The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  “We can get you on a ship,” de Champsfleuris told me. When I had last seen him he was some sort of an under-secretary in the foreign department. Now he looked as much at home in his crude fisher’s garments and his stocking cap as ever he had in a white tie at a reception. “It is simple, that. Within eight days a fishing boat leaves which will not arrest itself until it has arrived at—” No, I’ll x out that word; it would indicate the coast. Say England, Portugal, Africa, whatever strikes your fancy. “But you must live somewhere until then. The inn is not safe. An American—but, yes, you still retain the slightest of accents, my friend—living here to no purpose— We do not have tourists now. And still less safe to establish you with one of my friends, for I would imperil not only you but him.” He mused, and then his eyes glinted as I had once seen them glint when he remembered that a Ruritanian Plyszt took diplomatic precedence over a Graustarkian Glagoltnik. “Dr. Palgrave,” he said softly.

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “You do not know of Dr. Palgrave, you an American? But then I ask myself how many Americans know of your fine surrealist work. Each man to his field, and the greatest in his field may be unknown save to himself. This Dr. Palgrave, he has a villa here, where his laboratory also finds itself.”

  “Research? What sort?”

  De Champsfleuris’s eyes twinkled. “Ah! That you will learn, my friend, do not fear. He is a strange one, that. I do not know myself, me, Henri-Marie de Champsfleuris, who can tell at a glance if a diplomat is authorized to make twice the concessions which he offers, I do not know if that one is one of the greatest men in the world or only one of the greatest fools. You are an artist; perhaps you will tell me.”

  “And he is—” I felt a little awkward as to how to put it. “He is one of us?”

  “No— Alas, no. He has not awakened himself. He is as you were, my friend, a few short months ago. If he knew why you were here and what it is that you think to do when you leave here, I should not speak for his reception. But say only that you are an American from his old university. Say that you interest yourself— Are you acquainted with time theory?”

  I nodded. “It’s one of the few aspects of modern thought that we surrealists found material in.”

  “Good. Then talk to him of that. He will invite you to stay at the villa. Stay there, and do nothing until I send word to you through the postman Soisson.”

  It seemed a curious station on the underground railway, to spend a week in a luxurious villa talking time theory. But I had no suspicion then of how curious. I certainly never expected to meet, at my first dinner there, the head of the local Gestapo. Which brings us back now to when you came in.

  Herr Oberst Heinz von Schwarzenau would be a fine name for one of the lean and leering Gestapo villains beloved of melodrama; but this jolly little man with the round, beaming face and the pudgy white hands hardly seemed at first glance to live up to his label. Dr. Palgrave wasn’t too well cast as the Mad Scientist, either. His hair was neatly combed and his eyes were mildly blinking. His dinner jacket hung on his thin stooped shoulders about as gracefully as it might have decorated a scarecrow. There was nothing colorful or eccentric about him but his conversation. That was enough.

  “You may define a dimension as you will, my dear colonel,” he observed over the fish. “You may quite correctly term it the degree of manifoldness of a magnitude or any other proper terminological gibberish your methodical mind chooses to employ. But a dimension is basically a measure of extent; and if extent is measurable, then extension is possible.”

  The colonel beamed. “I am not sure if you are playing with ideas, or simply with words. What is your opinion, Mr. Holding?”

  I had to fight to keep from jumping each time he addressed me. I had to remind myself that my exploits in the Little Massacre had been strictly anonymous and that the Gestapo, so far as I knew, had no more information on me than that I was a practitioner of degenerate art but otherwise harmless. I was, I kept saying to myself, far safer here, as a sort of purloined letter in person, than anywhere else. But I have since wondered how the purloined letter itself felt about the Minister D—’s brilliant ruse. “What are ideas themselves but playing with words?” I said casually. “Can a wordless idea exist?”

