“Well,” Melanski suddenly exclaimed, “What have you to reply to Monsieur Allan Kardec? Wasn’t I right? In any case, I’ve assured myself of the fact, and there’s nothing as convincing as experience. What one has seen, one has seen. In sum, what have you to reply to Allan Kardec?”
“My friend,” I said, I left Paris so precipitately that I didn’t have the time to go and consult Monsieur Kardec for you; but I confess that I’m not sorry about that, because as far as I understand, your case of spiritism is unworthy to occupy and intelligence like yours. Is it possible that you, who have made a special study of the laws of life, find anything but an admirable fable in the story of Galatea, and that you believe a statue capable of willing and executing what it wills—capable of saying to itself ‘I’ll go there,’ and going; capable of animating itself with the magnetic fluid of a superabundant soul? Oh, how many men endowed with such a soul, if that were the case, would replace their mistresses of flesh and bone with mistresses of marble, women in moments of amour but statues apart from that? Yes, statues,” I added, laughing, as soon as they threaten to become embarrassing!”
“I don’t claim,” Melanski replied, very seriously, “that life can be transmitted or restituted in its integrity and in its permanence by the operation of the mind. Don’t get confused. I’m only saying that certain amours, at their apogee, determine a kind of reflection of their flame, like a reciprocal desire and a propulsion, for as long as it lasts, on the part of objects that are ordinarily devoid of life, but that one wants to vivify.”
Although that opinion appeared to me to be too absurd for discussion, I solicited Melanski, so far as I could, to defend it, because I hope that he would be obliged to cite me his own example and lay bare is madness. He avoided the trap.
I said to him forthrightly: “When you have shown me such an extraordinary spectacle, I’ll declare myself convinced.
He responded, dryly: “I won’t show it to you. I wouldn’t want to see it again myself. That’s what rendered me mad. Anyway, let’s leave it there, I beg you, my dear friend.”
In the afternoon we went for a walk together as far as Bléville, which is a league and a half from Montivilliers, and we sat on the shingle on the sea-shore.
God preserved us from repeating the pretentious banalities that the Ocean has inspired in its admirers for a long time. We did not exchange many words. We restricted ourselves to feeling, and I believe that the variable colors of the waves, their regular splashing on the shore, and their perfume, gently carried to us by the breeze, gave us the same sensitive wellbeing, which I call velvet calm.
Nevertheless, I remember that Melanski, seeing a porpoise leaping over a sunlit wave, exclaimed: “Look! It’s bizarre, isn’t it? I have here”—he pointed at his heart—a horrible porpoise that bounds and pirouettes like that one, an eater of joys...oh, petty joys, for I’ve never had any great ones.”
V
You will easily divine what demon kept me wake the second night of my residence in Montivilliers.
Would Melanski come again to accomplish in his study, at the strange box, the mysterious ritual that I had witnessed? Or was that only a temporary whim that would not be renewed?
Alas, the confession he had made me himself of his madness and the slow precision of his various movements indicated all too clearly a special and habitual somnambulism—which is to say that Melanski ought to repeat it every night.
There are three species of sleepwalkers: those who are acting out their dreams, like roof-walkers; those who, very preoccupied on going to bed with the following day’s work, get up to do it a little in advance; and finally, those who are obsessed by a fixed idea, like Lady Macbeth.
Melanski belonged to the last species of sleepwalkers.
I had, therefore, gone to bed and had resumed my reading of the previous night with the resolution not to stop before hearing the door-knob turn. From time to time I looked at my watch, anxiously. I listened for sounds coming from the door, curiously, desiring that Melanski would come, even though I feared it, because of the distress it would cause me, and above all because of my affection for him.
He arrived. As he came in I blew out my candle, and then stiffened myself, propped up on my elbow.
Without omitting anything, he played the same pantomime that I have already described. It even appeared to me that he added something, to wit, that as he turned round, he kissed the void above his right arm, tenderly.
On the third night, I had the malice of placing a chair in the path to the large box. That was an audacious experiment, for if he bumped into the chair and knocked it over, the noise would doubtless wake him up…and then what countenance would he adopt, on finding himself face to face with me, so oddly equipped at such an hour?
Would he confess his terrible secret to me, or would he devise a subterfuge? In any case, I counted on trying hard to put him at his ease and observe him better by simulating a profound sleep: a superb snore, eyelids half-closed. But would he even remember the objective of his expedition? That was not certain. Between the second life and reality the thread of ideas almost always breaks.
The chair did not accomplish much. Although Melanski was walking with his head held high looking directly ahead, he went around it with perfect ease; and, more curiously, when he went back, for fear of bumping it with his pretended burden, he turned sideways.
The fourth night, another stratagem: at quarter past one—Melanski came at half past one precisely—I got up and placed my lighted candle at the exact spot on the mantelpiece where he placed his.
He was no more embarrassed by that than by the chair. He placed his own candle at the other end of the mantelpiece, but when he came back, he took mine by mistake.
As the candles in the study differed considerably from those in the bedroom, and Melanski never alternated their service, he was astonished the following morning to find one of the candles from the study on his nightstand.
