The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3)

by André Couvreur

  Yes, all those details made me a rare animal. Human snobbery, that enormous stupidity, now disdains the breed of English terrier that I represented so magnificently, after having been so enthusiastic about it. We are no longer fashionable. With us, it is much the same as it is with music and old dances. Dance-halls no longer admit anything but the cacophony of negro music and savage contortions. It is the same with the adopting of long-haired dogs—lapdogs, barbets, Pomeranians, King Charles spaniels—as many sullen uglinesses with lice in their fur, and consequently propagators of epidemics, and perpetually scratching. As for me, sweep me with a sponge, and I remain a paragon of neatness and hygiene. I don’t want to malign my new brothers and sisters, but I granted myself an indisputable superiority on that score. Such was, at any rate, my opinion when I was a man.

  I was appreciating myself thus at my full value, before the mirror, when the sound of the elevator door closing down below warned me that someone was about to come up. Look out! I said to myself. Let’s not be noticed.

  I had the presence of mind to go and hide behind one of the benches that exist on the landings of well-to-do houses, which had been waiting there unsuccessfully for years to accommodate the seats of people fearful of mechanical devices and fatigued by climbing up on foot. Invisible in that refuge, I saw the old gentleman who lived on the fourth floor pass by, with whom I had had altercations because of his passion for deafening wireless broadcasts, to which he gave free rein late into the night in order to soothe his insomnia, which provoked ours. I had severely taken him to task for it one day, and since then we no longer spoke to one another. He passed by humming like a brass band. I had the prudence not to reply by barking.

  Some time afterwards the elevator vibrated again. I went back to my hiding place and saw a young telegraphist appear, who stopped on my floor. What! The concierge had not sent him up in the service elevator? I would take him to task for that. Oh, but no—I no longer had the voice for that.

  The telegraphist rang the doorbell, for form’s sake. He waited without conviction, and then bent down to slide a telegram under the door, which he had just taken from his bag.

  A telegram at this hour? Was it for me? Was it for Floriane?

  My jealousy, suddenly flaring up again, stronger than prudence, precipitated me toward the delivery boy in order to read the address before the missive disappeared. Too late, alas! A kick in the side greeted my curiosity.

  When the telegraphist had gone, I perceived that the tip of the envelope, insufficiently pushed through, was still visible at the bottom of the door. By virtue of a delicate mutual convention, Floriane and I each refrained, unless the correspondence concerned us both, of taking cognizance of the mail that the other received. As a dog, however, I no longer had to encumber myself with civilized scruples.

  I tried, therefore, to pull the telegram out with my claws. I only succeeded in pushing it a little further in. Then I put my muzzle to it for a long time, sniffing hard. My sense of smell, singularly enhanced, allowed me to recognize an ambergris perfume dear to Georges Ferval. There was no more doubt about it; the telegram was from my rival. It could only be destined for Floriane.

  Proof already, I thought…and sadness overwhelmed me.

  After which I rooted around to the right and the left, a little on the ascendant stairs, and a little on the descending ones, collecting dust and posing in front of the mirror, but always to return to the revelatory odor, to the stub of the telegram that mocked me.

  The sun was totally eclipsed by the window. The electricity did not take long to replace it. A religious silence reigned. Kitchen odors reminded me that I had not eaten since the day before. People were dining everywhere, in the peace of their hearths.

  And I was alone!

  Patience has its limit, even for dogs. I was beginning to grumble when the elevator advertised once again that someone was about to come up.

  It was her.

  Oh, my splendor! Never, on seeing her emerge from the elevator cage, so sprightly in her summer dress, tinted pink by the day’s warm air, with the smile that never left her, pricking her cheeks with two dimples, had I marveled so much, never had I been so convinced that she was my sole reason for living. And I had just stupidly acted out the tragedy of separation.

  She moved a bunch of tea-roses from one hand to the other, in order to take her keys from her handbag. She prepared to open the door. I could hold still no longer. I quit my hiding-place and bounded toward her, putting my paws on her skirt and whimpering with pleasure.

  But she shoved me away.

  “What’s that dog doing here? Have you finished soiling my dress?”

