Devil's Score: A Tale of decadent omen….

by Edouard Jourdan

  Theseus going to fight the Minotaur had less heroism between the two eyebrows.

  Mrs. Bansberg slept till evening. Still she was awakened by a nurse who brought her various things found on her husband.

  A card gave the list:

  An embroidered handkerchief J. B.

  A wallet in a sorry state.

  A tie pin, coral.

  An alliance.

  A signet rings.

  A gold watch with its chain.

  A purse in gold mesh.

  A small knife.

  A pair of gold cufflinks.

  Katarina signed it and remained thoughtful. These objects evoked Johan with strength. He never parted from it. The rings especially were, so to speak, part of themselves. They were a little of his person, a few of his hands ... And the alliance! Oh! the alliance! This little gold rings! This small link in the invisible (and extensible) chain that linked Johan's hand to Katarina's hand through the ring finger! … God! it seemed now that the chain was detached on one side!

  As the dry wood carries flame and smoke in him, the empty rings carried in them the spectral hands of Johan. These hands, Katarina created them. Glancing at the glittering circles, she made out, by the operation of her fantasy, imaginary fingers, long and slender, a pale flesh, a maze of blue veins, and beneath appeared ivory and ebony. a keyboard. She saw these hands, stripped of these rings for the time of a sonata, thrown on the keys in the race of allegro ...

  And the rings were there, on a plate, deprived for a long time of heat, so finally that if their owner never had to put them back and that they had been drawn from his

  Phalanges frozen by death. And tomorrow ... Tomorrow! Who knows? ...

  Ah! Damn disaster!

  Suddenly, Katarina remembered the nightmare she had just made. His sleep had lacked placidity. But what she had dreamed about in a dream was not her lover's pangs, her wife's worries, nor the physical fatigue of her searches among the crushed wagons. These were the phantasmagorical moments when "Demonoplasm" had arisen in front of her.

  In truth, whatever may have happened, the supernatural must have exercised a very peculiar influence over his soul, so that a semblance of prodigy might take possession of it in this way, at the expense of much more legitimate emotions! What childishness!

  But someone scratching at the door, Katarina, for no reason, jumped.

  - Come in! she says. Then she added, the throat clutched by a strange apprehension: Who is there? ...

  The Marquis showed himself. He had an armful of flowers.

  - Who is here? he said. Florio Tosco, madam!

  - Oh! How nice you are, Marquis! ... and say: what did you do there? M. de Varmand passed his hand over his polite head, and replied:

  - I worked on my surgical treatise on endemic baldness of billiard balls and congenital alopecia areata.

  - Be serious. I meant: what happened to you, Rue d'Assas? My step-dad…

  This ministerial officer has been beneath all wilting. "If Johan was not a pianist, he would not have gone to Luxembourg; if he had not been to Luxembourg, he would not have been a victim of the Saint Maur disaster. That's all he found to tell me.

  - Alas! … And you? A soap?

  - First choice. Exhibition article. Thirty percent potash.

  "But, my good friend, why remain under the rule of this man, now that your paintings would sell so easily?

  M. de Varmand, shaking his head with a napoleon style, paraphrased:

  - And what would I buy with the money of my paintings that gives me as much joy as my paintings? Freedom? What will I do! Finally, do you know: I always have sympathy for your father-in-law, and I imagine that, without me, it was a long time ago that mediums and Valentin's husband put it on the straw, him - and you, by ricochet.

  "Another thing: I asked, below. It seems that Johan is pretty good. You? It's okay? ... Listen, I'm sleeping here, in the next room. When loneliness weighs you down, call me, do not you?

  "And now, what do you offer me?

  Sometime later, under the influence of a narcotic which M. de Varmand had surreptitiously poured into her cup of orange blossom, Katarina fell asleep fully clothed. The old gentleman took her in her paternal arms, and, having carried her to the bed, wrapped her in blankets. He was himself tired of fatigue, having reluctantly played this role of jester, which was his usual way.

  Finally, he withdrew on tiptoe, stifling the creaking of his shoes and lamenting what he called their "arthritism".

  Dawn was sinister. The sun poured over Paris a skylight.

  At first light, Katarina sat up on her bed, recovered all her presence from the start, and stood up.

  It was six o'clock. In sixty minutes Johan would be operated.

  Despite the warmth of her room, Mrs. Bansberg shivered. It was the lamentable hour of discouragement. She opposed the action, and gave her dress an almost gymnastic ardor. But anxiety gripped his epigastrium like a stomach cramp. And what she saw soon made her shake even more.

  Among the peculiar noises of the alarm clock, where the men are already agitated but still silent, Katarina heard a slight humming which brought her to the window

  She was scantily dressed and charming in this abandonment. She shuddered, and believed, in her agitation, that frost suddenly covered her whole body.

  A motor-car of the funeral undertakes to turn in the street, to rush under the porch of the clinic.

  Petiot, alas, did not save all his patients!

