“So, my dear Pilesèche,” said the man in the velvet jacket, continuing the conversation, “my uncle has suddenly felt his familial fibers vibrating?”
“He has, at least testified the desire to see you,” the other replied, not without a certain reticence.
“I’m still amazed, not being accustomed to such tenderness on his part.”
“The sentiments are modified, Monsieur Bémolisant, and soften at the approach of death.”
“And you think that the old man is there?”
“I believe that it would be very difficult for him to get better. I think he’s worn out. He’s developed an extreme nervous sensitivity, and I’ve been able to observe profound disturbances in his organism of late. However, he might live for a few weeks yet; yesterday evening, when I left him, Monsieur Grillard was not exactly worse; he merely manifested the desire to be alone, and dismissed me rather abruptly, I have to say...”
“In order not to misrepresent his amiable character. You’re an angel of forbearance, Monsieur Pilesèche, and in your place, I would have broken his retorts over his head a long time ago.”
“Are you astonished, then, that he has quarreled with you?”
“What do the doctors say?” asked the other, after a brief pause.
“The doctors? You can hardly doubt that he’s refuse their intervention, and you know how determined he is...”
“How stubborn, you mean. Yes, yes, I know my dear uncle, although he banished me from his presence a long time ago. I know that one can’t easily get him to give in. He’s doubtless a great scientist, but what an insupportable fellow!”
Pilesèche pursed his lips with an indulgent gesture. “Everyone has his little faults; I’m used to his and I’m no less affected for that by the sad state to which I see him reduced. Oh, since a month ago the laboratory no longer exists. Even before being bed-ridden, the poor man had no heart for anything. Experiments begun were left incomplete. There was only his most recent research…you know, his research on the occlusion of living beings?”
“The occlusion of…,” said the other, nonplussed. “He was working on the occlusion of living beings. What on earth can that be?”
“You don’t keep up with the reports of the scientific societies?”
“Eminently unhealthy nourishment, Monsieur Pilesèche—no, I don’t read them. The occlusion…ha ha! My dear uncle definitely had a very accentuated crack in the brain. At his age, it’s pardonable.”
“You can laugh, but I assure you…the results are precise and I myself...”
“What you too? Well, you’re a bit touched yourself, my friend. Anyway, it’s not astonishing. The great man’s laboratory assistant…and it’s contagious. But come on, explain it to me: what is this occlusion, of which I’ve never heard?”
“Artist as you are, you must have heard mention of some recent very singular discoveries. In the course of digging in perfectly virgin ground, incontestably undisturbed for several centuries, it sometimes happens—rarely, I admit—that is breaking blocks of stone, one sees emerging from one of them a toad, which yawns and stretches: a living toad, awakening after a centuries-long sleep...”
“And you’ve seen that yourself?” said Bémolisant, incredulously.
“No, I haven’t seen it myself,” the laboratory assistant replied, mildly, “but our experiments prove the possibility of the phenomenon. We’ve reproduced it artificially; we’ve hermetically sealed up toads, frogs, even cats...”
“For centuries?” the artist interrupted, holding his ribs.
“For a few days—but that’s sufficient to demonstrate the conditions in which a living being can remain like that, without dying.”
“You’re amazing!”
“No, no, it’s quite simple. It’s quite evident that it you content yourself with enclosing your subject brutally, whatever it might be, it will die quickly, asphyxiated. But in the multitudinous phases of hypnotic sleep, there’s one, still little known, that resembles death but isn’t. It isn’t catalepsy, properly speaking, in which the subject doesn’t cease to breathe and the blood still circulates; it’s like a paralysis of the entire organism, a complete suspension of life...”
“And the animal can live without air, without light?”
“It lives…if one can call the complete arrest of all the vital functions living.”
“And what do you do to enclose it in its pebble?”
“The prison doesn’t matter, so long as it’s hermetic; the one that Monsieur Grillard normally employs is a metallic envelope deposited by galvanoplasty.”
