To which Dr. Socrates replied:
“We are only miserable animals, and yet we are our own providence and our own gods. The lower animals, whose immemorial reign preceded our own upon this planet, have transformed it by their genius and their courage. The insects have traced roads, excavated the soil, hollowed the trunks of trees and rocks, built dwellings, founded cities, metamorphosed the soil, the air, and the waters. The labour of the humblest of these, that of the madrepores, has created islands and continents. Every material change produces a moral change, since morals depend upon environment. The transformation to which man in his turn has subjected the earth is undoubtedly more profound and more harmonious than the transformation wrought by other animals. Why should not humanity succeed in changing nature to the extent of making it pacific? Why should not humanity, miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life? Why indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder? We may expect a great deal from chemistry. Yet I do not guarantee anything. It is possible that our race will persist in melancholy, delirium, mania, dementia, and stupor until its lamentable end amid ice and darkness. This world is perhaps irremediably wicked. At all events, I shall have got plenty of amusement out of it. It affords those who are in it an interesting spectacle, and I am beginning to think that Chevalier was madder than the rest in that he voluntarily left his seat.”
Nanteuil took a pen from the desk, and held it out, dipped in ink, to the doctor.
He began to write:
“Having been called on several occasions to attend — —”
He interrupted himself to ask Chevalier’s Christian name.
“Aimé,” replied Nanteuil.
“Aimé Chevalier, I have noticed in his system certain disorders of sensibility, vision and motor control, ordinary indications of — —”
He went to fetch a book from a shelf of his library.
“It’s a thousand chances that I shall find something to confirm my diagnosis in the lectures of Professor Ball on mental diseases.”
He turned over the leaves of the book.
“Just see, my dear Romilly, this is what I find to begin with; in the eighteenth lecture, page 389: ‘Many madmen are to be met with among actors.’ This remark of Professor Ball’s reminds me that the celebrated Cabanis one day asked Dr. Esprit Blanche whether the stage was not a cause of madness.”
“Really?” asked Romilly uneasily.
“Not a doubt of it,” replied Trublet. “But listen to what Professor Ball says on the same page. ‘It is an incontestable fact that medical men are excessively predisposed to mental aberration.’ Nothing is truer. Among medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. Still, a man is not a reasoning being merely because he is an idiot.”
After glancing a little further through the pages of Professor Ball’s lectures, he resumed his writing:
“Ordinary indications of maniacal excitement, and, if it be taken into consideration that the subject was of a neuropathic temperament, there is reason to believe that his constitution predisposed him to insanity, which, according to the highest authorities, is merely an exaggeration of the habitual temperament of the individual, and hence it is not possible to credit him with full moral responsibility.”
He signed the sheet and handed it to Pradel, saying:
“Here’s something that is innocuous and too devoid of meaning to contain the slightest falsehood.”
Pradel rose and said:
“Believe me, my dear doctors we should not have asked you to tell a lie.”
“Why not? I am a medical man. I keep a lie-shop. I relieve, I console. How is it possible to relieve and console without lying?”
Then, with a sympathetic glance at Nanteuil; he added:
“Only women and physicians know how necessary untruthfulness is, and how beneficial to man.”
And, as Pradel, Constantin Mate, and Romilly were taking their leave, he said:
“Pray go out by the dining-room. I’ve just received a small cask of old Armagnac. You’ll tell me what you think of it!”
Nanteuil had remained behind in the doctor’s consulting room.
“My little Socrates, I have spent an awful night. I saw him.”
“During your sleep?”
“No, when wide awake.”
“You are sure you were not sleeping?”
“Quite sure.”
He was on the point of asking her if the apparition had spoken to her. But he left the question unspoken, fearing lest he might suggest to so sensitive a subject those hallucinations of the sense of hearing, which, by reason of their imperious nature, he dreaded far more than visual hallucinations. He was familiar with the docility of the sick in obeying orders given them by voices. Abandoning the idea of questioning Félicie, he resolved, at all hazards, to remove any scruples of conscience which might be troubling her. At the same time, having observed that, generally speaking, the sense of moral responsibility is weak in women, he made no great effort in that direction, and contented himself with remarking lightly:
“My dear child, you must not consider yourself responsible for the death of that poor fellow. A suicide inspired by passion is the inevitable termination of a pathological condition. Every individual who commits suicide had to commit suicide. You are merely the incidental cause of an accident, which is, of course, deplorable, but the importance of which should not be exaggerated.”
Thinking that he had said enough on this score, he applied himself immediately to dispersing the terrors which surrounded her. He sought to convince her by simple arguments that she was beholding images which had no reality, mere reflections of her own thoughts. In order to illustrate his demonstration, he told her a story of a reassuring nature.
