“That’s good, my child—you trot like a goat, you go so quickly. Above all, don’t forget your mask!”
VIII. The Boutique of Scourges and Abominations.
I had been shown everything in the encampment of my new friends. It was now a matter of installing us, the young Polynesian and me—since, for an indeterminate time, we would have to share our accommodation.
By clearing away a few beams, Monsieur Vandermolen found us a little corner, where two sumptuous beds were laid down, for we had a mattress each that was not too hard. There was only one available blanket, which was for me, a man of mature years; young Marcel Blondeau had to be content with a canvas sack, with his clothing for an eiderdown.
I was still stunned by the day’s events, during which my mind had, so to speak, been hammered by so many shocks and extraordinary revelations. My brain was truly seething in my head.
What? I am dreaming? Or am I being deceived, made a laughing-stock? All this is too implausible. It’s inadmissible. It’s impossible…yes, impossible! Can the world have been changed, overturned, disrupted to this extent? What about civilization, then? What about the general softening of mores? The fraternization of races, the fusion of peoples? That was all people were talking about when I left. And the thinkers, the scientists, radiant humanity? No, I don’t understand! I’m lost. Into what cavern have I tumbled? These people are mad, fit for a straitjacket! On the other hand, these ruins, the shells, the toxic gases....come on, come on, it’s necessary to clarify all that, this evening, or I’m the one who’ll be going completely insane tomorrow morning!
I spotted Dr. Christiansen and Monsieur Vandermolen sitting in a corner of the common room, facing one another, on old packing cases, looking at one another pensively, without saying a word.
The others were occupied in various tasks: the New Zealander and the Peruvian lieutenant were skinning the rabbits captured in the dunes; the rifleman Mohammed was arranging his rats on a spit in order to roast them; the Spaniard was making faggots for the fire; Madame de Vitalis was preparing her saucepans. As for the Swiss artilleryman, Monsieur Jollimay, he had his nose plunged in a little book. As I approached him, he looked up and handed me the volume.
“It’s a manual of expert gardening—in Dutch, but I’m beginning to understand it. Do you know anything about gardening? Me, I’m just a simple professor of history, not good for much. We’ve cleared patches of garden here and there, planted with potatoes, but there’s still space. I’d like to sow haricot beans. Is there still time?”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking about something else.
I took a chair and went to sit down with the doctor and Monsieur Vandermolen. The young man from Polynesia, who seemed as tormented as me and never left me for a moment, remained standing behind me, attentively.
“Monsieur,” I said, putting my hand on the doctor’s arm, “we have time to talk tranquilly now. I’m anxious—terribly anxious—finally to have a clear and detailed explanation of al the somber revelations you’ve sketched out for me. I’ve been living in a nightmare since my disembarkation this morning, a frightful nightmare…ever since you saved my life in the midst of incidents incomprehensible for me....”
The doctor raised his head, apparently looking at me without seeing me, like a man completely absorbed in his thoughts.
“But first of all,” I went on, “please excuse the vivacity of the protestations that I can’t help expressing. How can I let your blasphemies against science pass tranquilly? You see me scandalized and indignant. I shiver, the more I think about it. What, you—a man of study, a man of science, a medical man, a physician, you...”
“A man of science…repentant!” exclaimed the doctor, returning to himself.
“Repentant! Get away!” I exclaimed in my turn. “Come on, Doctor, that’s a further blasphemy!”
“Although I don’t have on my conscience any invention having, to any degree whatsoever, produced or added to the sadness and misery of humankind, I’m making honorable amends, all the same, on behalf of others...imprudent, unconscious, if you wish...whose works and research, without any evil intention, I admit, have nevertheless, in a hundred of our short years, absolutely perturbed the world and precipitated humankind into the formidable cataclysm under which we’re struggling. Woe, woe everywhere! A Deluge of frightful evils, a flood of atrocious calamities, a general annihilation of humankind! The author of the evil? Quite simply, that which you proudly call progress by means of science! Accursed Science, that slut Science!”
