A few sailors came into the cabin, tied up the lovers with silk cords and carried them up to the deck with an ease that disconcerted, while proving to him that he had presumed too much of his strength. While the crewmen supervised the maneuver, now steering the airplane toward the return, pretty cabin-boys came to distract them. They performed a thousand graceful somersaults in front of them, threw them flowers, pulverized perfumes; and as the cold, in spite of the distributions of warmth, was intense at that altitude, they covered them with ermine mantles in which omnial heat maintained a mild warmth. Then, after having checked that their bonds, while immobilizing them, were not too tight, they left them alone.
“Monsieur Marcel,” said Miss Mary then, “I’ve been very disappointed by my peregrinations through the world. I’ve knocked on all hearts, but none has truly opened to my pleas. But at least, when I wanted to go away, the people formed a cortege for me and let me go. Governments even assisted my departure. Alas, here I’ve been subjected to the greatest injustice, don’t you think, since Caresco, after having promised me freedom of action, has taken me prisoner?
“If only that were your sole destiny!” Marcel murmured.
“Well, know that I don’t regret this new misfortune,” Miss Mary continued, “for it has finally been given to me to admire a man…and that man was you! Your revolt was superb, Monsieur Marcel! But it was futile, as you can see. It’s therefore necessary to resolve ourselves…at last, I’m becoming fatalistic…to support what we cannot prevent.”
“They’re going to separate us. Will you resolve to forget me?”
“I don’t know what will become of me; I don’t know whether, now that I’m going back a captive forever, I’ll be able to struggle eternally against the new seductions that will tempt me…for moral resistance, alas, is exhausted like any other.... But remember this, Monsieur Marcel: my heart is entirely yours. Whether I live splendidly or die miserably, no one other than you will ever cross its threshold!”
Sunlight irradiated her hair, and her proud profile, emerging from the large mantle that covered her, was outlined very purely against the clarity of the blue spaces. Marcel was content with that declaration. He felt that he had run out of energy. He hoped that their fate might be less cruel than the captain had made them envisage. However, one last time, when the clouds traversed by the descending airplane covered his companion with their mist, he was gripped by one last surge of rage. Were not the light wisps that were now surrounding Miss Mary, seemingly rendering her more distant, a presage of the future, indicating that she was irremediably lost to him?
At that thought, he writhed in his bonds. Oh, if only he could free himself from the silken cords, in the denser cloud, pick up his fried, traverse the ten meters of deck that separated them from a liferaft-balloon, cut the mooring-rope and flee, flee again, with her, toward the unknown toward oblivion!
But his shackles were inextricable, and, in trying to rid himself of them, he sensed that he was only rendering them tighter.
The celestial blur cleared and returned them to their thoughtful and impotent contemplation. The temperature became exquisitely warm. The sailors reappeared, relieved them of their mantles and restored the liberty of their movements. It must have been about ten o’clock in the morning when they perceived the distant murmur of waves. Winged children came to alight on the metallic ringing. Songs and perfumes saluted them.
When they were taken to the bulwark to contemplate the enchantment of the landing, a unanimity of cries acclaimed them; the entire population of the island was there to receive them. They saw forty thousand arms extended toward them, in a swarming, picturesque, variegated disorder. Around them were verdure and flowers; in the distance, there were the gilded pegs of shiny monuments, red, silvery and pompously multicolored domes. The seductions of the panoramas took hold of them again. They were no longer thinking about escaping.
They landed.
Then, an enormous, inextinguishable laughter, from all the mouths and all the bellies, greeted them. The hilarious contagion had even gained Choumaque, Marius, Carabella and Madame Môme, all four of whom were placed in the first rank of the crowd. Courtesans, gitons, fecund mothers covered them with rose petals and inundated them with perfumes. A spouse with a long twisted beard tickled Miss Mary. At any other time Marcel would have reacted violently—but without knowing how, he was overwhelmed by that gaiety, and he began laughing invincibly, as the Redlander was laughing herself. Marjah took him away, while Carabella took possession of the young woman, after having planted the two bloody swellings of her mouth on her lips.