That is certainly an astonishment that does not come to the mind of many people, because its object is so insignificant. Only maniacs pick up on such details; so Melanski’s mania was fundamental.
He said to Pélagie, in my presence: “How do you explain, Pélagie, that one of the study candles is in my bedroom?”
“Well, Monsieur,” Pélagie replied, “it’s not always me who carries things upstairs; it must have been you, yesterday evening, when you went to bed.”
“I’m sure that it wasn’t,” he said. “I never make use of a candle like that.”
I smiled; he perceived it, and said, gravely: “It’s you who played that trick on me eh?”
“How would I do that?” I said.
“By coming into my room and making the swap while I was asleep.”
Someone who had loved Melanski less and suffered less from his morbid condition would have been inclined to laugh; I swore to him that I was incapable of mystifying him in a fashion so devoid of ingenuity, and added, not without emotion: “If I were a sleepwalker I’d say to you: ‘It’s possible that I came into your room while I was asleep,’ but I don’t believe I am. In fact, you, who are a doctor, examine me a little: have I the appearance of a somnambulist?”
“What an idea!” he cried, excitedly. “Not at all, my friend. Don’t go getting that idea into your head. You’re no more a somnambulist than I am, thank God!”
“Thank God, you say. Is it a great misfortune, then, to be a somnambulist?”
“A very great misfortune,” he told me. I wouldn’t want to be one for an empire.”
“But I don’t see what’s so afflicting about sleepwalking.”
“Oh, you don’t see... First of all, the nervous system is extraordinarily overwrought, just when it ought to be at rest; secondly, somnambulists very often enjoy an incomplete, and hence deceptive, lucidity, which induces them to commit many stupidities; and finally, when they’re woken up during their excursion, the abrupt reaction can be fatal to them.”
Those final words frightened me by inf
orming me that my experiment with the chair had exposed my friend to the risk of a dangerous awakening.
As for the incomplete lucidity of somnambulists that Melanski mentioned, I admired it in him, in whom I had discerned it clearly, recognized it, and had no doubt that he offered an example of it.
In fact, let us take it from the moment when he got out of bed during the fit.
To light his candle in order to go down to his study was to have the sentiment that he was acting by night; but not to put on his slippers was to be unaware that his feet would be chilled by the steps of the staircase.
To place his candle on the mantelpiece, head for the big box, open it, and, soon believing his arms laden, to use the precaution I described to close it and pick up his candle, etc, etc., was to show an astonishing presence of mind on the part of a man asleep; but not to perceive that he had absolutely nothing in his arms, to imagine the contrary, as revealed by the stressed attitude on which nothing as weighing, was a comical delusion.
And not to remember that I was in his house, that he had put me in his study to sleep, not to see my effects to the right and the left, nor me, whereas he had seen the chair and the lighted candle so promptly, was certainly a vast breach in Melanski’s lucidity.
Soon, I had an indication of it even more essential, because it related to the very object of his nocturnal campaigns.
VI
When the initial curiosity was satisfied, I began to weary of being interrupted every night during my first sleep by such a funereally eccentric scene that scarcely changed. On the other hand, although I had nothing to fear, I did not have sufficient placidity to go to sleep as if nothing would happen. Then I almost regretted the discretion that had made me refuse Melanski’s offer of his bedroom. I would have liked him to raise the matter again so that I could change my mind, but he did not. The matter was settled. I had questioned his decision several times, but he was no longer thinking about it.
To that concern I added another, less egotistical: that of extracting poor Melanski from his sorry state.
A change of scenery, many fatigues and distractions and the suppression of the damned box seemed to me to be the best specific to employ, and I promised myself ardently to prescribe a departure from Montivilliers.
However, I had not reached the end of the surprises that were in store for me.
One day, when Melanski was traveling the country in his carriage, instead of accompanying him, as I often did, I stayed in the house. I had a headache.
Repose did not soothe it; on the contrary, it aggravated it; I wanted to try a little exercise.
In the garden there was a small patch of land that was absolutely uncultivated and had fallen prey to parasitic plants. It had not occurred to me to ask Melanski why that tiny part of his garden was languishing in that fashion amid well-kept flower-beds and carefully trimmed bushes.
I thought it was because he was planning some important plantation, unless something prevented him from digging it up...and I went to fetch a spade, and started work, taking a childish delight in plunging in my spade with the aid of my foot, lifting the clods of earth and turning them over, disheveled, moist and embalmed.
Suddenly, I felt a rather strong resistance. I parted the earth and I discovered a little box two or three feet square, buried at a mediocre depth.
What could that box contain? Was it money? Who had put it there? Was it Melanski?
Well, yes, it must be him. First of all, the box was too intact to have been there a long time. Secondly, although it was a false calculation, the presence of the box explained why Melanski left fallow the plot in which it lay. But in that case, it wasn’t money that it contained, because I knew very well that Melanski did not have the mania of hoarding.
What was it, then?
The lid was only stuck to the box by two pins, and the adherence was imperfect. I was able to slide the blade of the spade into the interstice, and a slight pressure was sufficient to lift out the two pins and raise the lid.
