The Doctored Man

by Maurice Renard

  Alas, I had not long to be anxious that Jean Lebris might be attacked while out walking. As I made ready to take him to Lyon to carry out the radiography, a violent crisis, accompanied by spitting blood, laid him low.

  We put him to bed. He was never to get up again.

  I estimated immediately that he would not live for longer than a fortnight. From then on, we no longer had any other concern but to watch over him. Fanny installed herself at his bedside, aided by Césarine, Madame Fontan and—considerable less—poor Madame Lebris. Authorized by the weakness of the sick man, I forbade access to his room to any stranger whatsoever, and I spent as much time with him as I could spare.

  To begin with, Jean fell prey to a bout of fever, during which he completely lost touch with reality. The twisting of his face and the oft-repeated gesture of putting his hands over his eyes informed me nevertheless that he was suffering electrical dazzling, and I masked him with opaque spectacles, recommending Fanny to follow my example, even at night, every time Jean seemed discomfited as if by light. Mademoiselle Grive, a docile nurse, had no objection to make, and made none.

  On the third day, Jean emerged from his torpor. Fanny and I observed his slow awakening from either side of the bed. The invalid turned his head toward me, then toward her. I had a presentiment that he was about to pronounce our names, thus revealing that he had recognized us—that he could see!—for he had quickly become accustomed to the distinctive electromagnetic appearances of different people. Before he could speak, I prudently said to him: “Mademoiselle Grive and I are here. Can you hear me, Jean?”

  He nodded his head affirmatively, remained motionless for a few minutes, then took our hands in his own excessively warm hands, brought them together and joined them, with a slowness that took on an aspect of solemnity.

  “Monsieur et Madame…” he murmured.

  His face was one of those that would never smile again.

  What a glance we exchanged, we two whom he had brought together with such simple generosity! I saw Fanny’s eyes suddenly moisten with tears. Unable to master her heart, she let herself fall to her knees beside the bed, and sobbed convulsively.

  After a pause, Jean Lebris began to whisper. I leaned over so that I could hear him. It was to me that he was speaking.

  “Bare,” he said, “in the writing-desk, there…the middle drawer…testament. Take it. Mama…prejudiced…will certainly oppose what you know…but testament…categorical. I leave you my eyes. I authorize…dissection…ah! Prosope is ringing the doorbell! Don’t let him in! My revolver…Fanny, do you hear that bell? It’s Prosope. He burned the hospital…he shan’t have my eyes… How he rings! How he rings!”

  The fever had taken hold of him again, and he was becoming delirious. Jean let slip a flood of words, sometime incoherent, but more often revelatory of the secrets of his life. His memories of war and especially of captivity, obsessed him. Fearful of loose talk and curiosity, filled with admiration and gratitude for Fanny’s mute zeal, I made sure that from that moment on, Jean Lebris would receive no other care than that of our beloved friend or myself.

  His condition worsened, without remedy. Sometimes his mind wandered, sometimes he slept. At intervals, becoming lucid again, he conversed with us weakly about our future nuptials, which seemed to be his sole preoccupation.

  On the evening of the sixth day, however, when I had just given him an injection, he pointed to a corner of the room and said: “What have you put there?”

  “Up there? There’s nothing there, my dear Jean. It’s an illusion.”

  “Why lie to me? Come on, Bare—what is it?”

  His eyelids widened over is statuesque eyes, He followed through the air the displacement of a vision that presumably vanished, for he did not persist further.

  I did not attribute any importance to what I considered to be a phantom provoked by the fever—but the phenomenon was reproduced so frequently, and the sick man was affected in so remarkable a manner, that I was forced to revise my opinion on the subject.

  So far as I could understand, the first apparition had been manifest to Jean Lebris in the form of a disk of violet fog, animated by a rotatory quivering. The disk crossed the room, drawing away by passing through the ceiling, and disappeared. Every day, though, more and more distinctly, other vibrant disks were displayed to the dying man. He described them to himself, without paying any heed to me or to Fanny.

