With a fine confidence, Roger, the implacable and terrible scientist, the Man of the Apocalypse, set forth on the road to happiness.
Personally, I had a heart bruised by an indefinable sadness. I was still assailed by the most somber presentiments.
Those presentiments crystallized in Marseilles, in the most frightful and unexpected form.
While traversing the great city to go to the boarding jetty of the transatlantic liners, we had the impression of a city in turmoil. The crowd was agitated by the frisson of anguish characteristic of great misfortunes. On the streets people were snatching the newspapers. In the tumult of overlapping cries, over the racket of the autobus rolling over the cobblestones, we could not discern the words being howled by the newsvendors.
“What’s happened, then?” Roger asked, when we arrived at the port.
“What! Monsieur doesn’t know?” said the loquacious southerner to whom my friend had addressed himself. “Alas, the news arrives more rapidly in Marseilles than in Paris, especially when it comes from Messina.”
“Messina!” I exclaimed, seized by an emotion and a reminiscence.
“Terrible, Monsieur, terrible! Worse than in Japan... There’s been an earthquake. There’s no more left of Messina than a handful...”
A hasty reading of the first dispatches convinced us of the extent of the terrible disaster. And among the confusion of news transcribed as telegrams arrived and precipitate special editions were published, Roger indicated to me with a thrust of his fingernail a small item found in the Petit Provençal:
A bizarre prophecy
A few days before the catastrophe, the Crown Prosecutor received a strange letter sent by a certain Jobert, a French subject. Wanted for a crime committed in Paris, the individual had been arrested by the Sicilian police, and had then succeeded in escaping from the municipal prison.
In his letter to the magistrate, this Jobert, who is believed to be an anarchist madman, complained of various denials of justice committed in his regard, demanded the immediate restitution of papers and notes seized from him, and the cessation of the pursuits instituted.
If these conditions were not accepted and fulfilled, he threatened to destroy Messina from top to bottom before the end of the week.
“He’s kept his word!” pronounced the chemist, with a troubling gravity.
“What! You judge the wretch capable of having unleashed such a catastrophe!” I exclaimed, fearfully.
“He had the means to do it, given the subsoil of the north-eastern tip of Sicily, disrupted by a series of anterior catastrophes: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes…a chaos of rocks in unstable equilibrium. I only hope that this time, Jobert has exhausted his supply of acid, or that he’s perished.” Then, in a tine of determination: “No matter! I’ll clarify the matter. I want to know whether the man is dead or alive!”
Seeing me distressed, shivering with horror, he made an effort to chase away an importunate thought, perhaps of remorse. In a casual, almost scolding tone, he added: “What do you expect, my friend? It’s a great misfortune, but any progress is costly, As soon as I’m a billionaire, I’ll help to reconstruct Messina. But in the midst of all this, let’s not miss our boat!”
XI. The Death’s-Head
We are in Biskra.
About the first part of our voyage I shall say nothing. It only left me with vague and painful impressions. The terrible events in Messina had plunged me into a dire state of mind. Pitiless sea-sickness accentuated those evil dispositions by keeping me bed-ridden in my cabin from the emergence from Marseilles to the landing in Philippeville.
Then there was a frightful day of jolts on the railway across a sullen landscape beneath a soot-black sky. That gray weather, which lent the high Algerian plateaux the aspect of the black plains of Artois, minus the towns, was worth the magic of a marvelous contrast when the train crossed the threshold of El Kantara.
Through the breach pierced in the somber rocks the golden vision of the sun-bathed desert appeared to our dazzled eyes, revealing palm trees and the gardens of the celestial paradise.
An hour later, our enchantment came to an end. Bikra offered itself to us, in its whiteness and its verdure.
Étienne was waiting for us at the station.
Roger’s first words were to enquire about the Thiérard-Leroys. With a joyful animation, the child hastened to satisfy his master’s anxious curiosity. The astronomer and his daughter were installed at the Villa el Blod—the White Villa—rented for the season; the young woman did not appear to have suffered from the fatigues of the journey. She spend long hours in her garden; she went out in her carriage.
