Suddenly he thought: "Supposing he were still alive!"
A while ago, for the s.p.a.ce of a second, by the light of a match blown out as soon as it was struck, he had seen the hole in the actor"s skull.
But what if he had seen incorrectly? What if he had taken a mere graze of the skin for a serious lesion of the brain and skull? Does a man retain his powers of judgment in the first moments of surprise and horror? A wound may be hideous without being mortal, or even particularly serious. It had certainly seemed to him that the man was dead. But was he a medical man, able to judge with certainty?
He lost all patience with the wick, which was still charring, and muttered:
"This lamp is enough to poison one."
Then recalling a trick of speech habitual to Dr. Socrates, as to the origin of which he was ignorant, he repeated mentally:
"This lamp stinks like thirty-six cart-loads of devils."
Instances occurred to him of several abortive attempts at suicide. He remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club a well known sportsman, after a card scandal, tried to blow out his brains but merely shot off an ear. These instances applied to Chevalier with striking exact.i.tude.
"Supposing he were not dead."
He wished and hoped against all evidence that the unfortunate man might still be breathing, that he might be saved. He thought of fetching bandages, of giving first aid. Intending to re-examine the man lying in the front room, he raised the lamp, which was still emitting an insufficient light, too suddenly, and so extinguished it. Whereupon, surprised by the sudden darkness, he lost patience and exclaimed:
"Confound the blasted thing!"
While lighting it again, he flattered himself with the idea that Chevalier, once taken to hospital, would regain consciousness, and would live, and seeing him already on his feet, perched on his long legs, bawling, clearing his throat, sneering, his desire for his recovery became less eager; he was even beginning to cease to desire it, to regard it as annoying and inconsiderate. He asked himself anxiously, with a feeling of real uneasiness:
"What in the world would he do if he came back, that dismal actor fellow? Would he return to the Odeon? Would he stroll through its corridors displaying his great scar? Would he once more have to see him prowling round Felicie?"
He held the lighted lamp close to the body and recognized the livid bleeding wound, the irregular outline of which reminded him of the Africa of his schoolboy maps.
Plainly death had been instantaneous, and he failed to understand how he could for a moment have doubted it.
He left the house and proceeded to stride up and down in the garden. The image of the wound was flashing before his eyes like the impression caused by too bright a light. It moved away from him, increasing in size against the black sky; it took the shape of a pale continent whence he saw swarms of distracted little blacks pouring forth, armed with bows and arrows.
He decided that the first thing to do was to fetch Madame Simonneau, who lived close at hand, in the Boulevard Bineau, in the residential part of the cafe. He closed the gate carefully, and went in search of the housekeeper. Once on the boulevard, he recovered his equanimity. He felt most uncomfortable about the accident; he accepted the accomplished fact, but he cavilled at fate in respect of the circ.u.mstances. Since there had to be a death, he gave his consent that there should be one, but he would have preferred another. Toward this one he was conscious of a feeling of disgust and repugnance. He said to himself vaguely:
"I concede a suicide. But what is the good of a ridiculous and declamatory suicide? Couldn"t the fellow have killed himself at home?
Couldn"t he, if his determination was irrevocable, have carried it out discreetly, with proper pride? That is what a gentleman would have done in his position. Then one might have pitied him, and respected his memory."
He recalled word for word his conversation with Felicie in the bedroom an hour before the tragedy. He asked her if she had not for a time been Chevalier"s mistress. He had asked her this, not because he wanted to know, for he had very little doubt of it, but in order to show that he knew it. And she had replied indignantly: "Chevalier? He? Good gracious no! You wouldn"t have had me look at him!"
He did not blame her for having lied. All women lie. He rather enjoyed the graceful and easy manner with which she had cast the fellow out of her past. But he was vexed with her for having given herself to a low-down actor. Chevalier spoilt Felicie for him. Why did she take lovers of that type? Was she wanting in taste? Did she not exercise a certain selection? Did she behave like a woman of the town? Did she lack a certain sense of niceness which warns women as to what they may or may not do? Didn"t she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed Felicie for the accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus.
Madame Simonneau was not at home. He inquired her whereabouts of the waiters in the cafe, the grocer"s a.s.sistants, the girls at the laundry, the police, and the postman. At last, following the direction of a neighbour, he found her poulticing an old lady, for she was a nurse. Her face was purple and she reeked of brandy. He sent her to watch the corpse. He instructed her to cover it with a sheet, and to hold herself at the disposal of the commissary and the doctor, who would come for the particulars. She replied, somewhat nettled, that she knew please G.o.d, what she had to do. She did indeed know. Madame Simonneau was born in a social circle which is obsequious to the const.i.tuted authorities and respects the dead. But when, having questioned Monsieur de Ligny, she learnt that he had dragged the body into the front room, she could not conceal from him that such behaviour was imprudent and might expose him to unpleasantness.
"You ought not to have done it," she told him. "When anyone has killed himself, you must never touch him before the police come."