“It’s only scientists that have such ludicrous ideas!”
“Pooh! Have you forgotten your theories about music, then? Do you think that the six-thousand-note scale with which you once wanted to endow us wasn’t at least as singular?”
“So I wasn’t understood by the men of my time, and in order not to lower my art by vile concessions to the level of my contemporaries devoid of ears, I renounced music...”
“You see...”
“Now I do sculpture…decadent sculpture…you’ll see! A revolution, my dear, a revolution! The primitives were nothing, the Byzantines nothing more; the art has never been understood like this...”
“You were talking about cracked brains a little while ago, Monsieur Bémolisant. I have reason to believe that, by virtue of atavism, you...”
“Oh! I’m misunderstood before I’ve even spoken!”
They arrived at the coaching entrance of an old house of rather sordid appearance, and, after darting a distracted glance at the lodge, deserted for the moment, they climbed the somber staircase whose sticky handrail adhered to the fingers.
The fourth floor landing, to which insipid and nauseating odors rose up from the rest of the house, was illuminated by wan daylight falling vertically through a glazed skylight open in the roof.
Pilesèche took a large key from his pocket and introduced it into the lock of a door painted in yellow ocher.
“My uncle lodges a long way up,” said the artist, out of breath after his climb.
“That’s because of the laboratory; one can’t find appropriate premises to let everywhere.”
“And then, admit it, landlords don’t like having such a constantly grumpy tenant...”
They went into a gloomy vestibule, which gave access on one side to a small kitchen, and on the other to a room decorated with the name of the drawing room and furnished with four rickety armchairs. At the back was the door to the laboratory, the biggest room in the apartment: the only one in which Népomucène Grillard lived, and which was really useful to him.
The two newcomers were walking on tiptoe, as is appropriate in the apartment of an invalid. Pilesèche gently lifted the latch of the laboratory and pushed the door. The vestibule was suddenly invaded by a violent flood of light and empyreumatic odors.
The laboratory was illuminated from above, like a painter’s studio. The raw daylight fell upon tables overloaded with an inextricable tangle of glassware: flasks of various shapes, test-tubes and reagents of all colors in recipients of every form. There was a microscope, and countless items of bizarre apparatus, in chaotic disorder. An enormous chimney-hood, on which iron-clad furnaces, earthenware crucibles and pot-bellied retorts were strewn, completed the encumbrance of the fin-de-siècle alchemist’s lair, while various guinea-pigs, cats, frogs and toads were scratching in their cages or beneath bell-jars scattered here, there and everywhere.
The scientist’s laboratory also served as his bedroom, but the iron-framed bed, on which a meager mattress was thrown, attested that Népomucène Grillard was no sybarite.
The newcomers approached it with muffled footsteps, in order not to trouble his slumber. Wasted effort! They were astonished—on might almost say frightened—to find the bed empty.
Pilesèche opened his eyes wide in bewilderment, but no exclamation could escape his gaping mouth, so tightly was his throat constricted by that unexpected spectacle.
“Co
me on, let’s pull ourselves together,” said Bémolisant, the first to recover the power of speech, passing his hand over his forehead. “If he’s not here, he must have gone out, improbable as the supposition might seem. The concierge will have seen him go past. I’ll go and question her.”
The artist ran downstairs and presented himself at the lodge, where the concierge was in the process of warming up her milk, with his back turned.
“Has Monsieur Grillard gone out?” asked Bémolisant, out of breath.
“Out! Oh, the poor old man. He’s not in any state to go for a walk. He’s in bed. It’s a month, now that he hasn’t been down and I haven’t seen him. Monsieur Pilesèche gives me news of him every say, for you can imagine that, with his everlasting bad mood, I don’t risk going upstairs to offer him my services.”
The good woman had turned round, hands on hips. “You can go up confidently. He’s at home, in bed…unless Monsieur Pilesèche is putting one over on me,” she added, laughing thickly.
