Collected Works of Gaston Leroux

by Gaston Leroux

  ‘Myself, I was in a state of consternation. I was rendered speechless. I watched this freak perform his antics and say with a chuckle which alarmed me:

  ‘“I have greatly changed I daresay. You must admit, my dear Michel, that you hardly recognise me. You did quite right to call this evening. We shall see some sport. We have a few very special friends, and, you know, apart from them I don’t care to meet anyone - merely as a matter of pride. We don’t even keep a servant. Wait for me here. I must get into my smoking jacket.”

  ‘He went off, and almost at once the lady of the lamp appeared. She wore the same low-necked dress of the year before. As soon as her eyes fell upon me, she seemed strangely perturbed, and said in a strained voice:

  ‘“Oh, so you are here! You’ve made a mistake, Captain Michel. I gave your message to my husband, but I forbade you to call this evening. I may tell you that when he learnt that you were in this place, he asked me to invite you this evening, but I did no such thing because,” she went on, ill at ease, “I had good reasons. We have certain very particular friends who are rather a worry — they are very fond of noise — uproar. You must have heard them last year,” she added, giving me a look out of the corner of her eye. ‘Well, promise me to leave early.”

  “‘I promise to leave early, madame,” I returned, and yet a vague misgiving took possession of me at this conversation the meaning of which I was far from understanding. “I promise you faithfully, but can you tell me how it is that I find my old friend in such a state? What terrible accident happened to him?”

  ‘“None at all, monsieur, none.”

  ‘“What do you mean, ‘none at all’? Don’t you know anything about the accident which deprived him of arms and legs? Yet he must have met with it since your marriage.”

  ‘“No, monsieur, no. I married the captain as he is now... But excuse me, our guests will be here presently, and I must help my husband to put on his smoking jacket.’

  ‘She left me to myself, dazed by the one stupefying thought: “She married the captain as he is now!” and almost at once I heard sounds in the hall, the curious sounds which had accompanied the lady of the lamp to the garden gate and baffled me last year. This noise was followed by the appearance, on their wheeled platforms, of four cripples without arms or legs who stared at me in wonder. They were all attired in perfectly-fitting evening dress with snow-white shirt fronts.

  ‘One wore gold-rimmed pince-nez, another, an old man, spectacles, the third a single eye-glass, and the fourth was content to gaze at me out of his own proud, shrewd eyes with an expression of boredom. All four, however, saluted me with their little hooks, and asked after Captain Beauvisage. I told them that he was dressing, and Madame Beauvisage was quite well. When I took the liberty of speaking of Madame Beauvisage, I caught an exchange of glances between them which seemed to embody a certain raillery.

  ‘“Haw, haw, I presume you are a great friend of our good old captain,” drawled the cripple with the monocle.

  ‘The others smiled with a look which was by no means pleasant, and then they all started to talk in the same breath:

  ‘“Sorry, sorry, monsieur... We are quite naturally surprised to meet you at the house of the good old captain, who swore on his wedding day to shut himself up in the country with his wife, and not to receive anyone — anyone but his very special friends, you understand. When one is so thoroughly a cripple as the captain consented to be, and is married to such a beautiful woman, it is quite natural — quite natural. But, after all, if in the course of life he met a man of honour who does not happen to be a cripple, we’re glad of it... We congratulate you.”

  ‘And they repeated: “We’re glad of it... We congratulate you.”

  ‘Lord, how odd they were, these dwarfs! I watched them and held my peace. Others arrived in twos and threes and so on. And they all contemplated me with a look of surprise or uneasiness or irony. For my part I was rendered speechless by the spectacle of so many cripples without arms or legs; for after all I was beginning to see through most of the extraordinary happenings which had so greatly stirred my mind; and though the cripples, by their presence, explained many things, the presence of the cripples still required explanation, as also did the monstrous union of that splendid woman with that awful shred of humanity.

  ‘True, I realized now that these little ambulating trunks were bound to pass unperceived by me in the narrow garden path line with verbena, and the road running between two low hedges; and, truth to tell, when at the time I said to myself that it was impossible to avoid seeing any person going down these paths, I had in mind persons who would be standing upright on their two legs.

