One of them is walking unsteadily, though, in the bright darkness of that sun-privileged land; he is drunk on grief and the bitter wine of his dolor. Rozal imagines himself as a wreck drawn by mysterious currents toward problematic destinies. Oh, if love is infinite joy, the consolation in advance, it quickly turns to melancholy and suffering. The happiness of love weighs upon everything. Like a man deflated, Rozal is no more than a piece of debris, a rag. He is zigzagging as yellowed leaves in the autumn wind do when the tree has no more need of them, when they can no longer help it respire, and are left to rot.
The other is Turner. Exhausted, not speaking, they have arrived at the Boulevard des Moulins above the Jardins de Monte-Carlo, and they can see the Palais de l’Or, into which avid men and women are pouring. On all sides, there are lights in profusion, the electricity of life, of fever, of the struggle for the incalculable smile. Certainly, Rozal is not alone in his torment; he is among the turbulent dust of beings flocking to that marvelous principality from all parts of the planet, stirred by a wind of luxury, and luxury to come, from who knows where. A grain of sand in a multitude, it appears to him, suddenly, that his pain, great as it is, is a poor thing of which none of the cosmopolites swarming there, in the gardens, the Place du Casino or the Palace of Hazard have any inkling, our need to have any inkling. Then, slightly ashamed of himself, he feels slightly appeased.
“What are you going to do?” Turner asks him.
“I don’t know.”
“Go back, then...”
“Where?”
“To Paris. To work.”
“I want to die.”
“No, you have to live, regardless. Dolor is a sport that makes a man stronger.”
“When he triumphs over it!”
“You must triumph.”
Now they are both attracted by the lights of the Temple of Gaming—a Cathedral well patronized by the pilgrims of the entire world, a Pagoda in which Hope allows herself to be glimpsed, but hides behind her veils, attracting thousands of worshippers to the land of flowers, sun and sea: other people like them, other people, of whom they know nothing, who might have frightful ulcers in their hearts and yet, on their lips, manifest a smile of contentment and defiance. Before Orestes and Pylades, the attractive silhouette Moloch of stone and gold looms up in the spring night—and they go toward it, toward the Palace of Chance.
Part Three:
THE HUMAN ARROW
I. The Victory of Travail
A continuous, regular, monotonous sound, of a hive of activity—a slightly muffled, somnolent noise, in which one can make out, very distantly, the curt and sparse voices of exceedingly busy men—fills Henri Rozal’s factory.
At their vices, the fitters, clad in blue overalls, leaning over the delicate component that the lime is etching, are making haste, with a kind of fever betrayed by their eyes, those of enlightened believers. One divines that they, the most intelligent, their leader’s near-immediate collaborators, have been infected by the inventor’s hopeful speeches and the obsessive desire to know whether, this time, success will come. In the steel jaws of their instruments, the bizarre shapes of steel, nickel or bronze are like works of art, incomprehensible to false artists, whose beauty their avid gazes are able to see. Their sure, almost precious, gestures are reminiscent of the sculptors in gold of the Florentine Renaissance. Polished cylinders encased, mathematically, in squat and rigid armatures; dozen of fine and delicate components, fragile in appearance but incredibly strong, are grafted on to the skeleton on which, in their turn, disks are juxtaposed fitted with hundreds and hundreds of minuscule metallic winglets. They are assembling the rotary engine designed by Rozal.
Already, ten or twenty times in the last six years, these untiring workers have recommenced their work, always with the same faith in their eyes after the fruitless trials, when it was necessary to abandon the path they had been following, throw the precious, amorously-polished little things and the thick steel blocks on the scrap-heap and return to work, with even more ardor, sure that the new effort would bring the deceptive chimera out of the darkness.
They know their boss; he absolutely cannot be mistaken; one day, the will vanquish the custodian sphinx of the secret he seeks. In series beneath the roof of the hall, the aligned work-benches are like the tables of a laboratory. In front of each man, a diagram is displayed, and he labors over the iron, the bronze and the steel with the conscientiousness of an ancient engraver in wood faithfully reproducing the design of a great painter.