“An English physician,” he told her, “was attending a lady, like yourself, highly intelligent, who, like yourself, was in the habit of seeing cats under her furniture, and was visited by phantoms. He convinced her that these apparitions corresponded to nothing in reality. She believed him, and worried herself no longer. One fine day, after a long period of retirement, she reappeared in society, and on entering a drawing-room she saw the lady of the house who, pointing to an arm-chair, begged her to be seated. She also saw, seated in this chair, a crafty-looking old gentleman. She argued to herself that one of the two persons was necessarily a creature of the imagination, and, deciding that the gentleman had no real existence, she sat down on the arm-chair. On touching the bottom, she drew a long breath. From that day onward, she never again set eyes on any further phantoms, either of man or of beast. When smothering the crafty-looking old gentleman, she had smothered them all — fundamentally.”
Félicie shook her head, saying:
“That does not apply to this case.”
She meant to say that her own phantom was not a grotesque old man, on whom one could sit, but a jealous dead man who did not pay her visits without some object. But she feared to speak of these things; and, letting her hands fall upon her knees, she held her peace.
Seeing her thus, dejected and crushed, he pointed out that these disorders of the vision were neither rare nor very serious, and that they soon vanished without leaving any traces.
“I myself,” he said, “once had a vision.”
“You?”
“Yes, I had a vision, some twenty years ago. It was in Egypt.”
He noticed that she was looking at him inquiringly, so he began the story of his hallucination, having switched on all the electric lights, in order to disperse the phantoms of darkness.
“In the days when I was practising in Cairo, I was accustomed, in the February of each year, to go up the Nile as far as Luxor, and thence I proceeded, in company with some friends, to visit the tombs and temples in the desert. These
trips across the sands are made on donkey-back. The last time I went to Luxor I hired a young donkey-boy, whose white donkey Rameses was stronger than the others. This donkey-boy, whose name was Selim, was also stronger, slenderer, and better looking than the other donkey-boys. He was fifteen years old. His shy, gentle eyes shone from behind a magnificent veil of long black lashes; his brown face was a pure clear-cut oval. He tramped barefoot through the desert with a step which made one think of those dances of warriors of which the Bible speaks. His every movement was graceful; his young animal-like gaiety was charming. As he prodded Rameses’ back with the point of his stick, he would chatter to me in a limited vocabulary in which English, French and Arabic were intermingled; he enjoyed telling me of the travellers whom he had escorted and who, he believed, were all princes or princesses; but if I asked him about his relations or his companions he remained silent, and assumed an air of indifference and boredom. When cadging for a promise of substantial baksheesh, the nasal twang of his voice assumed caressing inflexions. He thought out subtle stratagems and expended whole treasuries of prayers in order to obtain a cigarette. Noticing that I liked to see the donkey-boys treat their beasts with kindness, he used, in my presence, to kiss Rameses on the nostrils, and when we halted he would waltz with him. He often displayed real ingenuity in getting what he wanted. But he was far too short-sighted ever to show the slightest gratitude for what he had obtained. Greedy of piastres, he coveted still more eagerly such small glittering articles as one cannot keep covered — gold scarf-pins, rings, sleeve-links, or nickel cigar-lighters; and when he saw a gold chain his face would light up with a gleam of pleasure.
“The following summer was the hardest time of my life. An epidemic of cholera had broken out in Lower Egypt. I was running about the town all day long in a scorching atmosphere. Cairo summers are overpowering to Europeans. We were going through the hottest weeks I had ever known. I heard one day that Selim, brought before the native court of Cairo, had been sentenced to death. He had murdered the daughter of some fellaheen, a little girl nine years old, in order to rob her of her ear-rings, and had thrown her into a cistern. The rings, stained with blood, had been found under a big stone in the Valley of the Kings. They were the crude jewels which the Nubian nomads hammer out of shillings or two-franc pieces, I was told that Selim would certainly be hanged, because the little girl’s mother refused the tendered blood-money. Now, the Khedive does not enjoy the prerogative of mercy, and the murderer, according to Moslem law, can redeem his life only if the parents of the victim consent to receive from him a sum of money as compensation. I was too busy to give thought to the matter. I could readily imagine that Selim, cunning but thoughtless, caressing yet unfeeling, had played with the little girl, torn off her ear-rings, killed her, and hidden her body. The affair soon passed out of my mind. The epidemic was spreading from Old Cairo to the European quarters. I was visiting from thirty to forty sick persons daily, practising venous injections in every case. I was suffering from liver trouble, anæmia was playing havoc with me, and I was dropping with fatigue. In order to husband my strength, I took a little rest at noon. I was accustomed, after luncheon, to lie down in the inner courtyard of my house, and there for an hour I bathed myself in the African shade, as dense and cool as water. One day, as I was lying there on a divan in my courtyard, just as I was lighting a cigarette, I saw Selim approaching. With his beautiful bronze arm he lifted the door-curtain, and came towards me in his blue robe. He did not speak, but smiled with his shy and innocent smile, and the deep red of his lips disclosed his dazzling teeth. His eyes, beneath the blue shadow of his eyelashes, shone with covetousness while gazing at my watch which lay on the table.
