“Why is that slut…?”
A sudden maneuver on the part of the courtesan soon proved that he had not been mistaken to be suspicious of her. As she was holding out the mask that was to be fitted on to Miss Mary’s diving suit he saw her swiftly remove the cupule of omnium and replace it with another that had been hidden in her hand. That substitution was accomplished in the blink of an eye, with such care that the neophyte did not observe it. Choumaque became anxious. He tried to protest, to prevent Philoxénie from doing it, but the heaviness of his apparatus immobilized him and the laughter of the sailors covered his voice.
Their gaiety increased further when, in order to complete the philosopher’s equipment, they had shod him with little trampolines, fitted with springs so powerful that at the first step he took, he was precipitated into the sea. The cries that he uttered as he fell proved that the balance of his equilibria was tilting for the moment toward a rather painful quotient, and his Stoicism was subjected to a rude assault.
Marcel and Miss Mary, forewarned of what might happen, jumped in after him.
And there was a delightful excursion, utterly enchanted by unknown spectacles. They acquired the habit of making use of their trampolines, which did not cause them to rebound when they had taken the precaution of letting themselves flow without agitating their legs. The play of the springs was calculated in such a fashion that they could settle on the sea-bed at leisure or launch themselves up twenty meters with a simple thrust of the heel.
At first they traveled over large areas bristling with rocks and hollowed out by fissures, exposing an infinite number of abrupt, denuded environments, as far as the limit of the last recent volcanic convulsions. After that they came to a flat terrain strewn with the softest sand, where the submarine flora blossomed among long strips of sticky algae. They saw thousands of unfamiliar fish, which fled at their approach
They chatted joyfully, pointing out the views to one another; their respiration amplified, filling them with energy; they felt a delightful freshness. Then, as the masses of water overhead became more compact, when the light of the heavens, vanquished by the opacity of the marine surface, left nothing more beneath it than shadow, they perceived that their diving suits were radiant, and that they were as phosphorescent as the large fish that their passage disturbed.
Marcel had drawn closer to Miss Mary; he had taken her arm, and they both shivered beneath that immense unknown. He took pleasure in bounding with her, feeling the gentle waves brushing and caressing their carapaces at each of their upward movements, or afterwards, when they plunged vertically downwards. With interjections, brief comments lucidly transmitted by the resonator, he confided the delights of the adventure to her. Their masks permitted them to admire the animation of their faces.
Oh, the profound, absolute intoxication of those mysterious solitudes, those troubling depths into which so many unknown lives fled, so distant from their own, and so revealing of a constant creative amour! Oh, the infinity of the sea, where so many secrets lay dormant, where so many deaths and births were buried, where nature continued, more visibly than in the infinity of the heavens, her great rhythm of prodigious fecundity. And in his bounds, with a pressure of his hand, Marcel sealed his enthusiasm.
As for Miss Mary, for the third time since she had arrived on the island, she was subjected to an upheaval of her entire sensibility. The enchanting gas that she was breathing, another poison of the Superman emanating from the cupule slipped into her mask by Philoxénie, while leaving her a constant lucidity of mind, overwhelmed her with such an intoxication that she had never experienced anything like it. Although things conserved their appearance, the colors had not changed and the panoramas were curious, she considered them with an extraordinary intensity of magnification and seduction. Every phenomenon offered to her perception immediately became a element of a real joy, an incomparable bliss, in her mind.
Even Choumaque, wedged in his carapace, seemed to her as handsome as a young god, but less so than Marcel, the sight of whom transported her with a thousand acute admirations. She shivered unforgettably at feeing him beside her. When they held one another in order to jump, or slid toward the bottom, and he displaced water moved around their couple, she vibrated as if at a voluptuous touch. Soon, the only desire that persisted was that they might be nude, in order to feel the liquid embrace together.
