“What did I tell you!” said Claude, triumphantly, feeling safe with his companions.
“There’s something different about the window,” Charles murmured. “It’s partly masked; something—perhaps a curtain—has been drawn across the left-hand side; at no time have I seen the light on that side, which leads me to believe that someone has come into the room without a light to block that half of the window, before coming in with a lamp. We’ll come back to that later. For the moment, it’s necessary to act. We can’t see anything from here. I have a plan.
“You, Claude, are going to stay under the chestnut-tree, and you, Julien, are going to come with me. We’ll go up to the loft. The small window nearest to the lighted window is no more than three or four meters away, and isn’t so far beneath it that one can’t easily see from there what’s happening in the room. All this is rather curious. We’re dealing with an ingenious robber, but there’s no evidence that he knows he’s being watched tonight by new forces…Julien, I advise you to be silent. Let’s get going.”
As they set forth on this preliminary operation, Claude, strongly impressed, whispered: “Be careful, Monsieur Charles!”
“Don’t worry. Our fists will suffice, but we both have revolvers as well.”
Claude shook his head. “Something tells me that a revolver is just as good as nothing, on this occasion.”
“Come on!” Charles said to the chauffeur.
The latter, a sturdy fellow in the prime of life, could hardly contain his jubilation. This adventure pleased him enormously.
In the drawing-room, Charles switched on an electric pocket-torch. Preceding his auxiliary, he crossed the room, thus reaching a spiral staircase. They went up stealthily.
The door to the loft was not locked. They went in. Two small windows facing the door cut out two rectangles of moonlit sky. The other windows visible from outside were those of the attic bedrooms.
A bluish milky light filled the lethargic, extraordinarily silent place. There were thick shadows between the beams and in the corners. To the right of the right-hand window, forming a rectangular patch of darkness in the grey wall, was a gap: the opening giving access to the bottom of the little five- or six-step stairway that led to the mysterious room—with the consequence that, in order to leave that room, it was necessary to pass through the loft. And to get out of the loft through the door that good Christians used, it was necessary to go past the widows.
Walking on tiptoe, having put out the little electric torch, Charles reached the right-hand window without meeting any obstacle, followed by Julien. Not a single creak escaped the old floorboards, which were thick and solid.
As he had expected, without being perfect, that observatory offered very appreciable advantages. It did not permit the revelation of the entire little top room, but allowed much more of it to be seen than Charles had hoped. Although the door was no longer visible at all, at least the bookcase appeared in nearly all of its breadth, only the bottom third remaining hidden—for, as we remember, the small window was on a lower level. Finally, to the left of the bookcase, an expanse of wall was visible, clad in the old flowered wallpaper that Charles recognized, and ornamented with engravings no less dear to his memory.
He hoisted himself up on tiptoe. The top of a lamp-glass was reveled—and that lamp was definitely set on the lower shelf of the ridge-backed desk. He cursed the curtain, screen, or whatever it was, though, that blocked the whole left side of the lighted window, preventing an observer from seeing an important part of the little top room. Nothing else could be seen, relative to the intruder, but the top of that lamp-glass. It was necessary to be patient and wait for something to happen. Then they would take action accordingly.
They remained motionless for minutes that seemed to them to be singularly long, their eyes fixed on that feebly-lit half-window—the lamp must be fitted with a shade—careful not to reveal their presence by any distraction.
Suddenly, Charles drew back reflexively into the shadow of the loft. The man had just got to his feet, unhurriedly. He had undoubtedly been sitting down at the desk, until that moment. He picked up the lamp, went to the bookcase, opened one of the glass doors, lifted up the light, and began to search for some book or document.
In an almost non-existent whisper, Julien observed: “I don’t understand. What’s he doing?”
The pressure of Charles’ hand imposed silence on him. The latter opened his eyes so extraordinarily wide that the chauffeur, seeing his stupefied face in the moonlight, began to lose confidence.
Charles was, in fact, experiencing an indescribable stupefaction at that moment.
The man with the lamp was of medium height. He wore short graying side-whiskers; his long hair formed an unkempt mass of curls. His features testified to his vigor. His eyes were bright. He was dressed in an ill-fitting, unbuttoned olive-green jacket with a brown velvet collar. The broad collar of his loose-fitting shirt was negligently open, maintained by a silk cravat, tied without much artistry.
He was not a man of our era—and yet, Charles knew him as well as he knew himself. For he had before him, on the other side of the window in the little top room, the individual represented in a certain romantic painting, a paining full of life and charm, hanging in the drawing-room of the house in the Rue de Tournon. The only things lacking in the matter of absolute resemblance, were a rifle in one hand, a telescope in the other, a pistol passed through his red belt and a parrot on his shoulder.
In brief, incredible as it was, on that night in September 1929, Charles was looking at the moving, living—or, rather, re-living—image of…who? You’ve guessed it: César Christiani, the former corsair captain of His Majesty the Emperor Napoléon I, who had been murdered in Paris at 53 Boulevard du Temple on July 28, 1835, at the age of 66.
