A Chair on the Boulevard

by Leonard Merrick

THE LAST EFFECT

Jean Bourjac was old and lazy. Why should he work any more? In his little cottage he was content enough. If the place was not precisely gay, could he not reach Paris for a small sum? And if he had no neighbours to chat with across the wall, weren't there his flowers to tend in the garden? Occasionally—because one cannot shake off the interests of a lifetime—he indulged in an evening at the Folies- Bergère, or Olympia, curious to witness some Illusion that had made a hit.

At such times old Bourjac would chuckle and wag his head sagely, for he saw no Illusions now to compare with those invented by himself when he was in the business.

And there were many persons who admitted that he had been supreme in his line. At the Folies-Bergère he was often recognised and addressed as "Maître."

One summer evening, when old Bourjac sat reading Le Journal, Margot, the housekeeper, who had grown deaf and ancient in his service, announced a stranger.

She was a girl with a delicate oval face, and eyes like an angel's.

"Monsieur Bourjac," she began, as if reciting a speech that she had studied, "I have come out here to beg a favour of you. I thirst for a career behind the footlights. Alas! I cannot sing, or dance, or act. There is only one chance for me—to possess an Illusion that shall take Paris by storm. I am told that there is nothing produced to-day fit to hold a candle to the former 'Miracles Bourjac.' Will you help me? Will you design for me the most wonderful Illusion of your life?"

"Mademoiselle," said Bourjac, with a shrug, "I have retired."

"I implore you!" she urged. "But I have not finished; I am poor, I am employed at a milliner's, I could not pay down a single franc. My offer is a share of my salary as a star. I am mad for the stage. It is not the money that I crave for, but the applause. I would not grudge you even half my salary! Oh, monsieur, it is in your power to lift me from despair into paradise. Say you consent."

Bourjac mused. Her offer was very funny; if she had been of the ordinary type, he would have sent her packing, with a few commercial home-truths. Excitement had brought a flush to the oval face, her glorious eyes awoke in him emotions which he had believed extinct. She was so captivating that he cast about him for phrases to prolong the interview. Though he could not agree, he didn't want her to go yet.

And when she did rise at last, he murmured, "Well, well, see me again and we will talk about it. I have no wish to be hard, you understand."

Her name was Laure. She was in love with a conjurer, a common, flashy fellow, who gave his mediocre exhibitions of legerdemain at such places as Le Jardin Extérieur, and had recently come to lodge at her mother's. She aspired to marry him, but did not dare to expect it. Her homage was very palpable, and monsieur Eugéne Legrand, who had no matrimonial intentions, would often wish that the old woman did not keep such a sharp eye upon her.

Needless to say, Bourjac's semi-promise sent her home enraptured. She had gone to him on impulse, without giving her courage time to take flight; now, in looking back, she wondered at her audacity, and that she had gained so much as she had. "I have no wish to be hard," he had said. Oh, the old rascal admired her hugely! If she coaxed enough, he would end by giving in. What thumping luck! She determined to call upon him again on Sunday, and to look her best.

Bourjac, however, did not succumb on Sunday. Fascinating as he found her, he squirmed at the prospect of the task demanded of him. His workshop in the garden had been closed so long that rats had begun to regard it as their playroom; the more he contemplated resuming his profession, the less inclined he felt to do it.

She paid him many visits and he became deeply infatuated with her; yet he continued to maintain that he was past such an undertaking—that she had applied to him too late.

Then, one day, after she had flown into a passion, and wept, and been mollified, he said hesitatingly:

"I confess that an idea for an Illusion has occurred to me, but I do not pledge myself to execute it. I should call it 'A Life.' An empty cabinet is examined; it is supported by four columns—there is no stage trap, no obscurity, no black velvet curtain concealed in the dark, to screen the operations; the cabinet is raised high above the ground, and the lights are full up. You understand?" Some of the inventor's enthusiasm had crept into his voice. "You understand?"

"Go on," she said, holding her breath.

"Listen. The door of the cabinet is slammed, and in letters of fire there appears on it, 'Scene I.' Instantly it flies open again and discloses a baby. The baby moves, it wails—in fine, it is alive. Slam! Letters of fire, 'Scene II.' Instantly the baby has vanished; in its place is a beautiful girl—you! You smile triumphantly at your reflection in a mirror, your path is strewn with roses, the world is at your feet. Slam! 'Scene III.' In a moment twenty years have passed; your hair is grey, you are matronly, stout, your face is no longer oval; yet unmistakably it is you yourself, the same woman. Slam! 'Scene IV.' You are enfeebled, a crone, toothless, tottering on a stick. Once more! It is the last effect—the door flies open and reveals a skeleton."

"You can make this?" she questioned.