A cry of alarm from Choumaque snatched her momentarily from her ravishment, however. A monstrous maw opened in front of them, ready to crush them. They perceived its gape, as wide as one of Hell’s gates, in which white symmetrical and cruel asperities were aligned. At that moment Marcel sensed his companion’s entire soul taking refuge in his. With a sovereign self-control, he extended his pike in the direction of the danger. A globe of fire sprang from it, and the shark collapsed, thunderstuck. Still palpitating with surprise, they circled around it. The monster had settled on its side, no visible trace of a wound gaping among the iridescent gleam of its scales. Marcel blessed the day’s unique event.
“That’s a famous spear-thrust!” affirmed Choumaque, who had drawn nearer. “Oh, the fellow gave me quite a fright…for you, my children!”
“I owe you my life, Monsieur Marcel!” said Miss Mary, impetuously.
“Don’t I owe you far more—love?” replied the young man, squeezing her arm gently.
They resumed their progress, the darkness having become more complete. Soon, they found themselves confronted by huge advertising hoardings, where, in luminous letters, the word BEWARE was repeated as far as the eye could see. They were approaching the danger zone, and had been instructed to proceed with caution.
What they saw a little further on seemed quite ordinary, not very complicated in its appearance. It was simply a network of metallic wires, its mesh about a meter wide, raised perpendicularly by a conductive masonry emerging from the bed. Behind it, however, there was an agglomeration of immense dead things forming a kind of second rampart.
As they came closer they recognized monsters similar to the one that Marcel had defeated a little while before—whales, sharks and enormous cephalopods in slow decomposition; then, at the same level, the carcasses of a dozen submarine torpedo-boats whose open flanks displayed their precious mechanisms crushed and reduced to shreds by a fantastic commotion.
Then, Marcel remembered a great event that had occurred ten years before, when an entire English fleet had disappeared, engulfed and swallowed up by the sea without the Admiralty wanting to admit to what region and on what mission it had been sent. The explanation was thus manifest before their eyes, and they admired the colossal organization of the island, that vast trap extended around its shores, abolishing natural ferocities and human determinations with a simple anonymous shock.
They were getting ready to return, retracing their route, when a bell extracted them from their reflections. Almost immediately, on approaching a luminous station, they heard several familiar voices. One might have thought that the incidents of the excursion were being followed from the interior of the earth.
“Adieu, eh! Are you well?” sang the deep baritone of Marius, vibrant with sympathy.
“Thanks to the Superman, we can see you perfectly,” added Madame Môme. “We can see my Choumaque hitching up the belt of his damp trousers...”
“That’s true!” admitted Choumaque, amazed.
“May Caresco operate on you, Mademoiselle and Messieurs!” exclaimed Mirror-of-Smiles.
The voices died away, and then the excursionists perceived that they had been replaced by luminous letters that appeared on the vast screen of the station, and which, lighting up and going out in their turn, signified rapidly-written sentences. It was a second means of security, the functioning of which they confirmed. They were able to take turns sitting down in front of a writing-machine situated at the foot of the luminous screen, disposed like a piano keyboard. They communicated by that means with their distant friends, joyfully, and arranged to meet them, in an hour’s time, on the ship, wher
e another snack and amusing games were being prepared in their honor by the crew.
They did, indeed, find them there. Night had fallen in the interim, and the crew had taken advantage of it to light up the ship marvelously. When they came aboard again, they thought they had been transported to an immense bed of magical flowers, whose brilliant corollas, harmoniously blooming, framed sumptuous beds next to tables covered with delicacies and exquisite beverages. They could not retain cries of admiration.
Miss Mary, very enervated, hastened to take off her diving suit. When she turned round to look for Marcel, she could no longer see him. In the distance, on the sea, a little boat was fleeing, carrying two people: Carabella and the one she desired.
“Is that my friend going away?” she asked a cabin-boy, who was none other than Philoxénie.
“It is, indeed, him. An order from the Superman has just summoned him to his duties as a Sower. But what does it matter? Does not love take hold with everyone?”
“Evidently,” she replied, conceding entire truth to the statement, so far away had ravishment driven her reason.
