Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  Can it be that such an avaricious and murderous expression is the face of Eros? And is it surprising that so many women in love shut their eyes beneath the kisses of that deity?

  Emma, therefore, gazed complacently at that vile physiognomy, and did not see Lerne watching her, laughing up his sleeve at her misapprehension.

  Laughing—but philosophically, and in order not to cry. My uncle was visibly suffering. He seemed to have understood that Emma would never love him, and the professor was not taking his disappointment well. He was growing old, killing himself with work. Machines had been installed on the terrace of the laboratory and the roof of the château, whose deployment interested me greatly. They were surmounted by characteristic antennae and, as bells were continually ringing in the two dwellings, it was my opinion that they had been transformed into wireless telegraph and telephone stations.

  One morning. Lerne sent a little boat out on the pond—a toy torpedo-boat. He controlled it from the bank with the aid of an apparatus that was also equipped with antennae: telemechanical apparatus. That was conclusive: the professor was studying communication at a distance with no solid intermediary. The new method for transposing personalities? Very probably.

  I lost interest in it. A fortunate outcome of my tribulations now seemed an impossible miracle; I would therefore know nothing of that future discovery, nor of any other secrets blackening the past of my uncle and his assistants. It was by means of the meditation of these latter mysteries that I countered the anxious insomnia of my nights and the idleness of my days, but I found nothing. Perhaps, though, my mind was growing dull, for, among the daily occurrences that I have just narrated, there were some that it was unable to retain, to which certain of Lerne’s confidences lent a cardinal importance, and the reasoned examination of which would have given me cause for hope of deliverance.

  So, in mid-September, that deliverance was accomplished without my having anticipated it, in the following circumstances.

  For some time, the platonic acquaintance of the Minotaur and Emma had being growing firmer. They were savoring an increasing intoxication in contemplating one another from afar. The monster, having become accustomed to my body, gesticulated. His pantomime was lascivious and simian. As for Emma, unable to refuse these apelike gallantries, she had adopted the tactic of remaining hidden in the small arbor. There, invisible to everyone except for that horrid booby who parodied my role in deplorable buffoonery, she was able in total liberty to lock gazes with him, send him kisses from the rosy tips of her white fingers, as from a dainty imaginary catapult, and swear her passion by means of mummery and grimaces, as ballerinas do. At any rate, I can’t believe that she sketched any other declarations or other promises than those…and yet, they were sufficient to unleash the beast’s rut.

  Yes, that vile occasion arrived.

  One afternoon, while I was attempting to catch sight of my beloved through the bushes where she was leading on the false Nicolas, a racket of breaking and falling glass suddenly broke out. The Minotaur, his patience exhausted, had jumped through the window of the summer-house. Without the slightest care for my unfortunate physique, he ran forward, bruised, lacerated and covered in blood, howling in pain in a terrifying manner.

  It seemed to me that Emma uttered an exclamation and tried to escape—but the creature had already plunged into the little wood.

  Then behind me, I heard the sound of someone running. In response to the noise of breaking glass, Lerne and his assistants had emerged from the laboratory; they had seen the escape and were racing toward the fateful arbor.

  Unfortunately, the assistants were fearful of coming too close to me, and the detour they were making to avoid me, outside the pasture, was delaying them. Lerne, intrepidly, had taken a short cut, climbing over the wire fence, and was heading straight across the enclosure, his frock-coat ripped by the artificial thorns.

  Alas, he was old and slow…they would all get there too late. Atrocious! Atrocious!

  No! It must not be! I launched myself at the frail barrier and crashed into it, breaking it in spite of the little spikes that lacerated my skin. With a single bound, I smashed through the wall of foliage….

  The scene that confronted me was worthy of admiration.

