The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  We stopped. Monsieur Vandermolen immediately responded to the appeal.

  “What is it?” asked the doctor.

  “Come on,” said Monsieur Vandermolen. “Someone’s asking you for a consultation. It seems that there’s a patient here. Let’s go see!”

  We made a detour toward the head, which explained something to the doctor. It was the hirsute face of an old mariner, with a white mane under an old discolored cloth cap. When we came closer we saw that he was in a hole, like the entrance to a cave in the dune, on the other side of a hillock of sand that hid the sea. Another human burrow!

  As we arrived, the head sank back into the hole and he doctor followed. Out of curiosity, I went down behind him, while our companions plunged into the long grass.

  The hole was narrow and carefully lined with strong wooden beams. There were a dozen steps to descend, and we found ourselves in a deep chamber, illuminated—if one can use the word—by oblique shafts rising up to the dune.

  When I had adapted somewhat to the gloom, I saw that the room bore a strong resemblance to a ship’s cabin, with bunk beds on one side. A large green plank attaché to one of the walls of the cave-cabin bore the inscription in red letters: Gredel-Vlissingen.

  “Yes,” said the doctor, on seeing my astonishment. “They fished up the cabin of their old boat and reassembled it here, piece by piece...”

  “Shipwreck?”

  “Sunk! For want of a house, also destroyed, the family lives in here—what remains of the family, at least: one old woman, one young, one old man and four children. Since when? I don’t know. They’re worthy fisher folk of Flessingue, who washed up here and hollowed out this burrow...”

  The family surrounded us; the children still had their masks on, except for a very small one, who was in bed.

  “Let’s see what’s wrong...”

  An old woman, bizarrely dressed in the remains of a Zeeland costume, explained to the doctor and Monsieur Vendermolen that the child, too young to understand the necessity of the mask, had struggled for a long time before allowing it to be applied to his face, and then had taken it off too quickly, and seemed very ill.

  The doctor examined him, muttering.

  “We’ve lost a lot of children like that—they’re afraid of the mask, they don’t like it…one can’t explain the necessity to them…the gas comes and they succumb.”

  “Abominable!”

  “I knew how to cause maladies,” groaned the doctor, “almost all maladies, but I can’t, I don’t know how, to cure them! I tell these worthy folk that they have to try not to catch anything, that’s the best thing. No medicaments—nothing at all! I can find herbs, but that’s all. It’s a long time since I’ve been to search the ruins of the pharmacies of Harlem…there’s no longer anything there. Let’s see, all that I can do…let’s see…I still have a few old marshmallow roots, well, he’ll drink a tisane, lots of tisane. That’s the whole of my prescription. Go on, old chap, tisane for the little one, and confidence, confidence! I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Is the child very sick?” I asked the doctor, when we were back in the daylight.

  “It’s quite serious; he’s breathed in a little of the gas; he’ll be ill for three weeks, at least. The tisane always does the bronchi good. Marshmallow, borage, a few herbs—that’s all I possess in my pharmaceutical arsenal to struggle against no matter what indisposition or malady, and…well, the hygienic conditions in which we’re vegetating aren’t very good, as you’ve seen. The most important thing is to avoid starvation…I hope we’ll eat this evening. Oh, if you’d arrived last week you’d have had, like us, to forget one meal in two!”

  I could not dissimulate a grimace. Hunger had been clawing at me for two hours.

  “Aha!” the doctor went on, when we had caught up with our companions. “There’ll be rabbit! Our hunters have emptied the snares set in the dunes. How many? Only two? These dune rabbits have become very wary—we’ll have to try fishing...”

  The Peruvian lieutenant and the Dutchman had rejoined us. They showed us two fine rabbits, with satisfaction, which Monsieur Vandermolen made me feel and weigh in my hand. There had been a third, but it had been spoiled by the gas.