“I thought he had escaped. And this surprised me, not because captives are strictly watched in Oriental prisons, where men, women, horses and dogs are herded in imperfectly closed courtyards, and guarded by a soldier armed with a stick. But Moslems are never tempted to flee from their fate. Selim knelt down with an appealing grace, and approached his lips to my hand, to kiss it according to ancient custom. I was not asleep, and I had proof of it. I also had proof that the apparition had been before me only for a short time. When Selim had vanished I noticed that my cigarette, which was alight, was not yet tipped with ash.”
“Was he dead when you saw him?” asked Nanteuil.
“Not a bit of it,” replied the doctor, “I heard a few days later that Selim, in his jail, wove little baskets, or played for hours at a time with a chaplet of glass balls, and that he would smilingly beg a piastre of European visitors, who were surprised by the caressing softness of his eyes. Moslem justice is slow. He was hanged six months later. No one, not even he himself, was greatly concerned about it. I was in Europe at the time.”
“And since then he has never reappeared?”
“Never.”
Nanteuil looked at him, disappointed.
“I thought he had come when he was dead. But since he was in prison you certainly could not have seen him in your house. You only thought you saw him.”
The physician, understanding what was in Félicie’s mind, quickly replied:
“My dear little Nanteuil, believe what I tell you. The phantoms of the dead have no more reality than the phantoms of the living.”
Without attending to what he was saying, she asked him if it was really because he suffered from his liver that he had a vision. He replied that he believed that the bad state of his digestive organs, general fatigue, and a tendency to congestion, had all predisposed him to behold an apparition.
“There was; I believe,” he added, “a more immediate cause. Stretched out on my divan, my head was very low. I raised it to light a cigarette, and let it fall back immediately. This attitude is particularly favourable to hallucinations. It is sometimes enough to lie down with one’s head thrown back to see and to hear imaginary shapes and sounds. That is why I advise you, my child, to sleep with a bolster and a fat pillow.”
She began to laugh.
“As mamma does — majestically!”
Then, flitting off to another idea:
“Tell me; Socrates, how comes it that you saw this sordid individual rather than another? You had hired a donkey from him, and you were no longer thinking of him. And yet he came. Say what you like, it’s queer.”
“You ask me why it was he rather than another? It would be very hard for me to tell you. Our visions, bound up with our innermost thoughts, often present their images to us; sometimes there is no connection between them, and they show us an unexpected figure.”
He once more exhorted her not to allow herself to be frightened by phantoms.
“The dead do not return. When one of them appears to you, rest assured that what you see is a thing imagined by your brain.”
“Can you,” she inquired; “guarantee that there is nothing after death?”
“My child, there is nothing after death that could frighten you.”
She rose, picked up her little bag and her part, and held out her hand to the doctor, saying:
“As for you, you don’t believe in anything, do you, old Socrates?”
He detained her for a moment in the waiting-room, warned her to take good care of herself, to lead a quiet, restful life, and to take sufficient rest.
“Do you suppose that is easy in our profession? To-morrow I have a rehearsal in the green-room, and one on the stage, and I have to try on a gown, while to-night I am acting. For more than a year now I’ve been leading that sort of life.”
CHAPTER X
Under the great void reserved by the height of the roof for the upward flight of prayers the motley crowd of human beings was huddled together like a flock of sheep.
They were all there, at the foot of the catafalque surrounded by lights and covered with flowers, Durville, old Maury, Delage, Vicar, Destrée, Léon Clim, Valrosche, Aman, Regnard, Pradel, Romilly, and Marchegeay, the manager. They were all there, Madame Ravaud, Madame Doulce, Ellen Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Clai
re, Louise Dalle, Fagette, Nanteuil, kneeling, robed in black, like elegiac figures. Some of the women were reading their missals. Some were weeping. All of them brought to the coffin of their comrade at least the tribute of their heavy eyes and their faces pallid from the cold of the morning. Journalists, actors, playwrights, whole families of those artisans who gain their living by the theatre, and a crowd of curious onlookers filled the nave.
The choristers were uttering the mournful cries of the Kyrie eleison; the priest kissed the altar; turned towards the people and said:
“Dominus vobiscum.”
Romilly; taking in the crowd at a glance, remarked
“Chevalier has a full house.”
“Just look at that Louise Dalle,” said Fagette. “To look as though she’s in mourning, she has put on a black mackintosh!”
A little to the back of the church, with Pradel and Constantin Marc, Dr. Trublet was, in subdued tones, according to his habit, delivering his moral homilies.
“Observe,” he said, “that they are lighting, on the altar and about the coffin, in the guise of wax candles, diminutive night-lights mounted on billiard cues, and are thereby making an offering of lamp oil instead of virgin wax to the Lord. The pious men who dwell in the sanctuary have at all times been proved to defraud their God by these little deceptions. This observation is not my own; it is, I believe, Renan’s.”
The celebrant, standing on the epistle side of the altar, was reciting in a low voice:
“Nolumus autem vos ignorare fratres de dormientibus, ut non contrisemimi, sicut et cæteri qui spem non habent.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 191