by Guy Endore
You can’t very well throw soup on the floor. But you can throw a piece of meat. And the orderlies had discovered Bertrand’s love for meat. It got to be quite good sport to starve him for a day, then open his door suddenly and fling in a bone covered with shreds of flesh.
The orderlies, armed with whips or clubs, would stand in the opening and watch Bertrand pounce upon his food and crouch on the floor to gnaw off and bolt the meat in chunks, and then to crack the bone for the marrow fat. For greater amusement the orderlies liked to offer Bertrand some especially hard bone, the heavy thigh bone of the horse, for example. The sound of enamel grinding against bone filled the room with a sinister crackling. The orderlies trembled and retreated as far as they could. And they held the handle of the door, ready to slam it shut at the least sign of danger.
In this they were well advised, for on several occasions Bertrand, irritated by their laughter or excited by their applause, suddenly leaped at them. Once he was rewarded by having his face caught between the door and the jamb, so that his cheek bones were nearly crushed in. But on another occasion his teeth managed to reach the leg of Paul, and slashed through the cloth, but without catching the flesh.
Paul had had enough. He had long thirsted for vengeance, anyhow. One day, knowing the doctor absent, he procured aheavy whip from the stable. Bertrand was drugged and chloroformed and tied to the bedpost, where he slumped over the ropes that sustained him, for he was completely unconscious. They took turns beating him, now lashing him with the fine thong, now clubbing him with the butt. Bertrand groaned softly. But he did not wake, though blood spurted from his bruised and shredded back. For weeks after, though, his days and nights were one long torture.
Of all the patients, the men took a peculiar delight in annoying Bertrand. On the days when he was starved, preparatory to being drugged, they used to stand outside his door and listen to his mad bellowing. That amused them. And then when he had been drugged, they found some strange pleasure in manhandling him. He was docile as a sick child. The orderlies scrubbed him, put soap in his eyes or tweaked his nose. He responded with a silly grin. Once an orderly thought of a clever trick. He put sharp tacks through the soles of Bertrand’s shoes so that points projected through. And thus Bertrand, oblivious of pain, was walked along the hall and down the flights of stairs to the reception room where his uncle awaited him.
To his uncle’s greeting he gave no answer. Stood by glumly until Aymar forced him into a seat. Aymar tried to question him. Bertrand continued to glare angrily. Or if his face broke into a silly smile, the effect on Aymar was only the worse.
He tried kindness. “Answer me. Answer me. Please, Bertrand, answer me. Bertrand, look at me. Are you angry at me? Did I not always do my best for you? No father could have struggled harder. And what, after all, did I have to do with you? Neither your mother nor father was any relative of mine. But you came to belong to me, and I came to love you and feel responsibility for you. You were mine, but only as a stray dog sometimes attaches himself to a passerby and will not be shaken off.”
Bertrand grinned.
“Well for you to smile,” Aymar continued. “It was I who had all the pain and disappointment. It is I who now bear all the affront of your ingratitude.”
Bertrand’s smile faded. His face darkened into a scowl.
“Yes, scowl if you like. But you will be sorry. For I shall not see you much longer. I have received papal dispensation and will soon take holy orders. Then I may be sent far away. To China, to South America. And you will be left here. Will you write to me at least? Probably not. You have answered none of my letters so far. Your brutish nature has swallowed all the learning I gave you. Do you recall how I taught you your letters, cutting the alphabet out of various colored papers, and how you first thought that every letter from red paper was A, because A had been cut from red paper?
“So you will not forgive me for having brought you here, where you are surely better off than in that prison asylum? Here it is expensive and beautiful and you have the freedom of that great garden, and the care of a famous doctor who means to help you, if he can, which I doubt, but at any rate.
“Well, speak, finally! Answer me! Or are you dumb?” Aymar rose and yelled into that stolid scowl. He postured, gestured, pleaded.
Then he mopped his brow. “I am going crazy myself,” he thought. “It is plain that the poor boy is totally off.”
