Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17)

by Maurice Leblanc

  For my part, as I had had no proof of Massignac’s death, I was not surprised at his return. But the alteration in his features and attitude astounded me. He looked ten years older; his figure was bent; and the everlasting smile, which used to be his natural expression, no longer lit up his face, which had become emaciated, yellow and anxious.

  He caught sight of me and drew me to one side:

  “I say, that scoundrel has played the very devil with me! First he beat me black and blue, down in a cellar. Next he lowered me into the water to make me talk. I was ten days in bed before I got over it! . . . By Jingo, it’s not his fault if I’m not there now, the villain! . . . However, he’s had his share too . . . and he caught it worse than I did, at least I hope so. The hand that struck him was steady enough and showed no sign of trembling.”

  I did not ask him what hand he meant or how the tragedy had ended in the darkness. There was only one thing that mattered:

  “Massignac, have you read Benjamin Prévotelle’s report?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it agree with the facts? Does it agree with my uncle’s account, the one which you’ve read?”

  He shrugged his shoulders:

  “What business is that of yours? What business is it of anybody’s? Do I keep the pictures to myself? You know I don’t. On the contrary, I’m trying to show them to everybody and honestly to earn the money which they pay me. What more do they want?”

  “They want to protect a discovery . . .”

  “Never! Never!” he exclaimed, angrily. “Tell them to shut up and stop all that nonsense! I’ve bought Noël Dorgeroux’s secret, yes, bought and paid for it. Very well, I mean to keep it for myself, for myself alone, against everybody and in spite of any threat. I shan’t talk now any more than I did when Velmot had me in his grip and I was on the point of croaking. I tell you, Victorien Beaugrand, Noël Dorgeroux’s secret will perish at my death. If I die, it dies: I’ve taken my oath on it.”

  When Théodore Massignac, a few minutes later, moved towards his seat, he no longer wore his former air of a lion-tamer entering a cage, but rather the aspect of a hunted animal which is startled by the least sound and trembles at the approach of the man with the whip. But the chuckers-out were there, wearing their ushers’ chains and looking as fierce and aggressive as ever. Their wages had been doubled, I was told.

  There was no need for the precaution. The danger that threatened Massignac did not come from the crowd, which preserved a religious silence, as though it were preparing to celebrate some solemn ritual. Massignac was received with neither applause nor invective. The spectators waited gravely for what was about to happen, though no one guessed that that was on the point of happening. Those seated on the upper tiers, of whom I was one, often turned their heads upwards. In the clear sky, shimmering with gold, shone Venus, the Evening Star.

  What a moment! For the first time in the world’s history men felt certain that they were being contemplated by eyes which were not human eyes and watched by minds which differed from their own minds. For the first time they were connected in a tangible fashion with that beyond, formerly peopled by their dreams and their hopes alone, from which the friendly gaze of their new brothers now fell upon them. These were not legends and phantoms projected into the empty heavens by our thirsting souls, but living beings who were addressing us in the living and natural language of the pictures, until the hour, now near at hand, when we should talk together like friends who had lost and found one another.

  Their eyes, their Three Eyes, were infinitely gentle that day, filled with a tenderness which seemed born of love and which thrilled us with an equal tenderness, with the same love. What were they presaging, those women’s eyes, those eyes of many women that quivered before us so attractively and with such smiles and such delightful promise? Of what happy and charming scenes of our past were we to be the astonished witnesses?

  I watched my neighbours. All, like myself, were leaning towards the screen. The sight affected their faces before it occurred. I noticed the pallor of two young men beside me. A woman whose face was hidden from my eyes by a thick mourning-veil sat with her handkerchief in her hand, ready to shed tears.

  The first scene represented a landscape, full of glaring light, which appeared to be an Italian landscape, with a dusty road along which cavalry-men, wearing the uniform of the revolutionary armies, were galloping around a travelling-carriage drawn by four horses. Then, immediately afterwards, we saw in a shady garden, at the end of an avenue of dark cypresses, a house with closed shutters standing on a flower-decked terrace.

