The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  I went to the door and called for a boy, and gave him the order. When I came back and sat down, Miss Finney had an envelope in her hand, and was giving it to Dr. Gollmer. “I don’t know whether it’ll be exactly what you need,” she was saying. “There’s no point in pretending that you treated the case just as I might have treated it myself. I said exactly what I could say in good conscience, and no more. I said that you gave the customary treatment which the patient would have received under most doctors but I made it pretty strong that my statement was made dependent on the accuracy and completeness of the records given for my inspection. I had to do that, Doctor. I made it as emphatic as I could without saying something I suspect—which is, that there were complications in this case that the records don’t indicate.”

  Dr. Gollmer was silent. He looked extremely unhappy, and his mouth went a little more out of line than it ordinarily was. He began, “The complications in this case—” and he wanted very much to go on and say something further, but he stopped himself with considerable effort.

  He changed course and said, with a directness that made you like him, “Perhaps I am not the best of doctors, Dr. Finney. But this case seemed so extremely simple. I say, seemed. And it is true that I gave it the simplest, the most routine treatment. You are extremely good to give me your statement, especially since it was extremely presumptuous of this mysterious friend to ask you for it. If you are giving it to me with any reluctance at all, I hope you will feel free to change your mind and take it back, without feeling any embarrassment.”

  “Don’t worry,” Miss Finney said. “I’d never put anything in writing I wouldn’t expect to stand by the rest of my life. And as I’ve said, I’ve protected myself with reservations and so on.” Her voice had been very matter of fact. Now there was the slightest change in it, a relaxation, just the smallest suggestion of an invitation to confidential exchange. “I can see how the case seemed extremely simple. I can only guess at what the complications might have been,” she said.

  Whatever Dr. Gollmer had wanted to say before was almost more than he could keep from saying now. There was a distraction while Alfonse appeared with a tray of glasses and whisky, seltzer, plain water, and ice. Dr. Gollmer’s eyes followed not Alfonse but the whisky bottle on the tray, from the moment Alfonse entered the door until he set the tray down on the table beside me.

  I said, “Miss Finney?”

  “Very small,” she said. “Plain water, lots of ice. Just flavor it.” She smiled at Gollmer and patted her abdomen and said, “Have to go easy. Upsets me these days,” which was a black lie.

  “Dr. Gollmer?”

  “A little whisky over some ice, please,” he said. It was already a generous drink when he said, “No, no—enough!” and I let some more spill in after that.

  The minute I had poured myself a drink Dr. Gollmer raised his and said, “Your health, Dr. Finney. Mr. Tolliver.”

  “Yours,” Miss Finney said, and took a sip from her glass. Dr. Gollmer took a couple of hefty swallows from his, and for the first time since he had sat down he leaned back in his chair. I had always liked his looks, with their combination of a kind of mauled elegance and casual disreputability, and as the whisky began to relax him, these qualities became more pronounced. It was easy to imagine him, as it hadn’t been when he first came in, playing and sporting around at the Funa, in the waning moonlight, with Lala and Baba, as I had seen him doing only a few hours before.

  The conversation was general and meaningless for a while. I don’t think ten minutes had gone by before Dr. Gollmer passed me his glass and I filled it for him again. I made it another heavy one. I handed it to him and he began chuckling.

  “Well, Dr. Finney,” he said, “and Mr. Tolliver, this is very pleasant, very pleasant indeed. There is something Dr. Finney wants to know, and old Gollmer is being reduced to a state of complaisance by Mr. Tolliver’s hospitality.” He looked at me and I felt myself reddening, but Miss Finney just grinned and said, “I told you I wasn’t going to beat around the bush. I don’t know whether I can explain to you exactly why I’m interested in what I’m going to ask you, or not. Just put it down to female curiosity, won’t you? It’s about Madame Morelli, Liliane Morelli. Not as a medical history—as a person. The more I hear about her, the more she interests me.”

  Dr. Gollmer sobered somewhat and said, “La pauvre petite. What do you want to know about her?”

  “Well, first let me tell you I was talking to Madame de St. Nicaise this morning.”

  Dr. Gollmer took a particularly long drink. He lowered his glass and said, “You could not have heard anything very pleasant.”

