The Lynx

by Michel Corday

  It’s true: last night…Simone…! Could I have dreamed it?

  He turned his head to flee his memories, for he retained a frightful melancholy. In vain he congratulated himself for having saved the life that was most precious in his eyes, to have rendered life, and soon health, to Simone, to have created happiness. From that resurrection, another would profit. The flood of bitterness that had invaded him in the invalid’s bedroom assailed him again. Oh, the appeasing certainty that death brings... To know that one can any longer possess someone who no longer exists...

  But already his conscience was revolting against the odious thought.

  “Exit this way!”

  Yes, exit, escape to normal life, and no longer to think about anything but work. He handed over his ticket automatically, went past the collector, who sounded him with his gaze, and found himself outside.

  A special atmosphere floats around railway stations. The fever and rush of departures collides with the lassitude of returns, much as opposed electric fluids must clash. Gradually, a sort of equilibrium, or rather an exchange, is established between the two currents, in which those who are going are calmed, and those who are coming restored.

  All travelers, and even passers-by, have observed that ebb and flow, have felt themselves caught up in its eddies. This time, however, Gabriel Mirande, ordinarily to sensitive to the ambient environment, did not participate in it. He was unmoved by a woman who, at the moment of separating from her husband, placed her head on his shoulder and wept inexhaustibly. He was unamused by a group of Cook Agency tourists, English, German and Rumanians mixed together, under the guidance of their young gilt-capped cicerone, who were standing on the edge of the sidewalk, wide-eyed, waiting for their carriages. Neither did he savor the animation of the great boulevard, whose perspective was already encumbered with trams and automobiles, and whose high facades, in the vaporous azure, were opening their windows to the morning sunlight.

  No, his rancor persisted, and that incomprehensible leaden hand weighted upon his brain. He took a few steps at random. Then, whipped by the fresh air, he was slightly reanimated.

  What am I doing here? What about the boss?

  Had he not decided to rejoin his old master, Brion, whom he had left ailing he previous evening, as rapidly as possible?

  Planted on the sidewalk, he waited momentarily, hoping for an empty automobile taxi. As none appeared, he hailed a fiacre.

  “15A Rue Méchain, Driver!”

  “Rue Méchain?”

  “Yes. It opens into the Rue Saint-Jacques, not far from the Observatoire.”

  “That’s right,” conceded the man, touching his forehead.

  A violent appeal of the reins, an energetic crack of the whip, and the horse was already under way. But Mirande changed his mind.

  “Call in at the Post Office first…the nearest one…”

  Yes, decidedly, where was his head? He had promised to telegraph his sister as soon as he got off the train, to inform her of the resurrection of her childhood friend. Even though they had ceased to see one another after Simone’s marriage to Doctor Castillan, Mirande anticipated Jeanne’s joy on learning of the incredible event.

  He went into the Post Office like a whirlwind, and scribbled the prodigious news in twenty words on a pneumatique form, leaving the details until later, when Brion’s health permitted him to return to the communal nest. He wrote the address more carefully—Mademoiselle Jeanne Mirande, 12 Rue Monge—and slipped the blue paper into a tube.

  “Now, Rue Méchain, at the trot!”

  His dear old master...

  He was running to his bedside with a filial piety. He owed him, materially and morally, everything that one man can owe another. He had felt himself sustained by that benevolent hand since childhood.

  Mirande remembered the epoch when the chemist, already in the glory of his laboratory discoveries, had arrived in Chatigny. To begin with, he had rented a kind of abandoned farm for a season—at the extremity of the village, because he was in search of isolation. Then, seduced by the green peace of the locale, and the tranquil charm of the banks of the Yonne, he had bought the house and the surrounding meadows. Gradually, demolishing and reconstructing, he had turned it into an eccentric dwelling.

  Physically, Brion had then appeared to be a tall fellow, excessively hirsute and bearded, whose meager torso was carried obliquely on long legs. One saw him go past, always alone, not addressing a word to anyone, absorbed in thought. Dressed like a peasant in a blue blouse and shod in sturdy boots, defying the dust and the mud, with a long knotty stick in his hand, he wandered the fields and the woods. Sometimes he stopped, looked at the ground, and bent down over a plant, which he uprooted and enclosed carefully in a botanist’s box maintained over his shoulders by two leather straps.