  The carriage stopped at the foot of the terrace and drove off again after setting down an officer who ran up to the door and knocked at it with the pommel of his sword.

  The door was opened almost at once. A tall young woman rushed out of the house, with her arms outstretched towards the officer. But, at the moment when they were about to embrace, they both took a few steps backwards, as though to delay their happiness and in so doing to taste its delights more fully.

  Then the screen showed us the woman’s face; and words cannot depict the expression of joy and headlong love that turned this face, which was neither very beautiful nor very young, into something more alive with youth and beauty than anything in this world.

  After that, the lovers flung themselves into each others’ arms, as though their lives, too long separated, were striving to make but one. Their lips united.

  We saw nothing more of the French officer and his Italian lover. A new picture followed, less bright but equally clear, the picture of a long, battlemented rampart, marked with a series of round, machicolated towers. Below and in the centre, among the ruins of a bastion, were trees growing in a semicircle around an ancient oak-tree.

  Gradually, from the shade of the trees, there stepped into the sunlight a quite young girl, clad in the pointed head-dress of the fifteenth century and a full-skirted gown trailing along the ground. She stopped with her hands open and raised on high. She saw something that we were unable to see. She wore a bewitching smile. Her eyes were half-closed; and her slender figure seemed to sway as she waited.

  What she was awaiting was the arrival of a young page, who came to her and kissed her lips while she flung herself on his shoulder.

  This enamoured couple certainly moved us, as the first couple had done, by reason of the passion and the languor that possessed them, but even more by reason of the thought that they were an actual couple, living, before our eyes and at the present day, their real life of long ago. Our sensations were no longer such as we experienced at the earlier exhibitions. They had then been full of hesitation and ignorance. We now knew. In this late period of the world’s existence, we were beholding the life of human beings of the fifteenth century. They were not repeating for our entertainment actions which had been performed before. They were performing them for the first occasion in time and space. It was their first kiss of love.

  This, the feeling that one is seeing this, is a feeling which surpasses everything that can be imagined! To see a fifteenth-century page and damsel kissing each other on the lips!

  To see, as we saw immediately afterwards, a Greek hill! To see the Acropolis standing against its sky of two thousand years ago, with its houses and gardens, its palm-trees, its lanes, its vestibules and temples, the Parthenon, not in ruins, but in all its splendour and perfection! A host of statues surround it. Men and women climb its stairways. And these men and women are Athenians of the time of Pericles or Demosthenes!

  They come and go in all directions. They talk together. Then they drift away. A little empty street runs down between two white walls. A group passes and moves away, leaving behind it a man and woman who stop suddenly, glance around them and kiss each other fervently. And we see, underneath the veil in which the woman’s forehead is shrouded, two great, black eyes whose lids flutter like wings, eyes which open, close, laugh and weep.

  Thus we go back through the ages and we understand that those who, g
azing down upon the earth, have taken these successive pictures wish, in displaying them to us, to show us the act, for-ever youthful and eternally renewed, of that universal love of which they proclaim themselves, like us, to be the slaves and the zealous worshippers. They too are governed and exalted by the same law, though perhaps not expressed in them by the intoxication of a like caress. The same impulse sweeps them along. But do they know the adorable union of the lips?

  Other couples passed. Other periods were reviewed. Other civilizations appeared to us. We saw the kiss of an Egyptian peasant and a young girl; and that exchanged high up in a hanging garden of Babylon between a princess and a priest; and that which transfigured to such a degree as to make them almost human two unspeakable beings squatting at the door of a prehistoric cave; and more kisses and yet more.

  They were brief visions, some of which were indistinct and faded, like the colours of an ancient fresco, but yet searching and potent, because of the meaning which they assumed, full at the same time of poetry and brutal reality, of violence and serene loveliness.

