The latter withdrew. It was decided, however, for the convenience of the investigation, that the sports car would be put under seal, along with the goatskin and the fur helmet of which one of the malefactors had made use in order to borrow Doctor Bare’s appearance.
As the vestment and the headgear were being removed, the clerk observed that the goatskin, by virtue of the special fate reserved for it, had escaped his investigations. He then had the idea of plunging his hand into one of the interior pockets.
Quite calmly, without suspecting the value of his find, he drew out a few sheets of white paper, folded in four. They were covered in fine, compact handwriting. The other pockets were empty.
Acquaintance with this manuscript demonstrated peremptorily that the assassins would not have left it behind if they had known that it was contained in the goatskin. In a hurry to put on his disguise, one of them had doubtless removed it from the doctor’s body before the corpse had been searched. Thus, the goatskin had been taken out of consideration by virtue of the role it that had to play, in the same way that it had almost escaped the perspicacity of the law, by virtue of the role that it had already played—which is a rather curious trait of psychology that might provide a philosopher with food for thought.
The stupidity of the criminals was forgivable, however—if one might put it that way—for it was now known that the principal objective of their theft was the contents of the safe and, secondarily, the desk. The documents distributed in the other items of furniture, and perhaps on their victim’s own person were, in the thieves’ view, of little interest, because they believed them to be enigmatic in isolation. How could they have suspected that the goatskin, a cape for occasional use, contained such important revelations? It was necessary, in order to explain it, to indulge in conjectures, and assume that Doctor Bare had just added the final words to that summary account when he telephone rang in the silence of his office. He had been summoned urgently to Salamont. The life of a sick woman depended on his haste. He did not think that he ought to waste several minutes opening his safe, and thought it more prudent to take the document with him, resolving to put it in a safe place as soon as he returned.
It is this document that we publish hereafter. It tells a story to which the doctor’s death is merely a bloody epilogue. Alas, what you are about to read is only a very imprecise relation of the observations made by the physician from Belvoux. It is merely an intimate history in which he recounts information that could not be placed in his technical memoir, which was stolen by the redoubtable burglars on the very eve of being sent to the Academy of Sciences. It is true that—according to the doctor—the technical memoir was itself very incomplete, but its loss is no less deplorable, if one considers all the light that might have been cast into depths of the unknown of which the manuscript from the goatskin one gives a faint glimpse.
Without further ado, we offer the reader these memoirs, which, mingling the precision of a report with the sincerity of a confession, retrace the vicissitudes of a tragic and marvelous adventure.
I. Death on the Field of Honor
I believe, in all sincerity, that there are few men as calm and as unimpressionable as me. I think that love alone has been able to hasten the beating of my heart. And yet, every time the old doorbell rings in the corridor, I can’t retain a slight start. My nerves themselves remember the apparition and the circumstances that accompanied it; insensible to explanations, they cannot lose that stupid habit so easily. And it’s the persistence of such a phenomenon that gives me retrospective proof of my fear, for, at the time, I thought I was only able to experience surprise without disquiet, a sort of embarrassment in which a sense of impossibility, the suspicion of a practical joke and—very faintly—a suspicion of the trustworthiness of my senses, were in contention.
It must be the case, however, that fear struck me unaware, since, every time it rings, that bell makes me quiver imperceptibly, in the same way that a child raises an elbow and blinks when a hand that has previously beaten him moves. Furthermore, why should I make use of that word “apparition,” which is false, if I didn’t have some absurd individual within me, who has remained under the influence of astonishment and persists in his unreason?
I suppose that my nerves would be more tranquil if the day and the evening had not required them to work in a funereal mode and put me in a state of mind exceptionally favorable to certain weaknesses.
On the day in question, the town of Belvoux had celebrated the memory of its children killed on the field of honor, and Madame Lebris, an old friend of my late mother, a partially paralyzed old lady, had begged me, together with Maître Puysandieu, the notary, to help her move around. According to the order of the ceremonies, we had to take her from the church to the monument in the mall, and from the mall to the cemetery; then we would meet for an intimate dinner in the worthy woman’s home.
