813

by Maurice Leblanc

  “She has the tastes of all women; and wealth, luxury and power give joys which not one of them despises.”

  “Yes, Geneviève does. And you would do much better …”

  “We shall see. For the moment, let me go my own way. And be quite easy. I have not the least intention, as you say, of mixing her up in any of my manœuvers. She will hardly ever see me … Only, we had to come into contact, you know … That’s done … Good-bye.”

  He left the school and walked to where his motor-car was waiting for him. He was perfectly happy:

  “She is charming … and so gentle, so grave! Her mother’s eyes, eyes that soften you … Heavens, how long ago that all is! And what a delightful recollection! A little sad, but so delightful!” And he said, aloud, “Certainly I shall look after her happiness! And that at once! This very evening! That’s it, this very evening she shall have a sweetheart! Is not love the essential condition of any young girl’s happiness?”

  He found his car on the high-road:

  “Home,” he said to Octave.

  When Sernine reached home, he rang up Neuilly and telephoned his instructions to the friend whom he called the doctor. Then he dressed, dined at the Rue Cambon Club, spent an hour at the opera and got into his car again:

  “Go to Neuilly, Octave. We are going to fetch the doctor. What’s the time?”

  “Half-past ten.”

  “Dash it! Look sharp!”

  Ten minutes later, the car stopped at the end of the Boulevard Inkerman, outside a villa standing in its own grounds. The doctor came down at the sound of the hooter. The prince asked:

  “Is the fellow ready?”

  “Packed up, strung up, sealed up.”

  “In good condition?”

  “Excellent. If everything goes as you telephoned, the police will be utterly at sea.”

  “That’s what they’re there for. Let’s get him on board.”

  They carried into the motor a sort of long sack shaped like a human being and apparently rather heavy. And the prince said:

  “Go to Versailles, Octave, Rue de la Vilaine. Stop outside the Hôtel des Deux-Empereurs.”

  “Why, it’s a filthy hotel,” observed the doctor. “I know it well; a regular hovel.”

  “You needn’t tell me! And it will be a hard piece of work, for me, at least … But, by Jove, I wouldn’t sell this moment for a fortune! Who dares pretend that life is monotonous?”

  They reached the Hôtel des Deux-Empereurs. A muddy alley; two steps down; and they entered a passage lit by a flickering lamp.

  Sernine knocked with his fist against a little door.

  A waiter appeared, Philippe, the man to whom Sernine had given orders, that morning, concerning Gérard Baupré.

  “Is he here still?” asked the prince.

  “Yes.”

  “The rope?”

  “The knot is made.”

  “He has not received the telegram he was hoping for?”

  “I intercepted it: here it is.”

  Sernine took the blue paper and read it:

  “Gad!” he said. “It was high time. This is to promise him a thousand francs for to-morrow. Come, fortune is on my side. A quarter to twelve … In a quarter of an hour, the poor devil will take a leap into eternity. Show me the way, Philippe. You stay here, Doctor.”

  The waiter took the candle. They climbed to the third floor, and, walking on tip-toe, went along a low and evil-smelling corridor, lined with garrets and ending in a wooden staircase covered with the musty remnants of a carpet.

  “Can no one hear me?” asked Sernine.

  “No. The two rooms are quite detached. But you must be careful not to make a mistake: he is in the room on the left.”

  “Very good. Now go downstairs. At twelve o’clock, the doctor, Octave and you are to carry the fellow up here, to where we now stand, and wait till I call you.”

  The wooden staircase had ten treads, which the prince climbed with definite caution. At the top was a landing with two doors. It took Sernine quite five minutes to open the one of the right without breaking the silence with the least sound of a creaking hinge.

  A light gleamed through the darkness of the room. Feeling his way, so as not to knock against one of the chairs, he made for that light. It came from the next room and filtered through a glazed door covered with a tattered hanging.

  The prince pulled the threadbare stuff aside. The panes were of ground glass, but scratched in parts, so that, by applying one eye, it was easy to see all that happened in the other room.

  Sernine saw a man seated at a table facing him. It was the poet, Gérard Baupré. He was writing by the light of a candle.

  Above his head hung a rope, which was fastened to a hook fixed in the ceiling. At the end of the rope was a slip-knot.

  A faint stroke sounded from a clock in the street.

  “Five minutes to twelve,” thought Sernine. “Five minutes more.”

  The young man was still writing. After a moment, he put down his pen, collected the ten or twelve sheets of paper which he had covered and began to read them over.

  What he read did not seem to please him, for an expression of discontent passed across his face. He tore up his manuscript and burnt the pieces in the flame of the candle.

  Then, with a fevered hand, he wrote a few words on a clean sheet, signed it savagely and rose from his chair.

  But, seeing the rope at ten inches above his head, he sat down again suddenly with a great shudder of alarm.

  Sernine distinctly saw his pale features, his lean cheeks, against which he pressed his clenched fists. A tear trickled slowly down his face, a single, disconsolate tear. His eyes gazed into space, eyes terrifying in their unutterable sadness, eyes that already seemed to behold the dread unknown.

  And it was so young a face! Cheeks still so smooth, with not a blemish, not a wrinkle! And blue eyes, blue like an eastern sky! …

  Midnight … the twelve tragic strokes of midnight, to which so many a despairing man has hitched the last second of his existence!

  At the twelfth stroke, he stood up again and, bravely this time, without trembling, looked at the sinister rope. He even tried to give a smile, a poor smile, the pitiful grimace of the doomed man whom death has already seized for its own.

  Swiftly he climbed the chair and took the rope in one hand.

  For a moment, he stood there, motionless: not that he was hesitating or lacking in courage. But this was the supreme moment, the one minute of grace which a man allows himself before the fatal deed.

  He gazed at the squalid room to which his evil destiny had brought him, the hideous paper on the walls, the wretched bed.

  On the table, not a book: all were sold. Not a photograph, not a letter: he had no father, no mother, no relations. What was there to make him cling to life?

  With a sudden movement he put his head into the slip-knot and pulled at the rope until the noose gripped his neck.

  And, kicking the chair from him with both feet, he leapt into space.

  Ten seconds, fifteen seconds passed, twenty formidable, eternal seconds …

  The body gave two or three jerks. The feet had instinctively felt for a resting-place. Then nothing moved …

  A few seconds more … The little glazed door opened.

  Sernine entered.

  Without the least haste he took the sheet of paper to which the young man had set his signature, and read:

  “Tired of living, ill, penniless, hopeless, I am taking my own life. Let no one be accused of my death.

  “GÉRARD BAUPRÉ.

  “30 April.”

  He put back the paper on the table where it could be seen, picked up the chair and placed it under the young man’s feet. He himself climbed up on the table and, holding the body close to him, lifted it up, loosened the slip-knot and passed the head through it.

  The body sank into his arms. He let it slide along the table and, jumping to the fl
oor, laid it on the bed.

  Then, with the same coolness, he opened the door on the passage:

  “Are you there, all the three of you?” he whispered.

  Some one answered from the foot of the wooden staircase near him:

  “We are here. Are we to hoist up our bundle?”

  “Yes, come along!”

  He took the candle and showed them a light.

  The three men trudged up the stairs, carrying the sack in which the “fellow” was tied up.

  “Put him here,” he said, pointing to the table.

  With a pocket-knife, he cut the cords round the sack. A white sheet appeared, which he flung back. In the sheet was a corpse, the corpse of Pierre Leduc.

  “Poor Pierre Leduc!” said Sernine. “You will never know what you lost by dying so young! I should have helped you to go far, old chap. However, we must do without your services … Now then, Philippe, get up on the table; and you, Octave, on the chair. Lift up his head and fasten the slip-knot.”

  Two minutes later, Pierre Leduc’s body was swinging at the end of the rope.

  “Capital, that was quite simple! Now you can all of you go. You, Doctor, will call back here to-morrow morning; you will hear of the suicide of a certain Gérard Baupré: you understand, Gérard Baupré. Here is his farewell letter. You will send for the divisional surgeon and the commissary; you will arrange that neither of them notices that the deceased has a cut finger or a scar on one cheek …”

  “That’s easy.”

  “And you will manage so as to have the report written then and there, to your dictation.”

  “That’s easy.”

  “Lastly, avoid having the body sent to the Morgue and make them give permission for an immediate burial.”

  “That’s not so easy.”

  “Try. Have you examined the other one?”

  He pointed to the young man lying lifeless on the bed.

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “The breathing is becoming normal. But it was a big risk to run … the carotid artery might have …”

  “Nothing venture, nothing have … How soon will he recover consciousness?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “Very well. Oh, by the way, don’t go yet, Doctor. Wait for me downstairs. There is more for you to do.”

  The prince, when he found himself alone, lit a cigarette and puffed at it quietly, sending little blue rings of smoke floating up to the ceiling.

  A sigh roused him from his thoughts. He went to the bed. The young man was beginning to move; and his chest rose and fell violently, like that of a sleeper under the influence of a nightmare. He put his hands to his throat, as though he felt a pain there; and this action suddenly made him sit up, terrified, panting …

  Then he saw Sernine in front of him:

  “You?” he whispered, without understanding. “You? …”

  He gazed at him stupidly, as though he had seen a ghost.

  He again touched his throat, felt round his neck … And suddenly he gave a hoarse cry; a mad terror dilated his eyes, made his hair stand on end, shook him from head to foot like an aspen-leaf! The prince had moved aside; and he saw the man’s corpse hanging from the rope.

  He flung himself back against the wall. That man, that hanged man, was himself! He was dead and he was looking at his own dead body! Was this a hideous dream that follows upon death? A hallucination that comes to those who are no more and whose distracted brain still quivers with a last flickering gleam of life? …

  His arms struck at the air. For a moment, he seemed to be defending himself against the squalid vision. Then, exhausted, he fainted away for the second time.

  “First-rate,” said the prince, with a grin. “A sensitive, impressionable nature … At present, the brain is out of gear … Come, this is a propitious moment … But, if I don’t get the business done in twenty minutes … he’ll escape me …”

  He pushed open the door between the two garrets, came back to the bed, lifted the young man and carried him to the bed in the other room. Then he bathed his temples with cold water and made him sniff at some salts.