  And always the woman’s eyes were the centre, the purpose, as it were the justification of the pictures. Oh, the smiles and the tears, the gladness and the despair and the exquisite rapture of all those eyes! How our friends up aloft must also have felt all the charm of them, thus to dedicate them to us! How they must have felt and perhaps regretted all the difference between those eyes of ecstasy and enchantment and their own eyes, so gloomy and void of all expression! There was such sweetness in those women’s eyes, such grace, such ingenuousness, such adorable perfidy, such distress and such seductiveness, such triumphant joy, such grateful humility . . . and such love, when they offered their submissive lips to the man!

  I was unable to see the end of those pictures. There was a movement round about me in the midst of the crowd, which was beside itself with painful excitement; and I found myself next to a woman in mourning, whose face was hidden beneath her veils.

  She thrust these aside. I recognized Bérangère. She raised her passionate eyes to mine, flung her arms round my neck and gave me her lips, while she stammered words of love. And in this way I learnt, without any need of explanation, that Massignac’s insinuations against his daughter were false, that she was the terror-stricken victim of the two scoundrels and that she had never ceased to love me.

  CHAPTER XVII. SUPREME VISIONS

  THE EXHIBITION OF the following day was preceded by two important pieces of news which appeared in the evening papers. A group of financiers had offered Théodore Massignac the sum of ten million francs in consideration of Noël Dorgeroux’s secret and the right to work the amphitheatre. Théodore Massignac was to give them his answer next day.

  But, at the last moment, a telegram from the south of France announced that the maid-of-all-work who had nursed Massignac in his house at Toulouse, a few weeks before, now declared that her master’s illness was feigned and that Massignac had left the house on several occasions, each time carefully concealing his absence from all the neighbours. Now one of these absences synchronized with the murder of Noël Dorgeroux. The woman’s accusation therefore obliged the authorities to reopen an enquiry which had already elicited so much presumptive evidence of Théodore Massignac’s guilt.

  The upshot of these two pieces of news was that my uncle Dorgeroux’s secret depended on chance, that it would be saved by an immediate purchase or lost for ever by Massignac’s arrest. This alternative added still further to the anxious curiosity of the spectators, many of whom correctly believed that they were witnessing the last of the Meudon exhibitions. They discussed the articles in the papers and the proofs or objections accumulated for or against the theory. They said that Prévotelle, to whom Massignac was refusing admission to the amphitheatre, was preparing a whole series of experiments with the intention of proving the absolute accuracy of his theory, the simplest of which experiments consisted in erecting a scaffolding outside the Yard and setting up an intervening obstacle to intercept the rays that passed from Venus to the screen.

  I myself who, since the previous day, had thought of nothing but Bérangère, whom I had pursued in vain through the crowd amid which she had succeeded in escaping me, I myself was smitten with the fever and that day abandoned the attempt to discover upon the close-packed tiers of seats the mysterious girl whom I had held to me all quivering, happy to abandon herself for a few moments to a kiss on which she bestowed all the fervour of her incomprehensible soul. I forgot her. The screen alone counted, to my mind. The problem of my life was swallowed up in the great riddle which those solemn minutes in the history of mankind set before us.

  They began, after the most sorrowful and heart-rending look that had yet animated the miraculous Three Eyes, they began with that singular phantasmagoria of creatures which Benjamin Prévotelle proposed that we should regard as the inhabitants of Venus and which, for that matter, it was impossible that we should not so regard. I will not try to define them with greater precision nor to describe the setting in which they moved. One’s confusion in the presence of those grotesque Shapes, those absurd movements and those startling landscapes was so great that one had hardly time to receive very exact impressions or to deduce the slightest theory from them. All that I can say is that we were the observers, as on the first occasion, of a manifestation of public order. There were numbers of spectators and a connected sequence of actions tending towards a clearly-defined end, which seemed to us to be of the same nature as the first execution. Everything, in fact — the grouping of certain Shapes in the middle of an empty space and around a motionless Shape, the actions performed, the cutting up of that isolated Shape — suggested that there was an execution in progress, the taking of a life. In any case, we were perfectly well aware, through the corresponding instance, that its real significance resided only in the second part of the film. Since nearly all the pictures were twofold, impressing us by antithesis or analogy, we must wait awhile to catch the general idea which directed this projection.