  Colonel von Schwarzenau frowned. “That is loose thinking,” he said severely, in that overperfect English of his. “Ideas can exist for instance as mathematical formulas, or even as an unformulated series of sensory images. Please, Mr. Holding, more discipline in your thought.” Having put me in my decadent place, he turned back to his host as Antoine brought on the braised meat. “But granting, sir, your possibility of extension in the time dimension, to what practical purpose do you propose to apply this theory?”

  I had my marked suspicion that the meat was horseflesh, but Antoine had accomplished such wonders with a sauce bordelaise that I didn’t give a damn. That sauce would have been enough to distract my attention from most conversations, but Dr. Palgrave’s next remark jerked me back.

  “Propose to? But, my dear colonel, I have applied it. My time machine is already in operation.”

  All of the colonel’s plump body shook with delight. “Ah, so? And what treasures do you bring us from the future, dear doctor? Ray guns perhaps, to aid us in perpetuating the New Order?”

  “I must confess that I have so far succeeded only with the past, but—”

  “The past? But there are treasures there, too. Perhaps you could fetch back and restore the honor and glory of France?” He chuckled at this one.

  “I . . . I have not as yet ventured into the machine myself. But I consider my efforts with the transportation of inanimate objects and of small animals to have proved my case completely. Iron sent into the past, left there for a year, and brought back has returned covered with rust, while it remained in the machine for only a minute of our time here. My first guinea pig died of old age through a mistake in my calculations. He was not yet adult when I put him in the machine; when I took him out thirty seconds later, he was dead of senile decay.”

  Colonel von Schwarzenau’s chuckle became almost a giggle. “You are so symbolic, my dear doctor. It is you and not our friend here who should be the poet. Iron that rusts and guinea pigs that die of senile decay, always while seeking the past and ignoring the future. What better picture could you paint of the Third Republic?”

  I held my temper. “And you offer—”

  “Steel that never rusts and men who never age while their eyes remain fixed on the future, on the glory of the New Order. Steel and the bodies of men and always the future, the German future that must be the future of the world.” For a moment he was in deadly earnest, but then the pudgy chuckle crept back into his voice. “Ah, it is good to be among representatives of your great democracy who still understand us. And such representatives. A scientist and a poet. A scientist who plays with time machines and a poet who plays with surrealism. There is your science and your art in a democracy. And yet you understand us, do you not, my friends? You are the admiring crowd who look up, the spiked wheels of the Juggernaut and cry, ‘How beautiful is the goddess Kali today!’ And because you see her beauty, she will spare you. Yes, you will be spared, and long may you be happy here in your haunted villa. Pursue your time machines and your surreal reality. And do not interfere. ” There was a fleeting expression of grimness, then a broad beam.

  Dinner went like that. We were treated like two not-too-bright but understanding Quislings who were fortunate to be in the good graces of the potent representative of the New Order. I boiled inside. I seethed so that I forgot the excellences of Antoine’s miraculous makeshift cooking, even forgot the astonishing significance of Dr. Palgrave’s claims. I wanted nothing but to kick out the Herr Oberst’s shining white teeth, build them into a marimba, and play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on them.

  But I had to be sensible. There was work for me to do. I had to put up with this until the fishing boat left. But Palgrave? He was staying here, living in the mi
dst of this, putting up with it, liking it—

  I couldn’t help myself. I boiled over when Colonel von Schwarzenau made a regretfully early departure for an evening tour of inspection. “How can you tolerate that man as a guest?” I burst out, pouring myself an outsize dose of my host’s notable brandy. “You, a free American, how can you listen to—”

  Dr. Palgrave smiled calmly. “Why should it bother me? Much of what he says may be true. I don’t know. Politics are no concern of mine. But if I listen to him politely, he lets me work in peace. What more should I ask?”

  I took a deep breath. “Politics,” I said slowly, “are no concern of yours. I never thought to hear those words again. I thought they were as dead as the grandfather of all dodos. Man, have you any notion of what your friend the colonel stands for?”

  “Young man,” Palgrave said, with a certain quiet dignity, “I am a scientist. The petty squabbles of men hold no meaning for me. I have my laboratory here. It is a valuable possession, expensive and difficult to reconstruct. I shall certainly not risk it by bothering my head about matters that do not concern me. Shall we have Antoine bring us some more—well, let us continue to call it coffee, in the living room?”