The worthy doctor became animated; his bushy eyebrows were bristling, his long beard jutted forward with every one of those abominable affirmations.
I got carried away too. Neither the Pole nor age had chilled me.
“Monsieur,” I said, severely, seizing his hand. “Be sure that I am still full of gratitude to you for having collected and saved a poor shipwreck victim, but there is no longer anything here but two men of science, arguing, contesting…courteously...”
“Do as I have done, repent! As much as you, I once admired, and followed, alas, as a fervent disciple, the masters of that satanic science. Well, remorse is crushing me! With the energy of conviction, I protest against that accursed science; I accuse it formally of being the great culpable, the frightful criminal...”
“You’re continuing to blaspheme! On the contrary—calm down, look harder, and see the uninterrupted march of humankind, guided toward progress by beneficent science, that increasingly rapid ascension toward the luminous summits…a magnificent and sublime spectacle! That course of Progress, the scientists of all nations spending their lives in laboratories, dogged in the study of natural forces, clarifying phenomena and laws of nature, extracting from nature all her secrets, in order that grateful peoples might profit from them...”
“Contrition!” said the doctor. “Remorse!”
Poor Monsieur Vandermolen bowed his head, with a defeated expression, but the young man from Polynesia, standing behind him, seemed even more frightened than consternated.
“...And discoveries succeeding one another incessantly, multiplying, ever more important, discoveries leading incessantly to new discoveries. Come on, instead of crying anathema against science, tell me about its new conquests! Since I left Europe, it has moved on, radiant science, it must, continuing its splendid work, have accumulated marvels, realizing yet more, ever more, new dreams, opening ever vaster horizons... I’m waiting—speak, talk, tell, bring me up to date!”
“Indeed, indeed, she has moved on, more and otherwise than you think. She has sprinted, the slut! Let’s talk about her marvels, then! Let’s talk about that famous ‘course of Progress’ with which our brains were stuffed on the college benches, cramming us with all dangerous nonsense and forcing us to swallow the entire boutique of Academic poisons! You’ll see! You’ll see!
“Progress is a pretty word, agreed, but first of all, at what point is it necessary to suspend the forward march toward the promised land? On what plateau of the mountain is it necessary to stop? At what moment does fortunate and fecund progress become dangerous and harmful momentum? At what moment does that sought-after and blessed progress become, with its suspect benefits, a producer of unknown evils and a generator of unprecedented sufferings? How does one perceive, in the intoxication of discovery, the horrors that those discoveries and marvelous inventions are about to unleash? How does one discern the danger, perceive the unintended consequences, the side-effects of our marvels?
“Impossible! One never can…no one thinks about the danger, in any case! Oh, wretched blind men, you don’t see it, you can’t divine it, but some little discovery, insignificant in itself, or even bringing certain immediate real advantages that are welcomed joyfully, bears within it, without anyone suspecting it, the seed of frightful misfortunes with an imminent term! You ought to weep and tremble…but in the meantime, the Academies hand out crowns, and the scientists congratulate one another...
“However, I know one, at least, who
repented: Nobel, an inventor of explosive for good motives, Monsieur, for great works of industrial transformation...the good motive! Yes, it’s always the good motive they invoke! And after a while, it turns out that one has worked primarily for the bad. That one, the culpable Nobel, tried to redeem himself by founding prizes of all the arts, literary and scientific…yes, scientific again, decidedly, the poor fellow hadn’t fully understood!”
I had tried to interrupt, but he wasn’t an easy man to stop. “I protest!” I cried. “Wait for the dawn that your eyes don’t yet divine! Wait for the sun! Be certain that from all these discoveries, new enlightenment will surge forth for the good of humankind!”
