Out of Time, page 18
“Come to my office and you will hear Jean-Claude himself give you all the answers, Commissaire.”
Having made him comfortable and mixed him a drink, I brought out the tape-recorder.
For a long time after, he was silent.
“Doctor, it can’t be true, can it?” he said at last.
“Is there any other possible explanation, Commissaire? Are you satisfied?”
“Yes and no,” he said, finishing his drink. “I feel like the kid the first time he saw a giraffe and didn’t believe it. But, supposing that it is true, how could Manoque shove his brother-in-law under the train, Doctor?”
“How did Ludo make him try to shoot his wife, forge a signature to a cheque? There are so many forces in nature and in us which we cannot yet understand, Commissaire. Forces which you perhaps classify as strange or surprising coincidences.”
As the Commissaire left my house, a heavy flower pot fell and exploded on the pavement. He was not able to find out what window it had come from and, though I tried, I was unable to tell him that my left hand had suddenly become very hot and started shaking after his departure and that, like an automaton, I had simply followed my hand to the window and watched it push out a flower pot, the largest it could find.
THE MIRACLE
To Bernadette, this story she knows well.
The railways did things handsomely. Shortly before Monsieur Jadant was due home, workmen came to remove the kitchen steps and build instead an easy slope for his wheelchair which arrived a few days later. The wheelchair was a beautiful silent thing of black lacquered enamel with soft brown leather cushions. The neighbours came round to help Madame Jadant cut strings and unwrap yards of brown paper strips and take turns at reading the booklet of instructions and examine one by one the various attachments and gadgets.
But what had surprised the neighbourhood most of all was the return of Monsieur Jadant; they had not, of course, expected such a luxurious ambulance, but after the wonderful wheelchair, that in itself was not so very surprising. No, what had really astonished everybody was the extraordinary way in which Monsieur Jadant had bounced out of the ambulance and skilfully hopped across the pavement and through the open gate of his little suburban villa with the aid of two brand-new chromium-plated crutches. True that, on reaching the bottom of the front steps, he had had to let the ambulance attendants carry him up like a large bundle.
Monsieur Jadant at last found himself seated in his beautiful wheelchair in the very middle of his new room, the ground floor drawing-room from which Madame Jadant had extracted a number of gilt chairs, two round tables and a gigantic green plant to make room for a bed.
It was there that Monsieur Jadant, a little like a king on his throne, received his neighbours who were introduced one at a time, or in small groups of twos and threes, as they arrived to congratulate him on his return home and to try to guess how much longer he really had to live.
All of them of course expected to hear a detailed account of the terrible railway accident in which Monsieur Jadant had been involved, of the anguish and the horror which they had all read about in the long illustrated article which most of them had carefully cut out—the very least they could do since they personally knew one of the victims.
To all, he spoke of God, Mercy and Divine Wrath! Most of his visitors shuffled their feet, coughed politely and smiled awkwardly at Madame Jadant; one or two managed to nod wisely and sigh.
“That man is hurt, terribly hurt,” said the local wine merchant to his wife who had replaced him behind his counter. “Hurt there!” he added solemnly, tapping his forehead and tying the strings of his long blue apron.
“No,” chimed in the butcher, drinking off his second vin blanc, “it’s worse than that. That man already has one foot in the grave, that’s what it is. Did you hear him? Only a priest, or a man about to die, can talk that way!”
“And now, close the shutters and lock the garden gate,” said Monsieur Jadant to his wife after the departure of the last visitors; “I have something to show you.”
“But…my poor Louis, dinner is already late…and I have such a nice little chicken for your homecoming…”
“Do as you are told, and don’t worry about the dinner,” snapped Monsieur Jadant.
“What will people think?” asked Madame Jadant, shrugging her bony shoulders.
“It’s dark, don’t let them see you, that’s all…Hurry!”
When she finally closed the shutters and drew the heavy plum coloured curtains, Madame Jadant turned round and saw her husband; she was only able to gasp: “Well!”
