Emotion grips my throat, and I have to make an unusual effort in order not to weep.
Alas, I was later to shed the tears held back at that moment.
The decision taken, as a man of action, Mayrol does not lose a minute to make arrangements for the adventurous attempt.
I take him to Monsieur Luissant and General Hochtheim. When they know the plan as a whole and the role to be played by little Tourte, they accept it without objection, without a word of pity or affection. They simply give the accolade to the little fellow. For them, the child is a man, running to sacrifice.
Mayrol settles the details of the execution in concert with Hochtheim.
At first he thinks of taking off at dusk; then he decides to depart in complete darkness. At midnight, the moon will be low enough on the horizon to prevent the alerion being distinguished, while permitting the silhouette of the convent to be discerned in a perfectly sufficient fashion.
In any case, four powerful searchlights will concentrate their beams on the squat bell-tower of the chapel. That will be the beacon that will guide Mayrol in his flight.
The choice of a launch-site for the apparatus is quickly made; various items of information coincide in indication an ideal terrain: a platform situated on the crests that rise up between Pierrefitte and Cauterets. It is seven hundred meters above the valley of Argelès and dominates the plain by about a thousand meters. From there the sliding skips departed that served for the exploitation of an abandoned mine.
That point of departure is twenty kilometers from the Ossat as a bird flies; the pilot thinks that he will arrive over the needle in half an hour.
Finally, one of the great advantages of the chosen point is that it is in the immediate vicinity of the electric railway line to Cauterets. Transportation of the alerions will thus be effected with ease.
A rapid reconnaissance permits Mayrol to take account himself of the excellent conditions offered by the platform of the mine.
Similarly, General Hochtheim will prepare him a landing-ground that will be illuminated from midnight on.
The material details having been duly settled, the pilot sets out to utilize the remaining hours of daylight to carry out a trial. A hillock masked from the Ossat by a pine-wood is selected. Little Tourte takes his place on the saddle placed behind the pilot’s seat. A rope fifteen meters long is solidly fixed to the framework of the apparatus.
Launched by the sandow, the alerion rises without difficulty. Lightly and easily, it rises above the plain, aided by the strong breeze.
Mayrol suggests to the child that he set down in a farmyard, on a heap of straw capable of deadening the shock in case of a fall.
And several times, the exercise, perilous in itself, is carried out with an ease that renews our hopes. At an agreed signal, emitted by Mayrol by means of a shrill whistle, Étienne lets himself slide down the cable at the precise moment when the apparatus passes over the heap of straw.
“It’s nothing—less than nothing!” the boy says, when we congratulate him on his agility. “Like descending from a moving autobus.”
After those encouraging trials, we go back to the inn for dinner: a sad meal that reminds me of those we had at the front, on the eve of an attack, when we and the chiefs were griped by the terrible responsibility. Risking one’s own life is a little thing, once one gets used to it, but leading, driving others to death...
Isn’t the present case similar in every point?
Mayrol is silent by temperament; I’m too emotional to talk; in any case, as soon as I attempt a remark, an interior thrill quivers within me and prevents me from continuing.
Fortunately, Étienne has coolness enough for two; his nose in his plate, he eats with a hearty appetite; he regales himself on a cream desert concocted by our hostess.
Oh, those hours of waiting that separate us from the supreme attempt! They seem all the more cruel to me because I’m alone now.
Luissant has been obliged to go back to Paris, recalled to the Council of Ministers; the Prefect is at his post in Tarbes; General de Lozières is supervising the installation of the railway track. The three scientists have gone to the observatory on the Pic du Midi to study the progress of the atmospheric refrigeration.
I have told Tourte to rest for a few hours before the great departure.
Mayrol has returned to his hangar to check the bodywork of his alerion one last time. In addition, he has given orders to paint the wings black, in order to render the apparatus invisible at night.
I am, therefore—I repeat—alone, horribly alone beside the smoky lamp.
