Am I not an artist too? Why not? Why should there be a barrier in the minds of the ignorant between science and arts? Life is organic, a whole. It is these barriers, this splitting and sealing-off, that stunts, stultifies, desiccates the cheese-nibblers like my wife and her precious friends.
Aha, you will say upon reading this paragraph. Jealous… Yes, jealous. I killed that wretched Casimir out of personal, professional – animal – jealous hatred. That bastard stole my life. When he blackmailed me, it was to me a thin shadow of formal excuse or pretext. For the blackmail itself I cared not a rap. Bella has a husband well able to look after her.
Six
I got so heated that I stood up and walked about. Then I went and had a look at myself in the bathroom looking-glass. (Bella says she has never seen herself better-looking than there.) I do not look at myself for your benefit, my dear van der Valk. I am aware that your trained eye has absorbed every detail of my appearance and manner that could appear indicative. I do the same. Like me, you accustom yourself to using meetings, conversations, examinations, as tools in your trade. We have, as you have remarked jokingly on two or three occasions, a great deal in common… You form impressions of people. Is so-and-so likely to be a criminal? No, that is not fair to you. Capable of being criminal? I would say, and for all I know you would agree with me, that everybody is. Regardless of who or what he may be.
No, I went to look in the glass above the washstand to look at the man as you see him. I wish to see what you see. I am not even familiar with my own appearance, for I have no personal vanity and except as attributes to love I dislike looking-glasses. I shave with my jaw reflected in the tiny mirror let into the inside of the box my razor lives in. I comb my hair, which is short and straight, without needing any reference to my reflection. I know that it is clean, tidy and healthy; what further interest have I? At the barber’s, I keep my eyes resolutely shut; I find it a good place to rest and it discourages their infernal tattle. In my apartments, I have no looking-glasses; I pay large amounts of money to tailors to see that my suits fit me. The only glass there is in any room I frequent is the one above the washstand, in the bathroom between the examination- and consulting-rooms.
It is one of the most important places in the house! How many women who arrived in my house combed and collected, impeccably painted, sometimes cold and haughty to cover their fear, have later seen themselves dishevelled in that glass. It excited and fascinated you from the start, I noticed. You need no guiding hand through that labyrinth at least. One of the first things you did, I’ll be bound, was to make a little sketch-map of the way the house is arranged. Old Munck had, of course, this consulting-room, and his examination-room at the back as it is now, the discreetly curtained windows of the former verandah looking out on the chestnut-tree in the garden. But Munck had his secretary in the ‘bathroom’, and his waiting-room was the one opening off the hall. It was my idea to put my secretary upstairs, and have a second waiting-room there. It greatly annoyed Beatrix, but it was quite natural and not in the least sinister. A neurologist is always half psychiatrist, and my patients do not care to meet each other or to be seen by anyone but myself and Miss Maas – and not always by her; by no means always! She leaves at four-thirty, and her day is taken up with the telephone and the appointments book, the records and the accounts. My most solid witness! She has been with me since I began in practice, and has never seen anything not of the most perfect propriety. Nor, I may add, would she believe it if she did. She has known patients to behave in the oddest ways and nothing surprises her. You will have decided, regretfully, that Miss Maas will be of little use to you.
But we were talking about the bathroom. I admit that it is vulgar; there are heavy rubber tiles that have a pleasantly soft, matt feel under bare feet; the washstand and the bidet are ‘porcelaine de Paris’ with the classic ivy-leaf motifs, and the shower is lined with tiles in the same pattern. The towel rail is heated, and there is discreet austere soap from Roger & Gallet. I do admit that any expensive hotel gives you just the same. That is the point, in a sense, as you will see if you think a moment.
For you wrinkled your nose at it. You found this luxury contemptible and though you said nothing your face told me that in Holland the most expensive doctors content themselves with a plain washstand in the corner of the examination-room, and that this was all very singular and suspect.
You make me laugh, because for all your sophisticated experience you are a puritan still. Even here in Amsterdam, the only town in Holland where there is a scrap of aristocracy and a scrap, as well, of canaille, one can never be outside the sphere of conventional morality. To have a bath more than once a week is simply not done. As far as I know I am the only person that has succeeded in breaking this rule.
I am making excuses. I know that the bathroom is a weakness, and not only in the evidential sense. It is my streak of sensuality and my yielding for once to the power of sheer wealth. And the women enjoy it so! In my bathroom a woman puts back her face, her self-command – her mask of morality! After a half-hour in my bathroom no woman has ever shown the faintest sign of hysteria, of rancour, of jealousy, nor of any emotional exaggeration. It is a therapy – just like everything else I do. I always left them there for as long as they wished. When they came out I would be writing quietly at my bureau. But I had nearly forgotten, in the defence of my bathroom, that I went there to have a look at myself, wondering what you will find, there behind the features.