  ‘The handle of the garden gate itself no longer puzzled me, and in my mind’s eye I saw the invisible hook which had turned it.

  ‘The peculiar noise which I heard was but the creaking made by the small badly oiled wheels of these cars for freaks. Finally, the extraordinary sound like the thunderous beating of a wooden drum was obviously caused by the many cars and hooks striking the floor when, after an excellent dinner, our friends the cripples indulged in a dance.

  ‘Yes all this was capable of explanation but I was conscious as I caught a curious eager gleam in their eyes, and heard the peculiar sound of their nippers, that something terrible still remained to be cleared up, and that all else which had surprised me was of no account.

  ‘Meanwhile Madame Beauvisage promptly appeared, accompanied by her husband. They were greeted with shouts of delight. The little hooks “applauded” them with an infernal din. I was deafened by it. Then I was introduced. Cripples were all over the place: on the tables, chairs, stools, on stands usually occupied by vases, on the sideboard. One of them sat on the shelf of a dresser like a Buddha in his recess. And each one politely held out his hook to me. They seemed for the most part people of good position, with titles and names indicating their relationship to aristocratic families, but I learned afterwards that these were false names given to me for reasons which will be obvious. Lord Wilmer certainly maintained the best front of them all, with his fine golden beard and no less fine moustache which he continually stroked with his hook. He did not leap from chair to table like the others, nor did he have the air of a huge bat taking wing from wall to wall.

  ‘“We are only waiting for the doctor,” said the mistress of the house, who every now and then gave me a look of obvious gloom, but quickly resumed her smile for her guests.

  ‘The doctor arrived. He was a cripple but he possessed both arms.

  ‘He offered one of them to Madame Beauvisage and led her to the dining-room. I mean that she touched his arm with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Covers were laid in the room with the closed shutters. The table, which was laden with flowers and hors d’oeuvre, was illuminated by a large candelabrum. There was no fruit. The dozen cripples at once leapt upon their chairs and began to pick greedily from the dishes with their hooks. It was not a pleasant sight, and I marvelled at the voracity with which these trunks of men, who seemed just before so well-mannered, devoured their food.

  ‘And then suddenly they quietened down; their hooks kept still, and it seemed to me that they lapsed into what is usually described as a “painful silence”.

  ‘Every eye was turned on Madame Beauvisage, whose husband sat by her side, and I noticed that she buried her face in her napkin, looking very uncomfortable. Then my friend Gérard, clapping one hook against the other with a flourish, said:

  ‘“Well, my dear old friends, it can’t be helped. One doesn’t meet the luck of last year every day. But don’t distress yourselves; with the exercise of a little imagination we shall succeed in being as merry as we were then...”

  ‘And turning to me as he lifted the small handle of the glass which stood on the table before him:

  ‘“Your health, my dear Michel. To us all!”

  ‘And each man raised his glass by its handle with the end of his hook. The glasses swung over the table in the quaintest fashion.

&
nbsp; ‘My host went on:

  ‘“You don’t seem to be equal to the occasion, my dear Michel. I have known you in merrier mood, more up to the mark. Is it because we are ‘like this’ that you are so gloomy? What do you expect? We are what we are. But let us have some amusement. We are met together here, all of us very special friends, to celebrate the time when we became ‘like this’. Is that not true my friends of the Daphné?...”

  ‘“Then my old comrade,” Captain Michael went on to explain, heaving a deep sigh, “told us how the Daphné, which sailed between France and the Far East, was wrecked; how the crew escaped in the boats, and how these miserable people took refuge on a chance raft.

  ‘Miss Madge, a beautiful young girl who lost her parents in the catastrophe, was also picked up by the raft. Some thirteen persons in all were on it, and at the end of three days the victuals were consumed, and at the end of the week the survivors were dying of hunger. It was then that, as the old song says, they agreed to draw lots as to “which should be eaten.”

