The Golden Rock

by Theo Varlet

  “Atrocious, you mean, Monsieur,” said Frédérique. “But while waiting for television, the simple news that these disasters are happening right now is enough to wring our hearts.”

  “So many orphans! So many widows!” the star felt obliged to declaim, theatrically.

  “Yes,” I observed, “henceforth, the whole world will vibrate in unison, thanks to the wireless. Fifteen years ago, this catastrophe wouldn’t have disturbed us as much, because we’d only have learned about it from the newspapers three or four days later. The rhythm of life on our planet has accelerated, and humankind is increasingly forming a whole, a single organism palpitating all at once with the same reactions.”

  “You’re forgetting the war, my dear colleague,” said the Swiss professor, ironically. “Your ‘whole’ isn’t homogeneous. The races are irreconcilable…charged with different potentials of sensitivity.”

  The mistress of the house did not give me time to reply. She hated arguments, even courteous ones. She brought the subject beck to the subject of the moment. “At any rate, it’s over; after these few disasters, the cyclone will exhaust its force, dissipate and fade away...”

  “Hmm,” said Jolliot. “You’re an optimist, Cienne. The cyclone might well sweep away more ships in its course before arriving here…like all Atlantic storms. We’d better get our umbrellas ready. But that’s no reason to go hungry—let’s sit down at table. That way, we’ll be on the coffee when the Tower makes it next broadcast.”

  The meal provided a diversion. After the hors-d’oeuvre, as everyone tucked into the turbot, a tacit truce was established; the subject of shipwrecks was relegated to the domain of the subconscious, and we talked about other things. The professor and Jolliot launched into a digression on the respective merits of European and American hotels, and even the star became a little more animated.

  That gave me a welcome opportunity to exchange a few words with my neighbor, the charming doctor, who had as little interest in the subject of hotels as I did. But what point is there is reporting what we said? Banal and uninteresting for any listener, it simply served to support the marvelous intimacy that had revealed itself between us, and my eyes replied in the same language to the limpid confidence that her blue eyes with the black lashes dedicated to me. In feeling close to her, as in a bath of blissful effluvia, I knew that love had just connected our secret magnetic fields forever.

  I asked her the name of her perfume.

  “Remember,” she said, with a smile. “The name’s slightly twee, but I like the perfume. Do you?”

  “It evokes the scents of a beautiful summer day by the sea,” I murmured, reflectively. “The sun on the sand and the briny breeze…it’s as poignant and profound as one of those landscapes that one never forgets...”

  She darted a glance of infinite softness at me, her lips parted to reply...

  But she did not have time. At that precise moment, a subterranean rumble became audible, muted and prolonged, a kind of roll of thunder. Glasses clinked and the house was shaken as if a heavy truck were passing just outside its walls—but the villa was isolated in its grounds on the edge of the cliff, fifty meters from the road.

  “An earthquake!” I exclaimed, remembering one that I had once experienced in Italy.

  Unfamiliar with such phenomena, the other guests looked at one another, more surprised than anxious.

  “Come on, my dear colleague, your deluding yourself!” the professor from Basle objected, disdainfully. “There have never been any seismic shocks in this region!”

  “Even so, it might be more prudent to go out into the open,” suggested the star—but without getting up.

  We remained on the alert for a minute, napkins in hand, ready to make a move—but the shock was not renewed, and we were ashamed of our alarm.

  The clear laughter of the young doctor was the first to ring out. I admired her frankness. “You frightened me, Monsieur Marquin!”

  “I’m very sorry, Mademoiselle, and I beg you to forgive me, but I really thought that I recognized the precursory symptoms of a quake. I was in Naples in 1912 during a slight earthquake, and it was exactly like the one just now.”

  Jolliot consulted his wristwatch. “Thirteen fifty-five. In five minutes, perhaps the Tower will tell us what it was. Shall we go on to the veranda? The coffee’s ready.”

  We were disappointed, however. The radiotelephonic broadcast only mentioned the cyclone, which had increased in extent, causing further disasters.