He sniggered. “The final conflagration of the world. Mene Tekel Upharsin! We’re there, my good Monsieur. It’s the liquidation of humankind! People have talked many times about the bankruptcy of science, impatient for change, discontented by petty inconveniences... Bankruptcy? Oh, may it please Heaven! Alas, pitiless Heaven did not want it.” He raised his long arms into the air and repeated: “Bankruptcy? Bankruptcy? Yes, bankruptcy for the real wellbeing of unfortunate humankind!”
I tried to get a few words in: “The immense progress realized thanks to her, in all the orders of human activity: locomotion, steam, electricity, aviation, chemistry...”
“Have only served to furnish humans with new and more ferocious weapons with which to destroy one another, more and more formidable means of instantaneous and devastating aggression. To the pillory with science! Certainly, war has been something sad and horrible at all times, but our science has come, and she has multiplied a hundredfold…what am I saying?...a hundredthousandfold, the horrors and the terrors of war; she has developed, multiplied and generalized the possibilities and the facilities of massacre, at any distance and over the widest range. She has so altered and aggravated the conditions of the struggles of nations, so frightfully spoiled, uglified and hideously soiled the horrors of warfare, that the wars of old seem no more than simple lively scuffles, the battles of old a game of brutal heroism...
“Yes, there they are, the marvels of Science, the benefits of Science, the surprises of Science! Hurrah! Appreciate and admire, humans crushed by Her! There happened to be in this world a nation of prey, a ferociously covetous race, which has divined, which has understood, the advantage to be obtained from these famous marvels, and why has slyly heaped up all the weapons, combining all the new, as-yet-unemployed means that that accursed science was able to furnish…and when the moment came, the eagle-vulture of Prussia flapped its wings, and the entire race, proud of the invincibility, rushed joyfully to the slaughter, to the immense scramble for the land, the property and the riches of neighboring peoples, coveted for ages.”
His beard trembled; he had a coughing fit. Jollimay and the others surrounded him, and nodded their heads approvingly.
“The progress of locomotion, railways, the automobile, O marvels! Charming, the circular voyages in luxury trains! Very agreeable, the softly padded automobile that transports you at eighty kilometers an hour through the countryside. Delightful, all that! But that is what has permitted the gathering and rapid transportation of those armies of millions of soldiers, with their immense and scientific weaponry, and superb engines of destruction brought to the peak of perfection and enormity, the fabulous stocks of munitions and necessary food supplies, and the regular circulation between the militarized factories of the rear and the and the armed factories of the front, of the nourishment of men and cannons!
“Without those modern means of locomotion, none of that would be possible, and the most formidable wars would continue to be, as they were in the past, nothing but the collision of one big army—an enormous army of two of three hundred thousand men at the most—and another army of similar strength, with the result that after three or four pitched battles, the decision would be clear and everything would be settled. O good old times of innocence!”
“Yes,” said Jollimay, the professor reappearing beneath the artilleryman, “We all thought and said such stupid things once, swallowed in good faith and made others swallow terrible blunders! Where is the time of the Medieval armies of fifteen thousand men, of the poor Middle Ages that we made so Dark? Oh mild calumniated Middle Ages, I make honorable amends! Doubtless those fifteen thousand men could ravage the country over which they battled. Certainly! I agree entirely—but they did not all have thirty thousand arms, and they only ravaged for fifteen thousand men!
“Listen! In the sixteenth century, one of the captains of your king Francois I—I remember having once read about it in a journal—proposed the creation of a national army, constituted at a rate of one man per village…yes, imagine that, a conscription of one man per village: a volunteer to serve for three years and to remain available for disposal, in return for certain advantages, in his hearth, for a few years more. And that good captain would render himself strong enough, with twenty-five thousand men on each frontier, to render France unassailable! What do you think? Those times are far away, alas—a thousand times alas!”
“Yes, indeed! Yes, indeed! Poor Middle Ages, Monsieur Jollimay,” said the doctor. “Brave centuries and good men!”
I remained speechless for a moment. That damnable doctor had assailed me with such arguments that I was weakening under so many violent blows. I tried to pull myself together, though, and furnish a few objections to that anathematization of great Science, which was making me suffer cruelly.