Bémolisant had no desire to persist. While going back up as hastily as he had come down, it occurred to him that the sudden disappearance was going to seem singular to many people, to say the least.
Pilesèche was waiting for him at the door, his expression utterly distressed, pale and worn out, his arms dangling. “I’ve found him, alas,” he moaned, in a cavernous voice.
“He’s hanged himself, perhaps?” the other queried, anxiously.
“No, worse than that.”
“Well, what? You’re killing me with your reticence...”
“Come...”
Taking hold of his jacket, the laboratory assistant led him to a corner of the laboratory, where Bunsen piles and galvanoplasty vats were scattered. One of them had unusual dimensions; it was full of a green-tinted liquid in the middle of which one could make out the black form of a human body.
“There he is,” murmured Pilesèche, strangled by emotion.
“He’s drowned himself!”
“No…he’s metalized himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like the toad, Monsieur Bémolisant, like the toad!” He shook his arm.
“But he’s dead, at any rate?” said the nephew.
“Oh, it’s probable. The human species doesn’t have a long life, alas.”
They both stood there, immobile and mute before the strange spectacle.
Suddenly, Bémolisant, moved by a sudden inspiration, uttered a stifled exclamation. “But my friend, there’s something you haven’t thought of...”
“What’s that?”
“We’re going to be accused of having killed him.”
“Oh my God! But that’s absurd!”
“It’s less absurd than supposing a sick man capable of steeping himself in a galvanic bath all on his own. Think about it! No one has seen him for a month; he’s been sequestrated. He’s found in that state; there’s been a violent death. We’re the only ones who’ve been in here; it’s us that will be accused. You and me—both of us.”
The other was stunned. “You’re right,” he moaned, wiping his forehead. “What are we going to do, then?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he’s left a note, a piece of paper announcing his fatal resolution. That will suffice to get us off the hook...”
“Alas, he’s capable of not having done anything, in order to play one last trick on us.”
“Let’s look anyway.”
Their eyes troubled by anguish, they looked everywhere, on the tables and in the drawers.
Nothing.
Suddenly, however, their eyes fell upon the blackboard, which bore the following singular inscription:
READ CAREFULLY:
bfoomgtqkl ovyesqnuesrsngbnljuefrplfyesqn
ugnxglpretkynqitcpsgstknptfzpftifpcfyesk fj
gpbutigoskeneruteexrbpdbvetvangnugtjpsutu
dvipps.
“It’s a cryptogram! To mock us one last time for our ignorance. Can you decipher it, at least?” demanded the laboratory assistant.
“Oh, as to that, no.”
“Then we’re back with the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.”
After a moment of silent meditation, in which their minds were heavy with pitiful thoughts, Bémolisant said, with a somber expression: “Pilesèche, the moment has come for grave decisions.”
At that remonstration, the other straightened up, ready for anything.
“It’s necessary for the corpse to disappear,” the artist concluded, his voice whistling.
“Ah!”
It will disappear; we’ll take it away. And later...” His voice attained the extreme limit of tragic falsetto; one might have thought that it was escaping his brain through his cranium. “…Later,” he continued, in the stifled tone of a traitor in a melodrama, “well, we’ll be able to explain the disappearance. The most urgent thing is to get rid of the evidence.”
The two men leaned over the vat. The laboratory assistant opened the tap.
The liquid ran out slowly, and its soft, musical susurrus contrasted strangely with the sinister situation. Gradually, the contours of the body emerged in their black envelope; one might have thought it a statue emerging from the mold, still covered with a layer of powdered oxide.
Unconsciously, as if he were still in the middle of one of his habitual experiments, the laboratory assistant rubbed the cheeks with the palm of his hand, where the metal whitened, polished without difficulty.
“It’s nickel,” he said, finally.
The body, clad in its metallic pellicle, was holding two nickel cylinders in its hands, attached to the negative pole of the pile.
“He’s heavy,” murmured Bémolisant, trying to lift him up.