There was, in the crowd welcoming the captives so comically, only one man who was not laughing. Hidden behind the others, in the third rank of spectators, he resembled a sterile husband in the abundance of his large beard. But if that fake ornament, rendered apparently real by artifice, had been removed; if the frightful intensity of his gaze, fixed upon Miss Mary, had been observed; if the few words of madness that emerged from his contracted throat had been overheard, the joyful people would undoubtedly have ceased laughing for a moment. That man was Caresco.
After the scattering of the crowd, left alone on the shore, he watched the sea coming and going. Then he began to howl.
CHAPTER XXIV
His forehead taut and his eyes cruel, with a weary gesture, Caresco pushed away the crucible in which he was attempting, by means of chemical combinations, to give birth to the cell, the first manifestation of Existence.
Disappointing labor! For twenty years, after many calculations engendered by his overheated mind, after many formulae, he had applied himself in vain. The infinitesimal particles of Omnium, alloyed and triturated, only ever produced Forces or Matter, but had never at any moment resulted in Life, that animate protoplasm whose combinations would have ensured the synthesis of Being.
Weary of his ardent research, the potentate was obliged to struggle with long mental effort to distinguish the place where he was. He finally recognized the sumptuous room in the palace, the walls streaming with precious metals and the most sumptuous fabrics sheltering his futile laboratory.
He shivered on finding himself alone—but the presence of Dr. Hymen, somnolent on a nearby stool, reassured him almost immediately. He considered the risible thinness, draped in the long frock-coat and the trinket-dangling waistcoat, coiffed in the furry top hat. That company was a benefit to him. It lulled his increasing anxieties and his ever-more-tormented humor with a sovereign calm.
“Hymen! Wake up, Hymen! Come here. You were asleep; and me, I’m so tired! Examine me! Something’s happening in my organism that frightens me. Do you think I have a fever?”
“I don’t think so,” said the doctor, coming to take his pulse.
“Look at my eyes—are they normal?”
“They’re such as I’ve always seen them, with unequally dilated pupils.”
“And my reflexes, Hymen? Look for my reflexes!”
“What’s the point? They don’t exist…but they’ve never existed, for as long as I’ve known you.”
“So?”
“So, undoubtedly, in another country people would say that your brain was that of a madman—but here, I can only observe your genius.”
“Yes, my genius!” proclaimed the Superman, suddenly straightening up. “My genius! And think, Hymen, in what cause I’ve employed it! In struggling against nature, in creating happiness!”
“For thirty years now, every day, you’ve repeated the same words to me. I know them. You’d have done better to let me go on sleeping. You tire me out; I need sleep.”
“Not at all!” protested Caresco. “You have no more time to rest than I have. Are there not a thousand things for us still to plan? Do you not have to watch over a thousand details? Have you thought about the foreigner? Do you know that I’ve subjected that daughter of the Red Land to my aphrodisiac fluid, and that she now measures eight-six on the psychometer? She’ll be my triumph, Hymen!”
He calmed down. He stood up; t
hen, palpating the oblique face of his collaborator, he said: “Why do you keep that ridiculous nose? Would you like me to put it straight, right now? You’ll never be able to serve as a witness at my marriage like that!”
“Your marriage?”
“Yes, I shall marry the purest of the pure, the virgin of Virgins, Miss Mary Hardisson in a week’s time, when my aphrodisiac superfluid—the Superman’s superfluid, is that felicitous?—will have ten times the ordinary power that it exerts at present, and will have revealed he culminating point, the hundredth degree, of my scale! Know that! My scientists are working on it…ardent brains concentrating my new formula…violet backs bent, day and night, over crucibles, over needles, over mechanisms. Oh, the brave servants, the good subjects! And in a week, the evening of the Festival of Life, everything will be ready; the virgin will have blossomed in Passion…and I shall possess the Nature in her! Let’s go! Unfreeze yourself, Hymen—we’ll see where we’ve got to!”
