New Bodies for Old/Chapter 12

When I was in the black hide of the bull, I had sworn to myself, if my original shape were ever restored to me, to flee away at once, with or without Emma; and yet the autumn was growing old, and I had not yet left Fonval.

The fact was, my treatment was now the exact reverse of what it had been. To begin with, I disposed of my time as I liked.

The first use that I made of that liberty was to go to the shambles in the forest-clearing, and there efface all traces of my visit. A favoring god had not decreed that during the time I had lived a bucolic life in the meadow, somebody should come there, and the assistants should remark the violation of the sepulcher.

Either they had changed their cemetery, or my uncle no longer dissected anything, except tiny creatures, of which the dogs left no trace, or else experiments in animâ vili were completely abandoned.

Let me say that I proved to my satisfaction a detail which lifted a great weight from my heart. ​I had been afraid that the soul of the unhappy Klotz had been transferred into some animal carefully kept in hiding; but his remains themselves, although marvelously recalling Baudelaire's famous poem, refuted me. The brain of the dead man, marked as it was with numerous and deep sinuosities, still visible, whilst bearing witness to his humanity, was proof of a murder pure and simple, thank Heaven!

So I enjoyed a large measure of freedom, and besides, an affectionate and repentant Lerne had shown himself at my bedside while I was convalescent. Oh, not the Lerne of long ago, the companion of my Aunt Lidivine; no, but he was no longer the grim and bloodthirsty host, who had received me in the manner in which one shows people the door.

When he saw me up and about, my uncle brought Emma in, and said to her in my presence, that I was cured of a passing touch of lunacy, and that she might now adore me as much as she liked.

"For my part," he continued, "I give up emotions no longer suitable to my age. You shall have Emma. All I ask of you is not to leave me. A sudden solitude would increase my distress, which you can easily understand, and which both of you will pardon. This distress will pass. Work will get the better of it. Do not be afraid, ​my dear; the chief part of my profit shall be for you! Nothing has been changed with regard to that, and Nicolas shall be mentioned in the partnership deed and in my will. You may love one another in peace."

With these words he went off to his electrical machines.

Emma showed no astonishment at anything. Trustful and simpleminded, she had accepted my uncle's speech with a clapping of hands.

I, knowing him to be an actor, might have told myself that he was feigning kindness, in order to keep me in the house; that either he was afraid of what I might reveal or that he was hatching some new project; but the two Circeean operations had rather troubled my memory and my reasoning powers.

"Why," said I to myself, "why doubt this man, who has, of his own free will, rescued me from the most awful position? He perseveres in the good way, and all is for the best."

At the sight of my laborious and domesticated Professor, who could have believed in his victims, and in a trap which he had laid for me, in the assassination of Klotz, in the distress of Nell? She never ceased her bowlings to the stars, suffering from the troubles which I had endured; for she was still there, and it puzzled me that Lerne should continue the punishment of a fault which ​must appear much less now that Emma no longer interested him.

I resolved to confide in my uncle.

"Nicolas," he said, "you have put your finger on my greatest anxiety, but what is to be done? In order to reëstablish the right order of things in this affair, it is absolutely necessary that the body of Macbeth should come back here. By what stratagem are we to persuade his father to send him back? Try to find one. Help me. I promise to act without delay as soon as one or the other of us has found a solution."

This reply had dissipated my last feelings of dislike. I did not ask myself why Lerne had metamorphosed himself so as to give in so easily and quickly.

My belief was that the Professor had at last been restored to wisdom; and in default of the other virtues, which would no doubt appear in due order, his rectitude of long ago seemed to me to be born again, rectitude which was as great as the erudition which had never abandoned him, and as evident as it was.

And Lerne's erudition was almost inexhaustible. Each day I was more and more convinced of it.

We resumed our walks, and he profited by them to discourse learnedly about everything we came across—a leaf led him on to botany, entomology was suggested by a beetle; a drop of rain let loose ​upon my admiration a deluge of chemistry, and when we had got to the edge of the forest, I had heard from Lerne's lips the lecturing of a whole collegeful of dons.

But, it was there, at the edge of the woods and fields that one should have seen him. After the last tree had been passed, he never failed to stop, hauled himself up to the top of a boundary stone, and held forth concerning the Universe, in presence of the plains and the heavens.

