The World Above The World

by Brian Stableford

  He went to the theater and arrived in the middle of a discussion. It concerned a poor devil who had been hit by four revolver-bullets during a brawl. Three had been extracted but the fourth remained undiscoverable. When Dr. Schwanthaler was seen, his opinion was solicited—purely out of deference, for it was known that, since his last operation, he was reluctant to undertake hazardous interventions.

  To the great astonishment of the assembly, however, he advanced resolutely, removed his monocle, closed his right eye, seized a probe, inserted it without hesitation, and withdrew the bullet.

  “There!” he said, simply, in the midst of a murmur of admiration.

  Other patients were brought to him, and every time, after a rapid inspection, Dr. Schwanthaler identified the seat of the malady. He extirpated tumors, scraped bones, removed needles. Almost all the patients died, but the operations had been admirable.

  “What insight! That Schwanthaler…it’s so unexpected!” said the doctor’s colleagues, amazed and jealous. In a single day, Cornelius Schwanthaler had surpassed all the surgical glories of the century.

  Slightly fatigued, Dr. Schwathaler spent the afternoon lying on his divan, savoring the intoxication of his triumph. He received an angry letter from his fiancée reproaching him for his silence and summoning him to a rendezvous on the riverbank the following day—but he read it distractedly, almost bored. He loved her a great deal, however, his Marguerite, so gracious and so pretty, with her violet eyes, her peach-flower complexion and her figure as slender as a little. For the moment, though he was entirely possessed by scientific pride. Love paled beside the aurora of his renown, like the last star of the night in the rays of the rising Sun.

  He was in a hurry to collect the first echoes of that renown. He recalled that there was a ball at the burgomeister’s house. It was there, assuredly, that the news of his success at the hospital would first be hawked around. He resolved to attend. He detested social occasions and dancing, but he was a philosopher. He reflected that, in addition to the pleasure of being praised, he would be able to see the strange appearances offered to his Röntgenian eye by feminine coquetries and social vanities. He knew already what science would gain from his discovery; he would not be sorry to establish the profit that psychology would draw from it.

  At the appointed hour, he put on his ceremonial frock-coat and headed for the burgomeister’s house, repeating a line from a French poet: Nothing true thereunder but the human skeleton.30

  When he made his entrance, the ball was in full swing. He was immediately surrounded, congratulated and questioned. He allowed himself to be admired. Then, as a quadrille was forming up, dispersing the masculine groups, he hid himself in the bay of a window, closed his right eye, opened the left, and gazed.

  The spectacle was certainly strange, and well worthy of the observations of a disciple of Schopenhauer. Black skeletons leaned over, bowing to one another, swaying, making graceful gestures, then suddenly gripping one another two by two, violently, as if they wanted to confuse their respective ribs—which were, however, maintained a short distance apart by the medusa-like envelopes that the doctor had remarked that morning in his old serving-woman, which were the flesh, the form and the beauty that had disappeared in the penetrating light of the implacable rays. Only jewelry and metals remained opaque, and it was only one bizarrerie more that all those osseous bodies bore diamonds and decorations suspended over the sternum, like votive offerings.

  Suddenly, the doctor redoubled his attention. He had just perceived a furtive couple who had slipped behind the palm-trees in the gallery. Softly, slowly, through the transparent leaves, two jaws, two preposterous hollow noses and two skulls approached one another and stuck to one another for some time.

  A kiss! the doctor thought, and his irony suddenly collapsed. He did not want to see any more. He left the ball, saddened.

  He had to reason sternly with himself, tell himself repeatedly that science ought not to recoil before anything, that truth was the most important thing of all. “Yes, but love!”

  He went to bed, slept badly, had nightmares, and woke up the next day with a violent headache.

  He went out into the country. The freshness of a spring morning restored his serenity. After all, he still had one eye accessible to the lies of form; that was enough for love. It was simply a matter not taking off his obstructive monocle inappropriately and replacing it in good time. His vision would thus be divided into two parts: one for science, the other for life.

  Reassured, the doctor opened his left eye, desirous of studying nature in its internal aspect. He was disappointed, though. The leafless, colorless trees, loomed up like the tentacles of an octopus. Sometimes, the small black skeletons of birds took off from the grey branches. That was the sole reality that arrested his gaze within the immense bare horizon.

  He sat down on a mound on the river bank. His anxieties took hold of him again. In being a great scientist, one was no less a man.

  Decidedly, he thought, the truth isn’t pretty. It is, however, thus that the Supreme Being sees everything.

  Around him, the morning was suave; everything was singing. There was an adorable concert of murmurs, a delightful harmony of colors and perfumes—and the flowers raised their corollas toward the pensive doctor, whispering to him: “Look how beautiful we are, Doctor. What do the names matter that we bear in herbals when dead, and the inert structures that we reveal to the microscope? God made us to give fragrance to humans, not to educate them.” And the trees, in their turn, but more loudly, said: “Schwanthaler, Schwanthaler, make no mistake; we have been created to shelter nests and protect the fearful kisses of the amorous from indiscreet gazes.” And the leaves lost in the sky quivered with anger, saying: “Schwanthaler, Schwanthaler, your science will bring you misfortune.”