  “We do not know the exact number, because communications with North America by cable and wireless have been interrupted. Given the trajectory of the phenomenon and its velocity of travel, the meteorological office anticipates the arrival of a violent tempest on our Atlantic coasts and in the Channel during tonight and tomorrow morning. Ships presently at sea are advised to seek shelter in the nearest port. Departures are suspended on the Paris-London and Paris-Cherbourg airlines.”

  The commentaries continued, but I was only listening distractedly. The four o’clock express was due to take me to Paris, and I still had to go to my home in Boulogne to pick up my baggage. Even with the automobile that the film-director had put at my disposal, I would only just have time.

  I said my goodbyes.

  Lucienne Jolliot wished me bon voyage as if it were a matter of an eight-hour excursion. It would not have taken much for her to ask me to send her a postcard from the South Pole. Her husband, who was more expansive, gratified me with a warm accolade.

  As for the professor, he renewed the invitation I had given him: “It’s understood, isn’t it, my dear colleague, that we’ll lunch tomorrow at Claridge’s? Elsa and I will be leaving Boulogne at seven-thirty in the morning, to arrive in Paris at about eleven. Rendezvous at eleven-thirty at the Taverne Royale—and try to bring your friend Monsieur Rivier.”

  I bowed, dissimulating my joy. I shook the father’s horny hand, and then the daughter’s soft and frank one. The last vision of her I took away was of an amicable smile of her blue eyes with the black lashes, which I was glad to be able to admire again the following day.

  II. The Atlantic Cyclone

  I ought to say immediately that the meeting did not take place, and that it was the first link in the chain that broke in the series of events on which I was counting.

  Right on time, I disembarked on to the Parisian asphalt at eight-thirty. I had eaten in the restaurant car. The theaters and cinemas did not tempt me. Having deposited my baggage at the Terminus and sent a telegram to Rivier, I took a taxi and went along the boulevards to spend a couple of hours before going to bed.

  In the lukewarm early September evening the crowds of pedestrians and automobiles displayed their boring film amid the civilized apotheosis of electric lights. Once again, as in all of my visits to Paris, I was astonished to find the city insouciant and cheerful, in vesperal fête, in spite of the economic distress and the pound at 460.8 Only the newsvendors—“Liberté… Intran!... Special editions!”—were communicating a hint of anxiety to the flood of passers-by, with their papers hot off the press, which people were buying and scanning rapidly.

  To read them, I sat down on the terrace of the Café Cardinal at the crossroads of the Boulevard Haussmann.

  Stormy debate in the Chambre on the measures to prevent the devaluation of the franc... Ministerial crisis in prospect... Collision of aircraft at Villacoublay...

  With regard to the tempest, the evening papers told me nothing more than the two o’clock bulletin from the Tower. As I resumed following the spectacle of the boulevard with an amused eye, however, a luminous announcement attracted my attention. In the background, on the roof of the Paris-Projecteur building, a sequence of characters was unfurling from tight to left.

  “Tempest ravaging the Azores. Further maritime disasters... The forty-watt Phoebus Lamp is the sun at home... Loss of transatlantic liner Zuyderzee… Drink Kichof aperitif...”

  A melancholy developed within me, born of that news, which was transposed on to t
he egotistical plane. I savored the Paris evening bitterly—the last, for how long? A year, perhaps two, spent in the bleak wilderness of the Antarctic...

  No matter, though! I was not leaving anyone behind; I was alone in the world, since my wife and my mother had been killed in Paris in April 1918 by a shell from a Big Bertha. The irony of fate. While my hospital was at Malo, exposed to daily fire from the artillery at Dixmunde... No children, scarcely any family. A few good friends, at the most, like Jolliot and Rivier...

  Good old Jean-Paul! He had a durable gratitude, that one! True, the hazards of a bathing-spot, fifteen years before, had permitted me to save his life, but how many others would have remembered, in his situation? I could ask him for a hundred thousand francs tomorrow, and he’d give them to me with a smile... In the meantime, it was to him that I owed the chance to flee my unsatisfactory existence; he was the one who had imposed me as ship’s physician, at the last minute, on Commander Barcot, whose cruise he was subsidizing...

