The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  In my capacity as a stranger or a guest, I found myself seated between the doctor and our host, Monsieur Vandermolen. My young companion was installed facing us, between the two ladies…and I saw a very animated conversation engaged between them, rapidly. The young man from Polynesia, instead of displaying the slightest depression, took on the appearance of a man at a salon, disengaged from all care, and I saw him leaning very amiably toward one or the other of his neighbors to say something gracious to the young woman, or something polite to the old one, like a guest at a bourgeois dinner in ordinary times.

  Madame Vitalis had made us a vegetable soup that was more succulent than abundant. Afterwards, we had a few snails, a mutton stew without any mutton, and then rabbit fricasseed without any oil, and a salad, likewise without any oil. One could fill up on potatoes, which were eaten instead of bread.

  A few gourmets, among them the Senegalese rifleman, Monsieur Jollimay and the Spanish businessman, did full honor to the roasted rats. My appetite began to return. I devoured my portion. The doctor was alarmed, and remarked to me that the dinner was a veritable feast, and that I ought not to expect such plentiful nourishment every day.

  And I had been sighing for such a long time at the Pole for white bread and civilization! We had no bread to eat at the Pole, and I had dreamed so much during our return voyage about crusty croissants, tender brioches, etc. etc...

  As the doctor remained somber and mute, I tried to make Monsieur Vandermolen talk, and to extract a few items of information to verify what the doctor had said, but it was a waste of time. He talked to me about his vessels, four great steamers torpedoed at Flessingue, two others sunk by mines off Dunkerque. He described his tulip fields in their heyday, and reeled off lists of the names of particularly rare tulips—or ships, I’m not entirely sure. Similarly, I couldn’t tell whether he most regretted the ships, the tulips or his family manor, in the ruins of which we were sitting.

  As I persisted in lavishing condolences upon him, he showed me, hanging on the wall behind us, opposite the kitchen stove, a little painting grossly framed with white pieces of curtain-road.

  “No more than that,” he said, “for consolation for the ships, the house and the tulips. Franz Hals, Monsieur, the great Franz Hals…a masterpiece!”

  “What! What is it?”

  “Franz Hals from the city Museum, Monsieur—a little fragment. The Museum and all the Franz Halses burned, along with the City Hall and the city. Fire of Boche joy! I found in the rubble that last little fragment of a Banquet of the Civic Guard.12 I cut it out of the burned canvas, neatly, cleaned it and framed it. The last masterpiece!”

  I got up to take a look. It was, in fact, the head of a handsome officer of the arquebusiers, with a wide collar. One could also see a tankard with a hand and the rutilant nose of a second officer. But the fire had cooked or seared the colors to such an extent that the Franz Hals looked more like a Rembrandt.

  So that was all that remained of the magnificent Franz Hals room, the glory of the Harlem Museum?

  The Dutchman nodded his head sadly.

  “Yes, perhaps all that remains of the entire Dutch school, for what has become of our other Museums? Have they not suffered the same fate, gone up in flames in the same fashion? I don’t know for sure...”

  “Let’s talk about this excellent fricassee instead,” the French aviator said, from the other side of the table. “You see, Monsieur, that there are still good moments in life! The rabbits of the dunes are nourished on almost-marine grass, which gives them their flavor. Oh, if only we could catch more—but they’re so suspicious, the brigands!”

  “The rat possesses even more flavor,” said Monsieur Jollimay. “I advise you to sample some, since it might be the case that you’ll have to, some day. Would you like a thigh?”

  I thanked him, but put it off for another time; my stomach still had scruples.

  And during the whole of that soirée, no one talked about anything but food, the game that they hoped to catch with the snares, the fish that they hoped to net on the sand at low tide, and the best way of cooking octopus. And the carrots and turnips that were looking so hopeful, and the spinach sown in a certain mine-crater, the salad vegetables that it was necessary not to allow marauders to pick. Or the work of excavation secretly undertaken in a cellar in the Ridderstraat, in order to try to tunnel into the basements of a block of ruins where there ought to have existed, before the catastrophe, a large store-room of comestibles: tins, jars of jam, cooking oil, other groceries, etc., etc. All those etceteras made the mouth water, as they competed in detailing their hopes for good finds.

