In the calm and peace of that solitude, the surgeon, after the physical expenditures of the day, the fatigues of operations, consultations, trips to the establishments of manufacturers of surgical instruments, bookshops and publishers, still found sufficient energy for cerebral function. He needed that obstinate labor in that quiet corner, in order to produce so much, to astonish the medical world with the quantity of the works conceived by his powerful brain.
On the other hand, that physical and cerebral hyperactivity was welcomed by the surgeon’s adversaries as a weapon that they turned against him. One doesn’t burn the candle at both ends, said some. Overwork leads to folly when it doesn’t lead astray, others thought.
That afternoon, however, Armand Caresco, sitting at the blackened wood table, was not working. Before his eyes he had numerous letters from the morning’s mail, brought by one of the footmen from the Avenue Hoche—for, confident in Bordier’s punctuality, he had not yet made the daily visits to the patients on whom he had operated the previous day. A depressed lassitude overwhelmed him; his indifferent hand rummaged through the letters without deciding to open one.
Nothing connected with his clinic had given rise to his depression, however; his latest series of operations, apart from one female pauper who had died on the table—a trivial concern, a pauperess!—had been successful. No patient had manifested disquieting convulsions, and the telephone call he had received a few minutes ago from Soeur Cunégonde had announced the departure of the old grandmother he had trepanned, also recovered.
What intimate contrariety, then, rendered his hand limp and veiled his thoughts vaguely with the mists of discouragement? He took a small notebook from his jacket pocket and opened it. Figures were aligned there which he added up. That notebook never left him; he inscribed his expenditure and receipts therein, without details, in round numbers. Every week he established the balance; every month and every year he added up the totals.
Armand Caresco leaned his elbows on the table, interrogating the pages of the notebook from the beginning, turning the pages slowly. Thus he reviewed the history of his income during the twelve years he had been practicing, from his father’s wretched clinic to the superb establishment in the Avenue Hoche. What a road traveled!
The takings of the first years were very modest, in truth; his receipts barely covered his expenditure. Then, suddenly, from fifteen thousand the sum jumped to fifty thousand, during the fifth year. It was a giant step that had been further amplified in the years that followed. And last year, had he not taken in four hundred and fifty thousand francs? Almost a fortune. At first, the expenses had not followed the pace of the receipts; he had had savings; a little longer, and he would soon have been rich. But the installation in the Avenue Hoche, and, above all, Mathilde’s rapacity, had swallowed up his savings.
Desperately, he went over the figures again, as if searching for an arithmetical error, a fortunate slip that would chase away the anguish of observing his vanished wealth. Besides, why linger over his calculations? Was his wallet not empty? Did he not have, for the fifteenth of December, that absurd debt of a hundred thousand francs borrowed from Israel—a debt that he finally had to repay, for the banker had told him firmly the day before yesterday that he would no longer renew it and that he would leave the bailiff the care of acting in favor of his interests if the money was not forthcoming. Israel, a former fellow in religion, a man he had invited to his home so frequently, whom he had treated as a friend! Caresco recognized the traditional rapacity of the race of which he regretted being a member. The Jew was threatening him with the bailiff, and he would do as he said.
For a moment, the surgeon thought about taking out a further loan, of finding some lender confident in his future and his success—but where could he turn? Of friends, he had none; usurers would only advance him a hundred thousand francs at enormous rates of interest and in the short term—at the end of which he would find himself in the same situation, doubtless aggravated. It would be climbing higher in order to fall further.
Ask Mathilde? Mathilde, who was the reason for the difficulty—for it was for her, to satisfy her stupid caprice for that necklace that he had got into debt? His mistress would put her hand in the fire to pull him out of the abyss, he was sure, but could she do it? She was as poor as him. All the money he had given her had only gone to fill in her own gulf. She had often told him that, and Mathilde did not lie.