  “What I heard was very unpleasant,” Miss Finney said. “I’m afraid the session ended with something like hard feelings. But she told me one thing. I hope you don’t mind my asking, and I hope you won’t be offended when I tell you that it seems extraordinary to me that Liliane insisted on having you as her doctor. Madame de St. Nicaise was very agitated. Apparently she tried to argue Liliane out of it, and Liliane was adamant.”

  Dr. Gollmer held his glass out in front of him and seemed to study it carefully. Without looking at either of us he said, “I am not sure, Dr. Finney, but that I might be a little offended by that question. Or rather, I feel that I should be. Can you give me any good reason why Liliane, or anybody else, shouldn’t call me in as their doctor?”

  “Certainly I can,” Miss Finney said, “and so can you. Madame de St. Nicaise has waged a persistent whispering campaign against you—”

  “Hardly in whispers,” Gollmer corrected her.

  “Well, you understand the methods she’s used, at any rate. That’s one good reason why some people wouldn’t call you in, and it has nothing in the world to do with your ability as a physician. And the reason Liliane wouldn’t be expected to call you in hasn’t anything to do with your ability either. You know very well what it has to do with.”

  Gollmer handed me his glass. It was empty except for ice. “Fill it for me again, young man,” he said. “Fill that glass for old Gollmer. And when I ask you to fill it once more, fill it, and after that, no matter whether I ask you or not, don’t give me another.”

  I put in another couple of chunks of ice, and poured whisky over them to fill the glass. It was a good four-ounce drink at the very least. Dr. Gollmer accepted it with a nod of thanks, held it up to the light, squinted at it, and murmured, “Beautiful. Beautiful.”

  Then he took a preliminary sip, and set the glass down on the table. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and withdrew the letter Miss Finney had given him. He handed it to Miss Finney and said, “For you.”

  “But Dr. Gollmer—gosh, I hope I haven’t made you feel—”

  “Not at all. Take it, Dr. Finney. You should never have been asked for it, you should not have felt obliged to write it, and I should not have accepted it. Please take it.”

  “But—”

  He held up his hand, still offering the letter with the other. “Take it,” he said. Miss Finney took it, with what I am certain was genuine reluctance, and looked at Dr. Gollmer questioningly.

  The old man picked up his drink from the table and settled back in his chair. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and smiled. “I feel much better,” he said. “And now I can talk freely. Oh, I know that the letter was not any kind of payment, advance payment, for information you would like to have; and I could have accepted it without feeling that I had to give payment, in case I had felt able to accept it at all. But now without question I can speak freely, more freely. You say that I know perfectly well why it seems odd that Liliane should call me in. Of course I do. You are thinking of the affair of the picture of Liliane, the ‘Venus.’ But what I also know is why it was not odd at all—given her sweetness of character—that she should insist on having me. Are you certain that none of this will embarrass Mr. Tolliver?”

  “I’m certain it won’t embarrass him and I’m certain he won’t repeat anything you don’t want him to
repeat.”

  “Very well. Now for your sake, Dr. Finney, let me describe to you a scene in Léopoldville, on a certain night, when one of the Ladies’ Group auctions is being held. I was not there, for the very good double reason that it is a stupid way to pass an evening, and that I have no money to waste on bids for useless objects. But I have heard the evening described many times, with malicious relish by my enemies, or sympathetically by my friends, and I have made it a point to create for myself the clearest picture of that auction. Now you must imagine the hall crowded with the best people in town, and with people in town who are not the best, but who like to be in the same room with the best, even if they must buy their way in at an auction. You must imagine Liliane passing the money box for the bidders—Liliane because she is pretty, she is obliging, and the sight of her puts the men in a good humor when they must pay their bids. The objects begin to come up, one after another…”

  Dr. Gollmer went on to describe the scene at the auction. He nursed his drink along, going slowly on it since he had only one more to look forward to. He told the whole story of the sale of the picture to Morelli for ten thousand francs, and told of Morelli leaving with Liliane. At the end he passed me his empty glass without comment, and I filled it without saying anything either and handed it back to him, and put the cap on the bottle.