Ligny thereupon went off to notify the commissary. The first excitement having pa.s.sed off, he no longer felt any surprise, doubtless because events which, considered from a distance, would seem strange, when they take place before us appear quite natural, as indeed they are. They unfold themselves in an ordinary fashion, falling into place as a succession of petty facts, and eventually losing themselves in the everyday commonplace of life. His mind was distracted from the violent death of an unfortunate fellow-creature by the very circ.u.mstances of that death, by the part which he had played in the affair and the occupation which it had imposed upon him. On his way to the commissary"s he felt as calm and as free from mental care as though he had been on his way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to decipher despatches.
At nine o"clock in the evening, the police commissary entered the garden with his secretary and a policeman. The munic.i.p.al physician, Monsieur Hibry, arrived simultaneously. Already, thanks to the industry of Madame Simonneau, who was always interested in matters of supply, the house exhaled a violent smell of carbolic and was blazing with the candles which she had lit. Madame Simonneau was bustling to and fro, actuated by an urgent desire to procure a crucifix and a bough of consecrated box-wood for the dead. The doctor examined the corpse by the light of a candle.
He was a bulky man with a ruddy complexion. He breathed noisily. He had just dined.
"The bullet, a large calibre bullet," he said, "penetrated by way of the palatal vault, traversed the brain and finally fractured the left parietal bone, carrying away a portion of the cerebral substance, and blowing out a piece of the skull. Death was instantaneous."
He returned the candle to Madame Simonneau and continued:
"Splinters of the skull were projected to a certain distance. They will probably be found in the garden. I should conjecture that the bullet was round-nosed. A conical bullet would have caused less destruction."
However, the commissary. Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel, a tall, thin man with a long grey moustache, seemed neither to see nor to hear. A dog was howling outside the garden gate.
"The direction of the wound," said the doctor, "as well as the fingers of the right hand, which are still contracted, are more than ample proof of suicide."
He lit a cigar.
"We are sufficiently informed," remarked the commissary.
"I regret, gentlemen, to have disturbed you," said Robert de Ligny, "and I thank you for the courteous manner in which you have carried out your official duties."
The secretary and the police agent, Madame Simonneau showing the way, carried the body up to the first floor.
Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel was biting his nails and looking into s.p.a.ce.
"A tragedy of jealousy," he remarked, "nothing is more common. We have here in Neuilly a steady average of self-inflicted deaths. Out of a hundred suicides thirty are caused by gambling. The others are due to disappointment in love, poverty, or incurable disease."
"Chevalier?" inquired Dr. Hibry, who was a lover of the theatre, "Chevalier? Wait a minute! I have seen him; I saw him at a benefit performance, at the Varietes. Of course! He recited a monologue."
The dog howled outside the garden gate.
"You cannot imagine," resumed the commissary, "the disasters caused in this munic.i.p.ality by the _pari mutuel_. I am not exaggerating when I a.s.sert that at least thirty per cent of the suicides which I have to look into are caused by gambling. Everybody gambles here. Every hairdresser"s shop is a clandestine betting agency. No later than last week a concierge in the Avenue du Roule was found hanging from a tree in the Bois de Boulogne. Now, working men, servants, and junior clerks who gamble do not need to take their own lives. They move to another quarter, they disappear. But a man of position, an official whom gambling has ruined, who is overwhelmed by clamorous creditors, threatened with distraint, and on the point of being dragged before a court of justice, cannot disappear. What is to become of him?"
"I have it!" exclaimed the physician. "He recited _The Duel in the Prairie_. People are rather tired of monologues, but that is very funny.
You remember! "Will you fight with the sword?" "No, sir." "The pistol?"
"No, sir." "The sabre, the knife?" "No, sir." "Ah, then, I see what you want. You are not fastidious. What you want is a duel in the prairie. I agree. We will replace the prairie by a five-storied house. You are permitted to conceal yourself in the vegetation." Chevalier used to recite _The Duel in the Prairie_ in a very humorous manner. He amused me greatly that night. It is true that I am not an ungrateful audience; I worship the theatre."
The commissary was not listening. He was following up his own train of thought.
"It will never be known, how many fortunes and lives are devoured each year by the _pari mutuel_. Gambling never releases its victims; when it has despoiled them of everything, it still remains their only hope. What else, indeed, will permit them to hope?"
He ceased, straining his ear to catch the distant cry of a newsvendor, and rushed out into the avenue in pursuit of the fugitive yelping shadow, hailed him, and s.n.a.t.c.hed from him a sporting paper, which he spread out under the light of a gas-lamp, scanning its pages for certain names of horses: _Fleur-des-pois_, _La Chatelaine_, _Lucrece_. With haggard eyes, trembling hands, dumbfounded, crushed, he dropped the sheet: his horse had not won.
And Dr. Hibry, observing him from a distance, reflected that some day, in his capacity of physician to the dead, he might well be called upon to certify the suicide of his commissary of police, and he made up his mind in advance to conclude, as far as possible, that his death was due to accidental causes.
Suddenly he seized his umbrella.
"I must be off," he said. "I have been given a seat for the Opera-Comique to-night. It would be a pity to waste it."
Before leaving the house, Ligny asked Madame Simonneau:
"Where have you put him?"
"In the bed," replied Madame Simonneau. "It was more decent."