“Of course, of course—but the preparation of our departure is important and urgent too, since we don’t want to be here forever. Haven’t you told me that you want to get to Paris, where you still have family, as quickly as possible?”
“Yes, Monsieur, certainly...I think so…but no one’s waiting for me...”
“Of course, nor for me either, but I’m desperate to know for certain…in haste to see for myself. Oh, Paris, Paris! How are things out there, really? How will we find it? Anyway, let’s make preparations—for an early departure, I hope.”
“Yes…yes...”
He appears to me to be quite cold today, the fellow who was burning to get to Paris, to embrace a couple of aunts left in the homeland, and to put himself at the service of the fatherland right away.
This morning, I went out to go exploring. The Vitalis ladies had just left for the suburb with Marcel, Miraud and the Senegalese rifleman. They were going to lend a hand with the clearing of the restored terrain and then go hunting for wildfowl in a ravaged and abandoned park.
While cautiously coming down the hill of the broken windmills, with which I was already familiar, I saw Marcel pass below me, marching with a spade under his arm beside Jeanne Vitalis. They didn’t see me and I was able to overhear a few words that made me prick up my ears anxiously.
“You’re going to leave us, then, Monsieur Marcel?” said the young woman.
“That’s the plan, at least,” Marcel replied, “but…it requires reflection…yes, it demands serious reflection. It’s necessary to examine the possibilities of the journey...”
“Very difficult, Monsieur Marcel; we’re blockaded here. I don’t see at all how you can go into that unknown, plunge into that darkness…through obstacles that are said to be insurmountable...”
“But I’m not in a hurry, Mademoiselle,” the young man murmured. “We’ve been welcomed so perfectly here…collected…saved. We’ve fallen on our feet…everyone is so good to us…you’ve been so good, Mademoiselle Jeanne! We’re very grateful to you, Mademoiselle Jeanne, me particularly...”
The young man’s voice was emotional. He was looking at Jeanne Vitalis with moist eyes. One might have thought that the young woman had snatched him from the waves and saved him from the toxic gas all by herself. The boy was exaggerating, truly!
“Well, young Marcel!” called the aviator Miraud from the other side of a mine crater some distance away. “If you amble along like that you’ll scarcely have time to dig your patch!”
“All right all right!” said Marcel. “I’m examining the terrain—I haven’t been living in the caves of Harlem for two years, like you.” He went on in a lower voice: “Anyway, Mademoiselle, I find charm in the region, in spite of all these ruins that nature is in the process of covering and embellishing. And then…and then, you’re here. There are presences that render the most frightful and the most dangerous places habitable, and allow one to support the...”
Jeanne Vitalis laughed quietly. “The desert most denuded of comforts, uncertain nourishment, the lack of everything, etc., etc.”
“No, no, don’t joke. You’re here; you accept, courageously, the daily perils, the...”
“Quotidian privations?” suggested the young woman, laughing.
“Certainly: sorrows, dangers and privations! And I’m only thinking about running away...without looking back... No, no! I’m staying, definitely…unless you want to send me away?”
“Oh, of course not! Quite the contrary.”
A flirtation in these caverns! A flirtation, in the midst of such terrors, these somber days, in the midst of these horrors! Oh, I didn’t expect that. However, I really ought to have noticed that Marcel had immediately shown a particular sympathy for the Vitalis ladies, and that Jeanne Vitalis didn’t appear to receive him with an ill grace when he hastened to come running at the slightest difficulty of material organization or renewal of the food supply.
Stones that I caused to roll down the slope interrupted the conversation. Marcel and the young woman hastened their pace. I grabbed Miraud, who was going toward them, by the arm.
Since Marcel Blondeau seemed determined to remain in the refuge of Harlem, I could try to entice the aviator Miraud to set off for Paris with me, in spite of all the risks.
Miraud seemed pensive and melancholy—or, rather, in a bad mood. So much the better. After vegetating for two years in the caves of Harlem, the ex-aviator had to be chewing the bit; it might be possible to convince him to attempt an escape with me.
