The Golden Rock

by Theo Varlet

  With regard to the inopportune visit, the snow, which resumed falling on the afternoon of the fifteenth, gave us a measure of temporary security, by reducing visibility at sea. A ship would have to pass within two miles in order to perceived the silhouette of the peak. With regard to celerity, all went well. The work progressed at a constant rhythm; it was completed within the anticipated interval of three days.

  The fury with which the sailors worked did not diminish. On the other hand, however, symptoms of demoralization increased. Whereas, among our “civilized” selves, the initial intoxication was transformed into a patriotic fervor and a desire for intensive exploitation, the proximity of the gold seemed to aggravate its deleterious effect on our men. With somber and surly expressions, muddy and sweaty in spite of the snow, they no longer obeyed any orders but those of the engineers concerning the extraction of the gold, refusing to participate in any other task. Thus, for the erection of the huts designed to lodge the part of the mission that would remain on the island, we—I mean the officers and scientists—were obliged to set to work ourselves, and I was obliged to spend the entire morning of the sixteenth under the snow, opening boxes and screwing together the planks of the dismantled huts.. My hands were grazed and full of blisters for several days.

  On the sixteenth, the midday meal was not ready; the cook, the waiters and the steward had abandoned their post to go and join the gold-diggers. We had to take tins from the stores, whose contents we consumed in anxious silence. From time to time, when louder outbursts of voices reached us from outside, we interrupted ourselves and mechanically patted the butts of the revolvers strapped to our thighs.

  The probable plan of the crew was to abandon us on the island and set sail with the cargo of gold for a country where the customs and the authorities appeared to be more easily bought than in Europe: Chile, Ecuador or some other South American republic. And their frenzied labor was explained by the anticipated division that they would make of their future booty. In fact, the bosun, who remained faithful to his duty, told us that they had formed a syndicate and appointed inspectors charged with counting the wagons furnished by each crew.

  The vigilance of the Commander and the rest of us, however, prevented this plan from being put into execution. The rebellion did not even become manifest. The men were too well aware of their impotence; there were forty of them and only seventeen of us, to be sure, but we held all the firearms, and a machine-gun set up on the poop transformed the ship into a veritable entrenched camp.

  On the evening of the seventeenth, under a load of two thousand tons of nuggets, the flotation-line was brushing sea-level. The holds, however, seemed half-empty, thanks to the density of the gold, and the Commander had to appeal to reason in order to determine preparation for sailing the following morning, without heaping the available space with a further provision of gold.

  There could be no question of setting sail for Europe and leaving the island and equipment unmanned, even under the safeguard of the French flag and an official declaration of its possession, enclosed, in accordance with custom, in a sealed tinplate box. Part of the personnel would remain on the island, at least until the arrival of the destroyer, in order to continue the extraction and form a stock of nuggets ready to embark on the transport vessel that was accompanying the warship.

  The latter role was attributed to the corvette captain, the four engineers, Gripart—who had not finished studying “his” bolide—and all the scientists, plus Lefébure and the second lieutenant, who would be in command, and fifteen crewmen. How should the latter be chosen, though? In the state of indiscipline prevailing among the sailors, there could be no question of designating them by order.

  The bosun, having been consulted, suggested that he ask for volunteers, and half an hour later he came back with fourteen names: ten sailors, the carpenter the steward and two waiters. How had he convinced them? Had he held out the hope of taking possession of the motor-launch and setting forth with a more modest but more easily negotiable cargo of gold? It’s possible—at any rate, we were then able to drew up a complete list of those leaving: eight sailors, the eighteen mechanics and stokers, the storeman and the cook, with a general staff consisting of the first lieutenant, promoted to first mate, the four technical officers, the wireless operator and the bosun, promoted to the functions of first lieutenant, plus Commander Barcot and me.

