THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN BERSELIUS
Berselius, for the last fortnight, had been going back, slowly going from
bad to worse, and keeping the fact to himself.
Sulphonal, trional, morphia, each tried in turn had no power to prevent
him from dreaming. Sleep as soundly as he would, just as he was awaking,
the black blanket of slumber, turned up at a corner or an edge by some
mysterious hand, would reveal a dream or part of one.
There was nothing in these dreams to terrify him when he was dreaming
them; in them, he was just the old brave Berselius that nothing could
terrify, but there was often a good deal to terrify him when he awoke.
Many of them were quite innocent and as fatuous as dreams are wont to be,
but even these innocent dreams fretted the soul of the waking man, for in
every scrap and vestige of them he recognized the mind of that other
personality.
After the first few days, his intellect, so severe and logical, began to
lose its severity and logic, and to take up sides with his heart and to
cry aloud against the injustice of this persecution.
Why should he be haunted like this? He felt no trace of remorse now for
the past; the sense of injustice swallowed all that. Every day seemed to
drive that past further off, and to increase the sense of detachment from
that other man and his works; yet every night a hand, like the hand of
some remorseless chess player, put things back in their places.
With the falling of the curtain of sleep he became metamorphosed.
Then came the day when the evil he was suffering from declared itself in a
physical manner and Thénard was called in.
Thénard found his patient in bed. His mind was quite clear, but the pupils
of his eyes were unequal; there was numbness in the left arm and want of
grip in the hand. He had been prepared for the change evident in
Berselius's face and manner, for Maxine had told him in a few words of the
accident and loss of memory, and as he took his seat by the bedside he was
about to put some questions relative to the injury, when Berselius
forestalled him.
Berselius knew something about medicine. He guessed the truth about his
own case, and he gave a succinct account of the accident and the loss of
memory following it.
"This is due to the result of the injury, is it not?" said Berselius,
pointing to his left arm when he had finished.
"I am afraid so," said TThénard, who knew his patient, and that plain
speaking would be best.
"Some pressure?"
"So I imagine."
"Oh, don't be afraid of speaking out. I don't mind the worst. Will an
operation remove that pressure?"
"If, as I imagine, there is some pressure from the inner table of the
skull on the brain, it will."
"Well, now," said Berselius, "I want you to listen to me attentively; ever
since that accident, or, at least, since I regained memory, I have felt
that I am not the same man. Only in sleep do I become myself again--do you
understand me? I have quite different aims and objects; my feelings about
things are quite different; my past before the accident is ruled off from
my present--that is, when I am awake.
"When I dream I become my old self again--is that not strange?"
"No," said Thénard, "every man is double. We have numerous cases where,
from accident or other circumstances, a man's personality changes; one
side of his nature is suppressed. There is one strange point about your
case, though, and that is the waking up of the suppressed personality so
vividly during sleep; but in your case it is perhaps not so strange."
"Why not?"
"Because, and excuse me for being personal even though I am complimentary,
your personality as I knew you before your accident was so profound, and
vivid, and powerful, that even though it is suppressed it must speak. And
it speaks in dreams."
"So!--perhaps you are right. Now tell me, if you operate and remove the
pressure, may I become myself again?"
"You may."
"Even after all this time?"
"The mind," said Thénard, "has nothing to do with time. At the Battle of
the Nile, a sea captain, one of those iron-headed Englishmen, was struck
on his iron head with fragment of shell. He lost his memory. Eight months
after he was trephined; he awoke from the operation completing the order
he was giving to his sailors when the accident cut him short----"
"I would be the same man. I would not be tormented with the other self
which is me, now?"
"Possibly--I do not say probably, but possibly."
"Then," said Berselius, "for God's sake, operate at once."
"I would like to wait for another twelve hours," said Thénard, rising and
re-examining the slight dent of his patient's skull.
"Why?"
"Well, to see if things may be cleared up a bit, and the necessity for
operation be removed."
"Operate."
"You know, in every operation, however slight, there is an element of
danger to life."
"Life! what do I care? I insist on your operating. Not another night shall
pass----"
"As you will," said Thénard.
"And now," said Berselius, "make your preparations, and send me my
secretary."