  Nothing could show more strikingly the uncertainty of this abject morning. This put an end to Katarina's anguish. His misfortune took on a scale of punishment. She wondered what unconscious fault Heaven was punishing her.

  Meanwhile she was watching for the exit of the van, which was not long in coming.

  Silent and stealthy escape. Only in the coupe, two men of the family, in deep mourning. How awful!

  Katarina discovered the sewer of the palace, the reverse side of a glory, the waste of a genius. His despair was doubled by a philosophical discouragement: that of any thinker who, his finger snuck under the velvet of a throne, touches the rough fir tree ... And then, she also suffered from a more painful discomfort. This dead man, who had just been taken away as a block of material that could no longer be used, made it quite hideous how clinics look like workshops. The living flesh is treated under the knife like the wood under the slab and the iron under the rolling mill ... That an irreparable break occurred just now, during the trepanning of Johan, and tomorrow the van would come to rid the factory this mechanism out of order!

  It was too much. She quickly finished dressing, and asked M. de Varmand to keep him company.

  He came. The operation, he says, was announced under happy auspices. It would be long.

  In fact, three endless hours passed, during which the brave man spent, in order to distract Katarina, all the resources of his mind. The young woman did not listen to him.

  With her forehead in her hands, she used her imaginative powers to move into the operating room. But, under the influence of anguish, he was provided with gloomy visions. His ignorance simplified things, exaggerated by his fantasy. She saw a skull open like a pot, a bleeding brain, like those bathing in these culinary vessels. She saw locksmith's tongs, carpenters' cranks, sacrifice’s cutlasses. Petiot, in a white coat, steady like the butcher's arms, spread out, tapped, pruned with a wild joy, taking from an animal bound drops of liquid or fragments of brain matter, which he incorporated into the brain of Johan ...

  Thus, Katarina felt herself sliding on an abominable slope.

  Her torture ceased: Dr Petiot asked by a nurse that everything had gone well and that, barring any complications, Mr. Johan Bansberg seemed to him to survive.

  Katarina fell on M. de Varmand's chest and burst into tears. The Marquis, quite moved himself, began to pat his shoulder. But he remembered very aptly that the actors of cinema never miss this realistic effect, which proves on their part a great acuity of observation, and out of modesty he refrain
s from continuing.

  From this moment, Mrs. Johan Bansberg was admitted to the bedside of her husband, on the condition of spacing her visits.

  The first was moving. For one saw the patient only a form swathed with bandages. The figure itself disappeared under strips.

  It was a white mummy, in the uniform of the white clinic.

  But, thanks to the sky, the two legs stretched out straight, in their cotton-laced heels, and under the hydrophilic woolen mittens, Bansberg's two hands rested symmetrically.

  "Now," said Petiot, "we must rely on nature. The men did what they could.”

  A powerful, steady breath raised the pectoral bandages. Johan, making his lungs work, seemed to perform an exclusive task; and Katarina listened to her breathing, as she had formerly listened to her playing the masterpieces of the masters in ecstasy.

  6 – PHANTASMS

  It was a perky Thursday spring, in Paris.

  The month of April displayed a Riviera azure on the north, and in the park of the convalescent house, filled with elegant visitors, the sticky buds burst into verdure.

  Katarina Bansberg, having escorted her father-in-law and the Marquis to the gate, came back to the back of the garden.

  A little helpless. The visits of the former notary froze her every time. This bilious old man, with a twisted owl's beak, always seemed to be in the shade, so much did his physical person and his moral being mourn. Antithesis of M. de Varmand, he was the Heraclitus of that Democritus, John-who-weeps with John-who-laughs.

  For more than two months since Johan had left Dr. Petiot's clinic for Paris' convalescent home, his father had come to see him every other week. Flanked by the Marquis, who more than ever made the teaser (but as much to brighten up a group of funerary statues), he sat down beside his son, looked around rapaciously at him, and contemplated Johan with as much pity as contempt. It was not without reason that M. de Varmand, always mocking but sometimes trivial, had dubbed him "the laconic father." His mute, hard mouth, ignoring the smile, made one think of a condemned door. After a while, he consulted his watch and left, saying nothing but "good morning" and "goodbye." M. de Varmand did not fail to accompany him. They were moving away, like the doctor “Mojo” at the arm of his colleague “Jinx”.

  Such visits, given Johan's condition, were perfectly contraindicated. Petiot had prescribed a diet of distraction, and it was difficult to count as entertainment the bi-monthly exhibitions of his parent.

  To tell the truth, the convalescent did not go out of there darker than before. But dark, could it be more?

  Katarina sees him from afar, under the red-striped tent and kisses of the folding armchair. The director's little boy, crouched on a stool, reads it. He does not listen. He looks in the void. The child shakes his hand, and Johan gently flatters the blonde's head.

  This does not prevent him, the next moment, to fall back into his sadness.

