Receiving an affectionate welcome, Florine was shown round by Lord Rashleigh and admired the park and the manor in detail, while Lucius worked with his model before his eyes. The visitors were kept to dinner, and it was about six o’clock when they stepped into a brougham belonging to their hosts. The nearest village station was about ten miles away.
Halfway, while they were passing through a thick wood, they heard a chorus of many drunken voices chanting the Red Gang’s* rallying cry, and their horses were stopped by a band of more or less intoxicated prowlers.
The impulsive and excitable Lucius alighted to hurl abuse to the attackers, who quickly reduced him to helplessness and made Florine get out, fearfully clasping Gillette who was asleep.
A that moment, after shooting and wounding the leader of the gang twice with a revolver, the coachman plunged into the night, struggling vainly to hold back his horses, who had bolted at the sound of the explosions.
The chief, wounded only slightly but exasperated at the sight of his own blood, leapt at Lucius, brutally rifled his pockets, then snatched Gillette from Florine’s arms and had her searched by his men.
The child, woken by a stranger’s touch, had begun to cry, and when Lucius saw the robber stun her with blows of his fist to make her be silent, he freed himself from all restraint with a leap so violent that a dagger was knocked from the fingers of one of his guards. He swooped on the weapon and furiously struck at the tormentor with it, aiming at his face rather than at his breast, since that was shielded by Gillette. The blade gashed his cheek from bottom to top and penetrated deeply in his left eye.
Seeing Lucius quickly caught again, the chief, bleeding and blinded in one eye, screamed like a wild beast. Maddened with pain, he had dropped Gillette, who was now yelling on the ground, and he realized, from a thousand indications, that in order really to torment the couple he would have to pick up the child. In a choking voice, pointing at Gillette, he gave the command: “Sir Roger de Coverly.”
All the bandits, except three who were holding Lucius and Florine, formed into two lines facing each other and began an infernal jig whose center was marked by the child. Starting from two opposite corners, the chief and a confederate skipped diagonally to meet each other, struck Gillette ferociously with their heels, then regained their places by a backward movement. The occupants of the other two end-positions started on the opposite diagonal and completed an identical maneuver. The same two couples alternated several times, performing various twirls and bows in the center, of which the example of the first was slavishly copied by the second; and at each trip the monsters bruised the victim — or angrily trampled her beneath the entire weight of their bodies. The chief, in an excess of cruelty, aimed fiercely at her head or belly.
After which, two vis-à-vis, one taken from each of the preceding couples, passed by stages from one end of the quadrille to the other, by means of a series of pivotings performed inwardly to one another, then separately with each dancer of the two files. At a certain point, this second figure provided a fresh opportunity to crush the little martyr with their feet.
After this everything started again as in the beginning, and for a long time the frightful jig pursued its course before the parents’ haggard eyes. As a result of the rotation established by the periodic return of the second figure, all the dancers occupied the active positions in succession and vied with one another in torturing Gillette beneath their incessant hopping.
It was indeed the classic jig, “Sir Roger de Coverly,” transformed into the famous penalty which the Red Gang inflict on those who betray it.
The frenzied men accelerated their nightmare ballet to fever pitch, applauding one another when the blood spurted from some new gash due to the nails of their shoes.
At the sight of the coachman furiously lashing his whip as he brought the brougham back loaded with men armed with revolvers, the whole gang abruptly took to their heels. Florine rushed to her daughter, but gathered up, alas, only a frightfully disfigured corpse covered with bruises and wounds. On touching the child and gazing at her, Lucius was struck down by madness, and burst out laughing, imitating the gait of the odious dancers as he raved. The horrified Florine dragged him into the brougham, which took the road back to the manor, while the new arrivals followed the bandits’ tracks.
The Rashleighs, staunch and compassionate, stayed up all night with Florine beside Gillette’s corpse and faced the poor lunatic’s terrible outbursts.
After the child’s burial, Florine signed a deposition against the murderers, who had been ably captured, then parted affectionately from her hosts and brought Lucius back to Paris, where many treatments were attempted.
Believing himself to be Leonardo da Vinci, the wretched man connected his universal speculations in art and science with his daughter, the thought of whom obsessed him.
For two years Lucius, whom diligent research might have over-excited, had been cared for in turn, without result, at five well-known asylums where, despite his reiterated demands, he had been refused all materials for work.
From this narrative, Canterel deduced the certainty of a cure: being opposed, in such cases, to the slightest contradiction, he resolved on the contrary to accede slavishly to the sick man’s most extravagant wishes.
In order to arrange deep silence and calm for Lucius, he had a plain, scantily furnished room quickly erected in an elevated position in his park. This had no other opening except a wide gate whose two leaves, composing the façade, looked out over a vast stretch of forest — a unique and restful vista, magnificently green as far as the eye could see.
The patient was transferred here — where, carefully covered up during the hours of darkness, he might constantly absorb the tonic emanations of the open air. Next day he was freely given a large number of separate items, the list of which he had laboriously prepared.
Not without traces of his former talent, he began a picture whose subject, redolent of insanity, consisted of many outspread wings with cords drawing a personification of the dawn. As Canterel learnt from a series of therapeutic conversations he had initiated, the sick man intended in this way to suggest Gillette being carried off in the morning of her life.
Next he fashioned, with his sculpting tools, some small, light figures from various thin pieces of rubber skin, worked from behind like chased metal. As a result of a succession of precautionary measures, this retained whatever delicate shape was patiently produced thanks to its elasticity. He gummed the edges to join them, and ballasted each foot with fine sand; last of all, before closing it in its turn, he blew into a deliberately contrived opening in the very top, which would easily be opened temporarily for periodic reinflation. Then he abandoned himself to the marvelous work of coloring them all over, taking great pains with the intensity of their expressions and the details of their costume. Soon he had twelve almost weightless little fellows, all suggesting evil prowlers.