  I changed the subject when the coffee came. I couldn’t risk insulting my host. And a curious phrase of the colonel’s had recurred to my mind. “Your friend wished us happiness in this ‘haunted villa.’ What did he mean by that? Surely this is too modern a place to have its ancestral specters?”

  Outside the large windows of the living room we should have seen the terrace and the sea, but the blackout curtains shut us into our narrow personal cell. From outside a steady drumming noise beat into this cell, the percussive rhythm of machinery from the nearby Barras plant, origin of France’s cheapest pleasure car in peace times and now given over to even de Champsfleuris knew not what. Dr. Palgrave hesitated before replying, and the steady thumps of manufactured death were loud in the room.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “This place is, by reliable reports, haunted. Or once was. One sole manifestation, which is, I gather from physical students, most unusual.”

  “Give,” I said. “Or does your scientific mind reject it?”

  “So many scientific minds have rejected what I have accomplished that I keep my own mind open, or try to. But this is a curious incident. It was before my tenancy, when the villa belonged to its original owner, the British novelist Uptonleigh. One day in 1937, I believe, in the midst of a house party, there suddenly appeared a ghost. A black-faced ghost, like a relic from one of the minstrel shows of my boyhood, clad in dirty dungarees and tattered tennis shoes. He spoke with an American accent and announced that he had just been treacherously murdered and had never expected heaven to be like this. The guests were sufficiently merry when he arrived, as was usually the case with Uptonleigh’s guests, to enter into the spirit with the spirit, so to speak; if it chose to believe that heaven was one long party, they would give it one long party. The party lasted, I believe, for six weeks, almost equaling the record set by the wake which Uptonleigh held when his best novel was filmed. In that time the ghost assumed civilized attire, washed its face and grew a beard. The party might have gone on to a new record if the ghost had not vanished as abruptly as it appeared. It has never been seen since.

  Dr. Palgrave related this preposterous narrative as calmly as he had told of his time machine, as calmly as he had accepted Colonel von Schwarzenau’s manifestos of the New Order. I smiled politely. “Some drunken American who decided to crash a good party,” I suggested.

  Dr. Palgrave shook his head. “You do not understand. The ghost appeared suddenly from nowhere in the midst of them. One moment there was empty space, the next this black-faced intruder. All accounts allow of no rational explanation.”

  The Barras works thumped. I stared at the thin-bearded scientist. Did nothing interest him, nothing perturb him but his ventures into the past with senile guinea pigs and rusting iron? “It would be fun,” I said, “to see your ghost meet your colonel.” Dr. Palgrave half smiled. “But we talk of these trivial matters when I have so much to show you, Holding. I want so very much to interest you in my experiments. I even dare hope that if I can convince you—”

  There was an honest-to-God gleam in his eye. “Hold on,” I said hurriedly. “You aren’t aiming to graduate from guinea pigs to me, are you?”

  “I should not have put it quite that way, but my thought was something of that nature.”

  “I’m afraid,” I said politely, “I haven’t any scientific aptitude. I’d never learn to handle the controls on a time machine. I can’t even drive a car.”

  “Oh, that would be nothing. I have a remote-control panel so that I can operate the machine from such a distance that its field does not affect me. Contact with the field, you see, sets up a certain sympathetic parallel in the electronic vibrations of the blood stream; it is that that enables me to recall a living object from the past even if it has left the physical bounds of the machine.”

  “Then you have brought them back alive?”

