I paused thoughtfully.
“All right!” I said. “So be it! And these Germans didn’t inform you of their intentions. That would have been the least they could do!”
“I don’t believe they were Germans. Those people were speaking an unknown language, and I swear to you—make no mistake—that I had no idea where I was.”
My amazement was undiminished. “We’ll resume this conversation later,” I said. “For the moment, I can see Césarine, your old housekeeper, opening the shutters. Madame Lebris is awake…”
“No, we won’t resume this conversation. You’re a good friend, my dear Bare, but I beg you to let me experience the joy of being here, in my little town, close to Mama and to you, in all its plenitude. No going back! No stories! I’m here, alive; let that suffice. And as for you, the scientist, the researcher, well….” He started laughing, and groped to find my shoulder. “Well, leave me in peace! Go now, my dear friend, and come back soon. And thank you, with all my heart.”
That same day, shortly before noon, having done my morning rounds, I was striding back and forth in my study. Jean had been welcomed back into his mother’s house with the embraces you can imagine, but the thought of his incredible adventure was aggravating my ignorance.
I like things to be clear. All darkness irritates me. Bulls aim for the red; it’s at the bull’s-eye that I charge. To set me a puzzle is to place a bowl of soup in front of a starving man. When I feel the truth escaping me, I’m no longer alive.
It’s all very well to say “No stories”, and “Calm down.” Jean Lebris had a right to rest; agreed! But that sequestration, those experimental operations, did all that not merit investigation? Were the French authorities mounting that investigation? It was necessary to clarify the conditions in which Jean Lebris had disappeared from the Saxon field-hospital, to establish responsibility, to exact sanctions, to discover who it was that had cared for him, after their fashion, and to verify whether the young soldier might, if better treated, have retained the use of his eyes. Finally, I confess, my medical curiosity was violently excited, and I would have given a great deal to know the mysterious objective that Jean’s abductors had had in mind.
I knew from experience about administrative indifference, bureaucracy, piles of paper. They had only to let it lie; soon, there would no longer be any question of doing anything; the guilty parties would remain unpunished and the enigma would remain unsolved. Was it right to sacrifice justice and truth to the inertia—to the cowardice, almost—of a sullen young man? Oh, that misanthropic character, that skittish timidity, that morbid self-effacement—how could they be overcome? How could I triumph over my friend Jean?”
Someone had just opened his bedroom window, and I saw him through the gap in my curtains, groping his way around the familiar furniture. His mother was there, but she soon left him alone.
Jean was holding his brushes, and a palette. Alas! He put them down, sadly.
What would become of him? The Lebris were not rich; that little house constituted the bulk of their wealth. They only occupied the first floor; the ground floor, converted into a shop, was rented to a milliner, and the second floor had been vacant for several months. What future awaited them, in these expensive times, now that she was old and tormented by rheumatism, and he was blind!
But wasn’t the future, for him, after a brief delay, the sanitarium?
The slow chime of noon began. My lunch, served, went cold. I was retained there by some confused anomaly…some indefinable contradiction between Jean Lebris’ gestures and the fact that he was blind.
I followed his careful comings and goings with my eyes. His hands slid along the mantelpiece, feeling surfaces, making sure of contours. One of them suddenly moved toward his waistcoat pocket, and the gesture that he made was so natural, so normal, that, for the moment, I didn’t have any sensation of an incredible phenomenon…
When the last vibration of the church bell died away over the town, though, I was still frozen in the same attitude…
At the last stroke of noon, Jean Lebris, the blind man, had checked his watch and set it right.
III. The Adorable Fanny
What did it mean?
Jean is lying, I thought. He can see. What! Without eyes? With those inanimate things? Go on! It’s mad! I must be mistaken. I saw it wrongly. He took out his watch and he set it right be touching the hands, after raising the glass—nothing’s easier; everyone knows where 12 o’clock is on the face of his watch, relative to the circle. But no, though—I was watching attentively…it requires confirmation. Lying? Why? If he really has been provided with visual apparatus, if he carries precious marvels beneath his eyelids for replacing sight, would he be so egotistical, so malevolently stupid, as to hide them?
To this question an internal voice replied: Yes. And it was not without irony that I measured how much less pure and less perfect Jean Lebris appeared to me now that he was no longer dead. His return to the world of the living had stripped him of a halo, and I felt incapable of rendering to the living the reverence I had devoted to his memory. Small as his faults were, I recognized them—but the dead are gods.
On the other hand, I continued, silently, there are pretences that the gaze of a physician can surely see through. Feigning blindness isn’t easy, and I shan’t be deceived by it. It’s true that at present, all I have is a vague doubt…but I shall put the matter to the proof!
Scarcely had I come to this decision than a beam of sunlight came directly into my study. Jean, at the back of his room, had turned toward me. His window was still open. I opened mine noiselessly, and I put a little pocket mirror into the path of the sunbeam. Reflected by the mirror, a tremulous circle played upon the shaded façade, then the wall at the back of the room; it superimposed itself like a mask of light on Jean Lebris’ face…
The man did not flinch, nor did his eyes blink.