“She’s better, much better!” little Étienne whispered in my ear.
Good! The reassuring news was only designed to soothe Roger’s confidence, about which I had begun to be slightly anxious. Things were arranging themselves in a better fashion than I had dared to anticipate. For the moment, therefore, there was nothing to do but abandon myself to the fortunate influence that emanated from the marvelous land, to take advantage in mid-December of the delightful temperature of a fine month of June in France.
We allowed Étienne to guide us to the Imperial Hotel.
It was an immense caravanserai responding to the uniform model that luxury hotels offer to well-off travelers everywhere.
With his habitual intelligence, our little courier had been able to choose a most agreeable apartment for us. Our bedrooms overlooked the palm trees of the oasis, with an extended view over the immensity of the desert. Another room destined to serve as a drawing room and study overlooked a gallery with arcades, beyond which was a Moorish courtyard paved with mosaics, ornamented with spurting fountains and orange-trees in tubs. It formed a delightful décor.
It is nearly seven o’clock. We dress for dinner; we are both inaugurating our dinner-jackets. I cannot help smiling on seeing us decked out as snobs when the immense mirror on one of the monumental lands reflects our image.
We penetrate into the vast dining-room: white tablecloths, flowers and green plants everywhere; crystal scintillating under the caress of the light. Waiters with felted footsteps circulate silently, like black phantoms, crossing one another’s paths, avoiding one another, hastening in a perpetual farandole. In a corner, “lautars,” or imitations thereof, their rounded torsos stuffed into embroidered jackets are picking out more-or-less Rumanian rhapsodies.
The diners are various: a few young women in bright pretty dresses, a few angular old women; the men are unobtrusive, dissolved in the same uniform blackness. How much I prefer the frame and public of our Parisian restaurants to that conventional luxury, those sad, extinct people with faces like those in a wax museum.
But what’s the point in quibbling? All in all, the milieu isn’t unpleasant. Everything invites me to live and let live, to chase away preoccupations and bad memories. I have only to take my inspiration from Roger, who seems to be enjoying his new existence with the amused astonishment and happy insouciance of a child.
Already he has chosen a table near a glazed bay window.
“That’s Monsieur Barnett’s table,” remarks a maître-d’hôtel, in a tone that says a great deal about the importance he accords to that individual. Then, with an obsequious smile: “Here…the next table is free; the Messieurs will be very comfortable here.
We sit down. Soon, the Barnett in question, our neighbor, arrives. His advent suspends conversations and the sound of forks. There is good reason; never has such a strange spectacle been offered to my eyes.
Barnett certainly “makes an entrance,” as the phrase is understood in the circus.
First, him: a skeleton in a black suit. Impossible to trace a more exact portrait of his ensemble. Oh, that frightful head with the bald cranium and the glabrous face, the ivory-tinted skin stuck to the bones; those frightfully hollow orbits, in which glaucous eye glimmer, immobile and expressionless; and those bloodless lips, drawn back to expose a double row of excessively white teeth. Then, to complet
e the hideous effect, a thin nose with hints of violet, which, seen from a certain angle, designs a hole in the wan face.
A death’s-head!
Slightly behind that macabre individual comes a little man with an olive complexion and a face like a ferret, certainly a half-breed. Finally, closing the march, a negro of colossal stature with a horrible bestial visage, covered in scars.
The negro is wearing a somber livery overladen with silver ornaments, the outfit of a undertaker in full regalia. And, a contrast between the hideous and the pretty, his huge black paws are respectfully holding a rose-wood tray surmounted by a perch, on which are set two ravishing hummingbirds, two living jewels.
Open-mouthed, we watched that incoherent stage-setting. The continuation of the performance was to reserve further astonishments.
