The test revealed both that Paul was not contagious and that there were no specific complications; the severity of the attack, nevertheless, would require the maintenance of a restricted diet over a considerable period. The notices disappeared from the doors, the prophylactic bric-à-brac was reassimilated into the anti-icteric reserves of the Service Médical. Paul was once more a freeman of the sanatorium.
Out into the centrally-heated passage shining with the reflection of first snows on polished floors; warmly clad, ambulant invalids passing through the swing door; Emile delivering mail the laborantine, unself-conscious as a pleasure-boat waiter, balancing a tray of six specimen jars of foaming urine; Sœur Valérie, pen in mouth, a report form on the table in front of her, staring thoughtfully at a stack of temperature charts and a bundle of clothes (clean laundry, a suit, a raincoat and a pair of shoes) neatly tied with cord and labelled: M. Hourmikos.
The first visitors—Kubahskoi, Glou-Glou, Manniez and certain of the nurses. The missing weeks resumed and restored in a few phrases, gestures and grimaces.
Kubahskoi, arms puffy and contused, condition unchanged, had been granted an extension of a further two months of tuberculin injections. The set of his features, the intonation of his voice, were dry of hope; it was evident that he was adjusting himself to the prospect and the implications of sooner or later returning to a sanatorium in his own country.
Glou-Glou, relatively lucid and controlled (for his mental health was always inversely related to his physical health), had had a relapse. He sat coughing quietly at Paul’s bedside, his little, trapped eyes twisting in all directions as though seeking a breach in the cornea through which to escape. Stripped of his medical accoutrements, he looked like a market-place charlatan on the run, one whose stock had been seized, but whose inside pockets were bulging with a residue of unguents, potions and specifics. He spoke sensibly, coherently; when a cough forced him to raise his portable crachoir to his lips, he hurriedly sounded his chest with knuckles and crooked fingers, at the same time whispering barely audibly: “Glou-Glou, dites: ‘glou-glou-glou’.”
Manniez, very satisfied with himself, announced his condition to be comfortable, almost consolidated, not worse, certainly in no way worse, better if anything, better, that is to say, in so far as it could be better, for inasmuch as it was almost consolidated there was little scope for betterment, and it had now been almost consolidated for—and he broke off to count the months in Spanish on his fingers. “I am now almost consolidated since nearly six months!” he said proudly, and his beard expanded an inch on either side, only visible symptom and symbol of the smile which it concealed. And now, did Paul want (or did he not want?) to buy a second-hand accordion in splendid condition at a throw-away price? There was no more therapeutic or melodic way of gently re-conditioning all the muscles of the upper half of the body. “Buy now,” he advised, “a real occasion. Today you learn to play and tomorrow you make Cheli dance!”
And Hourmikos, whose clothes were awaiting disposal, had accomplished his modest purpose. It was the nurse who had attended him who recounted to Paul the course it had taken. He had resisted every attempt to make him eat; nevertheless he had been basically so strong a man that it had taken a relatively long time before his fast had taken effect. Each day he had had violent disputes with Dr. Vernet and Dr. Bruneau; on one occasion when Dr. Vernet in a fury had ordered him to take his temperature, Hourmikos had snapped the thermometer in two and had tossed it at the doctor’s feet.
On the day that he had died, his nurse had made a last attempt to get him to take some nourishment. Hourmikos had smiled slyly and had replied that he would do so on one condition—a condition which he could only whisper in her ear. “I will eat,” he murmured very weakly, “I will eat if you will be so good as to let me put my fingers up your skirt.” The nurse had slapped away the skeletal hand prematurely raised. “Wicked man,” she had cried. “God will punish you for your evil thoughts!” But her admonitions had had no effect, and each time she had gone near him he had persisted in obscene gestures and demands. And as he had died, he had cursed her, saying: “Only the Queen of Bitches would refuse a dying man the right to touch it for the last time.”
Michèle. Every sound in the passage, every knock on the door, and Paul asked himself: “Is it she?” His thoughts had so often turned to her during his weeks of isolation that he had had to suppress them as aberrant, anachronistic. But now that at any moment she might be calling on him, he so feared her reaction to his deplorable appearance that he would have given anything to have reverted to the circumstances of his former putative contagion. To make himself more presentable, he had shaved off the beard he had grown, realising only too late how well it had served to conceal the glabrous, yellow contours of his cheeks.
Then when she didn’t come he became the prey of another sort of panic. Perhaps she had forgotten him. Perhaps she had formed an attachment elsewhere. Perhaps the whole concept that any feeling had ever existed between them had been no more than the wishful elaboration of his imagination.
And when at last she did come (which was immediately on learning that the isolation notices had been removed) she ran without knocking straight into the room, stopping abruptly and raising her hand to her mouth in confusion as she suddenly reflected on the indiscretion of her mode of entry. But as she looked at Paul her confusion turned to dismay, and Paul, who had been holding his bedclothes about his chin, now pulled them above his nose.