  My existence…!

  And I thought once again about my last nine years, as a nomad doctor, migrating from Paris to Trouville, from Trouville to Sanary, from Sanary to Boulogne, without being able to settle down or find anything else in a few brief relationships but disappointing flirtations...

  I saw myself, finally resolved to shake off my old self and put on a new skin, for a regenerative exodus to the wilderness and heroic life of the Pole...

  And then, as a young blonde, tall and lithe, in the same blue coat as Frédérique, passed by on the sidewalk, the image of the latter came back to me with an almost hallucinatory acuity, and I sensed once again the same disturbance that had possessed me in her presence. Her perfume—Remember!—evoked in the Parisian evening the splendor of the sun on a summer beach. I saw her smile again...

  Frédérique! New light! Oh, life with you would perhaps be sweet...

  But I shrugged my shoulders, irritated with myself and my crazy imagination, already enchanted by a future in which the blonde doctor would be my lifelong companion, my spiritual ally...

  Go on, fool! You’re leaving tomorrow for Antarctica...

  Just your luck, isn’t it, that windfall in extremis, of which you can’t take advantage! I’m to see her again tomorrow, and then? A fine affair! Shall we know one another, after having had lunch together? And if our sympathy is increased, it will only poison my departure, which I still considered as a liberation this morning! And her father, the enigmatic Swiss—what does he want from me? What does he want from Rivier? If I do him this favor, will he grant me the hand of his daughter in exchange?

  Then again, no! It’s absurd. One can’t get engaged in that fashion, after two hour-long conversations on the eve of departing for the end of the Earth...

  I slept badly that night, having gone to bed too soon in my room at the Terminus-Nord. I dreamed about a cruise in the midst of shipwrecks, with Frédérique as captain and her father amusing himself by fishing with a rod and line for floating cadavers.

  I had not drawn the curtains or closed the shutters. When I woke up, it was so dark that I ran to the window to check the time on the station clock. It really was eight o’clock! Rain was falling from a sky the color of antimony, rattling against my windows in furious gusts. It was the storm announced the previous day. My first lucid thought was for Frédérique, who had just boarded a train in Boulogne, in that abominable weather, which was doubtless even worse on the coast.

  An initial disappointment awaited me in the Avenue de Villiers, at Jean-Paul Rivier’s house, where I arrived at ten o’clock in accordance with my telegram. The banker had left the day before for Biarritz, summoned by a telegram from his wife, and would not be back for two days.

  What a blow! Adieu to the hope to fulfilling my promise to Hans Kohbuler…but bah! Too bad for him! The essential thing for me was to have lunch in his company, and above all, that of his daughter...

  I still had an hour to kill before the arrival of the two travelers. I spent it at the rendezvous—the Taverne Royale—reading the morning newspapers and watching the rain fall.

  According to the latest news, after a whole series of disasters in the Atlantic, the cyclone had reached the French shore in Brittany at about one o’clock in the morning. Boats that had remained at sea in spite of the warnings had been sunk. Even in the ports, and here and there inland, a tidal wave had caused serious damage.

  At eleven o’clock, the Paris-Midi brought further details, albeit summary and provisional, for the cyclone had blown down the telegraph-poles and interrupted communications with the capital. Even the wireless was only receiving messages blurred by the “static” of a magnetic storm raging over the entire northern hemisphere.

  The tidal wave, several meters high, had unfurled successively over all the coasts of Western Europe: Ireland, England, France, Spain, Portugal... In the Channel it had reached Cherbourg at three a.m., Le Havre at five; and, increasing its violence in the bottleneck formed by the curve of the coast extending from the Somme to Cap Gris-Nez, it had swept over the dyke at Berck at half past six, razing several villas, and carried away the iron bridge over the Canche at Étaples.

  That would have cut the main line from Calais to Paris, two hours before the passage of the express that was due to bring Frédérique and her father that morning!

  By virtue of a last residue of hope—the Kohbulers might have changed their plans and taken an overnight train—I waited another hour…but no one appeared.