  It was nine o’clock in the evening when these arrangements were finally completed and communicated to the interested parties—for you must not imagine that we were all installed like good bourgeois around the wardroom table, smoking our pipes and enjoying a last glass of fino before going to bed! A state of siege reigned aboard the vessel, as I have said, and the night-shift was still at work on land. For those two reasons, the officers of duty were missing, along with the engineers directing the extraction, the scientists guarding the gangplank and the poop and the wireless operator Madec, who no longer left the radio cabin since an attempt had been made to sabotage his apparatus. There was, in consequence, no one in the wardroom but the Commander and the Captain, the second mate, two mechanics, Gripert and myself—all harassed by sleepless nights, for we were almost constantly on our feet and had hardly slept since the threat of revolt had emerged.

  Nevertheless, the prospect of soon seeing an end to the nightmare rendered us a measure of cheerfulness. Once the decision was made, it was like a release. Only the naval officer retained his frown.

  “What’s wrong, de Silfrage?” the Commander asked him. “You seem worried. Is it staying here that displeases you? You’re under no obligation to do so, and your mission...”

  “I consider that my place is on the island, where I shall maintain order until the arrival of the destroyer. As for my report to the Ministry, Commander, you will see that it reaches its destination. No, that’s not what’s worrying me—it’s that we’re at the mercy of an inopportune visit. It only requires a ship to pass within sight...”

  “Obviously, there’s a risk,” said Barcot, “but it’s unavoidable. If we could at least camouflage the mine...”

  “Or cover up the stockpiles of gold, which are too visible at a distance with the aid of binoculars,” I suggested.

  “That’s what comes of having to deal with a bolide,” Gripart sniggered, “instead of a volcanic island.”

  Contrary to his habit, the loquacious Lefébure had not yet said anything. He was smoking his old brier-pipe, slightly to one side, and smiling to himself, seemingly very amused by some idea of his own. When Gripart had made his comment, he raised his head.

  “A volcanic island? Bah! It would be sufficient to simulate a small eruption.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Explain!”

  No one understood—but enlightenment dawned on me. I remembered having seen Lefébure on several occasions, meditating in front of the barrels of sulfur stacked on the bank.

  “Bravo, Robert!” I exclaimed. “That’s it—you’ve got it. Yes—the smoke of an artificial eruption!”

  Invited to explain, the first mate went on: “What’s the objective, in sum? To gain time—a fortnight, a month, until the moment that island N is awarded to France by the worthy League of Nations. As the very existence of the island remains in doubt, and its exact position is unknown, there’s little chance of another expedition coming to search for it, especially where it is—which is to say, much further north than is thought, and outside the usual traffic routes. So, if we have to put off two or three ships passing by chance, from now until the decision is made in Geneva, that will do the trick. And hide what? Not the existence of the island—these sheer cliffs and the snow-capped cone are scarcely attractive—but the only true landing-point, and our mine...

  “Well, Commander, I’ll take responsibility for that, especially if we have to deal with people who aren’t overly curious and in a hurry—like the captain of a transatlantic liner, for instance. We have the sulfur...”

  By now, every
one had cottoned on, but Lefébure, carried away by his subject, continued: “Those barrels, those blessed barrels of sulfur, about which we have all joked, and which you, Commander, have cursed as the dishonor of your vessel…well, they’ll serve us well, and as we have no aircraft, we’d pay ten times their weight in gold to get hold of them. Given the price of gold in these parts, I might even say a hundred times.

  “It’s simple. At the water’s edge, all around the inlet, you dispose a cordon of twenty open barrels covered by tarpaulins, and if a ship comes, you take of the tarpaulins and set fire to them. In three minutes, the creek will be filled with beautiful white smoke, which will simulate perfectly, up to and including the odor, a volcanic eruption. Behind that camouflage, neither seen nor suspected, the mine will remain unknown—and in order to deprive the boat in question of any desire to make a closer approach, nothing prevents us from letting off a few cheddite cartridges.15 I’ll bet you a round of orange curacaos at the Café de la Paix, when we get back to Paris, that the captain will steam away at top speed, for fear of catching a volcanic bomb on his funnel, or seeing the bottom of the ocean rise up beneath him and leave him high and dry on a peak like this one.”