Sell the necklace? Perhaps—he would talk to her about it. The sum they would get back would be far from sufficient, but might it not persuade Israel to be patient? Then again, in the month between now and the settlement date, he could anticipate a few fruitful operations. He had a few in prospect, which he could hurry along: General de Rion, the farmer’s wife, and Stella, the member of the company at the Opéra-Comique, who would be brought by the dancer with whom he had dined a few days before, and two others already announced by the Vicomtesse de Mesma would help to fill the hole.
Already, he had established a scaffolding of certainty on those probabilities, losing—as the desperate do—a precise sense of things, his clarity of vision, the sage coordination of affairs that had always characterized him before he had been caught in this labyrinth of worries. Yes, truly, he had not anticipated, when he had gone a few months before to hold his hand out to the banker, that he might end up in such an impasse, drowning so piteously in the bankruptcy of his common sense! What a disaster! Was it worth the trouble of being so organized, so strong, of having worked so hard, to have done so many operations, to find himself, in the final analysis, dragged by the claws of bad luck to the base of the rock, where the howling pack of creditors would tighten its semicircle to tear him apart, without his being able to escape, to sink into the rock that opposed his flight!
Oh, money worries! The worst of all, after Mathilde!
He replaced the notebook in his jacket pocket on the left side, the side of the heart, devotedly, as if he were placing the portrait of a lover. Then, determined to chase away the shadows of his anxiety with the light of work, he picked up the abandoned penholder, consulted his notes, and exerted his mental strength upon the lines he was writing.
But his mind could not follow his will; his thoughts flew away toward the image of a strong-box filled with gold and thousand-franc bills that he could extract as he wished, making gold coins spill from torn sacks. Then there was the raptorial face of Israel, which surged forth between himself and his abstraction.
Generally unimaginative, very much the master of his intellectual distributions, he was momentarily astonished by these obsessions. And, definitively unable to apply himself, he pushed away the books and pens, and abandoned the work.
Then he opened a drawer, took out a case that contained a superb pair of dueling pistols, chose one and, without moving from his seat, extended his arm and took aim at the target. Shot after shot rang out, and every one hit the bull’s-eye. The black cardboard circle was eaten away by the bullets; soon, nothing was left of it.
Satisfied with his skill, he went to detach the target, and considered it at length.
“Here you are, with your toy!”
It was Mathilde coming in, returning from the Bois. Her plaited black skirt rustled. Her rounded doll-like face, whipped by the keen cold air of the excursion, had rediscovered the pink colors of its cheeks; her opulent bosom filled the room.
Armand put down his weapon, stood up, and put his arms around his mistress’ study waist.
“There you are my dear; did you have a pleasant excursion? I’m glad you’re here; I need to talk to you seriously. You need to help me alleviate serious concerns...”
“Poor rat! There are serious concerns!”
She covered his face with little cold kisses, pressing the pulp of her lips upon his tanned skin, going to search his neck for the favorite place. Those caresses usually sufficed to avert the threat of serious conversations, but this time, Armand seemed to remain insensible to their advances. Mathilde, sensing the question of m
oney approaching, abandoned the embrace and went to sit in an armchair, seriously.
“What is it, then?”
“Israel doesn’t want to know any longer.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“The day before yesterday. After renewing the loan for a month and a half at ten per cent—which is nearly a hundred per cent per annum—that if I’m not in a position to reimburse him by the fifteenth of December, which is in forty-five days, he’ll send the bailiffs in and have my sanitarium seized. Not the instruments—he doesn’t have the right—but all the furniture, the tapestries, the pictures, the works of art. You can imagine the scandal, can’t you?”
“The old Shylock!” exclaimed Mathilde, feigning indignation. “What do you owe him?”
“The price of the necklace—a hundred thousand. A hundred and ten with the interest.”
“Well, between now and then...”
“Between now and then, my dear, I can’t earn a hundred thousand francs. Operations on which I was counting have fallen through; others haven’t been paid for and never will be. No, I can’t see how I can get out of it.”
“Ask your father.”
“My father! My father, part with money! It’s obvious that you don’t know him. Then again, he hasn’t a sou.”
