by Theo Varlet
I know that the common enterprise already established in life for ordinary people who love one another is to have children, but Aurore isn’t an ordinary woman. With her scientific knowledge and her exceptional intelligence, she has a higher role to play in the world than to labor in its repopulation. I even thought that her honorable functions as laboratory assistant and secretary to Professor Nathan were unworthy of her.
How has she been able to accept that as her normal and legitimate fate for two years, when she might have accomplished great things? I felt a certain distress and muted resentment on seeing her caught up in the routines of bureaucracy, leaving every day at the same time for the Institute, with the same gestures, saying to me; “I hope your work goes well, my love!”
She considers that we are each following our parallel tracks, me in art and her in science. And do I not feel, on going back into my studio, that I too am prey to routines? It’s nothing but routine that afflicts me, crushing me with monotony, making me impatient and heartsick. Aurore is a functionary of science, and I’m a functionary of art.
That’s because I’m no longer the artist in love with his art that I was two years ago, when I met her. I’ve lost my naïve faith, and glimpsed, thanks to her, a new light, which does not destine me...
At any rate, painting has ceased to appear to me as the most beautiful of occupations; it has ceased to give value to my existence since I’ve understood the sovereign beauty of science. I’m no longer myself. I’ve become something else. I’ve submitted to the contagion of a superior personality. My admiration for my wife has extended to science. It’s in science, and no longer in art, that I now see the supreme accomplishment. All that remains of the artist I was is an insatiable desire for adventure.
Evidently, at my age, I can’t recommence my studies; I can’t associate myself with my wife’s work, pursue a twin career, like the Curies and Flammarions, for instance, and many others—but an adventure in which science comes into play...
It seems to me that if Aurore had not given up her career as an astronautical pilot, I would have experienced a supreme joy in accompanying her, in order to be useful to her in her first extraterrestrial flights. I would have thought, then, that I was serving some purpose on earth, having put our love at the service of humanity, far above vulgar egotism.
I have never dared to confess all that to Aurora. Perhaps she would think that I’m tired of her, that our love is no longer sufficient to fill my life—although I love her as much and more than to the first day, and she is the only person who counts, so far as I’m concerned...
We arrived home in the Rue Cortot. In the studio, sitting on the edge of the divan, I waited, my throat tight, for my wife to speak. Why had I left her unaware of that important mental crisis? It was a revelation that I could not make to her at present. Just as long as no understanding resulted from it, at that decisive hour!
Immediately, however, I understood that the admirable intuition of her feminine heart had divined my secret. Coming to me, she took my hands affectionately, forced me to look at her, still standing, and said, gravely:
“My beloved, you and I have never let lies or voluntary reticence come between us, but there are matters over which I sense that we hesitate to explain ourselves Our life has, until now, resolved these questions automatically; to ask them was superfluous. I’ve accepted serving science under the direction of Nathan…a master great enough to be worth the sacrifice of my individual inclinations, and the desire that I’ve been able to contain for two years.
“Six months ago, as you know, I refused an offer that would have permitted me to satisfy that desire, but it subsisted, and still subsists, within me. Now, circumstances have changed, and a new opportunity has been offered to me, today, to pursue what I believe to be my vocation. It’s up to you to decide whether I ought to accept it, or renounce it once again—definitively, this time. You don’t belong to the cult of science; you’re an artist...”
I dared not understand. Was it the great adventure that was opening up before us?
I stood up, palpitating, my hands clutching hers, and said, rapidly and fervently: “Aurore you give me proof of a splendid love in offering to renounce, to please me, a desire that has remained within you to be the first human to land on a world other than the Earth—for I’m not mistaken, am I? That really is what this is about? But even if I were a Michelangelo or a Rodin, I wouldn’t have the right to ask for such a sacrifice, and I’m only a simple dauber. Painters of my talent are counted in dozens, hundreds…no, let me finish; it’s the truth. I only live in your spiritual radiation. All I want is to serve science with you, under your orders. That’s where I stand. Now, speak: what did Madame Simodzuki offer you?”