Oh, that frightful vigil!
My apprehensions return in a host. Then night falls in my spirit and I fall back into my intellectual lethargy.
“Well, Monsieur Lefort,” are you sleeping awake?”
Guy Mayrol is before me, shaking my shoulder.
It’s true; I had seen him without seeing him.
“It’s time,” he says, simply.
I shudder. On the morning of his execution, a man condemned to death experiences what I’m experiencing at this moment. And yet, it isn’t my life that is at stake,
I go to the next room, where the child is asleep. Before I wake him up, a sharp dolor traverses me. In the final analysis, it’s necessary. Undoubtedly, there exists, beyond the immaterial wills that prowl around us in order to weigh upon us, if necessary, our own intimate will. I must be going through one of those psychological phases, because, when I shake the little sleeper gently, I am acting like the obedient subject of a hypnotist.
The gamin leaps out of bed, like a soldier hearing the alarm sounded.
I dress him in a fur jacket for which I’ve sent someone to search in Tarbes, because the cold outside is very sharp; the thermometer is marking seven degrees below. What a fall in three days!
We take our places in the automobile that will take us to Pierrefitte, a journey of thirty minutes. There, the electric train is waiting for us; a truck is carrying the glider. The train climbs the slope rapidly. Now we’re at the alerion’s launch-site.
The moon is due to disappear at about one o’clock. Mayrol will take off at about twenty past twelve. Everything is ready. The sandows are stretched by the aides.
In haste, I renew my instructions to Étienne. Once again, I hug the dear boy to my heart. Mayrol installs him on the saddle, and then seizes the controls.
The apparatus shudders, lifted by the winds but retained by the military engineers. My heart has stopped beating.
“Hup!”
That’s the conventional “let go.” The rubber bands contract. The black bird bounds into the void and disappears into the night.
The die is cast.
XXIII. Life is Stronger than Death!
In haste, I make the return journey to Pierrefitte. The auto brings me back to the Ossat.
Followed by the engineers, I climb the wooded slope that masks us from the needle.
Now I’m at the crest. I stop dead; the soldiers accompanying me do likewise. The vision that is offered to our eyes breaks our momentum.
Illuminated by the white light of the electric projectors, the granite summit is outlined against the sky, an immense black tower with a bizarre crown formed by the tapering of the rock and the silhouette of the roofs, steeples and turrets of the Franciscan convent.
One might think it a fabulous animal crouched on the tower: a unicorn, dragon or chimera with trenchant claws and a crested spine.
Down below, all around, troubling glaucous glimmers rise from ground level, as if to prohibit any approach to that place of terror and mystery; they are low-lying pools of frozen water whose surface is iridescent in the moonlight.
The appearance is so fantastic that one can scarcely place it in the real world. It is a scene of Walpurgis Night, and one searches the air for phantasmal shadows, for deformed larvae.
I dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands in order to rid myself of the emprise of those hallucinations.
But n
ow the moon has disappeared behind the western hills, plunging the plain and the base of the cyclopean giant into blackness. I fix my eyes on the darkness rising along the granite like a sea of ink. I prick up my ears. Will I discern the strident blast of a whistle that ought to mark the decisive moment? Or will I hear the racket of the fling machine crashing into the rocky wall?
My nerves are stretched to breaking point as the seconds succeed one another, as the tide of shadow gets closer to the summit.
A time elapses that must be quite short, but seems to me to be a century.
And through the night passes a light, distant sound that quavers like the call of a cricket in the hearth.
There is no doubt about it; it’s Mayrol’s signal.
Behind me, a bright light sets the curtain of trees masking the aviator’s landing-ground ablaze; I divine that it is composed by acetylene beacons, lit at the agreed moment to facilitate Mayrol’s return.
The lights go out abruptly. Perhaps Mayrol has already landed. Nevertheless I march a hundred meters and stop at the limit of the first potholes. With all my strength, I resume listening to the silence.
