He went to sanctuaries, implored the divinities; he tried conjurations and incantations—in vain. The diamond did not recover its purity. He became terrified then, and despaired. The stone the color of fire, which he had hidden in his bosom, was now burning him to the utmost depths of his heart.
A pious Brahmin whom he met and consulted, without telling him the whole story, advised him, as a last resource, to undertake a pilgrimage to the sources of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, where the sanctuaries of the gods were, beyond the plains and the clouds, near the summits of the Himalayas. So he went northwards, and walked so far that his feet bled, and reached the sources.
With many fervent prayers, he steeped the stone in the sacred waters day and night for a week. At the end of the week, the diamond had become entirely red—the red of blood. No stone like it had ever been seen. It shone with a magical glare, and all the splendor of the crime was in its fires.
Then the wretch lay down on the brink of the springs, on the bare ground; his eyes closed, and night fell, with swirls of snow that made him a white shroud.
In the morning, the priests found his body. He was still holding the ruby in his clenched fingers. The priests took the new stone and, with appropriate incantations, embedded it in the forehead of Shiva, the god of death.
The Vestal
It was an obscure redoubt, with walls of unpolished stone, a sort of sad, low-ceilinged cell. Damp oozed from the walls and ceiling. A lamp in the form of a bird gave a feeble light. On the edge of the niche, near the lamp, a morsel of coarse bread was visible, and on the floor of compacted earth beneath it, a jug. There were steps rising from the floor toward the ceiling. A women was sitting, motionless, on the bottom step, her head swathed in veils like the statuettes of mourners.
The woman was named Julia Fausta. Belonging to one of the oldest and richest families in Rome, she had been consecrated since childhood to the cult of Vesta, the austere goddess. She marched in the processions before the venerable statue.
One day, when she was passing through the city, she had come across the cortege of a condemned man who was being taken to his execution. In accordance with the privilege granted to the Vestals by law, the encounter saved the man. He was the son of a senator, sentenced to death for having conspired against the security of the State. His name was Caius Spurius. His youth and audacity were admired.
Julia Fausta was as beautiful as the statue of Beauty, and the distant inaccessibility in she was maintained by her vows rendered her more desirable. Caius conceived a wild passion for the woman that had saved his life.
The young woman shared that love. She struggled in vain to keep intact that chastity that she had been forced to avow one day, as an ignorant child. Cupid is the first of the gods, and all the others vanish at his approach like fearful phantoms. One evening, the vestal fled by means of the hidden door of the sanctuary. She met Caius. In a villa hidden in the depths of the Roman countryside, they tasted brief but unforgettable joys. Then lictors armed with fascia surrounded the villa. The young people were taken back to Rome, amid the ignominy of a howling crowd. Justice was pitiless. For having allowed the sacred flame to be extinguished in her soul, Julia was interred alive in the crypt that would be her tomb. She had bread and water for a day or two, and the lamp, whose brightness—the image of life—would go out after a few hours.
Oh, it was not that she regretted expiating her crime, if it was a crime, but only that the black face of Destiny had not, at least, appeared later. The gods were cruel to have become jealous of her happiness in love so quickly. What right did anyone have to forbid her to live as other women did? Why had her life been bound forever, at an age when she was still too young to know what life was? Was it necessary that a grim law should separate her from the rest of humankind, to make her, a frail child, similar to those ephemeral insects which die of their first embrace?
Julia Fausta got to her feet. How many hours she had been enclosed in that subterranean prison she did not know—but the lamplight was beginning to pale. The young woman knew that there as a heavy stone above her head, then a thick layer of earth, and beyond that, separated from her forever, the open air, the blue sky and the delicate perfume of flowers. Perhaps, by digging with her feeble hands, patiently, in the black soil underfoot, she might find the roots of trees whose foliage spreads out majestically up there. Oh, to know that life was there, present, and to find, forever, the other side of life!
Suddenly, a slight noise made her shudder. Then she became still. The sound continued, regularly, and more emphatically. It was as if someone were digging in the soil heaped up over the cavity. The young woman remained nailed to the spot, listening with her heart.
A hard object collided with the stone. Then a crack of light designed a straight line. And the trap was lifted, pulled by vigorous hands, letting through a flood of light, air and life.
A form cast a shadow from the top of the steps, and a man came down. It was Caius.
“You!” cried the bewildered young woman. “It’s you! Oh, praised be the gods, who did not want me to die before seeing you again! What am I saying, to die? We’re going to live. This funeral cellar will be the veritable cradle of our love.”
Caius was now beside her, and he shook his head sadly. Other shadows appeared at the entrance. Man descended into the crypt. There was a centurion accompanied by two legionnaires. The slender shadows of lances carried by other soldiers outside were visible on the steps.
The centurion spoke, in a clear, trenchant voice.
“Caius Spurius, the Senate had absolved you of your first crime, but it was not able, without injustice, to pardon you for having betrayed the faith of the Vestals and soiled one who served the goddess of the hearth. It grants you the death that is your due. By a residuum of pity, it has permitted you to wait for it beside the one who was your accomplice. Caius Spurius, thank the clemency of the Roman Senate, the master of peoples and kings.”