He went into the corridor and called an attendant. “Good-bye, Bertrand. Who knows if I shall ever see you again.” Bertrand meekly followed the orderly without so much as another glance at his uncle.
Aymar knocked at the doctor’s office. Dr Dumas greeted him with a smile.
“Come in, M Galliez. Come in. Have a glass of porto with me.”
Aymar was only too happy to sit down and talk to a human being for a change. Dr Dumas was indeed a kind and intelligent man, one with whom one felt at once at home.
“And how did you find your nephew, M Galliez?”
Aymar sipped his porto and answered sadly: “I’m afraid he’s not doing very well.” He shook his head and sighed.
“Well, well,” said the doctor, “such cases, you know, are devilish hard to treat. You must repress their beastly side and that robs them of their joy in life. They grow angry at the whole world and sulk or else mock you in secret.—Here, let me fill your glass.”
After a few glasses of porto, Aymar was feeling more mellow. “What disturbs me, what, in fact, wounds me deeply, is that he will not even talk to me. And why does he never answer my letters?”
“Ah, well, M Galliez, one must put up with such things. Gratitude is rare enough among the sane. For myself, I cannot approach him without raising a scowl on his face. And yet, you know yourself how much care and attention we give to our patients here. What kind of a life is this, after all, to devote oneself, sacrifice everything, in order to relieve the suffering…”
“You should feel ennobled by that, my dear doctor. To attempt to relieve the world’s ills, from whatever side. Oh, by the way, you know, I intend soon to take holy orders.”
“Really?” the doctor was shocked, but recovered quickly. “Then allow me to congratulate you. May I drink to your future? There is nothing finer than the career of priesthood. I am not one of those blatant medicos who are so vociferous in their denunciations of the Church. As a man of science I must be unbiased, as a student of the soul, I know that religion is a potent force.”
Aymar was pleased. There was something he had had on his heart for a long time. Could he entrust it to Dr Dumas?
“I’ve wondered. I know, of course, that your patients may have mass said to them, if they so desire, but do you, ah, systematically attempt to open their hearts to religion? Do you, for example, try to teach them to pray?”
“You have hit there on one of my pet theories, monsieur. I am gradually working toward that.”
“I neglected that myself, in former years,” said Aymar, “but since the terrors of the last year I have become deeply convinced that man must return to the simple faith of his ancestors, back to what we in our modern sophistication and pride term vulgar superstition.”
Dr Dumas nodded his head in agreement, and filled the glasses.
“There is something,” said Aymar, “that I have been wanting to ask you.”
“Certainly.”
“You have watched my nephew carefully?”
“Why, monsieur!”
“I am implying no criticism,” Aymar declared quickly, “but you know, of course, that I have had my nephew in my care for many years?”
“Yes.”
“Well, have you ever observed him change?”
“Change? What do you mean?”
“I mean into a wolf.”
“Into a wolf?”
“Why, yes. You know, of course, that he is afflicted with lycanthropy?”
“To be sure, but that is a mere name.”
“I beg your pardon, it is the truth.”
“Ah, come
, M Galliez. You would not have me believe that your nephew does more than delude himself? You know, his disease is quite common. I have in fact made a study of it. And given considerable attention to the huge mass of testimony in the medieval werewolf trials. There is, in all this testimony, full proof that no one ever saw a werewolf, and the patients themselves confess that they only felt like wolves.”
“Whatever may have been the case,” Aymar returned, “—and I am not prepared to agree with you, for I have studied the matter myself—I am certain that my nephew has been a wolf, and does change into a wolf.”
“And you have seen him do it?” the doctor smiled.
“No. But I am convinced he does.”
“Have you seen the wolf?” Dr Dumas insisted.
“No, but—”
“You seem easily convinced then.”
