- I beg your pardon. Yes, yes, I know you're telling me the truth. You do not hide anything from me. I believe you…
- Let's see, what is it?
It looks like it's a little girl who explains her big sorrow. She would not want to cry, the little girl; but it is difficult. His speech is nothing more than a series of spoken hiccups and articulated sobs, with bizarre humming, which would be laughable if they were not annoying:
- My husband is ... no longer ... as before. Of course, before, it was not ... not a happy minstrel. Far from there! ... Ah! I ... I suspected that his ... hands would cause him ... torment. But, my word! he ... he lives only to ... fear not being able to play the ... piano! And you would say that this is a ... cataclysm! A misfortune, yes, a great misfortune, if you will! But finally, there is not only the ... piano, in life! ... He loves me, yes. Oh! Yes! But not so much ... that his ... hands! ... He would have sold his country, he would be ... sentenced to death for treason, you would not see him desperate. It's not him anymore! It's not him anymore! ...
She keeps blowing her nose. Petiot, pitying him, said:
"In time, dear little Madame, all this will diminish. The forces will come back, and they will bring back endurance and courage. Remember that Mr. Johan Bansberg has borne the strongest hemorrhage that a terrestrial creature can survive ... I give you my word of honor that the liquids used by me to replace the blood contained no elements of a nature to change the vital rhythm of the patient.
- None - how would I say? - no principle ... animal? ...
"In the sense that you mean it, no, little Madame. But let me smile at your fears. I see you pursued by all the stories that are written today in the margins of science ... You are in the presence of a very normal case of diminishing. When the trauma has completely disappeared; when the brain, powerfully irrigated, will work properly; when the hands will be restored ...
- What do you think, exactly, of these hands?
A doctor never knows to what extent nature will endeavor to perfect his work. I do not know if your husband's hands will ever allow him to continue his virtuoso career. Once again, I did what I could; and as my ancestor would have said, I healed him, God heal him!
On a discouraged gesture of Katarina, he resumes with resignation, the saddened eye of a shadow.
- You are like your husband. You do not realize that at this time it should be under six feet of earth, or at least one-armed, one-legged and perhaps foolish. You are angry with me for the imperfection of my work, without admitting that my great collaborator, life, has not finished his work. You are forgiven, because you like a lot.
"Do not go up, little lady; do not exaggerate anything; be fair and be logical. It is the characteristic of convalescents and, in general, of all debility, to act as Mr. Johan Bansberg does. What frightens him today will do no more than annoy him tomorrow. I'll see you in a year.
"In the meantime, I would consider it salutary for Mr. Johan Bansberg to return home. I was hoping for better morale - why hide it? An additional cure is needed. The environment will favor it. Surrounded by the objects he loves, plunged back, so to speak into his mother's water, you'll get him out soon.
"I will examine it and give it its exeat.
"Imagine," said Katarina, who was firming herself, "do you imagine that I went so far as to question him about our past, to make sure that it was always him!
She laughs, she's about to make fun of herself. But Petiot takes the sky to witness this enormity.
- O literature! cried he. What instruction do you give to the new layers!
- Well! Mr Bansberg, how are you?
An evasive movement, a fleeting glance, loaded with boredom, if not rancor; here is the welcome.
Obediently, Johan takes a few steps without crutches, ready to examine his stitched occiput.
"Let's see our hands," said Petiot.
Embarrassed by the silence of her husband, Katarina speaks in her place:
- The appetite is good, doctor. But the nights are bad. I often hear him moan, suffocate. I go: he is swimming.
- Do you suffer at night?
- No, said Johan.
"I think," said Katarina, "they are nightmares. When I ask him what he has, he tells me he cannot remember.
- Time issue, says Petiot. In a few days you will return to your house, dear sir, and these troubles will disappear.
The house ... The living room of the house ... The piano of the living room ...
What distress filled Johan's eyes! And how he lowers them with terror to his hands!
Nightmares?
The following night, Katarina was able to study the matter under particularly favorable circumstances.
But the facts impressed her so strongly that she could not go back to sleep, and kept from these nocturnal moments an indelible memory.
Mrs. Bansberg served as a nurse to her husband. Their two adjoining rooms communicated through a door that was never closed. The head of the beds touched, here and there, the wall of separation. In the silence of the night, we heard the slightest noises on both sides.
Now, Katarina had fallen asleep from the heavy sleep of youth.
She was suddenly pulled by a painful sigh.
The electric night light dispensed its minimum light.
Instead of getting up on the spot or banging on the partition, as it was enough for her to dispel Johan's morbid dreams, Katarina listened to the sleeper wailing and complaining.
It was a sinister audition.