Above their heads, three axle-trees are turning, purring; their conical gears, made of disks of unequal size, command precise machines via leather belts, whose hardened tools cut through metal with ease. At the feet of complicated lathes, mortising-machines, planers and shining serpentine polishers twist and overlap, reminiscent of the machines that drive carousels by mean of ribbon spools at the Montmartre fair in the Place Pigalle. Beneath the drilling-machines, heaps of little sparkling roundels resemble confetti—for there is a festival atmosphere in this joyous labor.
To the left, a door suddenly opens. In the depths of a smoke-filled workshop, bare-chested men are swinging their arms, striking incandescent blocks, which emit showers of sparks like splendid fireworks. Others, two by two, are pouring fire into molds, and the molten metal flows with strange gleams in which ardent greens are alloyed with reddish violets, vermilions, purples and bloody oranges.
Then, in the midst of a racket of terrible and resounding blows, the door closes again. The noise of the hammers is muffled, seemingly distant; but one retains in the yes for a long time that vision of the forges where the Vulcans of the 20th century are making arms for the conquest of the Heavens by humankind.
To the right, the part of the hall that was once called the Aviation Unit had completely lost its primitive aspect. A year ago, carpenters were working there, fitting together pieces of light wood that resembled children’s playthings. Immense frameworks, made of longitudinal shafts and crosspieces, resembled the carcasses or skeletons of giant birds. And, imposing as those strange assemblies were, in their dimensions, they retained an appearance of lightness, of grace, even of prettiness, which mad one think, immediately, of the flight of a seagull, or of a distant frigate-bird gliding, out to sea, over the waves of the great blue or glaucous ocean.
That poetic studio has disappeared; the carpenters have gone, along with their creations, which also resembled bird-traps. With them, too, have gone the women who extended white canvas sheets over the graceful frames; pretty birds are no longer made in Henri Rozal’s factory.
The Aviation Unit has been modified now. Workmen of another kind have come, with different work-benches and stranger tools. There are no more long strips of wood, no more mundane ribbons; the new men use steel pincers to twist leaves of white metal over narrow corner-plates of hardened aluminum.
A half-assembled mechanical bird rests on the trestles. It resembles a monster, some gigantic, fantastic flying fish whose carcass has been fished up from a deep marine gulf—an underwater Himalaya.
All around it active workers are coming and going, riveting attachments to its flanks, steel loops to which more steel wires swill be attached in their turn, gathered in sheaves, which will be grafted on to a supportive antenna or the tip of an aileron.
In spite of oneself, one is skeptical, disabused; when the assembly of aluminum, steel, nickel and bronze is complete, when the powerful engines are encased in their solid mountings, how will that apocalyptic beast take off? One regrets, instinctively, the silhouette, so slim and graceful, of the bird of wood and canvas, the gigantic butterfly, the white dragonfly, which it was sufficient to study for a restful moment I order to imagine it flying through the air with ease.
So, a man has dared, now, to mistrust nature, to imagine a force stronger than the weight of this monster, a powerful organism that will not resemble anything imposed by the eternal laws? One fears for that man. One dreads that he is mad, on gazing at his work; he had made an err
or—and one cannot imagine that he will be able to get off the ground, to make this formidable beast fly. To be sure, its form is slender and streamlined, pure in design, but even so, a tangle of metal sheets and corner-pieces, steel wires, metal blocks, a whole that is a torpedo, a bolide, an engine of penetration, ism by virtue of its mass, the opposite of a bird.
Like the others, however, the fellows in that workshop all have eyes filled with the ardent belief of artists and heroes. By means of their active hands, the curious beast is completed. The engine, its life, is beside it. It is a sort of swollen cigar, very thin at the rear, which terminates in a little rudder between two narrow planes. The front resembles and might be mistaken for the head of a giant bumble-bee. It is a rounded block, into which is grafted the propeller with the robust curved blades, broad at the base and narrow at the extremities. To either side, welded to the mass by neat attachments, are the powerful wings, pure and simple in design, with polished surfaces.