Standing erect by his wheelchair, smiling at himself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, Monsieur Jadant put his hands on his hips; threw up his chin, swelled out his chest, drew in his stomach and stood on tiptoe. Then, as he had learned to do in the army twenty years before, keeping his body erect, he slowly bent his legs.
“There!” he exclaimed, a little red in the face after bobbing slowly up and down twice.
“They have cured you then?”
“My poor girl, what a fool you are. Of course not! And don’t go getting such silly ideas into your head! I am incurable, do you hear? Incurable! My…my… something or other—it is all written down in their certificate—is completely, totally, and hopelessly crushed. The great professor who came all the way from Bordeaux to examine me—the one the railways paid for specially— discovered it all alone. None of the other doctors had noticed it, but they of course all agreed afterwards.”
“But then, Louis…you have cured yourself alone?”
“Me! Get better just like that? Of course not! I keep telling you that I am incurable! And I intend remaining incurable until they cough up, and they’ll have to cough up plenty, I can tell you! Later, if I get better and am one day even able to walk, we shall let God have all the credit and the glory.”
“Louis, explain yourself,” said Madame Jadant, crossing herself, “What does all this mean? I don’t understand…I’m afraid. Louis…you are going to get us into trouble.”
“Allez! Now cry! Women are the limit. Never a tear at learning that your dear husband can no longer walk, and now that you know that I am not paralysed after all, you start crying! Woman, don’t you understand? Don’t you understand that I have fooled them all! Every one of them, do you hear! Doctors, professors, experts, and all the others who came to look at me, examine me, touch me, pinch me, push me about and ask me silly questions about my ancestors and the amount of wine I have been drinking daily…We have won, won, I tell you! We need only be patient enough, and the money is going to pour in; and now that all the experts agree that I can never walk again, it shouldn’t be long coming.”
Sure enough, the money was soon forthcoming. There had of course been previous offers, offers which Monsieur Jadant had smilingly disdained; he had been careful never to sign anything—he had even refused to sign his hospital discharge sheet. When he started talking about his lawyers, the railways had come down with a final offer of ten million francs. Monsieur Jadant knew then that he had reached the limit of what he could expect; he also knew that if he did go to a lawyer, he might well end by getting a life pension which, for obvious reasons, did not interest him. After due consideration, he had accepted the offer.
“And now what do you propose doing, my poor Louis?” asked Madame Jadant, gazing at the ten million franc cheque which two businesslike gentlemen had finally left in exchange for some half-dozen signatures. “We can’t use that money, we can’t buy anything, because the day they find out you are not paralysed, they’ll want it all back.”
“So that’s what you think, is it? Now, listen; with that money I am first of all going to buy a car.”
“A car you won’t be able to use, Louis!”
“A car with which I shall go back to work. No more crawling around in trains, though. I am a good travelling salesman and with a car I can easily treble my earnings. I am well known throughout the country, and I can get other goods and other clients. 1 can…”
“You’re mad, Louis! I tell you they will take the car away from you! They’ll seize and sell all we have, and you will be lucky if they don’t send you to prison!” sobbed Madame Jadant.
“Damnation, don’t shout and cry like that! Now wipe your nose and see who is at the door,” said Monsieur Jadant, hopping into his wheelchair.
“Goodness!” gasped Madame Jadant. “Louis, it is the parish priest, Monsieur le Curé in person!”
“Good. Show him in. Wait! Give me my rosary, there in the right hand pocket of my waistcoat. Give it to me! Now run and open the door like a good girl…and stop worrying, please.”
Monsieur le Curé came back often. They spent quite a few hours together, talking over the various occupations which Monsieur Jadant might eventually take up to earn a little money. There was of course that young paralytic girl who had bought a knitting machine .with which she made sweaters, cardigans, vests and scarves; little by little, she had built up quite a reasonable trade through the local shopkeepers who agreed to retail her work. Monsieur Jadant might like to call on her some day, proposed the curate, thinking that Monsieur Jadant’s bursts of laughter and contageous good humour might be an excellent thing for Raymonde. No doubt about it, she too, was courageous, but it was more the courage of accepted defeat, without that warmth of heart, that glow of confidence that beamed from Monsieur Jadant’s face.
