It was in that ostentatious accoutrement that she went down a few minutes later into the immense park terminated in the background by the décor of the rocks. A large greyhound with soft eyes and silky fur immediately started following her and became her companion.
The greyhound could talk; it pronounced a few terms of politeness and affection, but so inappropriately that the neophyte, who was too preoccupied in any case, omitted to marvel at them, and the disdained animal ended up falling silent.
Meanwhile, Miss Mary strove to revolt against the suggestion of the radiant morning, the warmth of the atmosphere and the persistence of the perfume of lilacs—which was inexplicable, given that there were none of those flowers among the abundant vegetation that extended before her in a living and languorous harmony, receiving the caress of a spring-like sun. Doubtless it was another surprise of chemistry that embalmed the air in that fashion, for the pleasure of the sense of smell.
She would have liked to feel ill-at-ease among the delightful flower-beds, but she was obliged to submit to their charm. Excessively crowded, their agglomeration, hiding the leaves, gave the impression of fireworks in broad daylight, so many vivid and varied colors were there, from the ardent red of geraniums to the delicate white of hyacinths.
She soon got a grip on herself. She felt sad, and the solitude weighed upon her. To see Caresco, and to see him right away, became her unique objective. But how could she do that? Who could tell her? She was alone; the two maidservants had withdrawn, after kissing her hand.
She advanced, following a little stream that was singing in the moss, toward a verdant arbor with a rustic bench at the center, on which she sat down, in distress. The place was silently restful, impregnated with an enigma of tenderness.
The greyhound, which had followed her, came to place its striped muzzle against her. Insufficient society, alas! Why was she experiencing, for the first time, the new sensation of feeling isolated? She would have liked someone to appear who would talk to her about her homeland, and estimate with her the probability and nature of the help that she might encounter in Eucrasia, and who could tell her how to reach the Superman.
She waited.
Fortuitously, that someone did not take long to appear. Marcel arrived from the direction in which he had drawn away the previous day. She saw his elegant and supple silhouette designed through the foliage, and the ease with which he too was wearing a new costume. It was an orange velvet doublet patterned with black diamond-shapes, terminating half way down vigorous legs clad in tights. The sleeves were short enough to permit the free play of the joints. The widely-separated collar was bordered by dark braid, which, along with the black belt and shoes, broke the uniformity of the costume. The head, coiffed by a large hat designed to provide protection from the sun, stood out energetically, contrasting with the excessive affectation of the outfit. Nevertheless, the foreigner was vexed by judging him so adequate to that banal and mild environment, that artificial nature.
“Miss Mary!” he cried, with a joy that he could not restrain, as soon as he saw her. “I’m profoundly happy to see you again, Miss Mary.”
Before obeying her welcoming invitation to sit beside her on the bench he gazed at her, braced in her revealing peplum, the splendor of her shoulders mildly attenuated by the raised hairstyle. He found her delightful, enigmatic and new. He put his hands together.
“How beautiful you are!”
“Oh, let’s not talk about my beauty, Monsieur,” she immediately objected. “Let’s not talk about this stupid accoutrement! There’s only one costume becoming to an adversary of the coalition: a suit of armor that stops bullets! I’m furious at having to wear this frippery—can’t you see that? I’m furious that these flowers aren’t making a bed for our dead, and that I can’t make use of those rocks to crush those who are drinking the blood of my brothers! Caresco! Where can I see him? I want to go to the man who can put vengeance into my hands!”
Her two vigorous arms, like those of Bellona, reached out for the individual invoked, and Marcel admired her, quivering with her glorious dream, proclaiming the distress of her native land and gazing into space toward her iron sky. O unexpected woman, avenging Diana! Her peplum had come undone; her bosom was heaving with hope and anger. He desired her, so swollen with the valorous blood of her race.
“Oh, if only I could serve you, Miss Mary!” he said, frantically. “And how sorry I am to know that you’re going to flee the oasis where the spring of calm and repose sings!”