  My emotion must have been communicated to her however, perhaps by one of those psychic exchanges that exist between humans, and which might just as well—why not?—pass from animals to the successors of Adam and Eve, for she left the key in the lock to consider me at length.

  Softened, she murmured: “But it’s adorable, the little mongrel! Who can it belong to? That slut on the fifth? A gift from her gigolo…which he’ll have stolen somewhere?”

  A supposition that dispelled a priori the possibility that she might take any interest in me. Indeed, after a caress on the head that made me quiver she dismissed me.

  “Go away, dog. You’re on the wrong floor. Go look somewhere else. Go.”

  She closed the door in my muzzle. On the other side, she bent down to pick up the telegram. I saw the fragment on which I had worked so hard disappear. I would know nothing, then.

  I was most annoyed at having been left outside. I waited for a moment, and then appealed, with a plaint that would have softened the heart of a gangster. A futile supplication. She must not have heard me, in her bedroom, situated at the back of the apartment. Or was she absorbed by her telegram? Then my plea mutated into an irritated barking, as only a tenant fortified by his right to enter his domicile could have uttered. At the same time I scratched the closed door frantically.

  She reappeared. She still had her hat on her head. It was, therefore, the telegram that had occupied her attention.

  “What, you again!”

  But I did not wait for her to decide to let me in. I irrupted into the apartment and made straight for the drawing room, where I leapt up on the Louis XVI sofa—and there, henceforth sure of being able to dispose her in my favor, I struck the irresistible pose of a dog that, to use the common expression, sits up and begs.

  “Oh, but he’s so sweet! You have no master then, doggie? You have nowhere to sleep, so you’re introducing yourself by force into my home?”

  She remained meditative and uncertain, admiring my pose, gripped by the languorous little whimpers that I was emitting without interruption.

  At that moment, Maria, our chambermaid appeared. Her afternoon of liberty concluded, she was coming, as a faithful servant, to ask whether Madame needed anything.

  “Do you know this dog, Maria?”

  “No Madame.”

  “It doesn’t belong to anyone in the house?”

  “There’s only one dog in the house, and that’s the Pekinese on the fifth.”

  “Can you imagine that this one came in without me calling him, and that it doesn’t want to go?”

  “It divines that Madame is so good,” Maria flattered, smarmily.

  “What are we going to do with it?”

  “Madame can always keep it overnight…I can prepare a basket in the kitchen for it to sleep in…and think about it in the morning.”

  “You’re right. It would be inhuman to put it out on the street this evening.”

  Inhuman—never had that word, applied to a dog, been so apposite.

  “And tomorrow we’ll interrogate the local concierges. Go on, Maria. Give it something to eat—the little thing is probably hungry. You’ll be able to find a drop of milk. When Monsieur comes in later, I’ll send him to the kitchen to see if it’s being good. As a precaution, tie it up with a cord. Go on. Bonsoir Maria—I don’t need you any longer.”

/>   A supreme felicity: I was staying in the apartment! I would be sleeping in the kitchen with a cord around my neck, but I had been admitted. Tomorrow, they would keep me.

  Maria had already taken me in her arms to carry me away. She smelled good. She emanated the same perfume as Floriane, and for good reason... But I could not tell her. In any case, she took it upon herself to make me forget her odor by emitting a supposition before going out that spoiled my joy.

  “I’ve just thought, Madame: might it not be Monsieur Georges’ dog, who has come to see Madame, and who, not finding Madame, might have left it at the door to await her return?”

  The wretch! She plunged my back into my drama.

  So, an understanding, a complicity, existed between mistress and maidservant, since the later called the other by his forename, and supposed that he might have visited her in my absence...

  I detested that girl. I could have sunk my teeth into the breast against which she was clutching me!

  However, her reflection did not trouble Floriane.

  “No, Maria, Monsieur Ferval has no dog. How could a naval officer have a dog? In any case, he wouldn’t have brought it from Toulon. Good night, Maria. Go to bed now. Tomorrow, breakfast at eight-thirty, as usual,”

  Maria took me away. In the kitchen, while grumbling, she put a wicker bread-basket on the floor for me, without even adding a dish-cloth that would have served me as a mattress. I was thus obliged to spend the night on straw, which, without being the damp straw of a dungeon, offering me no less discomfort.