  “Guinea pigs, yes. But I have not had the opportunity to experiment with higher forms of life. How the field would affect the nervous system, whether there might be certain synaptic short circuits—Antoine refuses to make the attempt. And moreover he is so valuable a cook— But if I could interest you in the tremendous possibilities—”

  I cursed Henri-Marie de Champsfleuris thoroughly up one side and down the other. It wasn’t enough that he should play purloined letter with me under the nose of a Gestapo colonel. No; he has to expose me as guinea pig to a time-machine crackpot. I began to think it would have been a simpler and safer life to hide in hedges, sleep in haymows, and live off ditch water till that fishing boat sailed. I couldn’t antagonize my host; but I was damned if I was going to have curious currents shot through me, whether they transported me in time or not. I was trying to frame a courteous excuse when I heard a thud that wasn’t from the Barras works.

  It was the steady rhythmic clump of trained marchers. They went to the back of the house first, and I heard sullen curses and a sharp scream that must have come from Antoine. Then they came back, thudding across the terrace.

  The Barras works thumped out death for all men. The feet on the terrace thumped an unknown but far more immediate peril. And Dr. Palgrave talked about the effect of a temporomagnetic field on the ganglia of guinea pigs.

  The French windows opened and a squad of four men came in, in gray uniforms with swastika brassards. A corporal saluted us and said nothing. His hand was an inch from his automatic as the men searched the room.

  Dr. Palgrave paid no attention to them. I started to speak, but I thought better of it when I caught the corporal’s hard eye and saw his fingers twitch. I sat there listening to the details of the Palgrave remote-control time mechanism while the four men completed their wordless search.

  The corporal saluted again in silence, and the searchers filed out. I stared at Dr. Palgrave.

  “It is nothing,” he said calmly. “You see we are near the Barras works. Not infrequently saboteurs are spotted near here. Perhaps even a Commando. These searches are necessary. To protest would imperil my position. Antoine sometimes objects to the treatment he receives, but I give him a bonus.”

  I was speechless. But no speech from me was necessary. Dr. Palgrave’s remark was answered by a new voice, a fresh crude voice with a vivid Americanism I hadn’t heard in years of self-exile.

  “Shut up, you guys,” it said, “and stay shut. Fermy le butch or cuppy le gorge, get me?”

  I turned to gape at the ghost of the villa—dirty dungarees, tattered tennis shoes, blackened face and all.

  “Why, you’re the ghost,” Dr. Palgrave observed, as one who notes an interesting but insignificant fact.

  “Brother, it’s you that’s slated to be the ghost if there’s any trouble.” There was the sheen of steel in the figure’s hand—an efficient-looking blade about six inches long that seemeci to be all cut
ting edge.

  I got it. “You’re a Commando,” I said.

  He snorted. “You civilians don’t know from nothing. I’m a Commandoman.” I was put in my place again. “But, look, boys. You talk English. You talk it kind of funny—classylike—but tell me: Are you Americans?”

  I nodded.

  “Is that a relief! I didn’t do so good in French class; I was better at rough-andtumble. And I guess I don’t need this either, brothers.” He sheathed the glinting six inches. “But get this: You’ve got to hide me.”

  “Why?” Dr. Palgrave asked imperturbably.

  Blackened eyebrows lifted on the blackened face. The Commandoman jerked a thumb at Palgrave. “ ‘Why?’ he says. Is he nuts?”

  “He runs the joint,” I said. “I’m just here pretty much the way you are.”

  “Look, brother,” he addressed Dr. Palgrave. “I got cut off from the Commando. That patrol missed me by a flea’s eyelash and I ducked in here after they’d gone. But they’ll be back. They always search twice; it’s a rule. And you’ve got to hide me.”

  “Why?” Dr. Palgrave repeated.

  “Why? You’re an American. Or are you?”

  “I am, sir, a citizen of the world of science.”

  The distant thud of returning footfalls was barely audible over the Barras thumpings.

  “Look.” The Commandoman’s hand rested on his sheath. “You listen to sense or you listen to Betsey. It don’t make no matter if I get killed. What the hell, every time you black your face you say to yourself, ‘Make-up for the last act.’ But I’m the dope they made memorize the plans for sabotage at the works here. I’ve got to get through to a certain Frenchman with that message. And if they get me there’s always the chance I’ll crack under the games they play. So you’ve got to stall them and hide me some way.”