“I know those insipidities. I’ve never be able to listen to them. I need actions, not words!”
Scarcely had Miss Mary stung the young man with that response than Carabella, emerging from a bush, presented herself to them. She had an animated flush, her eyes still brilliant with sensuality. A living corolla among the flower-beds, a flower of desirable flesh emerged from the flowers, her warm and mat-complexioned body was contained, almost entirely visible, in the satin of a recently-crumpled mauve tunic. She gave the impression that she had just been yielding the flavorsome aroma of her firm breasts, while letting down her recently pinned-up jet black hair, to the caprice of an individual who, while passing by, had dragged her into the verdant arbor. The red make-up of her symbolic stripe was still on display, melted in the perspiration of her pleasure.
She put her arms around Miss Mary gently, applying her lips to the nape of her neck with an insistence that the young woman found repugnant. Then, addressing herself to Marcel, she said: “You ought not, Monsieur, to behave so affectionately with Mademoiselle. Can’t you see that she’s wearing the costume of a virgin? Such as she arrived in this land, so she must leave it. In speaking to her so prettily—for I heard everything—you have committed an infraction of our laws. I alone have the prerogative of giving her, along with beautiful words, a little pleasure, if she so wishes. To you, it’s formally forbidden. Let’s walk, if you desire, but let me separate you.
She slid between Marcel and Mary, and her two arms, gripping her companions’ elbows to the right and the left, indicated her willingness to be as affable with one as the other.
Followed by the greyhound, they traversed a number of charming places. The beauty of the locations unfolded, changing with every fold of the terrain. Only their presence diversified the solitude, and Marcel felt the tranquil and sensual charm of the stroll, languidly. Numerous unfamiliar birds with varied polychromatic plumage were chirping, hardly bothering to move away from their passage. A kind of large leopard, supple and undulating, came to brush Miss Mary’s robe in a familiar fashion; she uttered a cry of surprise and disgust, for the beast, which symbolized Albion, had a place in the enemy’s blazon.15
Misinterpreting that reaction, Marcel thought she was afraid and stepped forward to protect her, but Carabella started laughing.
“Have no fear, divine one! Calm down, handsome Marcel! The animals in our country are not malevolent. They know that we love them; furthermore, we provide them abundantly with an essential nourishment, which they receive every morning, distributed by the Chief Huntsman. Do they not merit our respect, the animals in whom the souls gleam of future beings like us? They evolve, as we do, who are in constant transformation, and who progress through successive stages, always toward improvement...”
Such words in the mouth of a courtesan astonished Marcel, but he remembered that they were the expression of the religion imagined by Caresco. He took advantage of the opportunity to ask: “What will become of you, Carabella, once you have accomplished your present life?”
“I shall doubtless become a mother. I’ll have the right to live in a family and have children. We have an entire population of them on the island. You’ll see that in due course...”
“The maternal state is, then, the last word in perfection?”
“Yes.”
“And afterwards, Carabella?”
“Afterwards? I’ll return to the cellular state to become a plant, and then an animal, and then a human being, and so on, accomplishing m
y role in the eternal cycle of fecundation, unproductive once, capable of reproduction the next time....”
“That’s rather well-planned,” said Marcel, smiling.
“It’s necessary not to mock these holy things,” the courtesan observed, gravely. “If the Superman knew that, the earth would tremble.”
Marcel dared not dig any deeper into her religious faith, for he sensed that she was sincere. The simple observation already explained, however, why the people were so mild in their treatment of their fellows, animals and nature, why they submitted so tranquilly to the concept of blissful fatalism. Every parcel of living matter, every constituted individual, became, in that fashion, one of the modest cogs of creation, one of the vibrations of harmonious Joy.
They continued their walk.
In the meantime, several airplanes furrowed the air with the muffled rhythmic thrum of their giant wings. They also perceived smaller ones, whose nacelles were occupied by two or three silhouettes. Forming corteges for them, the lovely bodies of children, adolescent boys and girls, were flying and singing. They were clad in pink and green veils, whose long trains floated at the whim of the air.