The two men, a little flushed from the wine, slowly raised their voices. The doctor could no longer pretend to be a friend of religion. He began to berate the Catholic Church for having burned the werewolves. Aymar defended the Church, claiming that the burning was a kind of sanitary device to stop the infection. Somehow D.D. Home* came into the discussion. They went astray here for a moment, while the doctor recalled how Home used to give séances before Impératrice Eugénie. He used to cause harmonicas to float in the air and play tunes by themselves. “Do you believe that?” the doctor asked.
“The Church says that this is the work of the devil, though similar phenomena occur in the lives of the saints. In any case, I should want to see it with my own eyes.”
“Well, of course,” Dr Dumas agreed. “Precisely. But here we have a case which you confess no one has ever seen. Not you, yourself!”
“I have never seen the wolf, true enough,” Aymar came back. “But I have as many good proofs as I want. I have, or rather I once had, a silver bullet which was shot into a wolf by the garde champêtre of our district, and that silver bullet I extracted from the leg of my nephew. I saw his deeds. I heard of his dreams. I have seen, many people have seen, his footprints. I have heard his breath and his snort. There are stranger things. Shall I mention one of many? After he removes his clothes, when the change is about to overcome him, he finds it imperatively necessary to urinate. He has told me of that. Now I ask you, has my victim of lycanthropy read Petronius and other more obscure sources, to know that this is a universal trait of werewolves before the metamorphosis, and why should he want to follow their hints as to the manner of the ceremony? Nonsense.”
“I can’t quite see the point you wish to make, monsieur. I do not deny that the symptoms of the delusion are alike in all its victims. On the contrary, the symptoms would be alike. And if urinating is one of them, why, then of course it belongs there, like a fever in diphtheria. Moreover, the act of urinating can be explained more simply by the cold air striking the skin of the body. A lowering of temperature invariably brings on the desire to rid the body of the larger amount of moisture required in a warmer atmosphere. It is akin to a sudden condensation and precipitation.”
“Why not to the sudden necessity of getting rid of an excess of moisture because a wolf naturally carries less? Good Lord, doctor, do you think I lived twenty years with this thing without debating with myself every single minute point? Ten years would not suffice here to recapitulate the entire story of the origin and mystery of this creature. I was as unwilling as you to accept the facts. I am not by nature gullible.”
“I take for granted your original incredulity. I ask myself only how you ever changed. How could you ever come to believe that he was metamorphosed into a wolf? That is per se preposterous!”
“Certain things. Many things, some small in themselves, but all of them together presenting an invincible argument made me change my mind. His birth on Christmas Eve, for example.”
“Statistics will show, I am sure, said Dumas eagerly, “that thousands born on that day have had lives no different from the rest of us. Are you going to bring up astrology?”
“Not at this moment,” said Aymar, “but science has still not explained many phenomena of human character and emotion.”
“Would you set limits to science?” Dumas raised his voice. “Man is a compound of chemicals and some day we shall write the chemical reaction of love!”
“Tommyrot!” Galliez retorted. “Man is a union of spirit and matter. In the instant between life and death, for example, what leaves the body: a chemical?”
“No, but the chemical order or aggregation is altered there.”
“Ha, ha! So we do have a remarkable change of form, here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Simply that the alteration from man to wolf is no greater than from life to death.”
“Rhetoric, monsieur!”
“That’s no answer. Are you at loss for a scientific argument?”
“But, man!” Dumas bellowed. “Consider what you are saying: that a man can turn into a wolf. A wolf, remark you, that has no sweat glands, whose bones and teeth, hardbodies, mindyou, are all differently shaped, whose every cell and every hair and nerve—”
“And why not?” said Galliez, flourishing his wine glass. “Do not such changes take place in nature? Have you never seen water change to ice?”
“Oh, come.”
“Have you never seen two gases unite suddenly into a snowy powder?”
“Yes, but—”
“And a worm change into a showy butterfly?”
“Yes, but in a whole month of time.”
“What difference does time make? Is not time infinitely divisible? If a wheel can turn once a year can it not also turn a million times a second? The life of some animals is the twinkling of an eye, while of others it is a century.”
