The experiment had already been attempted a year earlier but, poorly planned, had not succeeded. The cabin-shell, occupied by an entire family, had missed its destination and had gone astray, no one knew where—into the sea, if not into the sky.
Caresco interrupted the inventor. “That’s sufficient. I understand. I hope that our means of communication will eventually become more rapid. Get to work on it immediately. I’ll inaugurate the new mode of locomotion by making the first voyage. Make arrangements in such a way as not to kill your Master.”
Then, with a gesture he dismissed his flock of geniuses. The bowing violet backs were engulfed by an adjacent corridor. Soon, he remained alone in the silence of the enormous space. He got up and pressed a button. A metal dot opened, giving passage to a form.
“Come in, courtesan. Come here! Tell me what the result of my Quintessence of Happiness was on the foreign woman.”
“It had none, Superman!” said Carabella, with fear in her voice, depositing flowers at the Master’s feet.
“What! None?” the potentate growled, frowning.
“Alas, yes, Superman. On the first day, when I got Miss Mary to take the two fruits that you prescribed, I really thought that she was going to succumb to my tenderness. The images of the Passion enthused her. She almost fainted with pleasure, but the influence must have been too short in duration, and the virgin immediately pulled herself together. On the second day, it was Marcel, the young Sower, who nearly reckoned with her...”
“I instructed that she be kept away from contact with a man!”
“Have no fear, Lord; I was there, on watch. I would have stopped their audacity at the right moment, for I suspect that she’s beginning to fall in love with that young man, but I didn’t have to intervene. The neophyte snuffed out the flame of her own accord when it began to burn. Again, the reaction was too brief.”
“And on the third day?”
“On the third day, it was impossible for me to get her to take the fruits. Miss Mary, her suspicions alerted, flatly refused them. Since then, she’s even stopped demanding aliments from her personal utilities panel, she’s so fearful that their composition might be modified. She obtains nourishment elsewhere—I don’t know how.”
At that declaration, the Superman stamped his foot. He would not succeed, then, in triumphing over the Redlander! There existed, in nature, an energy that his science was impotent to overcome! He would not take possession of that virginal force, that heroism! He would not deflect them from their objective to make them love his land, his sky, his sensual delights, and all the creations of his genius!
What could he attempt to subdue the fibers of the foreigner, now that neither his serum nor his essence of happiness had succeeded? By what means could he tame the woman whose primitive constitution struggled so astonishingly against his magic?
But what precious flesh she would become when he had vanquished her, when he possessed her, when he threw her into everyone’s arms—she, who did not want to be anyone’s wife!
His brow furrowed, he continued to meditate and scheme for some time, Carabella, perceiving herself to be superfluous to his reflections, had made herself scarce.
CHAPTER XVI
In the days that followed, Mirror-of-Smiles came several times, early in the morning, to look for Choumaque and Marcel, in order to take them to the games. They went without enthusiasm. In truth, the attraction of exploring the Inferior Limbs did not make up for the tedium of the exercise that they had to do beforehand.
A monitor, chosen from among the slaves, strove to teach them the somersaults that all the citizens of the realm were able to execute, and which constituted the formula of politeness, the hello and goodbye, that the indigenes accorded one another by way of graciousness.
It was necessary for Marcel to relearn the gymnastic exercises of his youth, to which his elegant and muscular slimness submitted easily. But it was also necessary for Choumaque, who had never been a gymnast, to apply himself to that task, scarcely in conformity with the flights of his metaphysical intellect. Although his body, renewed and stripped of adipose material, rendered supple by mechanical massages and toned up by fluids, had recovered an apparent youth of twenty years, the play of the muscles was still awkward, the creaky joints lacked elasticity and the perilous somersault completed by a considerable displacement generally left him refractory.
Can one comprehend, the philosopher asked himself, what purpose these puerile manifestations of civility serve? Here’s a Superman who desires the tranquility of his people, and begins by imposing the prowess of clowns! I’ll surely break my bones!
When Marius had explained to him, however, that these customs had entered into common practice in order that the Superman’s subjects could accomplish, with the satisfaction of submitting to religious etiquette, to an exercise that was simply intended to maintain health, Choumaque conceded some reason to the argument, and remembered that Greek and Roman orators had not disdained to enter the arena. From then on, he listened more benevolently to the advice piped by the soft voice of the good-looking slave:
“Bend your knees! Jump higher! Head down! Brace your back! Turn! Fall on your feet!”
He even took a certain pleasure in it, for the skillful athlete, with the aid of a net briskly deployed at ground level, prevented him from hurting himself when he miscalculated his thrust and botched his landing, which happened almost every time.
The only annoyance that he still retained was the presence of an audience always amused by his exercises. The games took place in the open air, in woods marvelously brightened by grassy lawns. There, a quantity of indigenes—fathers and mothers of families, adolescents, courtesans and gitons—for whom physical effort was simply a recreation of anatomical mechanisms, met up, arriving by tube, to amuse themselves.