  Furthermore, Maria knotted a piece of string around my neck, the other end of which she attached to the leg of a table. She also omitted to give me the nourishment prescribed by her mistress. All those circumstances revealed that she was in a hurry. I understood her haste when, once she had gone out, I heard her running down the service stairway instead of going up to her bedroom.

  My night…oh, my first night at home, captive and hungry, weeping all the tears of my heart! My night, a few meters away from Floriane! I imagined her giving the final cares to her sumptuous flesh, not waiting for my return to lie down languidly in our beautiful all-white bed. Her eyes were closed, her pretty blonde head framed by her left arm—the position she adopted to go to sleep. She was smiling in a dream at a naval officer. And I, the amorous spouse, the master, was subjected to St. Peter’s experiment in the basket of a psychic guinea-pig, in the neighborhood of saucepans, dish-cloths and the kitchen sink.

  I do not want to insist on the sadness of that night. It will be understandable that it kept me awake until four o’clock in the morning. I ended up, however, yielding to the heavy fatigue of my celestial journey and the emotions that had followed it.

  Chapter IV

  The next morning, at eight o’clock, the key grating in the lock of the service entrance woke me up. It was Maria. What a sight! A face exhausted by the nocturnal excursion, red eyes framed by livid circles, residues of wine, dancing and that which had followed.

  She collapsed into a chair. “And to think that it’ll be necessary to run around all day for the bosses! There’s no justice in the world!”

  She spotted me then. “And that dirty beast! That’s all I need!”

  I had made up my mind about that joker long before. I would sack her without delay.

  Sack her? What was I thinking? As If I were still her “boss,” as if I could dismiss her...

  She busied herself before a mirror repairing her face with the aid of ingredients she hid in an improvised make-up box, a stew-pan that was never used.

  Mélanie, the cook, came in at that point. She was a conscientious old spinster, integrally honest, who had been in our service since our marriage. She had a just pride in the succulence of her cuisine. At any rate, she placed herself in the same level as Alexandre Dumas père, who cooked as well as he wrote. I anticipated that she would cherish me.

  “A dog!” she exclaimed.

  “Don’t worry. Well throw it back into the street.”

  “No you won’t! He’s lovely!”

  “It’s obvious that you’re not the one who’ll have to look after it.”

  “Mademoiselle hasn’t given up her idleness.”

  “Go on…hurry up with the chocolat.”

  I savored that repartee, significant of two natures. When the breakfast was ready, Maria liberated me from my leash and took me away with her tray. We went into the bedroom where Floriane was still sleep. She only woke up when the large curtains were drawn, bringing her the gift of a radiant daylight.

  “Why, Monsieur hasn’t come back.”

  “Monsieur will have been retained by his friends,” suggested Maria, perfidiously.

  Monsieur is me, I would have barked, and Monsieur takes note that his absence is observed without provoking any emotion. It is true that Floriane held out her arms to me and covered me with the caresses that Monsieur merited, with an enthusiasm of which the true Monsieur would doubtless have taken advantage.

  “Did he have a good night?”

  “Very good, Madame. I stayed up late with him, continuing the pajama suit that Madame asked me to sew for Juan-les-Pins. He was very good.”

  “You had some milk?”

  “Yes, Madame, there was some left. He drank it to the last drop?”

  “Have you taken him downstairs?”

  “He did what he had to in the kitchen, the big and the small.”

  “Take him down anyway—and ask the concierge who he belongs to. If he isn’t anyone’s, I’ll keep him myself. He’s a lovely dog, isn’t he, Maria?”

  “Oh, yes, Madame... But before keeping him, ought Madame not take him to the police station?”

  “So that he can be sent to the pound? Oh, no. He deserves better than that.”

  “Madame is perhaps taking a risk.”

  “Go on, Maria, do as you’re told. And keep an eye on him, to make sure that he doesn’t run away.”

