EXPERIMENTS! HALLUCINATIONS!
Emma, Lerne and I were in the little drawing room after lunch, when the
Professor had a sort of fainting-fit.
It was not the first. I had already observed similar signs of breaking
health in my uncle, but this one was very clear evidence. I could
observe all the details of it, and it was accompanied by curious
circumstances; that is why I shall speak about it more particularly.
Any one who saw them and did not know all the facts would have
attributed those incidents to intellectual overwork. To tell the
truth, my uncle did have spells of overwork. The laboratory, hothouse
and _château_ were no longer sufficient for him. He had annexed the
park, also, and now Fonval bristled with complicated poles, abnormal
masts, and unusual semaphores, and as some trees interfered with the
experiments, a gang of woodcutters was sent for, in order to cut them
down.
The joy of seeing the possibility of free passage to and fro restored
in the grounds consoled me for this sacrilegious destruction. All
about the immense workshop of the valley basin one saw the Professor
feverishly moving about from one building to another, from a dynamo to
a switch, ferociously determined to suppress the fatal “attachment.”
Sometimes, however, he had an attack of weakness, as the result of one
of those very peculiar fainting-fits which I am describing. It was
always whilst he was reflecting profoundly, with his eyes fixed on some
object or other, and brain working at high pressure that the attack
came, and he collapsed. At such times he became paler and paler, until
the color came back into his cheeks by itself, and by degrees.
Those attacks left him limp and without strength. They robbed him of
his fine feeling of confidence, and I heard him complain after one of
them, and murmur in a tone of discouragement:
“I’ll never succeed, never!”
Often had I been on the point of asking him about it. That day I made
up my mind to do so.
* * * * *
We were drinking our coffee, Lerne seated in an armchair in front of
the window, holding his cup in his hand. Our talk was a broken sort of
conversation, with longer and longer intervals.
For want of something to talk about, the conversation languished.
Gradually it ceased altogether, as a fire goes out for want of fuel.
The clock struck, and one saw the woodcutters going to their work, with
their axes over their shoulder. They brought before my mind a picture
of ragged lictors going to carry out an execution of trees.
Which amongst my old comrades would perish to-day--this beech, or that
chestnut? I saw them from my window, clothed in all the yellows of
autumn, from the deepest copper to the palest gold, each showing its
dark touch of shade, or its reddish light amongst those various yellows.
The firs were beginning to get black. Leaves were falling here and
there as seemed good to themselves, for there was no breeze.
With a spire like that of a cathedral, a poplar colossus with a hoary
head dominated the leafage. I had always known it thus--a monumental
tree--and the sight of it stirred in me the memories of my childhood.
Suddenly a flight of terror-struck birds escaped from it--two rooks
left it, cawing, a squirrel jumped from branch to branch, and took
refuge on the neighboring walnut tree.
Some unpleasant creature, climbing into the tree, had doubtless
threatened their safety. I could not distinguish it, for a clump of
bushes hid all the lower part of the poplar, but with a surprise that
was almost pain I saw it quiver from the top to the roots, shake itself
once or twice, and slowly sway its branches. One would have said that a
breeze had sprung up which blew for it alone.
I thought of the woodcutters, without, however, forming a very precise
conception of the part they might be playing in this drama.
“Can my uncle,” I said to myself, “have ordered them to execute the
poplar--that venerable patriarch--that king of Fonval? That would be
too much.”
Then, as I was on the point of asking Lerne about the matter, I
perceived that he was in one of his fainting-fits.
I satisfied myself of the presence of the distinctive symptoms of his
trouble, the immobility--the pallor--the fixed look--and I succeeded in
determining what he was looking at with that persistent fixed stare of
a somnambulist.
What he was gazing at was the poplar--that _animate_ tree, whose
appearance at the moment was recalling in so terrifying a way the date
trees of the hothouse excited by love and battle.
I remembered the note-book. Was there not some appalling analogy
between the _absence_ of that man and the life of that tree?
Suddenly an ax smote the trunk with a sound as of low thunder. The
poplar quivered, twisted about, and my uncle gave a start. His cup
dropping from his hand, was dashed to pieces on the floor, and whilst
his cheeks regained their color, he put his hand down quickly to his
ankles, as if the ax had struck the man and the tree at the same blow.
