A Singular Man Read online

  When Madame Dechatellux reappeared after one of her brief absences, I said: "It seems to me that Richard is becoming more and more active."

  This, she replied, was nothing. Next month her husband would be directing a free clinic. She would become his partner. She wasn't complaining. Nor was Richard. The more they had to do, the happier they were.

  At that moment the man with the white beard, who had made such a bad impression on me because I had detected in him that awful trait known as late-blooming ambition, walked up to us.

  "May I come in?"

  "Why, certainly, Doctor, do by all means come in."

  I stood up. Madame Dechatellux introduced me. After giving my hand a hearty shake he drew Edith off into a corner. I went over to a window. It was starting to rain again, and drops were landing on the dry part of the balcony. An electric train swept swiftly past in the cut leading to the Gare Saint-Lazare. From this high up it looked like a toy. And so did the passers-by, and the automobiles, and the houses in the distance. I turned around. Everything in here was on a human scale. Madame Dechatellux and the doctor were now standing in the middle of the room. That fellow was definitely getting on my nerves. Though he was going on and on I could tell that he had nothing to say, that the only purpose of this stream of words, punctuated by predictable gestures, was to keep Edith there.

  Richard joined us at last. Egoistically, he allowed his self-satisfaction to show. It was legitimate, oh, as legitimate as could be, after such a busy morning. He was smiling, but like a man who despite himself is still thinking about the work he has just left off. With each passing minute that smile grew brighter. You don't get rid of mental tension the way you do a patient. Richard needed to be handled gently, given time to regain his bearings. In a minute or two he would be himself. Would he then recall the scene from the other day?

  "You'll stay for lunch," he said to the doctor who, after having hung about for so long, was making as if to go.

  The telephone rang. Richard excused himself, disappeared. There he was, yes; there was the man who, in the middle of a conversation, would recall something he had forgotten, the man who had to be intercepted in mid-career, who besought you to wait one little moment, who didn't return, who after that allotted you much more time than you had asked for; in short, the man I didn't like.

  At a quarter of two we sat down to lunch.

  "Who's that place for?" Richard inquired, noticing an empty chair.

  "For Mathilde."

  "Is she supposed to come?"

  "She announced she was coming. As for being able to tell you whether she actually will. . ."

  Richard saw me, heard me. Every so often we exchanged a few words. He had even very kindly paid me a compliment. But for him I was still one of those innumerable living beings he had encountered in the course of the morning. I was an element in his entourage. He had not yet had the time to distinguish me. Suddenly, he clapped his eyes on me. I felt that little by little he was remembering me, remembering my last visit, the promise he had made me, his failure to keep it. No change came about in his attitude. But when he addressed himself to his wife and to his guest, from the sound of his voice I could tell that in his view I had ceased to be some harmless visitor.

  The man with the white beard having left, Richard asked me to come with him. I waited a few moments while he accompanied Edith back to her room. An accident had befallen her when she was young and she walked with difficulty, using a cane.

  "I'll lead the way," he said, passing ahead of me.

  Now that he was by himself he exuded a rather disturbing gravity. He opened one door, then another. We reached his office.

  "I'm pleased you came, because I have a good many things to say to you."

  He checked to see that the window was well shut, did much striding about the room in manner of preamble. I had remained standing. I followed him with my eyes. He had the stern expression of men who, before receiving a new visitor, concentrate for a few moments in order rid their minds of the preceding one. After casting a glance at some papers, as if he was not about to lose sight of his overriding preoccupations, he sat down.

  "Have a seat," he said to me.

  He rose halfway in order to pull up the armchair I had chosen.

  "Here we are face to face. I'm delighted. For that matter I knew you'd be coming today. I arranged things so as to be free for the whole afternoon. I hope that you're free as well, Jean."

  "Yes."

  He appeared satisfied with my answer even though, certainly, he could not have thought for one instant that I might not be free.

  "Listen to me, Jean. I'm not going to do what some others would in my place, hemming and hawing and toning down what I have to tell you. I'm going to speak to you frankly. I think that's always the best way to proceed. I didn't send you the money. It wasn't through forgetfulness, it wasn't for economy's sake. I shall not send it to you, in your own best interest. I've thought about it. I have no reason to give you an allowance, absolutely none."

  "It's true," I remarked.

  Richard's sincerity, as one sees, was contagious.

  "Let me finish. I know you're going to ask me a question."

  "I shall ask you no question."

  "Yes, you will. You are going to ask me why the reasons I have had for supporting you have suddenly disappeared. If they were adequate in the past, you ask me, why have they stopped being so today? Here is my answer. I felt sorry for you."

  "Sorry! You too!"

  "Yes. I warned you I would speak frankly. That is what I am doing. You were misfortunate. . ."

  "And today you think I'm not anymore?"

  Richard had been on his feet for several minutes. He was pacing the room, hands behind his back. I could not help but find it extraordinary that a man, speaking to me about things that so intensely preoccupied him, could pace back and forth as if he were dictating his correspondence. He planted himself abruptly in front of me: "You've just given yourself away," he exclaimed in triumph. "You've said something that's absolutely characteristic of you. How old are you?"