Shivering with an indescribable fever, Charles devoured the incredible spectacle with his eyes. Then, abruptly, he returned to a rational conception of things. The trick had been mounted with care, very intelligently, and was, without any doubt, aimed at him, Charles Christiani—for such a reconstruction would not have been able to evoke a particular disturbance in Claude, Péronne or any of the neighboring villagers. He therefore observed in a cooler manner the disguised individual and the scene that he was playing for his clandestine spectator.
It was well done, and it was well played: a perfect imitation of the old sea-dog, aged about 60; the coarse gestures, the original clothing, and an unspecifiable air of the obsolete, the outdated, foreign to our time. And the lamp! The old oil-lamp of the first Empire, which was still kept in the cabinet on the ground floor, from which the trickster must have removed it without Claude’s knowledge!
Meanwhile, the individual was pursuing his search of the bookcase shelves with an admirable conviction. He made a semblance of finding what he was pretending to look for: a stack of papers. Then he returned to the invisible desk and, once again, nothing more could be seen than the upper part of the bookcase and the wall.
You can imagine how Charles searched for something that would reveal the truth. He went from hypothesis to hypothesis, but nothing caused him to pause at one rather than another. The only clear point in his mind related to the continuation of the operation; he was firmly resolved to lie in wait for the joker to make his exit, in order to find out where he would go and what he would do after quitting the little top room, since he routinely came out of it at midnight.
It was a long wait. The man only showed himself once before his departure, marching back and forth, still in that deceptive silence, which ended up becoming oppressive.
The moment arrived, nevertheless, when he picked up the inefficient old lamp again, ran his fingers through his untidy hair, like a sentry weary of his duty, and, having darting a glance toward the window which seemed a trifle ironic, extended his long free arm toward the handle of the invisible door.
“Look out!” said Charles, in a whisper—and they both plastered themselves against the wall.
It was a cri
tical, ambiguous, anxious moment. To tell the truth, they had both lost a sense of reality, to some degree—and, in the depths of their inner being, they were not too sure of the shape of events. Someone was about to come out of the room, come down the steps of the stairway, come into the loft, and pass in front of them, or move away in the direction of the other attic rooms…
It would happen noiselessly, as if in a dream, and it was unpleasant to anticipate that phantasmal march…
While they waited, nothing appeared. Obviously, the mysterious man had put out his lamp, as Claude had predicted; of that there was no doubt. But no one appeared in the opening at the bottom of the stairway. No one passed through the moonlight that picked out the black and white shadows of the cross-sectioned windows on the floor.
When a certain time had gone by, Charles returned to his original observation-post, expecting to see the light in the room again. They must have witnessed a false exit on the part of the night-walker…
No, there was no longer any lamplight in the room—but the moon threw a more intense illumination into it than one would have thought possible; that anomaly was evidently due to the reflection of the façade at right-angles to it.
By virtue of that luminosity, Charles could still see.
There was no movement, either in the room or in the loft; not a tremor was perceptible.
Where had the individual gone, then?
V. The Marvelous Reality
Charles switched on his electric torch. The chauffeur did likewise.
The well of the little stairway to the top room was quite empty. They verified that with as much ease as certainty, the steps being nothing more than planks with slits between them.
They climbed the steps, one after the other. In the lead, Charles reached the narrow landing outside the door of the little top room. There he listened—and there, childishly, he hesitated.
There was no sound.
He pushed the door abruptly, having turned the handle rapidly. The two minuscule pocket searchlights did their work.
The little top room was deserted. Glacially, harshly, gloomily deserted. There was no one behind the door, no one under the sofa. Nothing in the atmosphere testified that a man had recently been there for three hours with his lamp lit.
Charles, who was scanning the room with the dazzling beam of his pocket-torch, uttered an exclamation. “Look at that!” he said, pointing at the bookcase.
“So what? It’s a spider’s web.”
“Doesn’t that tell you anything? Think. That spider’s web is situated in such a way that it would be torn away if the bookcase were opened. Now, that bookcase was opened a little while ago. We saw the man open and close that glass door! That, without a doubt, is prodigious! I have to let Claude know—I’ll go call him.”
In order to do that he turned to the window, from which he intended to hail the old steward—but stupefaction petrified him.
“The…the Moon!” he pronounced, hoarsely. “Look at the Moon!”
“Good God, Monsieur Charles. That’s a full Moon!”
“Yes, an entirely round Moon in the east—a Moon that rose scarcely three-quarters of an hour ago, although we know that tonight’s Moon is a crescent and that it was about to set over there, in the west! It’s a dream! We’ve been drugged…”
Without any further palaver, Julien ran to the window at the back—the one looking southwards—and shoved the shutters open with a bang…
The nacreous crescent appeared in the south-west.
“Two Moons!” Charles exclaimed, having remained facing the round silver face rising into the clear sky. He moved closer to the window that looked out on that full Moon. “I’m going mad, Julien!” he cried.
“What is it now?”
“Come here—put out your torch and look. Then tell me…the porch…can you see it?”
“No, Monsieur—it’s no longer there. It’s disappeared.”