“I concede you that,” said Dumas slowly, “but you have mentioned the butterfly. Have you ever seen it turn back into a worm?”
“No, but if, as you said, life is a chemical reaction, is there any reason why it should not be reversible?”
“No,” the doctor said slowly, for he was beginning to recall his professional discretion. He’d better not argue himself out of a patient here. He swung slowly around until he was agreeing with Aymar.
“And those eyebrows that meet,” Aymar pursued.
“Yes, I’ve noticed that, but I took that for a sign of hereditary syphilis.”
“Not at all,” said Aymar. “And those nails.”
“A common enough sign.”
“Interlocking teeth set with little spaces between.”
“Of course, there are wide variations in the dentition of man.”
“And those hairy palms.”
“Very strange, that, isn’t it?”
“Not so much any one of these signs, but all together. It is as if the beast in him peeped forth here and there. And then, of course, his actions, more than anything else.”
“Hm,” said the doctor. “You know, M Galliez, that what you say there interests me immensely. It unfolds a remarkable new theory for all the inexplicable manifestations of morbid and abnormal psychology. The intrusion, even in partial degrees, of lower forms of life into the human form. Of course, attractive though the idea is, I cannot accept your conclusions fully. But I intend to study the matter.”
From this point the discussion grew more and more one-sided and even more flattering to Aymar. When he arose to go, it was with renewed and increased faith that in Dr Dumas’ sanatorium he had found the ideal spot for Bertrand. In fact he felt a little concerned for the doctor. “I hope you can do him some good, Dr Dumas, but let me give you a little friendly warning. Be careful. He’s a dangerous criminal. Watch out for him. And if you must approach him, remember to cross yourself.”
“Thank you for your advice,” the doctor replied. “I shall avail myself of it. And may I communicate to you the results of my observations?”
He stood at the door and as he watched Aymar go off with a more unsteady limp than usual, he snorted quietly: “I may have two patients yet, out of that family.”
>
Bertrand, when not in a rage and not drugged, had now no pleasures in life but these two: the singing of Sophie, and the hope of revenge on Paul. As for communication with his uncle, that had best be given up, even as a dream. For it was plain that they would never let Aymar up here, and equally plain that they would never let him down unless he was drugged. If not by food, then by an injection. And as for writing, there was no possibility of that; not only was material lacking, but how to post a letter, even should one succeed in writing it?
Often, when ruminating thus over his miserable fate Bertrand was overcome with sadness, it might happen that the faint singing of Sophie would sound through the wall. The bitterness would vanish from his grief. Tears would come to his eyes. “Sophie,” he would say to himself, “Sophie.” And he would lie down on his mattress, which was on the floor and constituted his entire bed, in fact his entire furniture, and imagine she was in his arms. Her black curls were in his face, her soft, moist lips against his, and her slender arms about his body. And the dream would last until the singing ceased. Then he would beg: “Sing again, Sophie. Sing another song.” And if, as sometimes happened, the flat, drawn-out notes rose again, then he was almost certain that she knew he was here, in the room next door, and that she knew he wanted to hear her sing.
After a while the singing alone was not enough. The mere dream of Sophie no longer held. He must get into the next room. But how? He formulated a hundred bold plans and rejected all. He discovered, however, that he could manage to leap up to the oval window, catch on to the sill, and by digging his toes into the wall, almost hitch himself up to a seating position. If only his toes could secure abetter hold on the wall. With his fingernails, with a splinter of bone, he remedied that. Two little niches now served to give him a good purchase on the wall and actually to seat himself on the sill.
Chance favored him there. The entire framework of the oval window, bars and all, was loose in its setting of stone. Evidently the workman who had made a permanent opening above the glass, for ventilation, had loosened the frame from the plaster and not bothered to repair his damage. Or else time had shrunk the wood to its present size. In any case, one could take hold of the bars and pull out the whole window as if it were a stopper. Having made sure of this, Bertrand waited feverishly until late at night to explore further.