The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  We started out to the car, and Miss Finney said, “Emily, I was just telling Hoopie about Dr. Gollmer,” which, since we hadn’t mentioned Dr. Gollmer’s name for some time, I took to be a cue that any further talk from me was out, until we got rid of Emily.

  “Dr. Gollmer,” breathed Emily. “Oh, dear.”

  “Emily doesn’t like Dr. Gollmer,” Miss Finney said. “She thinks he is a horrid man.”

  “Oh, indeed I do,” said Emily, and then with more spirit, “and indeed he is. Anybody can tell that. Just to look at him.”

  Miss Finney said, “He suggests to Emily an excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the bed and the bottle.”

  “I never said that,” said Emily.

  “Oh yes you did, but you didn’t admit they were pleasures,” said Miss Finney, so smugly that I had a suspicion she had been amusing herself, as she frequently did, by seeing if she could manipulate the conversation around to the point where she could get somebody to say something in the exact words she wanted them to say it in.

  I said, “You’re right, Emmy, he looks terrible,” because although he had spruced up a little, I remembered how vigorous he had been when I first knew him, and how broken he looked now.

  “He’s taking the Morelli thing very hard,” Miss Finney said. We had got downstairs now, and to the car. We climbed in, all three in the front seat because Emily took up no more room than a sack of groceries, and didn’t generate much more in the way of body heat. Miss Finney said, “I’ll tell you about that, Hoop. Know anything about blackwater fever?”

  What I knew about blackwater fever was that you usually died from it, and that everybody was always saying “Be sure to take your quinine,” the idea being that if you got malaria and then had to take the big doses of quinine they gave you in treatment of it, the malaria might turn into blackwater if you hadn’t already accustomed your system to the quinine by taking the five or ten grains a day which were standard. But you heard all kinds of things—for instance, after we had taken our quinine for months in the pill form they sold to us in the Congo, we heard somewhere that you had to mash them up, because the pills were so hard they went right through you, otherwise. And a lot of people took quinine all the time and got malaria, and a lot claimed they never took it at all, and never got anything at all, and so forth and so on in every possible combination. And once for five weeks I had taken Tommy Slattery’s bicarbonate-of-soda tablets every day thinking they were the quinine tablets that looked just the same and came from the same place in the same kind of box, labeled with the very unlovely name of, the drug chain, Compagnie Pharmaceutique du Congo—Cophaco. I said all this to Miss Finney.

  She said, “Well, I wouldn’t say you had an exhaustive knowledge of blackwater, but you’ve got the popular essentials down. You could look it up in a book and learn something. For the moment I’ll tell you that for reasons sufficient unto myself I talked to Gollmer yesterday and asked him to outline the treatment he gave Liliane—quinine dosage and so on—when she came down with malaria. He did it all according to routine procedure, and according to routine procedure there isn’t any reason in the world why it should have turned into blackwater.”

  “Does that have to mean anything?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t have to,” Miss Finney said. “On the other hand, it easily could. But this has hit him awfully hard. He did hope for a comeback, although considering the way people feel about these two girls of his—“

  “Mademoiselle Lala and Mademoiselle Baba,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Miss Finney. She grinned. “That old goat,” she said. “Well, what with all this Lalababa stuff and the fact that you can see he’s turning into an old drunk and what with one thing and another, I guess you know he’s really been on the rocks, and when he was called in by the Morellis he felt he was really ready for a comeback.”

  “I can’t understand how they happened to call him in,” I said. “He hasn’t had a respectable patient for a long time.”

  “Or a paying one either,” Miss Finney said. “He told me the reason they called him in was that Liliane insisted on having him.”

  “Liliane did?”

  “So he says. It’s surprising, but you’re consternated. Why?”

  “If Liliane really called him in, I’d say it was a pretty generous gesture, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “Something he did to her, that’s all,” I said, remembering Emily was listening. “This is your story. Go ahead.”

