∗ ∗ ∗
While the professor was speaking, Khóng-dk-lèn had been persistently teasing the solar ball, as the sea horses dragged it slowly along.
When he had finished, Canterel walked round the gem rolling up his right sleeve fully, then, making a sign to Faustine, who at once set Khóng-dk-lèn upon her shoulder, he again mounted the ladder.
As the dwarf sun went by, he gripped it with his fingers, breaking the adherence of the metal sheaths; soon it lay beside the bottle of Sauternes. One by one the hippocampi were taken in the net and restored to their jar, where the production of air bubbles from their breasts entirely ceased.
Canterel held his hand beneath the back of Faustine’s head, while she faced him, thrusting her head back and catching hold of the rim of the circular opening, as Khóng-dk-lèn rubbed himself against her cheek. Lifted by the nape, she recovered herself quickly and was thus able to kneel on the glass ceiling, then descend the nickel-plated ladder behind the professor. The latter, after drying his arm and hand with his handkerchief, briskly rolled down his sleeve.
The cat jumped to the ground and slipped away in the direction of the villa, while our group resumed its quiet stroll, augmented by Faustine. Upon our remarking that she was in danger of catching a chill, the dancer replied that this was completely averted by an intense and lasting reaction that always occurred throughout her body on her emergence from the aqua-micans.
* * *
* A Siamese word meaning “toy.”
4
After following canterel along the esplanade, we descended a straight, gently sloping path of yellow sand with luxuriant lawns on each side. It soon became horizontal and broadened out suddenly, like a river encircling an island, to encompass a certain lofty and gigantic cage of glass which covered a rectangular area of perhaps ten by forty meters.
This transparent construction, in which the straight line reigned supreme, was entirely composed of immense panes of glass supported by a rigid, though delicate iron framework. The geometrical simplicity of its four walls and ceiling made it resemble some monstrous, lidless box, placed upside down on the ground in such a way as to make its principal axis coincide with that of the path.
When we arrived at the sort of broad estuary formed by the obliquely diverging borders of the latter, Canterel signaled to us with a glance to follow him; bearing to the right, he rounded the corners of the fragile edifice, then called a halt.
There were people standing at intervals along the glass wall now beside us, toward which our whole group turned.
Before our eyes was a kind of square room all by itself, set right on the ground behind the glass — separated from it by less than a meter. To make it fully and clearly visible, the ceiling and one of the four walls — the one whose exterior should have been facing us nearby — were missing. It had the appearance of some ruined chapel used as a place of confinement. A window that opened halfway along the wall standing to our right was fitted with two curved and widely separated horizontal rails, which braced a row of bars ending in fine spikes. Two pallets — one large, one small — were disposed on the weathered flagstones, together with a low table and a wooden stool. Reared against the back wall were the remains of an altar from which a great stone Virgin had fallen and broken into pieces; the accident had also torn the infant Jesus from her arms without otherwise damaging him.
From a distance we had noticed a man wearing a fur cap and overcoat, strolling about inside the enormous cage, whom Canterel, in a couple of words, had introduced to us as one of his assistants. At our approach he had entered the chapel’s gaping side, from which he had just reemerged, moving away to the right.
Stretched out on the larger pallet was a stranger with grizzled hair, who seemed lost in thought.
Soon, as though reaching a decision, he rose and walked toward the altar, stepping gingerly with his left leg which was evidently painful.
Then, beside us, a woman in a crepe veil, leaning on the arm of a young boy, burst out sobbing. “Gérard . . . Gérard . . .” she cried, stretching her hand out hopelessly toward the chapel.
Having reached the altar, the man she had thus named picked up the infant Jesus and, seating himself on the stool, laid it upon his knees. Using the tips of his fingers he took from his pocket a round metal box the hinged lid of which lifted to reveal a kind of pink ointment, which he began to smear thinly over the statue’s childish face.
At once, as though alluding to this strange make-up, the spectator in the black veil said to the young boy:
“It was for you . . . to save you . . .” — while the boy nodded his head affirmatively and wept.
Gérard, continually on the alert and apparently dogged by the fear of interruption, made rapid progress with his task, until soon the whole stone face was pink with ointment, as also were the neck and ears.
Laying the statue on the small pallet standing against the left-hand wall, he examined it for a moment, then replaced the closed box of ointment in his pocket and went to the window. Thanks to the shape of the grille, which bulged slightly outward, he was able to lean over and look down outside.
Out of curiosity we took a few steps to the right and saw the other side of the wall. The window was situated in a slight recess between two angles, the furthest of which served as a receptacle and support for a varied accumulation of rubbish, including, notably, innumerable scraps of pears. Ignoring the peel among these, Gérard stretched his arm out between two bars and collected all the bunches of internal filaments united with the stalks and pips. After making this harvest the hand went inside again, while we regained our former vantage point to the left.