  His appearance and his behavior had rendered him suspect in the locale. Strange lights with green, red and yellow flames were seen shining at night in one of the outbuildings of his domain. He was not far from being reckoned to have cabalistic powers; he was called “the sorcerer.” It was claimed that he cast spells, and one day, he was held to be responsible for an epidemic that decimated whole flocks of sheep.

  When it was learned, however, shortly thereafter, from journalists who had come to interview him, that he had just discovered a remedy for the disease in question, the suspicion in which he was held, while remaining just as superstitious, was transformed into consideration. He was still a sorcerer, but a good sorcerer.

  Finally, when it was notorious that his science brought him money, that he invented serums for all sorts of maladies and that he had created an institute in Paris to rival Monsieur Pasteur’s, he became a local glory. The cult of the peasant for wealth had accomplished the prodigy of turning the devil into a good God.

  It was already a long time ago that Gabriel Mirande had acquired the scientist’s amity. Aroused by their parents, who attributed the loss of their livestock to the sorcerer, the village children had gone to throw stones at the windows from which fantastic lights escaped. Young Gabriel did not share in that superstitious hatred. Several times, on crossing the stranger’s path, he had received a smile in response to his tipping his hat, with the consequence that the evildoer no longer seemed so terrible to him as legend claimed. He even sensed an attraction toward him.

  He therefore protested against the aggression of his comrades. His natural inclinations, a mysterious atavism of reserve, mildness and generous revolt, rendered the cowardice of the crowd odious to him. But when he saw that his tranquil counsels went unheeded, that two windows had just been smashed, he became suddenly enraged and put his fists in the service of reason.

  Little Gabriel launched himself at the mob and, alone against ten, struck out wildly. He would inevitably have succumbed to the weight of numbers if an ally had not appeared to aid him. That reinforcement was the sorcerer himself, armed with his knotty stick. He had seen the whole scene. A few blows of the cudgel, well applied, quickly dispersed the young fanatics.

  “So it’s you who are protecting me, little fellow!” the sorcerer pronounced, in an astonishingly paternal voice. “Do you know that you’ve just rendered me a great service? You’ve just saved a culture of streptococcus whose flask a stone would certainly have broken. And well, they’re precious to me, my streptococci.”

  Troubled, Gabriel had bravely raised his head to look at his ally. He received without quivering the cares of the bony hand that stroked his cheek. He glimpsed, beneath the terrifying aspect of the bushy eyebrows, the kindness of the gaze. The whole ensemble seduced him.

  “You have an intelligent air about you. What’s your name?”

  “Gabriel Mirande.”

  “Mirandum,”7 Brion emphasized, smiling.

  Gabriel did not know whether he ought to smile too. Mirandum was a very enigmatic term to him, and smacked of magic. What if the man really was a sorcerer?

  But the strange man had already continued: “Where are your parents, so that I can compli
ment them?”

  Alas, Maman had been sleeping in the cemetery for three months, next to Papa, who had preceded her...

  “Poor kid!” the sorcerer had murmured slowly.

  But he had not lost interest in his young defender. He had quickly judged him capable of more elevated studies that those of the communal school. His steps, supported by a favorable report from the schoolmaster, had soon earned him a bursary at the Lycée de Sens. Brion took responsibility for the accessory expenses. Of course! Gabriel would reimburse him later by assisting him in his work, in rendering him small services during the vacations. As for his Sister, Jeanne, at the same time, she had been confided to an orphanage kept by two charitable ladies—with the consequence that the two children, in order to climb that social step, to pass from the plow to the book, did not have to eat into their meager heritage, ownership the few fields that the hard labor of generations of ancestors had acquired for them.

  After the baccalaureate, the headmaster of the Lycée would gladly have spurred him on to the École Normale, but Mirande asked for time to think, in order to consult his great friend, and Brion had riposted with a formal reproval.