Under the influence of an obsession that no longer left her, Madame Lebris made that dinner into one last ceremony dedicated to the memory of her son.
“He loved you very much!” she told us, in an emotional voice, in reaching out to us across the table. And we talked about nothing but him, until the moment of separation.
Madame Lebris is my neighbor. To go from her house to mine one only has to cross the High Street. I went home profoundly sad and sat down, as I do every evening, to work at the desk on which I am writing at present.
It was impossible for me to work. Usually, I have too much work to do to burden myself with respect the disappearance of the people who were my friends and whom the war had devoured, but a few hours of concentrated idleness had brought me much closer to their austere company. I was surrounded by cherished phantoms, and the thought of Jean Lebris was haunting me.
I saw him again, thin and pale, a trifle bowed down. I believed, in fact, that he had “love me very much,” in spite of the ten years that made me his elder. His delicate health put him under the dependency of my solicitude. He was a talented young man, an artist, who would doubtless have been a painter. He was irreproachable, save for being unsociable, home-loving, and pushing timidity to the extent of a generalized phobia. His affection was all the more precious to me. He had written to me often, in the army. Then, one day in June 1918, a letter from his mother had come to notify me of the disaster: missing in action near Dormans during the German advance…and two months later, coming via the Swiss, the final confirmation:
Died in the Saxon field-hospital at Thiérache (Aisne)…
I put down my useless fountain-pen and put my head on my hands, over my open books. Those who have lost loved ones know the sacred game that consists in bringing them back to life in front of you, by concentrating all the forces of memory and imagination to create shades that resemble them. This was what I did, on that April evening.
It was then that the old doorbell rang, and I was suddenly standing up, repossessed by a down-to-earth sentiment and placed under the orders of my scientific nature again. At least, I thought so. I thought that existence—my existence as a physician—had abruptly taken hold of me again, and that my evocations of the world beyond the grave were far away. Some client had come in search of me—probably a client from the Saint-Fortunat quarter, since it was the bell connected to the back gate, in the Rue de la Botasse, that was ringing.
I opened the door at the end of the corridor. I stopped on the threshold. The darkness was impenetrable.
“Who’s there?” I called across the courtyard.
The silence was heavy.
“Who’s there?” I repeated, intrigued.
No one replied from outside, but the bell tinkled softly behind me. Was it the sick person who was ringing in person? Was he unable to speak?
The light in the corridor projected a corridor of light into the courtyard. Rapidly, I went to the gate to the street; the bolts clicked one by one, and the gate creaked on its hinges.
If anyone should read this story some day, that person will already know what was behind that ga
te, for I am not a novelist skilled at managing his effects but a straightforward man who reports what he sees as he sees it.
For a moment, I was dumbfounded. The apparition stood still, scarcely visible. I was looking at the frightfully pale face of Jean Lebris. His thinness was not of this world; his features seemed fixed in an eternal gravity, and his eyelids appeared to be closed in the final sleep. He was facing me, and he was neither lying down nor leaning against a wall, but standing upright—but I distinguished his body as a shadow within a shadow.
My seizure, as measured by the chronometer, only lasted for a tenth of a second. The phantom whispered: “Is that you, Doctor?”
A stout form, which I had not yet discerned, emerged from the shadows beside him. “Good evening, old chap!” said that form, in a low and joyful voice. “It’s me, Noiret. I’ve brought you Jean Lebris! As surprises go, what do you think of that one?”
“Jean!” I exclaimed, taking the young man’s hands. “My dear Jean!”
He smiled blissfully, and we embraced, although I am not much given to effusiveness.
“No noise!” said Jean. “No one must suspect, this evening…Mother mustn’t know. You’ll tell her tomorrow, won’t you, taking precautions…?
