A small incident which was to lead to one of greater significance occurred one evening when rissoles were served for dinner. When opened, they gave off so great a stench that not only was eating them out of the question, it was not even possible to keep them in the room until such time that the trays could be removed by a waiter. Quite spontaneously a dozen were collected, wrapped individually in tissue paper, and despatched to M. Halfont with a label bearing the legend ‘Analyse, S.V.P.’.
M. Halfont was aggrieved—the incident implied disrespect, the students were not sérieux. They must be dealt with. Accordingly an announcement was placed on the notice board summoning the representative committee of the students to M. Halfont’s bureau, where he would address them upon the topic of food.
And when they were all assembled, M. Halfont, wearing an immaculate double-breasted blazer which swelled over his immense stomach like a maternity gown, swept into his bureau and, deliberately not asking anyone to be seated, pulled a chair away from his desk, sat down adroitly, crossed one sausage-like thigh upon the other, polished the finger-nails of one paw upon his sleeve, scrutinised them, then glanced up at the faces of the students. “Eh bien, messieurs …” he said very coldly.
It was an ill-chosen phrase and it evoked a multi-lingual response. M. Halfont got up from his chair with great dignity and raised a hand for silence. Then, referring to the incident of the rissoles, he commented that the affair was unworthy, that he was accustomed to dealing with ‘gens sérieux’, and that such behaviour reflected little credit upon the students as a whole. There had been a number of representations (he preferred to call them misrepresentations) to the authorities of the I.S.O. about the nature of the cuisine; all this was unwarranted and had to stop. There was nothing wrong with the food, and he and his family ate, and would think of eating, nothing else. But people who were ill were notoriously difficult to please, and it was universally acknowledged that of all invalids none was more exacting than the sufferer from tuberculosis. Now the time had come for the students, who presumably could be considered intelligent and reasonable people (a note of irony was discernible), to employ a little psychology in order to gain some measure of insight into their condition. Let them start with this premise: the food was good. And not only was it good, it was prepared by a first-class chef.
But here, let us face it, it could not be denied that a difficulty arose—the preparation of the food was in the French manner. If the students did not like French cooking, then there was nothing to be done ….
At this juncture Grominoff, the President of the Students’ Committee, interposed that complaints were concerned not with the preparation of the food, but with its quality and quantity.
M. Halfont drew himself up proudly. “Monsieur,” said he, “I am a man of honour, and for the quality of the food I myself will answer. You have my personal assurance that no better food exists anywhere. As for the quantity, well …” and he drew in his stomach sharply, “we do not cater for gourmands. But it is sufficient and very healthy.”
To a complaint about the black bread which was served for breakfast, M. Halfont replied that it was specially ordered on account of its high vitamin content, which vitamins were essential to the preservation of health and protection against minor ailments. It might be less delicate than other breads which undoubtedly made greater appeal to effeminate palates, but one was not here to titillate one’s gastronomical fancies, but to get well. His family had grown accustomed to eating black bread for breakfast and would now refuse anything else.
The morning coffee was sweetened with saccharin? Next complaint, please, that issue was frivolous. No, it was regretted that it was essential that the coffee be sweetened before it reached the table—the provision of sugar-bowls containing lumps of sugar would involve far too much labour. “What labour would it involve?” inquired John Cotterell. “Why, having to count out the lumps,” replied M. Halfont.
“The question of butter,” said Grominoff, but M. Halfont interrupted him with a raised hand. Butter was one subject about which he was willing to hear no complaint. Two hundred grammes of the finest, freshest butter were served each week to every student. And where in the world, except perhaps in the fleshpots of America, in the fabulous establishments maintained by the leaders of commerce and the cinematograph industry, would one find anyone so privileged as to consume two hundred grammes of butter every week? Two hundred grammes!
M. Halfont looked about him in triumph; who would be so brazen as to claim that two hundred grammes of butter was insufficient? M. Cotterell had something to say? Well? So. M. Cotterell wished to suggest that the allocation of three coquilles de beurre for breakfast and another two for tea could not possibly weigh two hundred grammes over a week? Good. It was very simple. If M. Cotterell chose not to accept his word, let him save up his butter for a week and then weigh it ….
“Is it not a fact that, despite all you say, the cuisine for the private patients is very much superior to our own?” demanded the representative of the Czecho-slovak students.
“Yes,” replied M. Halfont candidly. “Nevertheless your cuisine is comparable to that served in some of the best houses in France. It is what I could call ‘la Haute Cuisine Bourgeoisie’.”
“And what would you call the cuisine of the private patients?”
“That,” said M. Halfont, rolling his eyes, “is incontestably ‘la Haute Cuisine Classique Française’.”