* * * * *
At twelve o'clock that night, Maxine was seated in the library, with a
book which she had been vainly trying to read face downward on the floor
beside her.
Thénard, his assistant surgeon, and two nurses, had arrived shortly after
ten. Operating table, instruments, everything necessary had been brought,
set up, and fixed by Thénard's own man.
Adams had no part in the proceedings except as a looker-on. No man could
assist Thénard in an operation who was not broken to the job, for, when
operating Thénard became quite a different person to the every-day Thénard
of lecture room and hospital ward.
That harsh voice which we noticed in him in the first pages of this book
when on entering the lecture room of the Beaujon he could not find his
coloured chalks, came out during an operation, and he would curse his
assistant to the face for the slightest fault or fancied fault, and he
would speak to the nurses as no Frenchman ever spoke to Frenchwoman unless
with deliberate intent to insult. When the last stitch was in, all this
changed; nurses and assistant forgot what had been said, and in the ease
of released tension, worshipped more than ever the cadaverous genius who
was now unwinding from his head and mouth the antiseptic gauze in which he
always veiled them when operating.
The clock on the mantel pointed to a few minutes past the hour, when the
door opened, and Adams came in.
Maxine rose to meet him.
She read both good and bad news in his face.
"The operation has been successful, but there is great weakness." He
rolled an armchair for her to sit down, and then he told her as much as
she could understand.
Thénard had found a slight depression of the inner table of the skull, and
some congestion and thickening of the dura mater. It all dated from the
accident. There would, without doubt, have been severe inflammation of the
brain, but for Berselius's splendid condition at the time of the accident,
and the fact that Adams had bled him within an hour of the injury. Thénard
had relieved the pressure by operation, but there was great weakness.
It was impossible to say what the result would be yet.
"Has he regained consciousness?"
"He is just recovering from the anæsthetic."
The girl was silent for a moment, then she asked where Thénard was.
"He has left. He has to operate again to-night on a case which has just
called for him by telephone. He asked me to tell you that everything
possible has been done. He will call in the morning, and he has left
everything till then in my hands."
"I shall not go to bed," said Maxine. "I could not sleep, and should my
father want to see me, I shall be ready."
"Yes," said Adams, "perhaps it will be better so. I will go up and stay
with him, and I will call you if it is necessary."
He left the room, and Maxine took up the book she had dropped, but she
could not read. Her eyes, travelling about the room, rested here and there
on the trophies and the guns and the wild implements of destruction
collected by the hunter, who was now lying upstairs, like a child dandled
on the dark knees of death.
The books on philosophy, natural history, oceanography, and history, in
their narrow cases contrasted strangely with the weapons of destruction
and the relics of the wild. The room was like a mirror of the mind of
Berselius, that strange mind in which the savage dwelt with the civilized
man, and the man of valour by the side of the philosopher.
But the strangest contrast in the room was effected by Maxine herself--the
creation of Berselius--his child, blossoming like a beautiful and fragile
flower, amidst the ruins of the things he had destroyed.
When, after daybreak, Adams came to find her, she was asleep.
Berselius, awaking from a sleep that had followed the effects of the
anæsthetic, had asked for her.
Thénard had fixed upon the white marble bathroom adjoining Berselius's
sleeping chamber as his operating theatre, and after the operation the
weakness of the patient was so great, and the night so hot, they
determined to make up a bed for him there, as it was the coolest room in
the house.
It was a beautiful room. Walls, pillars, floor and ceiling, of pure white
Carrara marble, and in the floor, near the window, a sunk bath, which,
when not in use, was covered by a grating of phosphor bronze, showing a
design of sea serpents and seaweed. There were no basins or lavatory
arrangements, nothing at all to break the pure and simple charm of this
ideal bathing-place whose open French window showed, beyond a balcony of
marble, the tops of trees waving against the blue sky of early morning.
Berselius was lying on the bed which had been arranged for him near the
door; his eyes were fixed on the waving tree tops. He turned his head
slightly when Maxine entered, and looked at her long and deliberately.
In that one glance Maxine saw all. He was himself again. The old,
imperious expression had returned; just a trace of the half-smile was
visible about his lips.