  I had lunch alone, it did not matter where, furious at that failure, cursing the cyclone and striving to dispel the haunting memory of Frédérique.

  After coffee and Benedictine, and having smoked two cigars, I observed that I still had five full hours until my departure. A kind of misanthropic perversity deterred me from making the two or three visits that I had originally planned; I sank back into my sulky melancholy, spending my last afternoon in Paris trailing from one café to another.

  The capital was living with a simple sulkiness in the dreadful weather, without any apparent concern for the maritime catastrophe. The continuous procession of mechanical vehicles—buses and taxis—assumed a lugubrious and inhuman aspect beneath the cataract of rain. On the sidewalks, the passers-by, their heads invisible beneath umbrellas clenched in both fists, were striding purposefully: mud-spattered trouser-clad legs, and feminine legs of every curvature and caliber, sheathed in silk, with high-heeled shoes, miraculously intact amid the deluge...

  At four o’clock, further special editions helped me to be patient.

  The disaster was extending. Mute since the day before, America finally sent its contingent of details, via Pernambuco and Dakar.

  Sooner and more violently than Western Europe, the Eastern United States and Canada suffered the effects of an unprecedented tornado. A ninety foot wave—more than thirty meters!—a veritable wall of water, hurled itself upon the coasts of the two countries, initially in Newfoundland, devastating ports, lifting up ships and hurling them against skyscrapers in destructive collisions. As we go to press, the victims are already counted in tens of thousands...

  An interview followed, obtained from the head of the Meteorological Office and commenting on the unprecedented anomaly of the “double tempest”—so to speak—“progressing radially in opposite directions toward America and Europe, as if from a common center of atmospheric and marine perturbation.”

  The seven o’clock express bore me away toward Marseilles, beneath a belated dusk falling from an apocalyptic sky, amid a diluvian mixture of rain and hail that peppered the windows like machine-gun fire. A meal in the restaurant-car…splenetic hours in the first-class compartment, facing an English clergyman and his wife, who stubbornly kept the electric light on all the way to Lyon, in order to read...

  The sun, caressing my cheek, woke me up. The flat landscape of the Crau extended away from the windows, beneath an immaculate azure, but the cypresses bordering the track were bending over beneath a furious mistral. At the exit from the Nerthe
Tunnel, the Mediterranean was displayed, leaden blue in color, bristling with white crests. The tempest was here too, but it was a dry tempest, and the ships had found safe havens behind the various promontories that extended their arms between L’Estaque and Marseilles, for the transatlantic tidal wave had expired on the threshold of the Latin sea, in the straits of Gibraltar.

  At eight o’clock, having disembarked at the Gare Saint-Charles, I took a taxi, with my baggage, through the sunlit streets of the ancient Phocean city, along the picturesque and swarming Cannebière, toward the Old Port, where my ship, the Erebus II, was moored at the Quai des Belges.

  III. The Departure of the Erebus II

  The activity of a day of departure reigned on the proud three-master, constructed to brave the ice-sheet, but in which my layman’s eyes could see nothing as yet but a steamship like any other. Sailors in red jerseys, with white monograms deformed by the play of their robust pectoral muscles, were busy around a gaping hatchway, into which the crane of a loading-mast was lowering barrels picked up on the quay from an automobile truck. The yellow dust filtering from the barrels and powdering the truck and the pavement I recognized, not without surprise, as sulfur.

  The officer on duty at the gangplank took possession of me, however; he took me on to the upper deck, to Commander Barcot, a sturdy quinquagenarian with the clean-shaven and ascetic face, who had been popularized by photos in the weeklies and dailies in connection with his first Antarctic expedition.

  With my visiting-card between his fingers, he stared at me with his aquamarine eyes for such a long time that I looked away. Finally, he offered me his hand and said, rather dryly: “Welcome aboard, Doctor…since you’re Monsieur Rivier’s friend. I didn’t think of asking, in my letter, whether you have sea-legs? Yes? So much the better, for we’re going to dance tomorrow in this mistral.”