  The sunlight coming through the vaults of leaves striped the undergrowth with light. I saw Emma stretched out on the edge of the slightly sunken path, pale and huddled, with her jeweled undergarments alluringly displaced. She was moaning voluptuously, and her hoarse, feline plaint was too familiar for me to hesitate for an instant as to its nature. Standing in front of her, more bewildered than ever, the ignoble creature was not hiding the ridicule of his assuaged and now-inoffensive virility.

  I did not have the time for a longer look. All the stars of midnight blazed between him and me. In a rush of blood, I was drunk. Unmanageable wrath hurled me through that dazzling curtain, horns poised. I struck something that fell; I trampled it with my four hooves and, turning back upon my victim, I stamped, and stamped, and stamped….

  Suddenly, my uncle’s breathless voice screeched: “Hey! You’re committing suicide, my friend!”

  My dementia evaporated. The stars went out. Everything reappeared.

  The beautiful girl, emerged from her luxurious coma, was sitting on the ground, blinking her eyes uncomprehendingly. The assistants were watching me warily, each one behind a bush—and Lerne, leaning over my inert and injured former body, was lifting up his head, bloodied by a large wound.

  And it was me—me!—who had committed the indescribable stupidity of damaging myself!

  Having felt all the parts of the wounded man’s body, the professor formulated his diagnosis: “One arm dislocated; three ribs broken; fractures of the left clavicle and tibia; they’re not mortal—but the horn-thrust to the head is more serious. Hmmm! The brain has been reduced to pulp. It’s ruined. Nothing will save it. In half an hour, finita la commedia!”

  I had to lean against a tree in order not to collapse. So my body, my ultimate fatherland, was going to die! It was over. Banished forever from my annihilated dwelling, I had eliminated the first condition of my deliverance. It was over. Even Lerne had admitted that he could do nothing. Half an hour! The brain reduced to pulp! But…but…that brain…

  He could…

  On the contrary, he could do everything necessary. I drew nearer to him. It was my last throw of the dice.

  My uncle, who had turned to the young woman, said to her sadly: “You must love him very much, to love him still in such a degenerate state! My poor Emma! I must be extremely unlovable, for you to prefer such a wreck to me!”

  Emma was weeping into her hands

  “She must love him,” Lerne repeated, looking at the sinner, the dying man and me in turn. “She must love him!”

  For a few moments, I surrendered myself to uncouth entrechats and attempts at vocalization, intended to express my thoughts. My uncle was wrapped up in his own. Without quite realizing that his clouded brow must be harboring some stormy conflict of interests and passions, dominated by the imminence of a catastrophe that he might be able to prevent, I redoubled my objurgations.

  “Yes, Nicolas, I understand what you want,” my uncle said. “You’d gladly donate your brain to its original envelope, which might save it, since you have put Jupiter’s beyond use…well, so be it!”

  “Save him! Save him!” implored the adulterous mistress, who had only grasped that one word. “Save him! I swear to you, Frédéric, I swear to you that I’ll never see him again!”

  “Enough!” said Lerne. “On the contrary, you’ll have to love him with all your heart. I don’t want to cause you any more grief. What good is it to struggle against one’s destiny?”

  He called the assistants and issued curt orders to them. Karl and Wilhelm took possession of the Minotaur, who was gasping. Johann had already left the clearing at a run.

  “Schnell! Schnell!” said the professor, and added: “Quickly, Nicolas—follow us!”

  I ob
eyed, torn between the joyful prospect of recovering my body and the dread that it might die before the operation.

  It was a complete success.

  Nevertheless, deprived of precautions preliminary to the anesthesia, which urgency did not permit us to be given, I experienced and instructive but painful ether-dream.

  I dreamed that Lerne, by way of jest, instead of restoring my own figure, had given me Emma’s. What a purgatory that ravishing form was! I missed that of the bull. My soul found itself assailed therein by nervous demands and impetuous instincts, which mastered it. A natural desire, more powerful than the will, dictated my actions, and I felt that the resistance of my masculine spirit was reduced to a minimum. To be sure, I was dealing with an exceptional temperament in which lust was a chronic malady, but, all the same, considering the ordinary conduct of men and the power of Venus over so many women, how many of you, my brothers, were to you change sex while retaining your brains, would make honest girls rather than loose women?

