“About ten o’clock an orderly delivered me a message that the Colonel wished to speak to me. Pale and uneasy, though I knew not why, I obeyed the order.
“I found my good Colonel more pale and uneasy than I was.
“‘Captain,’ said he, gasping as if in despair, ‘the military chest of my regiment was broken open this morning and there were taken from it fourteen thousand francs. Do you understand? Fourteen thousand francs.’
“The old officer advanced toward me, with his arms folded on his chest, and a stern and menacing eye.
“I felt the pulses of my temples bound and my very brain seemed ready to burst. I drew back with indignation.
“‘This handkerchief was lost by the robber, and found under the chair of the treasurer. See, sir, it bears your ciphers, E.V.’
“I took the handkerchief mechanically; it was indeed mine. My knees quivered, my eyes became filled with tears, and I could not articulate.
“‘Now, sir,’ said the Colonel, ‘go and blow your brains out.’
“I left the room without uttering a word, completely overwhelmed at being called a criminal and a robber. It did not enter into my mind to declare my innocence, or to demand any inquiry. No, I returned to my quarters and took from the arm-rack a loaded pistol.
“I paused and began to sob. Rapidly I recalled the happiness of my childhood, my first campaign, my mother and George, especially the latter.
“‘To die. To die disgraced!’ murmured I.
“‘You shall not die,’ said a clear, vibrating voice, at once metallic and deep, but which seemed to proceed from no human organs.
“The pistol fell from my hand. George stood before me. His eye was fixed, but, brilliant as a star, illumined his pale and diaphanous complexion.
“Explain this to me, doctor. As I detail this horrible affair, I feel my hair grow erect, my teeth chatter, and my voice to quiver. In the presence of George, however, I experienced a serene joy, an ideal and unmingled happiness. My youth, my dreams of love, appeared again to cheer me. But a moment before I had seemed oppressed beneath an unaccountable fatality, but now knew myself watched over by an almost divine power. I will even say, that the apparition of George did not astonish me. It seemed to me a fact simple and natural. We spoke to each other as brothers, who had been long separated.
“‘Etienne, what were you about to do?’ said he to me sadly. ‘I have come to save you. Your servant is guilty; he robbed the chest of fourteen thousand francs, as he robbed you of the handkerchief. You confided in that man, and thought him honest. So he was, but he has a Moorish mistress who makes him purchase her favors dearly. Two thousand francs will be found in his bed, and twelve hundred in her house. Go directly to the Colonel. I have no more to say.’
“I was alone. A sentiment of reality returned to me, and I dashed open the blinds of my window.
“In the shade of the white walls of the barrack yard, beneath the dark blue of the torrid sky, the soldiers were idly smoking, wrapped in their ‘bournous.’ A negro boy was feeding a flock of Numidian fowls, the green plumage of which reflected every tint of the rainbow. Above all towered the white parapets of the Casbah, while calm and silent the waves of the Mediterranean were seen in the distance. I was alive. I did not dream. This impossible hallucination, this phantasmagoria was the truth. Terror seized on me. Icy chills passed from my brain to my feet. My nerves became contracted, and from that moment I began to grow gray.”
Here the General paused and ordered a halt. The column had left the rocks, and before it lay a rolling plain through which a river wound its way. At the other side of the plain rose the black and threatening walls of the Djebel-Ammer, or mountain of Ammer.
General Vergamier dismounted, and leaning on the doctor’s arm, continued:
“Subsequent events proved all the spectre had said to be true. The servant confessed the crime, and the money was found. The good old Colonel, distressed at what he had said, would willingly have shot himself. All my brother officers came to see me. A few days after, at the instance of the Colonel, I was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. The reparation was complete.”
The doctor was silent.
“You do not believe me,” said the General. “Well, I scarcely would believe another, myself, on such evidence. I saw George, I am sure, but I can scarcely realize the fact. The thing however took place, Doctor, or I am a madman.”
“Did you ever see the apparition again?” asked the Doctor, who had been much amazed by the story.
“I did,” replied General Vergamier, in a melancholy tone. “I saw him the evening before my duel with Major Berkard de Ris. I had just come from drill, fatigued and melancholy, and had gone into my room in which there was no light, but a fire of dry branches. George sat in my chair, sad and moody. As I entered, he arose, and said ‘I was waiting for you. Tomorrow you will fight with de Ris, who is a swordsman. You do not fence enough.’ George leaned against the wall, and I saw that he had a sword in his hand. I took down a foil and put myself en garde. ‘Pay attention,’ said George, ‘I am about to give you a lesson. See this pass. Engage him thus, and then thus. Very well, you did not thrust far enough through.’”
“‘I dared not,’ said I, and the cold sweat stood on my brow.
“A languid smile played on his lips. We fenced again and with such violence that my sword broke on the wall. I ran George through and through. Strange, however, to say, my sword met with no resistance.”
“‘Very well,’ said George. ‘With a quick eye, coolness, and a steady hand, you will do well.’
“‘George,’ said I, with a reproachful voice, ‘why do you leave me? Is there anything above which retains you?’
“George shook his head sadly.
“I said ‘Will you return?’
“‘Once more,’ replied he, ‘but thenceforth we will not be separated.’
“The vision disappeared.
“I am in my senses,” continued the General, “and am sure of all I say. I, General Vergamier, took a fencing lesson from a ghost. You know the result of the duel. Doctor, that was long ago, and now I expect the third visit.”
The Doctor could not suppress a feeling of uneasiness, he was so much disturbed by the feverish state of the General.
“To horse,” said he, assuming the command. “Control yourself. You have told me only what you have dreamed. Do not think of the matter. Be calm and composed. It is almost day.”
“Doctor, I have not seen George for a long time.”
The column soon turned to the left to follow the torrent of the Oued along the plain. General Vergamier, wrapped up in his cloak, did not speak, except to give an order from time to time. At dawn, fires were seen on the declivities of the Djebel-Ammer. They were the bivouacs of the first column, with which Vergamier had orders to unite his own command. This was soon done.
The little army was encamped on the side of the army and saw at its feet a vast plain covered with a plentiful harvest and intersected by a network of canals fed with water from the Oued. On the other side of the mountain was a large Arab village, the irregularly-built houses of which seemed ready to fall into the valley. Vast rocks of trachytic porphyry were piled above it, and all was in the midst of a gigantic forest of cyprus, fig and pine trees.
At the command “Break ranks,” given by the General and repeated by all the officers, the soldiers scattered over the plain laughing and shouting.
“Here, Conscript,” said Corporal Gobin to Gabet, at the same time throwing him a box of matches, “go make your first fire.”
“One sous a packet, two sous a box,” said an old gamin of Paris, from the neighborhood of the Temple.
The plain was soon in a blaze, and the soldiers were forced to retreat before it. A light crackling of the grass was heard, then a whirlpool of blaze seemed to be formed in the midst of an immense mass of smoke. The matches, insignificant as they usually seem, in a country like Africa become terrible weapons, were seen everywhere busy in effecting t
he razzia. When the whole field was on fire, the column united again, to ascend the mountain; it crossed the ravines and valleys, and in the gorge of an immense pass, descended with loud hurrahs toward Djebel. Everywhere the greenish blaze of the match was visible, and the burning junipers made all the atmosphere fragrant.
The slope of the mountain was scarcely descended, when the village was in a blaze as if it had been built of straw. A few Arabs hurrying from the houses exchanged shots with a handful of Spahis without much injury to either side. There were, however, two or three men wounded, and the doctor had taken care of them, when the column reached the base of the mountain. The conflagration had so closely followed the column that it seemed in pursuit of it. The fire wound round them like a serpent, until both man and the element paused on the banks of the Oued. The fire went out about dawn.