  They were no longer merely disks now, but buoyant globes, containing a vertiginous circulation. They wandered unhurriedly, going this way and that, through solids, passing through the atmosphere as easily as through items of furniture, houses and the ground. And they sometimes attached themselves to objects or individuals, with which their union formed bunches that Jean compared to aggregates of soap-bubbles full of mysterious eddies. He tried to chase the bubbles away when they drew close to him—but could he chase them away? One had to doubt it, on seeing the efforts that he made to snatch them away from his breast, claiming that they were choking him.

  Once, he warned me that one of these globes had attached itself to my brain, and I realized that I was suffering from a painful headache just then. Was that a coincidence?

  The problem presented itself: was Jean Lebris still observing directly? Was the delirium showing him non-existent creatures, or was it necessary to believe that his sixth sense, still in progressive development, still becoming more powerful, had succeeded in enabling him to perceive hitherto unsuspected forms?

  Until now, the electroscopic eyes had only grasped the electromagnetic aspects of entities perceptible to our ordinary senses. Now, that aspect had never ceased to become more precise, more complete. What proof was there that becoming accustomed to the apparatus fabricated by Prosope might not have permitted Jean Lebris to make further progress, and to discover a clandestine world: a population exclusively formed of electricity, constituted by a fluid so rarefied that our most sensitive detectors were not influenced by them? In sum, had a human being finally been able to glimpse one of those invisible races with which philosophy tells us that we are surrounded?30 And does that race use humankind at its whim, without humankind suspecting it? Do we sometimes owe disease, dementia or death to it?

  I could not resolve that question, having been unable to tell exactly when Jean Lebris was delirious and when he was not.

  He died on October 22, at daybreak, after a 24 hour coma. Fanny wept on my shoulder.

  When Jean Lebris had lost consciousness, certain that death was approaching rapidly, I had taken advantage of a moment of tranquility to open the writing-desk. Contrary to my expectation, the middle drawer was quite empty. I rummaged through the others, but discovered nothing the resembling my friend’s will. I searched the whole desk, taking the drawers out to look behind and underneath them. A sudden sweat chilled my temples. There was nothing behind or underneath the desk, nothing in the chest of drawers, nothing anywhere!

  There were two alternatives. Either the testament had been stolen, or Jean Lebris, in telling me of its existence, had spoken in the heat of his fever and mistaken his intention for an accomplished fact. The theft seemed more probable to me. How long ago, in fact, had Jean decided to write his will? Doubtless before the crisis that was to carry him off, and which had followed so closely after the fire at the hospital. Before that fire, therefore, at a time when our suspicions had not been alerted, the theft had presumably been committed.

  At any rate, there was a considerable risk that, thanks to that larceny, I might be frustrated in my quest for valuable knowledge. At the mere idea of approaching Madame Lebris and admitting to her the necessity of an autopsy, all hope abandoned me. One can imagine my feelings as I closed the blackened pupils over the artificial eyes of my dear friend Jean Lebris.

  I had no right to hesitate, though. My duty was to try, by any means possible, to obtain the free disposition of his remains. Would the authorities not laugh at me, though, if I appealed to them? Who, then, could give me such a right if not Madam
e Lebris?

  I asked her for it. She refused. Her religion, her principles and what she called her “common sense” rebelled against it. Her grief gave way to indignation. In spite of all my efforts, she told Madame Fontan, Césarine and Fanny about the “profanation” that I had had the “audacity” to claim. In vain I protested that it was for Science and the Fatherland, that Jean’s blindness offered a particularity whose explanation—a prodigious argument!—would make a contribution to the salvation of France, that Jean himself, in an undiscoverable testament…

  Madame Lebris shrugged her shoulders. A testament written by a blind man! That was taking “the desire to satisfy the most unhealthy kind of curiosity” too far.