Still, impressed by her conversation with Petiot, preoccupied with the next start on Rue Lesueur, the young woman felt an odious sensation of misery and crushing. Shadows mingled with the depressing and the insidious. Half awake, a dreamy steam still enveloped him.
It was in this state of intellectual gravity that Katarina Bansberg spied in the night.
Johan was shouting in muffled clamor. Then all that was heard was his panting breath, hasty, hoarse.
A faint light came from his room. Katarina thought he had lit his night light. She got out of bed cautiously and, her bare feet skimming the floor, she approached the door stealthily.
There, she stiffened to restrain an exclamation, while thinking that this exclamation would perhaps have completed awakening ...
Because, could she believe the reality of what she saw?
Johan was kneeling on his bed, in the attitude of prostration. His night light was not lit; however, a light source illuminated the chamber with an aquatic phosphorescence.
It was a pale spot, hanging in the middle of the room, just in front of Johan, not far from his face. And this task, that vague vaguely round kind of moon, was the seat of movement. Confused shapes were moving around. They became more precise. An animated image was born of their grouping.
It looked like the cut of a brain, revealing the ideas of the thinker. It was like the projection of Johan's brain, his externalized nightmare!
A terrible nightmare.
Phosphorescence is a grand piano on a platform. A man is there, dressed in an evening dress. And it's Johan. And his face is terribly sad. He salutes the invisible audience, and sits in front of the piano, which he opens. But the keyboard is not composed of black and white keys ...
The keyboard is now only visible to him; he and the hands of the pianist; all the rest is gone. There is only some kind of dark fire in the background. Johan's hands are on the keys. But these keys, really, we don’t know what it is. The right hand pulls out one: a huge bloody medieval dagger! ...
Now we see only the knife in our hand; all the rest is gone. The handle of the knife is marked with a number ... "666". Johan's hand is tense on the handle ...
Now we see only the blade of the knife; all the rest is gone. It is a sharp blade, pointed. But now she is covering herself with something. It seems to sweat a scarlet and viscous liquid ...
The hand disappears. The knife shines, becomes shorter, becomes a steel square, sharp. It is framed in a narrow portico. It's a guillotine! And in
the guillotine, there is a head ...
Now we see nothing but the head caught in the wooden straitjacket; all the rest is gone. It's Johan's grinning head.
A dismal cry resounded. The hellish dreamer twists his arms on his bed.
- Johan! Honey!
Katarina, with a passionate sweetness, covers him with caresses. Fever burns him ... But the shadow surrounds them; Katarina's call must have awakened the sleeper and cast away the sinister dream, for the luminous phantasy has vanished.
The light bulbs of the room light up suddenly. Then Katarina returns to Johan, wipes his forehead, raises the sheets.
- What is going on? She said. He is plunged into torpor.
- What's up, Johan? You dreamed, did not you?
- Did I scream? he said finally. Yes, I think I dreamed.
- But what were you dreaming?
"I do not remember," he says with difficulty.
This man falls from fatigue. He goes back to sleep as we fall.
Katarina, at her bedside, meditates diligently.
Dreams may well leave on the memory only a slight trace, it is very surprising, at the end of such a nightmare, that Johan does not remember! He hides, that's for sure. He dissimulates, either by false shame, or to prevent Katarina from tormenting himself.
On the other hand, this nightmare itself is so extraordinary! M. de Varmand must be able to give some clarifications on this point. Nightmares did not come back. At least, if they came back, it was in natural conditions, and they confined themselves inside the pianist.
This one, however, was very dark when the day was up. And when M. de Varmand arrived at eleven o'clock, according as he had become accustomed to it, Johan welcomed Napoleon III of the Rue d'Assas with an air of absence.
The Marquis announced himself as always:
- Varmand! Without t, with a s! And he added exceptionally:
- Always caustic and narcissist.
Katarina neglected to see the constant irony, and, pulling away, she began the spiritism.
She told him what she had seen during the night.
- What do you say about that, Marquis? Me, I'm still all back.
The Marquis, immobilizing a corner glance, held forth on this way:
- The nightmare went according to the rule. Chain of inconsistencies connected by puerile associations, chaplet of disordered scenes whose generator is the piano concept, it is a typical nightmare, a model nightmare.
- Yes, but ... visible!
- Externalization of thought! There is nothing that can surprise me. Some might explain it in another way. This portion of Johan, which materialized by projection out of himself, could be considered as a fragmentary appearance of the astral body, this ghost of the living ...
But these explanations, nebulous like occultism in person, did not satisfy Katarina. She knew too well that for M. de Varmand the more supernatural a solution was, the more likely it was. Besides, a word had struck him: ghost. Thinking of "Demonoplasm", she digressed:
"You believe in the ghosts of the living," she asked; do you also believe in the ghosts of the dead? I have seen one, myself once, twice.
