Every time he had encountered her there, dreading that he might reawaken her dolor, he had not dared evoke the memory of the companion torn away from her tenderness, nor that of the persecuted fatherland from which Caresco’s tyranny had separated her forever. Every time, too, he had to admit that he had found her less sad. Carabella, her faithful guardian, by virtue of personal attachment as much as the despot’s orders, no longer left her side. She was gradually initiating her into the pleasures of the island, which Miss Mary no longer seemed to be disdaining, and for which she even seemed to be acquiring a taste.
The neophyte’s conversation, instead of concerning, as before, memories of the past, now revealed the advent of her senses of life. She spoke about the frivolities of the land, the tranquility of mind that the indigenes experienced there, extolled the beauty of bodies, of places, of monuments, fêtes and games. On several occasions, she had spoken without fear about the marvelous operations with which the Superman favored the health and happiness of his subjects.
She still remained faithful to her brother’s efforts; she made daily pilgrimages to the reportage screen, which showed him to her, ever valiant, with his handful of brave followers, offering desperate resistance to the collation, but Choumaque thought he divined a habit rather than a real concern. Was that defection only apparent? Was Miss Mary feigning indifference in order to deceive her companion’s surveillance? Or was she really, by virtue of a moral decline, showing that she was less well-tempered than she had seemed, sufficiently submissive to the deliquescent influence of new mores for the sacred images of General Hardisson and Marcel, her two heroes, to have been burned already by the sun of seductions?
In his present discouragement, the philosopher would willingly have leaned toward that second supposition. However, in this case, as in Marcel’s, he would not have dared to swear to anything, for his usual skill in diagnosing psychological states had been disrupted by the fact that on the island, people’s personalities were so extensively modified by stupefying and stimulating fluids, and also by the medical and sanitary practices, that he had to wonder whether those physical agents did not constitute an entirely artificial mentality, incomprehensible for a philosopher whose mind had remained sane, and whether their suppression might not bring his friends back to the pure conceptions of normal life.
Having arrived outside the foreigner’s apartment, he hesitated momentarily. Access to the room was forbidden to him, but, more than that prohibition, he feared the friction that his irruption into such a sacred refuge was about to cause. After confiding his name to the announcer, he was, therefore, very surprised to observe the enthusiasm with which he was received.
“There you are, my dear Choumaque! Come in! Sit down as comfortably as possible, on that divan.”
Miss Mary was to longer afraid to show a part of her body naked beneath the rich brocaded surah fabric that ornamented her bed. Her hair, gathered up in a torsade, leaving the pure slenderness of her nape uncovered, still had the same delightful blondeness, iridescent in the sunlight, but her face was enlivened by warmer and more youthful colorations, as if, in order to spice it, she had had recourse to the fluids and ointments with which the courtesans rendered their seductions more evident. Dark violet-tinted rings around her orbits suggested a hint of lassitude, and Choumaque wondered what the nature of that fatigue might be, for the large bed was in a state of disorder, and the trace of another body persisted beside her, hollowed out in the feathery softness.
“You’re not alone? I’m disturbing you...”
“Not at all. Carabella, who spent the night with me, has just left.”
That confession made her blush. She felt the visitor’s gaze settle on her shoulder, where there was still an ecchymosis, the trace of an excessively ardent kiss. Understanding that that signature might have betrayed the impetuosity of her companion, she hastened to cover it with a large sachet embroidered with golden arabesques, on which she was lying. Then, to deflect the philosopher’s perspicacity, she asked: “To what do I owe the joy of such an early visit, my dear Choumaque?”
“Nothing in particular. I simply wanted to enquire as to your health, to learn from your own mouth whether your reintegration to the island is not saddening you excessively.”
“No, not excessively. I won’t hide from you that I’m rather enjoying it. Carabella is an exquisite friend, who has made me understand that one can live agreeably here.”
“Evidently…but you ambition was not, at the beginning, to attach yourself to this soil. Your brother, your compatriots....”