The nearby sea, divinely blue, sent its spray through the gilded trees. Multicolored birds chirped and pronounced loving words in familiar language. Wild animals came to offer their fleeces to caresses. Forming improbable chains that wings could not sustain, adolescents swung in the trees, or mingled their harmonious young bodies in wrestling bouts. Then they took pleasure in forming a circle around Choumaque and his monitor, observing the neophyte’s gaucheries, and not sparing him a little gentle mockery.
The games were accomplished in light costumes only protecting the hands and feet, with the result that the audience for the philosopher’s inaptitude was able to observe, beneath their make-up, the still-fresh traces of his recent operations—which provided a further pretext for gibes. Perfect as he was in his new esthetics, Choumaque nevertheless felt that he was still the most counterfeit individual on the island. He was protected, however, firstly by the essential cordiality of the society, and also because people had learned that, although he was ill-equipped for gymnastics, he had considerable intelligence, and was due to speak in public about a subject of which they were all ignorant as yet, philosophy.
As for Marcel, he had immediately mastered that science of politeness. One day, he even executed a perilous double somersault, which won him universal applause. His superb complexion, his muscles, the force of his shoulders and hamstrings, were out of the ordinary, and as he had a new beauty, fecund mothers picked him out for the satisfaction of their ulterior concupiscence. He collected smiles. Several times, Veloutine, the wife of Gilded-Gaze, demanded his kiss when he passed by, his torso covered in sweat.
The newcomers, however, maintained secret causes for not enjoying themselves more completely. Choumaque still remained under the influence of the emotion that he had experienced watching the Superman’s butchery. Although that anguish did not touch him personally, he was frightened of an autocracy such that, at a gesture from the surgeon, the humblest subjects might be submitted, on the operating table, to violations as ferocious as those that had been carried out on the human monad. Might not Marcel, his dear pupil, be dragged there? Might not the pure flesh of Miss Mary Hardisson tempt the Superman’s dementia? For that philant
hropist, infatuated with a seemingly-logical social renovation, that master whom a prostrate people adored in a servile fashion, that scientist whom the world pretended to ignore because to recognize him might attract his destructive lightning, was undoubtedly mad, with an insanity already long manifest in flashes of genius, and evident in any case to Choumaque, before whom that act of surgical eroticism had unfolded.
The same fears—less positive, it is true—troubled Marcel’s amour, and he was reluctant to put them to the proof. He would gladly have allowed himself to be enveloped by the temptations of the island; the smiles at his ardent and pleasure-loving youth; they evoked in their splendor the libertinage that he had formerly practiced in a paltry fashion in Paris. Scarcely had he conceived the constant possibility, however, than his affection for Miss Mary returned to pierce his heart, like the stabbing of wounds that are not painful while at rest, but are awakened by the slightest movement.
He sensed instinctively that Caresco did not experience for the neophyte the same banal indifference as for his other subjects. He remembered the sudden transformation of the Superman, stripping away his attitude of lassitude and detachment in order to concentrate on Miss Mary on the day of their appearance. The covetous gleam that had spring forth in his eyes, and the procrastination of his pronunciation in response to the foreigner’s supplication, when it would have been easy to content or reject the request, frightened him, without the motives for that fear being exactly definable.
What disturbed him more than anything else was the abrupt transformation that the young woman had manifested in her relationship with him, the fashion in which, after having been so tenderly amorous, she had resumed her previous proud mistrust almost instantaneously, as if she were pulling herself out of a dream or a second state. In those inexplicable changes of direction, Marcel divined the influence of the potentate.
Given that, what delights could he take in the marvels of the new life? What attraction was there in savoring the excursion that had been suggested for that morning: a trip to the sea-bed in order to visit the submarine defenses, the ingenious works thanks to which the mass of rocks defied any approach by submersible vessels?
Their exercises completed, they were about to leave. The white spume of waves was beating the sides of the motor-boat of which Marcel, heroically outlined in his leotard, was holding the tiller. People who had run to the shore were looking curiously at the unfamiliar means of locomotion. Sterile husbands, courtesans and children were pointing at the black hull of the distant ship swayed by the tranquil silvery sheet, to which the graceful launch was about to take them.
Suddenly, the appeals of new voices interrupted the mariner’s gesture. Raising his eyes to the sandy slope, he saw the foreigner, in company with Carabella. A simple sheath of pink silk covered her from head to foot, over which she had thrown a light veil that allowed her splendor to show through. That simple apparel did not prevent her from advancing with the sovereign gait particular to her. Beneath her immodest garment, she had the supreme candor of her blonde beauty.
On seeing her, Marcel’s heart leapt exultantly.
From a distance, she shouted: “Wait! I’m going with you. Carabella received the order this morning.”
“I confide her to you,” said the courtesan, with a hint of regret, when they came closer. Then she added: “You have fine weather, and an excursion beneath the waves will be particularly pleasant. In any case, the eddies are scarcely perceptible on the sea bed, even when the swell is heavy.”
“Are we putting on our diving-suits right away?” asked Miss Mary, clapping her hands.
“We’ll find them aboard the ironclad of which I have the command.”
“Well then, let’s go, Captain!”
Carabella kissed her mistress on the forehead, not having been permitted any other kiss. She obtained the promise of a seashell. Marcel, helping Miss Mary to get her footing, felt the divine and desired flesh lean delightfully on his shoulder.