The features are nothing remarkable. My hair is short and stiff, and goes sideways at the top of a fairly high forehead. The face is long and narrow, with large ears and a wide mouth. The eyes and nose are large too but regular – no, the face is not bad, I confess; it has character and humour as well as intelligence. Nobody will believe there should be malice in the lines I have in plenty around eyes and mouth, and nobody will think that the character in that straight nose and neat jaw can be so very dreadful. My voice is deep, calm and deliberate, with quite a pleasant intonation, and the eyes are clear grey and have a level frank look. As a doctor, this face has helped me a good deal. With women, of course, a face is unimportant; I could have the face of an orang-outang, the wild man of the woods, and it would never have made the faintest odds. What is it you see? I am curious.
Seven
You appeared again a week and more after the first time. I suppose you had calculated that this was a good interval, enough to make me stew tender, grow uneasy, begin to crumble. I had not crumbled, because I know how people like you work. I had decided that you were anything but satisfied, and that when unsatisfied you would be bulldoggish. I knew that while you would find little to grip in my slippery surface it would be a long while before you let go. There would be a long period of patient calm enforced upon myself before you went away, satisfied or not.
This time again I was struck by a certain force of imagination you possess. You had thought up an original comic approach that was designed to put me off my stroke and you would, I guessed, continue this tip-and-run act, a war of irritation and attrition. I felt fairly sure that you would never adopt the laborious plodding of the average police action, setting large men in raincoats to watch the house, with long tedious lists of every visitor. You wanted to gain a foothold in my interior, in my castle, among my fortifications, there to prepare a subterranean sap to blow me up when I least expected it. So you phoned Miss Maas for an appointment exactly like any businessman with stress symptoms, and in you sailed to the consulting-room, cheerful and full of obtuse self-satisfaction. I was not deceived by this air of imbecility.
“Would you prefer the chair there, or do you feel more at ease on the sofa?”
My consulting-room is extremely pleasant, a large high square room with two big windows that face the tree-shaded street. It was fine warm weather and all the lindens were looking their best. My bureau is placed cornerwise, between the windows and the side wall, lined with bookshelves, behind which one goes zigzagging upstairs towards Casimir. There is
no more furniture than is needed in this room, but there is a large sofa of warm ripe yellowish leather. Plenty of people, and especially women, prefer to sit here than in the ‘customer’s’ chair at the corner of my bureau.
“I think I do prefer the sofa,” in your voice of jovial idiocy, “I like the look of it very much.”
“How’s your health?”
“I don’t know; there’s all sorts of queer things wrong with me, I suspect. What can you treat?”
“Many things. Not conditions plainly requiring surgery, though I have sometimes succeeded in avoiding it even when it looked urgent.”
“But there is a thing called neurosurgery.”
“A very exacting discipline, outside my abilities. I could probably whip your appendix out for you; that’s just elementary carpentry.”
“What do you do most of?”
“I get a lot of people whose troubles border on psychiatric booboo things and who need no psychiatric treatment. And of course many people on the obverse side, with insomnia or something that they imagine is a sign of mental trouble, due to a purely physical origin. And, evidently, an army of psychosomatic aches and pains. Is that what you want to know?”
“You do massage?”
“Frequently. And I often send patients to a masseur.”
“And electric things, shock and so on?”
“I give no shock treatments; they belong in certain types of insanity. I use vibration, warmth, sometimes heat, various short waves, ranging from ultra-violet to feeble X-ray. I also use warm air and both warm and cold water,” I added, a little too sarcastically.
“And I suppose fruit and herb cures, and swimming, and riding bicycles?”
“Certainly. We have not, I’m afraid, the time to indulge in an explanation of the various possible applications of these things. You could, of course, go and read up your Larousse Médical.”
“Oh I have,” you shouted enthusiastically. “Become my favourite reading these last weeks… You treat skin diseases?” you asked suddenly.
“I’m not a dermatologist. Occasionally, when they are of nervous origin, as they quite frequently are.”
“And cosmetic treatments?”
I decided you needed a snub. “What are cosmetic treatments?”
“Oh, making old women beautiful again with calve’s liver or some such thing.”
“My poor friend, you have been reading magazines. There are cosmetic surgeons, and there are gerontologists, who use hormone treatments upon occasion. That has no interest for me. Such ideas.”
“I have been told you made people younger.”
“Let me make myself clear. If a patient comes to me with a disordered system, living an overloaded or unhealthy life, and I am able to help him, he feels better. In a flush of well-being, he tells his friends he feels ‘years younger’ and the ignorant, like you, loving drama, imagine that I possess magical powers and miracle cures. Superstition.”
You were not too snubbed. During this absurd speech you looked at me steadily with your sunny, benevolent expression unchanged.
“You have, however, a large number of women patients in early middle age.”
“And do I really need to explain that to you?”
“Do. Why not? Since, as you say, I am ignorant.”
“Every doctor has many patients of the type you describe. They are bored, nervous from doing nothing, needing distractions and amusements: a fertile ground for all sorts of ills. Add that women of this age suffer various biological disturbances and you get the common coin of every doctor’s life. Why do we discuss these trivialities?”
