The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  “Suzanne?”

  “Marie-Thérèse?”

  “Fabienne?”

  “There’s nothing alive out there—nor anything dead, either…and up in the sky, there’s nothing at all.”

  “The sarvants have taken them to another part of their world!”

  “Don’t say that, Maxime!” cried Madame Le Tellier, all her limbs trembling. “I beg you—not that!”

  “But what are you hoping for, then, Mama?”

  “How do I know?”

  Maxime had taken possession of the telescope. He studied the mounds. Everyone was silent.

  At that moment, among all the murmurs of the dawn chorus, a dog yapped.

  Madame Arquedouve pricked up her ears.

  The yapping drew closer.

  The blind woman pressed both hands to her heart. The others looked at her curiously. She was listening to the dog as if she were admiring the splendor of the reconquering light. She was too overcome with emotion to be able to say anything.

  “Mother, mother!” whispered Madame Le Tellier. “Is that really Floflo coming home?”

  Madame Arquedouve lowered her eyelids, and everyone interrogated her with their gaze. Floflo? Floflo, whom Robert and Maxime had seen in the sarvants’ realm? Floflo alive? Floflo coming home? The grandmother must be mistaken…

  It was, however, really him.

  He arrived, an interminable pink tongue hanging out, jumping with joy in spite of his fatigue, licking hands, faces and even shoes. But how thin he was, poor thing! And dirty, too! The dust of the road was sticking to his long hair, which was still soaked…

  “It doesn’t require a magician,” Maxime reasoned, “to see that this dog has been plunged into water before accomplishing a long journey—before or during. He’s taken a bath along the way, in some spring—but where has he come from? It isn’t the mounds; we’d have seen him crossing the marsh, and he wouldn’t be so exhausted, nor covered with so much dust. Anyway, it’s inadmissible that the sarvants have thrown him from the height of…”

  The bell at the main door rang, preventing him from finishing.

  The emotion that overwhelmed them made them go pale; it was a contradictory mixture of hope and anxiety, which produced a physical sensation of sudden weakness and icy cold.

  Disappointment awaited them; the visitor was a bumpkin on a bicycle. But there was another surge of emotion; the bumpkin had brought a letter for Monsieur Le Tellier—and then there was a delirious joy, for the letter came from one of Monsieur Le Tellier’s friends, in Lucey, on the Rhône, 18 kilometers from Mirastel, and it said:

  (Item 988)

  Come quickly. This morning, the surviving missing persons were found on an islet in the river between Lucey and Massignieu-de-Rives. None seems to be injured. The authorities have put them in quarantine.

  In spite of the bizarrerie of that final sentence, their joy assumed such proportions that it was frightening to behold. It seemed to them that the atmosphere had suddenly been transformed. The astronomer told us: “It was as if I had been relieved of a straitjacket that I had been wearing for six months!” Laughter was reborn in the depths of their throats, but their faces had lost the habit and their cheeks opposed it. They made an infinite number of futile movements, marching right and left with groans of delight. Finally, they calmed down.

  Maxime interrogated the bumpkin.

  At daybreak, a laborer on his way to work had spotted a group of people on an island in the Rhône, in a very poor state—badly dressed and in poor health, most of them lying down—in company with an incredibly various population of animals, some of which were trying to get over the water. When the man arrived, a little black dog was swimming across, heading northwards, and the current was carrying away two or three emaciated animals, betrayed by their lack of strength in mid-stream. An eagle was apparently making relentless attempts to take off. The mayor had forbidden anyone to approach the island for fear of some ruse on the part of the sarvants, and had put the escapees in quarantine.

  They piled into the large white automobile, as on the day of the abduction—but how the faces had changed since then! And how their cheerfulness contrasted with their wrinkles and their emaciation! And they were laughing! They were laughing! They seemed to be deceiving themselves, laughing so heartily with such faces. It would not have taken much to make them break out into song.

  As they passed by, Monsieur Le Tellier shouted to the peasants: “They’ve come back! They’re here! My daughter has come down!”

  “And my children too!” rectified the doctor, in a comical tone, feigning sensitivity. “My children too!”

  The same altercation was renewed at every encounter. The brothers-in-law were amusing themselves wholeheartedly, slapping their thighs, and the others were laughing with their mouths wide open.