This time, toward the foot of the bluff, I hear a distinct sound. It recurs at regular intervals. One might think that it were the crystalline sound of glass breaking as it falls. What can it be?
I don’t have time to forge hypotheses. From up above, I hear a cry.
In the muted echo, I rediscover the shrill, child-like timbre of a voice that has not yet broken, and also the heart-rending anguish of someone calling for help.
Horror! Only little Étienne could have uttered that cry.
I think I’m about to faint. My ears buzz, the blood beats in my temples with a staccato rhythm.
I truly think that at that moment, I was on the brink of collapsing under the sledgehammer blow of a cerebral congestion.
“Monsieur Lefort? Are you there?”
Perhaps it was that intervention by Mayrol that saved me, by provoking an instinctive reaction of my reflexes.
It is only at the third appeal, although the young man is almost within arm’s length, that I can articulate: “Yes...I’m here.”
I cling on to him, in order not to fall.
“Hey! Monsieur Lefort, you’ve allowed yourself to be gripped by the cold.”
By the light of a lantern, I can vaguely distinguish other shadows moving around me. I feet a bottleneck introduced between my lips.
“Drink!”
I obey. A sensation of wellbeing invades me. Now, I’ve recovered my aplomb. I can now hear the pilot, who declares in his tranquil voice: “I succeeded. Little Étienne has set down up there. Before I prolonged my flight over the rooftops, the brave boy called: ‘It’s okay!’ Except, it was time for me to come down to earth. I was gripped by the cold. Then I experienced a bizarre impression: the air was no longer supportive. When I reached the ground, I broke the machine…eh? What’s that?”
A second apart, two detonations have just sounded on the summit of the Ossat: two gunshots.
I seize Mayrol’s hands and in a breathless voice: “My fried, a frightful drama is in play up there. I’m a criminal, yes, criminal, for having let that child…to what? My God, what to do?”
I give signs of the most violent despair; I march, I totter, I weep with impotence and shame.
In vain, the pilot tries to calm me down.
I am obliged, however, to yield to the evidence of the arguments he enumerates. There is nothing we can do until daybreak.
How will the hours go by that separate us from the dawn?
I know nothing about them. There is nothing there in my memory but a dead time.
Except that, at the first light of morning, I have returned to a state of sluggishness, in much the same condition as when one emerges from a faint.
I can no longer feel much of anything, neither physical inconvenience nor mental anxiety. My bare hands are not suffering from the sharp cold that is powdering the earth with a white frost; my eyes rediscover the sinister stele of the Ossat indifferently.
My nerves are decidedly torpid.
Perhaps fatality wanted to have pity on me, by permitting me that anesthesia of my sensitive being, before pushing me toward the frightful calvary that still remained for me to climb.
Mechanically, I follow the officers and soldiers who are hastening toward the foot of the rick. They too are impatient to piece the mystery of the successive sounds that troubled the silence of the night of anguish. They have all heard the fall of broken glass, the supreme cry for help and the gunshots in the course of their guard duty—and also another sound, much duller and more muffled, that came from directly below the granitic spur, shortly before daybreak. That sound, I did not perceive.
With agility, those brave fellow run through the potholes and crevasses of collapsed earth. They give no thought to the possibility that the madmen might greet them with rifle fire from their lair.
As best I can, in follow on the heels of the nimble group—and suddenly, I see the soldiers stop, lean over toward the ground, step back, and then form a motionless circle.
I approach in my turn.
On the hardened ground, there is the cadaver of a man, a body folded in two, the limbs dislocated, the skull open.
Blood, the debris of viscera and cerebral matter have splashed the surrounding area.
At the exhortations of a lieutenant, the soldiers overcome their horror and lift up that miserable human wreck. They uncover the face, left almost intact. I throw my hands over my eyes; I have just recognized Roger Livry.
It’s too much.