Rapidly his fingers separated the filaments he had collected from the stalks, then from the parts containing the pips; in this way he obtained coarse, whitish strings, which he afterward patiently divided into a large number of fine threads.
Filled with enough tenacity and zeal to triumph over his evident absence of professional ability, Gérard undertook a strange task of simultaneous weaving and fabrication with the aid of these strands — knotting several together end to end to make up for their lack of length. At last, by dint of tight crisscrossing designed to produce a kind of overall convexity in the article thus engendered, he had a passable nurseling’s bonnet in his hands, which might have been taken for linen. He set it on the head of the pink-faced statue, which, turned to the wall and with the bed-clothes to its neck, took on the appearance of a real baby now that its stone hair was concealed.
He carefully collected all the refuse from his work and immediately threw it out of the window to his left. After which, for a brief instant, his attitude seemed to betray a certain vagueness and absence.
Recovering his lucidity, he sharply lowered his left hand, with his elbow raised and his fingers extended in a tight bunch, to let a golden bracelet, made of a small chain from which hung an old crown piece, slip from his wrist into the hollow of his right hand.
By scraping the ancient coin for a long time against the lower spike of one of the window bars, Gérard obtained a considerable quantity of gold dust, which he continually collected in the palm of his unemployed left hand.
On the table, where it contrasted with four modern octavo volumes, was a very large and ancient book bearing the following plainly legible in big letters on the spine of its binding: “Erebi Glossarium a Ludovico Toljano.” Beside it stood a pitcher filled with water and a flower stalk.
Gérard put the bracelet in his pocket and moved the stool closer to the table standing quite near us against the wall in which the window gaped. He seated himself before the Dictionary of Erebus, placed it in a convenient position, then opened it at its very beginning by turning the cardboard of the binding, accompanied only by its completely unwrinkled endpaper, about its horizontal axis to the left. The front of the first leaf, or flyleaf, lay quite flat and was entirely blank.
Gérard
seized the flowerless stem between three fingers like a penholder and slightly moistened one of its ends, which still bore a long thorn, in the almost overflowing water of the pitcher. Then, still betraying a kind of anxious haste, he began to write on the dictionary’s blank leaf with the point of the thorn.
At the end of several lines Gérard put down the stem and took a pinch of gold dust from his still-extended left hand and, by moving his thumb and forefinger, spread it bit by bit over the fresh invisible writing, which at once became colored. Beneath the word “ODE,” traced in large letters as a title, came a stanza of six alexandrines.
After completing this brief task, Gérard allowed the remainder of the pinch of powder to fall back onto the supply in his left hand, moistened the right end of the stem again and began to write with the thorn. Soon a second stanza had been laid upon the sheet, then sprinkled with gold.
The same work of alternate scribbling and dusting was continued in this way until tiers of stanzas reached the very foot of the page.
After giving it time to dry, Gérard lifted the leaf for a moment and half-rolled it up, thus conveying all the specks of powder not captured by the water onto the left-hand margin; when he gripped the dictionary by its top and stood it almost vertical, they slid onto the still-considerable heap of gold in his passive left hand, held ready to receive them. Freed from any prejudicial surroundings distracting to the eye, the fragile golden text, which until then had been nebulous, appeared in all its purity.
Holding the dictionary, Gérard let it fall gently back on the table; then, with one hand, he piled the four octavo volumes under the front board of the binding so that it rested upon them horizontally instead of sloping. He turned the flyleaf to reveal its blank verso and, without altering his procedure, covered this with stanzas in golden characters, which were soon dry right to the end.
This time, by bending the paper cautiously, he brought the specks of gold remaining free to the right-hand margin and returned them to the reserve in a fine cascade by lifting the heavy book again momentarily.
At the end of an operation which Gérard performed as though he only possessed one arm, the octavo volumes were to be found supporting the other board of the binding on the right. An endpaper and a flyleaf lay quite fat upon it, the latter displayed its virgin face opposite the last page of the dictionary — which was now open with all its pages stacked horizontally like a volume that has just been read. Gradually it became covered with fresh stanzas, written one by one in water with the thorn, then gilded.
After seeing that it was dry, and recovering the particles of gold in the usual manner, Gérard turned the flyleaf over to finish the ode and sign it on the back; the stanzas all followed the same pattern, and he remained faithful to his strange expedient for writing to the end. Only a few grains of the precious powder then remained in his left hand, and these he shook to the ground.
This time, when even the golden signature placed at the foot of the page was perfectly dry, Gérard let all the metal filings extraneous to the text fall haphazardly on the table by holding the opulent volume upright first of all, then closing it and setting it down.