Meanwhile, Lerne gradually recovered. I pretended to have observed
nothing except his fainting, and I told him that he should look after
himself--that those repeated fits would end by killing him. Did he know
what caused them?
My uncle gave a sign that he did. Emma came near his chair.... “I
know,” said he, at last, “cardiac _syncope_. I am treating myself.”
That was not true. The Professor was not treating himself. He was using
up his life in the pursuit of his chimera, without more heed for his
skin than it if had been an old work-jacket, to be thrown away as soon
as the task was over.
Emma advised him to go out.
“The air will do you good,” she said.
He went out. We saw him going towards the poplar, smoking his pipe. The
blows of the ax fell faster and faster. The tree bent over and fell.
Its fall made the sound like an earthquake. The branches hit my uncle
but he did not step aside.
And now, robbed of its only _campanile_, Fonval seemed to have sunk
lower than ever into the depths of the valley, and I sought, in the
forlorn sky, to fix the place of the tree, which one had already
forgotten, and its tall form, which was already legendary.
Lerne came back. He did not seem to know that he had been imprudent.
His carelessness made one tremble when one realized that he might be
as reckless in the most hazardous experiments--for example, those
transfusions of soul about which the note-book spoke.
Was it one of those attempts which I had just witnessed? I meditated
about it, with that strange feeling which I had already experienced at
Fonval, like that caused by groping about in mysterious darkness.
Were Lerne’s fainting-fit and the tragedy of the tree some mysterious
coincidence, or had some strange bond united them at the moment of the
ax’s blow?
Certainly the arrival of the woodcutters at the foot of the poplar
would have been enough to cause the flight of the birds, and as for the
shuddering, why should the cutter not have produced it by climbing up
the other side of the trunk in order to fix the traditional rope?
Once more, the crossways of probability offered me a choice of
solutions, like so many roads, but my mind was not acute at the time.
* * * * *
I was often with Emma, but as much as I loved those meetings, I had
to make up my mind to stop them, for the following unanswerable
reason--but for the note-book I might have attributed it to my nervous
condition; I should then have called it a pathological consequence of
the operations, and Lerne would have fooled me to the end--fortunately
I guessed his tactics at the first.
He had confided to me that he was thinking of assuming my shape, in
order to be loved in my place. His eagerness to save my mutilated body;
the method he had explained in the note-book, and the business of
the poplar--all coordinated themselves in my mind. His fainting-fits
assumed all the appearance of experiments, in which Lerne, through a
sort of hypnotism, flung his soul into other beings.
So now with his eye to the keyhole he watched every move I made,
transfusing his _ego_ into my brain, using the power which his
unfinished discovery procured him, to put in practice the most
astounding substitution of personalities. I shall be told that this
very appearance of unlikeliness ought to have weakened the value of my
reasoning; but at Fonval, incoherence being the rule, the more absurd
an explanation was, the more likely it was to be the right one.
Ah! that eye at the keyhole. It pursued me like that of Jehovah
blasting Cain from the top of its triangular peephole! I was never
free of it. Emma felt my distress, but she was far from understanding
the real cause of it.
Although I am joking now, I had perceived my danger, and my one thought
was how to avert it. After long deliberation, I determined to take the
only reasonable course--one which I should have taken long before,
viz., departure. Departure with Emma, of course, for now nothing in the
world would have made me leave to my uncle what I had won.
But Emma was not one of those women whom one can carry off against
her will. Would she consent to leave Lerne, and the promised wealth?
Assuredly not!
The poor girl did not see this modernized form of fairy-tale going on
around her. The glories to come completely occupied her mind. She was
both silly and avaricious. To make her follow me I should have to make
her believe that she would not be worse off by a penny, and it was only
Lerne who could reassure her effectively on that score.
So, what I required was the Professor’s consent! Certainly there could
be no question of any consent except of one sort; only one wrested from
him by constant intimidation would serve the purpose.
I would make play with Macbeth’s murder, and Klotz’s assassination,
and my terrified uncle would speak to Emma as I wanted him to, and I
should carry her off, no doubt depriving Mr. Nicolas Vermont of an
inheritance (very much eaten into), and Mlle. Bourdichet of (probably
quite chimerical) splendors.
My plan was soon arranged in detail.