The people applauded noisily when the white wake of the propellers striped the fluid immensity.
They had sat down, Choumaque in the bow. They breathed in the air, perfumed by spray; the water splashed; the waves were celestial. What poetry the excursion had in their radiant souls!
The little boat sped soundlessly. Miss Mary, collecting all the grave purity of the elements in her virginal being, lifted up her pink veils over her white sandals dotted with turquoises. One of her hands was supporting the adorable oval of her chin, and she was dreaming while Marcel admired her infinitely. Oh, if only the sweet moment might last! If only the cherished moment in which the splendor of the waves had thrown them into ecstasy might be prolonged!
For an imprint remained of those two assaults by Caresco on the entire character of the virgin, something like the trace left by the lick of a flame on the purest gem, in dissociating its elements and tarnishing its radiant gleam slightly. Everything denoted that imprint: the lighter costume she was wearing, her less serious bearing, and her joy at accepting an excursion that might, however, have another proof in store for her. In addition, under the influence of those poisonings, which had organized a kind of chronic breakdown, it had often happened that Miss Mary thought about Marcel, confusedly remembering the frissons that had run through her at the approach of his strong frame, his silky beard and the gleam in his gaze.
She had not forgotten the incidents consecutive to the effect of the quintessence of happiness; their unfolding had left a lacuna in her life; and yet, vague perfumes emanated from that dark hole, of nature and of amour, which it did not displease her to inhale. She reproached herself for it; she felt that she had lost her integral purity; she reanimated her patriotic ideal—but almost immediately, triumphant suggestion pierced the mists of Faith; Marcel took Harry’s place; the senses surpassed sentiment; and it was perhaps the surest result of the Superman’s enterprise to have led that exceedingly virginal virgin to suspect that human love existed.
Too greatly influenced by Caresco’s alchemy to perceived her transformation clearly, she wondered, however, in short glimmers of reason that were quickly dissipated, what suggestion drove her to admire that mariner, whom her heart had not yet adopted. Yesterday still so pure, so sincere, so near to celestial lyricism, could she have changed so rapidly, and be impregnated already with the sensuality overflowing in all nations, but the unique motive force of the individuals here? Or was she now double; were there two souls in her body, one of them the valiant and heroic daughter of the Red Land, the other hatched in Eucrasia, the slave of Caresco and Marcel?
That reverie was of short duration. Soon, they were on the deck of the ironclad. The welcome they received astonished the former navy lieutenant. Far from the stiff attitudes imposed by the military discipline of his homeland, he found himself confronted by a crew of a dozen men at the most, six sailors and six cabin-boys, clad in the most frivolous and cheerful clothes, who saluted him while dancing and throwing flowers. Evidently, the uselessness of the vessel, considered more as a museum, the objective of excursions made by tourists to relax, and sometimes make love, rendered such license excusable. The island had other means of protection, which they were about to visit.
And yet, in carrying out an inspection of the ironclad, traversing the remotest corridors of the rubber-lined hull—a method employed in the middle of the twentieth century by maritime nations desirous of obtaining vertiginous speeds—and studying the watertight seals and the electric machinery that supplied motive force to the propellers, Marcel convinced himself of the efficient functioning and the remarkable maintenance of the vessel, which a turn of the wrist could have got under way. He contented himself with congratulating the crew of men and boys, and accepting from them a snack of tasty sea fish, boiled in exquisite sauces, washed down with particularly agreeable wine that resembled champagne, and was just as delicious.
That sparkling liquor disposed them to undertake their submarine excursion cheerfully. Marcel was amused to see Miss Mary putting
on a diving suit, accompanying her movements with adorable laughter, displaying all the health of her young teeth. Choumaque remained perplexed, though, on observing that the diving suits had no tubes to conduct air.
“How are we going to breathe in them?” he asked a cabin-boy, whose physiognomy he had been contemplating with astonishment, remembering having seen him somewhere before but unable to say where.
The cabin-boy reassured him. Respiration was accomplished marvelously, thanks to a release of gas produced by composites of omnium, of which the mask contained several particles. At the same time as oxygen was produced, the toxicity of the expiration was annihilated: an invention of the Superman that was both very simple and very ingenious. A week of submarine life was reserved for them, if they wanted to remain that long.
As he completed his explanation, a sailor abruptly dropped the cage over Choumaque’s head, and he found it quite comfortable. A plate of glass placed before his eyes allowed him to see his companions, and a resonator placed at the level of the mouth even permitted him to speak and be understood by the others. It was thus that he heard that someone had just handed him a pick-ax, of which he was only to make use to defend himself from monsters, if they encountered any—for they were quite common in the region.
“I’m well-equipped, with that cane, to defend myself from the maw of an antediluvian...”
But a discovery suddenly amazed him. He had finally recognized the cabin-boy whose physiognomy had been haunting him for some time. There was no doubt about it; those dark ringed eyes, that palpitating hooked nose, those flavorsome lips and that wisp of black hair betraying the artifice of the blonde wig were those of Philoxénie, the friend of strangers. He had retained too precious and too embarrassing a memory of their seduction for him to be mistaken.
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