“Where we shall catch out the rascal is over the butter,” said John Cotterell, addressing the members of the committee when the meeting with M. Halfont had reached an end. He proposed that M. Halfont should be taken at his word and that one week’s supply of butter should be weighed. To save time, it was agreed that the following morning thirty-five students should each bring one coquille de beurre to the room of President Grominoff; this would represent the issue of butter to one student for a week. It would be carefully weighed and subsequent action would depend on the result.
There was no difficulty in finding thirty-five volunteers. A balance was borrowed from the laboratory, and immediately after breakfast the next day Grominoff’s room filled rapidly. When all the butter had been collected, it was weighed amidst complete silence. Grominoff waited until both sides of the balance were still, then, in his very precise voice, he announced: “Exactly forty-five grammes.”
A great cry of mingled triumph and indignation. Then spontaneously, and without a clearly formulated intention, John Cotterell seized the balance and holding it above his head marched to the door, the donators of the butter falling into line behind him. The procession passed down the corridor, and, as news of the result of the weighing spread from room to room, doors opened all along the landings until, with the exception of those too ill to leave their beds, the whole of the student population was marching behind John Cotterell.
To the sound of a great clattering of boots the procession mounted the stone staircase which led to the corridor where M. Halfont’s bureau was situated. Semi-moribund private patients peered timorously round half-open doors in order to see what was accounting for the uproar. Dr. Bruneau was sighted for a moment as with a white and ghastly grin he watched the proceedings from behind the lift-shaft; then he disappeared, apparently well-pleased to leave so purely an administrative matter in the hands of M. Halfont.
With rhythmic step the demonstrators marched down the corridor to M. Halfont’s glass-panelled bureau, where two frightened clerks were just in the act of climbing through the window on to a narrow ornamental balcony. “Where is Monsieur Halfont?” cried John Cotterell as he threw open the doors. “We don’t know,” said one and “He’s out,” cried the other. As this information reached the students wedged outside the bureau, there arose a great cry of “Hal-font, Hal-font,” and one section of the students detached itself from the main body and, marching up and down the passage, shouted with hypnotic insistency the two syllables of the name of the directeur of Les Alpes, whilst the remainder stamped their feet in unison to the cry of “Beur-re, beur-re.” The uproar increased in intensity, reaching the ears of private patients on other floors, who left their rooms and began to assemble at vantage points on the stairs from where they could discreetly survey the gratuitous spectacle. Emile the concierge, an expression of gravity ill masking the satisfaction which he felt in contemplating a situation so pregnant with unpleasant possibilities for everyone but himself, was describing for the benefit of new arrivals the events which had led up to the demonstration.
Then Grominoff called for silence. He mounted a chair and began to address the students. As he was speaking, a face was observed to be peeping through one of the glass panels of the bureau. Undoubtedly attracted by the silence, M. Halfont had entered his office through a side door; too late he realised his error. Everyone cried aloud his discovery. John Cotterell, brandishing the scales, raced towards the bureau, a swarm of students behind him.
M. Halfont ran forward and tried to turn the key in the lock, but he was too late, and the door shot open and was all but pulled from its hinges as student after student forced his way into the bureau.
“Canaille!” hissed M. Halfont, backing behind the counter and towards the window. “Beur-re, beur-re, deux cent grammes de beurre, beur-re,” chanted the students. “Disposez instantanément ou je vous foutrai dehors,” cried M. Halfont, his cheeks becoming glaucous. A great laugh greeted this challenge, and the crush in the doorway grew more solid, more menacing.
M. Halfont had now his back to the window; he could retreat no farther. Pressure from the crowd without forced those at the front more deeply into the bureau. “Vous faites encore un pas et je vous——” M. Halfont broke off; someone had seized one of the pats of butter and had hurled it at his face. A protest from Grominoff; a pause. “Salauds!” cried M. Halfont. Losing control, he aimed a blow at the student nearest to him. A dozen hands sought a coquille de beurre and the air became charged with yellow pellets. Direct hits on M. Halfont’s forehead, nose and chin. Dramatically the window opened behind him and two pairs of arms pulled him out backwards on to the narrow balcony. The window was slammed down again; behind it, gasping and panting, with rolling eye and drooping jaw, M. Halfont looked like an expiring globe-fish in an aquarium.
A very powerful Czech shouted out for everyone to follow him and to pelt M. Halfont with snow from outside the building, but Grominoff called the demonstrators to order and warned them that they had already gone too far. “Any more force will weaken our position,” he said, and there was assent from the more moderate elements. He ordered everyone to return quietly to his room for the cure, whilst a committee meeting would take place in the evening to decide on the best action for the future.
And at the meeting it was decided that an exhaustive report should be prepared about the food, and that this would be the task of a sub-committee composed entirely of medical students. As soon as the report was completed, it would be submitted to the authorities of the I.S.O., whilst copies would be circulated to Dr. Vernet and the management of Les Alpes.