  They arrived.

  The road ran along the Rhône, which forked at that spot through an arid and bare archipelago. A host of villagers was crowding both banks level with the escapees’ island. The later, like the others, projected a bank of livid earth from the robust flow, strewn with a few bushes. It was quite a long way from the shore.

  Monsieur Le Tellier wanted to unhitch a boat, but the local policeman stopped him “by reason of the quarantine.” The astronomer became angry, but to no avail. Wrathfully, he gazed at the wretched survivors of the aerium lying on the ground amid hares, chickens, wild pigs, foxes, buzzards, guinea-fowl and other wild or domesticated creatures that did not seem much less self-conscious than their overlords. The eagle was running back and forth, from one end of the islet to the other, occasionally leaping up with its wings employed, then slumping back again, devoid of strength. They were all dying of consumption; hunger had sapped the strength of the men and women, and an imbecilic ruling was preventing anyone from helping them!

  At a distance, Monsieur Le Tellier could only recognize Fabienne Monbardeau-d’Arvière to begin with; then it seemed to him that Suzanne…but he was distracted from his examination by a terrible scream behind him.

  Everyone turned round. Madame Le Tellier, standing on the seat of the car, proclaimed dismally: “Marie-Thérèse isn’t there! There are only 15, instead of 16! And my daughter’s not there! Not there! They’ve kept her! She’s the only one they’ve kept! Oh, my God!” She collapsed on the cushions.

  Monsieur Le Tellier aged 100 years in a second.

  And nothing was truer. By some means as yet unknown, the sarvants had repatriated all the inmates of the aerium—except Marie-Thérèse.

  Henri, Suzanne and Fabienne sketched hasty gestures of recognition from time to time. Madame Monbardeau looked at them longingly.

  But the relatives of the other escapees had come running, curiosity-seekers were massing incessantly, and everyone was murmuring in opposition to the quarantine. There is no way of knowing what havoc might have been wrought upon the mayor and the local policeman, if Maxime and three young men from Massignieu had not landed on the island with the aid of a punt that they had discovered upstream.

  When it was seen that nothing disagreeable happened to them, the quarantine was lifted; a flotilla of boats accosted the lazaret, and the company took possession of the 15 inert, famished and wrinkled, voiceless and seemingly unconscious bodies. Monsieur Le Tellier’s friend lent his limousine to Monbardeau; the inn in Lucey opened its doors to the revenants that had not yet been reclaimed.

  As for the animals, they were killed, for no particular reason, with no considerable necessity or humanity. In doing that, does it not seem, strictly speaking, that the killers showed themselves to be inferior to the sarvants, who had not killed them? Is it not reasonable to suppose that the Invisibles had finally perceived the existence of pain? Having discovered that subtle, atrocious and marvelous thing—foreign to their world—in the creatures from below, had they not stopped the vivisections?

  For it must be admitted—the state of the cadavers bearing witness to it—that the vivisections had suddenly stopped, and the only valid
reason that can be given for that is the mercy of the sarvants, awakened by the discovery of suffering. And if they had not immediately repatriated the poor wretches whom they had begun to pity, was it not necessary to attribute that delay to the time it took to construct a second aeroscaph or some other invisible apparatus designed to take the down again? On that subject, the most likely hypothesis is that of an automatic machine, driven by the wind, which had set down on the island by chance; a trigger-mechanism would have made it rise up again automatically, after unloading. Nothing authorizes certainty on this point, but it is not impossible. The reality is that the sarvants returned our people to us as soon as they could, and everything leads us to believe that they were motivated by intelligence and generosity.

  It is, in fact, rather monstrous, logically speaking, that the poets and philosophers who have imagined intelligent beings other than humankind have always made those creatures bloodthirsty and malevolent. To be certain of affecting the reader and to forge civilized beings that are as different from humans as possible, these utopists have refused their chimerical individuals the virtues that pass for our own. They have tried, by this expedient, to demonstrate independence with regard to anthropomorphism, and they have sacrificed themselves in a servile fashion, without being aware of it, by depriving their hypothetical nations of merits and qualities of which humankind, in crowds, is similarly deprived.