“Truly, one thinks oneself too indispensable to everyone. They are maintaining the resistance very valiantly without me. Will they be victorious? Perhaps. I imagine that my presence might even be an obstacle. Carabella has assured me of it.”
“And the Superman?”
“I no longer hear mention of him. He wishes me well...”
“It’s doubtless for that reason,” Choumaque persisted, “that I’ve caught sight of him on several occasions prowling in the gardens perfumed by the odors of the night, once disguised as a slave, once as a feline and a third time covered in foliage, like an ambulant tree...”
“Don’t you think that you might have been led astray by your imagination, my dear Zéphi? Carabella has told me what the Superman wants of me...doubtless you know that? Confess that it’s very little, in compensation for the happiness that an entire lifetime will have in reserve for me?”
“And Marcel?” Choumaque finally risked, anxiously hitching up his belt.
At that name she stated slightly. All the aspects of her valiant past and present decline were more imperatively specified by that question than the preceding ones. She lowered her eyelids over the confusion of her eyes.
“Yes, Marcel…he’s the sole cloud that persists of my dissipated tempests. I dream about him every night, even though Carabella informs me as to his occupations elsewhere. I hope that we’ll be reunited in the future. If Caresco is good, we’ll make a household later, as Madame Môme and Marius have made one. I hope so…and why not? I envisage a pleasant enough liaison thus…have you seen him? Does he still think about me? Have you talked to him about me?”
“I was talking to him about you this morning. He has not forgotten you, either.”
“So you see, my dear Zéphi, that everything is for the best!” the young woman concluded, becoming joyful again, and offering the philosopher a box of pink pastilles, with which she began to fill her mouth.
Choumaque thanked her and fled. It was high time that things took a different turn in order that those two cherished children could retain one another, before Caresco, with a sweep of his scalpel, cut the last fibers that linked them together. But what could he do?
Then, in his confusion, he resolved to consult Madame Môme. The High Priestess alone was capable of giving him good advice, given that her functions had familiarized her with the secret mechanisms of the island, and that she had not hesitated to assist the young people’s flight the first time. At least she would tell him positively whether there was anything that could still be attempted in order to save them.
Against the façade of the Palace of Sensualities there was a kind of large translucent cage reminiscent of a leech attached to the wall, level with the frescos swarming like a colossal Sabbath of erethism and recounting in violent colors all the practices of amour. Silhouettes were agitating inside the bell. After having admired the erotic sculptures that descended from there in cascades of gestures all the way to the base of the monument, Choumaque paused momentarily to listen to a song, celebrated on the island, emitted by a familiar deep voice; then, omitting to applaud the singer, he hailed him.
The same voice replied: “What! It’s you, pauper! Come up, then.”
“I’d like nothing better, but how?”
“That’s true, unless...”
Sliding along the wall, the cage descended, stopping at the level of the portal. Choumaque stepped over the two pink marble breasts of
a recumbent nymph, set foot on the red porphyry loins of a faun lying next to the woman, trod on the shoulders of a blue sandstone satyr who was sitting watching them, and then, after having climbed a ladder of attitudes no less equivocal with the aid of his hands, finally reached the cage, which opened to let him in.
When he was inside, Marius pressed a switch that took the apparatus back to the level of the frescos that he was regilding.
“As you see, darling, I’m retouching my masterpieces. I’m patching up the façade for the festival the day after tomorrow. What do you think? Will posterity celebrate my talent?”
Choumaque did not reply. He said bonjour to the painter’s companions: Madame Môme, who was lying languidly on a sofa, mixing essences in her pulverizer; and a radiantly formed adolescent clad in a long green smock, who was Marius’ apprentice. He sat down, curiously inspecting the painter’s airborne laboratory, which could easily have been mistaken for a boudoir if a display of brushes and polychromatic receptacles had not affirmed its laborious utility. In one corner, on a glass-topped table, there was an ingenious device animate by omnial force, a kind of miniature pile-driver, crushing colors and combining them with solid materials that ought to render their brightness imperishable. At intervals, the adolescent left his brushes and went to regulate the machine, or pour into the elements of the compound into a funnel: sparkling substances with ardent reflections, liquid silicates, powdered rock and chemical ingredients.