The great weakness of the man, far from veiling the returned personality,
served as a background which made it more visible. One could see the will
dominating the body, and the half-helpless hands lying on the coverlet
presented a striking contrast to the inextinguishable fire of the eye.
Maxine sat down on the chair by the bed. She did not attempt to stroke the
hand near her, and she smothered whatever emotion she felt, for she knew
the man who had returned.
"Your mother?" said Berselius, who had just sufficient voice to convey
interrogation as well as words.
"She has not returned yet; we telegraphed for her, she will be here
to-day."
"Ah!"
The sick man turned his head again, and fixed his eyes on the tree tops.
The hot, pure, morning air came through the open window, bringing with it
the chirruping and bickering of sparrows; a day of splendour and great
heat was breaking over Paris. Life and the joy of life filled the world,
the lovely world which men contrive to make so terrible, so full of
misery, so full of tears.
Suddenly Berselius turned his head, and his eyes found Adams with a not
unkindly gaze in them.
"Well, doctor," he said, in a voice stronger than the voice with which he
had spoken to Maxine. "This is the end of our hunting, it seems."
Adams, instead of replying, took the hand that was lying on the coverlet,
and Berselius returned the pressure, and then relinquished his hold.
Just a handshake, yet it told Adams in some majestic way, that the man on
the bed knew that all was up with him, and that this was good-bye.
Berselius then spoke for a while to Maxine on indifferent things. He did
not mention his wife's name, and he spoke in a cold and abstracted voice.
He seemed to Adams as though he were looking at death, perfectly serenely,
and with that level gaze which never in this world had been lowered before
man or brute.
Then he said he was tired, and wished to sleep.
Maxine rose, but the woman in her had to speak. She took the hand on the
coverlet, and Berselius, who was just dozing off, started awake again.
"Ah!" said he, as though he had forgotten something, then he raised the
little hand of Maxine and touched it with his lips.
Then he asked that his wife should be sent to him on her return.
Alone, he closed his eyes and one might have fancied that he slept, yet
every now and then his eyelids would lift, and his eyes, unveiled by
drowsiness, would fix themselves on some point in the room with the intent
gaze of a person who is listening; so in the forest, or on the plain, or
by the cane brake had he often listened at night, motionless, gun in hand
and deadly, for the tiger or the water buck.
Half an hour passed and then from the adjoining room came a footstep, the
door opened gently, and Madame Berselius entered. She was dressed just as
she had traveled from Vaux. She had only just arrived, to find death in
the house, and as she looked at the figure on the bed she fancied she
beheld it indeed.
Closing the door gently she approached the bed. No, it was not death but
sleep. He was breathing evenly and rhythmically, sleeping, apparently, as
peacefully as a child.
She was about to turn away when, like a bather who has ventured into some
peaceful tropic rock pool wherein lurks an octopus, she found herself
seized and held. Berselius's eyes were open, he was not asleep. His gaze
was fixed on hers, and he held her with his eyes as the cat holds the bird
or the python the man.
He had been waiting for her with the patience and the artfulness of the
hunter, but no game had ever inspired such ferocity in him as this woman,
vile and little, who yet had abased him to the earth.
He was dying, but what beast full of life is more dangerous than the dying
tiger?
As Berselius gazed at the woman, she, with all her will urging her body to
retreat, approached him. Then, her knees touching the bed, she fell on her
knees beside him and his hand fell on her shoulder.
Holding her thus, he gazed on her coldly, dispassionately, and critically,
as an emperor of old might have gazed on a defaulting slave. Then, as
though his anger had turned to disgust, as though disdaining to waste a
word on her, he struck her full in the face with the back of his right
hand, a blow that caused her to cry out and sent her groveling on the
marble floor, where a moment after the nurse on duty, attracted by the
cry, found her.
Berselius was dead, but the mocking smile on his lips remained, almost
justified by the words of the nurse imploring the woman on the floor to
calm herself and restrain her grief.
Whatever his life may have been, his death affected Adams strangely. The
magnetism of the man's character had taken a strong hold upon him,
fascinating him with the fascination that strength alone can exercise. And
the man he regretted was not the ambiguous being, the amended Berselius,
so obviously a failure, but the real Berselius who had returned to meet
death.