  This time, the swoon did not last long.

  Gérard timidly opened his eyes and raised them to the ceiling. The vision was gone. But the arrangement of the furniture, the position of the table and the fireplace, and certain other details all surprised him … And then came the remembrance of his act, the pain which he felt at his throat …

  He said to the prince:

  “I have had a dream, have I not?”

  “No.”

  “How do you mean, no?” And, suddenly recollecting, “Oh, that’s true, I remember … I meant to kill myself … and I even …” Bending forward anxiously, “But the rest, the vision …”

  “What vision?”

  “The man … the rope … was that a dream? …”

  “No,” said Sernine. “That also was real.”

  “What are you saying? What are you saying? … Oh, no, no! … I entreat you! … Wake me, if I am asleep … or else let me die! … But I am dead, am I not? And this is the nightmare of a corpse! … Oh, I feel my brain going! … I entreat you …”

  Sernine placed his hand gently on the young man’s head and, bending over him:

  “Listen to me … listen to me carefully and understand what I say. You are alive. Your matter and your mind are as they were and live. But Gérard Baupré is dead. You understand me, do you not? That member of society who was known as Gérard Baupré has ceased to exist. You have done away with that one. To-morrow, the registrar will write in his books, opposite the name you bore, the word ‘Dead,’ with the date of your decease.”

  “It’s a lie!” stammered the terrified lad. “It’s a lie! Considering that I, Gérard Baupré, am here!”

  “You are not Gérard Baupré,” declared Sernine. And, pointing to the open door, “Gérard Baupré is there, in the next room. Do you wish to see him? He is hanging from the nail to which you hooked him. On the table is a letter in which you certify his death with your signature. It is all quite regular, it is all final. There is no getting away from the irrevocable, brutal fact: Gérard Baupré has ceased to exist!”

  The young man listened in despair. Growing calmer, now that facts were assuming a less tragic significance, he began to understand:

  “And then …” he muttered.

  “And then … let us talk.”

  “Yes, yes … let us talk …”

  “A cigarette?” asked the prince. “Will you have one? Ah, I see that you are becoming reconciled to life! So much the better: we shall understand each other; and that quickly.”

  He lit the young man’s cigarette and his own and, at once, in a few words uttered in a hard voice, explained himself:

  “You, the late Gérard Baupré, were weary of life, ill, penniless, hopeless … Would you like to be well, rich, and powerful?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “It is quite simple. Accident has placed you on my path. You are young, good-looking, a poet; you are intelligent and—your act of despair shows it—you have a fine sense of conduct. These are qualities which are rarely found united in one person. I value them … and I take them for my account.”

  “They are not for sale.”

  “Idiot! Who talks of buying or selling? Keep your conscience. It is too precious a jewel for me to relieve you of it.”

  “Then what do you ask of me?”

  “Your life!” And, pointing to the bruises on the young man’s throat, “Your life, which you have not known how to employ! Your life, which you have bungled, wasted, destroyed and which, I propose to build up again, in accordance with an ideal of beauty, greatness and dignity that would make you giddy, my lad, if you saw the abyss into which my secret thought plunges …” He had taken Gérard’s head between his hands and he continued, eagerly: “You are free! No shackles! You have no longer the weight of your name to bear! You have got rid of that number w
ith which society had stamped you as though branding you on the shoulder. You are free! In this world of slaves where each man bears his label you can either come and go unknown, invisible, as if you owned Gyges’ ring … or else you can choose your own label, the one you like best! Do you understand the magnificent treasure which you represent to an artist … to yourself, if you like? A virgin life, a brand-new life! Your life is the wax which you have the right to fashion as you please, according to the whims of your imagination and the counsels of your reason.”

  The young man made a gesture expressive of weariness:

  “Ah, what would you have me do with that treasure? What have I done with it so far? Nothing!”

  “Give it to me.”

  “What can you do with it?”

  “Everything. If you are not an artist, I am; and an enthusiastic artist, inexhaustible, indomitable, exuberant. If you have not the Promethean fire, I have! Where you failed, I shall succeed. Give me your life.”

  “Words, promises!” cried the young man, whose features began to glow with animation. “Empty dreams! I know my own worthlessness! I know my cowardice, my despondency, my efforts that come to nothing, all my wretchedness. To begin life anew, I should need a will which I do not possess …”

  “I possess mine.”

  “Friends …”

  “You shall have them.”

  “Means …”

  “I am providing you with means … and such means! You will only have to dip, as one would dip into a magic coffer.”

  “But who are you?” cried the young man, wildly.

  “To others, Prince Sernine … To you … what does it matter? I am more than a prince, more than a king, more than an emperor …”

  “Who are you? … Who are you?” stammered Baupré.

  “The Master … he who will and who can … he who acts … There are no bounds to my will, there is none to my power. I am richer than the richest man alive, for his fortune is mine … I am more powerful than the mightiest, for their might is at my service!”

  He took the other’s head in his hands again and, looking deep into his eyes:

  “Be rich, too … be mighty … I offer you happiness … and the joy of living … and peace for your poet’s brain … and fame and glory also … Do you accept?”