  He was so close to death that one wondered whether his cure was not, properly speaking, a resurrection; and sometimes, seeing him so serious, at first Katarina was tempted to believe that he had made a stay in the land of shadows and that the memory of the underworld obsessed his melancholy ...

  The reason is simpler and less beautiful.

  Since Johan's convalescence, he thinks only of his hands.

  To have escaped total destruction, to be there, to walk on the old earth of men with his pair of legs; to be able, like everyone else, with his hands safe and sound, to seize, feel, caress; with both eyes unscathed contemplating nature, it seems that this does not count for him.

  He does not say anything. He never talks about it. Katarina would not dare to mention. But like the right leg, which has remained shorter than the other, such as the arms still wanting, Bansberg's hands return to life only slowly; and he, the virtuoso, suffers, one would say, from a perpetual ungainliness which renders his clumsy fingers clumsy.

  One feels him devoured by anxiety, humiliated in his noblest pride, clinging to the fierce hope of recovering his talent. He jealously conceals his inferiority, in the belief that it is temporary, in the desire to triumph over it, in the laziness of working on it. He avoids in public the acts where his clumsiness would reveal itself. He is very unhappy, that's for sure.

  Katarina came near him. He watched it come as a transparency through which he followed something else ...

  Johan Bansberg is a small man. He has always been frail and nervous. Its rounded features denote the weakness of the character. He is still pale with all the blood he has shed. Two or three slashes scratch his forehead. The scar of the occiput traces in his brown hair a livid mark. His crutches are against the chair; a cane will suffice him soon.

  But the little reader is silent; Johan, asleep, closes his eyes.

  Katarina takes the opportunity to look at the poor hands; and, as always, she draws confidence in their examination.

  Certainly, they have gone through a cruel ordeal, one hundred seams glove them with an ugly reddish and purple hairnet. But finally, nothing is missing! The broken pieces got better. Under the skin, which will soften, the bones project clear and clear. The shape of the set is not hopeless ... In place of Johan, Katarina would be full of courage and spirit!

  But from Johan to Katarina, in terms of energy, there has always been, as we say, a whole world; and since the catastrophe, Johan seems to have lost all firmness of soul ...

  As well, since Katarina lets us enter her heart, we must know that this is, for her, a subject of trouble and perplexity.

  No! Whatever the misfortune that threatens the artist, and whatever his weakening, it is not natural that Johan resists so badly to the fear that eats him! He is too weird in his apprehensions, too appalled in his reveries, too ingenious in the way he has to lull all these musicians, dear masters and others, who hasten to see him and leave him persuaded that he was virtuoso. and virtuoso

  he stays. Hands, that's nothing. But the brain, everything is there. Petiot was powerless to restore what the wound destroyed. And even, it is very difficult to believe that Johan's strangeness does not come from an operating strangeness! There is in his ego something new, unforeseen, surprising, an almost monstrous element, made of fear, misguidance and bluster, that the state of his hands does not justify in any way! ...

  - He is sleeping? murmurs a man's voice behind Mrs. Bansberg.

  She turns around. It's Dr. Petiot.

  "Do not wake him," he said.

  The surgeon and the young woman walk along the paths of the park.

  - Exactly, said Katarina, I wanted to talk to you, doctor.

  - It looks like it's serious.

  - Yes and no ... I ask you to tell me, frankly, what kind of brain operation you have done to my husband.

  She has fire on her cheekbones and speaks jerkily.

  - But very willingly, little Madame, although "cerebral" is an improper term. I will only ask you to tell me why you are asking me this question today, to which I would have responded heartily the day after the operation ...

  It has been a long time since she promised to question Petiot. But so far, the very presence of the surgeon has gagged her. He exerts such an ascendency upon his fellow-men, his high value and his righteousness make him shine with such a halo, that one only knows how to be quiet when he approaches. He is one of those superior men who move with them an area of​​security and submission. Today, if Mrs. Bansberg felt able to speak, it is not that she is more worried than usual about Johan. It is only that Petiot does not spare his visits, and that by dint of happening, he becomes for her, little by little, a man like the others. The prestige of the scientist crumbles every day under the action of habit; today, a big piece has just come off.

  Petiot completes his explanation. He talked about the trephine and the saw. The operation was very simple, but very delicate. All in all, a vulgar word summarizes it: cleaning. The fracture of the occipital had determined the contusion and compression of the left lobe. Splinters were lodged in all directions. It was necessary
to practice a large oculus, to indulge in the most minute washes, and to close again.

  - Anyway, said Katarina, nothing special? No latest fashion? No ... borrowings ... transfusion? ...

  - Well! Petiot! What an idea? What are you going to look for, little lady?

  Katarina blushes more and lowers her head. The surgeon stopped and considers her supremely intrigued.

  Petiot. His clear eyes are mirrors of loyalty. The statues erected on the public squares will not have the presence of his person. We are looking for a pedestal under his feet. And who would see this base, would read this trinity: Knowledge, Power, Goodness.

  Katarina stammered in a trembling voice: