“Go to it! Go to it!” he eggs me on.
He’s the one who’s pepping me up… chewing me out!… He’s flying high! Whirling around!… Spinning so fast I can’t see his legs any more!… He’s not even touching the ground!…
“Go to it! Make the most of it! He’s ours! Got a firmer hold on him than back in Benares!”
He shouts that out to me in mid-gallop!… then he slows down… halts! Stretches out on the carpet!…
“Feel me! Feel me here!…” he goes.
He means on his stomach!… His belly button!…
“There! You feel that? The knot?…”
Goa was under his belly button!… Right in the hollow of his stomach!… Something hard… Sosthène wanted me to grope down deep!… Press my whole hand all the way down… my left hand, my strong steady hand… and feel around.
Seeing how scrawny he was, you hit bottom right away, touched his other side, his backbone!…
“Listen, now, this is big time! You loafer! Listen! I’ve got the Goa cramp!… This is the ultimate! You better believe we’ve won favour!… Take a look!… Turn to the page!” Got to crack back open the Vega!
He stays flat on the floor, wheezing!…
“What page, where?”
“The King’s page!”
Couldn’t find it.
“Concentrate! Lord in Heaven… Concentrate!”
“To do what?”
“Get Buckingham Palace on the line!”
“Won’t get it.”
Ah! He sighs!… I’m putting a damper on him… He remains flat on his back with his cramp in his belly!…
“Ah! You know, you’re mucking up everything for me!…”
What a thing to say! It was really out of line! After the way I’d gone all out for him.
I just didn’t see any miracle, and that was that!… It wasn’t my fault! He had nobody to point a finger at but himself!
Sure as hell made him sore… He was still after something!…
“You want me to change the face of things?”
He was talking bigger and bigger!…
He wanted a trance to top all trances! Make me drop dead in admiration! He’s shooting for the moon.
“So, evil curses aren’t enough for you? You need cataclysms? The gentleman wants another Great Flood?”
Mr Claptrap really cracked me up! I could barely stand on my own two legs, I was so wiped out… and him flat on the floor with that big knot in his belly!… And now he’s talking cataclysms!
“Ah! You know what?” I say to him… “You’re full of bullshit!”
I just can’t keep it in… I’ve had it!
“You red hairy ass! You’re up shit creek, Goa!…”
I’m having a ball… I need to!…
“Watch your mouth! kid… Watch your mouth!…”
Ah! He’s threatening me… I’m in for a performance now.
He peeks towards the door to check whether anybody can really hear him. He motions me to stoop down close… wants to say something in my ear… He grabs my head… and whispers…
“I’m going to stage a battle of the gods! They’ll all mix it up together!” He lets go of my head… I stand up! Ah! I don’t get it!… Something fantastic as usual! I open my eyes wide… and wait!
“So what’s going to happen?…”
He motions me to stoop close again… and he’ll spell it all out for me!… I can’t stop giggling!… He gets mad!… I bust out laughing right in his face!… He spits in mine… Seriously miffed… in his eyes I’m one hopeless moron!
Ah! What’s he got to gripe about? I did everything! Called up everybody, the Lord Mayor!… The Consul!… The Pope!… Now he wants to phone up the Good Lord in person! He’s a pain in the ass with his Goa! He’s bullying me!… I’m a real sucker!… It’s true… for putting up with all this!…
“Fuck off!… The pair of you, you and your Goa!…” That’s what I hit him with all of a sudden! What I want is for him to leave me the hell alone!… And for the two of us to turn in! And for him to let me catch a few winks! Enough is enough!…
“Yes, it is! It is!…” he keeps harping away… “It’s rare for a person to keep hold of Goa! It’s a miracle, you damn no-good oaf! You’re lousing up everything! You’re botching it all up!…”
He’s pointing the finger at me again!… He stands back up on the carpet… He takes up his position at the other end of the room.
“So you want me to do the seven signs?” he announces… “So I’ll do the seven signs!…”
He cuts loose.
We’re in for another big show!…
He starts waving his two arms… signalling through the air!… And zigzagging… then runs through it a second time with his back to me! Facing the opposite direction… more zigzags…
“Don’t move,” he shouts over… “This is the Sar of the Third Power!… The overthrow of all religions!…”
He’s shouting at the top of his lungs!… Waste of breath… I hear him loud and clear!
“Fine! Fine!” I shout back!… “I get you!…”
“Look at me!” he goes!… “Take a real good look!… Don’t move!… Take a good look! Don’t you see anything around my head?”
He kept waving his arms around, standing stark naked in front of the window.
“Take a good look at me!”
I opened my eyes as wide as possible! Didn’t see anything around his head.
“Concentrate! Concentrate! For God’s sake! You’re going to see the halo, I’m telling you!…”
“Ah!” I answer… “Enough already! Get the hell out of here!”
“Nothing’s there? Nothing? What kind of jerk do you take me for?…”
The mouth on that guy!…
Ah! What do I have to do to shut his trap? Ah! He’s really pissing me off!…
“Ah! OK, time to hit the hay!”
My riot act.
“To do what? What was that?…”
He won’t hear any of it… He wants to concentrate till he drops!… He wants me to see his halo!… I go ape!
“So what’re you saying, you don’t want us to go to bed?”
“I’m slaving away for a lout! A boor! I’m reducing my life to cinders!”
That’s what he fires back!…
“I’m floating, you get that, moron? I’m floating on my magical emanations! Can’t you see me floating? Look!”
Ah! I quit looking at him! Ah! Let him rip himself to pieces! Go at it hammer and tongs until he breaks himself in two, the asshole!… He’s chugging around the room!… The dance of the magic emanations!… That’s what he’s wailing over at me… I shut my ears! Ah! He can go and take a flying leap! The crummy crackpot… the fucker! I don’t give a damn!… I quit looking at him… and even hearing him! I don’t give a damn! I hit the sack like a ton of bricks!
*
Here we are back in the workshop. I could see their glorious gear, those masks, masks galore… All over the place, small ones, big ones, incredible jobs both in size and appearance. There were the flops, the winners, misshapen messes, camouflage masks, some with valves, with tubes, with ropes, all the Colonel’s brainstorms, every variety, dimension, a carnival of hardware… Helmets and masks from every epoch, updated for chemical warfare. Made out of cardboard, copper, nickel, for every conceivable danger. Weapons and toys! All the headgear for hell, the trek to the depths of the abyss! Three gigantic diving suits for deep-sea pressure. An entire armoire full of small Henry II-style toques done up with feathers, plus tulle veils by way of gas filters, quite smart-looking. The Colonel thought of everything. One goddamn unholy mess! I always run into slobs! The workbenches disappeared under five or six layers of tools of every size and type. Sosthène was rooting around at the bottom, hunting around for a little screwdriver, and setting off avalanches in his wake! The whole heap of trash came crashing down ba-da-boom! Spilling all the way to the stairs! Torrents of tangled metal! And the wrangles that broke out between them!
> “Mr Sosthène! You are a skunk! You lose everything!”
They traded some harsh words, raked each other over the coals because of the mess. Apparently I was going to restore order. I was supposed to hang up everything on little nails driven into the rafters, all the instruments scattered around, clear off the workbenches, the oven, the dormer windows. Lucky me, I had it made now!… My arrival meant order!… I was going to make myself useful!
“You know, young man, we are lost! Lost! Lost! And this gentleman is a swine!”
Over the large door to the workshop, way up high, were written in red the words: Sniff and die! Colonel O’Collogham pointed out the motto to me, tickled pink, laughing up a storm… he really got a kick out of it!… He was having a good chuckle all by himself!… “Hee! Hee!… Sniff and die!…” This was his hyena streak, his way of spooking us. Then he went back to work, shook a carboy, two carboys, dripped out some liquid, took a whiff, laughed hard… As for Sosthène, he was roaming around, filing down pieces, adjusting the pins on a huge fire-red mask with nickel-copper mounting, equipped with huge mica goggles, plus right at the crown, a can ingeniously rigged in place! With adjustable straps that buckled under your arms and then looped around your waist, really a very graceful effect, plus a dozen tube coils with thin piping that unfurled towards the back in a plume two or three yards high, a great fantastical touch! In short, a sort of customized dressed-to-kill version of the Eiffel Tower, one you could wear around on your head!… To hear them tell it, from a strictly technical viewpoint it was a miraculous feat of skill!… Providing nearly one-hundred-percent anti-gas protection… A considerable, indisputable advance, with huge implications… Universal filtration…
Sosthène, who fancied himself well-informed on the subject, judged this model the best of the bunch. Although cumbersome, if not outright excruciating, because the thing wasn’t padded, it was still rational and reliable, the little head factory, the “anti-gas washer” held in place by a dozen straps. Even so it wasn’t foolproof… a leak could spring somewhere… not to mention any unpredictable twists… Unpredictable twists upset Sosthène, they actually threw him into a pretty bad funk… He’d go hours without saying a word!… And the trials were getting closer… Preparations were being made over at Wickers Strong… “Have your gases delivered!…” It was going to be held in some sort of blockhouses… we already had the specifics…
For himself the Colonel had picked out a so-called “tow snout” canvas model, soaked in three absolutely neutralizing solutions whose formulae he would divulge only after the trials, and then to no one but to the King in person… This device for experts in the field transformed the most toxic gases, the most diabolical instant-death poisons into harmless fumes by combining them with ozone, hence making them actually good for your system by your fifteenth or twentieth lungful, on top of the fact they were regulated by an automatic air clip that responded to the density of the cloud and the nature of your physical effort, with such and such an amount for cyclists, another for swimmers, another for pedestrians, an air-pump control calibrated to the millimetre, obviously the ideal system, the dream machine sought by every engineer since the Air Pump Convention held in Amsterdam in March 1909.
The gentlemen out in Wickers were going to be flabbergasted! The Colonel was bringing them not just one, but twenty solutions to the problem of milli-doses! His protocol proved it! Just think of it!
Ah! But watch out!… Caution! He’d take his full battery out of wraps only as an absolute final last resort! His second contest mask was more in the domino style, equipped with faceted goggles, protruding snout and netted padding… the entire mask mounted on muslin that pulled down over the head and hugged the face, topped with three feathers! Ostrich plumes, Prince of Wales style! His ever-present preoccupation with elegance. High-fashion science!… This piece of gear was finished, absolutely polished and perfected, but the heavy mask, Sosthène’s, the copper diving suit, was still giving them lots of worries. They had to send it back to the forge to make it a little more airtight, and then pop it back into the fire again for at least another two solid hours so that they could stick on the valves… a God-awful headache… And it was all Sosthène’s fault! He was always to blame!… Apparently he was having trouble breathing, and he’d been told a hundred thousand times that he was supposed to count two beats between breaths and not gulp air in one go like some animal! Every time he hiccuped he unhooked the whole contraption! And then the entire suit had to be readjusted! More excuses for chewing each other out! The pair were really pissed!
“Hey!” he shouted over to me. “Just take a look at this catastrophe!…” and he let out an awful yell to let off some steam, a howl that went like this: “Yee-oowoh! Yee-oowoh!” The Colonel was going too far! He didn’t understand anything.
“What’s that, Monsieur de Rodiencourt? What’s that?”
“Nosing! Nosing!”
What a fit the Colonel threw over Sosthène’s mangled “nothings”! He gives him a real tongue-lashing!
“I’m going to teach you, Monsieur Sosthène! Repeat after me! Listen! Thing! Thing! Thing!”
“General, sir! It’s not worth the bother, I’m killing my tongue, beating myself up over nothing… Maybe someday I’ll be able to cope with the Tower of London, the pointed tower, the Watch-Out Tower! But I’ll never be able to cope with the little zigzag you do inside your mouth!… You need to have a different kind of tongue!… As far back as 1893, back in Chandernagore, I lost £235 on a bet that I could do it… And I really kept at it!… It was in the canteen of the Indian Medical Service… I kept it up for five hours straight!… My wife and I were guests… What a hoopla!… The Thousand and One Nights! Ah! People in those parts really know how to treat a guest!… Now there’s flair for you, dear Colonel! The Indian Medical Service!… But as for your zigzag action, Colonel, you can go and stick it right up your ass!…”
It went on like that the whole afternoon, the pair taking turns chewing each other out… missing most of their own insults because of the horrendous racket, the hammering on sheet metal, carboys overturning, tumbling around… scrap metal in motion!…
Around five Virginia would come up with tea and sandwiches. Her uncle used to call her through the dormer window. She had to wait for the exact moment down in the garden…
She wasn’t allowed to go out any more, our city errands were a thing of the past. The only exception was the garden with her dog and birds!… The fact is she was cut off from the world… a state of affairs dating back to the Tweet-Tweet to-do! Ah! It was no joke!… Ah! I had my tail between my legs!… Ah! I felt real sorry! It scared me whenever she talked to me, if only to say hello! I wished I could be living out in the sticks somewhere! Everything spooked me!