- You? Did you see the ghost of a dead person? ... Ah! ah! but that's interesting! Do not see who wants the ghosts ... It is true, Katarina, that you have amazing eyes, so wide, so pure, so disturbing! do not blush. And tell me: are you sure that the vision of this night is a vision of Johan? ... This is not a vision of Katarina? ... In this last case, two hypotheses: or you have seen the dream of Johan by privilege, or Johan did not think, and then ... Come on, your husband told you to have no memory of his dream. Why suspect his franchise?
Katarina hesitated, recalled her own memories, and was categorical:
- No, she said. I did not dream. I did not sleep either.
- But did you sleep when you saw the ghost of the dead?
At these words, which she picked up, Katarina got angry and fell back on herself, sulky and discontented. She did not doubt her senses. She knew herself wonderfully balanced, lucid and serene. His intelligence was solid as his body. She could not confuse the outside world with phantasies resulting from an impossible delusion; and she made it loudly to the spiritic painter.
The latter, to return in favor, retorted by nonsense. But she supported his cause with angry tenacity. And it must be said that the events were on the verge of giving him reason.
7 – DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
Pressed to flee the house of the nightmare, Katarina decided that the apartment on Rue Lesueur would be returned the next day.
M. de Varmand having promised to stay until evening near Johan, she went on the hour to Paris, in order to prepare the scene of the return.
She wanted her charming and familiar. The man had to welcome Johan under the double aspect of a festive decor and an interior that we have not ceased to inhabit.
Katarina worked fervently with the help of her servants, with the help of roses and carnations, balls of snow, and mimosa.
These kinds of occupations singularly favor the free flow of thought. The exercise of the body, the mechanical work of the fingers and even the superficial activity of the understanding allow the reflection to function at best in the depths of intelligence.
Without ceasing to come and go, to marry the vase to the flower in assorted unions and to order with art the most beautiful disorders, Katarina leads a mental investigation on the causes and circumstances of the prodigious nightmare.
That she has no doubt about her reality, that she is certain to have seen with her eyes the externalized dream of her husband, that is an acquired point, on which Mrs. Bansberg does not even have the idea to come back. But the dream itself, the images of which it was formed, are what preoccupies it. Pass for the piano. Given the great terror of the future that dominates the virtuoso, the appearance of a piano in one of his dreams is nothing but rational. The same is true of the desperate look of his double, when he was sitting in front of the instrument. But the knife? The knife marked with the number "666"? That demonic number ... Katarina remembers old biblical memories. She remembered the story of the slain nun as a child. The murderer had painted this cursed number on the ground. The crime?
The punishment?
These four concepts have no apparent relation to the piano concept. But, between them, they seem united by the bonds of a causality as tight as one might wish! In spite of M. de Varmand's opinion, Johan, for most of his dream, showed an unmistakable spirit. So, why deny that this logic presided over the whole dream? Why should this logic not link the piano concept to other concepts, by an association of ideas that Katarina cannot suspect, but of which Johan would possess the key? ...
He has become so taciturn, so withdrawn, since the catastrophe!
"Since the disaster". It would be better to say "since the trip to Luxembourg". That would be more accurate.
But Katarina knows perfectly all the facts and gestures of Johan during this short trip. The virtuoso arrived in Luxembourg the day of the concert, and he left the next morning. So, he only spent a few hours there, of which Katarina knows the job by an enthusiastic letter from Lucy Smith. The Smiths are good British but ardent French-speaking friends. They live in Luxembourg for family affairs. It is here that Johan received hospitality. We did not leave him. He was full of enthusiasm, Mrs. Smith, as soon as the disaster known, and to inquire about the arrival of Johan, hastened to write to Katarina. She said what triumph their friend had won by masterfully performing the “Hungarian Fantasia” for Piano and Orchestra. His letter did not mention anything abnormal. The young couple had kept company with their host until the departure of the train.
On the other hand, since the tragic arrival of the same train at Saint Maur, Katarina has separated from her husband only to put it back into the honest hands of Petiot.
Conclusion: if Johan had some bad meeting, this meeting occurred in the trip from Luxembourg to Saint Maur. And if this journey did not involve any new fact, what the pianist would conceal, is that his t
errible injury caused all the harm: and in this hypothesis, the nightmare is due to the disruption of his faculties.
Here stands the cadaverous silhouette of "Demonoplasm". The Ghost Man, in all likelihood, was Johan's traveling companion. Did he speak to him? What did he do to him? What did they say to each other? Of the two travelers only one has survived, and this one is silent, and it is forbidden to question him.
"Do not annoy him, make him live sweet and easy", such is the imperative recommendation of the doctor ...
No dawn rises on so much darkness.
However, Katarina is still working on her enigma.
Devil's Score: A Tale of decadent omen…. Page 6