The spectacle that she had had before her eyes soon made her forget the absentee. The entire sea had just lit up in its turn; the waves were no more than flames flowing immensely, as if the apotheosis of a setting sun had emanated from their depths to variegate the surface. That gave a diversity of admirable hues to the attitudes of a thousand dancers treading on the waves by means of rackets fitted to their feet, accomplishing gracious evolutions there. One might have thought them Neptunian spirits emerged from the dark depths, streaming with light, to dazzle the privileged humans.
Miss Mary, still under the influence of the enchanting gas, lay down on a bed beside Choumaque, and took an ineffable pleasure in seeing everything, in tasting the delicacies filling the precious vases, in wetting her lips in the sparkling glasses. Her eyes were shining more brightly with an interior reflection expressing all the new excitement of her sentiments, the piercing desire to melt into another flesh, to appease by strange contact the covetousness dilating every fiber of her being. When Philoxénie slipped a hand into the gap of her corsage, at the place where the neck extended delicately toward the shoulders, she uttered a cry stifled by a swoon. And as, in the gloom, she imagined that Chounaque was being audacious, no longer able to resist, she enlaced him with her muscular feet.
“Oh! What’s happening? You’re no longer seeing clearly, my child! I’m not Marcel. Don’t persist, I beg you! Have you gone mad?”
“Yes, mad! Crazy for you! Crazy for your strange beauty.”
Without having time to reflect on the improbability of that good fortune, the philosopher was obliged to defend himself. With an unhealthy avidity, she caressed his beard, demanded his lips and clutched his doublet. The efforts of Philoxénie, surprised to see the effects of passion whose joys she had been instructed to collect deflected in that fashion, only exasperated it.
The courtesan tried in vain to slide between them, used all her strength to try to separate them, and fought to distract the young woman’s ardor to her own advantage; nothing could tear Miss Mary away from her bewildered philosopher. There was soon a melee of three bodies, pulling in opposite directions and rolling on the floor, to the great astonishment of the crew.
In the course of that struggle, though, the Redlander was exhausted. A liberating breath passed through her brain and sobered it up. Somewhat astonished to find herself on the floor, holding Choumaque tightly in her arms, she pulled away from him and stood up. Calmly, she took her place at the table and continued her meal. Then, wiping her drink-moistened mouth with a distinguished grace, she said: “What a charming soirée! But what’s become of Monsieur Marcel?”
The philosopher abstained from interrogating her about the extraordinary act that she had just committed. Not without fear, he detected the power of the Superman therein, making use of all his occult forces to bend the heroically virginal complexion of the foreigner to his will.
CHAPTER XVII
Although broad daylight had long ago taken possession of the room and returned their particularities, colors, projections and life to the things that darkness had confounded in a neutral equality, Miss Mary was still asleep. With her bare arm passed beneath her neck and entangled in her unruly hair, she was dreaming.
A smile, raising the corners of her red lips, confessed the pleasure of her thoughts. The same enchantment had pursued her throughout her slumber, and was still continuing at present to intoxicate her drowsiness. She saw herself on Marcel’s arm, participating in pompous and sparkling processions, listening to music that their presence rendered divine, savoring with a tenfold intensity the marvels of the island of Eucrasia.
An importunate ray of sunlight woke her up, and the abrupt transition of her ideas caused her profound bitterness. She recalled her dream. She was astonished to find it so dissimilar to the obsessions that, since her earliest days had laid siege to all of her nights, torturing her with anxiety for the fatherland. She cursed the inconceivable seductions that, conquering her even in a waking state, now made her subject to the attraction of jewels and perfumes, filling her with an almost carnal voluptuousness when she touched precious fabrics, and then dressed on them, in order that Marcel should not find her displeasing. She resolved no longer to sacrifice anything of her virile ideal to them.
Alas, the oath was immediately betrayed, as soon as Carabella, arriving, said to her, after having scattered the petals of a large bouquet of wild violets on the floor: “Know, divine one, what I’ve just been told: your friends will be entering into their functions today. Monsieur Choumaque will talk about philosophy before the assembled people, and Monsieur Marcel will also employ himself for the public good.”