"I could make it if I chose," he answered.

"Will you?"

"It depends."

"On what?"

"On you!"

"Take any share you want," she cried. "I will sign anything you like!
After all, would not the success be due to you?"

"So you begin to see that?" said the old man drily. "But, I repeat, it depends! In spite of everything, you may think my terms too high."

"What do you want me to do?" she stammered.

"Marry me!" said Bourjac.

He did not inquire if she had any affection for him; he knew that if she said "Yes" it would be a lie. But he adored this girl, who, of a truth, had nothing but her beauty to recommend her, and he persuaded himself that his devotion would evoke tenderness in her by degrees. She found the price high indeed. Not only was she young enough to be his granddaughter—she had given her fancy to another man. Immediately she could not consent. When she took leave of him, it was understood that she would think the offer over; and she went home and let Legrand hear that Bourjac had proposed for her hand. If, by any chance, the news piqued Legrand into doing likewise—?

But Legrand said nothing to the point. Though he was a little chagrined by the intelligence, it never even entered his mind to attempt to cut the inventor out. How should it? She was certainly an attractive girl, but as to marrying her—He thought Bourjac a fool. As for himself, if he married at all, it would be an artist who was drawing a big salary and who would be able to provide him with some of the good things of life. "I pray you will be very happy, mademoiselle," he said, putting on a sentimental air.

So, after she had cried with mortification, Laure promised to be old
Bourjac's wife.

A few weeks later they were married; and in that lonely little cottage she would have been bored to death but for the tawdry future that she foresaw. The man's dream of awakening her tenderness was speedily dispelled; he had been accepted as the means to an end, and he was held fast to the compact. She grudged him every hour in which he idled by her side. Driven from her arms by her impatience, old Bourjac would toil patiently in the workroom: planning, failing—surmounting obstacles atom by atom, for the sake of a woman whose sole interest in his existence was his progress with the Illusion that was to gratify her vanity.

He worshipped her still. If he had not worshipped her, he would sooner or later have renounced the scheme as impracticable; only his love for her supported him in the teeth of the impediments that arose. Of these she heard nothing. For one reason, her interest was so purely selfish that she had not even wished to learn how the cabinet was to be constructed. "All those figures gave her a headache," she declared. For another, when early in the winter he had owned himself at a deadlock, she had sneered at him as a duffer who was unable to fulfil his boasts. Old Bourjac never forgot that—his reputation was very dear to him—he did not speak to her of his difficulties again.

But they often talked of the success she was to achieve. She liked to go into a corner of the parlour and rehearse the entrance that she would make to acknowledge the applause. "It will be the great moment," she would say, "when I reappear as myself and bow."

"No, it will be expected; that will not surprise anybody," Bourjac would insist. "The climax, the last effect, will be the skeleton!"

It was the skeleton that caused him the most anxious thought of all. In order to compass it, he almost feared that he would be compelled to sacrifice one of the preceding scenes. The babe, the girl, the matron, the crone, for all these his mechanism provided; but the skeleton, the "last effect," baffled his ingenuity. Laure began to think his task eternal.

Ever since the wedding, she had dilated proudly to her mother and Legrand on her approaching début, and it angered her that she could never say when the début was to be. Now that there need be no question of his marrying her, Legrand's manner towards her had become more marked. She went to the house often. One afternoon, when she rang, the door was opened by him; he explained that the old woman was out marketing.

Laure waited in the kitchen, and the conjurer sat on the table, talking to her.

"How goes the Illusion?" he asked.

"Oh, big!" she said. "It's going to knock them, I can tell you!" Her laugh was rather derisive. "It's a rum world; the shop-girl will become an artist, with a show that draws all Paris. We expect to open at the Folies-Bergère." She knew that Legrand could never aspire to an engagement at the Folies-Bergère as long as he lived.

"I hope you will make a hit," he said, understanding her resentment perfectly.

"You did not foresee me a star turn, hein?"

He gave a shrug. "How could I foresee? If you had not married Bourjac, of course it would not have happened?"

"I suppose not," she murmured. She was sorry he realised that; she would have liked him to feel that she might have had the Illusion anyhow, and been a woman worth his winning.

"Indeed," added Legrand pensively, rolling a cigarette, "you have done a great deal to obtain a success. It is not every girl who would go to such lengths."

"What?" She coloured indignantly.

"I mean it is not every girl who would break the heart of a man who loved her."

They looked in each other's eyes for a moment. Then she turned her head scornfully away.

"Why do you talk rot to me? Do you take me for a kid?"

He decided that a pained silence would be most effective.

"If you cared about me, why didn't you say so?" she flashed, putting the very question he had hoped for.