  He raised his head again, as if to brave the universal malediction—and then, at a turning in the path, he perceived a frail skeleton that was advancing, its tibias bumping together, with a gross stomach wobbling in front of it, whose abnormal volume contrasted strangely with the slenderness of the bone structure.

  Excellent! thought the doctor. A new case, not yet studied, of gastric abnormality!

  Science had resumed it total grip on him.

  Meanwhile, the frail skeleton was still advancing. When it was very close to the doctor, it stopped, and a youthful voice pronounced: “My dear Cornelius, are you so absorbed that you’re unable to recognize your beloved? Oh, these scientists!”

  Frightened, the doctor replaced his monocle and reopened his right eye. Malediction! His fiancée was standing before him.

  It was too much. He lost his head and cried: “Never! Never!” Then he fled toward the town, gesticulating like a man possessed.

  Gretchen stood there petrified.

  Dr. Cornelius has gone mad, she thought. And she collapsed at the foot of a tree, her arms hanging down loosely, plunged into despair.

  Having gone back into his laboratory, Dr. Schwanthaler took his head in his hands and shed abundant tears. “I didn’t think of that!” he exclaimed. “What if I were never to see her otherwise again!” But he still had one eye. He opened it very wide to convince himself of its integrity.

  Was it the emotional shock that had caused a slight infiltration of the phosphorescent serum from one or bit to the other? It seemed to him that he saw less clearly even with the reserved eye.

  He looked at himself in a mirror. His flesh appeared to him less firm, his form less accentuated. Was he, too, going to assume the appearance of a mournful skeleton enclosed in a medusa? Horror! No longer to see, no longer to see himself, no longer to see in any other way!

  Gripped by rage, the blasphemed against science. “Ecclesiastes was right!” he cried, tearing at his hair. “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow. God has retained the worst part for himself: the truth, which is sad. He has left us beauty, illusion and hope. And I have refused the role allotted to human beings, which was that of happiness.”

&nbs
p; Taking possession of an instrument, he tore out the accursed eye, and threw it out of the window.

  And when the blonde Gretchen, all a-tremble, came in search of news of him, he explained to her that a horrible ophthalmia had obliged him to destroy his left eye.

  “It was doomed,” he told her.

  When he offered to release her from her engagement, however, the gracious child put her arms around him and whispered to him: “But since it was doomed…and after all, you still have one…”

  “And it’s a good one,” said the doctor, “for it sees beauty!”

  Michel Corday: The Mysterious Dajan-Phinn

  (1908)

  It is 9 a.m. on a cool April morning, on the platform at the Gare de Lyon; scattered groups are awaiting the arrival of the express from Marseilles. All faces are turned toward the luminous access-route, amid a view encumbered by signals and motionless trains, watching for the first glimpse of the engine. If all the foreheads are orientated by the same gesture, however, how diverse are the thoughts that they conceal! What varied motives these seemingly-identical impatiences have!

  Examine the little group of two ladies and three gentlemen who have advanced to the very edge of the platform. These five people have come to meet Doctor Bro, returned from Borneo after an absence of seven years. How disparate their sentiments are, though! To grasp them, it will be necessary to know the man who inspires them.

  It would, it’s true, require a fine mind to define Dr. Bro exactly. When he left for the Orient, at 45 years of age, his contemporaries had the most contradictory opinions of him: an unsound mind; a universal intelligence; an innocent; a charlatan; a semi-lunatic; a superman. His life had been hectic. As a naval physician, he had once traveled the world with an avid curiosity and a relentless ardor. He wanted to try everything, to know everything, to exercise himself in all the directions of human activity. Then, at about 30, during an extended stopover in Malaya, he had become enamored of a young orphan in the Dutch colony and had married her. Renouncing his naval career, he seemed to want to settle in Borneo, to devote himself to personal endeavors within the tranquility of the family. After two years, however, his wife had died giving birth to a little girl.

  Bro threw himself violently into pure science. Having returned to France, he confided his little Suzanne to the care of a nurse, then to the protection of a boarding-school, and plunged himself entirely into his work. For more than two years he divided his time between his laboratories and research stations of marine physiology where attempts were being made to wrench the secret of organic origins from the oceans.

  Finally, he published the results of his research on the living cell. Picking up the theory of spontaneous generation after Traube, Leduc and Raphael Dubois,31 he claimed, with evidential support, to be able to create life. He displayed artificial vegetation made with his own hands. The manufacture and the experiments, the news of which expended beyond the scientific world to reach the crowd, were passionately contested.

  By a singular hazard, his most redoubtable adversary was his best friend. This Bro, in whom brutal grief and the empery of science seemed to have dried up the wellsprings of affection, had remained faithful, throughout his turbulent life, to one adolescent friendship—but Ruchard, whom he had known during his student years, had followed a straight line. Now a famous professor, he defended orthodox theories with authority, from the height of State-approved chairs. Exasperated by the sight of his old companion compromising himself with pursuits that he deemed chimerical, he castigated him in private and pursued him in public. The contest was too unequal; Bro was vanquished. His doctrines were reduced to the rank of alchemical dreams and his experiments to the dimensions of puerile games.