  ‘“Messieurs,” added Captain Michel, in a serious voice, “such things have happened more often perhaps than they have been talked about, for the great blue waters close over these peculiar feats of digestion.

  ‘They were on the point, therefore, of drawing lots on the raft when the doctor’s voice was heard: “you have lost all your belongings in the wreck of the ship, but I have saved my case of instruments and my forceps for arresting haemorrhage. This is my suggestion: There is no object in any one of us running the risk of being eaten as a whole. Let us, to begin with, draw lots for an arm or leg at will, and we will then see tomorrow what the day brings forth, and perhaps a sail may appear on the horizon.”’

  At this point in Captain Michel’s story the four old salts, who up to this had not interrupted, cried:

  ‘Well done!’

  ‘What do you mean “well done”?’ asked Captain Michel with a frown. ‘Yes, “well done”! Your story is a good joke. These people were ready to lose an arm or leg in turn.... That’s a good joke, but there’s nothing frightful about it.’

  ‘So you really find it a good joke!’ growled the Captain, bristling with annoyance. ‘Well, I swear that if you had been seated among all those cripples whose eyes were bulging like live coal, and heard the story, you wouldn’t have found it such a good joke.... And if you had noticed how restless they were in their chairs! And how vigorously they clasped hooks across the table with an obvious delight which I couldn’t make out, but which was none the less frightful for all that.’

  ‘No, no,’ broke in Chaulieu once more — that old fellow Chaulieu— ‘your story is not in the least frightful. It is funny simply because it is logical. Would you like me to tell you the end of the story? You shall say whether I am right or not. The people on the raft drew lots. The lot fell to Miss Madge who was to lose one of her beautiful limbs. Your friend the captain, who is a gentleman, offered his own instead, and he had his four limbs amputated so that Miss Madge should remain unscathed.’

  ‘Yes, old man, you’ve got it. That is so,’ exclaimed Captain Michel who felt a longing to break the heads of these imbeciles who treated his story as a good joke. ‘Yes, and what’s more, when it was a question of cutting off Miss Madge’s limbs after the survivors, except the young lady and the doctor - who had been left with both arms because they were wanted — had lost all their limbs, Captain Beauvisage had the pluck to have the poor stumps left from the first operation, cut off on a level with his body.’

  ‘And the young lady could do no other than offer the Captain her hand which he had so heroically saved,’ interposed Zinzin.

  ‘Why, of course,’ growled the Captain in his beard. ‘And you consider it a good joke!’

  ‘Did they eat all the limbs quite raw?’ enquired that ass of a Bagatelle.

  Captain Michel struck the table such a resounding blow that the glasses danced like rubber balls.

  ‘That’ll do, shut up,’ he exclaimed. ‘All that I’ve told you is nothing. Now comes the frightful part of it.’

  The four friends looked at each other smiling, and Captain Michel grew pale, whereupon seeing that they had carried matters too far they hung their heads.

  ‘Yes, the frightful part of it,’ went on Michel with his gloomiest air, ‘was that these people who were only rescued a month later by a Chinese sailing vessel which landed them somewhere on the Yang-Tse-Kiang where they separated — the frightful part of it was that these people retained a taste for human flesh, and when they returned to Europe arranged to meet together once a year to renew as far as possible the abominable banquet. Well, messieurs, it did not take me long to find that out! First of all there was the scarcely enthusiastic reception accorded to certain dishes, which Madame Beauvisage herself brought to the table. Though she ventured to claim, but with no great assurance, that they were pretty nearly the same thing, the guests were of one mind in abstaining from congratulating her. Only certain slices of tunny-fish were received with any sort of favour, because they were, to use the doctor’s terrible expression, “well cut”, and, “if the flavour was not entirely satisfactory at all events the eyes was deceived”. But the cripple with the spectacles met with general approval when he declared that “it was not equal to the plumber”.

  ‘When I heard those words I felt my blood run cold,’ growled Captain Michel huskily, ‘for I remembered that about this time the year before a plumber had fallen from a roof near the Arsenal and was killed, and his body was picked up minus an arm.