Carabella named a few of them. One tall man with a curly rutilant red beard threw flowers to her, which she picked up joyfully.
“That man,” she said, “is Gilded-Gaze, a sterile spouse. I received his kisses yesterday at the fête. He’s married to Veloutine, that fecund mother, dressed in blue like all her fellows, whom you can see sitting next to him in the aeronat. There are three children with them but they aren’t his.
“Does that astonish you, Monsieur Marcel? Our laws are formal. Reproduction is not permitted to everyone, and the Superman possesses certain means of preventing it. It’s to that law that we owe our happiness. Thus, that husband caressed me yesterday. He’s very genteel, and he’s called Gilded-Gaze because a golden ingot seems to emerge from beneath his brow eyelids.” She suddenly stopped and declared: “But here we are at the Field of Truce.”
She pointed to a vast plane surface where, among the flowers and in the shade of tall parasol pines, thousands of mausoleums surged forth. Some of them affected the form of a pink cone; others opened like the calyx of a flower, dividing into two ovoid shells, also pink; yet others were square, simply surmounted with red crosses. All of them contained accessible crypts.
In the middle, a superb Ionian temple loomed up, white and shiny, with golden vibrions and ovules.
Carabella explained: “It’s here that the mortal remains of our brothers and sisters are deposited. Their sex is sufficiently indicated by the erection of marble virilities or the gaping of shells of Venus. As for the asexual, courtesans or gitons, the cross on top of their tomb is the distinctive sign. But those are only symbols to which we attach little value, since death does not exist for souls, and at the most, the body, like those which rest here, is subject to a truce before returning to matter...
Having given this information, Carabella wanted to take her companions into the midst of the tombs in order to visit a few crypts. In vain she set out the bait of certain curiosity; she was surprised to observe that Miss Mary recoiled before that incursion into the realm of the dead, and that a teardrop of sadness formed on her blonde eyelashes.
She took them away by a different route.
That fit of sensibility was fortunately dissipated by the arrival of a stranger, the first living person they had been able to approach that morning. He was a man of young appearance and medium height, who tottered slightly as he advanced toward them, as if drunk. As he came closer they distinguished his silhouette, weighed down by intoxication, more clearly.
The costume he wore was violet in its entirety, composed of the same essential components as Marcel’s: a doublet tightened at the waist, slender but lacking in elegance, as if secured in a restrictive corset; and tights imprisoning thighs and calves that were too thick in proportion to the thinness of the torso. Of his head, covered in a white cap that even hid the ears, nothing could be seen but the full black beard, frizzy in the moustache an curly toward the point, and the nose reddened by drunkenness, ablaze between two little blue eyes, mobile and astonished.
He was a stranger, and yet it appeared to the strollers that the person was not entirely unknown to them. Indeed, as soon as he perceived them, the man expressed his satisfaction by flapping his two violet arms.
“Finally, I’ve found you! Oh, my dear friends, how happy I am to be finished with it! What do you think of me? Am I a sufficient mixture of Byzantium and the sixteenth century?”
Having made a complete turn, not without difficulty, in order to show all his faces, the individual has approached and seized the young man’s hands warmly, then Miss Mary’s.
His breath, however, when he could speak again, did not give off the odor particular to drinkers.
“Well, have you nothing to say? You can’t place me? Am I so changed, then?”
Marcel was about to go past, pushing the drunkard aside, when suddenly, a gesture that the stranger made—which consisted of hitching up the belt of his tights, although they were solidly maintained by a deerskin strap studded with amethysts—made him recognizable.
“Choumaque! You! My dear old Choumaque!”
“Finally!” the man proclaimed.
“Is it possible?”
The philosopher sat down on the grass. He raised a finger in the air.