  It might be, though, that ether is a poor professor of gynecology, and that my dream had abused me—for it was nothing but a vain nightmare. It probably lasted for a quarter of a second, the time to experience a single tooth of a biting saw, or the trenchant blade of an ill-sharpened scalpel.

  Twilight fills the laundry with a vermilion half-light. On lowering my eyes, I perceive the tips of my moustache.

  It is the resurrection of Nicolas Vermont.

  And it is also the end of Jupiter. The black mass in which I have sojourned is being cut up at the back of the room. In the courtyard, the squabbling dogs are already fighting over the first morsels that Johann is throwing to them.

  My broken leg is hurting, and the clavicle too. I’ve returned to a painful armor.

  Lerne is watching over me. He’s delighted. At least, he should be. Isn’t he at peace with his conscience? Hasn’t he atoned for his sins against me? How could I feel resentful toward him? It even seems to me that I owe him some gratitude…

  It’s very true that nothing simulates a good deed like the voluntary reparation of a misdeed.

  XII. Lerne Changes Tack

  I had sworn, while I was in the bull’s hide, that if my original form were ever returned to me, I would flee immediately, with or without Emma. Autumn was coming to an end, though, and I had not left Fonval.

  That was because my treatment there was the inverse of what it had been before.

  First of all, I could use my time as I wished. The first usage I made of that liberty was to go to the charnel-house in the clearing and to erase every trace of my visit. Some favorable deity had dictated that no one had gone there during my bucolic phase in the meadow, so that none of the assistants had noticed the violation of the grave. Either they had changed their cemetery, or my uncle was no longer vivisecting any but tiny creatures of which the dog-pack left nothing, or the experiments in anima vili40 had been completely abandoned.

  I observed, that day, a detail that took a great weight from my heart. I had feared that the soul of the unfortunate Klotz might have been transferred to some carefully-isolated animal, but his remains—although magnificently evocative of a Baudelairean poem—refuted that hypothesis. The dead man’s brain, beneath his wound, was engraved with numerous and deep circumvolutions, still visible. Their number and depth testified to their humanity, proof of a pure and simple murder—thank God!

  Thus, I enjoyed considerable independence.

  Besides, an affectionate and repentant Lerne had been manifest at my beside during my convalescent. Oh, not the Lerne of yesteryear, my aunt Lidivine’s cheerful companion—but, all the same, no longer the sullen and bloodthirsty host who had welcomed me as if he wished that I would go away. When he saw that I was back on my feet, he summoned Emma, and told her in my presence that I had been cured of a temporary imbecility, and that she was to adore me.

  “As for me,” he continued, “I renounce an exercise that was no longer appropriate to my age. Emma, you shall now have your own room, next to mine; the one in which you keep your finery. I only ask that you do not leave me. Sudden loneliness would augment the distress that you can easily imagine and that both of you will pardon. It will pass; work will get the better of it. Don’t be afraid, my girl, the greater part of the profits of my invention will be yours. Nothing has changed in that regard—and Nicolas will be no less provided for in the deed of partnership and my will for having been in your bed. Love one another in peace!”

  Having spoken thus, the professor took himself off to his electrical machines.

  Nothing astonished Emma. Confident and naïve, she had accepted my uncle’s tirade by clapping her hands. Personally, knowing what an actor he was, I might have been able to tell myself that he was feigning generosity in order to keep me in his house, whether because he was afraid of what I might reveal or because he was hatching some new plan—but the two Circean operations had disturbed my memory and my intelligence somewhat. Why, I said to myself, should I suspect a man who has, of his own free will, rescued me from the darkest situation imaginable? He’s following the right track now! All is for the best!

  A new life therefore began, pleasant and immoral: a life of love and liberty on the one hand, and of work and apparent abnegation on the other. We were all discreet, in our own fashion, Emma and I in our effusions, my uncle in his regrets.