He described things so ingeniously, that one could believe one saw Nature unfold and open to the very depths of the earth, and to the very ends of infinity.

His words knew equally well how to dig into the hills to lay bare the strata of the soil, as to bring near to us, the better to discourse about them, the invisible planets.

He knew how to analyze the vapor of the clouds, as well as to show the origin of the cold wind—to evoke prehistoric landscapes, and to prove in the same way the unending future of the countryside.

He roamed in spirit with his eyes over the immense panorama, from the hut near at hand, to those wide horizons—the distant tints of blue.

In a few words each thing was defined, explained, and illuminated by commentary, and as he made sweeping gestures to every point of the ​compass, to draw attention now to a river, and now to a steeple, his outspread arms seemed to lengthen into rays, like those of a lighthouse, which sheds its long protecting beams over the countryside.

The return to Fonval usually took place in less scientific circumstances. My uncle continued his speculations which he would keep to himself, assuming them, I suppose, to be too abstruse for my intelligence, and he hummed as he went along, his favorite air, which I suppose he had learnt from one of his assistants, "Rum fil dum."

Once we got back, he hastened to the laboratory, or the hothouse.

We varied these walks with expeditions in the motor-car, and then my uncle put himself astride another hobby-horse. He classed my vehicle in its rank amongst animal categories, showed the creatures of to-day, of yesterday, and of tomorrow, among which, no doubt, the automobile would take its place, and this prophecy finished up with a warm panegyric of my 80 h. p.

He wanted to learn how to drive the engine. It was an easy business. In three lessons I made him a past master. He always drove now, and I did not complain, as ever since the two severings and two re-joinings of the optic nerves, any long strain tired my eyes.

My left ear had not yet recovered all the sensi​bility one could have wished, but I did not dare to talk about it to Lerne for fear of adding one more to the many remorseful thoughts that seemed to haunt him.

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It was at the end of one of those pleasure trips that I happened, in cleaning my car—a thing I had to do myself—to find between the back and the cushion of Lerne's seat, a little note-book which had slipped from his pocket. I put it away in mine, with the intention of restoring it to him.

My curiosity got the better of me. On regaining my room, and without rejoining the Professor, I examined my find. It was a diary crammed full of rapid notes and figures sketched in pencil. it resembled the daily record of some research—a laboratory journal.

The figures conveyed no meaning to my eyes. The text was composed mainly of German terms (more especially) and French ones, too. The terms seemed to be chosen in either language, as inspiration directed. The ensemble did not have any meaning for me. However, I discovered a piece of less chaotic literature dated the day before, in which I thought I could recognize a résumé of the preceding pages; and the fact of my understanding some French words, and the sense which they assumed (once they were put ​together) awoke in me both an inveterate detective and a new-born linguist.

Among such words were the following substantives, connected by German words: "transmission of thought," "electricity," "brains," "batteries."

With the help of a dictionary which I stole from my uncle's room, I deciphered this sort of cryptogram, in which, fortunately, the same expressions frequently recurred. Here is a translation of it—I give it for what it is worth, unfitted as I am for this task, and driven to haste as I was by the necessity of restoring the note-book as soon as possible:

"Conclusions dated the 30th: Aim pursued: Exchange of personalities without exchange of brains.… Basis of research: Ancient experiments have proved that everybody possesses a soul; for the soul and the life are inseparable, and all organisms, between their birth and death, enjoy a more or less developed soul according as they are higher or lower in the scale of existence. Thus, from man to moss, passing through the polypi, each living being has its own soul. Do not plants sleep, breathe and digest? Why should they not think?

"This proves that there is a soul where there is no brain.

​"So the soul and the brain are independent of one another.

"Consequently, souls can be exchanged with one another without the brains being exchanged …

"Experiments in Transmission.

"Thought is the electricity of which our brains are the batteries or the accumulators—I do not know yet; but what is certain, is that the transmission of the mental fluid takes place in a manner analogous to that of the electric fluid.

"The experiment of the 4th proves that thought is transmitted by conductors. That of the 10th, that it is transmitted without conductors, on the ether waves.

"Subsequent experiments have shown a weak spot which I now set down.

