They obeyed. She opened a bronze door in the wall, hidden by a thick silk curtain. They went into an ill-lit corridor in which the sounds of the fête no longer reached them. Even their footfalls were silent. Then, at a turning, there was a dazzling light. It was a sumptuous crypt, a glare of gold, green and red, which suffocated them with its vacillations of gems and rare metals, and the cascades of riches springing from the walls, as if all the brilliant treasures of the earth were accumulated there. One a pedestal of precious stones, at waist height, a pink marble group was radiant: a man and woman, naked, marvelously beautiful, engaged in sexual intercourse.
“Come closer!” the High Priestess ordered. “Look! Touch these divine bodies, while holding hands! Impregnate yourselves with Passion!”
Immediately, Miss Mary found herself projected toward the sublime Inspirers. Her wrist encountered Marcel’s, and pressed against it. A spark sprang from the couple, which traversed them both. The fluid was in them. They shivered.
“Now, my children,” said Choumaque’s mistress, “get away from here, in order that no contrary force can oppose the aphrodisiac benefits. Get out! Avoid Caresco! Stay away from Carabella! Both of them are searching for you. You, Zéphi, watch over them. I’m going back to my post, to die there if anyone has seen me! Oh, Zéphi, how I must love you, to have turned his own weapons against Caresco!”
She dropped her flask and fled.
An unknown ravishment had taken possession of the two young people. They put their arms around one another’s waist as they left the crypt. They seemed to be walking in Heaven, so light were their footsteps; in Hell, so much lust was coursing through their veins. They went out, no longer interested in the gigantic festival that was now displayed, prodigious, tumultuous and lascivious, in a fury of embracing bodies.
Immediately, the night took hold of them by the splendor of the moon at its apogee. They had never seen it as magnificent. Going around two rows of flamboyant airplanes, they went toward a wood of immense parasol pines, which the celestial fluidity plastered with blue tints among the shade of its branches. Underfoot, fresh grass sloped upwards to a rock beside the sea. They could hear the soft and solemn waves caressing the emergence of the island; and through a gap excavated in the caprice of the shoreline, they saw the brief spasms of waves glinting in the distance, running and dying away, in a languor of amorous achievement. The frissons and incense of nature were prowling around.
“Look, Miss Mary—Passion is singing and shining universally! Everything is telling us to love one another!”
He hugged her to his torso; he could feel her heart beating more precipitately, her breath gasping. He led her toward one of the tall trees, whose foliage extended its giant protection.
“O Mary! O virgin! Let’s imitate Creation! Let’s imitate those who fill intoxication with kisses! Everything is caressing! Everything is swooning! The slightest murmurs of the warm night bring us the testimony of a unanimous sensuality!”
She did not reply. She listened to that grave voice like a delicious music, as passionately enveloping as the perfumed air, as the light of the heavens, as the cadence of the waves and the scattered harmonies. She allowed her admirable head coiffed with large white lilies, which the radiance filtering from infinite space illuminated divinely, to tilt backwards.
Thus inclined, the velvet of her large eyes, the most pulp of her mouth, and the delicate nacre of her cleavage appeared, touched with celestial cosmetics. At the same time, two tears of tenderness confessed that her soul was similarly vanquished, offering itself.
“You’re weeping! You’re weeping! If I were only able to translate that which is also weeping in me! For you, indescribable songs are rising up there. Listen to them, understand them! My heart is broken for you, O whiteness emerging from the night, which I would like to drink!”
Then, she huddled more closely against him. She raised two hands hot with fever to his bold forehead, and caressed his silky hair; she caressed his ardent face, and it seemed that the touch of his beard released a thousand delights, which shook her to the deepest roots of her being. Their mouths approached, breathing in one another’s breath; their lips communed recklessly.