  "Thirty-eight years old."

  "I am forty-two. So we're both the same age, more or less, aren't we?"

  "Yes."

  "And it's one of your contemporaries you blame for not helping you?"

  "I don't blame you for anything."

  "I am replying to your question. You ask whether I think you're no longer misfortunate. You are misfortunate, you certainly are. I know you continue to be misfortunate. I don't doubt this. But what difference can it make whether you are or aren't? You imagined—you still do—that your misfortunes gave you rights, that they authorized you to demand reparations, compensation. And when I announced to you that I was stopping the handouts, instead of trying to perceive the real motives behind my decision, you immediately think of those misfortunes which, to your mind, should entitle you to so much special treatment. To think that I should forget that you were misfortunate! What hard-heartedness! What insensitivity! What injustice! But even if you were ten times as misfortunate as you are, even if you had to beg in the street, I would act no differently. Four years ago, at a period when I too was unhappy, when the death of my sister. . . You made a gesture—and since I mention it, I'll tell you again that it touched me very deeply and hasn't been forgotten—, you made a gesture which I didn't think you capable of, and which suddenly revealed to me that there was some heart to you. Appearances, my upbringing, all sorts of prejudices had deceived me. Yes, I had been unfair, we all had been unfair. I won't hide it from you, I had regrets. Then I did what you know. And I am not sorry I did. Why have I decided not to give you any more money? Why today instead of yesterday? I am going to tell you. You'll not take it amiss. You made me feel sorry for you. I do not feel sorry for you anymore, not the least bit. For the past four years I have seen the way you live. I thought, as would anyone else in my place, that you were a victim of circumstance, that your misfortunes were owing to the world's unkindness. I did sincerely think
so. Today I understand that nobody is responsible for your misfortunes, that they come from you. By assuring your existence I am doing you a disservice, I am preventing you from struggling against your shortcomings. Only a few weeks ago I yet believed you had your heart set on freeing yourself from the tutelage you were living under. How naive! You move into a little hotel in the Latin Quarter, presumably on account of memories attaching you to the area, and you wait. For what? Nobody knows. You wander to left and to right. At the age of thirty-eight, in sound health, you live like an elderly gentleman and when you have an inkling that this existence may cease, you lose your head. Well, it must cease, I am telling you so in your own interest, solely in your own interest. Listen to me, Jean, you must have the strength to prefer the direst poverty to such an existence. At least do it for me."

  "For you?"

  "Yes. I am pained by this situation. It pains me because, for my part, it humiliates me. You are intelligent. You understand me. It's over. I do not want to give you money anymore. I am not going to give you any. I have a family, I have friends. My wife doesn't criticize me. But other people! If I have not hidden from them what I have done for you, I am obliged to hide from them what I know about you. They have suspicions. They wonder what there can be between us. It's perfectly understandable."

  The door opened. I glimpsed Madame Dechatellux leaning on her cane, frozen like a spy on the stage when the curtain concealing him is drawn aside. I wasn't startled. Every time Edith left the solitude of her room, she would freeze this way for a few seconds in order to remember what living creatures were like.

  "Doctor Sellier wishes to speak with you," she said, glancing at us, her husband and myself, as if, since her arrival, everything we might have said to one another already belonged to the past.

  Since the two men had never met one another, the newcomer hesitated slightly, not knowing which of us two, Richard or I, was the master of the house. Thanks to this uncertainty I was for an instant or two the beneficiary of an amiability not intended for me. From the subsequent conversation I gathered that Richard's visitor, although unknown to him personally, was a colleague to whom Richard showed the high mark of esteem of referring those patients for whose care he did not wish to undertake the responsibility.

  For a good quarter of an hour the two doctors vied with each other in courtesies. A friendship was forming before my eyes, one so fervently desired by both parties that they had completely forgotten my presence. It was no longer possible for me to take for myself the graciousness that the visitor's indecision had directed toward me at the start. And when they parted I was surprised they did so on in such a friendly manner before a witness to the newness of their relations.

  I remained alone for some time while Dechatellux was seeing his friend out. Daylight was already waning on this winter afternoon. I was thinking about the speech I had just heard. It smelled of midnight oil, preparation, multiple drafts. Richard must have written it, learned it by heart, recited it to his wife. And now I had the impression of having read it somewhere, in an Ohnet novel perhaps. Listen to me, Jean. . . I'm not going to do what some others would in my place. . .You ask me why. . . You ask me whether. . . Here is my answer. . . I am replying to your question. . . you made a certain gesture. . . and since I mention it I'll tell you again. . . And the whole thing in such a sincere tone, the "I'm obliged to talk to you this way" tone.

  No, something had happened. Just as a certain gesture—to employ Richard's expression—had won me his esteem, so a certain other one—which had probably just been revealed to him—was earning me his contempt. The other day he had shouted at me that I was a miserable wretch. The same thought was in his head while making his speech just now. But he's wrong. I'm not a wretch.