“But medicine, Doctor, medicine—think of everything that the research of physiological scientists, chemists and bacteriologists has produced in the course of the last few decades: discoveries of genius overturning the old ideas of the quacks of the past, and coming marvelously to the aid of humans in their struggle against maladies once incurable and all the scourges that besieged...”
“Let’s talk about those discoveries! Excellent intentions, no doubt! One finds a microbe, one cultivates it, one weakens it and forces it to combat itself—that’s very nice; one passes for a benefactor of humankind. But from those discoveries, other doctors, and other chemists, obtain advantages with another goal entirely. We have them now, those maladies and those scourges, they’re thwarted, and we have those germs and those bacilli at our disposal, but they’re also a redoubtable arsenal, and we can draw new munitions from them for battle!
“We can put those microbes in bottles, after having rendered them as virulent as possible, and look! A new artillery created. Look! A medical corps no longer defensive but offensive, to launch against the enemy! Do you want scourges to ravage a city, an enemy capital, a province? To destroy the population of a coveted region or to suppress an inconvenient race, an entire population of men, women and children—even animals, if you wish, for we also have bacteria with their intention—to ruin and poison an entire race, in its constitution and its physiology, to suppress its future and clear it away? If you want shells loaded with these microbial machine-guns, your doctor-chemists will furnish you with all there is of the best and the worst!
“And that’s what they have made of the beneficent discovery of the naïve researcher who only thought of curing the maladies of poor human beings. He scarcely suspected that the worst of all our maladies is the malady of science…and it’s that one of which we’re dying.”
“Bah!” said the aviator Miraud, softly. “Your encumbering and invasive science, your progress turning back tranquility, has made the world, that poor ball, so ugly, flatly banal or outrageously hideous, that I almost feel consolation at the thought of its demolition. I don’t regret anything…anything, except perhaps, for my arm...”
IX. A soirée at the Vandermolen house.
“To table!” put in the voice of the charming Mademoiselle Vitalis. “To table, Messieurs—that’s six times I’ve called you without your hearing me.”
She had slipped her head between mine and that of the enraged doctor, at the moment when both of us, having risen to our feet, features contracted and eyes ablaze, we looked as if we were ready
to devour one another, him in the fury of his blasphemous maledictions, and me in the energy of the protestations that he would not let me express, and which I felt literally choking me.
“When the doctor is in one of his black moods,” the young woman added, cheerfully, “even dinner doesn’t succeed in getting him out of it. It is, however, a good moment of tranquility, after days that are often hard, and if the dinner is good, as it is today, one blossoms…come on, Messieurs, it’s necessary to blossom!”
The doctor seemed to swallow, with some difficulty, the flood of maledictions that still wanted to emerge. He closed his mouth, looked at the young woman with wild eyes, took a deep breath, and said: “Oh, yes…oh, yes…but…well…and the little patient in the dunes…it’s necessary to take him...”
“His medicine? He has it; I’ve just taken it to him. They’ll give him his marshmallow; he took a gumball in front of me. His mother says he’s much better, your visit alone reduced his fever. To thank you, the father gave me two whitings he caught yesterday...”
“That will be a dish for tomorrow,” said Madame Vitalis. “Let’s go, Messieurs—to table!”
Madame Vitalis was right. I should have had a terrible hunger; so many emotions should have hollowed me out profoundly—and yet, I no longer felt the appetite that had been clawing me a little while ago. It was the fault of that damnable Dr. Christiansen. Anyway, to table all the same!
The places had been set on an old extending table, resting on three solid sculpted legs, with a fourth meriting les confidence in simple white wood—a table extended even further at one end by planks set on trestles.
There was no luxury in the home of our rich ship-owner, no flowers on the tablecloth of the rich tulip-collector—and, in fact, no tablecloth. And what a miscellany of cutlery and crockery! Let’s not talk about it: in that heap of ruins, everything was poverty and dilapidation.
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 11