Bustling the doctor, he shoved him toward a cabin in which they both shut themselves up. Immediately following the pressing of a switch, a window opened on Miss Mary’s room. Although a hundred kilometers separated them, they were able to see what was happening in her apartment, hear the voices that rose up there, contemplate the individuals who were there, exactly as if they had been in the next room.
The young woman, recently impregnated with the fluid, was at grips with Carabella. With a gesture of supreme indecency, the courtesan, employing ardent protestations, had just unveiled her body, swollen with amour like a fruit full of sap. The virgin, a prey already subjugated by the delirium of Passion, was on the brink of no longer resisting. Their unfastened tunics confused their pink and mauve fluttering.
“There’s no need to see any more—the rest is banal,” said the Superman, closing the window. “She’s already succumbing! What will become of her when my intensive fluid takes effect? Prepare yourself, Hymen; I want to give a splendid fête to celebrate that definitive triumph of my genius over Nature. Caresco-King, Caresco-God, will espouse the Virgin of Virgins, Nature tamed by him!”
CHAPTER XXV
Choumaque and Marcel paused momentarily outside the entrance to the Temple of Fecundity, which the philosopher was not authorized to enter. He admired the cheerful perspective of the green hill pierced in certain places by white cascades allowing glimpses of their beds of red rock. A group of parasol pines delimited the crest. Nearer, three little lakes were alimented by the foam of torrents, and fish as blue as sapphires were zigzagging therein. The quotidian fête of the elements was renewed, adorably languid.
A fecund mother, her toga loose, with scarlet shoes studded with gems, emerged from a sandy pathway and passed close by. Her delightful blonde complexion was animated by a rush of blood when she recognized Marcel.
“I’ll wait for you, handsome Sower!” she said, as she went by, with a provocative undulation of the hips. “I’m your privileged, today!”
“That’s an admirable rump,” Choumaque observed, “and I congratulate you, my friend, on being its beneficiary.”
Marcel did not reply, occupied as he was in smiling at another fecund mother whose tunic he had untied the day before, and who was emerging from the same pathway, which ended at the bright façade of the gynaeceum.
“That one too!” exclaimed Choumaque, laughing. “My God, my friend, you have solid muscles. Madame Môme tamed mine more easily. How do you satisfy them?”
“Every morning I’m charged with a provision of genetic serum, which, as soon as it spreads through my veins, gives me the valor of Hercules with regard to the Amazons.”
“August deeds of the Sower, you’re losing your magnificence,” Choumaque murmured; then, aloud, he added: “You definitely seem to be getting a taste for your new functions.”
“Why not? One gets used to everything. That amorous diversity is easily supportable.”
“So I see. O great Seneca, forgive them!”
Automatically, Choumaque hitched up his belt. In the six days since the fugitives had been returned to the island, as they had been separated, definitively affected to different social roles, the philosopher had observed the evident victory of his pupil’s new mores. Marcel, having become a “Sower” for the constant repopulation of the island, had experienced a recrudescence of pleasure in going into the Temple of Creative Sensualities, where the quotidian labor awaited him. He no longer hid his appetite for it. He offered himself to the genetic serum as a drinker of other lands returned to his glass of alcohol, the morphine addict to his Pravaz syringe, the opium smoker to the blue spirals of his pipe, by virtue of a need for intoxication.
Yes, it was certainly the sybaritic poison of the island that had taken possession of the young man, which had dissolved his character so rapidly, had so promptly reduced him to the restricted mental level of the other subjects. Soon, undoubtedly, he would acclaim the autocracy of the Superman, and recognize in him the beneficence admitted by everyone.