Noiret—a friend of ours who lives in Lyon—explained: “I’ve left my car with the chauffeur at the corner of the Mall. We came by night so that Jean wouldn’t be recognized.”
“Come in,” I said, joyfully.
“No, no—it’s not worth the trouble, for me,” Noiret insisted. “I’m going back. I’ve got 92 kilometers to cover.”
“I don’t know how to thank you…” Jean said to him. He began coughing.
“We have to go inside, Jean! Come on!” While I was speaking, though, I looked at Noiret, performing a mime as expressive as the half-light allowed, touching my eyes pointing at Jean’s—which were still closed—and making interrogative movements with my head.
“Au revoir, Jean—see you soon!” said Noiret. “Look after yourself…au revoir Bare, old chap!” Then, murmuring close to my ear, he let slip the terrible word: “Blind!”
I saw him disappear with a desolate gesture. Meanwhile, utterly confused, with joy and sadness disputing over my thoughts, I took Jean Lebris’ arm.
“We’ve come like thieves,” he said, apologetically. “I didn’t want to raise my voice to answer you, when you said ‘Who’s there?’ I assume that no one can see or hear us. It’s just that, if Mama found out about it all of a sudden…apparently, she believes me to be dead?”
“There are two steps to go up, Jean—be careful. There. To the left now. Here we are in my study. Sit down, and drink a little quinine. You can sleep in the guest-room, and tomorrow, as soon as it’s light, I’ll go to your mother’s house. I’m so happy, Jean!”
“So am I!” he said, radiant with happiness, passing his hand over his forehead.
I examined him in the light. His appearance filled me with anxiety, and I understood how I had been able to hesitate for a little while, in the half-light, before recognizing him as the true and living Jean Lebris. His dry skin, tautly extended over his prominent cheekbones, was colored by the effect of emotion with an excessive brightness. In five years, the illness that I had combated before had run its course freely.
But Jean began to speak, with that slight quivering of the throat which great contentment produces.
“I arrived in Lyon yesterday evening, at my regiment’s barracks. I was immediately demobilized. I had someone take me to Noiret’s. He told me that you were in Belvoux, that you’d come back in January. Then we planned this nocturnal return. I didn’t want to send you a telegram or telephone you, because of Mama. A careless indiscretion might have broken her! Finally, I wanted so desperately to avoid noise, questions, and stories in the newspapers…”
“We’ll arrange everything for the best. Don’t make yourself anxious, my dear Jean. Be tranquil.”
“It was at Strasbourg, you know, that I made contact again…what an adventure! Oh, what an adventure. Just imagine: I’d been abducted—that’s the right word—abducted from the German field-hospital! I could no longer see clearly. They took advantage of it. I don’t know where I was taken. I was looked after very well. They were doctors, weren’t they? People who wanted to experiment with some kind of ophthalmological treatment…except that they didn’t keep me informed about anything, and I never went out! It was only that boy—a discontented servant—who told me about our victory, the armistice, the occupation…
“We left one evening, him and me. We were in a railway wagon for hours on end, and he left me on the Kehl Bridge. ‘You’re on your own,’ he said. ‘You’re in Strasbourg. It’s full of French soldiers.’ I made myself known…it’s curious, isn’t it?”
“Curious,” I said, “to be sure.” But I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying. Jean had just opened his eyes and I had been taken completely by surprise. Oh, those eyes! Imagine an antique statue brought to life; imagine a beautiful marble head raising its heavy eyelids upon the uniform orbs of its pupil-less eyes.
“What treatment have you been given?” I asked.
“For my eyes?” He suddenly closed them again. “Oh, bandages, I suppose. I can’t tell. No one told me anything. I had the impression that my case had a captivating particularity, and that they were keeping me there to study me…but here I am, cured, and I no longer have any interest for Science.”
“Cured, my dear Jean?”
“What I mean is that I don’t need to be looked after any longer.”
There was a hint of agitation submerged in his words. Before the conversation took a different direction, treating subjects that Jean brought up, there was a brief, rather unexpected silence between us.