She said: “The earth is large, the sea profound, the heaven infinite, but all that is nothing compared to my desire for you, Marcel. Close to you, I forget everything; I renounce everything. I forget my fatherland, which is bleeding, my brothers, who are falling, my countrymen, who are dying. O desire to love, which fills me, which is killing me, where are you taking me? What will you make me do? In what pincers will you crush me? With what frissons will you torture me? What does it matter! O Marcel, my lover, take me! I give you my flesh! Open your arms, that they may become for me a gulf like the sea, an immensity like the heavens, that I might bury myself therein forever!”
She had cast aside her veils, and her nudity, bathed in the astral light, burst forth like the most sublime vision in the universe. O splendor!
Deliriously, they lay down on the ground.
But suddenly, just at the moment when their exasperated senses were about to lead them to embraces akin to death, a deadly air expanded, engulfing them, paralyzing their movements, freezing them in the magnificent posture in which, sealed against one another, they were preparing to unite themselves.
CHAPTER XXVII
Placing before his mouth the small omnial apparatus, as pretty as a precious box, that permitted him to breathe pure air when all his people had been put to sleep by the dispersion of soporific gases, Caresco threw off his ostentatious and resplendent mantle, a black silhouette decorated with brilliant jewels, and looked down on the pompous polychromy of his numbed subjects. The beneficent inhalations did not calm his domineering transports.
Sniggering, he came slowly down the onyx steps, which red stripes streaked like trickles of blood over flesh. The smoking pylons were exhausting the last of their combustible materials, and their blue swirls, increasingly sparse, were evaporating idly. The lights had gone out. All that remained to give relief to the apparent corpses were two powerful jets of omnial radiation departing from the ceiling, which cut two vast golden cones through the darkness, in which little solid particles danced, which might have been taken for vibrions of matter.
Having traversed the violet ranks of his scientists, engineers and artists, surprised in their attitudes of spectators, he stopped at the last step and contemplated the frozen mass of the people. What power was his, which instantaneously, by pressing a switch, suspended the animation of twenty thousand individuals!
Traversed by a frisson of immense pride, he murmured: “O life! O succession of partial deaths! I am stronger than you!”
All his creation, his lot of splendid flesh, was there, within a radius of one square kilometer. The background formed a seed-bed of heads and arms drowned in the variegation of garments: red, blue, yellow, mauve, and green veils held by hands stopped in mid-dance, but closer at hand the gestures stood out, and conserved their light, undulant, rhythmic grace.
He noticed, in particular, the admirable profile of an adolescent and a courtesan surprised at the moment when, the one having seized the other’s waist, their attitudes offered an astonishing indication of the intoxication thy felt in enlacing. He recognized them. It was Philoxénie, with a giton.
The woman, with her head tilted backwards, her brown hair crowned with red geraniums deployed over her floating mauve veils, would have collapsed if the child’s arm had not been supporting her thus, in a swoon. The contours of her arched back, her lascivious loins, her red-striped abdomen, developed magnificently, bearing forward the challenge of her heavy, pointed marmoreal breasts. Her right arm raised, parting with a grandiosely impure gesture the veils of gauze, seemed to be opening a jewel-case to display the gem that she was. The adolescent, bending toward her, his torso going toward the naked flesh without yet touching it, had stopped at the moment when their two inclined heads were about to meet. They were smiling, the pallor of their teeth uncovered, a
nd the ecstasy of their wide-open eyes catching sparks.
Caresco swelled up with pride at the thought that he could immobilize them thus until death, until desiccation.
He passed on.
Further away, it was Carabella toward whom a circle of sterile spouses and fecund mothers were blowing kisses. She had been caught at the moment when, executing a step of the sacred dance, her body, inclined toward the floor, silhouetted the vision of the future. One of her delicate hands, the little finger raised, was held perpendicularly to the forehead, seemingly permitting her sight to plumb the depths of distant spaces. The other stiff arm was extended backward toward the firm rump. The surfaces of fabric stretched over her hips scarcely hid their perfection. Beside her, two children lying on the ground were maintaining her ankles; the ensemble symbolized the idea that if one could foresee the future, the present, more certain would attach you back to life.