“I believe that everything is possible here! Permit me to rest…I’m still stunned by the fluid with which they inundated me before butchering me…they poisoned me with I don’t know what. Besides which, my torso, recently thinned out, is rather poorly accommodated to the iron corset in which my organs, scarcely stitched up, are imprisoned. Oh, the sorcerers, the sorcerers!
“Is it truly necessary to calculate, as I have done until now, the slightest manifestations of the human psychosis, when one sees that the raw material can be transformed so simply? Is there no reason to wonder whether they have also made me a different individual, intellectually speaking? Do you think that I still speak like the others? They’ve scalped me in order to replace my hair—provided, great gods, that they haven’t touched my brain, for it’s in the head that the principle of health resides. Seneca said so: according to whether the soul is strong or depressed, the rest is vigorous or overcome with languor...”
Then, circumscribing his occiput with both hands and putting pressure on his sensitive temples, he continued: “I have aching hair! Dr. Hymen, when I woke up…for he’s the only one I saw, throughout…surrounded my head with a tight bandage and told me that I could safely take it off after ten minutes. It’s been at least fifteen. Marcel, would you care to ride me of this instrument of torture?”
The young man lent himself to the task willingly. When he had untied the strings of the skull-cap, his amazement reached its peak on perceiving that the philosopher’s new hair was read—mahogany red—while his beard, also newly vibrant, as in his first youth, shone brown. He burst out laughing.
“But my poor Choumaque, what have they done? Although your beard has become dark again, your hair is an ardent russet...”
“Dr. Hymen had doubtless been deceived,” Carabella hypothesized. “The poor man is afflicted with a malady of the eyes that causes him to get colors mixed up...”
“He ought to commence by healing himself!” said Choumaque. “But I don’t need a cure. I’m simply bi-colored. It’s a fact that does not stain my Stoical personality and imparts no prejudice to my doctrine of equilibria—on the contrary. Perhaps women might even find a certain piquancy therein...”
They went back, each of them to their own apartment.
The next day passed without them seeing anyone. They would only make contact with the life of the island after their appearance before Caresco.
CHAPTER VIII
Marjah pushed them along a dark corridor. They took twenty paces thus. Choumaque had adopted a detached attitude and, in the gloom, he translated his courage into a faint whistling
, which the metal walls that he was brushing echoed strangely.
Marcel and Miss Mary felt less valiant. The latter, although she had lost none of the bravery that had once driven her into battle for the defense of her homeland and had made her a heroine, understood nevertheless that she was casting the last throw of the dice, and all her womanly nerves, dominated by the unknown, got the upper hand and tensed. Involuntarily, she gripped Marcel’s arm.
“Have no fear, my child…be stoical,” said Choumaque, who was shivering with fear, and then added: “Are we not with you? Benefit, on the contrary, from all the philosophy of a rare event, and be thankful for the good fortune that will bring us face to face with the Superman. We’re going to see what that extraordinary Demigod has in his bag of tricks, for I’m going to talk to him!”
He did not have time to say any more. They suddenly found themselves in a flood of blinding light that surged forth from they knew not where. They were so dazzled that they had great difficulty, at first, in distinguishing a circular room in which, in front of a long white wood table laden with books and papers, a man of young appearance was sitting, clad in a wretched gray smock covered with bloodstains. His arms, bare to the elbow, bore evidence of recent butchery.
Apparently tall in stature, so far as could be judged by his costume, he was handsome, Semitic in type, with a full brown beard, curly, like his hair, a florid complexion that looked as if it had been reinforced with make-up, a curved nose and a sensual mouth with thick scarlet lips. His vigorous, enormous and hairy right hand, with the thumb folded back into the palm, was resting on the table, next to a fragment of quivering flesh that it had just abandoned.
The newcomers sought his gaze, but did not discover it, for it was turned away, fugitively. And from all that health, all that visible youth, all that beauty, emanated something fatigued, disillusioned, old and horrible: a human paradox that disconcerted the new arrivals and provoked a poignant malaise in them.
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