Barnett sat down in front of the only place-setting. Opposite him, the negro placed the perch, and then remained frozen a pace behind it, in the attitude of a vast, well-trained valet.
The half-breed took up a position to the right of the birds; from a leather case he took out a kind of little metal trough, perhaps silver-plated. He placed that bird-table accessory in front of the little creatures, and the hummingbirds set about pecking the minuscule seeds contained in the trough. Sometime, the attentive half-breed helped them by lifting a delicate ivory spatula to their beaks. With an imperturbable gravity, Barnet took his meal in parallel with that of the birds, while addressing gracious and encouraging words to them.
After a long moment of stupor, Roger and I ended up smiling at one another with our eyes. Then hypotheses flowed between us in whispers:
“A conjurer.”
“A necromancer.”
“A lion-tamer who’s going to give a performance at the hotel,”
“A hypnotist.”
We were mistaken. Barnett was none of those. After dinner, Étienne, who had been invited by Livry to take coffee in the hall in our company, revealed the quality of the extraordinary individual.
Barnett was simply a rich American, and an utter eccentric. After having been a master of the strange and redoubtable sect of the Ku Klux Klan, he belonged, it appeared to one of the “suicide clubs” that exist in the United States. At dates fixed by solemn engagements the members of those associations have to pass over to the afterlife by the most expedient means.
Oh, Franklin, Grant and Washington, what would you have said if someone had told you that some of your descendants would sink into such morbid extravagances?
Barnett still had a year to go before the supreme date. He was employing that period of grace traveling in the company of the only two beings for which he experienced a human sentiment, his birds.
He possessed about two hundred birds belonging to the rarest and most magnificent species in the New World. That winged population occupied three-quarters of the ten-room apartment retained for the season at the Imperial Hotel. With the aid of trellis, the rooms had been transformed into aviaries. Three people were attached to that little society: an avian veterinarian—the half-breed we had seen during diner—and two negroes. Every day, at the whim of his fantasy, Barnett “invited” some of his pretty boarders to dinner. That evening, it had been the turn of the hummingbirds.
“What a crackpot!” I exclaimed, shrugging my shoulders
“Bah!” said Roger, with a serene indulgence. “Everyone’s free. At least that one’s not harming anyone.”
And by a natural association of ideas, he returned to the other madman, the criminal and terrible madman. “Oh, I was thinking about Jobert. I think I’ve found a surer means than police searches of laying a hand on him.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Look, read this advertisement that I intend to place in the most widespread newspapers. Tell me what you think.”
I scanned the paper, on which was inscribed:
Monsieur Jobert may address himself in all confidence to Roger Livry. In the interests of science, Monsieur Livry will forget the past and invite his ex-assistant to reach an understanding with him.
“You’re making a pact with that murderer, then?” I exclaimed.
Roger smiled. “There you go with your fine words. Above all, I want to be practical, and render Jobert harmless, by taking away his teeth.
“How?”
“By making him a proposition: either I’ll buy the acid and the radium he stole at a price fixed by him, if he has any left, or I’ll offer to let him work with me.”
“With you? Père Philippe’s murderer!”
“First of all, Philippe is out of danger; when he comes out of hospital in a few days’ time I’ll ensure him an income.”
“But Jobert’s a dangerous madman!”
“In that case, isn’t it preferable to have him close at hand? You see, I intend to settle that matter before Mademoiselle Thiérard-Leroy becomes my wife. My responsibility is engaged, after all!”
Apart from that alarming confidence in the conclusion of his matrimonial projects, Roger seemed to the reasoning accurately; on analysis, his idea was perfectly defensible.
“Place your ad, then,” I ended up saying. “We’ll see whether Jobert reveals himself.”
Glad to have convinced me, Roger took me out of the hotel,
“This magnificent might invites a stroll,” he said. “Étienne can show us where the White Villa is.” And, rapidly, to take away a suspicion that was already pricking me: “Oh, understand me clearly. If I want to know where she’s living, it’s to be sheltered from any involuntary indiscretion.” In a lower voice, he pronounced, religiously: “For the moment, it’s sufficient for me to breathe the air she breathes, the air charged with delightful scents.”