  The idea was adopted enthusiastically; and, thanks to Lefébure’s inventiveness, we were all more reassured, those departing as well as those staying, when the Erebus II cast off its moorings and put out to sea the following day, the eighteenth, before midday.

  On land, the sailors gripped by gold fever did not even interrupt their work to watch the departure, and the rolling of the wagons, which were now discharging their gold into the stockpiles on the edge of the inlet, reached us like the distant and decreasing echo of the pulsation of our engines.

  Standing on the quay, the group of our comrades remained visible for a few minutes, waving handkerchiefs, but soon melted, along with the snowy peak and the black cliffs, into the white flocculation of the snow.

  Pitching and rolling on the long swell of the Atlantic, the Erebus II headed west-south-west, at its maximum sped of eighteen knots, directly toward Cherbourg.

  VIII. Father and Daughter

  Claridge’s Hotel, third floor above the Avenue; the apartment of Professor Hans Kohbuler and his daughter.

  Frédérique-Elsa is alone in the study-drawing-room. Filtered through a net curtain whose pattern features a flight of ducks, the sullen light of the gray afternoon is no longer sufficient for her; she has just switched on the bulb beneath the turquoise porcelain shade that illuminates the American desk over which she is leaning, hard at work.

  Framed by her blonde curls, her vertically-furrowed forehead, blue eyes and black eyebrows denote intellectual power combined with a certain indecision of character. Only the former is in operation at present, and not even at full tension, for the young doctor of mathematical sciences is curling her carmine lip slightly. That moue indicates disdain for the insufficient difficulty of her task, which a vulgar decoder could do as well, once the key had been discovered.

  It is the key in question that she is consulting periodically, in a little red morocco-bound notebook…a kind of manuscript dictionary. After each page consulted, her fountain pen inscribes another French word between the lines of a piece of paper that features a short paragraph formed of baroque words that are not in any language, but which a initiate would recognize as a conventional code designed to ensure the secrecy of dispatches.

  In the end, she sets down the notebook and the pen, and rereads between the lines of the document her translation “in clear.”

  Erebus II…Erebus II... Situation grave. Cannot wait for arrival of promised destroyer and transport ship. Commander, officers and doctor returning with vessel. You will have account of my mission in six or seven days. Meanwhile, urgent you obtain the attribution, as soon as possible, of island N to France, even at the cost of great sacrifice.

  DE SILFRAGE.

  The decipherer of the cryptogram raises her eyes to the clock-calendar held out to her by a bronze statuette of a nymph, and observes that it is fifteen hundred hours on the eighteenth of September. The vertical pleat of intellectuality on her forehead relaxes; she smiles, with a melancholy that is both tender and anxious, and then takes a little wallet from her handbag, placed on the desk. From that she takes a newspaper-clipping; it is the photograph of the Erebus II taken in Marseilles by the representative of the Excelsior. Among the officers it is possible to make out the shaven face of Dr. Marquin, in conversation with the first mate.

  It is at him that Frédérique-Elsa looks: him, the frank and honest man in whom she has conceived an inexplicable interest…the man she loves, it is now certain, and the love of whom will turn her soul, and perhaps her life, upside-down...

  But she shivers suddenly, and darts an apprehensive glance toward the door that leads to her father’s room. Behind the curtain, the dull sound of footsteps is perceptible, striding back and forth on the thick carpet.

  Her father? No. The man that she designates by that title, out of habit, but beside whom she feels so weak, so alone, so abandoned…the man whom she sees very differently now…feeling closer to the mother whom he has killed with his implacable tyranny.

  Dr. Hans Kohbuler, whose double life no longer has any mystery for her…officially Swiss, and a honorary professor, a world-renowned scientist and originator of medical discoveries, in communication with important people in all the countries of Europe, which he frequents in the casual manner of habit and wealth; in reality, German, the secret head of economic espionage in France… that is the father for whom she has been playing the role of secretary-cryptographer for two years.

  Why does that work inspire such repugnance in her today?