After a long moment during which he seemed to engage in deep reflection, Gérard espied the pile of octavo books and took up the top volume, simply bound in paper, which bore the title The Eocene upon its cover.
After pushing the dictionary aside, he placed this on the table and skimmed through the latter part of it, soon stopping at the first page of a two-column index. Here, words were arranged successively in a list, which he touched rapidly with his fingers one after another in order to count them. Then, on the following pages where the index continued, Gérard engaged in the same quick enumeration, without skipping anything, until, at the last word on one of the pages, he halted and stood up.
Walking away from us toward the window, he took the gold bracelet momentarily from his pocket and scraped the crown piece once more against the spike of the bar that he had already used. Collecting a very small quantity of glittering powder this time in his left hand, he settled himself again in front of The Eocene.
In the center, right at the top of the page where he had stopped counting, he wrote “Cell Days,” in his usual manner, but using printed capitals throughout. Above the left-hand column he wrote “Credit,” and beneath the right-hand one “Debit.” The latter title was written directly back to front — without difficulty, thanks to the geometrical simplicity of the characters adopted.
Next, Gérard struck out the first word actually printed in the first column.
The supply of powder had just sufficed to gild the water of the letters and of the erasure. When all moisture had vanished from the paper, Gérard held the volume for a moment at right angles to the table, upon which lightly tumbled all the grains that had escaped the delicate liming.
After placing his finger below the number immediately following the word scratched out, he skimmed through the beginning of the work as though looking for a certain page.
∗ ∗ ∗
At that moment Canterel made us walk a little to the right along the enormous, transparent cage and halted us in front of a very ornamental Catholic altar facing us behind the glass partition, with a priest in a chasuble before its tabernacle. The warmly accoutred assistant, who was leaving this place after performing some task there, bent his steps toward Gérard’s retreat, which he entered for an instant.
On the sacred table, to the right, was a rich and very antique-looking metal chest whose principle side bore these words in letters made of garnets beneath the lock: “The Unseasonable Vice of Golden Weddings.”
The priest walked toward it, raised the lid and drew out a rather large vice of very simple design, which functioned by means of a wing nut. Descending the altar steps, he stopped before a very aged couple, who had risen at his approach, vacating two ceremonial chairs placed side by side with their backs toward us. The man wore a simple dress coat and was hatless, while to his left, in deep mourning and with her head enveloped in a black shawl, his wife was snugly wrapped in a heavy mantle — though like him she had her hands uncovered.
Setting the two old people face to face, the priest united right hands, which he placed, tightly clasped together, between the vice’s parted jaws; then, gently, he began to turn the nut, which was orientated ostentatiously in our direction.
But the man smilingly intervened with his left hand and compelled the priest to let him take the metal wings, which he cheerfully turned several times himself, with mischievous and deliberate vigor, while his wife sobbed with emotion. The jaws must have been made of some soft imitation of iron, for they yielded without inflicting any suffering upon the two interlocked right hands.
When it became free again, the nut was carefully unscrewed by the priest, who soon carried away the vice and remounted the altar steps to approach the chest — while the couple returned to their seats, their long and solemn handclasp ended.
∗ ∗ ∗
Then Canterel led us several meters further along the giant cage, to the front of a magnificent building from which we saw the assistant in furs emerge, bustling toward the aged couple: he had gone there unobtrusively just before, by an indirect route that passed behind the altar.
Facing us, a very short way behind the dividing wall of glass, was an unelevated theatrical stage, with a set suggesting the sumptuous hall of some medieval castle. The absence of a rail enabled the assistant to enter and leave without difficulty by the front.
Toward the back, and slightly to the left, was a nobleman seen in profile with his neck uncovered, who sat, annotating a book, at a table placed askew, opposite a cant wall pierced by a large window. Upon his neck a Gothic monogram was visible consisting of the three letters B, T and G, in dark gray. In the center, right at the back, stood a man carrying a parchment, whom we saw full face in front of a closed door, precisely to the nobleman’s right and several paces from him
. The costumes of the two actors harmonized well, as to period, with the set.
In a tone of distinct irony, and without interrupting his notes or in any way changing his attitude, the nobleman said:
“Really . . . a note of hand? . . . What does it show as a signature? . . .”
His voice reached us through a round opening as large as a dinner plate, contrived in the glass partition two meters from the ground, which was covered simply by a disc of tissue paper with its overlapping edges stuck to the outside of the rim.
A girl in black, positioned just under this bull’s-eye so as to hear distinctly, was staring intently through the glass all the while to the man who had just spoken.
To the question asked, the man with the parchment made this brief reply:
“A cob.”
The very instant this latter word rang out, the nobleman spread his fingers and twisted his head to the right with amazing abruptness, moving his hands at once to the nape of his neck, as though from the effect of a pain which was nonetheless quickly forgotten.
Locus Solus Page 10