  He was hostile, with prejudice, to the overwork of the competitions, which, in his opinion, exhausted the brain, or at least entangled it with methods that the mind has difficulty escaping. He had found his independence; it had been fecund. It permitted him to launch himself into paths still unexplored by science, to succeed in biological discoveries on which his laboratory and his pupils lived.

  He offered to associate Mirande with his research. And when the student raised the objection of the absence of resources, Brion replied that he would pay him a wage immediately, and that it would be sufficient for Jeanne to live in Paris with her brother.

  Mirande accepted enthusiastically. To emerge from the scholarly cage, those captivating studies, under the direction of a master he venerated, was an enchantment. He put on the long white smock, took his place among the disciples in the vast luminous room continuous with the boss’s private laboratory, where the chemical compounds and serums utilized by the new therapeutics were prepared. He was initiated into the troubling struggles of phagocytosis. He knew the benefit of vaccines, the power of toxins, their molecular groupings, and their radioactivity. And his wonderment increased further when Brion, setting him aside and taking the bridle off his audacious mind, drew him into the vast fields of hypothesis.

  When his work was finished, Mirande went home on foot. It was his only daily exercise. Whether the ground was dry or the rain was steaming over the causeway, he always obtained a physical satisfaction from that movement, reminiscent of the vagabondage of his childhood.

  Sometimes, there was a joyful surprise: his sister Jeanne was waiting at the door of the institute. He linked arms with her, with a protective affection, and they both set forth, musing and stopping in front of shop windows, deliberately extending the route in order to go past favorite displays. On fine some evenings they sometimes took the boat and went downstream as far as the shores of Billancourt or Meudon. There they ate in a small restaurant. It was their great enjoyment.

  Most of the time, however, Gabriel went home alone. He hastened his steps, thinking that his little sister might worry if he were late. He anticipated an affectionate welcome, two arms that would knot around his neck, and the table laid, where good odorous soup would be served.

  One evening, he had fallen into the arms that were extended toward him, weeping. Simone was getting married. Jeanne had guessed that immediately. With a tacit accord, they had never talked about a union they knew to be impossible. When he had withdrawn to his bedroom, however, his shoulders drawn in and his legs weak, like a poor man whom life had just run over, she re-read a hundred times, with a bitterness mingled with anger, the announcement that her brother had just read. She finally understood the long silence of her childhood friend.

  They lived melancholy days in the little apartment in the Rue Monge. Jeanne continued to respect her brother’s dolor. She knew that words would not have eased it. In any case, she was soon to know the alerts of amour herself.

  That great clown Henri Lazaze, although his appearances were intermittent, was also affected by his friend’s chagrin. At the whim of his adventurous life as an aviator, he exiled himself for weeks to Mourmelon, in order to perfect the helicoplane he had invented, reappearing thereafter, his expression exultant or despairing, according to the results he had obtained. And one evening, when he was dining with the Mirandes, he had squeezed Jeanne’s hand violently, as she was about to escort him to the antechamber. Then, in his free language, he had said: “Excuse me, I don’t know how to make phrases…but perhaps, Jeanne, in both putting ourselves into it, in association, we might arrive, all the same, at consoling poor Gabi. Does that suit? Eh? Does it?”

  The request was a trifle nebulous, but it lit a flame in his steel-gray eyes. It was the abrupt explosion of a sympathy already old, and which she shared. She had consented, smiling.

  “Later…wait…I’m not saying no. Now, he’s still too sad.”

  She kept her secret for a long time, but it slipped out. One morning, a newspaper announced that the aviator Lacaze, departed to pilot his famous helicoplane at a meeting in Buenos Aires, had just succumbed to yellow fever. Jeanne had no sooner cast her eyes on that information than she fainted. When she woke up in her brother’s arms, he smiled.

  “Don’t worry, my dear, it’s false news. Look at this other paper, which denies it. Henri has, indeed, been afflicted by yellow fever, but very slightly, to the point that he’s already out of danger.”

  And as she sobbed, in a hectic nervous release, he scolded her gently: “And you were hiding that from me! You should rather have thought that if one thing might make me forget, it’s your happiness.”

  A telegram was sent. The response was reassuring. In any case, Henri Lacaze soon returned. The sea voyage had already half-cured him. A season at Vichy completed his convalescence. When he was entirely reestablished, the engagement was announced. Alas, destiny does not rest when it has begun to strike, and poor Jeanne had to climb, in her turn, a calvary far crueler than the one that had driven her brother to despair.

  All those events passed through Gabriel Mirandes memory with a cinematic intensity. The abnormal constriction of his brain had dissipated, leaving ideas their free play. He would have continued that return to life if the carriage had not turned into the Rue Méchain.

  The sight of the little street, ordinarily dormant in its quietude, disturbed him with a presentiment. On the sidewalk, facing the Institut Brion, people were grouped in discreet discussion, as if before a funereal threshold. Faces were visible at the neighboring windows. Reporters clad in long sports coats, soft hats over their ears, were taking notes. An automobile drew away, carrying two people who were saluted with deep bows, doubtless physicians.

  Mirande recognized, among the groups, present disciples of Brion, and others, who had quit the institute a long time ago, but who nevertheless remained attached to their former master. In the first rank, his attitude anxious, his hand tugging at his long Gallic moustache, he perceived Doisteau, the young surgeon whose operational skill and ingenuity were becoming legendary, and who had spent a residency at the Brion laboratory—and also the most reliable and surest of friends. He ran toward him.

  “Doisteau! You here…the boss is in a bad way, then? When I left him yesterday evening though, he seemed relatively well. What’s happened?”

  The surgeon shook his head dolorously. “I’ve just asked that of the great colleagues who came out. Oh, science! They lose their Latin in it...or, rather, mask their ignorance. They pontificated about some vague infection, the nature of which they can’t define, and which is complicating the poor condition of the heart, afflicted for a long time. The paralysis is increasing, the limbs growing cold, Oh, yes, science!”

  “Have they any hope?”

  “None.”

  Mirande made a gesture of desperate ra
ge. “Can he still speak?”

  “Yes, he’s lucid. Just now he bade us all adieu, confiding his work to us. It was poignant! He’s asked for you several times. Go, my friend, quickly. He’s in his laboratory, where he wanted to be transported.”

  A swift handshake, and Gabriel ran under the porch and traversed the bushy garden. At the back, the buildings of the institute loomed up, its chains of bricks and stone framing vast bay windows. It was an enchantment, that oasis, under the oblique smile of the sun, a corner of a wood in the heart of Paris. Mirande’s sadness was increased, however, by the contrast between that exuberant nature and the imminent death-throes. Here, so much sap, there, mortal exhaustion! At the sight of the great oak spreading its branches over the lawn, he thought of the beautiful human tree, once so robust, so rich in fruits, which was collapsing...

  He went past a vestry where his comrades’ white smocks were hanging, climbed a few steps, opened a door and stopped, oppressed by emotion, on the threshold of the laboratory.

  In spite of the penumbra of the great lowered blinds, he soon discerned the familiar décor, the alignment of shelves and bottles, and the vast bright porcelain fireplace, the mantelpiece of which was host to an entire population of instruments, retorts and Bunsen burners. In the middle of the room stood a table of translucent glass, covered with microscopes, ampoules, pipettes and a hundred flasks filled with tinted solutions. That display alone revealed an incessant labor, the continuous struggle of a brain for the triumph of human beings over the inertia or ambushes of matter. More moving still, however, was a group immobilized near the table: the physician and the faithful maidservant Catherine, leaning over the dying boss.

  The boss! Was that really him under that mass of bedcovers? Was that really him, that great body collapsed on a divan and scarcely breathing, jerkily? Only the head was alive. It was opposing to the inertia of the torso and the limbs, amid the tangle of his gray hair and white beard, the acuity of a gaze that one might have thought rejuvenated on the brink of extinction. Oh, that gaze, still shining with creative power…!