"A soul which is projected into an organism unknown to this latter, compresses, so to speak, a soul which is there, without being able to expel it; the projected soul—the soul which has broken loose from the body—is itself kept bound to its organism by a sort of inexplicable mental 'attachment,' which nothing up till now has been able to cut.

"If the two beings are consenting, the reciprocal transmission fails for the same reason. The major part of each soul re-installs itself perfectly well in the organism of its partner, but the troublesome mental 'attachment' prevents each of ​them from completely quitting the body from which it is striving to detach itself.

"The simpler the recipient organism is relatively to the transmitting organism, the more soul can this latter project into a receptacle, which contains so little of it in the beginning, and the thinner, so to speak, becomes the 'attachment' which keeps fast the mind in the transmitting body, but it always exists.

"On the 20th I projected myself, mentally, inside Johann—on the 22nd I invaded a cat, on the 24th an ash tree.

"Access has become easier and easier, and the invasion more and more complete, but the 'attachment' remains.

"I thought the experiment would succeed on a corpse because there was no fluid to encumber the receptacle to be filled. I had not reflected that death is not compatible with a soul—that inseparable companion of life itself. I did not get any results, and the sensation is abominable.

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"Theoretically, in order that the 'attachment' should be suppressed, what is required? A receiving organism, which should have no soul at all (in order that one may lodge one's own entirely), and yet which should not be dead, and in other terms, an organized life which has never lived. That is impossible.

​"So, in practice, our efforts must tend to the suppression of the 'attachment' by means of artifices, which I do not yet perceive.…

"Not but what the experiments of this period have yielded curious results, since we have arrived at the following demonstrable conclusions:

"A very interesting incarnation this, for it satisfies some of those desiderata, all of which I shall satisfy if I attain the aim at which I am driving.

"It seems to me unattainable."

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So this is the result of the studies which my uncle had been so ardently lauding!

​The theory was disconcerting. I ought to have been astounded by it; for there was revealed a tendency towards spiritualist doctrine—very strange in the case of a materialist like Lerne—and the new doctrine appeared in the light of a phantasmagoria, which would have made many eyes open wide behind learned spectacles, erudite pince-nez, and pedantic monocles.

As for me, I did not discover all the subjects of wonder at first sight, being still, at that time, somewhat unwell, and I did not perceive that I had translated a Franco-German mene mene tekel upharsin destined for me!

My attention was concentrated upon these facts—that the organized being which had never, lived, did not exist, and that, on the other hand, the Professor was doubtful of being able to suppress the "attachment." So he was foiled. After his former triumphs I expected any miracle from him; only his inability to perform them would have astonished me.

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I set off to seek my uncle, in order to give him back his note-book.

Barbe (with her corpulent figure), whom I met, told me that he was walking about in the park. I did not meet him there, but at the edge of the pond I saw Karl and Wilhelm, who were looking at something in the water. Those two black​guards inspired me with aversion, because of their interchanged brains.

Their presence was usually enough to drive me away, but that day, the sight which kept them on the water's edge, drew me to them.

This something they were looking at kept jumping out of the water with a shower of diamond drops; it was a carp. It leaped up, shaking its fins, which beat the air like wings. One would have said that it was trying to fly away. The poor creature really was trying to do so!

I had before me that fish which Lerne had dowered with a blackbird's soul.

The captive bird—a prey in its scaly flesh to the old aspirations of its race, and weary of its watery home—was leaping towards an impossible heaven.

Finally, with a more despairing effort, the creature fell on the shore, with its gills quivering.

Then Wilhelm seized it, and the assistants departed with their booty. They apostrophized it, and amused themselves with it like old ill-conditioned guttersnipes. They were whistling, and imitating the blackbird's song in mockery, and then, by way of a laugh, a great neighing came from their chests, and without knowing it, they reproduced the sound of a horse's trumpet much better than they had that of the winged flute.

​I remained deamily contemplating the pond, that liquid cage in which the enchanted carp had suffered the haunting desire to fly, and the regret for a nest. The liquid mirror, a moment disturbed by the fury of the fish's leaps, would not have reassumed its leaden calm before the creature was dead.

Its martyrdom was going to end in the stewpan. How would that of the other victims finish, the escaped beasts, and Macbeth?

Oh, Macbeth! how to deliver him!