"Because my position prevented it," he sighed. "I could not propose, a poor devil like me! Do I lodge in an attic from choice? But you are the only woman I ever wanted for my wife."

After a pause, she said softly, "I never knew you cared."

"I shall never care for anybody else," he answered. And then her mother came in with the vegetables.

It is easy to believe what one wishes, and she wished to believe Legrand's protestations. She began to pity herself profoundly, feeling that she had thrown away the substance for the shadow. In the sentimentality to which she yielded, even the prospect of being a star turn failed to console her; and during the next few weeks she invented reasons for visiting at her mother's more frequently than ever.

After these visits, Legrand used to smirk to himself in his attic. He reflected that the turn would, probably, earn a substantial salary for a long time to come. If he persuaded her to run away with him when the show had been produced, it would be no bad stroke of business for him! Accordingly, in their conversations, he advised her to insist on the Illusion being her absolute property.

"One can never tell what may occur," he would say. "If the managers arranged with Bourjac, not with you, you would always be dependent on your husband's whims for your engagements." And, affecting unconsciousness of his real meaning, the woman would reply, "That's true; yes, I suppose it would be best—yes, I shall have all the engagements made with me."

But by degrees even such pretences were dropped between them; they spoke plainly. He had the audacity to declare that it tortured him to think of her in old Bourjac's house—old Bourjac who plodded all day to minister to her caprice! She, no less shameless, acknowledged that her loneliness there was almost unendurable. So Legrand used to call upon her, to cheer her solitude, and while Bourjac laboured in the workroom, the lovers lolled in the parlour, and talked of the future they would enjoy together when his job was done.

"See, monsieur—your luncheon!" mumbled Margot, carrying a tray into the workroom on his busiest days.

"And madame, has madame her luncheon?" shouted Bourjac. Margot was very deaf indeed.

"Madame entertains monsieur Legrand again," returned the housekeeper, who was not blind as well.

Bourjac understood the hint, and more than once he remonstrated with his wife. But she looked in his eyes and laughed suspicion out of him for the time: "Eugène was an old friend, whom she had known from childhood! Enfin, if Jean objected, she would certainly tell him not to come so often. It was very ridiculous, however!"

And afterwards she said to Legrand, "We must put up with him in the meanwhile; be patient, darling! We shall not have to worry about what he thinks much longer."

Then, as if to incense her more, Bourjac was attacked by rheumatism before the winter finished; he could move only with the greatest difficulty, and took to his bed. Day after day he lay there, and she fumed at the sight of him, passive under the blankets, while his work was at a standstill.

More than ever the dullness got on her nerves now, especially as Legrand had avoided the house altogether since the complaint about the frequency of his visits. He was about to leave Paris to fulfil some engagements in the provinces. It occurred to her that it would be a delightful change to accompany him for a week. She had formerly had an aunt living in Rouen, and she told Bourjac that she had been invited to stay with her for a few days.

Bourjac made no objection. Only, as she hummed gaily over her packing, he turned his old face to the wall to hide his tears.

Her luggage was dispatched in advance, and by Legrand's counsel, it was labelled at the last minute with an assumed name. If he could have done so without appearing indifferent to her society, Legrand would have dissuaded her from indulging in the trip, for he had resolved now to be most circumspect until the Illusion was inalienably her own. As it was, he took all the precautions possible. They would travel separately; he was to depart in the evening, and Laure would follow by the next train. When she arrived, he would be awaiting her.

With the removal of her trunk, her spirits rose higher still. But the day passed slowly. At dusk she sauntered about the sitting-room, wishing that it were time for her to start. She had not seen Legrand since the previous afternoon, when they had met at a café to settle the final details. When the clock struck again, she reckoned that he must be nearly at his destination; perhaps he was there already, pacing the room as she paced this one? She laughed. Not a tinge of remorse discoloured the pleasure of her outlook—her "au revoir" to her husband was quite careless. The average woman who sins longs to tear out her conscience for marring moments which would otherwise be perfect. This woman had absolutely no conscience.

The shortest route to the station was by the garden gate; as she raised the latch, she was amazed to see Legrand hurriedly approaching.

"Thank goodness, I have caught you!" he exclaimed—"I nearly went round to the front."

"What has happened?"

"Nothing serious; I am not going, that is all—they have changed my date. The matter has been uncertain all day, or I would have let you know earlier. It is lucky I was in time to prevent your starting."

She was dumb with disappointment.

"It is a nuisance about your luggage," he went on; "we must telegraph about it. Don't look so down in the mouth—we shall have our trip next week instead."

"What am I to say to Jean—he will think it so strange? I have said good-bye to him."

"Oh, you can find an excuse—you 'missed your train.' Come out for half an hour, and we can talk." His glance fell on the workroom. "Is that fastened up?"