“When they may not be altogether trivial. When they may even have a suspicion of malpractice about them.”
I turned a glassy eye on you.
“I have concluded that you have received some scurrilous letter. Accusing me of making off with old Cabestan and now, apparently, of malpractice with women patients – if I understand you rightly.”
Casual nod.
“What I do not follow is your taking these rubbishy things seriously. A person with a grievance, exactly as I sketched for you at a previous meeting, seizing upon anything that might be ground on which a doctor could be attacked.”
“We got one, quite sober letter, not at all in scurrilous terms, simply saying that you had suppressed Cabestan because he had evidence that you misconducted professional relationships and had threatened to expose the fact.” Your voice was quite colourless.
“Unfortunately,” I spoke drily, “Mr Cabestan’s death is the one fact that is real and demonstrable in all this. If you really feel that anyone, not to speak of myself, killed him, you surely need something to support the supposition. Was there any medical examination, for instance?”
“Oh yes.”
“With what result, if I may allow myself the curiosity of asking?”
“None whatever,” cheerfully.
“Then surely the whole idea falls to the ground. This accusation could not stand up in a court. I hesitate to threaten, myself, but you must realise that any person accused on insufficient grounds of criminal action possesses means of defending himself. Wrongful arrest, interference with the liberty of the subject, or whatever.”
“Has anybody interfered with your liberty?”
“Defamation of character.”
“There isn’t any. Come, Doctor, I’m your patient, and any conversation between us is private and privileged. The famous medical secrecy.”
“A conversation sounding like blackmail?”
“We don’t blackmail people,” mildly. “Nor do we pursue frivolous accusations without grounds.”
“You mean you really think you do have grounds?”
“Oh yes. We even have a witness.”
“Produce this witness.”
“When the time comes.”
“A witness, my friend, that hides, is not a very solid witness, nor one in whom anybody could have confidence. I think that I will ask my professional association to take steps to ensure my protection. I will complain against illegal, unauthorised and unjustifiable police interference.”
You had been leading me on, of course, with deliberately weak arguments, tempting me to come out with this. I had been trapped, as I now realised. You proceeded, now, to blackmail me quite shamelessly. You have, my dear van der Valk, some good qualities, and you have, as well, a sort of low cunning that is revolting.
“You do that, Doctor,” with your country-boy’s broad beam, “if you really think it would do you any good to make any aspect of this affair more public. If you take such steps, the press get the substance of the complaint against you; it’s inevitable. You might end up by regretting your hasty move. As things stand, this is all no more than a friendly, discreet, personal little chat between you and me. Doctor and patient! This witness – we do not produce him simply because we wish to know how much weight to give his words. A standard of comparison. The person to provide that is yourself; surely that’s obvious. You must realise that my movements are heavily biased on the side of your protection and the assumption of your complete innocence of all this. Surely that is how it should be,” silkily. “If you prefer – really prefer – a noisy, public, clumsy enquiry, with your secretary, your patients, even your wife dragged into the dirty-minded stare of the public, well… There would be a cloud of gossip – exactly that malicious and stupid gossip you mentioned at our first meeting. By all means, if you prefer it, but I cannot see that it would help you.
It wasn’t badly done. If I did not make an intelligent answer it would look bad whichever alternative I chose. I reached for a cigarette and lit it.
“Listen carefully, Mr van der Valk, to what I have to tell you.”
You indicated jovially that you were all ears.
“I find your behaviour deplorable – typical, I suppose, of the police. You threaten me with mysteries, and when I seek to protect myself you threaten me with publicity. I refuse to be stampeded by this talk of accusations and witnesses, all t
he purest invention. I cannot see what you hope to gain by pestering me, and I cannot, apparently, stop you without further annoyance. Very well, do what you please; that is at least the smallest of these irritations. I allow you to talk to me since only by so doing can I convince you that you are wasting your time. If you wish to spend your days hanging about my house you must decide for yourself. I will give thought to the problem of how a citizen in a sensitive profession can best shield himself from jacks-in-office. If you wish to go any further than speaking to me, if you nose in my books or my household you must provide yourself with legal authority, which I will contest. I make myself clear?”
You got up, laughing.
“Suits me. This remains between the two of us. Just a friendly chat from time to time. Doctor and patient!” You laid your hand on the doorknob. “Which of us is which, eh, Doctor?” You walked out convulsed with idiot merriment; I watched you go, quietly, smoking and sending a screen of smoke after you, not bothering to make polite faces.
Is this witness of yours a pure invention? Do you really dare me to complain? You must know that if I did you would lose your job, since your approach to me is blatantly unethical and illegal. Consequently, you are very sure. Sure of yourself, sure that I will not risk either an official investigation or the subsequent publicity. You are a good poker-player. I cannot, of course, welcome a knock-down-and-drag-out case, since sooner or later someone would lose their head and yelp out matters sufficiently compromising to me. On the other hand, you cannot possibly prove I killed Casimir. Of that I am quite sure.
Criminal Conversation Page 12