  “Well nourished,” he said. “There’s no shortage of grass—but even so, they’re not very plump. It’s the worry, Monsieur, the chagrin, the desolation of the poor creatures. Oh, the dune rabbits I once knew, so full of joy—one saw them in bands, entire tribes, bounding through the long grass and the violet flowers, warming themselves in the sun outside their warrens, watching the boats go by and sniffing the sea breeze! They were pullulating then. Today, you only catch glimpses of them; they only risk themselves furtively; they stay underground, quivering with terror in the depths of their holes...”

  He sighed profoundly.

  “Poor old dune rabbits! The cannonades that demolished the towns, pulverized the villages and turned all of nature upside-down have addled their brains. They thought it was all for them. ‘Humans have become very nasty,’ they said to themselves. ‘Once they were content to annoy us from time to time with nice little rifles, which, with their little lead pellets, only stung the imprudent, frolicking around the hunters’ feet. Now, they attack us with big canons, fire at us with heavy artillery, bomb us from on high with airplanes and send armored fleets to bombard us from the sea. And all the nations of the world join in! Instead of gangs of joyful children running through the long grass, and young Friesians or Zeelanders coiffed in lace, with golden curls over their foreheads and coral necklaces, chatting with their lovers under the beautiful windmills that caught the clouds with their great arms, turning up there in the sky, there are evil encounters everywhere, people of all colors, all armed, all hungry, and all falling upon us! And the Hellish flames that they hurl at us! And the asphyxiating gases that they drop on us. How wretched we are! How can we escape? We dig our warrens deeper, but in vain; their machines collapse everything. Humans, without a doubt, have sworn to exterminate our race! After all, what have we done to Heaven to merit these misfortunes, we poor dune rabbits? Oh, humans have become exceedingly nasty creatures!’”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, “the poor rabbit of the dunes is quite right; the nastiest beast in the world is the human beast!”

  “The superman! The superbrute! The Prussian supergorilla!” cried Monsieur Vandermolen.

  VII. A city in smithereens.

  The warren under the rubble.

  We walked for some time with heads bowed, paying close attention in order not to stumble into a hole or step on some grenade. The doctor was muttering into his beard; I heard him murmur, through pursed lips: “Hou! Whorish science! Ferocious divinity! Pallas Athene, goddess of somber madness!”

  The sun was setting, striping the landscape with long red streaks against a yellow background I perceived strange mounds in that direction, outlined in black against the bloody stripes, desiccated and twisted trees, the distant skeleton of a large murdered windmill, which seemed to be oscillating in the wind, and whose arms were agitating in gestures of desperate protest.

  “We’re here,” said the doctor, stopping his wrathful monologue. “This is our home...”

  His hand indicated a few heaps of rubble slightly higher than the rest: the remains of the Villa Vandermolen, already invaded by brambles and nettles, and all kinds of weeds.

  “I thought you were taking me to Harlem.”

  “We’re here.”

  “What!”

  “Oh, not in the heart of the city—that’s a little further on. You see that lake of sorts from which islets of ruins protrude; that’s…no, that was the river…behind it is…no, that was the railway station…you go…no, you went straight past that to the Groot-Markt, the main square in front of the Town Hall…once... Here, this is the house of our friend Vandermolen, rich ship-owner. He’ll tell you how many vessels he owned; he’ll tell you their names, their distant routes, and what he knows about the tragic destiny of every one... But he’s sti
ll the richest of us all, since he’s our landlord, and in his munificence, he lodges us without demanding any rent...”

  “Come in, then,” said Monsieur Vandermolen.

  “That was easy to say, but which way? By looking more closely I saw what remained of one of the gateposts, where there had once been a sumptuous grille, for one long upright and a few spirals of wrought iron were still dangling from the hinges.

  We did not, however, go that way. Monsieur Vandermolen made us turn right, behind a pile of stones arranged as neatly as possible on top of one another in order to frame—or rather, to shield—the opening of a low vault.

  “The main courtyard of the Vandermolen House,” the American billionaire said to me. “Before the bombardments, the house must have been rather fine. It’s the cellars that we now live in—and we’re among the best accommodated in the town, as you’ll see.”