  This soon became apparent; and the mere narrative of what we saw showed how right my uncle Dorgeroux’s prophecy was when he said:

  “Men will come here as pilgrims and will fall upon their knees and weep like children!”

  A winding road, rough with cobbles and cut into steps, climbs a steep, arid, shadowless hill under a burning sun. We almost seem to see the eddies rising, like a scorching breath, from the parched soil.

  A mob of excited people is scaling the abrupt slope. On their backs hang tattered robes; their aspect is that of the beggars or artisans of an eastern populace.

  The road disappears and appears again at a higher level, where we see that this mob is preceding and following a company consisting of soldiers clad like the Roman legionaires. There are sixty or eighty of them, perhaps. They are marching slowly, in a ragged body, carrying their spears over their shoulders, while some are swinging their helmets in their hands. Now and again one stops to drink.

  From time to time we become aware that these soldiers are serving as escort to a central group, consisting of a few officers and of civilians clad in long robes, like priests, and, a little apart from them, four women, the lower half of whose faces is hidden by a long veil. Then, suddenly at a turn in the road, where the group has become slightly disorganized, we see a heavy cross outspread, jolting its way upwards. A man is underneath, as it were crushed by the intolerable burden which he is condemned to bear to the place of martyrdom. He stumbles at each step, makes an effort, stands up again, falls again, drags himself yet a little farther, crawling, clutching at the stones on the road, and then moves no more. A blow from a staff, administered by one of the soldiers, makes no difference. His strength is exhausted.

  At that moment, a man comes down the stony path. He is stopped and ordered to carry the cross. He cannot and quickly makes his escape. But, as the soldiers with their spears turn back towards the man lying on the ground, behold, three of the women intervene and offer to carry the burden. One of them take
s the end, the two others take the two arms and thus they climb the rugged hill, while the fourth woman raises the condemned man and supports his hesitating steps.

  At two further points we are able to follow the painful ascent of him who is going to his death. And on each occasion his face is shown by itself upon the screen. We do not recognize it. It is unlike the face which we expected to see, according to the usual representations. But how much more fully satisfied the profound conception which it evokes in us by its actual presence!

  It is He: we cannot for a moment doubt it. He lives before us. He is suffering. He is about to die before us. He is about to die. Each of us would fain avert the menace of that horrible death; and each of us prays with all his might for some peaceful vision in which we may see Him surrounded by His Disciples and His gentle womenfolk. The soldiers, as they reach the place of torture, assume a harsher aspect. The priests with ritual gestures curse the stones amid which the tree is to be raised and retire, with hanging heads.

  Here comes the cross, with the women bending under it. The condemned man follows them. There are two of them now supporting Him. He stops. Nothing can save Him now. When we see Him again, after a short interruption of the picture, the cross is set up and the agony has begun.

  I do not believe that any assembly of men was ever thrilled by a more violent and noble emotion than that which held us in its grip at this hour, which, let it be clearly understood, was the very hour at which the world’s destiny was settled for centuries and centuries. We were not guessing at it through legends and distorted narratives. We did not have to reconstruct it after uncertain documents or to conceive it according to our own feelings and imagination. It was there, that unparalleled hour. It lived before us, in a setting devoid of grandeur, a setting which seemed to us very lowly, very poverty-stricken. The bulk of the sightseers had departed. A dozen soldiers were dicing on a flat stone and drinking. Four women were standing in the shadow of a man crucified whose feet they bathed with their tears. At the summit of two other hillocks hard by, two figures were writhing on their crosses. That was all.