  Finally, the door opened again, and through it came Monsieur and Madame Dechatellux. She gazed at me with the look of someone who has just been put in the know. I believe that no woman has ever caused me so disagreeable an impression. She exudes an arrogant harshness and yet, once she unclamps her lips, it is to express herself with a mildness in which not the least trace of condescension can be discerned. I sought to help her walk. She must have imagined that I wished to appear to have forgotten what had just transpired between her husband and myself. She pushed me away, the while saying to me in an affectionate way: "Just go over and sit down."

  "I'll sit down in a moment. I want to help you."

  This time she accepted, but without uttering a word. After Richard and I had settled her in an armchair, she repeated, still with the same mildness: "Jean, obey."

  I sat down with a smile.

  "You are smiling, Jean. However this is no time for that."

  "I can smile," I rejoined, "there is nothing reprehensible in my smiling."

  "My husband has had a long talk with you," she went on. "I also am anxious to speak to you. There are certain things that a woman is better able to get across."

  I caught a stern expression on her face. You would expect that an invalid who needs a cane to walk would, once seated, take a comfortable position. Not a bit of it. She hadn't even leaned back. One sensed that she was among those women who consider that in our civilized society they have no need to kowtow to men, despite the weakness of their sex.

  "Especially when they are as unpleasant for the person saying them as for the one listening," she continued. "You are not unaware that we know Colonel Laîsné. I even think I recall that you met him in Compiègne four years ago at the home of my husband's parents. He came to see us and, without our having questioned him at all—and on this I give you my word—, he spoke about you. What he said left us literally speechless. And well it might, you will agree. You will agree that relations between us, which might conceivably have gone on, have become impossible."

  I didn't flinch. Neither my lips, nor my nostrils, nor my eyelids—nowhere was there a quiver to show the effect of emotion. I saw myself in the room I had had on rue Casimir Delavigne, harmless, solitary. I had expected to be there for a month. Four years had gone by. I had done nothing wrong. With no ambition or desire, I had not even had the occasion to cause hurt. And yet life kept raining blows upon me as it had in the past. Only the cadence had slackened. I grew afraid. Of what? I did not know. And what if I were to act like everybody else? What if I proposed a deal? What if, for money, I accepted being a wretch, accepted never again to return to rue de Rome, accepted never to give any further sign of life? It would have been abominable.

  Edith went on.

  "You will understand that, given the circumstances, there can be no further question either of our giving you money or indeed of seeing you at all."

  Night had all but fallen, and as it would have been disagreeable to look into each other's eyes, no one turned on the lights. Richard maintained silence. He sat back in his armchair as if, coming back to his senses but not yet having recovered consciousness altogether, he dared not take it upon himself to move from the position where he had been placed with the intention of providing him relief.

  I got up.

  "If Colonel Laisné," I said, "is able to remember a private in the company he commanded nineteen years ago (at which time he was only a captain), a soldier whom he spoke to only once from where he was sitting astride his horse, a soldier without means or personal connections, a soldier like all the others, it is because there is a reason. I am going to tell you what that reason is. It isn't as often as they say that a man finds himself in the presence of an injustice. Whenever that happens to him, he doesn't forget it. And he is even likelier not to forget it if the position he holds prohibits him from redressing it."

  Upon those words I left Dechatellux and his wife, taking care not to add anything at all for fear of diminishing their impact. The sky was overcast, there was not a break, not a chink in its despairingly uniform grayness. Passers-by marched forward, head up. Everyone's thoughts were exclusively upon his own business, upon his own little world. And I was like the rest. I have so little malevolence in me that I was thinking th
at Richard and Edith, especially Richard, had after all not fully exploited my weak point. They had acted without taking any notice of it as if I belonged to their milieu. They had ended our relations with propriety. I walked past the buildings. Inside each of them were families, animosities, rivalries, loves. Was I the only person dwelling upon his behavior? The differences that so preoccupy me melted away on contact with the crowd. The latter grew more and more dense as I approached the Gare Saint-Lazare. Don't we all ponder our deeds? What was going to become of me? When the effects of an event will become manifest only later on, when what has occurred is not misfortune itself but rather the preconditions that make it inevitable, you feel a sense of relief. It seems that we are going to take advantage of the freedom our mind has just recovered. We are going to take decisions. Our enemies can do us no further harm. We are already no longer the man they overcame, but someone else. Was I soothed by these reflections? Yes and no. Never before had I experienced such a feeling of impotence. When everything slips away from us, we take thought and ask ourselves to what extent we are responsible for what is befalling us. Had the hour struck for the paying for my sins? Perhaps our breaking off would prove profitable to me. All I possessed in this world was a roof over my head. But that meant dealing with the monthly hotel bill, a bill upon which there appeared pots of tea ordered and forgotten about, ten per cent service charges, and to which were pinned the pages from a notebook recording what I owed the laundress. Would I still be in any position to conduct my life?