A smile of affection and bliss, with a slight hint of mischief, testified that my nephew had not been mistaken.
“Be glad, then,” she went on. “I’ve been offered a chance to be the pilot of an interplanetary rocket…and to recruit a crew. Would you like to go with me?”
You can well imagine that it was a serious and sublime moment: envisaging a heroic adventure on behalf of science and humankind. Manifestations of joy, when one is not old and gout-stricken, reduce even the noblest representatives of civilization to atavistic childishness.
Without even trying to resist, I drew my scientific spouse into a hectic foxtrot, to the rhythm of a improvised hymn of triumphant barbarity, all around the studio.
V. Madame Simodzuki
My first meeting with Madame Simodzuki took place the next day, in her apartment at the Majestic, to which we had been invited for lunch following a telephone call from Aurore confirming a definitive acceptance.
The billionairess advanced toward us, smiling brightly. She was a slightly plump woman, perhaps forty years old, whose simplicity of costume and attitude contrasted with the sumptuous cosmopolitan luxury of the room. Her eyelids were only imperceptibly tilted, and her complexion, gilded beneath a cloud of powder, scarcely recalled her Japanese origin.
She greeted us with a bow, stopped in front of us and looked us in the eyes one after the other for a long moment, without speaking, like a women well used to judging people. Afterwards she merely shook our hands and said, in a slightly singsong voice but in impeccable French: “Aurore Lescure… may I call you that?... Monsieur Delvart… since the business is concluded and you have agreed to help me, we must become friends. We are not employer and employees; we are collaborators in a common endeavor—me with my money, you with your knowledge and devotion.”
I have retained almost no material memory of the meal that followed. The details that I might have been able to relate were swept away by the enthusiasm that uplifted me when Madame Simodzuki began to talk to us about her plans. I cannot say what was served to us by the silent maidservant with the olive complexion and woolly hair. I only know that it was not bird’s nests or shark-fins, but a banal hotel menu. And I remember that I was momentarily astonished, rather stupidly, on seeing our hostess sit down at table in the European fashion, sitting in a chair like you or me and using a knife and fork instead of her compatriots’ traditional chopsticks.
I also know that it was at that meal that I saw her private secretary for the first time. Leaning over her stenographic machine, she had not raised her eyes when we came in. Inviting her to sit at the table with us, her mistress introduced us.
“Miss Lat Kirjabad, my secretary and friend, does not speak French; please excuse her silence. In any case, Miss Lat is a Buddhist and my plans don’t interest her. She believes in metempsychosis and expects to be able to visit other planets—where she has lived before, she claims—after her death, at her leisure. I dare say that for the sake of her devotion to me she has put herself in flagrant contradiction with her principle that nirvana is superior to action, doing by herself more work than all my other employees combined.”
The young Hindu woman bowed graciously and touched our hand, murmuring a polite: “How do you do?” She had splendid dark eyes, whose d
istant gaze, even when looking directly at you, always seemed to be contemplating the vague agitations of human beings from the height of Sirius.
While we started on the hors-d’oeuvres our hostess began.
“I am a billionaires, as you will have learned from the newspapers—that’s the only accurate thing that they say about me. I still work, even here and when traveling, for four hours a day, checking the state of my finances and supervising their growth—for beyond a certain limit, money assembled in individual ownership tends to grow indefinitely, of its own accord, merely by virtue of its accumulation. My husband had already passed that critical point. A widow for ten years, I have therefore had no great difficulty multiplying the sum he left me tenfold.
“For anyone who does not have a mercantile soul, however, mere possession of wealth cannot be the ultimate objective of its acquisition. If I have continued to enlarge my fortune, it is not on behalf of distant heirs and it is not for the sake of luxury and ostentation. It is uniquely in order that I can, with that finance, do great and beautiful things.
“I have been called a philanthropist. In a sense, I am—or, rather, have been—one. The soothing of humankind’s miseries has long appeared to be a goal worthy of my retention—but those miseries are innumerable and incessantly renewed. Miss Lat claims that it misery a necessity of life itself, and that it is illegitimate to attempt to conquer it. It is, at any rate, futile. Even if I devoted my entire fortune to it, it would have no more effect than a drop of water in the sea.
“So, as my philosophical conceptions matured, I thought of serving humankind by means of more durable and more intellectually-elevated benefits—the foundation of hospitals and museums, It was at that level that the most highly-developed of my colleagues, the American billionaires, stopped. I almost followed the example of Mr. and Mrs. Dana and endowed the world with a peerless astronomical observatory20…yes, the idea was strongly tempting. I’m passionate about astronomy. My private observatory at Kiou-Siou possesses a telescope that ranks fourth among the largest in the world, with its seventy-meter mirror, but it’s really only a twenty-five-million-franc trinket. Remember that governments spend hundreds of billions every year to organizes what they call armies of peace—which is to say, the means of realizing the next universal slaughter, and that, with a tenth of the criminal budget, one could build a telescope of unprecedented power, capable of making an enormous leap forward in the penetration of the enigmas of the universe. And it is in their study that the highest nobility of the human spirit resides.
“Yes, I love and admire the philosophy of my ancestors, as Lat can tell you. I discuss the metaphysical speculation of the Orient with her gladly, but the science of the Occident, rational science, appears to me to be greatly obliged to them. They are the two faces of human spiritual genius. For I’m convinced that the Earth has been created—by God or by the Cosmos, what does it matter? they’re words to express the inexpressible—with the sole aim of permitting humans to crown organic evolution with the conscious thought and intelligence of the All of which they are a part.
“Understand me clearly. By ‘science,’ I don’t mean the steam engine, electricity, aircraft, wireless telegraphy and the other playthings that amuse the vulgar, who believe that their existence makes life easier and ensure them material wellbeing and happiness. All those are only applications with no superior interest. Even worse, they’re harmful, since the atavistic beast that subsists in human nature strives ingeniously to divert them from their role in order to make them into instruments of destruction and death. Science is the formulae, the laws, in which knowledge of the universe is summarized. That’s the science that is beautiful, noble and justifies in the gaze of the Cosmos…the eyes of God…the existence of the Earth and humankind.
“Now, what do we see? For want of remaining solely in the power of sages worthy of using it uniquely for the good of humankind, applied science has increased beyond all bounds in vertiginously accelerated proportion. It has put within the power of evil individuals an infinite capacity to do harm, which draws freely upon the secret energies of the universe, once forbidden to humans and reserved to the manifestations of natural forces.
“Suppose there were to be a war—which might break out tomorrow, or today; it would put an end to civilization, to culture, provoking a return to barbarism and the disappearance of everything that makes humankind worthwhile, annihilating the results of terrestrial thought since its origins.
“I have resolved to employ all the means that my exceptional fortune provides—I would sacrifice every last dollar of it—to make an attempt to save, if not humankind, at least science. I want to shelter from destruction and degradation a few minds, possessors of human thought, in order to permit them to resume its marvelous experiment in safer conditions, and to continue it elsewhere!”
The billionairess, who was not eating, then made her first gesture since she had begun, pointing her index finger toward the zenith with a prophetic and determined thrust. Her voice was slightly raised, but she had nothing of the illuminatus, or the pythoness, about her. The lucid reasoning behind the enthusiasm was sensible, and the certainty of vanquishing obstacles that unlimited wealth provides.
Aurore was gazing fixedly at our hostess. I was breathless, having deduced what was coming next. Only the young Hindu woman, calm and absent, had attacked her plate.