She insisted that he bare his face, and when, protesting, he did so, she considered it gravely. (And when on subsequent occasions he would grip the top of his sheet and pull it upwards in nervous concealment, she would laugh and say: “Ce n’est plus la peine, pauvre Chinois, j’ai déjà tout vu. Songez donc que je suis une fille chinoise, douleureusement frappée d’une vilaine blanchisse!”)
She looked in even better health than formerly and utterly free from anxiety. This, coupled with the fact that it appeared that she was no longer confined to her room, led Paul to assume that her condition had greatly improved. She laughed, however, when he gave expression to this opinion, and replied that Dr. Vernet had done no more than relax his initial severity, allowing her to get up for half an hour each evening on the understanding that she did not stir from her bed during the remaining twenty-three and a half hours. And carelessly she added the detail that two or three weeks earlier she had had the induction of a pneumothorax, and that soon Dr. Vernet would be performing an operation for the cutting of the adhesions.
Unfortunately it was not so straightforward as all that. Whenever Dr. Vernet screened Michèle, he commented with a groan: “Mademoiselle, you have so many adhesions that whether we shall ever manage to cut them God alone knows.” The reiteration of this remark at last so distressed her that one day, after a consultation, she rushed to Paul, crying: “I know that there are lots of adhesions, but why must he keep on telling me?”
And then one afternoon on a medical round Dr. Bruneau asked whether she had been told that as there was practically no possibility of a thoroscopy being successful, Dr. Vernet had decided to abandon the pneumothorax. And a little later Dr. Vernet sent for her, apologised that he had not given her the news himself, and then confirmed the substance of what she had already learned from Dr. Bruneau. She was at first incredulous (for in her own mind she had never doubted that she would have the operation, and that its outcome would be successful). And then, when Dr. Vernet thought that he had brought the matter to a close, she started to protest, to plead; but he was adamant, reasserting that the chances of the operation’s success were not remotely commensurate with its risks. “There are thick, multiple adhesions, mademoiselle, between your lung and the main artery. There are even adhesions to your heart ….” There was nothing to be done and no other treatment to be attempted. He had acquainted her parents with the facts, and it was now up to them to decide whether they wished her to remain in Brisset or to return to Liège.
“Believe me, chère mademoiselle,” he concluded, “if it were the question of my own daughter, I would be forced to make the same decision.”
“Soit!” said Michèle, getting up from her chair and offering her hand to Dr. Vernet. “So it’s really all up with me,” she added.
“We never think or speak in such terms, mademoiselle.”
“But is it not the truth?”
“You have every chance of recovery. Rest, good food——” Dr. Vernet broke off, realising that for once he had failed to introduce into his voice the requisite note of conviction.
In Paul’s room, Michèle’s courage temporarily deserted her. Her entry woke him from an afternoon dream so horrible that for some moments he was unable to orientate himself; when, however, he made a movement to turn on the bedside lamp, she begged him to leave the room unilluminated.
She sat at the foot of the bed, waited till she had proper control of her voice and of her breathing, then repeated what Dr. Vernet had told her. And suddenly her control broke down, and she wept, covering her face with her hands. Paul, tense with horror, tried to comfort her, reassure her, stumbling grotesquely between the clumsy locutions of consolation and the outraged realisation of his most veiled and secret fears. At one moment he stretched out his hand to touch her shoulder, but she shuddered and drew away from him. Her sobbing stopped, but she remained with her head buried in her hands. “Michèle,” whispered Paul, “I swear to you everything will be all right.” She got up and went towards the window, looking out for a moment across the mountains, her tear-stained face just visible in the reflected glow of the setting sun. Then, without a word, she left the room.
The next morning, coldly, almost hostilely, Dr. Vernet said to Michèle: “Mademoiselle, I have decided to look inside your chest.” Before she could smile, before the preliminary movement of her lips, he raised a cautionary hand. “Do not misunderstand me—there is no question of a thoroscopy, no question of cutting any adhesions. It is—and I repeat it—merely that I have decided to look inside your chest.” And again, because he saw that she was about to speak, he silenced her: “Do not erect any false superstructure of hope, do not exaggerate in your mind anything that I am saying. My intention is to satisfy my curiosity (causing you in the process a certain, inevitable degree of pain) and I offer you no further recompense than the fee for my services.” And with a quick nod, and a curt “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he strode out of the room.
Laughing with excitement, Michèle ran to tell Paul the news. All Dr. Vernet’s recommendations and reservations had been in vain; she neither considered nor contemplated them an instant. “I knew he would do it, I knew he would do it,” she repeated. Her happiness was overwhelming, her confidence in life was both vindicated and restored. Her enthusiasm was so infectious that it disarmed Paul’s critical faculties, and it was not until she had left him that he reflected on how an operation too dangerous to perform one day had become in her eyes no more than a formality the next.