  “That’s all there is to it,” Miss Finney said. “He seems to have diagnosed the case properly, he seems to have treated it properly, as malaria, but on the other hand he certainly has lost his patient, which, for him, means final curtain as a doctor. It’s one too many, and especially it’s one too prominent.”

  “What does he expect you to do about it?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact he seems a little uncertain as to whether he wants me to do anything at all about it. A well-wisher of his came to me, and—”

  “I didn’t know he had any well-wishers any more. Except maybe me.”

  “You?” Miss Finney asked. “How come you?”

  “I don’t know—no particular reason except that I’ve always liked him without knowing him, really—always felt he had an odd kind of honesty that explains a lot of the things people object to in him.”

  Miss Finney looked at me with the combination of calculation and beneficence that was one of her typical expressions when she was pleased, and said, “You’re a mass of flaws and shortcomings, Hoopie, but you’ve got some very endearing virtues. I’m glad you feel that quality in old Gollmer. I feel it too, or I wouldn’t be fooling with this case. I’m supposed to issue some kind of statement. People are talking about malpractice, at worst, or just plain incompetence, at best. I’m supposed to issue this statement saying that Gollmer made a correct diagnosis and gave the correct treatment and that in my opinion nobody could have done anything more.”

  “And coming from Mary Finney, that does Gollmer a lot of good,” I said.

  “Sure,” Miss Finney said, matter-of-factly.

  “And who’s this well-wisher?”

  Miss Finney ignored the question so ostentatiously that I asked another. “Can you do it for him?” I asked.

  “How can I? I didn’t see the patient. He had remarkably complete records, though. Madame de St. Nicaise ran a very orderly establishment for Madame Morelli, whether she liked her or not. Daily records of everybody’s quinine dosage for years past, even including guests, for goodness’ sake. Gollmer had all the temperature graphs and records of medication in good order. I wouldn’t be able to say a thing except that from what he told me and showed me everything seems all right except that it didn’t work. And according to him, Liliane was strong as a horse, hadn’t been sick a day since she came to the Congo. And that’s a record for any woman. She should have weathered this.”

  “I can’t imagine her sick, much less dead. Is that all you know?”

  “The essentials.”

  “Then why are you doing all this?”

  Miss Finney hesitated for a long time, then said uncomfortably, “I’m suspicious.”

  “What makes you suspicious? If that’s all you know.”

  “Things you’ve told me, mostly,” she said. “When I first mentioned it to you, I was shooting in the dark. Now I’m shooting at something.”

  “You wouldn’t want to go so far as to say at some body, would you?” I asked.

  At this point Emily gave one of her small apologetic coughs and said, “I sincerely trust, Mary, that you are not pointing the finger of suspicion at Madame de St. Nicaise.”

  We had got to the Petit-Pont, but Miss Finney said, “Wait a minute, Hoop, don’t get out, we’re going to sit right here and listen to this.” She turned full to her partner and said, “Emily Collins, do you know this Nicaise woman?”

  “Indeed I do,” said Emily.

  “Well for Pete’s sake,” Miss Finney said.
“Right in my own back yard. How come?”

  “I was with Madame de St. Nicaise this afternoon,” said Emily, in a virtuous tone which seemed to add, “while you and Hoopie were sitting around in bars. And I may say that I found her completely charming.”

  “Oh, you may?” said Miss Finney. “And may I ask why you were with her?”

  “Madame de St. Nicaise is chairlady of the Société des Dames Belgiques pour—“ Emily took a deep preparatory breath and shifted gear into English—“The Belgian Ladies’ Society for the Encouragement of Christian Music Among the Congo Natives. The Society is giving us fifty new hymnals and,” she said, looking as smug as Mary Finney had ever looked, although I had never before seen Emily look even faintly pleased with herself, “and a portable foot-pump-organ.”