Julia Fausta was plunged into a stupor. Caius, with his back against the wall, seemed a hunted beast, ready to launch himself in a desperate effort—but the centurion went back up the steps impassively, followed by the two legionnaires, and disappeared. The sound of the stone moving was heard, and a black shadow extended. Then Caius leapt toward the steps. He tried to reach the light through the diminished passage. Brutal hands shoved him back, and the funereal stone fell once again.
The smoky lamp, reanimated by the air from outside, lit the lugubrious scene. Caius lay down at the foot of the steps. Julia Fausta stood beside him, sobbing.
Eventually, she touched his shoulder gently.
“Oh, my Caius,” she said, “what does it matter if we are separated from humankind for eternity? Are the two of us not together? Death leaves us a few hours. We can encapsulate in those brief moments an entire loving existence.”
But the man had got up. His eyes wandered slowly, and his gaze made a tour of the cell. Julia knelt in front of him, extending her hands in a gesture of adoration.
“Bitch!” he cried. “Immodest bitch, who saved me once only to make me die more horribly! Get away from me! Back! I hate you. Cursed among all days be the day when your mother conceived you!”
While blaspheming, he perceived the morsel of bread deposited in the niche next to the lamp, and the jug of water on the ground. He seized the jug, lifted it up, and drank in long, savage draughts. Then he advanced to grab the piece of bread.
The instinct of self-preservation awoke in the young woman. Love suddenly foundered. There was no longer any presence but that of two starving beasts. She too extended her hand.
There was a rapid encounter; a brutal gesture by the man. The lamp, knocked over, fell to the ground. There was darkness—and in that darkness, the anguished cry of the woman was heard, as she was seized around the neck by two brutal hands. The cry died away into a croak, and finished in a sigh.
A delicate cadaver fell on the compacted earth. And the man remained alone in the darkness, with, to prolong his
torture, the bread, the water in the jug—and the flesh.
In the Next World…
For Georges Vésier20
The first time that I visited Doctor Crooker, I was primarily attracted by the reputation of his scientific work. His name was one of those that had seduced me a long time ago, to the point of making me ardently desire to know the man as well as the scientist. It would be inexact to claim that normal curiosity was not mixed with another, slightly anxious, such as those inspired whom one suspects of being in relation to a mysterious beyond. I knew that the physicist in him was combined with a redoubtable mathematician—one of those who, by virtue of a poetic and magical intuition, believed the abstractions of number to be realizable in the material domain, having read Pythagoras, whom everyone interprets as he pleases.
Dr. Crooker’s ideas went much further than the formulae one finds in books. His theories regarding the fourth dimension were not only theories. He believed not only in the possibility, but also in the existence of a world based on other geometrical axioms than those of the world in whose midst we live. I had the vague sensation that the unknown universe in question, evoked by a visionary in its sudden reality, would be a terrifying thing for minds possessed of the usual concepts.
Needless to say, I was led to return, attracted by interest in what the doctor had to say, by the redoubtable novelty of his remarks, and especially by the presence of a feminine form whose ideal perfection all geometrical description would have tried in vain to define. She moved around him like a blonde fairy around a black magician. From the first day onwards, her smile suddenly became for me an inescapable spell. I knew that she was Dr. Crooker’s niece, and that her name was Kate. She was the orphan of an Irish mother, and her uncle had taken her in. She undoubtedly represented all that that strange man could feel of human affection, and it appeared to me that she had also taken an affectionate interest, insofar as her feminine mentality permitted, in his work. But the brightness of her eyes was like the emerald green ocean from whose shores she had come, and merely by virtue of gazing at her golden hair, I had all the honey of Hymettus21 in my heart.
My scientific qualifications were sufficient for me to be able to render the old man a few commonplace services. I was able to become indispensable without revealing the prodigious interest that surpassed all other considerations so far as I was concerned—and a day came when I moved into Dr. Crooker’s house. We were alone, the three of us, with a deaf, almost mute, maidservant and a very old gardener.
It is a vast and ancient dwelling in the suburbs of the city, only connected to the rest of the world by walls and deserted alleyways. Side-doors once opened in the walls on to now-abandoned gardens; they have been sealed by dust and branches, and moss carpets their fractured doorsteps. The house is preceded by an avenue of linden trees. Its melancholy and flat façade has a northern exposure. A large clock on the ground floor chimes the hours implacably through the stairwell and the gloomy corridors. We live a secluded existence, which has nothing monotonous about it for me, illuminated by love and fear. Kate smiles when I speak to her, and without her saying anything to me, I know that her smile is for me. Emerging from unforgettable conversations, I go into the doctor’s study with anguished apprehension.
The furniture is austere. Two large windows without curtains pour a white light of infinite bareness and sadness. Large blackboards cover the walls, and on those blackboards chalk lines intersect and interlace, some of which are familiar to me but of which the others, by their novelty, pose a challenge to my not-inconsiderable knowledge. In the place that is reserved for me, I find the day’s work: equations to solve; diagrams to draw—work whose details I understand in a limited sense, but which is connected to a vast general plan whose totality escapes me. I am like a technician whom a great engineer allows to fashion a few isolated components, whose eventual juxtaposition and ultimate objective is known to him alone.