While we walked, I immediately broached my proposal, but as soon as I spoke, Miraud exclaimed: “Oh, no, no—not me. Take your young man from Polynesia, if you want, your Marcel Blondeau—he’s not afraid of fatigue, he’ll be a good companion, solid and courageous. Take him, I tell you, but not me!”
He hastened his steps, trying to catch up with the young couple, who, for their part, were advancing more rapidly through the gulfs and mounds formed by the already-aging heaps of rubble.
“No, no, not me,” Miraud repeated.
“Why not? If I can judge by my impatience and anxiety, you, a Parisian, must he...”
“No, no, my dear Monsieur, impossible! You want to go, so be it—but the least that can happen to you, after having circled around, bumping into insurmountable obstacles everywhere, is to remain hemmed in, gone to earth, lost in some hole without being able to budge, and die there slowly of starvation, if some shell or cloud of toxic gas doesn’t abridge your suffering. Me, I refuse to risk those displeasures. I find life good, perfectly bearable, in our cave in Harlem, sufficiently comfortable, and almost tranquil, with only a few petty dangers close by, dangers to which we’re accustomed, and which we’ve learned from long experience to avoid as much as possible. I’m going to wait here for the end of this long planetary quake. Everything indicates, Monsieur, that we’re in the last throes of world collapse, the last spasms of ferocious Boche dementia. On all sides I think, everyone is out of breath, out of explosives, chemical ingredients and virulent microbes. Hope is returning to help us to be patient.”
“I’d be a lot more patient in Paris...”
“Paris! Paris! What’s become of Paris? A mystery! How are things out there? No one knows...”
“All the more reason to go and see!”
“Go then! I’ve warned you. Above all, take Monsieur Blondeau!.... Well, Mademoiselle Jeanne, you’re running very quickly…you were going quite slowly a little while ago...”
We had caught up with the two young people. Jeanne Vitalis, very pink, replied, laughing, that she was in a hurry to plant out her lettuces, but it seemed to me that Marcel was looking daggers at the aviator.
I left them, to continue my exploration of the devastated plains around Harlem, hollowed out here and there by dips...
And I recommence the next day, and the following days; we all recommence, for the entire colony scatters to work the fields, to search and dig in the chains of hills formed by the debris, where brushwood is already sketching thickets and brush, and to hunt rats, and dune rabbits, and to go fishing...
If it rains, which happens quite often—beware of the bad season!—one puts the sack that one always carries with one over one’s head, and one braves the downpour.
The other day, it was fine. Marcel Blondeau went with me; it was his turn to suffer the melancholy and the cafard—I don’t know why. He didn’t say much while we walked; he didn’t look at anything, didn’t seek the sunlight and went straight past nettle-beds perfectly capable of furnishing a nice plate of spinach, distractedly, in spite of Mademoiselle Vitalis’ recommendations.
Suddenly, near a formless heap of stone and plaster that had once been a row of villas, the sound of voices rose from black hole leading to old cellars, which had been indicated to me and where I knew that my companions were trying to grow mushrooms.
Someone was singing. I recognized the voice rising from the excavation: it was Miraud’s. Marcel shivered.
Her hair is brown, so brown,
so brown!
Her deep, soft eyes are like an azure lake;
In my heart and all my woes night drown
And...
Miraud appeared, blinking in the light. He started when he saw us.
“What’s that you’re saying?” demanded Marcel Blondeau, in a voice that lacked amenity.
“I’m singing. It’s beautiful; the sun is making me vibrate,” Miraud replied.
I’m a furtive wanderer of river shores,
Watcher of reflections in green still pools,
A picker of florets from ivy stores
On the old crumbled wall of…of...
“Damn it, I’ve lost the rhyme!”
“That’s not what you were saying,” said Marcel. “I heard something else. You were singing another song.
“You think so? I’ve forgotten…one jumps so easily from one tune to another...