  Miss Finney looked stunned. She said, “Well, for crying out loud, pump-organs, and me needing hypodermics the way I do.” Then she beamed and said, “Little Emily, and Madame de St. Nicaise. Who’d have thought it?” She contemplated Emily with pleasure, and said, “Hot dog!” She followed this with, “Whaddayaknow,” and then, still grinning, she wound up her soliloquy: “Emily Collins, I can use you,” she said.

  All during dinner she kept on grinning, and now and then she would shake her head in wonder and delight, and although I would have been feeling very uncomfortable indeed if I had been in Emily’s position, indeed I would, Emily seemed happy and content, and pecked away at her food so steadily that she downed many an ounce before we took her home and put her to bed, and Miss Finney and I went automobile riding again so that I could tell her about the Great Stringed Instrument Schism for whatever it might be worth to her as part of the rat’s nest of information which she kept stored away inside her head for future refinement and selection.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT politics and bedfellows is true enough, but the strangeness of these combinations is as nothing compared with the strangeness of the heads that find themselves on the same pillow because of art. Nothing else in this world, except maybe a mutual love of fishing, which they didn’t happen to share, could have produced a union between Madame de St. Nicaise and Dr. Gollmer. And even this union through art was effected with difficulty and preserved, as long as it lasted, in pain.

  On the face of it you wouldn’t have said they could get together even on art. Dr. Gollmer was a member of the Friends of Native Art and a contributor to Brousse, and it was typical of Madame de St. Nicaise that she should be involved in something for the Encouragement of Christian Music Among the Congo Natives, because she was one of those unwilling inhabitants of the Congo who look on anything native as anathema. Ces indigènes, these natives, is for them a term of contempt and revulsion, and anything having to do with native art, native culture, native anything, is something to be, destroyed if possible, or hidden as second best, or ignored if you can’t do any better, and finally simply tolerated if it is something you can’t get along without, like native servants.

  But Dr. Gollmer played the violin and Madame de St. Nicaise played the cello, and they were joined in quadruple musical alliance with the two other members of the Léopold String Quartet, which gave two concerts a year.

  I went into the Consulate one morning, not long after Schmitty and I had sat at the café and I had been left cold by Jeanne Morelli, and when I came in, I thought Schmitty said, “Hello, chum.”

  “Chum yourself, bud.”

  “I didn’t say chum,” Schmitty said. “I said chump.” He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a small packet of pasteboard slips held together by a rubber band. He pulled the top one off the bunch and held it out to me, and when I didn’t take it he laid it down on the desk in front of me.

  “Fifty francs,” he said. That was around a dollar seventy-five.

  “You go to hell,” I suggested.

  “Not this time,” Schmitty said. “This time I’ve got you by where you can’t pull away. This is the local equivalent of the ticket to the Policemen’s Ball. Fifty francs.”

  I looked at the pasteboard, which was a ticket for a concert by something called the Léopold String Quartet, proceeds to go to the benefit of Belgian refugees. The only Belgian refugees I knew were those in Léopoldville who had got out by way of London with generous wads of dough and were now happily selling their Congo copper and tin and everything else as fast as they could pull it out of the ground, and I said to Schmitty that unless there was another brand of Belgian refugee somewhere who needed my fifty francs worse than I did, no tickee.

  “No tickee my foot,” Schmitty said. “Into every life some rain must fall. This is yours for today. Matter of foreign policy. You wouldn’t undo all the State Department’s work for a lousy fifty francs, would you?” He held out his hand and rubbed the finger tips together. “Give,” he said. I gave.

  “As a matter of fact,” Schmitty said, after we had gone out and got settled over morning coffee at the Equatoriale, “the Quartet isn’t so bad. You remember that old biddy we saw here the other day? The one that stalked out when Madame Stuff walked in? Wait’ll you see her lovin’ up that bull fiddle.”

  It wasn’t a bull fiddle Madame de St. Nicaise played, it was a cello, as I’ve said, but when you saw her playing it, you understood why Schmitty, who had an indecent turn of mind whenever possible, spoke in amorous metaphor. Madame de St. Nicaise was not a tall woman, and, if cellos come in different sizes, this must have been an awfully large one. Female cellists are always in a spot at a concert; there’s always that awkward moment when they sit down and assume the ungainly attitude in preparation for accommodating the instrument. Once they get going, all’s well, and they are part of the instrument, if they’re really good; the big instrument and the person playing it are part and parcel of the same thing, and music comes out of it.