  Until now, technical interest has sustained her. A doctor in mathematical sciences at nineteen, absorbed by the exercise of her precocious and marvelous intelligence, she believed herself permanently free of patriotic prejudices, and worked, like all the great chiefs of secret services, solely for the joy of successfully solving difficult problems, with perfect indifference to the consequences for one nation or another. Moral conventions? Verity here, error elsewhere! She has seen so many countries, crossed so many frontiers, lived under so many different skies, since her childhood and the revelation of her extraordinary mathematical aptitudes! In that rootless international existence, devoid of ties and only having the anonymous decor of palaces for a home, she had become a insensitive monster, a sort of angel of pure intelligence, whose conversation had, the previous year, extracted a cry of admiration from Einstein—an angel of heavens beyond good and evil, a stranger to the normal concerns of humanity, living in a sphere in which mental intoxication replaces and inhibits all other passions.

  It is for that reason that she has submitted without revolt to the sly ascendancy of that pseudo-father—she knows, her mother having told her on her deathbed, that he is not her progenitor—and it is for that reason that she has previously accepted without protest the work of assisting him, always as a cryptographer, in the affair of the false Banque de France banknotes that has been going on successfully for four months, inundating Europe with thousand-franc bills forged in the villa with the concrete cellars that the professor owns in Audresselles, near Wimereaux, printed on the same paper as the Banque, with an ink identical to the true ones, on presses imitative of the Banque’s, down to the last screw.

  Given that, why this repugnance today?

  She has always shrugged her shoulders at the stupidities of love; she is elegant and beautiful, because she is very much a woman, that Amazon of pure speculation, but she has ignored her heart and rejected the homages that have pursued her in society. However, since she has seen Dr. Marquin at the Jolliots in Wimereaux, a secret fiber has quivered within her. She is in love; it is impossible to doubt it. A new soul has been born within her, invasive and despotic: a loving and sensitive soul; that of her mother—“the Frenchwoman,” as Kohbuler calls her...

  Yes, a Frenchwoman, and in love, that is what Frédérique-Elsa ha
s surely become, as well!

  And for a few days, since she has devoted herself, still the docile secretary, to deciphering the coded dispatches intended for the Ministry of Marine and captured by her father’s clandestine antenna, she has experienced a reluctance unknown until now, a veritable distress, in discovering secrets whose divulgence might harm a country that was her mother’s. But she also feels a secret joy is having news of Dr. Marquin…knowing that he has not departed for the Pole…that he is sailing for France…that perhaps she will soon see him again...

  In the next room, the footsteps approach the door. Frédérique makes a gesture, as if to destroy the document—but what good would that do? She renounces it, and limits herself to hiding the cutting from Excelsior.

  Kohbuler comes in, and speaks to her in his guttural French. “Well, Elsa”—he never calls her Frédérique, out of hatred for her dead mother—“what about the dispatch? You’ve taken your time!”

  He studies his daughter with his malachite-green eyes, with a mixture of possessive tenderness and anxiety. He senses, obscurely, that she is getting away from him, that she would disappoint his hopes if he made a wrong move—and even he, the pitiless manipulator of men and international events, hesitates before certain secret cogs of the psychic mechanism, of which he has not yet dared to make use.

  She hands the piece of paper to him, silently.

  “Good. That’s perfect. But what can they have discovered on this island that’s so important? And we still lack the geographical location! It was a good idea of mine to put one of our men on the Erebus II—it was that story of the so-called scientific goals of the expedition that put me off. That Marquin is more artful than he seems—or perhaps even he didn’t know the truth. But that cruise had another purpose than the scientific, that’s obvious. Another six days? The League of Nations won’t pronounce a judgment before then, and we can delay its decision if necessary. But to make sacrifices in order to obtain the island? Hmm! We need to know what it’s about before getting involved. Messages have escaped us, undoubtedly, which specified it. They must have them at the Ministry, but agent K12 has been burned, for the moment, and his successor hasn’t yet been able to introduce himself in his stead. Rivier’s also up to date, of course. We need to make Rivier talk. You’re going to find him, Elsa, and use any possible means…any. You can say, by way of introduction, that you’re interested in Dr. Marquin.”