We chatted long into the night. We still had a thousand things to tell one another. When I decided to go to bed, we had made no further mention of the blind eyes, nor of what had happened between his disappearance and his return to Belvoux.
Personally, I went to sleep without any difficulty. I don’t know how to describe the bizarre and complex state in which I found myself. I was, if you will pardon the expression, a sort of human question mark. And most of all, I thought, with bewilderment, about those statuesque eyes, of which no example had offered itself to my eyes since life had begun to parade its faces of suffering and strangeness before me.
II. The Revelatory Gesture
Early the next day, I went into the blind man’s room. He was coughing in a heart-rending manner; nevertheless, I made no allusion to the state of his health.
I helped him to get dressed—which was easy, because, in spite of his blindness, Jean wasn’t awkward. Youth works miracles and, in addition, the poor boy had already grown used to his disability.
I asked him whether he had lost his sight as soon as he was wounded. He told me that he had, and that he had been blind for six months.
“Here are some dark glasses,” I said. “I think that you’d do well to put them on right away. It’s for the sake of your Mama. Women are so impressionable. I’ll go to her house as soon as the hour permits, and I’ll come back to fetch you. But…she’ll ask me questions, Jean, and I want to be able to tell her everything, in a few words. You see, my dear chap, I don’t know how to approach it. Let’s be precise. What happened to you? What has been done to you?”
“Exactly what I told you last night.”
“Nothing more complete, then? No details? Come on, Jean!”
“No, nothing more.” And he continued, in an irritated tone: “I’m desperate for rest and isolation. I want everyone to leave me alone, not worry about me, and not speak to me! I know, damn it! People will regard me as a sort of Lazarus emerged from the tomb. Oh, let me be left in peace, for God’s sake!”
I always go straight to the heart of a matter. “Will you let me examine your eyes?” I asked.
“Here we go!” cried Jean, impatiently. “You too! For four days, since I set foot in France, I’ve had dealings with no one b
ut investigating magistrates! If you knew how the military doctors have already questioned me!”
“Yes, that’s true? What did they conclude?”
“Do they know? They think that they’re provisional apparatus with which someone has equipped me, something preliminary, preparatory, and that I was rescued before the final operation. Go on, look! Look, if it’ll give you any pleasure! But promise me that there won’t be any more questions. I’m so tired!”
He opened his eyelids upon his Hermetic eyes, and I brought them fully into the light.
“But what about your eyes—your own eyes?” I asked, passionately.
“Destroyed. Enucleated. They were burned by gas from a shell.”
“Would you like to take out these…these items for a moment?”
“But I can’t! They’re fixed in place! You’re all the same, you doctors…”
“Fixed? And that doesn’t inconvenience you?”
“Not only doesn’t it inconvenience me, but I’m certainly much more comfortable since this apparatus has been set in place.”
“What! What use are they to you?”
“None, if you like—but they fill a void that I found painful, quite agreeably. Look—the comparison is crude, but they give me a vague impression of well-adjusted molds. And I absolutely forbid anyone to touch them.”
“Your obstinacy will do you a bad turn, Jean. That’s an unhealthy idea, let me tell you. A foreign body resident in the orbit! Come on, that’s not possible. You must feel some inflammation…”
Through my magnifying-glass, however, the eyelids seemed extraordinarily healthy and clean; their blinking kept the crystalline and motionless surface of each item of apparatus moist. The latter was white, tinted with blue. To the naked eye, it seemed perfectly uniform, but the magnification of my lens showed me that it was ribbed by vertical lines. In sum, it resembled a ball of capillary thread, coated with a layer of colorless enamel over which the eyelids slid. The “mold hypothesis” was sustainable, the two balls being unable to have any other function than to maintain the form of the orbital cavities, until some unknown definitive devices—presumably prosthetic instruments, artificial eyes of some new kind—could be inserted therein. But the fact that they were irremovable was what surprised me…and even frightened me.
The Doctored Man Page 12