She did not raise any more objections, but contented herself with a little sigh, smoothing the pleats of her skirt. The feathers in her black velvet hat stirred silently along with her body. She avoided her lover’s gaze as he fixed her with his black gaze, a burning demand on his lips.
Now that the anguish of money was suggesting the shrinkage of reality to him, he was wondering by what chain of events, by what aberration, he had arrived at a passionate attachment to that woman. Doubt regarding his strength and his habit of victory were mingling within him, since he, always the master of others and sometimes of destiny, lowering the flag before the omnipotence of the beautiful Tripe-merchant, had reached this point for her, for a caprice of coquetry, of getting into debt, into the impasse at the end of which is ruination.
That necklace! In giving it to his mistress he had committed a lapse of judgment for which he reproached himself dolorously, and a certain rancor took hold in his heart against the fat woman. His eyes, in coveting her, distilled the voluptuousness of his sentiments, but brief gleams were also passing here, charged with anger against the person who dominated him with her imbecile power. He tasted a poison that was simultaneously bitter and sickly.
“Yes, he went on, “it’s the necklace that has sunk me. Without the necklace...”
The beautiful Tripe-merchant continued her refusal to understand. Her coated mask conserved the same cheerful placidity, of a contented woman with a good digestion. But she divined that a recourse to her delicacy was about to be attempted, and internally, she was preparing the eventual story.
“Yes, my cat,” she said, “it’s that accursed necklace...”
Then, even though there was no desolation in her tone, nothing in hr physiognomy, her gesture or her voice that could give rise to the supposition of a regret for that unfortunate purchase, a generous impulse of her heart that might drive her to restore the ruinous pearls, to throw them at the feet of the unfortunate lover who had given them to her, Armand, as a skillful duelist, took advantage of the sentence to bring up his proposal.
“Oh, my dear Mathilde, don’t reproach yourself. No, I gave you those pearls with great heart, without foreseeing the embarrassment in which the gift would place me, so I certainly wouldn’t want to dispossess you of them, to accept the sacrifice that I sense that you’re disposed to make.”
Mathilde could not master a certain amazement. He continued: “However, perhaps there’s a middle course to which I could easily reconcile myself. It would consist of borrowing on the necklace, from the same jeweler who sold it, a sum...”
He did not finish. Mathilde, behind the fine batiste handkerchief that hid her eyes, was playing the comedy of tears.
“My wolf…forgive me, my big wolf…it’s already done!”
“What! It’s already done! Oh, my Tithilde, how generous you are!”
He had completely misunderstood. Mathilde sensed how unfavorable the reaction would be to her, and the difficulty she would have in completing her lie. She was burning her boats. Too bad! Did she not have enough to live on? She would never be naïve enough to give up property acquired. Such follies were all very well for inexperienced youth, but it had cost her too much to be generous in those times for man who had no gratitude for her sacrifices.
“You don’t understand. How annoyed I am by that! You know that I still had thirty thousand francs in debts...”
“You told me ten thousand...”
“I told you ten thousand? You’re mistaken, my rat. It was thirty thousand. So I went to find Jacob, the jeweler who sold me the necklace, and asked him to advance me that sum, leaving him the necklace in pawn. He accepted, and just now, I paid off my debt. Hold on—I have the receipts in my pocket…would you like to see them? No, you don’t want to, my poor cabbage! I’m utterly, utterly desolate!”
With her infantile gaze, she studied her lover’s distressed expression. Implausible as that retreat was, it seemed nevertheless to be accepted by the surgeon, who fell into an armchair in despair, his head in his hands, sunk in an obscure melancholy.
Mathilde, in order to distract him from his obsession and not to give him time to appreciate futility of her lie, resolved to fall back on heroic means. Rapidly, with a sure and habitual gesture, she removed her hat, caused her bodice and skirt to disappear and, clad in her open-necked chemise gripped in her corset and her pink silk bloomers descending over her black stockings, she went to stand in front of him.