  I imagine that there must have been conversations of the same genre on the raft of the Medusa. At the North Pole, where we had had the meat of bears and seals at our discretion, we talked about pâté de foie gras, cream tarts à la Savarin, candied apples, jam and pineapple...

  Fatigue overwhelmed me. As soon as my hunger was almost satisfied, I felt my head spinning and my eyes closing involuntarily. I could no longer think. Monsieur Vandermolen perceived that, for I almost slumped on his shoulder.

  “Come on,” he said. “Bed, sleep—very good!”

  Dr. Christiansen, compatriot of Hamlet, did not add: “Perhaps to dream?” He was still frowning, lost in his bitter and furious sadness.

  Two minutes later, I don’t know how, I was lying down, fully dressed, on my mattress, and sinking into sleep. The benevolent Dutchman covered me with a blanket and put the gas mask down beside my face, crying recommendations into my ear that I heard rather vaguely, as if they were coming from a very distant voice.

  Good sleep! My mattress, I saw the next day, was as flat as a pancake and no softer than a billiard table, but I found it so pleasant! All the lugubrious news, and all the frightful discoveries of the day were absolutely effaced from my mind. I slept, and I found the sleep delightful.

  And I dreamed too: gentle, pleasant dreams, which completed the relaxation of my overexcited brain and calmed my nerves.

  I was in Paris, at home; I rediscovered my armchair, my work-table and the divan on which I loved to reflect while smoking cigarettes. I found my collection of butterflies, and my nephew too. Then I went to a great banquet held in honor of my return; there were speeches in which people said to most flattering things; ladies covered me with flowers and ministers brought me various decorations. I heard salvos of applause loud enough to make the banquet hall collapse...

  Only one thing astonished me: almost all the women had a wooden leg and were missing an arm.

  How happy I was; how sweet and beautiful civilized life seemed!

  That lasted for hours, and suddenly, just like that, I woke up. There was noise outside…more salvos of applause, no doubt. As I said, it could have cause the hall to crumble, with that truly excessive enthusiasm...I could actually hear stones falling...

  It was light, but a dubious, smoky daylight. I didn’t recognize my apartment. Where was I, then? In a Rembrandt painting, no doubt about it…yes, exactly that…let’s see, was I still dreaming? That smoke, those faces…or rather, those shadows I glimpsed, that bizarre interior…but where was I, then?

  Oh! Ah! Oh! I uttered a loud cry and closed my eyes again. Adieu, my sweet dreams: I fell back into the hideous nightmare of reality.

  People came running in response to my cry. I heard wooden beams hitting the ground.

  There was Madame Vitalis first, then Monsieur Jollimay, then the worthy Senegalese, and finally Dr. Christiansen.

  “Well, my poor Monsieur,” said Madame Vitalis, “are you ill? You mustn’t be, you see...”

  “No, no,” I said, “I’m not ill...it’s not me, it’s the planet. Unless I’ve gone mad. I’d like that! Yes, mad…completely mad…utterly mad...how glad I’d be! Madame, my good friends, I implore you, tell me that I’m insane, demented, unhinged…I demand cold showers and a straitjacket!”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that,” said Madame Vitalis. “You’re not mad, I assure you, but you h
ave to pull yourself together. From time to time, we all have little moments like that, little crises…and then it passes...”

  “Slight depression,” said the doctor. “That was inevitable: shock to the brain!”

  “Cafard!” declared Jollimay, in a somber voice.13

  “Dirty cafard—very bad!” agreed the Senegalese.

  “Pull yourself together—we’ve let you sleep late. Do you know that it’s nearly midday? There were only five or six shells this morning. They’ve finished demolishing a few bits of wall not far away, but nothing on top of us, fortunately.

  Five or six shells—yes, yes, the salvo of applause in my dream, the banqueting hall collapsing!

  “It’s nothing; we get used to it. The Boches in the Peace Palace don’t have that many shells—a shortage of raw materials—and their factory was blasted one day by bomber aircraft. But they’ll catch up with the gas; there’s no shortage of chemical products. You’ll get used to it, I tell you.”