  Madame de St. Nicaise was adequate, but she wasn’t that good, and she wasn’t any good at all in making a graceful go of getting settled. She was dressed in the usual very full long skirt, which was of a fading bottle-green satin, and when Dr. Gollmer stood in front of her with the cello, while she got all arranged to receive it, it was a tableau straight out of Freud. If she had been a beautiful woman there might have been an exciting elegance about the whole thing, because Dr. Gollmer was being very courtly, but Madame de St. Nicaise was so plain and respectable, and her legs and knees, even through the green satin, were so obviously nothing more than acceptable utilitarian objects, that her action took on the quality of a public indelicacy as she prepared to embrace the instrument.

  She really worked at playing that cello, though. The cello itself only tolerated her; they never did really get going together. But you certainly had to say for her that she gave it everything she had. As the concert went on she began to perspire freely. Stains appeared on the satin. She never let up for a minute; she did everything she could to pull from the instrument everything it was capable of yielding; she seemed to surround it with a kind of heavy-handed loving encouragement. But she never did get any real music out of it.

  She was under some very special difficulties that night, however. This was the concert which became famous in Léopoldville’s social and musical history, the concert which began the Great Schism, which was the first severe blow in the series of blows which reduced Dr. Gollmer eventually to a desperate extremity, and which had to do with the death of Liliane Morelli. For a while, though, it seemed that this concert was doomed never to be performed at all. It was this preliminary crisis which resulted in my meeting Madame de St. Nicaise.

  One morning a couple of days after Schmitty sold me the ticket, I was working in our office and one of the boys came and told me the Consulate wanted me on the phone. I went to it and said hello and Schmitty’s voice said, “Good morning. An emergency has arisen.”

  I said, “Look, you’re always bitching about me being overpaid and underworked. I’m working. No coffee this morning.”

  “It isn’t that kind of emergency,” Schmitty said. “Do you happen to have an E-s
tring for a cello?”

  “I might laugh if you said G-string,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Neither would I. All right, what’s funny about an E-string?”

  Schmitty said, “The international situation’s tenser’n all hell this morning. Madame de St. Nicaise has busted her E-string and she says it’s up to your office to supply one, they being scarcer than hen’s teeth in these parts, as the saying goes, and the duty of your office being one of procurement and supply. It’s perfectly logical.”

  “Has she tried Brazzaville?”

  “Every place.”

  “This is an office of strategic supply,” I said. “I can’t get the G-string gag out of my head. Now there’s something strategic about a G-string—”

  “I’m beginning to think you’re overworked after all. Now listen closely: Madame de St. Nicaise has busted her E-string and if she doesn’t get one by Wednesday night you and everybody else will get their fifty francs back and the whole goddam refugee relief program will fold.”

  “For a lousy couple of hundred bucks?”

  “Listen, friend,” Schmitty said, “we live in a ve-ry complicated civilization. Pull out one prop and you don’t know what’s going to tumble. Honest to God, Hoop, you’ve got to take her out of my hair. I can’t do anything with her. You’re bigger than I am.”

  “What am I doing, wrestling her?”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do. Charm your way out of it if you can. If you can’t, civilization’s got to crack, that’s all. I’m through.”

  “O.K., what do I do?”

  What I did, Schmitty said, was to go to her house.

  “Her house!” I said. “Is she bed-ridden or something?”

  “Or something,” said Schmitty. “To wit, she has a grande-dame complex because of that de in front of her name. I know it sounds like a lot of you-know-what, Hoop, but honest, the old girl’s on every committee and everything, and all that smalltime stuff’s just as important around here as it is anywhere else. More. Couldn’t you possibly go out there this morning?”