The plain, the village, and the river were confounded in one sea of fire, the waves of which reached the mosses of the forests, hung on the side of the mountain. The Djebel was soon covered with a diadem of flames. The rays of the sun with difficulty pierced the smoky atmosphere of this vast furnace, giving it the appearance of molten copper.
General Vergamier had left his escort. At the commencement of the razzia he had dismounted, and after he had given his horse to a chasseur, attempted to ascend the mountain by a winding path which required both a quick eye and active foot.
Buried in thought, Vergamier did not observe that on his right hand rose impassable rocks, which stood like a wall between himself and his men. He, however, heard the firing distinctly, repeated by a thousand echoes, and even the roaring of the flame. Leaning on his saber he continued to ascend.
Soon he ceased to hear these sounds, and a winding of the path led him away from the ravine through which the column defiled. The whole mountain was silent as the tomb.
The General reached a kind of fertile plateau, where the table forest of Ammer began. Nothing could be more melancholy than the deep recesses of the cypress. Vergamier rapidly walked amid them. The soil was strewn with fragments of feldspar, sharp and pointed, which had been broken from the rocks by some tempest. They wounded his feet as if they had been razors. Vergamier, however, did not heed it. He paused at a torrent which fell over a prodigious rock, and drank a mouthful of water from the hollow of his hand. He then sat down on a mossy rock and became wrapped in meditation.
He passed in review his career. He saw himself again in the white plains of his native Champagne, in the silent halls of Saint Cyr, at Sidi-Ferruch and his first fight, amid the blue mists of Paris, the gigantic and glorious. He saw himself at the Tuileries, where his valor had been rewarded, and Palais-Bourbon, where he had been received with acclamations: He saw himself at the little drawing-room of the poet Nanteuil, with his kind heart and artistic luxury. He saw all whom he had loved....George. He looked around.
Above him was the stern rock with the black spiral trees which crowned it, shutting out the light. Behind him, near a cypress tree was a man.
“George!” said he.
He covered his face with his hands....
At eight o’clock, Doctor Banis, uneasy at the long absence of the General, had the mountain searched by a party of Spahis. About noon they found the body of General Vergamier at the foot of a deep ravine, completely crushed by his horrible fall. The soldiers thought that their General had been pushed over by some Arab, who had laid in the ambuscade amid the underwood. Doctor Banis, however, knew that he had received the last visit of George.
LIEUTENANT CASTENAC, by Erckman-Chatrian
(1866)
In 1845 I was attached as surgeon-major to the military hospital of Constantine. This hospital rises in the interior of the Casbah, over a precipice of from three to four hundred feet in height. It commands at once the city, the governor’s palace, and the vast plain beyond, as far as the eye can reach. It is at once a comprehensive and savage scene. From my window, left open to inspire the fresh breezes of the evening, I could see the vultures and ravens soaring around the inaccessible cliffs before withdrawing for the night into their fissures and crevices. I could easily throw my cigar into the Rummel, which flows along the foot of the giant wall. Not a sound, not a murmur came to trouble the calm of my studies, till the evening bugle and drums, repeated by the echoes of the fortress, called the men to their quarters.
Garrison life had never any charms for me; I never could accustom myself to absinthe and rum, or to the petit verre de cognac. At the time I am now speaking about that was called wanted in esprit de corps, but my gastric faculties did not permit my having that kind of esprit. I occupied myself there with visiting my patients, prescribing and dressing, and then I retired to my room to make notes of the cases, to read a book, or sit at the window contemplating the gloomy, savage scene before me.
Every one got accustomed to, and put up with, my retiring habits, save a certain lieutenant of Voltigeurs, Castagnac by name, whom I must introduce to you in propria persona.
On my first arrival at Constantine, getting down from the carriage, a voice shouted out behind me:
“Tiens! I’ll lay a bet that is our surgeon-major.”
I turned round and found myself in the presence of an infantry officer, tall, thin, bony, with a red nose and gray moustache, his kepi over his ear, its peak stabbing the sky, his sword between his legs; it was Lieutenant Castegnac, and who has not seen the same military type?