  “But I don’t want to get used to it, my dear Monsieur. I have no intention of staying here forever…I want to go away. I’m made a firm resolution to leave as soon as possible, no matter how—this very day, if I’m not too tired.”

  Monsieur Jollimay smiled. Monsieur Vandermolen smiled. The others who were grouped around the entrance of my redoubt burst out laughing, as if I had said something enormous.

  “Good, good,” said the doctor, who wasn’t smiling. “We’ll talk about that at table—the morning meal is ready. Can you smell frying? Your shipwrecked companion is more reasonable; he’s already at the table.”

  Let’s go to the dining room. I can, indeed, smell the frying, and also the appetite, which is beginning to make demands in spite of the troubled mind.

  “A good lunch cures the cafard,” Jollimay says to me.

  Let’s go treat my cafard according to the prescription, as long as the menu isn’t too wretched.

  Marcel Blondeau greets me cheerfully.

  “I announce to you fried artichokes, Monsieur Jacquemin—and very successfully, by Mademoiselle Jeanne!”

  These young people present a strength of resistance to emotion that stupefies me. I no longer have that spring, myself; I don’t bounce back so quickly... I arrived desperate, arms and legs broken, but him, that little Polynesian, that Marcel Blondeau, who I expected to find more depressed than me, by reason of his youth, appears rested, fresh and rosy, in the process of setting the table and joking with Mademoiselle Vitalis—what am I saying?—flirting with her! He’s been well brought up, in Polynesia!

  “Mademoiselle, I beg you, let me do it…I can’t permit…come on, leave that cooking-pot to me...”

  “You’ll burn yourself, Monsieur!”

  “No, I...”

  “There you see—I told you so!”

  Marcel swiftly takes his hand off the cooking-pot; he is heroic, and turns his grimace into an amiable smile.

  “Better me than you—I have a less delicate epidermis…and then, yesterday I was frozen. A little roasting will do me good.”

  Oh that youth! Watch it go! One would think that young Marcel, before the beautiful eyes of the young woman, has already forgotten the terrible news, the sledgehammer blows that have just rained down on our heads, and accepted his part in the worldwide catastrophe into the midst of which we’ve fallen.

  Ha ha! It’ll take a lot more than eyes and more eyes, blue or black, and smiles, to drag me out of the nightmare, the obsession and the haunting of all these horrors!

  But where are we, then? In a tranquil and brilliant Paris? Are we taking afternoon tea with Madame Vitalis in a nice apartment in an elegant quarter?

  I am forced to perceive that Marcel is cutting a dash, in spite of his accoutrement as a dilapidated shipwreck victim…a handsome lad, in fact, with a fine nascent moustache, a keen and clear gaze, and an impression of masculine frankness in his expression.

  I turn to poor Madame Vitalis. In spite of all her misfortunes and her wooden leg, she doesn’t have a lugubrious expression either, and doesn’t seem any more depressed. That’s the light mind of women! But I know that she has, to maintain her in that fine firmness, in that apparent calm, the concern of the administration of resources and the management of the household, of this clan of unfortunate debris camped on the rubble of the world. That’s something.

  “The mother of us all!” Vandermolen says to me. “Before her arrival, Monsieur, there was perfect disorder here, organized famine, general hunger six days out of seven, at least! She was able to arrange everything for the best. And that little Mademoiselle Jeanne—we all adore her, Monsieur!” He leans close to me. “I’m getting old; I’ll leave her my Franz Hals and my house....”

  “His house! Where is it, his house? Just fifty cartloads of gravel, outside of these cellars increased in size by a torpedo crater—which torpedo, in exploding, has furnished a supplement of accommodation that has permitted, as has been pointed out to me, the offering of hospitality to Marcel and me, without inconveniencing anyone overmuch.

  “She’s exquisite,” Miraud says to me, slipping into the conversation.

  “Who? Madame Vitalis?”

  “Jeanne, Mademoiselle Jeanne. You’ll see...”

  “We were as hideous as savages, we were sordid, dressed in rags and holes,” said Monsieur Vandermolen; these ladies took the needles they’d discovered God knows where, and the clothes that were still usable, and in a few weeks they rendered us this appearance of civilized men—for we’ve resumed, as you can observe, the manners of civilized people, And Mademoiselle Jeanne repairs marvelously, Monsieur! Admire this frock-coat, which she’s rendered presentable and respectable!”