The philosopher was only astonished by the rapidity with which that transformation had been accomplished. It gave him an even more wretched idea of humanity. He wondered what had become, in that collapse of character, of the keen passion that the young man had felt for Miss Mary, which seemed almost extinct. He knew, however, that during the first three days, the separation had been dolorous. For Marcel, no longer encountering the foreigner, remaining in horrible ignorance of the fate reserved for her, obliged to give to others the tenderness that he would have like to keep preciously for her, had constituted an ensemble of sacrifices whose affliction the sensual diversions of the temple had had difficulty overcoming.
At that time, Choumaque had kept silent, not wanting to torment a wound that was still raw, all the more so because revolt would have been futile, and he had made no attempt to disengage that soul from the inextricable seductive net that was enveloping it. Alas, that dolor had only lasted three days, so quickly did the phenomena of the soul, like those of the body, evolve on the island. Since then, the initial suffering had gradually dissipated. But if Marcel avoided interesting himself in the young woman’s destiny, was it because of a taste for his new functions, or out of a cowardly desire no longer to torment himself? On hearing his pupil’s declarations, the philosopher wanted to clarify the matter.
“My friend, what would you say if you learned that Miss Mary, for her part, remains no more hostile than you to the distractions offered to her?”
At the name of his beloved, Marcel was obliged to put his hand over his heart to quell its protestations. Choumaque approved of his initiative. Come on! There were still warm ashes in the hearth, since a little breath could reanimate the flame!”
“That’s true—what has become of Miss Mary?” the young man said.
“I’m glad to be able to tell you that nothing has become of her yet. However, it’s quite possible that that status quo will cease any day now. After your failed flight, Madame Môme, Marius and I thought that Caresco would definitely take possession of the child…you know in what fashion…the status of courtesan would then have been reserved for her, and you would have had the leisure to take advantage of it, like everyone else...”
Marcel could not repress a quiver of anger. The philosopher observed, however, that the surge was rapidly attenuated by a shrug of the shoulders translating the thought: Why not, after all? Since there’s no means of not submitting...
Saddened by that mute restriction, he continued: “No, nothing has happened yet. The Superman seems to be disinterested in the Virgin. He’s left her in the guard of Carabella, and appears not to be occupied with her any longer. I’m certain, anyway, that Caresco has other preoccupations…if preoccupations can grip a man to the point that he spends entire days meditating, his face stuck to a wall that his fingernails scrape, his mouth pronouncing incomprehensible words...
“At other times he summons his council of engineers and scientists, and, suddenly becoming amiable, submits projects of an insane conception to them. Has he
not proposed to them, seriously, to take possession of the sun and the moon, attracting them by means of omnial forces, and founding another realm there? He supported it with positive calculations...it was even discussed. Evidently, people around him are becoming anxious…it’s said that he’s always been strange, but that this time it might really be the onset of madness. And note that, in addition, he passes through periods of remarkable practical sense; he succeeds marvelously in the most delicate operations…three human monads have been manufactured in one night!”
“Have you seen her often since our return?” asked Marcel, cutting those details short, seemingly in a hurry.
“Yes, sometimes.”
“Does she talk to you about me?”
“Perhaps she thinks about you; she doesn’t talk about you.”
“Tell her, my dear Choumaque, that her memory is imperishable in me. Come on! I have to leave you…the mothers with many children are waiting for me...”
He shook the philosopher’s hand, and then moved away with a light tread. The grace of his stature, the high stance of his head, the perfect elegance of his orange doublet with crystal buttons and his harmoniously tailored legs—the whole ensemble of strength and charm that made him one of the most sought-after sowers—disappeared round a corner of the portico open in the façade of the Temple of Fecundity.
On seeing him stride away so rapidly, so insouciantly, Choumaque felt filled with melancholy. It’s time to act, he said to himself, but how? What can I do? Now that he’s declining toward the neutral state, I feel less ambition to get him out of his rabbit-hutch. And then again, truly, what can I do…?
Prey to lamentable ideas, but more confident than ever in his theory of equilibria, the principles of which he ruminated, Choumaque took the road to the Caravanserai, where he intended to pursue his enquiry. Miss Mary was still living there, and the park was her favorite place to walk.
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