Generally, he could not resist the sight of that overflowing flesh and the sight of Mathilde in that costume, the contrast of colors, the transparency of fabrics and the provocation of the silk having the gift of animating his desires, of striking the spark that ignited the beast, of making him forget his cares of his occupations, and the lassitude of toil, in order to plunge into the ardent satisfaction of the senses.
This time, however, he pushed her away, almost brutally, refusing the flesh-bath that she was offering him.
“No, not today. I’m tired.”
“Your fatigue never stops you, my wolf. Why do you no longer want the woman who loves you?” She pressed herself upon him, soliciting him with her bare arms, her globular breasts, the heady atmosphere that emanated from her.
Again, however, he pushed her away.
“No, no, no. Go away. Leave me alone.”
Offended by that disdain, she rapidly picked up her clothes and took refuge in her bedroom.
He picked up his hat, went out, leapt into the carriage that Mathilde had just quit, and had himself taken to the Avenue Hoche. On the way, he opened his mail, of mediocre interest: emotional letters of thanks, demands for money—he shrugged his shoulders at those!—clippings from newspapers concerning him, marked with red pencil, sent to him by an agency. With a rapid glance he scanned the pieces of paper, and then tore them into little pieces which he scattered in the wind through the lowered window of the coupé. Nothing inspired attention, nothing promised an operation.
In his consulting room, Soeur Cunégonde came to join him.
“Well, Sister, what’s new?” He was thinking about the condition of his patients.
She replied: “Number six—you know, the little seamstress with the ovariotomy—has left without paying.”
“Again! But you shouldn’t have let her go!”
“She didn’t have a sou, Doctor. Her uncle, who was supposed to pay the bill, thought the sum too high and didn’t want to settle it. She said that she’d pay it off in installments. I got her to sign bills. Here they are.”
She took four pieces of paper from her money-clip, which Caresco took angrily. Everything definitely seemed to be turning against him, even the humble, who were generally the most punctual payers, were also proving u
nwilling to hand over cash at the very moment when Israel was threatening him.
“Has Monsieur Bordier come this afternoon?” he went on.
“He’s still upstairs, Doctor.”
Followed by the sister, who hastened her steps to keep up with him, he went up the stairs at a run. No urgent necessity solicited such haste, but he was in his active mood, needing to expend energy, and anger was causing his soul to seethe, urging him to throw himself into his work, to enter more energetically into the fecund struggle of life, the struggle of endeavor and productivity.
He opened a door. On the bed in the room, a man on whose liver he had operated two days before was moaning.
“What’s the matter? Are you in pain?”
“Yes, a great deal.”
“An injection of morphine, Sister.”
He lifted up bedclothes and removed the pins securing the body-stocking fitted over the dressing. Then he brought forward a wheeled apparatus containing a fountain for washing and disinfecting hands, and a ray with a few instruments of primary utility, bathed in a solution of phenol: scalpels, forceps, scissors, probes and drains. While he made the soap-foam fly, Soeur Cunégonde filled a small Pravaz syringe with a morphine solution taken from a wide-necked bottle.
“Not now, Sister.”
He opened a tap, dipped his fingers in sublimate, returned to the patient and removed the wadding of the dressing. The odor of the iodoform with which the wound had been coated was released. The scarring was proceeding normally; the suture-points in the skin were not even reddened by inflammation. The patient considered the wound unemotionally.
“The wound is perfectly fine, Monsieur. Why are you complaining?”
“Doctor, I’m suffering horribly.”
“Give him the injection, then, Sister.”
In reality, the man was not in pain. He was complaining in order to obtain the morphine, for which he had already acquired a habit, which plunged him into a benevolent bliss. It was his second injection of the day.
The surgeon was not deceived. What did it matter to him if the patients contracted fatal addictions during their sojourn in his sanitarium? Was it not the surest way of obtaining the immobility necessary to the closure of the wounds, and also of shutting up the groans of pain, the cries of distress? By that means, people were healed without suffering or died without complaint. But the majority of those who were cured took away an indelible vice, the seeds of another death even more frightful, a disastrous passion that organized the simultaneous decay of the body and the soul, to end at Sainte-Anne.
The Necessary Evil Page 16