  Judging by the professor’s laborious and familial behavior, who could have believed in his victims? In the trap that he had set for me? In the murder of Klotz? And in Nelly-MacBell, who never ceased howling at the clouds or the stars that frightful torment that I had endured myself? For she was still there. That puzzled me—the fact that Lerne was perpetuating the punishment of a sin whose gravity must seem to him to be considerable attenuated, now that Emma no longer held sway over his heart. I resolved to confess my surprise to my uncle.

  “You’ve put your finger on my greatest concern, Nicolas,” he replied. “To re-establish the order of things in that situation, it’s absolutely necessary that MacBell’s body should return here…but what stratagem would make his father decide to send him back? Try to think of one. Help me. I promise to act without delay as soon as we’ve found one.”

  This reply dissolved my last doubts. I didn’t ask myself why Lerne had undergone such a complete metamorphosis from one day to the next. In my opinion, the professor had finally mended his ways, and, though lacking other virtues—which would doubtless reappear one by one—his old rectitude seemed to me to have been reborn, the equal of that science which he had never abandoned, and as evident.

  And Lerne’s science was almost unlimited. I was increasingly convinced of it as the days went by. We had resumed our walks, and he took advantage of them to entertain me learnedly about everything we encountered. A leaf gave rise to the entirety of botany; entomology developed with regard to a woodlouse; a raindrop unleashed for my delight a deluge of chemistry; and by the time we had reached the edge of the forest, I had heard an entire professorial college from Lerne’s lips.

  But it was just there, on the border of the woods and the fields, that he really came into his own. Once the last tree was past, he stopped. Inexorably, hoisted himself up on to a boundary-marker, and held forth regarding the universe, in confrontation with the earth and the heavens. He described things so ingeniously that, to listen to him, you thought that Nature was explaining herself, opening herself up from the depths of the earth to the end of space. His words were as capable of hollowing out hills in order to lay bare the geological strata as of bringing the invisible planets closer, in order to discuss them more easily. They were able to analyze the vapor of clouds and to reveal the origin of a wind, to evoke prehistoric landscapes and just as easily prophesy the future of the region, for centuries to come. He scanned the immense panorama with his eyes and his mind, from the nearby hut to the horizons that distance painted blue. Everything was defined by a word, clarified by a commentary, and as he made great sweeping gestures to designate, by turns, some river or bell-t
ower, the span of his arm seemed to prolong itself along the line of sight and describe the countryside with the luminous and salutary gesture of a lighthouse.

  The return to Fonval was usually accomplished less scientifically. My uncle continued speculations in private which, I suppose, he esteemed too abstruse for my intelligence, and he hummed his favorite tune as he went along, which he had probably picked up from his assistants: “Rum ti tum, ti tum…”

  Then, as soon as we were back, he hastened to the laboratory or the greenhouse.

  We alternated these walks with automobile trips. Then, my uncle bestrode another hobby-horse. He assigned my vehicle its place in the classification of animals, exposed the beasts of today, those of yesterday and those of tomorrow, in the midst of which, no doubt, the automobile would take its place—and the prophecy concluded with an affectionate hymn of praise to my eighty-horsepower machine.

  He wanted to learn how to drive the machine. It was an easy task. In three lessons, I made him a past master. He always drove me thereafter, and I made no complaint, because my eyes tired very quickly with sustained attention since the double section and the two consequential sutures of the optical nerve. My left ear had not yet recovered the desirable sensitivity, but I dared not confess that to Lerne, for fear of adding a further remorse to the number that he appeared to have already.

  It was after one of these sporting excursions that while cleaning my car—I had to do it myself—I happened to find a little notebook between the back and the cushion of Lerne’s seat, which had slipped out of his pocket. I stuck it in mine, with the intention of giving it back to him—but curiosity moved me when I reached my room without having been able to see the professor again, and I examined the find.