“How are we going to get him out?” asked Pilesèche.
“How, above all, are we going to get him past the concierge without arousing suspicion?”
“Oh, my head’s splitting. I’m not made for conspiracies!” He let himself fall on to a chair, his head bowed—but Bémolisant shook him rudely
“Come on, a little nerve, damn it! Are we little girls?”
“You talk about it so casually…I’ve never been accused of any crime until now.”
III. In which the Peregrinations of the Nickel Man begin
An hour later, a cab stopped outside the door of the house and Pilesèche got out, while Bémolisant went through the arch with three day-laborers he had recruited in the Place Maubert.
The concierge was on the threshold of her lodge.
The laboratory assistant made violent efforts to give his face a smiling expression, the muscles taut, and he saluted her. In spite of his determination not to allow his emotion to show, he was frightfully pale, more gauche than ever, his movements feverish and disordered.
“Bonjour, Madame Paponot,” he succeeded in saying, in a strangled voice.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Pilesèche,” the stout lady replied. “And your M’sieu, how is he?”
“Uh, he’s still nearly…you know…it comes and goes.”
Bémolisant started up the stairs; the concierge pointed at him, laughing. “That artiss in velvet, all hot under the collar, asked me a little while ago whether your invalid had gone out! Poor fellow! It’s not the time!”
“Oh no, Madame Paponot, it’s really not the time.” He added, by way of correction: “The gentleman is a scrap metal merchant.”
“Oh—not an artiss?”
“No, no, he’s a scrap dealer. One can’t turn around up there, it’s so cluttered—so I said to Monsieur Grillard, what if we were to get rid of all our superfluities?”
“Good God, what are those? You scientists, you have these words...”
“It means our scrap metal, our old stuff—you know.”
“Oh, yes…and the poor man agreed? That must be the first time in his life he’s ever agreed with someone.”
“When one’s ill, you know, one becomes more human. But I’m chatting, and my men are already upstairs. Au revoir, Madame Paponot, au revoir.”
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Quickly, he ran up the rickety steps in order to catch up with Bémolisant and the porters, whom he let into the laboratory.
Then, showing them the vat, over which he had nailed a lid of planks, he said: “This is it.”
One of the men took hold of the long box by one of its corners and tested its weight.
“Damn,” he said, letting it fall back. “It’s no featherweight.”
“Of course not,” Bémolisant replied, as tranquilly as he could. “Scrap metal is heavy.”
Everyone lent a hand to the task, and the box was finally taken down, with a great deal of difficulty, to the coaching entrance.
Pilesèche had no desire to chat; he went past the lodge rapidly, in a hurried manner—but that did not suit Madame Paponot, who stopped him.
“Hey, M’sieu Pilesèche!” she shouted after him. “A bit of advice—today’s Saint Sylvester, as you know. It seems to me that I can’t decently avoid going up tomorrow to wish the poor m’sieu a happy new year, like my other tenants...”
No, no!” exclaimed the laboratory assistant, precipitately. “He can’t see anyone. That might put him in a bad temper…and strokes can arrive so quickly, you know. Don’t worry, I’ll give you your present, and you won’t have to put yourself out.”
The box was loaded; the porters were dismissed.
The coachman leaned over toward his clients, already installed in the vehicle.
“Where are we going, bourgeois?” he asked.
That was a question that Pilesèche had not anticipated. Was it necessary to shout out loud he place that they had chosen as a refuge? They might as well put the police on the track immediately.
Fortunately, the artist had anticipated the eventuality, and, putting his head through the window, he shouted an address at the coachman chosen at random. When they reached the Rue des Écoles, however, while the horse continued its rapid trot, he lowered the glass again and, sticking out half his body in order to get closer to the driver, he said to him, without being heard by the passers-by: “I’ve changed my mind, Coachman—we’ll go directly to Avenue Clichy, number...” He pronounced the number so quietly that the coachman could hardly hear it.
The Nickel Man Page 15