The singsong voice continued, in a rapid and concentrated manner: “Elsewhere: on another planet. Elsewhere than on this Earth, which is condemned to see its two billion inhabitants destroy one another, along with twenty centuries of civilization, and all their grandiose hopes for the future. Elsewhere, where, thanks to me, a few dozen human beings…two or three couples, if the catastrophe happens too quickly to allow us to save more…will emigrate with the penates of the terrestrial homeland, with the sacred fire of science, and will continue purified Promethean history.
“Long ago, in the ancient world, on the eve of its destruction, a city threatened by a rival superior in force would send the flower of its youth to found a new city on other shores, the hope of the future, and the latter sometimes survived, gloriously continuing the story and genius of the metropolis, whose very ruins disappeared. Carthage prolonged in Africa the history of Tyre in Phoenicia; Marseilles is still proud of its Phocean ancestry: colonization on the scale of the ancient world, when the world was immense for slow means of communication. Then there is old Europe, which has grafted on to the New Continent an entire reserve future...but that future too is exhausted; the colony, like the metropolis, will not escape.
“Today’s history has changed its scale. The entire Earth, reduced in surface area every day like Balzac’s Peau de chagrin, by the network of ultra-rapid transportation, the omnipresent wireless waves, is no longer any more than a single city in the solar system. People are crowded here, stifling, killing one another for the sake of elbow-room. The genius of the Earth will perish, suffocated, murdered in the riot. In order to save it, I repeat, it is necessary to launch a sacred spring toward a new world…and on the scale of our civilization, there is no longer any new world on our globe; it can only be conquered Elsewhere!”
The little woman, dressed in black, with her arms folded, had taken on a Napoleonic grandeur. She concluded, more calmly: “That, Aurore Lescure, Monsieur Delvart, is the real significance of the voyage that we are going to undertake…for it’s understood, of course, that I shall accompany you.”
Emotion was strangling me. I stuttered…but the radiant Aurore pronounced: “Madame, I have long been ambitious to be the first representative of humankind to tread the soil of a world other than the Earth, but I imagined the exploit as purely sportive. I did not expect to participate one day in the salvation and migration of human thought toward a renewed destiny. You are doing me an honor of which I hope I can render myself worthy.”
The moment of enthusiastic emotion had passed. Miss Lat Kirjabad calmly speared a vegetable with the tines of her fork. Madame Simodzuki, to se
t us an example, drank a sip of wine and ate a few mouthfuls. After a minute’s silence she went on: “Now, let’s be practical. Before anything else, Aurore, one question. Mr. Cheyne was not mistaken in affirming that you would be capable, thanks to your previous experience, of departing in a spaceship virtually at one day’s notice, without further delay?”
“A week of final adjustments and one or two trials in space will suffice for me, if the model isn’t too original.”
“The apparatus that I intend for you is constructed on plans analogous to those of your MG-17 of two years ago, but on a template three times the size, and it possesses a much improved and more powerful engine. Mr. Northwell will explain—he’s our chief engineer. In fact, he’s also been yours; I bought the patents from Mr. Cheye, who simultaneously procured me the services of the personnel of the old astronautics factory confiscated by the American government when extraterrestrial flights were banned. In brief, in my rocket, which I’ve baptized the Ad Astra I, you’ll find the same control levers with which you’re already familiar. It’s April seventh, so the departure can take place on the fifteenth or thereabouts?”
Aurore reflected. I couldn’t help exclaiming: “But Madame, it takes six or seven days to cross from here to America—for if I understand you rightly, it’s in America that you’ve constructed the new rocket.”
The Japanese woman smiled at my petulance.
“The Ad Astra I has indeed been constructed over there, but it arrived in Gibraltar yesterday, in the hold of my yacht, the Fusi-Yama, and for five hours—since you telephoned this morning—it had been sailing, with its specialist personnel, toward the take-off site where it will be reassembled the day after tomorrow. It’s on the Île du Levant, a thousand kilometers south of Paris, opposite Lavandou. Well, Aurore?”
“In that case, a departure a week from now, as you desire, ought to be possible. But what, then, are you anticipating?”