Michèle’s visits to Paul increased progressively, and no member of the sanatorium staff had the heart to reprove her. Doctors and nurses behaved towards her with extreme mildness. De la Marelle sent her delicacies out of the hampers which he regularly received from his home in Normandy. Glou-Glou brought her a phial of the notorious Erlinger serum (which he claimed both to have invented and to be currently employing in re-establishing his own health), and Dr. Florent presented her with his school edition of Molière, explaining—with some confusion—that though the volumes did not look much, it was what they contained which mattered.
And Michèle, the hem of her cherry-coloured dressing-gown swirling about her calves as she hurried down the corridor, or darting into Paul’s room wearing no more than her open-necked shirt and white linen trousers, seemed unaware of the abnormal, the exceptional, degree of anxiety and solicitude which her situation was attracting. Her slender, boyish figure fitted sideways into an armchair, her trousered legs trailing over the arms, she would talk easily, light-heartedly, with Paul, to all appearances no more disturbed by the prospect of the future than she was by the present or the past. And when Dr. Vernet (fearing the state of mind which might follow upon disillusion) felt impelled to repeat his initial strictures concerning the operation she interrupted him, saying “I know, I know, you’re going to cut me up just for your own amusement and to make a bit of money.”
A date for the operation was announced; it was cancelled on the evening before it was due to take place and put back by a couple of days. Michèle, who had been psychologically and physically prepared, reacted to the news with nervous impatience. “It would have been almost all over now,” she protested to Paul, clenching and unclenching her fists. Then she made a conscious, almost visual, adjustment to the revised situation, and made no further comment on what had occurred.
On the actual evening before the operation she was delayed in reaching Paul’s room by certain pre-operatory treatments and preparations; when at last she arrived, she looked so alone, so young and so menaced that Paul closed his eyes. A large swelling under one arm indicated the presence of a preliminary dressing; her slender neck looked as if it had been bared for the guillotine.
She had brought with her her draughtboard, and without a word she set it up on the table by Paul’s bed and drew up a chair. They played several games with the nervous intensity of the occupants of a condemned cell, till at last Michèle tossed a handful of the pieces she had won on to the duvet and said: “I can’t go on playing any longer.” She went over to a table and sat on it, swinging her legs. Then she walked about the room, looking at books, straightening objects, flicking away dust.
“Oh! I’m so tired of this sanatorium,” she said. “I will be glad to get back to my pensionnat.”
“You’ll be back there very soon.”
“Why do you say that when you don’t believe it?”
“But I do believe it.”
Michèle picked up a magazine and started to turn over the pages.
“You know, a thoroscopy is not so terrible,” said Paul; “I had quite the wrong idea before mine. I——”
“Oh! do stop!” she broke in, tossing the magazine on to the bed. “I can’t bear another word. No one here ever talks about anything else.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This morning in the Service Médical I overheard Sœur Miriam talking to one of the sisters. She said: ‘La petite Duchesne believes in miracles. But in fact there’s not one chance in a hundred that her thoroscopy will be a success.’ You understand—‘not one chance in a hundred’!”
“Michèle!”
“Michèle!” she echoed. She came close to him. “Do you think like everyone else that I’m so naïve that I don’t know my life is in the balance and that all the odds are against me?”
Paul stammered, and shook his head.
“Then you do!” she cried.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“La petite Duchesne! So childish, so moronic that she believes everything that she’s told! You see! And that’s the reason why you dare say that you believe I’ll soon be back at my pensionnat!”
“That’s not the reason.”
“Then what is?” she demanded furiously.
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me!”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a bad reason, hopeless, futile, pathetic, of interest and significance only to me,” cried Paul, his own anger suddenly rising.
“You mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Of course you mean nothing!”
Paul turned from her gaze. “I believe what I’ve told you and I believe it because I’ve got to believe it.”
“Why? Why?”
“Because I must. Because——”
“Because?”
“I won’t tell you.”
“Because?”
“Because I love you.” He turned back to her savagely. “Don’t say anything. Don’t reply. I’ll be mocked no more by you, Michèle. I love you and I’ve loved you since first we met. Don’t look at me as if I’m mad. I’m sorry if I distress you, but I had to make it clear that I was not talking idly. I’m committed. And because I’m committed, I’ve got to believe that the thoroscopy will succeed.”
He reached out to take her hand, but she drew away from him as she had done several evenings before. “I must go now,” she said, glancing at her watch, “Vernet must already be sharpening his knives.” She turned at the door to wave good night, then seeing the expression of pain on Paul’s face she ran towards him. He clasped her desperately, held her face in his hands, covered her features with kisses, pressed his lips against her lips until the pain made her gasp, and under his teeth thin fillets of blood spread from her lips to his mouth.