  The sarvants are, I believe, as superior to us in morality as in altitude—and that opinion cannot be so very worthless, since it imposed itself on the eminent mind of Monsieur Le Tellier at the very moment when he was wondering, furiously, why the Invisibles had kept his daughter.

  For they had kept her; that much was certain. The census taken of the cadavers had been too assiduous for Marie-Thérèse’s to have escaped it. Thus, she was still up there. Why? Her beauty explained nothing, having no currency among the sarvants, any more than the grace of a spider has among us. Why, then?

  “Why Marie-Thérèse?” wondered Monsieur Le Tellier. “And why her alone?”

  They went back. He squeezed his wife’s hands as she lay unconscious on the floor of the car.

  In front of them, the Monbardeaus’ limousine was moving along the road; within it, leaning over his daughter’s plaintive face, the doctor murmured: “Suzanne, Suzanne! I’ve forgiven you, you know.”

  A smile passed lightly over the violet lips. Then Monsieur Monbardeau occupied himself with Henri and Fabienne—but as he had nothing to forgive them, he never succeeded in smoothing their expressions. Their distress surpassed all apprehension.

  “Henri, do you know why they’ve kept Marie Thérèse?” asked Madame Monbardeau.

  “Shh! Calm…silence,” advised the doctor. His son’s physiognomy had indicated a vague expression of ignorance. “Let him be, Augustine. We can interrogate him this evening—this evening or tomorrow morning.”

  The two automobiles slid along the bed of the celestial ocean. They left behind them a trail of dust similar to the opaque clouds with which marine octopodes conceal their flight.

  XXI. The Triumph of Absurdity

  That same day, at 5 p.m., as the Duc d’Agnès—who was wandering through Paris like a soul in torment—was crossing the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, 30 or 40 newsvendors launched themselves forward at a run, shouting at the top of their voices: “L’Intran! La Presse! La Liberté!” They were selling them on the wing to all the passers-by.

  Monsieur d’Agnès bought L’Intransigeant.

  (Item 1037)

  ‘

  UNEXPECTED RETURN OF MISSING PERSONS

  Their state of exhaustion

  Mademoiselle Le Tellier alone not among their number

  The joy occasioned by the first line did not last long, but it was sufficient to cast a darker shadow over the frightful disappointment of the last. And he learned that on the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle! No, such bad luck was not possible, not permissible! It seemed to him that the misfortune must capitulate in the face of his incredulity.

  One by one, he bought La Liberté and La Presse (items 1038 and 1039) and, in spite of the fact that their information was identical, sent the following telegram to Monsieur Le Tellier:

  Is true Marie-Thérèse not returned? Reply by return telegram, Avenue Montaigne.

  D’Agnès

  Then, in the fury of his helplessness, he started marching straight ahead, his eyes fixed and his teeth clenched, telling himself that the three newspapers could not be mistaken on this vital point, and that his misery was now worse than he had ever imagined, even though he had thought that it was the greatest misery of all time.

  It was while he was returning on foot to the house in the Avenue Montaigne that the Duc d’Agnès formed a resolution to kill himself. Mentally, he visualized the ultimate scene of his life, from the writing of the will to the final revolver shot…

  His sister was watching out for his return. She had read La Presse. The Duc had never felt fonder arms around his neck. He embraced her more tenderly than usual. He had touching words for the domestics, full of benevolence and tact. He wanted to die in generosity—which is the best way of departing in beauty.

  Mademoiselle Jeanne watched him anxiously, and when the anticipated telegram was brought in—whose text he knew without having read it—Monsieur d’Agnès had a smile so tearful, an expression so profound, that his sister, understanding fully, turned away to weep.

  The roar that she heard interrupted her sobs painfully, with a spasm of terror. She whirled around and saw her brother transformed, straightened up, uttering burst of ferociously joyful laughter, shaking the open telegram and eventually crying out, after a moment of delusion: “Jeanne! Jeanne! This telegram is from Tiburce! Tiburce has found Marie-Thérèse! Tiburce has found Marie-Thérèse! Tiburce! Tiburce! He’s found her! By chance! In Constantinople!”