Full of fright, I lowered it again very rapidly. I had just perceived, in a heap, all the bones of a human body; and what had struck me the most in the curse of the rapid glance was the skull, the frontal bone of which no longer presented anything but a void carefully cut out in a rectangle, like the envelope of an ordinary letter, and exactly the same size.
“A crime!” I exclaimed. “And perhaps Melanski’s! Oh, great God! No, not him, it’s impossible. Anyway, he hasn’t been in the house long enough. A cadaver can’t be reduced to bones in six months.
The author of the crime, evidently, was the person who had lived in the house before Melanski. But how was it that Melanski had left that precise plot of land uncultivated? It had to be admitted that if it was pure chance, it was a strange coincidence.
I spoke to myself thus while nailing the box shut again, reburying it, and even trying to replant the grass that my spade had uprooted—in sum, trying to efface the marks of my ill-judged labor as much as possible.
When I had accomplished such a reintegration, I walked pensively from path to path, very anxious as to the course of action I should adopt with regard to Melanski. The reader can imagine my embarrassment.
One of two things had to be true: either Melanski was guilty or he was not. I was reasoning, of course, in the natural hypothesis of a crime.
If he was guilty, the best thing was to appear to know nothing about it, for fear of causing him a terrible shame, of compromising my own dignity, and of rendering official, so to speak, the intimate scruple I felt in not denouncing him.
If he was not guilty—and in that case, he must have no suspicion of the already ancient deposit of the box of bones—it was better to inform him, in order that he did not bear any longer the latent responsibility for a crime that someone else had committed.
After much hesitation, I decided to tell Melanski what I had done, because I could not doubt that he was innocent.
Not only did his heart, the noblest that I had ever encountered, seem to me to be impenetrable to the idea of any crime whatsoever, but he had a veritable theory, confirmed many times by my arguments, that a criminal ordinarily harms himself more than his victim, and, in consequence, is acting like a madman.
It is true the Melanski had perhaps gone completely mad…in which case...
Suddenly I saw him come through the door to the garden and advance toward me. I was so absorbed that I had not heard the sound of his carriage when it had arrived.
“Come on,” he said to me. “Let’s have dinner.”
His face was less somber, almost cheerful. He added: “I’m pleased with myself this evening. I’ve carried out an operation that has succeeded marvelously. I removed a polyp bigger than your thumb from someone’s nose; and it’s an operation that I was scarcely expecting to perform this morning. Can you imagine that on the road from Montivilliers to Harfleur, I spotted a peasant with an extremely swollen nostril. I made him a sign like this, by touching my noise:
“‘That’s troubling you, eh?’
“‘Yes, Monsieur.’
“‘Would you like me to get rid of that swelling for you?’
“‘Very well, if it doesn’t cost me too dear.’
“‘I’ll take a nice chicken from you—is that too much?’
“‘Will it hurt much?’
“‘No.’
“The peasant lived in a farm next to the road; he took me to his house; I took out my instrument-case and extracted his polyp in no time. Oh, I missed you. I would have put it off to the next day so that you could come and watch if I hadn’t feared that my man wouldn’t want it any longer.”
“Me too,” I said, trying to maintain my composure. “I’ve carried out an operation—look.”
And I extended my arm toward the patch of ground that I had shifted recently.
He went very pale; his gaze wandered; his lips trembled: so many accusatory symptoms. The amazement into which I was thrown gave me a countenance little better than his.
&n
bsp; “Oh, well! You’ve seen the box?” he murmured, dully.
“Yes.”
“You’ve opened it?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve discovered a specimen of my madness?”
A specimen of his madness! There was something terrifying in that emphatic phrase.
“You can count on my discretion,” I told him, “although I’m exposing myself thus to sharing your remorse; never, I swear to you, will I reveal what hazard has revealed to me. I shall be content silently to curse the unfortunate inspiration that I had to do some gardening. Oh, I wish to Heaven that I was still unaware…if I had only settled on the idea that the box had been put there by you, I would have had the tact to hide my discovery from you, but I thought that it would come as a complete surprise to you.”
“Why would I be surprised?” he said, staring at me.
“I assumed,” I said, “that you were incapable of committing such an action, and I accused the person who lived here before you of having done it.”
“Eh? Who else but me would have been mad enough?”
“Mad!” I cried, withdrawing my arm, on which he had been leaning for a moment. “Mad…you’re priceless! Rather say criminal, all that there is of the most criminal!”
“You’re harsh,” he said to me. “In truth, I’ve ceded to a culpable impulse.”
At the phrase “culpable impulse,” I shrugged my shoulders in a gesture of indignation.
He continued: “Look, my friend, the proof that I have seen clearly what might have been odious to my charge in the drama from which I’ve just emerged is that I would have blushed to tell you about it. But since you’ve lifted one of the corners of the veil, it’s as well that you know everything. I’m much mistaken if, when fully informed, you aren’t also more indulgent.”
“No, no, Melanski, if you please. I’m only too embarrassed to know the reality of your crime, without also knowing all the details of it.”
Singular Amours Page 5