  He went on: “Now you will ask, why was old Gollmer such a fool as to paint such a picture in the first place? Well, my friends, it was a poor picture, a pretentious failure, a mistake. But you see I had begun painting these little pictures. In a way I had had a certain success. They always went well at the auctions, and some people in the city bought others from me, and seemed to enjoy owning them. There is a great pleasure in creation, and greater pleasure in gaining recognition, no matter how small. Now old Golimer is not quite a fool, but—have you ever painted? My little success was so unexpected, and the pleasure of painting was so great, that I became ambitious. I wanted to do something—oh, I was very mistaken—something beyond the simple landscapes and genre scenes of native life which had occupied me. I conceived this very bad picture. I had always admired Liliane, as a beautiful object. She was a great joy to look at. She was beautiful, Dr. Finney. You never saw her, but she was very beautiful—not in your drawing-room fashion or your movie-star fashion. She was not one of your mannequins. She was a beautiful woman because she was so natural, a great simple magnificent girl in full blossom, and with a skin—! She was beautiful. And so for my bad picture, my ‘Congo Venus,’ I thought of her. Like every man in Léopoldville, I—well, let us drop that.

  “I do not like even to deny that Liliane posed for that picture. Of course there was never a question of that. I would never have asked her and she would never have thought of such a thing. But when gossip spreads as it has spread, it becomes necessary to deny that Liliane posed, although even the denial, even this negative recognition of slander, is offensive. She did not pose.

  “For the head, yes. And that was a mistake on my part, to ask it, but not on hers to comply, since she did not know that it was to be more than a head. But it was a mistake on both our parts that she came to my house. It was like Liliane, obliging and innocent and thoughtless, to come. Obviously I could not enter the Morellis’ house; it was Madame de St. Nicaise, not Liliane, who said who should and should not come there, and after the affair of the cat—” He made a gesture of amusement and resignation.

  “So she came to my house. I made a sketch, on paper, of the head, in perhaps an hour. She did not see the painting at any time, she knew nothing about the painting. I never intended that anyone should know about that picture. It was an exercise, a secret pleasure for old Gollmer, who imagined himself becoming an artist and doing a salon picture, working on the sly like a little boy practicing a stunt in secret, where his friends cannot see his awkwardness and his failures. In the painting I put Liliane’s head on the goddess, and I fabricated the figure from my postcards of Botticelli and Rubens. That is the story of the ‘Congo Venus,’ which in the course of events I would have destroyed before long, because it was a poor picture. Although old Gollmer had been fool enough to conceive it, he had the sense to look at it when it was finished and know it was bad.”

  The whisky, and his interest in his own story, had at first brought a life and animation to Dr. Gollmer’s face, but now he looked tired again, and his face looked not so much relaxed as fallen in, and he not so much leaned back in his chair as sagged back in it. His glass was empty, and he looked ruefully at the capped bottle. I thought of Ulysses tied to the mast, and thought that the worst thing that could happen to me at that particular point would be for him to ask me to give him another drink after all.

  I think he would have, too, if Miss Finney hadn’t stopped him by saying suddenly, “Dr. Gollmer—I’m interrupting with a question—but how did Madame de St. Nicaise get hold of that picture?”

  Dr. Gollmer tore his eyes away from the bottle and turned to her and said, “You know that?”

  “I deduce that. I know that she didn’t attend the auction, and I know that she’s one of your not-quite-the-best, and that even if she had a roaring headache or anything else, if she’d had two broken legs she’d have dragged herself to that auction to cash in socially on her share of it—if she didn’t have more to gain by staying away. And all I can figure she had to gain was the certainty that the picture would come up for auction. She knew it was there, but if she attended the auction, say if the picture were unwrapped beforehand and she saw it in the presence of other people—she’d have had to see that it didn’t get put up, and that she didn’t want to take a chance on having to do.”

  Dr. Gollmer said, “Dr. Finney, in my position I have to try to say as little against Madame de St. Nicaise as my self-control will let me.”

  “Don’t you think you can carry the business of behaving more or less like a gentleman too far?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “In this case, you allowed Madame de St. Nicaise not only to harm you by getting that picture up, but you let her harm Liliane too.”