  The Duc sank to his knees, his hands joined, to utter some unknown prayer. He kissed the sheet of blue paper over and over again, laughing and sobbing, sobbing and laughing—it was impossible to tell when he was laughing and when he was sobbing—and stammered, in a soft and tender, slightly breathless voice: “Marie-Thérèse! My darling! My darling! Oh, my beloved darling!”

  His sister mopped his handsome, excessively cheerful face, whose long eyelashes were empearled…

  But the doorbell sounded again in the twilight, and a few moments later a second telegram as brought in—the one from Monsieur Le Tellier, his time, which did not say what Monsieur and Mademoiselle d’Agnès had expected at all, but this:

  Yes, is true Marie-Thérèse not returned, but Henri Monbardeau has revealed Mari-Thérèse not abducted with him and Fabienne. Was Suzanne that was kidnapped with her brother and sister-in-law. Had gone to join them in secret near Don on day of abduction. Marie-Thérèse has never been with sarvants. Hope, therefore. We hope.

  Jean Le Tellier

  “Monsieur le Duc,” said the valet, his empty tray in his hand, “there’s a man who rang at the same time as the second telegraph boy, who asks to see Monsieur le Duc. He says that he has an urgent communication to make and says that his name is Garan.”

  “Garan! Show him in!”

  That old friend came in, his moustache combat-ready and his eyebrows like tusks. “Good news, Monsieur le Duc! Guess what! Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse has been found!”

  “I know.”

  Garan was disconcerted, but continued anyway: “You know? Ah yes! The telegram, of course! Well then, if Monsieur Tiburce has already brought you up to date, that does no harm—and I’ve still arrived in time.”

  “In time? Why?”

  “Here’s the thing, Monsieur le Duc—it’s a funny story. You’ll understand. I’ve been sent here by the government to give you a word to the wise and ask you not to advertise certain details. They chose me because they know that I’m acquainted with you and played a part in the events in accursed Bugey! Show me Monsieur Tiburce’s telegram, if you please…let’s see: Have found Marie-Thérèse safe Constantinop
le, by chance. Arriving Marseille Wednesday. Very best wishes to your sister. Regards. Tiburce.” After a pause, Garan continued: “I suspect that laconic prose is due to the collaboration of Monsieur Tiburce with the Ottoman authorities.”

  “What do you mean?” cried Mademoiselle d’Agnès.

  “Listen, Mademoiselle—this is how it is. A little while ago, Foreign Affairs received a long dispatch from the Sublime Porte, via the Turkish ambassador, in which the story is told in full. But I must ask you urgently—as Monsieur Tiburce has been asked, out there—not to divulge anything, lest it compromise the memory of a highly-placed individual, a former vizier and cousin of the Sultan. In a word, Monsieur le Duc, this concerns Abdul Kadir Pacha, who abducted Mademoiselle Le Tellier!”

  Mademoiselle d'Agnès and her brother, the Duc, were amazed.

  The policeman continued: “Yes, it was that barbarian! A vicious, corrupt man, Monsieur, by virtue of an excess of this, that and the other! When I learned that—ah, the Blue Peril was less blue than your humble servant! Just think! Never in my life would I have believed it!

  “After asking for Mademoiselle Le Tellier’s hand in marriage, and being refused, that demon Abdul Kadir swore that he would have her in spite of everything. He had her abducted—as I told you—in an automobile, in the vicinity of Mirastel, on the fourth of May last, while she was on her way to Artemare to have dinner at Dr. Monbardeau’s house…and I saw the place, Monsieur and Mademoiselle! The trampled grass at the intersection of the little path and the road! I saw it, and noticed it! I showed it to Monsieur Tiburce, telling him that it might well be a place where…and a place which…and a place of which…! Imbeciles that we were, both of us!

  “The automobile rejoined Abdul Kadir in Lyon, where he caught a train to Marseille that evening with his 12 wives, in order to board a ship there. The animal had had one of those 12 martyrs killed—the oldest—by a eunuch from his seraglio, in order to substitute Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse for her. The dead woman was stuffed in a sack, naked, in the Sultanic fashion, and—for want of the Bosphorus—was thrown into the Rhône in the fog as they went over a bridge. It even appears that Monsieur Le Tellier went to Lyon when the body was discovered and was admitted into its presence. Isn’t that a coincidence? One can’t say different.