“Will he be taking command of his ship, then?” she asked, hastily.
“It’s not a matter of that. The position of commander is fictitious.”
“Then I don’t understand...”
“The nature of his functions? That’s true, you’re still so ignorant of our customs. Know that Monsieur Girard, having become a Sower, will be sent to the Temple of Fecundity, to make love there to blonde mothers and serve the repopulation. I prepared him for that important work yesterday by taking him away from the celebration, and making him go to bed early.”
That confession had no sooner been made than anguish gripped the young woman. She had completely forgotten the transports that the gas respired the previous day had caused her to experience, but the word “love,” pronounced by the courtesan, struck a dire blow to her feelings for the young man. Her heart palpitating, all her distress overflowing into action, she stood up swiftly, put on a peignoir, and strove to color with a pretext the urgency she felt in wanting to go and see Marcel.
“Quickly, help me get dressed! I don’t want to miss Monsieur Choumaque’s lecture.”
The courtesan adorned her, delicately. After having made her put on a Greek head-dress, the crown of which was imprisoned by golden ribbons, she anointed her face and hands with semi-liquid mixtures of perfumed oils. With a stroke of a pencil she emphasized the pride of the eyes, and heightened the health of the cheeks with an imperceptible powder. The superb torso, the firm legs, the full arms and the gilded tufts of the armpits disappeared beneath the leotard that the tunic soon half-concealed. She declared her adorable and kissed her.
They were about to leave, intending to take the first transport that could take them to the philosopher’s lecture, when a formidable rumble, like a roll of thunder, burst forth outside. At the same time, brass instruments blared, playing a triumphal march so loudly that the walls shook.
“Great God, what’s that?” cried Miss Mary.
“The Superman! It’s the Superman!” cried Carabella, prostrating herself face downwards.
The door opened and Cresco appeared. Behind him, in the vast gallery, his omnipotence was escorted by a numerous, scintillating, gaudy yellow retinue of slaves playing the role of lictors. He was discreetly clad in a black
doublet sown with golden vibrions and ovules, thick in the sleeves and close-fitting at the waist, continued by tights of the same color. A circle of red velvet surmounted by a diamond spray wound around his young and weary head, and provided an admirable frame for his natural elegance.
Carabella wondered what surge of passion had made him go out in that accoutrement, surrounded by such a cohort. Except for public festivals, when he showed himself to the people in all his pomp, from the height of sumptuous stages, he was never seen like this. He contented himself with governing from the depths of his palace, skeptical and coldly jaded, thus maintaining his legend of power, mystery and benevolence.
He advanced toward Miss Mary and held out his hand to her. Only considering his silhouette, one would have admired his eternal youth. But his antique gaze fled; the smile on his broad lips was awkward, as if constrained to displayed itself there, and a strange equivocation emanated from the ensemble typical of old women who deceive age by means of artifice, without the certainty of their trickery being easy to affirm.
“Bonjour, my lovely friend,” he said, as softly as possible. Then, addressing Carabella, in a tone that suddenly became imperious, he said: “Get up, courtesan, and get out!”
“Permit Carabella to stay, Superman,” Miss Mary begged, fearfully. “I need her in order to go and listen to the eloquence of the philosopher Choumaque.”
“I’ve come to find you precisely to take you there,” Caresco said, seizing that pretext for his visit, “but before then, permit me to offer you this present, still unworthy of your beauty.”
He made a sign, and two slaves came in, ceremoniously carrying a sumptuous robe whose weave, in dark pink, was almost entirely covered by an embroidery of precious stones and metals, streaming like he droplets of a multicolored crystalline cascade. In the old world, that fantastic garment would have represented the fortune of a billionaire; here it was worth no more than the artistic distribution of the gems: topazes, turquoises, sapphires and amethysts, representing vibrions and ovules, while the train, falling in black pearls, depicted a chimera.
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