A dispatch from the days of Dagobert,
Tells of a bad attack on the French,
With neither gas nor...
Marcel turned his back. One might have thought that the boy didn’t care for the music or the lines—unless it was the singer who was getting on his nerves…for he was visibly nervy.
I tried to attenuate his impoliteness with regard to Miraud.
“Oh, Monsieur Miraud, what courage, to rhyme and sing in the ruins of the world!”
“It’s to numb my cares, Monsieur Jacquemin.”
Pensively, I caught up with Marcel, who was marching on with long, stiff strides. He seemed to me to be furious, but I was beginning to divine the reason for his mood changes. I understood. Until then, my preoccupations had prevented me from distinguishing things that ought to have leapt to my eyes.
Of course. Her hair is brown, so brown, so brown! That’s Mademoiselle Vitalis! Charming, the young woman, the exquisite flower of our colony, and good, and gentle, and full of talents, as useful as they were various... No, let’s pass over the talents... She’s delightful, and it’s scarcely astonishing that my young friend Marcel should have fallen madly in love in the space of a fortnight. Yes, yes, I see—he has all the appearances of a fellow prey to the ancient malady. Why didn’t I see it immediately? So he’s renounced going with me; he no longer wants to leave the ruins of Harlem, an enchanted abode, the cellars of the Vandermolen house, which she illuminates with her presence!
And Miraud? That’s obvious too; Mademoiselle Jeanne’s lovely eyes have set fire to his heart as well; he’s in love with her too... Anyway, how could it be otherwise? They all adore her, each in his fashion. Vandermolen, who no longer has a sou, wants to make her his sole heir. Dr. Christiansen proclaims her his favorite pupil, in medicine and pessimistic philosophy, in spite of the laughter with which the young woman resists all catastrophes. And Jollimay gives her lectures on History or the progress of artillery, and the Annamite, and Gibson, and the Peruvian—all of them, the rifleman Mohammed…and me too, of course! Naturally. All those individuals, depressed by so many misfortunes and sufferings, sense the sweetness of her presence among them, amid this rubble, under the perpetual threat of death. She represents both the dolorous beauty of the past and the little glimmer of hope that filters through the funereal blackness of our caves...
All the same, this evening, here’s Marcel taking me to one side and telling me that he’s changed his mind and wants to go with me, as soon as possible...
What’s got into him now? The aviator Miraud and he are avoiding one another. As soon as one appears in one of the corners of our lodgings, the other moves away and disappears. At meal times, as it’s necessary to come together in the part of the cellar that serves as dining room, they make a point of not looking at one another, and stare at the ceiling, frowning.
Fortunately, my noisy arguments with Dr. Christiansen or Monsieur Jollimay prevent the others from noticing. But Jeanne Vitalis remains silent; one no longer hears her young voice striving to cast a little tonic gaiety into our morose conversation.
Amour, amour! Your flames are dangerous; you too bring us redoubtable explosives! Now my two fellows have become rivals. It’s becoming disquieting. Are they looking to murder one another? Are they going to bring hatred and discord into our refuge, where all these specimens of such diverse races live in perfect harmony and general sympathy?
What if I convinced one or other of them to go with me? That would pay my saviors back nicely for my debt of gratitude. All things considered, it’s Marcel I’d like to take, and as soon as possible. It would be better for him. He’s very sad. Undoubtedly, he’s taken stock of the situation; he’s telling himself that Miraud has been living for longer in the intimacy of the Vitalis ladies, and that there must be a more long-standing, more proven, sympathy between him and the young woman, against which he can scarcely compete.
Well, I declare to Marcel that I’m delighted with his resolution, and that we’re going to make our final preparations for the departure. While he was wasting his time gardening or hunting, I’ve explored the terrain around Harlem methodically, and put all the information together. Monsieur Vandermolen, while regretting and disapproving of our attempt, has indicated the suspect points, the directions to avoid, and the paths to follow in order to avoid running into Boche positions, at least within a certain distance—twenty or twenty-five kilometers. Beyond that is the unknown, the plunge into the mysterious horror that surrounds us and encircles us on all sides.