“Anyway, do you see this installation? It’s not in Paris that the members of the Institut can decorate a monument with as much comfort as if they were working in their studio, is it? This cage is my studio, which moves every time I inaugurate a new endeavor. Madame Môme knows it well, too. She’s spent exciting hours here, eh?”
The High Priestess responded with an affectionate grimace. Then, in order that her other lover should not feel unequally favored, she came to sit next to him, taking his hand. She was astonished to find it limp and discouraged.
“So, my dear Zéphi, it’s not going well?”
“Not at all.”
“Tell, then.”
“Not here. The walls are talkative, the ears remember...” He pointed at the adolescent.
Marius protested. “For once, old chap, the judgment you’re making is false. Here, I’m at home. No exterior purchase is possible on our thoughts or our words. This cage, which I ordered in crystal, in order that light could illuminate my work naturally within it, isolates us. In the same way, the substances in my paint are insulating. As for the adolescent, don’t worry any more about him than my pots—he’s as deaf as they are.”
“Deaf?”
“Totally, because his function in the State will be that of painter. Caresco, deeming that the perfectibility of one sense is improved by the abolition of competing senses, destroyed the child’s hearing—look at the scar behind his ear. He renders sculptors deaf in the same way, and musicians blind...”
“But that’s absurd!” exclaimed Choumaque. “To paint, to sculpt, to find rich harmonies is to create—and it’s necessary, in order to create, to have the assistance of all the senses, which complement one another!”
“That’s just it!” objected Marius. “You don’t know that, according to Caresco and the cohort of scientists and artists he brought with him, the people, once definitively installed in their happiness, will no longer have any need to create! After us, science and art will be definitive. The apprentices we instruct, like this adolescent, will no longer have to produce. They will maintain the good condition of our discoveries and our ideal, repeating their ingenuities or copying their esthetic, but they won’t contribute anything themselves. They’ll be remarkable workmen, no more. Progress is at its apogee.”
“Absurd! Vanity!” proclaimed Choumaque. “It’s a recipe for collapse, with brief delay. In a hundred years, other people will have overtaken you…the circle of machines that protects you will be destroyed by a new discovery. Your manifestations of art will be out of date; your monuments, already ridiculous, will be odious; your people, separated from nature by chemistry, will fall into decadence; and the rest will follow logically. You don’t understand, then, that happiness requires progress, and progress effort, and that perfection doesn’t exist! To dare to say that one has achieved it is the pretention of cracked brains!
“And that’s why I’m stifling in your indolence, why I’m fed up to the back teeth with your dream! For Caresco’s dream is a golden chimera seated on a bolster of ennui, and his island of Eucrasia is a paradise of flesh that makes my soul howl! Yes, to save myself! To save myself, taking my two friends with me!”
In despair he buried his bicolored head in his hands.
The High Priestess felt deeply moved. “That’s what’s making you sad, Zéphi, I can see. Well, know that there’s no longer any possibility of flight. You’re stuck here in perpetuity—all the more so as Caresco, if my knowledge of men isn’t mistaken, is utterly infatuated with the Virgin. Yes, she’s got under his skin. Take it from me, old men falling into senility are the silliest of lovers!”
“How do you know?”
“I know because he’s charged me with a certain task…”
“Oh! Tell me!”
Madame Môme’s physiognomy, until then so glad of these few moments of intimacy, so delighted to be able to manifest abandon by a return to her old expressions of mischief, suddenly resumed all its gravity. Making several movements with the back of her fingers sliding them over the soft underside of her slightly fleshy chin, she refused.
“Impossible, Zéphi.”
“I beg you, Môme!”
“Will you keep your trap shut, if I tell you?”
“On our love!”