“That’s not all. The grounds…”
It was, in fact, enough to drive one mad. The large chestnut-trees were now small saplings. The lawns, spirited away, had given place to a vineyard pierced by a narrow pathway, at the end of which was a small rustic summer-house. In the bright moonlight, all of that was as visible as in broad daylight.
“Do you understand?” said Charles. “That’s the garden as it once was, the château as it once was, the château before the addition of the porch, before 1860! I have drawings, paintings of those times; there’s no mistake! That little summer-house out there is unmistakable!”
“What summer-house?” said Julien. “I can’t see it! And what’s more—am I seeing things?—the porch has come back, Monsieur Charles!”
“No it hasn’t!” stammered the young man, anxiously.
“Yes it has!” the other insisted, no less anxiously.
“Ah! I think I understand!”
Charles had noticed that Julien, at present, was not looking through the same window panes as himself, but through the part of the window that had seemed to be blocked a little while ago when seen from without, which was now to their right. The historian, in his turn, stationed himself at that part of the window—which comprised two panes—and saw the modern landscape again, with its tall chestnut-trees, its porch, its lawns, and a sky that was moonless on that side.
“I’ve got it!” he announced, with a marvelous delight.
Julien waited open-mouthed for the explanation.
At that moment, Claude—having seen the two men gesticulating from down below, heard them speak and seen them open the south-facing window—arrived on the site of the prodigy.
“Here are two very singular window-panes,” said Charles, pointing to the left-hand half of the window. When one looks through them from within, one sees the garden as it was before 1860—perhaps many years before 1860. And when one looks through these windows from outside, one sees the little top room as it was then—as it was before 1829, the year when my ancestor César Christiani left Silaz, never to return.”
Claude was still unable to see anything in that but confusion—but Julien, who was more intelligent, asked how Charles knew that the vision had shown them a room anterior to 1829 and the departure of “Monsieur his grandfather.”
“Because,” Charles revealed, “it was him that we saw. And it’s you who’ve won your bet, Claude. We really are dealing with a phantom, and absolutely genuine specter, an indisputable sarvant. And, as there’s no such thing as the supernatural, we must conclude that this phenomenon is perfectly natural, and that our phantom is merely an entirely-explicable image.
“When one places oneself on either side of these surprising windows, what one sees is not what is there now, but what was there before 1829, or in 1829 but before the autumn, the time of the departure in question, when César Christiani went to Paris.”
“But how can that be?”
“I’m trying to figure that out… First of all, I now recall, much more precisely, something I only remembered vaguely a little while ago under the chestnut-tree, at the moment when I observed that half the window seemed blocked—the left half, which, now that we’re inside the room, is naturally to our right.
“That something is that, since my childhood, I’ve always seen the other half of the window covered with sheets that I took to be wooden panels. Understand me—the other half; not the one that seemed to me to be masked just now, but the other, which is now the left half, in which the phantasmagoria was produced. Yes, dark sheets, which I assumed to be wooden boards. I assumed that, for want of glass, someone had made a provisional repair at some time in the past, but then neglected to follow it up by substituting panes of glass for the boards. The glazed half-window and the south-facing window let sufficient daylight into the room, in any case. If I had remembered that detail when you talked to me about apparitions, I would have asked you immediately when the two opaque panels had been replaced by plates of glass.”
“Not at any time!” retorted the old steward. “Personally, I’ve never pai
d any great attention to such details. What I can certify is that, in the more than 30 years that I’ve been in service with your family, Monsieur Charles, no glazier has made any repair in the little top room.”
“Hold on!” said Charles, meditatively. “On reflection, therefore, one arrives at the conclusion, in fact, that those panels must have been placed there in the time of César Christiani himself. But then, it’s necessary to admit that they suddenly ceased to become opaque, to become what we see now—which is to say, displayers of a bygone era…”
“Retrovisors,” ventured the chauffeur Julien. “Like the mirrors mounted on automobiles for seeing behind the car, seeing the road traveled…”
Charles smiled. “It can’t be quite like that—for our past doesn’t seem to me to be directly observable, at least by us.”
“Naturally,” said Julien, “since it no longer exists.”
“Yes it does,” said Charles. “The past still exists in the medium of light, in optical form; but until now, our own past—that of the inhabitants of the Earth—has not been available to our own eyes. That doesn’t prevent it from being visually eternalized, like all the pasts in which light has reigned. Thus, when we look at the stars, it’s their past that we see, for light, in spite of its velocity of 3000 kilometers a second, takes years to reach us from the nearest star—in other words, to bring us the image of that star. With the result that we only see, in the firmament, stars as they shone 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago, according to the distance that separates us from them, and not as they shine at the moment when we contemplate them.”
After a pause, he continued: “In sum, these panes act exactly as if light, in passing through them, took as much time as it takes to cross immense celestial distances. It’s exactly as if they were condensates of space, compressing distance. I think that’s the direction in which it’s necessary to seek the solution of this marvelous enigma, however strange its initial formulation might seem—I don’t doubt that another can be found, which will be acceptable, since it will be true.
The Master of Light Page 8