  Madame Fontan and Césarine endorsed her opinion. Fanny remained mute, but her charming face, fatigued by sleeplessness and grief, advised me not to persist.

  “Let your will be done!” I said to Madame Lebris. And peace was restored among us—but I sensed the formidable empery of Prosope over the funereal house. Occult, it had reigned over us; it reigned still. By two crimes—an arson and a theft—his will had interposed itself victoriously between my desire and his secret. I was defeated. So be it! But I still had to protect Jean’s body from any assault. I still had to thwart any forceful move or ruse whose objective was the theft of the electroscopic eyes.

  I was sitting in Madame Lebris’ drawing-room, with my chin in my hands, plunged in somber and bitter mediation. I felt a caress on my forehead…

  Fanny was studying me sadly.

  I had no reason to hide the truth from her. The “when I’m dead” had, alas, arrived.

  She had suspected something for a long time. From the day when I had warned her that it would be imprudent to speak to me in sign language in the blind man’s presence, under the pretext that light sometimes affected him, she had sensed the mystery. Occasions on which we sat together, but never talked, had also intrigued her. Finally, during his delirium, Jean Lebris, surrendered to nature, had no longer concealed the fact that he saw certain appearances.

  Fanny had no difficulty forgiving me for having maintained in her respect a silence imposed by a sworn oath.

  “Ah!” I said to her. “Your rectitude soothes my pain! But I shall not be tranquil until the moment when our friend is resting in an inviolable sepulcher. Help me, Fanny!”

  “What can I do? Tell me?”

  Her lovely arms entwined around my neck, and she raised her loving eyes, delicately ringed with mauve, in ardent interrogation. “Tell me!” she repeated.

  “You’re tired, my poor love,” I murmured, tenderly. “And yet, I’m about to impose a surfeit of fatigue upon you. It’s necessary that you and I should take turns, until the end, to stand guard. It’s necessary that one of us is here, beside him, constantly. Until the end, Fanny! Until the coffin and the cemetery.”

  “But what about afterwards? Aren’t you afraid that some dark night, someone…?”

  I explained the plan that I had formulated—after which I left her there, as my substitute, pious and vigilant.

  X. The Exploit

  I spent all day giving orders to the mason and the locksmith, with Madame Lebris’ consent. She raised no objection to her son’s tomb being, in its subterranean part, a kind of unassailable blockhouse. The workmen promised me to do that diligently; in fact, the work had already begun before nightfall.

  It was the hour when I had to relieve Fanny of her funereal sentry-duty. I found her worn out, asleep standing up. I led her out of the dead man’s room on to the landing, where were able to speak freely. She told me that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred; a few friends had filed in front of the mortal remains, but no suspicious individual had betrayed his presence in the vicinity.

  Then, as I looked at her in the twilight, she lamented: “I haven’t seen you all day!”

  The dear soul crushed herself against me in a dolorous and coaxing collapse—and she would have gone to sleep on my breast if I hadn’t said: “Go and get some sleep, my love, for my sake!”

  Her lips were burning. One would have thought that she was no longer capable of pulling away. “Fanny!” I said, moved by such fervor. “How happy we shall be!”

  Her resistance exhausted, she dissolved in tears, gripped me in a passionate embrace, and then fled, stifling her sobs.

  “I love you!” I called, in a restrained voice.

  She gestured to me from the top of the stairs. I could scarcely see her. The shadows took possession of her.

  Dazedly blessing her, I headed for the silent and sealed room where the pale inanimate figure lay amid autumnal flowers. The servant was keeping vigil. She renewed the candles, gathered up the fallen petals, and asked me if I would be staying up late “beside Monsieur Jean.”

  “All night,” I replied. “You can go to bed, my dear Césarine.”

  She did so. I installed myself in an armchair and opened a Bible that had been placed there. Soon, though, similarly worn out by fatigue, drained by insomnia, crushed by the weight of an anxiety that Fanny’s love could not weaken without causing her to disappear, I was obliged to get up and walk around to vanquish drowsiness.