The next morning all the students were summoned by Dr. Vernet to a meeting in the entrance hall. He spoke quietly but angrily. There were never again to be such demonstrations as had occurred the previous day, no matter what grievance, supposed or actual, the students might have. The sanatorium had been gravely disorganised, patients who were seriously ill had been inexcusably disturbed and harassed. M. Halfont had been insulted and ill-used—he would have been justified in summoning the police, for the action of the students was criminal.
If ever such an event should occur again, then not merely the ringleaders but all concerned in the demonstration would be expelled from the sanatorium, irrespective of their condition. The students might make what they considered legitimate representations in a lawful and orderly manner, but hooliganism was not looked upon with a favourable eye in France. “And now,” said he, terminating his discourse, “return to your rooms, and try in future to behave like worthy representatives of your individual countries.”
The speech had a sobering effect upon the students, and Grominoff in particular was bitter about the turn the demonstration had taken. He claimed that until then the behaviour of the students had been irreproachable, and that this one lapse had given the advantage to the authorities. But he also believed that the decision not to act against the instigators of the demonstration was prompted no less by prudence than by benevolence, and that the management of the sanatorium was not particularly eager to promote a course of action which might lead to an extensive inquiry. In accordance with this belief he decided to concentrate all his efforts on the composition of the food report, and he appointed a sub-committee of the medical students who would be responsible for it.
The students who were not directly concerned with the production of the food report had no very constructive outlet for their energy. Certainly a considerable number studied for a part of the day, and, besides this, looked after their sick nationals, shopped and catered for them. But they were high-spirited, and their enforced idleness often led to juvenile behaviour. They bombarded each other with snowballs in the streets, they ran and slid along the highly polished floors of the sanatorium corridors, they dressed up as doctors, as postmen, as gendarmes. A very fat student borrowed a nurse’s uniform and, raising the skirt high above his plump thighs, paraded up and down the passages for the delectation of his fellows.
One day Paul jumped back, on leaving his room, to avoid being knocked over by a tea trolley harnessed to four Finnish students who were racing down the corridor. Precariously seated on a chair on top of the trolley, rocking from side to side, hallooing, cheering on his team and cracking an improvised whip above their heads, was John Cotterell.
Returning one day from the Service Médical after a refill of air, Paul found that his half of the room had been assembled at the end of the passage. His bed, carefully made and invitingly turned down, stood against the far window; next to it on the table de nuit were Paul’s water-carafe and thermometer case; slippers at the bottom of the bed, temperature chart—covered with the traditional peaks of a hospital cartoon—laid across the pillow; and on a chair—more functional in appearance than any structure of Le Corbusier—had been placed a Gargantuan urine bottle. Laughter up and down the corridor; students poured from their rooms, pointing, gesturing, bent double. Dr. Florent, appearing on one of his rounds, was conducted to the foot of the bed, had the temperature chart put into his hands. Then a chair was fetched for Paul, and half a dozen students with hammers and spanners cheerfully set themselves to dismantling the frame of the bed whilst others carried back to the room the mattress and furniture.
The larger the group, the more precipitously the mental age of the students diminished. Now that Paul was better he was required to attend the communal consultations and communal refills.
Some twenty students, pressed together and stripped to the waist, would assemble in the small X-ray room, which was sealed against external light and without ventilation. The air would rapidly become heavy with the stench of sweat and nudity. Despite the cramped space there were always two who mimed a boxing match, others who tickled the bare ribs of their neighbours. The noise was without precedent as the students shouted to each other in a dozen different languages.
They would grow quiet and a way would be cleared when Dr. Vernet entered, followed by his assistants and Sœur Miriam. Then the lights would be extinguished, and, forming up in file, they would pass, one after the other, through the cabinet of the X-ray machine. The skeletons projected on to the phosphorescent screen varied considerably in size; there was one student whose physical development was so retarded that the X-ray revealed what appeared as no more than the frame of a monkey.
At the instigation of Dr. Vernet the skeletons would turn first to one side, then to the other, then turn about. This curious danse macabre first fascinated, then oppressed. Paul at last would shut his eyes, endure the hateful and intimate contact of the flesh of those before and behind, allow himself to be propelled indifferently in the pushing, bustling queue. Those who had left the cabinet crowded behind Dr. Vernet’s back, studying the images on the screen, attempting, for the later edification of their comrades, to overhear his whispered comments.
Dr. Vernet was not always in attendance at these mass screenings; sometimes there would only be Dr. Bruneau and Dr. Florent, and occasionally Dr. Florent by himself. Then the jokes, the belles farces, would commence. Amidst suppressed, anticipatory laughter a student would enter the X-ray machine with a fork or a pair of scissors or a watch suspended across his chest, and everyone would wait for the confused and horrified gasp that Dr. Florent invariably emitted the moment he distinguished the object apparently encased deep within a lobe of the student’s lung.