  ‘Then... O then... I could not help thinking of the part which my beautiful neighbour must, of necessity, have played in this horrible, culinary drama. I turned my eyes to her and I noticed that she had put on her gloves again, gloves which covered her arms to the shoulder, and also hastily thrown a wrap over her shoulders which wholly concealed them. The guest on my right, who was the doctor, and, as I have said, was the only man among the cripples with both arms intact, had also put on his gloves.

  ‘Instead of bothering my head in vain to discover the reason of this fresh eccentricity, I should have done better to follow the advice which Madame Beauvisage gave me at the beginning of this infernal party, namely, to leave the place early — advice which she did not repeat.

  ‘After showing an interest in me during the first part of this amazing feast in which I seemed to discern — I don’t know why — a sort of pity, Madame Beauvisage now avoided looking at me and took a part which greatly grieved me in the most frightful conversation which I have ever heard. These little people with a vigorous clatter of nippers and clinking of glasses indulged in bitter recriminations or warm congratulations with regard to their peculiar appetite.

  ‘To my horror Lord Wilmer who until then had been most correct, nearly “came to hooks” with the cripple with the monocle, because the latter had once on the raft complained of the former being tough, and the mistress of the house had the greatest difficulty in putting things in their true light by retorting to the monocled bust, who was obviously at the time of the shipwreck a good-looking stripling, that neither was it particularly agreeable to have to put up with “an animal that was too young”.’

  ‘That’s also funny,’ the old salt Dorat could not help interjecting.

  It looked as if Captain Michel would fly at his throat, particularly as the three other mariners seemed to be shaking with inward joy and gave vent to queer little clucks. It was as much as the Captain could do to control himself. After puffing like a seal he turned to the foolhardy Dorat:

  ‘Monsieur, you have two arms still, and I have no wish for you to lose one of them, as I did on that particular night, to make you see the frightful part of the story. The cripples had drunk a great deal. Some of them jumped on the table around me, and were gazing at my arms in a very embarrassing manner and I ended by hiding them from sight as far as possible by thrusting my hands deep into my pockets.

  ‘I realized then, and it was a startling thought, why Madame Beauvisage and the doctor, the
two persons who still had arms and hands, did not show them. I grasped the meaning of the sudden ferocity which blazed in the eyes of some of them. And at that very moment, as luck would have it, I wanted to use my pocket handkerchief, and instinctively I made a movement which revealed the whiteness of my skin under my sleeve, and three terrible hooks swooped down at once on my wrist and entered my flesh. I uttered a fearful shriek.’

  ‘That’ll do, Captain, that’ll do,’ I exclaimed, interrupting Captain Michel’s story. ‘You were quite right. I’m off. I can’t stand any more.’

  ‘Stay, monsieur,’ said the Captain in a peremptory tone. ‘Stay, monsieur, for I shall soon finish this frightful story which has made four imbeciles laugh. When a man has Phocean blood in his veins,’ he added with an accent of unspeakable contempt turning to the four ancient mariners who were obviously choking in their efforts to keep back their laughter, ‘when a man has Phocean blood in his veins, he can’t get over it.

  ‘And when a man lives in Marseilles he is doomed never to believe in anything. So it is for you, for you alone, monsieur, that I am telling this story, and, be assured, I will pass over the most loathsome details, knowing as I do how much the mind of a gentleman can bear. The tragedy of my martyrdom proceeded so quickly that I can call to mind only their inhuman cries, the protests of some and the rush of others while Madame Beauvisage stood up and murmured:

  ‘“Be careful not to hurt him!”

  ‘I tried to leap to my feet, but by this time a posse of mad cripples was round me who tripped me up and I crashed to the floor. And I felt their awful hooks hold my flesh captive just as the meat in a butcher’s shop is held captive on its hooks.

  ‘Yes, monsieur, I will spare you the details. I pledge you my word; all the more so as I couldn’t give them to you, for I did not see the operation. The doctor clapped a plug of cotton wool steeped in chloroform on my mouth by way of a gag.