  Monsieur Vandermolen’s frock-coat! A kind of jacket restored with tan leather at the elbow and a big piece of yellow parchment in the tails, fragments of the binding of a sixteenth-century Bible, on which one can still distinguish a title in red Gothic capitals, almost washed away by the rain. Beautiful work, indeed—a masterpiece!

  “And the cooking, too, with her mother…”

  “Let’s leave those vulgar details,” said the aviator Miraud. “The ladies are charming, and possessed of a rare ingenuity. They’ve acquired all the talents necessary in adversity. I’m not denying the importance of the question of nourishment...”

  “Primordial importance!”

  “Primordial, if you like—but there’s something else, also very important: Mademoiselle Jeanne has a natural disposition for medicine. She saved my life! My life is hers—I owe it to her. Yes, Mademoiselle Jeanne, I owe it to you!”

  “She’s saved all of our lives,” said Vandermolen, “including Dr. Christansen of the slightly seething head. He has a thousand good reasons for his clamors and furies against Science, but it gives him distractions that could be dangerous…if Mademoiselle Jeanne weren’t here to keep watch on him. She knows everything, she brings back the slightest course…as well as good salad, roots and excellent plants for tisanes...”

  “She saved my life last month,” repeated Miraud. “Fluxion of the chest, possibly pneumonic...”

  “Bah! Simple cold, slight bout of flu,” said Vandermolen.

  “No, no, much more serious; I knew that, me!”

  I left them to dispute Mademoiselle Vitalis’ merits, and after the meal, I followed Dr. Christiansen, who undertook to show me, in the vicinity of our cellar, the dangerous places to avoid and the refuges prepared in case of surprise by gas, pathogenic microbes or something else.

  Marcel Blondeau, invited to follow us, declared that he would see all that later, when he had completed some task for which he had begged Mademoiselle Vitalis to utilize his good will.

  When we got back he had gone with Miraud and the two ladies to finish clearing a square of land, in a corner of the demolished and nonexistent suburb, now a formless mass of rubble, appropriate for the growing of vegetables.

  Oh, I was counting on not tasting those vegetables, and being far away from Harlem before they had even begun to emer
ge from the soil.

  X. A flirtation in the New Cave Era.

  I swore to myself, I had made a form resolution, in spite of all the frightful revelations about the fabulous events that had occurred, that I would go, as quickly as possible, and at any risk, to launch myself into the anguishing unknown and try to reach Paris, no matter how.

  Certainly, I felt the keenest sympathy, my heart overflowing with gratitude, for the worthy men who had picked me up and saved me, and particularly for Dr. Christiansen, so discouraged and so discouraging, but I could not resolve myself to accepting as absolutely exact, in every particular, the picture of the situation as it had been presented to me.

  Fabulously steeped in black, that picture—there had to be great exaggerations in it, originating from the morbid pessimism into which they all appeared to me to have sunk, in consequence of their sad adventures.

  A lugubrious nightmare, a macabre dream, madness!

  I decided to attempt something and see for myself. I gave myself a few days to study the terrain, determine my plan and make my preparations—but no more than a few days. No matter how, I would be gone within a week.

  Marcel Blondeau will leave with me, of course, and he will be a valuable companion, but I can see that he’s clear-sighted and valiant. Two knowledgeable and determined men can get themselves out of trouble more easily in a bad situation, and I can see well enough the enormous obstacles that will rise up before us as soon as we leave.

  I joke with the young man about his passion for gardening. Every day he goes to the garden with the ladies, clearing and digging ardently. The aviator Miraud goes too; he seems to have the same passion for the lettuces and cabbages in prospect.

  “You’d do much better,” I say to Marcel, “to explore the surroundings with me, to discover the best direction to take and try to avoid the dubious paths, the possible ambushes and traps...”

  “But Monsieur. I have to do something here, to make my small contribution to the communal food-supply. Think about it! We’re not precisely swimming in abundance among these ruins, and I wouldn’t want to be a parasite, a trimmer of exceedingly meager portions...”