  Dr. Gollmer said, “Don’t correct me, Dr. Finney!” but he said it not angrily, but pleadingly. “I was in an impossible position! The original mistake was mine, in painting the picture at all, and the harm was done by the time I knew about it, so I took my share of it, instead of adding to the gossip by bringing in Madame de St. Nicaise too. I might have helped myself—although I don’t think so, Dr. Finney; people who want to gossip will always believe an evil rumor instead of a creditable one—”

  “That’s what Mr. Tolliver says. He says drop a couple of rumors and give them an equal start and see which one comes out ahead.”

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Gollmer. “It wouldn’t really have helped for me to insist exactly why I feel certain that the picture was put up for auction through the manipulations of Madame de St. Nicaise, and it would only have added to Liliane’s misfortune. It would still have been a picture of her, and the fact that Madame de St. Nicaise was carrying on a nasty family intrigue would only have made Liliane the center of a further nastiness.”

  “But you did deny, publicly, that Liliane posed for it.”

  “Over and over again. I denied that Liliane knew anything about it.”

  “Which was true.”

  “Of course it was true!”

  Miss Finney said, “I seem to be asking questions instead of just letting you talk.”

  “Please,” said Dr. Gollmer. “Please do. I am tired. It is easier that way.”

  “Then what story does Madame de St. Nicaise tell as to how the picture got put up for sale?”

  “Oh, she tells a good story!” Dr. Gollmer said, “and a story I have no way of refuting. You see the Ladies’ Committee had asked me for some pictures, as usual, and I had agreed to donate some. After all it is a good cause even if the means are ridiculous and petty. I wrapped them, three small pictures, and the Ladies were to call for them at my house. You understand I was alone, then. I did not have
my Lala and my Baba as I have now; I did not even have a houseboy, for I was—you must know it—even more hard pressed then than I am now. That was in fact my low point, my very lowest point—although perhaps I can see a lower one coming, now that Liliane died under my care.” He stopped and looked at me beseechingly. I knew what he wanted, and I was already beginning to squirm. He looked at Miss Finney and said, “Doctor, would you prescribe for me just one ounce of whisky?”

  Miss Finney smiled at him and said, “I couldn’t do that, medically, without giving you a thorough examination. But socially, I must say you seem more comfortable and more fluent with a glass in your hand. Why not? Suppose I join you.” She turned to me and said, “Hoopie, two whiskies. Short ounces—ice and water and a short ounce for flavoring.” She said to Gollmer, “Think that’s all right?”

  Old Gollmer sighed happily, reached for his empty glass, and handed it to me. He began looking a little better even while I was mixing his drink. And I must say for him that he drank this one in tiny sips as if it were the last short ounce of whisky in the world.

  “So I wrapped the pictures,” he said, “and left them in my front room. But I left the house that afternoon, and on the door I pinned a note, saying that the pictures were wrapped and waiting just inside the door. Madame de St. Nicaise says that when she drove by to collect them, she sent her boy in to pick them up. He brought out the pictures I had intended, and the ‘Venus’ also.” Our question was so obvious that we didn’t even have to ask it. He paused for a moment and then said, “Unfortunately, the ‘Venus’ was wrapped too.”

  “That,” Miss Finney said, “is too bad. How did it happen to be wrapped?”

  “I always keep my pictures covered when the paint is wet,” he said. “As a man living alone, I failed to keep my house very tidy, and the dust—”

  “But you weren’t working on the ‘Venus.’ You had finished it.”

  “I had finished it and varnished it. If you know oil painting, Dr. Finney,” he said, “and especially oil painting with cheap paints and cheap canvas as I must do it, you know that the oil dies out dull and flat, especially over the corrected spots—and in this picture the corrections were very many indeed. But I had given it a coat of what is called retouching varnish, and on that the dust of my house would have settled and stuck in a thick coat. So the ‘Venus’ was varnished and then immediately and neatly wrapped. But it was put off to one side, and there, Dr. Finney, is what I can say, that it was perfectly obvious that the little pictures were ready and waiting, but to get the ‘Venus,’ it was necessary to enter the room and find it and take it from its place in the corner against the wall. But Madame de St. Nicaise forestalled me on that; you know her particular pet phrase, ces indigènes. Her stupid boy, she says, not only brought out the three little pictures, but in his stupidity saw the large wrapped picture and brought it also. Oh, according to her story, Madame de St. Nicaise would have given her own head to have kept the ‘Venus’ from being shown.”