  Before going down I paraded my gaze around. Yes, the house must have been large and well-to-do, and even of noble architecture, to judge by certain items of sculpted debris rolling under our feet: an old sixteenth-century town house, its date revealed by an antique coat of arms, almost intact, in heavy sculpture, still framed by a few bricks.

  “The family crest,” Monsieur Vandermolen told me. “We’ve been living here since the times of William the Silent!”11

  Poor old defunct mansion! Of the façade—or, rather, the four walls—nothing remained but the substructure of the ground floor, jaggedly sliced or dismantled by the catastrophes, on to which substructure the beams of the roof had descended, to pose obliquely, considerably dislocated, but still retained a few skylights and a lovely weather-vane leaning sideways in a melancholy fashion.

  There had been a great many breaches in the walls, and large holes in the tiles of the roof—more holes than tiles—but it all formed nevertheless a semblance of cover for the house, along with a great many climbing plants, binding the overly fragmented sections together with their vegetation.

  I decided to go down. We found ourselves in the old basements of the house, also considerably disturbed. In one large room, almost intact, there was a kind of stove compounded out of pieces of rusty pipe, slotted together by ad hoc kitchen-fitters. Monsieur Vandermolen told me that it was the common room, the drawing room, the kitchen and the dining room. All the furniture that could be seen was a long patched-up table, a few more or less rickety chairs, and whitewood crates able to substitute for them. A sideboard fabricated from disparate pieces of wood by well-meaning carpenters devoid, I have to say, of any talent, contained plates and various kitchen utensils.

  I felt so horribly tired that I let myself fall on to a chair.

  “You’re at home here, but you need to see the installation while there’s still enough light,” Monsieur Vandermolen told me, trying to haul me to my feet.

  In fact, night was falling and the house was scarcely illuminated by the twilight coming through two dubious openings that filtered the air currents rather than providing light.

  It was necessary to make a tour of the property, visit the various “apartments”—as the doctor said as he pushed me into the obscurity—and admire the ingenuity of the accommodations.

  “This is my bedroom,” said Monsieur Vandermolen, showing me a redoubt that was six feet square at the most, furnished with one chair and a mattress placed on a student’s iron bed-frame, extended at the foot by two planks placed on logs.

  I had certainly learned at the Pole to do without luxury, and I could be content with the strictly necessary, but the simplicity of that cell, which appeared to be damp, made me grimace. So the wealthy Monsieur Vandermolen was lodged like that!

  But wait and see the rest...

  To the right and left of the box reserved for the master of the house there were two other tiny rooms, one for the doctor and the other shared by the Peruvian lieutenant and the artilleryman-professor Jollimay.

  “We all have mattresses,” said the doctor. “You’ll have one too—that’s a refinement of comfort that has become rather difficult to find, but we’ll find you one. It will doubtless seem a little hard, as flat as a pancake, but it’s still better than the planks, or even a bed of brushwood.”

  The doctor’s mattress was posed on a wooden frame of the same manufacture as the dining room sideboard, but the one employed by the Peruvian and Jollimay was supported on the ruins of an old brick oven. Evidently, we were in the former kitchen of the Vandermolen house.

  Next—which is to say behind a few heaps of stones—there was the debris of a staircase that no longer went up to anything, a slightly larger room served as a dormitory for several of our companions. Proudly, the rifleman Mohammed showed us a kind of shelf in a corner, on which bizarre weapons were stacked.

  “I made all that,” he said. “Since the rifles are broken, and there are no more cartridges, there’s nothing but bayonets!”

  He put into my hands a kind of wooden club with a heavy lump of iron at the end. I perceived half a dozen different kinds of club, artistically fabricated, plus two or three with longer shafts, similar to the maces of the Middle Ages, with heads bristling with huge nails.

  Mohamed only had a hook instead of a right hand, but he wielded those weapons in his left hand, and sketched whirling movements with dexterity.

  As I was straining under their weight, the negro handed me a much lighter weapon.

  “For the ladies!” he said, with a broad laugh that showed all his teeth. “Good for tapping the Boches, when the time comes.”