  My thoughts formed a tumultuous confusion within my skull. I do not know how, but suddenly, with the brutality of a blinding light, the implacable idea was established in my head that it was necessary, at all costs, to steal the electroscopes.

  I was alone with the corpse, free to act…

  The church clock chimed 11 p.m.

  I had time before dawn to commit several crimes and carry out a number of exploits….but that was a praiseworthy act, was it not? Could I hesitate? Could I let the secret of the sixth sense be buried forever? “Never!”—if only for my compatriots! What! Should we Frenchmen remain in ignorance of such a discovery, when the enemy would possess it and perfect it? What! Tomorrow, if war broke out again, should we be subject to the fearful inferiority of having to fight against supermen? To have against us, among our innumerable assailants, extraordinary specialists who could decipher wireless telegraph messages in the sky itself? Who could pinpoint the most deeply buried networks, the most cleverly-concealed artillery batteries? People for whom mountains would be transparent?

  I recalled Jean Lebris’ astonishing perspicacity, with a thrill of fear. I remembered him indicating unhesitatingly the defective point of a magneto, or the diseased part of a spinal cord. I perceived a hundred practical applications of the sixth sense…

  Finally, the evidence shone before me like the Sun! It was not up to my will to satisfy the outdated demands of an old provincial lady. I was the advance sentinel of the national defense. Away with prejudices and superstitions! Fatherland first!

  In any case, no one would perceive the violation. It was a matter of 30 or 40 minutes, and I would have several hours to erase all trace of the operation. I even hoped to be able, with a little skill, to take account of the incomprehensible weld between the optic nerves and the electroscopes…

  Standing up, with my arms folded, in front of the cadaver that concealed such a vast mystery, I had the feeling of being possessed by impulsive forces that swept away all propriety and convention.

  Mechanically, I felt my instrument-case through the cloth of my jacket—and, shivering like a flag, I listened like a thief.

  The night was passing with reassuring calmness. The house was padded with silence. For several minutes I heard nothing except for the distant call of a night-bird, the rumble of an automobile out late, and irregular breathing coming from the next room, where Madame Lebris was asleep. Even so, I hesitated, and I don’t know why. The desire to delay suddenly overwhelmed me. I feared that I might be dreaming, having one of those nightmares from which one emerges exhausted. My faculties vacillated. It was only a fainting fit.

  I stepped forward firmly and, becoming professional again, I raised an as-yet-supple eyelid with a gentle finger…

  A muffled exclamation escaped me. Precipitately, I seized a candle, raised the other eyelid…

>   Instead of the electroscopes, and placed there to simulate their convexity, two small balls of cloth occupied the orbits.

  And the goggles! The goggles had also disappeared!

  I was suffocating. I was on the point of calling out. My secret wanted to advertise itself now. I needed to pour it out, recount it, argue with some friend full of commiseration about the incredible event that had struck me, and my entire race along with me…

  With an effort, however, I succeeded in checking that dangerous excitement. No one must know of my disappointment in its full amplitude. No one, except Fanny. Poor thing, though! Was I egotist enough to disturb her sleep? Besides, how could I wake her up, at this late hour, without provoking the astonishment of her aunt?

  Oh, how negligent I had proved to be in abusing her strength! How wrong I had been to impose on her the duty of guarding the dead man in my absence! To leave such a responsibility to a young girl who, for two days, her nerves taut, had not granted herself the slightest relief! Our adversary had taken advantage of that, of course! “No one suspicious has come,” she had told me. Well, for a young woman of 20, the undertaker’s employee is not suspicious. The carpenter who comes to make measurements is not suspicious. The parish priest, the medical examiner and the bonneted nun are not suspicious!

  I waited for morning with an unhealthy impatience. I wanted to know whether Fanny really had followed the instructions I had given point by point; and I was in great haste, too, to seek the appeasement of my distress in her compassion.