I almost never find myself alone in the study. It seems that the doctor experiences a reluctance to leave me in intimate association with his work unless he is present. That reserve has aggravated my curiosity since the very first day, and the impossibility of satisfying that curiosity renders my existence more bizarre and more painful as time passes. I would already have fled, were it not for the golden chain that retains me in this abode. I have the impression that a more anguishing mystery is unfolding by the hour. Prey to an increasing exasperation, which has gradually killed my discretion, I have reached the point of picking up torn pieces of paper that are sometimes strewn on the carpet. It’s rare that I can decipher a word or a formula in these strictly personal indications, in which he almost always uses notations who alphabet in unfamiliar to me.
For once, however, he has been obliged to emerge from the unexpected in order to run into the garden, where something untoward has just occurred. A fragment of paper, irregularly severed, as if torn off in a moment of impatience, was on the table. Twenty lines of tormented script remained. I’ve picked it up. He’ll think that he has thrown it away, or that it has blown out of the window, which was open just then. I shall read it this evening, in my room, behind closed doors.
I hastened to find myself alone. The day has gone by. The doctor, on coming back on his study, made no allusion to the disappearance of the paper. We dined silently, all three of us, served by the dead maidservant. Then Kate went to bed. I’ve come up to my room.
I’ve bolted the door, discreetly. I’ve moved a few books in order that the doctor, whose room is next door, should not suspect my impatience. Now I’m sitting next to the lamp, reading:
...material, but having only two dimensions, length and breadth. If they exist, only the faces would be visible to us, since they have no thickness. They would escape us in one direction. We can have some idea of them by comparison with mirror-images, in which the body had three dimensions for sight, but only two for touch.
On the other side of our world are beings with four-dimensions: length, breadth, thickness and a fourth, which extends an unknown direction. Perhaps, reasoning by analogy, we can say that two-dimensional beings are represented by surfaces, but are limited by the elements borrowed from the first dimension, lines. Three-dimensional beings, solids, which have length, breadth and thickness, are limited by two-dimensional surfaces. In the same way, four-dimensional beings must be limited by solids. And thus, in consequence…the world in which these beings move, even those closest to us, must infinitely surpass the coarseness of ours. It’s the place of a worse fall, the terrible world inhabited by…
The manuscript was torn there.
For some time, he has remained locked in his study all day long and almost all night. I am no longer permitted to enter. If he comes out, even if it’s only for five minutes he takes the key with him. A few furtive appearances, at meal times, permit me to observe the ravages of his obsession. His eyes are haggard. His lips move incessantly, only to produce incoherent words at rare intervals. In vain, Kate begs him to think of his heath. He shrugs his shoulders or looks at her with an alarming expression. The poor girl is ominously depressed when we’re alone. I’ve suggested that we go away together, quitting this house where I have the impression that some strangely deadly web is being woven. She refuses. She doesn’t want to abandon her uncle. She loves me, though. I know that now. Her heart is mine—but her soul is in the fourth dimension.
Every day, I observe the progress of the doctor’s madness fervently. He has evidently set off in pursuit of some horrible chimera. Exiled from the room where he works, I sometimes go as far as the door, dreading some misfortune. Most of the time, I can hear him moving about feverishly. He paces back and forth, with hurried strides, or stops in front of a blackboard, which he covers in chalk with rapid strokes. At other times, he talks to himself, incoherently. I’ve noted a few words and phrases that recur, like bewildered moans, in his monologues: unknowable…so close and yet so far….the forbidden country…
At other times, he seems prey to some grim conflict
with an invisible enemy. His voice becomes hoarse. He exerts himself, doubtless cursing the terrifying phantoms of his imagination—and sometimes, rarely, he utters a cry of triumph, which frightens me more than anything else.
The other day I stood for an hour with my ear stuck to the door, without hearing the slightest sound. I was afraid. I didn’t dare knock; I went into the garden. With the aid of a ladder, I succeeded in raising my head to the level of the window. I saw…
He was sprawled in an armchair, breathless, his eyes lost in sinister contemplation. On the blackboard in front of him there were geometric figures, evoking faces such as the Gorgon never saw in her most frightful nightmares.
Now I have to describe the infernal denouement. The unspeakable scene is before my eyes, never to be forgotten. I’m writing these notes in pencil, without knowing whether I’ll be able to read them, so much is my hand shaking.
This evening, he didn’t even make a furtive appearance at dinner. We went to bed very anxious. I dropped off anyway, but my sleep was troubled by lugubrious visions and cries of terror; I couldn’t tell whether they were imaginary or real, until one clamor, more terrifying than all the rest, woke me up.
I realized that I was no longer dreaming. The anguished scream continued, expressing all human distress. I leapt out of bed and looked at my watch. It was after midnight. I dressed in haste and rushed precipitately out of my room, to find Kate on the landing, candle in hand, paler than her night-gown.
The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait Page 10