So? What was I to think?
I was perplexed. The wisest thing was to keep silent until there was something new. In any case, whatever it might be, Jean’s secret did not affect his military honor in any way. From the beginning of the war until the end, he had conducted himself valiantly. Having fallen before the eyes of his commanders, in the course of an ordered retreat, he was now among the ranks of the presently demobilized. The peace was about to be signed; he was free—and thank God, I knew enough to be sure that, if his personal exile had been prolonged, it could only have been under duress.
I was obliged to be patient for a fortnight before finding the opportunity that revealed the truth.
The truth! It surpassed everything that my imagination had been able to foresee! Its revelation should have excited me, transported me with enthusiasm and left me confounded, as if I were some humble physician of the Middle Ages to whom the invention of the radiograph or the telegraph had been revealed by anticipation. I certainly can’t say that my mind was resistant to dizziness. When I realized the immensity of the discovery, a shiver ran through m entire being…but a man is made as his heart dictates; mine was then palpitating with a nascent love, and nothing could any longer impassion me that was not the adorable Fanny.
Fanny…!
My hand trembles when I write her name. I did not believe that any creature as seductive existed on Earth, and at first I thought that I alone was subject to the attraction of her charms, by virtue of the secret mechanism of affinity. I had lived to the age of 35 without believing in the kind of love of which poets sing. I had passed among the women of my era with my mouth taut and my eye hard, without more than one of them having attracted me, and that one only had to appear to make me her avid and quivering servant. A little later, with as much pride as jealousy, I realized that Fanny had the same effect on everyone else that she had on me, and that her youth exercised a universal empire…
Fanny! Fanny!
It was like a presentiment.
About two weeks after Jean’s return, Madame Lebris, justly anxious about her son’s health, had asked me to examine
him with my stethoscope. We were in the blind man’s room. Dusk was falling. I could hear someone walking back and forth above our heads, and the sliding of heavy objects dragged across the floorboards…
“Well?” asked Madame Lebris, when he examination was finished.
“Well,” I replied, dissimulating my private opinion, “it’s not very serious, but I think mountain air would do him good.”
“Never!” cried Jean. “Leave Belvoux! Oh, no! Spring’s beginning, and the air here isn’t bad. In the autumn, if you insist, we might go to the coast—to Nice or Cannes, for example…”
In the autumn, I thought. Where will you be, my poor Jean, in the autumn?
“Until then,” he continued, “with all due respect, Doctor, we shan’t budge, and we’ll save up.”
What psychologist or diviner could have explained why I was distracted—why, in spite of my grief, in spite of the pathological disaster of which the auscultation had just informed me, the sounds of house-moving hammering the ceiling were echoing in the depths of my being and claiming the better part of my attention?
“Oh, as for saving up…” Madame Lebris took up the thread. “Now that the second floor is let…”
“Time flies, Mama, and 1800 francs isn’t very much.”
“Ah!” I said. “You’ve let it?”
“Yes!” exulted the old lady. “We owe it to Maître Puysandieu. He’s found us charming tenants—ladies from Lyon…”
“From Arras,” Jean corrected. “But they were refugees in Lyon during the war. All their possessions have been destroyed. They were looking for a more rural residence. Puysandieu put advertisements for the apartment in the Lyon newspapers. 1800 francs fully furnished was very reasonable. The ladies came to visit this morning, and stayed. But I can hear from down here that they’re modifying the décor. People have their own tastes and ideas!”
“Madame Fontan has gone back to Lyon,” said Madame Lebris. “She won’t be back until tomorrow, with the trunks. It’s Mademoiselle Grive who’s rearranging things up there.
“Mademoiselle Grive?” I asked.
“The niece,” said Jean. “And Madame Fontan’s the aunt. Mademoiselle Grive is the young woman who commands, Madame Fontan the brave woman who obeys. Would you like to meet the child, Bare? Nothing easier—she’s dining with us. Mama will invite you, won’t you, Mama?”
“Gladly!” said Madame Lebris, manifestly dreading that the leg of mutton might be too modest or the capon too slender.
I found some excuse in order to refuse and left, faithful to the mission that I had given myself—which is to say, without taking any more risks than I had on the preceding days, to find out all I could about the inconceivable blindness of Jean Lebris.
Mademoiselle Grive was coming down the stairs from the second floor in a rush of muslin. I flattened myself against the wall of the landing, gripped by a delightful disturbance, and made an awkward and mechanical bow—and when I found myself back home, it seemed to me that it was by enchantment, and that a magic wand had transported me instantaneously from Madame Lebris’ landing to my study…
Fanny, I am nothing but a miserable coward. I have exerted all my strength to efface your charming image from my memory, but in vain; you have marked me with your red hot seal, and I have felt that sweet wound ever since the evening I first saw you, my beloved—since that night I passed in a fever of astonishment and boundless joy, repeating aloud that I was in love, in love, in love! Oh, the exquisite and frightful memory! Fanny! Blonde Fanny, who came down toward me, light and supple, amid the clouds of your hair and your petticoats, as Diana glided toward Endymion…
I love you still, alas!