  “But these are prehistoric implements,” I said to Dr. Christiansen.

  “Well, doesn’t everything here seem to you to be prehistoric? Don’t we live in caves of a sort, like the men of the earliest times? Caves made by human hands instead of natural cavities—but that’s the only difference, as regards habitation. As for lifestyle, aren’t we leading the existence of prehistoric troglodytes? And yet, prehistoric people, save for occasional bad moments, certainly lived much more tranquilly than us, the post-historic people, who are tracked everywhere, always under the menace of enormous, strange and complex dangers, ready to fall upon our poor heads everywhere. Oh, how the comparison turns to the advantage of the first humans! Oh, how they’d hate to live with us, the brave people of the prehistoric caverns, who had nothing to dread but bears, or a few other honest predators deprived of malice, almost inoffensive by comparison with the scientific and kultured biped of today! Let’s study, if you like, their real existence, with the authentic data that we’ve obtained by digging, and let’s compare...”

  “Here’s the ladies’ bedroom, on the upper floor,” the Dutchman said, cutting short the doctor’s dissertation. “It’s a little more comfortable, naturally...”

  The “upper floor” was only a few feet above the ground, at the top of a heap of bricks arranged as a stairway. As for comfort, I widened my eyes, but I could see nothing more sumptuous than the other cubby-holes. Yes, though—there was a fragment of broken mirror fixed to the wall, a zinc water-jug and a washing-basin on an old packing-case. Feminine coquetry never loses its rights. I also perceived a flower-pot with a clump of carnations, which added a bright note to the depths of the kind of ventilation-shaft through which a little light filtered. Yes, that was Mademoiselle Vitalis’ private garden.

  I cast a curious glance over another crate serving as a work-table. Let’s take a look at the “ladies’ handiwork” of these topsy-turvy times. No, no embroidery, no crochet work, no petit point on the work table, but socks of coarse fabric that only form a random assemblage of patches repairs in all colors and all thicknesses, with reinforcements in rabbit-skin here and there, alongside a galosh in the process of fabrication, and then a kind of overcoat in goatskin, to which had been attached, with string, the sleeves of an old jacket made of coarse fabric.

  “That’s a fur for me,” the doctor told me. “The ladies are very ingenious, and admirably clever at making the best of our meager resources, or the finds we make from time to time among the ruins.
Thus, we were too poorly furnished for socks last winter, which was particularly harsh, but when we were searching the pharmacy one day for cough medicine, we had the good fortune to stumble on the debris of a cupboard still containing the footwear of an entire family… somewhat worn, but not too badly burned or damaged. What a windfall! That was worth as much as the pharmacy for protection against colds! We pay great attention to shoes, because they get terribly worn walking over all these bits of stone!”

  Alas, I looked down at my footwear, made out of sealskin at the Pole. My fur leggings still had some wear in them; I could count on those—but the shoes weren’t up to much.

  The doctor understood what I was thinking. “Bah!” he said. “You can find moccasins for the time being, and Mademoiselle Vitalis can patch up your shoes comfortably.” He went on: “Ah, the finds! The hunt through the ruins for things once scorned, but precious today, on which one puts one’s hand! They’re our great joy, sometimes mixed with melancholy when we happen upon little familiar things once of everyday use, the delicacies of the life of old, for forgotten today!”

  “Señor,” said the Spaniard, who had followed us, “I’d give ten years…no, let’s be reasonable, six months…of my life for a bar of chocolate. God chocolate! Oh, carràmba!”

  “Perhaps we’ll find some one day, combing through the rubble of that big grocery in the Rue de Nassau.”

  “It’s already been searched over and over again by everyone. I’ve searched hard!”

  “Who can tell? Didn’t we carry out another fruitful dig last month? That was one of the finds that give me the greatest pleasure…more even then the footwear! A little bottle of gumballs, not spoiled at all, and an intact tin containing thirteen sugar lumps! You can taste one—there’s some left. Oh, I need that for the little patient—marshmallow with gumballs...”

  “I’ll take it to him, Doctor,” said Mademoiselle Vitalis.