On the water, now becalmed in deep repose, a last ripple was spreading its circles, and the depths of the firmament were reflected in its mirror again. The evening star was shining in the depths of the lake millions of leagues away, but at will, it was possible, on the contrary, to imagine it floating on the surface, and the leaves of the water-lilies, crescents and half-circles, seemed like reflections of the moon at its successive ages, which had remained there, slumbering in that chill water.

Macbeth! I thought once more. Macbeth I What about him?

At this moment there was the sound of a distant bell at the main door. Somebody at this hour of the day! Nobody ever came!…

I retraced my steps to the château at a rapid pace, asking myself for the first time what would ​happen to Nicolas if the Law descended on Fonval.

Hiding behind the corner of the château, I ventured a glance. Lerne was standing at the door reading a telegram that moment received, and I came out from my hiding-place.

"Here, uncle," said I, "here is a pocket-book. It belongs to you, I think. You left it in the car.…"

But the rustling of petticoats made me turn round.

Emma was coming to us, radiant in that sunset, in which her hair seemed, every evening, to gain a new wealth of red light—with a tune sounding on her lips, like a rose between her teeth.

She came straight on, and her gait was that of a dance.

The bell had interested her also. She inquired about the telegram. The Professor did not reply.

"Oh, what's the matter?" said she. "What's the matter, again, mon Dieu?"

"Is it so grave, uncle?" I asked in my turn.

"No," replied Lerne. "Donovan is dead, that's all."

"Poor fellow," said Emma. Then after a silence: "Is it not better to be dead than mad? After all it is the best thing for him. Come, ​Nicolas, you are not going to put on a face like that! Come!"

And she seized my hand, and dragged me to the château.

Lerne went away in the other direction.

I was prostrated. "Let me alone," I said, "let me alone. Donovan, the poor wretch. Let me alone. You cannot know! Let me alone, I say."

A maddening fear came over me. Leaving Emma I ran after my uncle and joined him at the laboratory. He was talking to Johann, and showing him the telegram. The German disappeared into the house at the very moment that I accosted the Professor.

"Uncle, you have not told him anything, have you? You have not said anything to Johann?"

"Yes, why?"

"Oh, but he will inform the others, and the others will repeat it before Nell! Nell will know it, uncle, that is certain. They will tell her, and Donovan's soul will learn that it no longer has a human body. It must not be! It must not be!"

"There is no danger, Nicolas, I assure you."

"No danger! Those men are scoundrels, I tell you! Let me prevent this catastrophe! Time is passing, let me in, I entreat you! Please, for a second, I entreat you! Damn it all, I will pass!"

​The lessons I had learned from the bull stood me in good stead; I charged head first.

My uncle fell back on the grass, and with a blow of my fist I opened the already half open door. At this, Johann, who was on the watch behind it, fell back, bleeding at the nose, and then I penetrated to the courtyard, and decided to take away the dog at any hazard, and never again be separated from it.

The pack slipped into their kennels. I saw Nell immediately. They had given her a kennel apart from the others. Her great starved, hairless, wretched body was lying against the grating.

I called out, "Donovan, Donovan!" She did not budge.

The eyes of the dogs gleamed in the depths of their somber huts, and some of them growled.

"Donovan! Nell!" I had an intuition of the truth. There also the scythe of Death had done its work. Yes, Nell also was cold and stiff. A chain twisted round her neck seemed to have strangled her. I was going to make sure of this, when Lerne and Johann showed themselves at the entrance of the courtyard.

"Villains," I cried, "you have killed her."

"No, on my honor, I swear," declared my uncle. "They found her this morning, exactly as you see."

"Do you think, then, that she did it of her own ​accord—that she put an end to herself? Oh, what a horrible end!"

"Perhaps," said Lerne. "However, there is another solution, and a more likely one. A supreme convulsion, I think, twisted the chain. The body was sickly. Hydrophobia declared itself some days ago. I hide nothing from you, Nicolas. I am not exculpating myself in any way. You can see that."

"Oh," I cried, in terror, "rabies."

Lerne went on quietly, "It is possible, also, that another reason for this death escapes us. They found the dog at 8 o'clock this morning still warm. The death had taken place an hour before, and," added he, "Macbeth succumbed at 7 o'clock—just at the same instant."

"From what did he die?"

"He died of rabies also."