Then, at that invocation, she yielded her secret, explaining that the Superman had given her the mission of charging the foreigner with an aphrodisiac superfluid of new invention, which would vanquish the virgin’s last resistance. The means was not new, since Môme herself, when she had still been conducting herself like the daughter of a superior officer, had been the victim of an honorable old man who had seduced her by offering her cantharidated bonbons. Blood of ovaries! What a broadside, for a first time! But here the method changed. It was necessary to march with Science—with the result that he had to guide Miss Mary to a special contact on the evening of the fête of Life—in two days time, that is...
“And then?” asked Choumaque, choking.
“Then, when she’s done to a turn, he’ll take her away.”
“Where? To do what?”
Marius, ceasing to paint, had turned round. He was the one who finished: “You know very well!”
“What do you expect?” concluded Madame Môme. “It’s his way. All tastes are in nature…and after that, there’ll be the great repose...”
“The true repose is only found in the study of wisdom,” Choumaque observed. In spite of the affirmation of that precept, however, such sadness invaded him that Madame Môme thought it her duty to console him. With her bejeweled hand she caressed the cherished face of her old lover. At the same time, she became indignant.
“Why didn’t that Joseph Marcel pop her cherry? I told him to do it! I said to him: violate her! That was the only means to make the Superman lose interest in the child! He couldn’t do it. So much the worse for him!”
“We still have two days and one night,” Choumaque objected, timidly. “Couldn’t we, between now and then…?”
“They’re being kept apart; it’s impossible. Unless...”
She meditated. A great breath of devotion suddenly illuminated her. She sensed the soul of a New Earth. Choumaque leaned toward her anxiously, hoping that deliverance might yet emerge from her indecision. And as she still remained hesitant, he had recourse to the sole means of persuasion capable of acting upon her. He took hold of one of her breasts, bursting forth beneath her loose tunic, and squeezed it forcefully.
“Unless,” the High Priestess continued, won over by that testament of sympathy, �
�on the evening of the fête that they have to attend, in the general disorder, in the noise and the crowd, I can...”
“Oh! Yes, my little Môme!”
“I’d be taking a big risk, Zéphi!”
She did not have time to give more ample explanations. A sound of thunder shook the glass walls of the cage. The Superman descended from his red airplane sown with golden vibrions and ovules, which was accompanied by a numerous entourage, and came into the cage. His costume, a vast butcher’s apron, left the violent musculature of his hairy torso and arms bare, stained with the blood of recent operations. His haggard eyes and clenched jaws, making his teeth grate, were terrible. Without paying any attention to the other people present, he was only interested in the High Priestess, whom he took into his nacelle, in order to give her orders.
CHAPTER XXVI
The night was magnificently extended. Airplanes appeared in the dark blue serenity. First their two headlights became visible, shining like double stars, and then, gradually, they were constellated by red, blue, yellow and green scintillations: an entire display of celestial jewels, whose gleam rendered visible the palpitations of wings, which did not take long to fold up. They landed, crammed with people, rutilant in splendid fabrics, dazzling with the light reflected by sashes studded with gems and precious metals Couples disentwined; adolescents, their legs outside the nacelle, waited to jump. Music, soprano and contralto voices, supported by masculine counterpoints, the chords of lyres, citharas, harps, flutes and sistrums, mingled and intersected, coming together in the same diapason. Arms raised hieratically toward the sky acclaimed the night of joy: universal joy, unanimously radiated. Everything melted, intersected, palpitated, prayed, sang for the Festival of Light, moving toward the Temple of Sensualities.
“Glory to the Superman! Glory to Life! Night of ecstasy, blessed voluptuousness! Sublime heavens!”
On the ground, along the hillside, at the feet of the giant trees, yet more people gathered, all rutilant. Fragments of processions, poured out by the tubes, brightened the roads fantastically, and the spreading branches formed vaults of gleaming chlorophyll. Cascades, growling at the passage of the happy crowd, caught their flamboyance, and their foam prolonged the memory of the magical vision in the shadow of their subterranean flight.
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