Thus, Monsieur Jadant’s first outing proved quite an affair. Monsieur le Curé came to fetch him and insisted on pushing his wheelchair whilst Madame Jadant walked by his side in her neat black suit. All along the street, people turned to watch them, and when they passed in front of the Café de la Mairie, the belote players dropped their cards to peep over the long window curtain. “There you are! There’s the proof! Didn’t I tell you that poor old Jadant was completely crackers?” said the proprietor, solemnly tapping his forehead with his finger.
“We are almost there,” said the priest, a little out of breath after negotiating a gutter. “Ah, and there is Raymonde waiting at her window.”
“Where?”
“On the first floor, the first window to the left of the grocer’s shop.”
Monsieur Jadant saw the childlike, sad little face, and sweeping off his hat he smiled and bowed low in his wheelchair.
The grocer and his boy were mobilized and since the wheelchair was much too cumbersome and heavy for the narrow stairs, Monsieur Jadant was hoisted up on an ordinary wicker chair. Puffing and panting they carried him right into the room of the pale, blonde, timid girl, sitting in a straight-backed armchair and gazing at him in silent wonder out of large blue eyes, a little afraid perhaps of this great mass of a man whose voice had boomed up through walls and doors and who was all at once laughing at and thanking the grocer, his boy, and the curate who was sweating profusely.
“He doesn’t’ understand; it is as though he does not know what it really is to be like that,” said Raymonde to her mother after the departure—just as noisy—of her visitor.
“Are you really going to buy a knitting machine?” asked Madame Jadant later that evening, wondering who her husband thought he was beckoning to as he hopped madly round his wheelchair.
“Yes,” he answered at last, lashing out two more uppercuts followed by a series of left-right hooks that were to wind up his two rounds of nightly shadow boxing. “Yes, I am indeed going to buy one, and I am going to learn to use it and make things with it, things which you will take round to the various addresses which that poor girl gave me. Like that, everything will be perfect; and in case of any future trouble, we will be able to prove that we had no hope whatsoever of ever using our legs again,” explained Monsieur Jadant with a knowing look.
“Oh, Louis…what do you intend doing, really?” pleaded his wife. “Won’t you tell me?”
“Why not, after all? Yes, I think the time has now come for you to know my plans. It might even be a good idea if you were to start talking about them in the neighbourhood.”
“Are you completely crazy?”
“No, my beloved and blithering fool of a wife, only daring and brilliant—though of course you wouldn’t know. You are nevertheless going to talk about it as though it was your idea, do you hear? Your idea!”
Warmly wrapped up and comfortably tucked in his wheelchair, Monsieur Jadant was basking in the warm spring sun of the Pyrenees. Madame Jadant had gone to buy him his morning paper and his daily box of five Voltigeurs cigars. He felt satisfied and quite happy sitting out in the little garden in front of the modest but comfortable Lourdes hotel where they had arrived two days ago. His arms hurt a little because, that morning at the famous grotto where Bernadette, the little shepherdess, had first seen the Virgin Mary, he had thought it a good idea to pray with his arms outspread as he had seen others do. Since he could not kneel on the pavement, just praying in his wheelchair was not going to attract much attention, and he wanted to be noticed. Then too, the outspread arms business had, he was sure, attracted a good deal of sympathy.
For the hundredth time perhaps, Monsieur Jadant sat thinking over the events of the past few months, from the moment when he had felt the railway carriage floating silently upwards, the moment for which he had been ready for the past twenty years. No, he could not find the slightest flaw anywhere; everything was really quite perfect. Nothing he had ever said or done could possibly be twisted or interpreted as the slightest indication that he had not been a real paralytic. All things considered, Madame Jadant had gone through with her part exceedingly well; she had talked so cleverly about the possibility of a pilgrimage to Lourdes, that it was Monsieur le Curé who had one fine day himself proposed it to him.