"I don't know. Do you want to see what he has done?"

"I may as well." He had never had an opportunity before—Bourjac had always been in there.

"No, it isn't locked," she said; "come on then! Wait till I have shut it after us before you strike a match—Margot might see the light."

A rat darted across their feet as they lit the lamp, and he dropped the matchbox. "Ugh!"

"The beastly things!" she shivered, "Make haste!"

On the floor stood a cabinet that was not unlike a gloomy wardrobe in its outward aspect. Legrand examined it curiously.

"Too massive," he remarked. "It will cost a fortune for carriage—and where are the columns I heard of?" He stepped inside and sounded the walls. "Humph, of course I see his idea. The fake is a very old one, but it is always effective." Really, he knew nothing about it, but as he was a conjurer, she accepted him as an authority.

"Show me! Is there room for us both?" she said, getting in after him.
And as she got in, the door slammed.

Instantaneously they were in darkness, black as pitch, jammed close together. Their four hands flew all over the door at once, but they could touch no handle. The next moment, some revolving apparatus that had been set in motion, flung them off their feet. Round and round it swirled, striking against their bodies and their faces. They grovelled to escape it, but in that awful darkness their efforts were futile; they could not even see its shape.

"Stop it!" she gasped.

"I don't know how," he panted.

After a few seconds the whir grew fainter, the gyrations stopped automatically. She wiped the blood from her face, and burst into hysterical weeping. The man, cursing horribly, rapped to find the spring that she must have pressed as she entered. It seemed to them both that there could be no spot he did not rap a thousand times, but the door never budged.

His curses ceased; he crouched by her, snorting with fear.

"What shall we do?" she muttered.

He did not answer her.

"Eugène, let us stamp! Perhaps the spring is in the floor."

Still he paid no heed—he was husbanding his breath. When a minute had passed, she felt his chest distend, and a scream broke from him— "Help!"

"Mon Dieu!" She clutched him, panic-stricken. "We mustn't be found here, it would ruin everything. Feel for the spring! Eugène, feel for the spring, don't call!"

"Help!"

"Don't you understand? Jean will guess—it will be the end of my hopes,
I shall have no career!"

"I have myself to think about!" he whimpered. And pushing away her arms, he screamed again and again. But there was no one to hear him, no neighbours, no one passing in the fields—none but old Bourjac, and deaf Margot, beyond earshot, in the house.

The cabinet was, of course, ventilated, and the danger was, not suffocation, but that they would be jammed here while they slowly starved to death. Soon her terror of the fate grew all-powerful in the woman, and, though she loathed him for having been the first to call, she, too, shrieked constantly for help now. By turns, Legrand would yell, distraught, and heave himself helplessly against the door—they were so huddled that he could bring no force to bear upon it.

In their black, pent prison, like a coffin on end the night held a hundred hours. The matchbox lay outside, where it had fallen, and though they could hear his watch ticking in his pocket, they were unable to look at it. After the watch stopped, they lost their sense of time altogether; they disputed what day of the week it was.

* * * * *

Their voices had been worn to whispers now; they croaked for help.

In the workroom, the rats missed the remains of old Bourjac's luncheons; the rats squeaked ravenously…. As she strove to scream, with the voice that was barely audible, she felt that she could resign herself to death were she but alone. She could not stir a limb nor draw a breath apart from the man. She craved at last less ardently for life than for space—the relief of escaping, even for a single moment, from the oppression of contact. It became horrible, the contact, as revolting as if she had never loved him. The ceaseless contact maddened her. The quaking of his body, the clamminess of his flesh, the smell of his person, poisoning the darkness, seemed to her the eternities of Hell.

* * * * *

Bourjac lay awaiting his wife's return for more than a fortnight. Then he sent for her mother, and learnt that the "aunt in Rouen" had been buried nearly three years.

The old man was silent.

"It is a coincidence," added the visitor hesitatingly, "that monsieur Legrand has also disappeared. People are always ringing my bell to inquire where he is."

As soon as he was able to rise, Bourjac left for Paris; and, as the shortest route to the station was by the garden gate, he passed the workroom on his way. He nodded, thinking of the time that he had wasted there, but he did not go inside—he was too impatient to find Laure, and, incidentally, to shoot Legrand.

Though his quest failed, he never went back to the cottage; he could not have borne to live in it now. He tried to let it, but the little house was not everybody's money, and it stood empty for many years; indeed, before it was reoccupied Bourjac was dead and forgotten.

When the new owners planned their renovations, they had the curiosity to open a mildewed cabinet in an outhouse, and uttered a cry of dismay. Not until then was the "last effect" attained; but there were two skeletons, instead of one.