletier’s coarse appreciation of that branch of the humanities.
“I mean,” said Aymar, “what for example do you think of…an afterlife?”
Le Pelletier smiled wryly. “That old question? I didn’t think people ever brought that up nowadays.”
“Then you think it’s settled?”
“Look here,” said Le Pelletier. “Here’s my watch.” He drew forth his timepiece. “If I wind it, it marks time. It exists. It is alive. If the spring breaks, it stops. It no longer marks the hour. It is dead. Time doesn’t exist for it. Same with you when your mainspring is gone.”
“And nothing, after that?” said Aymar.
“Nothing, and lucky for us that that’s so,” Le Pelletier declared. “Imagine being able to mark the passage of time while you lie in your coffin for thousands of years. Wouldn’t be funny that, would it?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Aymar said softly. His mind was filled with the image of his aunt as she lay in her coffin. Pale, faintly smiling, virginal. Was she marking time? Counting second after second?
“You have allowed your grief to get the better of you,” the notary said sympathetically.
Aymar sighed: “Do you believe,” he asked, “that a dog can sense when death is approaching one of the inmates of the house, and that he will then bay lugubriously?”
Le Pelletier looked up suspiciously. “Me, I’m a believer in science. I have nothing to do with superstitions. I’m a positivist with Comte.”
“But,” Aymar objected, “might not science discover that dogs are capable of sensing the near demise of some person who is close to them?”
“What are you driving at, anyhow?”
Aymar hesitated. Here he was talking as his aunt used to talk, while the rôle of the skeptic which had formerly been his was played by Le Pelletier. “Frankly,” he said at last, “something of the sort happened here at my aunt’s death and has left me shuddering still.”
“Nerves, just nerves,” said Le Pelletier with confidence. “Everyone has moments when he can no longer see clearly. Grief blinds one. You will get over it.”
And as a matter of fact, Aymar did get over it. Summer came and Josephine, Françoise and the baby went out to Mme Didier’s property. Aymar was to follow just as soon as he could dispose of the apartment in the city. He did not think it necessary to keep it up. The women could stay on the farm where Guillemin the métayer made living cheap with his lush garden and his basse-cour overflowing with hens and pigs, rabbits and sheep. As for himself, Aymar might provide himself with an inexpensive pied-à-terre somewhere in the town, but he would spend most of his time in the country too.
He could not make up his mind whether to obey his aunt or to forget her wishes. Either way he envisaged a path of pain. In truth, life no longer held any possibility of pleasure. He could not bring himself to labor for the oppressed or to fight the administration of the Little Napoleon who was dusting off the throne of France. At times a prey to the fear of death, at other moments longing for the peace of the grave, which in the moral world is the universal solvent as water is in the physical world—thus he tossed about on his bed of painful indecision.
Would he, could he really study for the Church? What would his life then be like? He had the courage, one day, during a sudden shower, to step into a nearby church. When his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, he examined with a certain curiosity the altars with their crosses and statues, the candles flickering in dozens of dark red glasses.
A priest came walking down the aisle. With sudden resolve, Aymar approached him. “Mon père,” he said in a low voice, “may I speak to you for a while?”
“Do you wish to confess?” the priest asked briskly, ready to retire into a nearby booth.
“No, no. Just a few questions I’d like to ask.”
“Certainly.”
Aymar was for a moment at a loss how to begin. Then he asked: “Do you enjoy your work? Pardon me, I know it is a bold question, and you need not answer it, if you are not so inclined.”
The priest laughed with a deep rugged voice. Altogether he was a healthy, robust fellow, most likable and certainly not in the least wan, pale or monastical. A joie de vivre emanated from his sturdy body, visibly sturdy despite his soutane. His eyes, his mouth showed lines eager to gather into smiles.
They talked. The priest explained his work. He had a rather cold, factual way of looking at things. He explained how he liked to perform mass, and went into details about various differences. He spoke of his literary ambitions. He wanted to write about the Bolandists and their vast labors interrupted by t
he Revolution. Did Monsieur know about the astronomical work of the Jesuits in China, their remarkable architectural constructions? In this day when the Church was being attacked so savagely, it was good to remember what science and art owed to the Church. And greater glories were to come. He meant to be there to share them.
His eagerness was infectious. Aymar, too, wanted to be there.
“It will be the Church that will some day lead man out of this economic muddle,” he asserted. “You will see. Rome, disappointed everywhere by unfaithful dynasties, will put its strength behind socialism. Then you will see a new era dawn for man.”
In succeeding interviews, Aymar became more and more friendly with the priest and more and more willing to become a part of this vast organization whose history was greater than that of any country. One day, he said: “I want to become a priest. What shall I do first?”
The priest shook his head: “Not you.”
Aymar said: “It is true. Hitherto I have been hostile, but you have explained much to me.”
Still the priest shook his head.
“You think,” said Aymar, “that my resolution will not last? Perhaps you are right. And still I mean to prepare myself for ordination. In fact, I must.”
“You don’t understand,” the priest said softly. “You limp. You cannot celebrate mass while physically defective.”
Aymar recalled having heard that long before, but still he was stricken. Suddenly he wanted badly to become a priest, now that the possibility had been snatched from him. He explained to the priest how, at first annoyed by his aunt’s last wish, he had gradually grown more anxious to fulfill it.