  Perhaps the defeat was all the more painful because it was inflicted by a friend. Nevertheless, he let nothing of that sort of that show. He did not fall out with the triumphant Ruchard. Shortly afterwards, however, he went into exile. His brother, the landscape-painter César Bro, had just got married. He entrusted Suzanne to the young household. As for himself, he applied for an obtained a post in the zoological gardens of Borneo.

  It was thought, by those around him, that he was going to try to forget his disappointments in the country where he had got married, and where he had spent a few happy and peaceful years. For seven years, his letters—rare and brief—remained mute regarding his work, his leisure and his inner life. Detached from his relatives, indifferent to the questions that had impassioned him, in retreat from the world, he seemed to have accomplished a sort of moral suicide.

  An event came into prospect, however, from which he could not disinterest himself: his daughter’s marriage. If it had been a matter of some random fiancé, no doubt he would have left the matter to the clairvoyance of those he had placed in charge of Suzanne and given his consent, nothing more. But could he accept for a son-in-law, without protest, the son of Dr. Ruchard? Such was the man, in fact, to whom it would be necessary for him to give his daughter, according to the two young people in question—for they were in love with one another. Each appeared to the other as the living promise of honor.

  Let no one see in this choice one of those fatal hazards which, in novels and plays, throw heroes destined to avoid one another together. There was nothing simpler and more logical than the circumstances of which the affinity was born. Professor Ruchard, although he had acted in the contest according to his scientific beliefs and in the interests of his friend, had experienced remorse over his excessively complete victory. He deemed himself partly responsible for the exile in which his old companion had buried himself alive. He had tried to repair the damage to the extent that was possible, and he had taken an interest and developed an attachment to the young girl who, without him, might perhaps have retained a father.

  A widower himself, Ruchard found favor in the family in which the girl lived. That intimacy became greater still when Henri Ruchard, the professor’s son, who was gifted with a considerable talent as a painter, took César Bro as a tutor. Thus the two young people were able, for years, to enjoy the benefits of one of those frank and healthy friendships in which temperaments and characters are revealed and tested, which ought to be the veritable school of marriage.

  Warned by a letter from his brother—a small masterpiece of prudent diplomacy and emotional eloquence—Dr. Bro said that he might give his reply in two months’ time. By the hundred-and-twentieth day, they were watching out for it with every mailboat from the Far East. Finally, a telegram came from Borneo: Am returning. Nothing else. And by means of a telegram dated the previous evening, from Marseilles, Bro had announced his return for that very morning.

  One can now imagine the mental dispositions of the two young people and their family standing on the platform of the railway station.

  The most excited, by far, is Suzanne Bro. She is going to see her father again. Oh, certainly, a father with whom she had hardly ever lived, whom she recalls in her schoolgirl memories, always feverish, quivering with the tension of thought, always about to leave. She does not hold that semi-abandonment against him. He must have suffered so much…having been left alone after two years of marriage, and then experienced so much unjust disappointment. Yes, unjust. Her knowledge of the great quarrel in which her father and Professor Ruchard were involved is somewhat confused, but she feels, and is sure, that her father was right. She has faith in him. And it is precisely because he was right that he was able to forgive his fortunate rival.

  As for thinking that her father, in consequence of those old differences, might oppose his daughter’s marriage, she refuses to believe it. Besides, will she not be able to vanquish him, to seduce him, if he makes any sign of resistance? One knows one’s power. One is 20 years old. One is not too repulsive. And is there not a joy that must override and efface everything, for a father who has left an indecisive little girl to recover a fully-grown young woman, neat and blonde in the typical Dutch manner, with eyes of a blue so limpid that they seem to instill a desire to bow down before t
hem?

  One person who is not bringing so much forbearance or confidence to the station platform is young Henri Ruchard. He cares very little about the living cell, its opponents and defenders. It is sufficient to observe his energetic and harsh features, his face contracted with jealous passion, to divine that he would gladly have left in Malaya the restless fanatic on whom his happiness depends.

  Professor Ruchard, by contrast, is standing tall, with his broad shoulders and his flourishing rosette, his handsome head serene and magnanimous. He is glad to have come to wait for his old friend to jump down from the train, effacing by that amicable step any possible rancor.

  César Bro, slender and placid in appearance, is thinking sadly about the older brother from whom the vicissitudes of life have so often separated him and whose daughter has become almost as dear to him as his own children. The common memories of their childhood have, however, woven bonds between them that the imminent return causes to vibrate. And, with the instincts of a painter and the weakness of a man, he is apprehensive of the signs of age with which the last seven years have inflicted on both of them and which they will discover in one another’s faces at the first glance…

  His wife, a cheerful and tender individual, a little bit romantic, in the full glory of 30 years of age, is awaiting the traveler she hardly knows with the avid curiosity of an audience-member anticipating the denouement of a play. Not that she has the slightest doubt about the outcome of the adventure. She would like to see someone get in the way of the marriage of the two your people, whose idyll she has nurtured with so much benevolence! But who knows whether some unforeseen plot-twist might not emerge?