Twenty-five kilometers of relative security, and afterwards, everything to fear, a thousand possible accidents and catastrophes, and all perils: the enemy, fatigue, hunger…especially hunger. Brrr! Let’s not get frightened; we’ll soon see!
“After twenty-five kilometers, if you run into insurmountable difficulties, as I expect, don’t be obstinate—come back to Harlem,” said the hospitable Vandermolen, who has drawn me an approximate map of the region and made me a gift of a compass. “We’ll be very glad to see you again. Your apartment in the house will remain at your disposal.”
It’s settled; we’re going to risk everything and go; we’ll soon find out what there is ahead of us.
Part Two: The Age of Burrows
I. One epidemic more or less.
A week! I gave myself that interval, which I thought very large, to finish the last preparations for our escape, and if I can believe my notebook, if I haven’t forgotten to mark a day on the little calendar I’ve improvised, it’s now seventy-three days that I’ve been living in Harlem, in Monsieur Vandermolen’s basements, with all the companions who have become my friends.
And seventy-three very busy days, well furnished with incident, filled with emotions, and with a few new anguishes into the bargain!
We’ve had a few alarms during those seventy-three days. A shell demolished our chimney, but the American billionaire, who is very dexterous, was able to repair the damage. Five or six layers of deleterious miasmas of various sorts have passed over us.
One night, we nearly all perished. The gases were fabulously lacrymogenic. I wept all the tears in my body; it seems to me that I’ll never again be able to shed the smallest one in the chagrins to come. Another time, Madame Vitalis, having adjusted her mask poorly, found herself badly intoxicated, and was in danger for a long week.
Afterwards, we were inconvenienced by infectious shrapnel fired from the first Boche lines, in advance of The Hague. They brought us typhus. There were a great many sick people in the town—by which I mean in the holes, in all the shelters under the heaps of rubble that represent the town of Harlem—and no medicines with which to treat them. The doctor ran around everywhere, but there was a very anxious moment in confrontation with the development of the epidemic.
We avoid going into the town, enclosing ourselves in our cellar, only going out for food supplies in the direction of the dunes. When the weather is good, we gladly spend our days in the midst of excavations of varying profundity, the labyrinth of holes and grassy knolls taking the place of Monsieur Vandermolen’s old tulip garden or the ruins of the windmill that o
ne raised water for its irrigation.
Oh, those gardens! They’ve been terribly watered by shells of all calibers; there were long battles here in the early days of the second war, and in certain places it’s necessary to refrain from touching the ground, for many of the combatants are asleep under all these tumuli, more or less disrupted by the projectiles and invaded by weeds that are covering the remains of crosses.
The epidemic seems to have spared us. The doctor isn’t sparing himself. He does everything he can, but the struggle is very difficult without medicines. Pastors, a few priests and people of good will are devoting themselves heroically to helping the sick, trying to save those whose organisms offer sufficient resistance to the scourge—and bury those who succumb.
Fortunately, according to the doctor, the epidemic isn’t very serious. It’s not like a previous epidemic, four years ago, that made terrible ravages in Amsterdam, Harlem and Delft, and probably elsewhere, claiming thousands of victims in those towns alone.
It seems that the scourge is evolving somewhat; it no longer presents the same characteristics; there are modifications and attenuations in the symptoms and the effects. The doctor attributes these favorable changes to various causes: an attenuation of the toxicity of the microbes because of their great diffusion, or the multiplication of other more or less virulent microbes and the struggle established between them; and then a sort of semi-vaccination acquired by the population, hardened by the kind of existence that they’ve been leading for so long, becoming refractory even to viruses.
Nevertheless, according to the doctor’s own estimates, I know that this benign epidemic has already killed three or four hundred people in the drastically reduced population of the town. We learned from one poor fellow escaped from the German trenches at The Hague that typhus is also rife among the brigands, with almost the same diminished gravity as here.
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 13