While I was familiarizing my eyes with this strange physiognomy, the lieutenant had seized my hand.
“Welcome, Doctor! Delighted to make your acquaintance. You are tired, I am sure. Come in—I will introduce you to the Cercle.”
The Cercle at Constantine was the restaurant and bar of the officers united. We went in. How was it possible to resist the sympathetic enthusiasm of such a man! And yet I had read Gil Blas!
“Garçon, two glasses. What do you take, doctor—cognac or rum?”
“Neither. Curacoa, if you please.”
“Curacoa! Why not say parfait amour at once? Ah, ah, ah! You have a strange taste. Garcon, a glass of absinthe for me, full to the brim; be attentive. Your health, doctor!”
“Yours, Lieutenant!”
And so I was forthwith in the good graces of this strange man. But it is needless to tell you that the intimacy did not last long.
Castagnac had habits that were especially antagonistic to my own. But I made the acquaintance of other officers, who joined me in laughing at the originality of his character.
Among them was a young man of merit, Raymond Dutertre, who said that he has likewise been obliged to drop his acquaintance, but that Castagnac having taken it up as a personal affront, they had gone outside the walls, and he, Dutertre, had administered to him a severe chastisement, which chagrined him all the more, as he had previously bullied with impunity, on the faith of one or two successful duels.
Things were in this condition, when about the middle of June, a malignant fever broke out in Constantine, and among the hospital patients were both Castagnac and Dutertre; but Castagnac was not there for fever; he was invalided by that strange nervous affliction called delirium tremens (and in our bashful army D.T.), and which is especially common among those who, in Algeria, are given to the frequent imbibation of absinthe.
Poor Castagnac used to get out of his bed during the attacks and run along the floor on all fours, as if he were catching rats. He also mewed like a cat, but the only words that he uttered were, “Fatima! oh Fatima!”—a circumstance that induced me to suppose that the poor fellow had experienced some disappointment in love, for which he sought consolation in the abuse of spirituous liquors.
When he recovered from his fits he would invariably ask the same question:
“What did I say, doctor? Did I say anything?”
I naturally replied that he had said nothing of importance, and bade him quiet himself.
But he was not satisfied, and after trying to search my inner thoughts with his fierce eyes, he would give up the attempt and resign h
imself to his couch, with the equally invariable observation:
“A glass of absinthe would do me a great deal of good.”
One morning, as I was entering into Castagnac’s room I saw Dutertre, who was nearly convalescent, hastening after me along the passage.
“Doctor,” he said, taking me by the hand, “I have come to ask you a favor. Will you give me permission to go out for a day?”
“Anything, my dear friend, but that. The fever is still raging in the town, and I cannot expose you to a relapse.”
“Well, give me then two hours—the time to go and come back.”
“It is impossible, my good friend. In another week, if you go on well, we will see what can be done.”
He withdrew, evidently deeply chagrined. I was sorry, but could not help it, but on turning around was surprised at seeing Castagnac following the retiring suitor with a strange look.
“What was Raymond asking for?” he inquired.
“Oh, nothing! He wanted to go out, but I could not sanction it.”
“You refused him permission, then?” persevered the sick man.
“It was my duty to do so.”
Castagnac said no more, but resumed his recumbent position with a grim smile, I was almost about to say a diabolical expression of countenance, which I could not account for, but which filled me with strange apprehensions.
That same evening my duties called me to the amphitheatre, where an autopsy claimed my attention. The so-called amphitheatre was in reality a vaulted dungeon fifteen feet long by twenty feet wide, with two windows opening upon the precipice and looking in the direction of the high road to Phillipville. The body lay upon a table slightly inclined, my lamp was placed upon a stone that advanced out of the wall, and I remained engaged in my examination till near eleven o’clock.
On leaving off at length, I was horrified at seeing the window blocked up by innumerable owls, small and gray-colored, with their feathers all erect, their green eyes sparkling through the semi-obscurity. They were waiting till I had done.
The Macabre Megapack Page 33