I saw her again the following day, when I went to see Jean to take him for a walk—for Madame Lebris, being disabled, was unable to serve as her son’s guide, and Césarine had other things to do—with the result that I had volunteered to devote one hour a day to Jean Lebris. When my patients did not leave me time and Maître Puysandieu could not take my place, my friend Jean risked going out alone, on a woodland path very familiar to him, whose hedge he felt with the tip of his cane. The woods, in fact, extended behind the Lebris house—and it appeared that it was the neighboring boscage that had decided Mademoiselle Grive to establish herself there for the summer.
I don’t know what household matter was responsible for her presence in her landlady’s apartment when I arrived there.
Madame Lebris introduced me.
On the previous evening I had scarcely had time to get a look at the young woman. I was still unfamiliar with the beauty of her face and body, the gracefulness of her movements, the velvet gaze of her pearl-grey eyes and the perfume of roses with which she was redolent. Her voice was musical…
I must have gone pale and trembled. I searched within myself for the man I no longer was. I wanted both to run away and never to leave her…
“I’ve come,” I stammered, “for Jean’s walk…”
Jean had just gone out. It was late. Thinking that I had broken my promise, he had resigned himself to going without me. Césarine, having taken him to the edge of the wood, came back upstairs.
“You’ll soon catch him up,” said Madame Lebris. “He’ll be so glad!”
“Oh, Madame, why didn’t you say anything to me?” said Mademoiselle Grive, reproachfully. “I would have accompanied your son…”
That was said in a tone full of humanity, so simple and so touching that the poor mother had tears in her eyes. And it was said in that tender voice, which seemed to lend to the slightest banal statement the passionate softness of the most tender promise.
I slipped away, my breast in a state of upheaval, intoxicated by happiness. Beautified Nature surrounded me with promises. I had never seen anything as lovely as that path of hectic grass, bordered by verdant embankments. The sun, shining through the young shoots, appeared to be holding a festival in my honor. The florets were only growing, and the little birds were only singing, in order to congratulate me. Spring only reigned because of my love. “I’m happy!” I whispered. “Thank you, daisies; thank you, bullfinches; thank you, thank you, Sun, sky, butterflies…so polite, bravo!” And I bore my heart like a monstrance!
That late afternoon was, however, more summery than spring-like, to tell the truth. A premature heat was cooking the ground, and a monstrous cloud-bank was massed in the south-west, like an enormous mountain of glistening snow.
I went on. Suddenly, as I emerged from my reverie, it occurred to me that Jean Lebris must have been walking with singular rapidity. Or had he gone in another direction? The path forked behind me; was it possible that the blind man had gone the wrong way? No. The path branched to the left, and I knew that Jean was careful to draw his cane along the hedge to the right. That, at least, was what he had told me. All things considered, though, was it necessary to believe him? The incident of the watch obsessed me.
I stopped. Nothing was audible but the rustling of the undergrowth in the stormy calm of the locality and, further away, the muffled murmur of the town. I refrained from calling out; on the contrary, my stratagem was silence. Jean thought he was alone in the midst of the thickets; to creep up on him, spy on him, that was the plan—to wait for him, if necessary, back there at the fork, without making a sound, perhaps even without showing myself…
But I seemed to perceive, in front of me, the hoarse sound of a coughing fit…
I went forward carefully.
The Sun was going down. Beneath the vault of foliage, darkness was gradually falling. A tortoise could have followed me.
Finally, I caught sight of Jean Lebris.
He was sitting on a fallen tree beside the path, which now snaked horizontally through the woods, and he had his back to me.
Slowly, selecting patches of moss in order to place my footfalls thereon, I reached the shelter of a thick bush. There, although I was still behind the walker, I was able to convince myself that he was examining something he was holding in his hands. What was it? My pos
ition and the increasing gloom prevented me from identifying it. The thing, however, was making a metallic clicking sound as it was handled.
The horizon rumbled. The abusive heat created one of those inhospitable ambiences that astonish and alarm the human body, as if the air were beginning to become unbreathable. I took out my handkerchief to mop my brow; my pocket-knife, slipping out, fell on to a stone.
In response to the noise, Jean Lebris sprang to his feet and turned to face me. “Who’s there?” he said, in a cutting voice.
My stupefaction was indescribable. He was looking at me through the opaque mass of the bush, and his staring eyes—his large enigmatic eyes—were shining with a faint gleam!
I don’t know what distressed me more: seeing those two glimmers in that face; being stared at by them in spite of the obstacle that separated me from Jean Lebris; or realizing that the man who was looking at me, and whose friend I was, did not recognize me!
“Who are you?” he went on, in a menacing tone. “What do you want? Answer me, or I’ll shoot!”
The object he had just been holding was now revealed to me: it was a revolver. He aimed it at me with incontestable precision. Twenty meters, at most, separated us.
Quite deliberately, and not without seriousness, I said: “Doctor Bare! Don’t be afraid, Jean.”
The Doctored Man Page 13