Nothing sticks out. All the mechanical parts are enclosed within the hull; the exterior only consists of the essential organs—the limbs, so to speak. Even the wheels of the landing gear are metal disks surrounded by pneumatic tires, at the end of strong legs whose other ends are embedded in a glycerine brake.
And this—if the engine will lift it into the air—is a lightning-fat warrior bird, very far from the graceful dragonfly of old, the Santos-Dumont apparatus,33 made of bamboo and thin white canvas, whose veins were so delicate in the creamy translucency of its extended wings. In Rozal’s creation, one senses the irresistible will of a fighter who wants to be the king of space, at a stroke, in the fashion of the great birds of prey whose mere shadow causes all the little birds to hide in the bushes.
Here comes the engineer.
As soon as he arrives, the workers seem to redouble their ardor. The foreman in charge comes over.
“There, boss. Another three or four stays to tighten, and the machine will be ready. We can begin the resistance trials.
Rozal does not hide his satisfaction. The workers pause, contemplating the apparatus. One of them boldly exclaims: “The beast will fly like an arrow. It’ll go by like a gust of wind!”
Rozal clenches his fists. “Ah, if the engine is sound!”
“Damned engine!” says the workman—but one senses confidence, all the same.
The turbine will spin, that’s certain. There’s no more to do than mount it. And it’s as if the crew that has just finished the assembly of the engine components cannot express their fury and the slowness imputed to them by the fitters!
Rozal smiles He senses that his workers are more impatient than he is.
And yet...
Three months had gone by since the drama at the Villa des Aigles. Henri Rozal had known dolorous hours, utter depression, terrible despair. Eventually, in a sort of resurrection, he had suddenly recovered consciousness, and his strength.
Turner had judged lucidly, from the first minute on, that Rozal’s only hope of salvation, in that lamentable adventure, could only come from intense hard work: the resumption of his research of the abandoned scientific problem. Instead of letting his friend sink into his depression, he had never left him.
Patiently, almost all night long, in their two adjacent hotel rooms, Turner had listened to Rozal’s complaints, his regrets, his insane plans, as one listens to a sick child who is being unreasonable, but whom one does not want to contradict—but in the calm intervals of the following day, he talked.
With exceedingly gentle words, little by little, he had evoked the image of the factory where, faithful and convinced, the unqualified workers were waited. He had described that family of brave men, committed to the magnificent work that they had not dared abandon—and Turner, who had not ceased to look in on them from time to time during the employer’s absence on the Cote d’Azur, explained:
“My poor old friend, they know that you had a right to happiness and they found it quite natural that you should go away with your wife—and even, pardon me, that you should be a trifle ungrateful. When they learned about our misfortune—for everyone knows—they experienced a selfish joy at the anticipation of your imminent return. You mustn’t hold it against them: you have associated them with a, endeavor in which they believe as in an enlightenment.
At first, Rozal had replied bitterly: “They too have private lives. Some are married, others only have mistresses, but they’re all in the quiet of their happiness; they can have the heat and mind for dreams that I no longer have.”
“You’re mistaken! Do you remember Michel, the fitter to whom you always gave the most delicate completions? Well, his girl-friend has run off with a taxi-driver, stealing his clothes. He loved her; he wept…and since then he had hardly left the factory. And as the work came to a stop, because you were no longer giving orders, he set about working on his own account, and he’s just patented a gear-shift that might perhaps make him rich—but you won’t lose that collaborator.”
“Oh!”
“And Larquier, the lathe-operator who bored your cylinders so well, he had an adored wife and a pretty little daughter. For those two beings, he forgot everything. Alas, the wife and child died of the same illness a month ago. Since then, the man works grimly, without saying a word. He told me that he had intended to throw himself in the Seine; what had held him back was that he had not witnessed the triumph that the factory would one day have, of which he wanted to be a part.”
Violently emotional, Rozal had seized Turner’s arm. “It’s true, then? The disasters of love have these derivatives: hard work; the resolute conquest of a difficult goal?”