The poor darling looked so sad, pale as death. Wish I could have kissed her but I couldn’t… I felt I was the culprit behind everything!… Felt guilty as hell! So how could I console her? I was powerless!… Without the strength or the money!… I was sick, and out of whack… Discombobulated!… Hallucinating!… My fever had carried me away… My ever so trusting, beloved little girl!… What harm I’d done her!… Dragging her along with me into a topsy-turvy whirl of the senses!… A dance of delirium!… Ah! Some nice guy I turned out to be!… Couldn’t tell true from false! And I’d kept my eyes peeled too!… I’d had wild impulses before… this wasn’t my first episode!… But never so violent… Ever since my stay in the hospital… ever since Hazebrouck I’d had episodes… I sort of would go on the blink… But this time I’d totally surrendered! Went to pieces, flew apart in a loony fury right off my rocker! Ah! And now I couldn’t find all my missing parts! Ah! Such a crazy foul-up!… So sad, so waifish, so unhappy, my little sweetheart!… Ah! I was torturing myself, worrying myself sick!… But if I had ever said to her: “Miss! Please don’t worry!” Well, presto, she’d think I was the worst sort of lout! A heartless cad! And gutless to boot! Doing nothing but making fun of her!…
That’s the situation I was in.<
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My poor adored little waif was so sad, so heartbroken… and a second before so fresh and frisky, so impish!… Ah! My little joke!… Ah! I’d distressed her!… Killed her happy-go-lucky spirit!… All it took was a word or two at the table!… And she changed into the most mournful little girl in the world… That’s what I did to her… And it all went on right under the eyes of the servants, that pack of shameful wretches… cunning… slippery… always ready with a yes!… First-class bastards!… And they’d seen her thrashing! It must have been sheer torture for her to be stuck under their noses that way… target of attention for all those pigs!… Why didn’t she try to run away?… What a bold, drastic move that would have been!… And what a good lesson for the lackeys!… Ah! The realization hit me!… Really would have been one hell of a solution! Some gamine she’d have been then!… Ah! I would have admired her if she’d pulled something like that!… Ah! It would have put a nice big smile on my face!… Truth is, it would have settled the whole situation!… I loved her a lot, to be sure… maybe even more than that… more dearly than before that damned night, my tender adorable idol… but I was afraid to approach her any more, or show her any attention! Not even the least little bit!… She scared me!… At mealtimes, especially dinner, I gazed off into space, to the side, under the table, out the window, anywhere to avoid seeing her dear face!… I’d put on all sorts of fronts, followed the conversation with such passionate attention my eyes popped from my skull and sweat trickled down my face… I went into ecstasies over the dumbest claptrap Sosthène could come out with, I looked like I believed in all his babble about India… I even applauded… Every now and then the Colonel would dart me a nasty glance! But he didn’t give me the boot… that was the main thing!… Then dessert right after… a quick bite, I excused myself… dead tired… and went up to bed… with no jaw-flapping!… I was wary of the way one thing leads to another during those after dinner heart-to-hearts… wary the kid might have something to tell me… Ah! And that would be that!… Oh! No way!… Oh! No risk of that… Ah! She brought me bad luck!… It’d make her uncle sore all over again!… The prickly old bird!… She just didn’t realize!… She was reckless… too naive!… I had to be careful for both of us!… For both of us!… No missteps!… Night and day I was on my guard!… I leapt into the sack… sleep! Or pretend to!… Going to sleep was a real workout… That’s no bull!… Sheer hell! Because of the whistling in my ears… plus my nightmares… noises… catastrophes… sorts of trapdoors… I tripped and tumbled to the bottom!… I’d wake up!… With a start! Flames everywhere! Like back in Claben’s cellar!… Enveloping me, sweeping me away… Just like that in my nightmare!… I hung on for dear life, and howled to bring the roof down!… Then fall back to sleep… wham! And keep on falling… back into the clutches… of frogs, this time!… Fire frogs!… And then the dragon gulping them down! A fantastical icky creature all green and belching fire!… Like the one on Sosthène’s gown! But this one was gigantic, the real McCoy! In a raging fury!… He gobbled up the frogs as he flew past!… The fire frogs! And then with a pounce he was hurtling towards me!… Started attacking!… He chomped down hard, kerrrunch!… Sank in his teeth!… Right down into my bum arm!… I let out a yell!…
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