  She started her breakfast, set down within arm’s reach. Monsieur’s absence did not prevent her perfect teeth from chewing the toast merrily. She even offered me a piece, which I swallowed voraciously.

  “He’s poorly-trained...” she reflected.

  Once in the street, in all honesty, I have to confess that my first act was to render to nature the tribute that a sentiment of propriety, persistent in spite of everything, had prevented me from delivering to the tiled floor of the kitchen. But I limited myself to that sole relief. I did not repeat it ten times over, at every emanation of another, as the irreverence of my brethren drives them to do. I say irreverence, but perhaps, after all, it is merely a matter of politeness, which my novelty under the pelt had not yet signaled to me as a testimony of canine civility. I would have been ashamed for my species.

  My reserve astonished Maria. She pointed it out to the concierge as soon as she had introduced me into the lodge to make enquiries on my account.

  When she had been informed she said: “Might as well be this one as another. He’s clean—you won’t have to clean up after him as much.”

  “Cleaning up after dogs isn’t my job,” declared the concierge categorically. “That’s your business.”

  “He’ll have to behave himself, then!” Maria threatened.

  It was thus, in the liberty of my being, that I was returned to Floriane. She had just finished her chocolate. On the tray, my legitimate cup remained full beside her empty one. She poured it out in order for me to drink it. I lapped it up all the more avidly because I was, after all, reclaiming my own wealth. The sentiment of property is as dominant in dogs as it is in humans.

  When I was replete, Floriane took me in her arms, brought me into the bed and cradled me there with the most tender words. Her husband’s belatedness did not seem, for the moment, to have caused her any anxiety.

  “Come and be cosseted,” she murmured to me. “You’re an exquisite doggie. I’ll do everything I can to see that you don’t leave me; I sense that I’m going to love you madly.” Words that she had never sa
id when I was in her arms before and she had claimed to love me—and the tus she addressed to me, so unlike the refrigerating vous that we employed, entered into my heart like music.

  Alas, I could only reply by uttering joyful little yaps and licking her plump arm. Our declaration of mutual love lasted a good quarter of an hour, after which she left me on the pillow in order to go into the dressing-room.

  “Stay there, doggie. I’ll come back.”

  She had never allowed me to watch her dress, out of a sentiment of modesty that I thought fundamentally laudable, while deploring it. I also think that she did not want me to know about the artifices with which she perfected her beauty. But this was an opportunity too good to miss; I had no reason not to take advantage of the privilege of dogs. I therefore quit the pillow to which she had consigned me, and followed her.

  “Little rogue, you want to know everything about me?”

  She did not know how right she was.

  I thus obtained the secret of her esthetic procedures. Stripped of all veils, she examined herself before her three-paneled mirror, from head to toe, front and back. With tweezers in hand, she undertook a careful gardening, uprooting with heroic traction hairs that had strayed from the normal flower-beds, even pruning lawns that she thought too bushy. Then she greased her face with an ointment that cost ten francs a gram, insisting on the places where her excess of thirty years was designing the infancy of wrinkles. She massaged them pitilessly.

  “Autumn soon!” she sighed.

  But no, you’re still in spring. I shall always see you…, I replied, internally.

  But why these scrupulous cares? For whom? Was it not to be able, when I returned, to offer me the homage of her peeled beauty?

  After a quarter of an hour of fervent make-up, she was finally ready to slip into her beautiful mauve silk undergarments and, on top of them, the organdie dress that I had recently paid for, melancholically, without letting her suspect that I thought the price in excess of our budget.

  While she finished getting dressed, another anxiety possessed me: to know what the telegram contained. It was abandoned on the dressing-table, close enough to the bed for it to be possible for me to leap up there, over the night-stand. I accomplished that acrobatic feat creditably—but what frustration; the accursed paper only displayed the address, the rest of the assumed writing remaining on the underside. I then had the idea of tipping it on to the ground, in the hope that it might flip over to reveal its contents. I was about to succeed in that, my paws having drawn it toward me, when Floriane arrived. She picked it up, reread it, then tore it up into little pieces, which she threw into the toilet bucket. I had been cheated yet again.