And elsewhere, around, in the distance, higher up, all the way to the ivory of the giant columns and the streaming crimson of the draperies, there was the same adoration, transparent in the gestures and the postures of the cataleptic bodies, in the hypnotized fixation of masks impregnated with sensuality: bodies offering themselves and taking one another with candid immodesty; other collecting caresses; others fleeing certain touches to go in search of those preferred, gliding over the floor, scarcely placing the soles of the feet; others, finally, tipped on the ground, coupling frantically, in an insensate lust, in which the sexes were not always distinct.
And all of that was still aflame, a furnace of life and enjoyment alimented by the pulp of vibrant flesh. The two great cones of light falling from the vault overlapped in the middle to give their relief of apotheosis and supreme conflagration to twenty thousand passions suddenly suspended there.
Caresco passed on, stepping over bodies. He was looking for Miss Mary, whom he had not perceived in the darkness. His obstinate desire was alarmed at not being able to find her right away. He did not think that she might be in Marcel’s arms; he had forgotten the young man completely.
On the other hand, a strange memory was reanimated in his mind. He remembered, forty years before, having been represented in an English wax museum, after a famous night of operations in which his carescoclast had triumphed. Later, he had gone to join the crowd that could admire his incredible feat for three pence. He had seen himself there, faithfully reproduced, his body leaning toward his patients, surrounded by an elite of scientists watching him work, plunging his ardent hands into a massacre of flesh. He had listened to the horrified and enthusiastic reflections of spectators. What glory he already had then! But what power he had now! He suppressed the memory of another age. He searched for Miss Mary.
“The virgin! Where is she?”
His inability to find her filled him with rage. Momentarily, he hoped to discover her in a group of dancers of which Madame Môme and Marius occupied the center, paralyzed at the moment when they were repeating the fantastic waddling of a naturalistic quadrille. He remembered confusedly that the High Priestess had had the mission of charging the young woman with the new fluid. He interrogated her, asked her what had become of his treasure, and when she did not reply, he extended his hands to obtain her confession at the same time as she exhaled her last breath—but already he was turning his head in another direction.
“Miss Mary! Miss Mary!”
Let her emerge from that stupid mass, then! Let her come toward him, arms open, to appease the devouring fury of his heart.
He called to her again. He listened to the echo of his voice make a circuit of the Temple, pass behind the draperies of the pilasters and come back to him, almost extinct. Then he launched himself forward and ran, the only animate being amid that vast slumber, jostling bodies, knocking them over, leaning over insensible physiognomies, tearing away veils, disentangling embraces, twisting hair, trying to recognize the woman for whom he was searching. The silhouettes collapsed with a flaccid thud, and he dived into a litter of bodies.
“O virgin, are you alive? Are you only asleep? If you’re asleep, show yourself, and I’ll wake you up! If you’re dead, let yourself be recognized, and I’ll bring you back to life, my queen! My queen!”
Now he was making prodigious bounds, howling. His feet trampled soft flesh. He tripped over a couple lying down to couple. Hindered by the tangle of garments that held him back, he ripped them, and then, in a rage, he stamped his heel on the face of a fecund mother, pretty and blonde, whose punctured eye stuck to his sandal and caused him to slip again.
He breathed in; he sniffed, with the ferocity of a hungry wild beast tracking its prey. His broad sensual lips were slack, flecked with foam. And as a slight vertigo also gripped him, indicating that he provision of fresh air was running out, he still had sufficient presence of mind to run outside in order to escape the somniferous effect, Going up toward a height that he knew to be above the layer of spreading gas, he ran into two individuals, and recognized Marcel and Miss Mary, asleep.
The worthy philosopher Choumaque, sitting at the foot of a parasol pine, was awaiting events. To impregnate himself more easily with the admirable spectacle of the night, and in order not to disturb the decisive intimacy of his two friends, he had gone up on to a mound, from which the panorama was splendidly deployed, in the enchanted calm of nature, beneath the twinkling of the stars.