Dr. Bruneau had had a bad day: Dr. Vernet was operating at Lausanne, Dr. Florent was in bed with a temperature. In the morning there had been a tedious series of aspirations preceded by a rapid and obligatory visit to the rooms of the grands malades and the grands opérés. During the afternoon and at irregular intervals there had been half a dozen new arrivals, each one posing frivolous questions; at five o’clock Dr. Bruneau had tried to lie down for an hour prior to starting on the consultations for Paul’s landing, when an invalid who was setting out for the station (having just been discreetly discharged home as incurable) had had a violent hæmorrhage and died on the very threshold of the sanatorium.
Then the mass screening. Dr. Bruneau’s eyes were red with staring at the fluorescent screen. His throat felt suspiciously dry. Was it the beginning of la grippe? Now the individual consultations, and again the same questions. “When will I be well?” “When can I think of starting work?” “When will I be fit enough for my operation?” How could he or anyone else answer them?
What was there that was particularly offensive in Paul’s manner as he came into the consulting-room? His step was lighter, his bearing more confident than usual. Implicit in his appearance was the consciousness of returning health. Dr. Bruneau looked at him sourly; twice while ausculting him he was forced to stop owing to an attack of coughing. Then, with eyes watering, he took hold of Paul’s dossier.
“Eh bien, monsieur, you have now a pneumothorax.”
Paul nodded his head.
“And you are pleased with yourself?” He silenced Paul’s reply by quickly resuming: “But why do I ask, when it is all too evident? And of course you have some questions?”
“Well, yes. I——”
“You want to know when you can return to England. Will I please give you a date so that you can book your ticket. Then when I have answered that question, you will ask me when you can again start work at the university.”
“As a matter of——”
“What a wonderful thing is science,” interrupted Dr. Bruneau. “You came here a few weeks ago a dying man, and now, grâce à un pneumothorax, the clouds have rolled away, you contemplate returning to your work, perhaps for all I know you are secretly thinking of marriage, of becoming père de famille.”
“Is such a thing impossible?”
“Ecoutez, mon cher monsieur. In this life nothing is impossible. Please sit down.”
He indicated a chair to Paul, at the same time sitting down at his desk. Then, leaning forward, he placed his elbows one foot apart on the inlaid leather surface of the desk, bent his hands at right angles to their wrists, brought the tips of his middle fingers together, and lowered his chin to the point where they met.
“Monsieur, you have a pneumothorax and you believe yourself to be cured. And yet …” and he turned a page in Paul’s dossier, “and yet what do I see here? If this entry is not incorrect, you are not even negative, that is to say that the bacilles de Koch are still present in your sputum.”
“Dr. Vernet told me that he believed that I would be negative next month.”
“He did indeed—I was there when he said it. Nevertheless even if you should be negative next month it is not the end of the story. Your lung was very ill, is very ill, it can reserve a number of unpleasant surprises. It would be a little premature for you to believe yourself cured when in actual fact you are still navigating a dangerous channel.”
So there could still be unpleasant surprises ….
“I didn’t know …” said Paul.
Dr. Bruneau laughed. “You didn’t know. Well, the lacuna is now supplied.”
Both men looked at each other. The blue-grey light of an oblong, glass-fronted case affixed to the wall and used for the display of full-sized X-ray plates illuminated the side of Dr. Bruneau’s face, discolouring it, modelling the curve of his nostrils and the contours of his jaw, which was so compounded of weakness and of strength. In the last hour he had ceaselessly run his fingers through his hair, twisting it, pulling it, erecting a series of irregular, rippled horns across its copper surface.
“What are you trying to tell me?” asked Paul in a low voice.
“Nothing.” Dr. Bruneau cleared his throat. With clarity and finality he repeated: “Nothing.”
There was a long silence. “Monsieur,” said Dr. Bruneau at last, “I too have had a pneumothorax—ten years ago. It was maintained four years; since it was abandoned I have had three—” and he raised three white fingers—“three pleurisies. After each I was forced to pass six months in bed. When I was first taken ill I was gaining a reputation as a surgeon. Look at me now. Since my last pleurisy three years ago I have not dared to leave the mountains, and here I am still an assistant doctor in Les Alpes, and never likely to be anything more.”
“I see,” said Paul.
“You think I enjoy my life?”
“No.”
“Allez. If I tell you these things it is because I was once like you. I also thought that because I had a pneumothorax, I was cured.” And, getting up from his desk, he signified that the consultation was at an end by replacing Paul’s dossier in a large filing cabinet.