They had come very early in the season and there were, so far, very few pilgrims. Monsieur Jadant had decided that a modest little miracle was really wiser than a grand affair during a large pilgrimage, or in the middle of some imposing ceremony where ever-inquisitive journalists and photographers might be swarming around. He had even given up the idea of letting the miracle happen during the first morning mass which was attended by quite a little crowd. Having read all the books that his wife had been able to find about miracles at Lourdes, Monsieur Jadant knew that a large crowd might be dangerous, how the priests sometimes had had to struggle, and even fight, to protect a person suddenly cured of an ailment; he had read how, shouting and raving, the mass of pilgrims would gather round and even trample each other in trying to see and touch the “lucky” pilgrim. No, decidedly everything would have to happen quietly before a few witnesses with, if possible, a priest or two. The best time for that was at the grotto a little before noon, when most pilgrims or tourists had already left for lunch.
“A really nice day for a miracle, isn’t it, my dear?” whispered Monsieur Jadant over his shoulder as his wife pushed his wheelchair out into the street
“Louis…I’m afraid.”
“Ah no! It’s too late for that now! Besides, you don’t have to do anything but cry, and that you can do naturally. Remember, I am not going to get up and walk off, just like that! No, that would be suspicious. When you see me stand, just give a shout and leave the rest to me; and don’t be afraid if you see me fall…I shall only walk very little at first.”
Trembling like a leaf, Madame Jadant pushed her husband to within a few feet of the iron railing at the entrance of the famous grotto.
“Fine,” whispered Monsieur Jadant. “Now leave me alone; go and sit on that bench over there.”
There were rather more people than he had expected, a mixed crowd of tourists and pilgrims, but he knew that it would dwindle rapidly towards noon. Many of the pilgrims were praying, one or two of them aloud. Without taking any apparent notice of anyone, Monsieur Jadant recited his rosary, and as people began to move away, shortly before twelve, for a long time he prayed head down, arms outspread.
Everything went off as Monsieur Jadant had said. Though still trembling, Madame Jadant had not been too afraid when she had seen her husband slowly stand up, his arms still outspread. She had been about to shout as he had told her to, when a soldier turning round had gasped: “Look!”
“He walks!” screamed a woman on her knees.
Slowly, his legs very stiff, Monsieur Jadant was walking like an automaton towards the railings.
“Miracle! A miracle!” shouted a man as a priest ran towards Monsieur Jadant, who had fallen to his knees.
“I walk…I can walk!” he gasped as the priest and the soldier helped him to his feet. “Let me go! I walk… I can walk, I tell you!”
And as they released him, he crumpled up again.
It was only later that the horrid tragedy of it all dawned on Madame Jadant, at the infirmary, when she heard her husband shouting and swearing at the doctor.
“Pray, pray, my son!” the priest who had accompanied him to the infirmary kept repeating. “You walked, I saw you! Pray! The miracle will happen again! Pray!”
Powerless, the doctor shrugged his shoulders and moved away from the bed where Monsieur Jadant was sobbing and raving:
“Do something, blast you! I could walk, I tell you! Doctor, do you hear? I could walk! Damn you, Doctor, I could walk!”
It was this time a human wreck that Monsieur Jadant’s neighbours saw being lifted out of an ambulance; no sparkling crutches, no hand-waving, no smiles—just a bundled up old man carried swiftly and silently into his house.
At the very moment when Monsieur Jadant was again being tucked into his wheelchair which seemed suddenly too big for him, Monsieur le Curé who thought him still at Lourdes, was knocking at Raymonde’s door.
“There is something I must tell you, Monsieur le Curé.”
“Speak, mon enfant,” said the priest, drawing up a chair.
“You won’t believe me, but please hear me out,” said Raymonde, gazing earnestly at him.
“Of course I will hear you out. What is the trouble?”
Clasping her long thin hands together on the old blanket round her legs, hesitatingly, faltering, Raymonde told her strange story.