A delight filled his heart. Ah, the lovely return of equilibria! In an instant, Miss Mary would no longer be desirable to Caresco. The energy magically drawn from the source of love unveiled by the High Priestess would soon make Marcel the sole master of the foreigner. No longer to be astonished by anything…nil mirari! To remain stoical, even in the face of happiness! He departed from that sage maxim in order to address himself congruently to agreeable dissertations in which was mingled the joy of having seen the entwined lovers disappear toward the nearby clump of trees, and hearing, he thought, the pleasant music of their kisses.
He was wondering how to extract from that immoral scene an edifying application in favor of his doctrine—and finding that the heavens were replete with admirable glimmers, and that the earth itself, so drowned in blue moonlight, was their element, infinitely—when, all of a sudden, he shivered.
That bounding body, which the successions of shadow and light hid and revealed by turns, was it not Caresco?
An incommensurable emotion seized him. Was the battle, then, already lost, at the moment when it was scarcely engaged? Had they been betrayed?
The Superman had just stopped, suffocating, and he folded his arms.
“Is that you, philosopher? Why aren’t you asleep like the rest? I’ve thrown twenty cubic meters of somniferous gas over my people, for two kilometers around…how have you managed to escape it? Can’t you ever do as you’re told? Aren’t you my plaything, my property, like all my other subjects, like your friends, whom I’ve just tripped over, there, in passing?”
Choumaque did not reply. He could see exaltation blazing in the madman’s eyes. He wondered what part of truth his words contained. He listened to the punctuated monologue.
“Yes, they’re there…why were they together at the moment when the fluid took effect, at the moment when the virgin ought to be marking a hundred on my psychometer? Tomorrow, I’m going to kill Madame Môme…but it’s time to hasten my marriage. I’m God, certainly…but the Other? The God on high, my rival...has he not taken sides with that Sower? For he knows that I want her virginal...yes, virginal…!”
Then, turning to Choumaque, whom he was mingling with the chaos of his ideas, he said: “Give me your advice: do you think I should wait? To remove her might be dangerous at this point…come on, speak!”
“You should wait,” Choumaque replied, at hazard, hoping to delay the peril.
“Joker! Are you advising me to do the opposite of what you think? For think on this: if I don’t take her now, will there be time tomorrow? Everything’s asleep, that’s true; but how do you know that everything will still exist tomorrow?
Come on—you’re going to help me, philosopher...”
Choumaque wondered what it was to which he was about to lend his assistance. He admitted that if it were to help the potentate of this world disappear, he would not hesitate to intervene. Never had murder seemed to him such a simple act, so rational and so practical, to get out of a situation. He suddenly discovered within himself the energetic measure of a dispenser of justice.
Caresco took him to an airplane, not far away, whose gray mass was level with the crowns of giant trees fringed by the moonlight. He forced him to sit beside him. Then, having switched on the searchlights and directed their glare toward the ground he mumbled: “Remember this, philosopher: when you see me lean over the side of the nacelle, you lean over too. When you see me draw back, you draw back. But above all, don’t breathe in while we’re in the zone that puts everything to sleep. You understand, don’t you?”
“I understand perfectly,” Choumaque affirmed, knowing that one should never contradict a madman, and not thinking that the words were sane.
The Superman operated the controls and the vehicle, extending its wings, came to hover momentarily above the place where the two young people were lying. The precision of the movement, placing the machine between the layer of dangerous atmosphere and the vault of the trees, demonstrated the extent to which the Superman had momentarily recovered his practical lucidity.
Choumaque looked over the edge and perceived his two friends, confusedly, lying twenty meters beneath him.
“Above all, don’t breathe in!”
It was as rapid as thought. The airplane dropped abruptly to the ground while its wings made an upward movement. Gripped by anguish, the philosopher saw Caresco take advantage of the second’s respite that the machine’s bound left him to lean over swiftly toward Miss Marry and draw her violently toward him. But the lovers, stiffened by the slumber, were no tightly enlaced that Marcel was grabbed at the same time as his companion. Instinctively, Choumaque aided the abduction. The couple, lifted into the air by the airplane, which resumed its flight, remained suspended in the void momentarily. Finally, secured by one last traction, they sung toward the nacelle and fell on to the floor.
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