“Yes. The more arduous the task is, the more rapidly it effaces the grief.”
At three fifty in the afternoon, on the day after the lamentable day, Rozal and Turner had caught the Paris express in Monte Carlo. It was necessary, immediately, to put distance between his wife and himself, in order to avoid the possibility that, one desperate evening, he might throw himself at her feet, weeping. It was necessary for him to leave the paradise that recalled their frenetic love immediately.
And once in Paris, Rozal, having seen his factory and those of his workers who remained, did not take long to recover his obsession with the rotary engine and his launch by means of a fabulous exploit. He would become rich at a stroke, and famous to boot. Millions and glory, that was what he needed now. The woman he had adored, and would adore forever, had taken him for an adventurer. The proud American heiress had misunderstood him, scorned him, humiliated him and sent him away—a man who, if immensely rich, would gladly have married her if she had not had a penny. Well, he would prove to her before long that he had been as rich as her when he married her! Then, having shown the world his audacity, he would punish her for her pride.
Doubtless he nursed—secretly, of course—the idea of reconquering her, but he dared not confess that to Turner, who, within a week of their return of Paris, had convinced a socialite, a cheerful drinking companion and an avid baccarat player, to put 200,000 louis into the business of the engine, to sustain the research and construction of the ideal turbine and the apparatus capable of supporting its power of impulsion. On the other hand, as we know, Rozal had won more than 40,000 francs in three hours in the private rooms at Monte Carlo when, no longer knowing what to do to pay Nasenberg, he had tried his luck for the first time.
Furthermore, on that fatal evening, before seeking shelter at the hotel in their sentimental distress and disarray—for the Sun limits the darkness and the marginal probability of misfortune—Turner had also gambled, with a profit in the afternoon of more than 120,000 francs, with a maximum bet of 12,000 on a sequence of reds, in the last eleven cards of a deck. Turner had been unable to resist his desire to continue at another table, or the same one, where another game would have got under way, but Rozal, with a glimmer of intelligence in his sunken mind, and being unable to take any more for want of air, had dragged him outside.
“Ah!” he said, “I feel thick-headed. A turn in
the sky in an airplane, with a rush of cool air lashing my face at an altitude of 2000 meters, would put me right…and then, if I were lucky enough to fall, to kill myself!”
But Turner felt on his breast, in the right-hand pocket of his smoking jacket, a wad of 160,000-franc banknotes; he replied to Rozal that they had to go to bed, and return to Paris the following day, by the 14:50 express from Monte Carlo.
Work, take the trouble; it was the funds that were lacking. The two friends had avoided, by pure luck, that obstacle to victory. Since then, in Paris, at the Nanterre factory—having, thanks to gambling, to luck in the midst of misfortune, the sinews of war, more 10,000 francs to live on and 200,000 for the chimera—Rozal, encouraged by Turner’s gaiety, had worked passionately…even though he could not forget his wife, and that season of love in the Vila des Aigles.
The two flaps of the iron door, opening on the sort of tunnel at the back of the factory, draw slowly apart. Men place within it the new apparatus that the assemblers have completed. It is a torpedo, furnished with wings and a tail, rather than a mechanical bird. With its large bumble-bee head, its gray color, its metallic planes, its rigid ensemble and its heavy semblance to a bolide or a bullet, Rozal’s monoplane is amazing. Nevertheless, its streamlining gives a real grace to the machine. The neat profile and the tapering shapes immediately evoke the idea of fabulous speed—only the impression of lightness is lacking.
“Damn!” says Turner, who is watching the experiment. “It’ll need some engine to maintain that bird in the air.”
“Two thousand horse-power,” Rozal replies, negligently.
And Turner, rooted to the spot, contemplates with admiration the man who makes such a formidable affirmation.
The roar of the immense ventilators becomes audible. Solidly suspended from the vault, retained by enormous cables and moored by powerful springs, the monoplane quivers at the first blasts sent forth by the ventilators, which are slowly set to work.
The Human Arrow Page 20