Roger, the cold calculator, turned to lyricism: I couldn’t help admiring the touching sincerity of the passion that guided him, and also the perfect delicacy with which it constrained his conduct.
So, that evening, we only saw from a distance the clump of palms and orange trees behind which the White Villa was sheltered. Roger resisted the desire, innocent I sum, to approach the wall. It was like a sacred terrain on to which he, being profane, could not stray without offending the divine creature who had captured his soul.
After a mute contemplation, during which his poor heart must have been singing a love song, my comrade took me back to the hotel.
In the hall, we encountered the macabre appearance of Barnett again.
The American is lying back in a rocking chair. In front of him there is a table laden with partly-emptied bottles. The ugly fellow isn’t on a diet of orange-blossom water. He has fled the rigors of “dry” America, and is pouring himself draughts of whisky, which he mixes with champagne.
As we pass by, he makes an effort to salute us, and even to smile. Oh, that death’s-head rictus! It’s enough to give one nightmares.
Roger bows courteously; in the phase through which he is passing, he can draw upon immense indulgence for people and things. Personally, I only lift my fingers to the brim of my hat. I find him repulsive, that alcoholic with his counterfeit eccentricity. Our idlers ought to react once and for all against the blissful admiration of these Anglo-Saxon so-called eccentricities. On tracing them back to their source, one invariably finds a cerebral breakdown caused by the abuse of strong liquors.
And our friends from England and America enabled us to know, in the course of the Great War, real men veritably worthy of our admiration.
At any rate. I’d like to see that skeletal individual a hundred leagues from Biskra. Is that a presentiment? Barnett doesn’t only cause me a disagreeable impression, he scares me!
XII. The Idyll Begins
What had to happen, has happened!
A fortnight ago, Roger entered into relations with the Thiérard-Leroys, and I needed that entire fortnight to determine the exact impression that the unexpected coup-de-théâtre made on me.
Unexpected? On reflection, I might, on the country, have calculated the probability of an encounter in a social circle as narrow as Biskra’s as a vir
tual certainty.
It occurred, inevitably, at an intersection of two narrow streets in Old Biskra.
We had gone as far as that agglomeration of clay houses and walls of dry mud enclosing garden of palm trees a few kilometers from Biskra, to which tourists go in search of a sensation exactly similar, so the colonials say, to a village in the Sudan.
We were following one of the alleyways, where the high cob walls are prolonged by the branches of palm trees overhanging the enclosures. Thus are formed shady, profound and silent corridors full of mystery.
Suddenly, in a patch of light that was plastered on the ground by virtue of an intersection, a few paces away from us, I saw the astronomer Thiérard-Leroy and his daughter appear.
We had to back up against the wall to allow the young woman to pass, leaning on her father’s arm. I experienced a horrible embarrassment. As for Roger, he was as pale as a corpse.
By virtue of an instinctive propriety, we saluted. With a mechanical gesture, the old man returned our salute; his eyes were vague and dolorous, doubtless fixed on distant preoccupations.
Madame Berjac looked directly at us, with a tranquil and gracious assurance. On discovering Roger, however, she experienced a shock. A pink tint appeared in her cheeks. She leaned more forcefully on her father’s arm. Then, after having passed by, white and frail, she turned to look back.
And I saw that she was speaking animatedly to the old man.
Roger continued to lean back on the earthen wall, doubtless in order not to fall. Taking him gently by the arm, I led him away.
“My God, how I love her!” he murmured, in a breath. “How beautiful she is!”
Yes, more than beautiful, touching. She appeared to me as Dante’s imagination invoked the shade of Beatrice walking amid the flowers of eternal gardens.
I drew my comrade outside the checkerboard of shadows, into the dazzling light of the sun.
On the Brink of the World's End Page 28