I move away a few paces in order to get further away from the abominable vision. I go around the granite base. There, other soldiers are considering curiously the debris of black glass that stews the ground, and also the gelatinous plaques extended here and there by splashes. The sight of those things forces my dolorous brain to think again.
That paste with the opaline tints is the terrible mixture of radium and the Omega aid.
In a host, question marks assail my mind. But I am decidedly empty, annihilated. The power of reasoning and the sense of observation have abandoned me.
By myself, I remain in no condition to untangle the tragic thread of events.
Someone has to come to my aid.
That aid, the dead man will bring me himself.
Before my distracted eyes the silhouette looms up of the lieutenant who substituted just now for my routed courage by occupying himself with the collection of Roger’s mortal remains.
“Monsieur,” the officer says, “this letter was found on the cadaver. I believe it’s addressed to you.”
I take the envelope that he hands to me. Indeed, the subscription, in which I recognize the handwriting of my childhood friend, is in my name.
I stammered a thank you.
Then, sitting on a large boulder at the foot of the sinister mountain, I took cognizance of the unfortunate’s final missive.
Such as it is, I am copying that document, in which, in a flash of lucidity, the madman retraces the final act of the drama, crying his pain to the universe, imploring its pardon.
My dear Paul,
Have pity on me. I’ve suffered so much.
By virtue of the suffering of the last year of my life, more than my voluntary death, I have commenced the expiation of my crimes.
For a year I have lived in a fog of death and desolation, scarcely illuminated during the few days that you know. I have seen so many things that you could not see. Mad—I was mad!
That dream of the regeneration of the world by the destruction of present Life, I made in good faith, I swear to you. Never, at any moment, did I believe that I was yielding to an egotistical rage or an amorous despair. Never, before tonight, have I perceived the enormity of the sins of which I was the unconscious cause.
In order to remove the scales from my blind eyes, it has required one final sacrifice, that of an innocent, that of poor little Étienne.
&nbs
p; By the time you read these lines, all those who were on the Mont d’Ossat will be dead. It is necessary, therefore, for me to tell you...
First of all, Barnett killed himself the other night. The wretch met a frightful end. Since our arrival in this convent he had not ceased drinking and getting drunk. In a fit of delirium tremens he became fearful of the mortal cold that was increasing and wanted to protect himself from it. Soaking his garments in gin, he set fire to them. For a few minutes he ran, a living torch, uttering the cries of a damned soul. In an interior courtyard of the convent, a heap of calcined bones and black ashes will be found. That is what remains of Barnett.
I remained alone with Jobert. As I got to know him better, the man filled me with horror: a sanguinary madman who exulted in the memory of his crimes. In the last few days, I have been obliged to use my authority to prevent him shooting with a rifle at the soldiers who appeared in the plain. Yesterday, he manifested a savage joy when the dirigible crashed.
This evening, he claimed to hear suspicious noises from the direction of our vats of acid—for my refrigerators are installed outside the convent, in an old vaulted cistern only receiving daylight from outside through long and narrow ventilation shafts; by that means, they were sheltered from the most powerful shells.
Alas, I judged it materially impossible for anyone to reach our eagle’s nest by any means whatsoever. However, little Étienne was there. Guided by the radiation of the radium, the child had discovered the stone staircase leading to the cistern. He had had the idea of taking the sixty vats one by one—they only weigh fifteen kilos each—and throwing them to the foot of the rock.
He had reckoned without Jobert.
Surprised by the wretch, Étienne tried to defend himself, but the other, like a coward, plunged a dagger into his heart.
Drawn by the martyred child’s cries, I ran. I recognized Étienne, my pupil—almost my son—lying in a pool of blood, and standing over him, Jobert, his dagger red, laughing ferociously, uttering threats and insults.
Then, a veil was torn in my poor head. I discovered the abominable truth. I was horrified.
On the Brink of the World's End Page 36