Then he produced a mass of warm vertical air currents on a marble table — with the help of a sheet of iron furnished with glowing coals, two firedogs without projections, and a piece of gray rep judiciously pierced on the spot with numerous pinholes. By manipulating the holes skillfully with his fingers, he made the dolls perform an aerial Sir Roger de Coverly, which became progressively more animated — and which shed light on the matter for Canterel. Beset by the two ideas of his grief and his universality, the pseudo-Leonardo, as a sculptor and painter, had created some symbolic figures capable of reproducing the fatal jig — while as a scientist he had conceived a style of dancing physically based on the lightness of hot air.
By demanding in his list a piece of rep for the experiment, while ingeniously stipulating the color gray, which would be unaffected by spots from flying cinders, Lucius gave proof of curious good sense, which the professor considered as a step toward recovery — for he had chosen a material which, because of its resistance, was capable of withstanding the heat close to
the embers, while having the advantage over any metallic sieve that its flexibility enabled the straying finger, by a gentle pressure of its flesh at a point in the vicinity of the vent, to give some particular air current a slight and subtle obliquity, favoring the displacement of the figurines.
Suddenly, releasing the rep, Lucius underwent a terrible crisis during which, as a consequence of reflex effects produced by vivid hallucinations due to the preceding evocative scene, twelve of his hairs stood on end and danced on his denuded cranium an uncontrollable jig, which little by little became more feverish, resembling in all respects that which the murderers had performed.
After that, each time night fell, under the influence of a reverie caused by the unsettling hour, Lucius, whose virtuosity was increasing, required the burning embers for anther jig in mid-air, which was invariably followed by the same capillary crisis.
∗ ∗ ∗
One morning the madman demanded a complex selection of chemicals and laboratory equipment, as well as a length of linen and a pair of scissors. After engaging in numerous manipulations, he produced, firstly, several colorless mixtures and, secondly, a stiff white Pharaoh’s serpent as slender as a thread, which, after being moistened in certain special ways, was capable of performing needlework with amazing rapidity — enabling him to accomplish many fairy-like pieces of linen work.
Being a skillful questioner, the professor discovered the key to the mystery. Because of a disturbance rooted in his obsession, Lucius sometimes believed his daughter’s birth was imminent and was making a layette under the impression that haste was indispensable; this, acting on the scientific side of his character, had engendered a remarkable invention.
The continual chemical manufacture of the quickly used, initially rigid thread had, despite all care and lubrication, produced a phenomenon of intense oxygenation that had rusted the grille, including the hinges, which had become paralysed. Various metals were tried out as new hinges, but they all deteriorated in the end except for solid gold, which Canterel adopted since it functioned perfectly.
Lucius was given a pair of well-sharpened golden scissors with which to cut his linen.
∗ ∗ ∗
Without visiting the sick man, who was in strict isolation, Florine used to come for news. One day, at the professor’s behest, she brought some strange implements that Lucius had demanded the day before; these had often been seen in his hands before the fatal departure for England, and their purpose was the artificial creation of speech or song.
On receiving the bundle the madman was not satisfied and insistently pronounced the word “fathom” several times. When Florine was informed of this circumstance, she remembered that, at the time when Lucius was busily engaged in manipulating the apparatus in question, he had been planning to construct a measure of length made for an elastic material, the choice of which perplexed him. For certain subtle phono-arithmetic reasons, this was to have been divided into sections like the old fathom, on a greatly reduced scale.
Next day, using one blade of his scissors, the madman cut a small ruler from a well-dried piece of fat bacon, which had been brought at his request, and transformed it into a toylike fathom by painting red divisions on one side of it.
With this fathom and the latest consignment of items received, he threw himself into some laborious operations based on daunting calculations of distance and heat, which were designed to impress, upon a certain green wax, marks capable of producing declamatory or musical speech.
The bacon, as the object of a judicious preference, provided a fresh indication of progress toward sanity; in view of its slightly resistant elasticity, it possessed the properties desirable, in the present instance, to a greater extent than any other material.
The wretched man’s sole aim, as his incoherent soliloquies testified, was to reproduce his daughter’s voice as it had been manifested to his attentive ear in the efforts to speak already made by her during the last days of her life. Using an infinite variety of timbres and intonations, he created all kinds of components from fragments of conversations or tunes, hoping that, among so many elements, he might chance upon some sonorous indication capable of setting him on the right path. Here again, combined with his obsession, the scientific genius of the person he believed himself to be intervened.
Since he was working at his layette between whiles, the metal of two dissimilar needles, adorning respectively a slender wooden handle and a vibrating membrane, rusted, and had to be replaced by unalterable gold.
One evening Lucius described and requested a certain heavy, ancient curio associated in his mind with his child’s baptism.
In Egypt, in the old days, the Coptic priest used to have a plank of sycamore bearing the text of the Mass engraved on both sides in their language, which served as a memory aid when they conducted services; this stood beside the altar and could easily be turned round at a given moment. After being used, the plank — piously considered the Mind of the Blessed Sacrament, since potentially it contained the Word — was carefully slid into its silken sheath, ornamented with the word “Mens” gracefully embroidered among various embellishments.
As a memento of Gillette’s baptism, Lucius had given Florine a plank of this description, which he had discovered, with its sheath intact, in an antique dealer’s display.
The plank and sheath were handed over to the sick man, who often handled them, smiling at these costly objects which recalled a celebration dedicated to his daughter.
Canterel’s method was gloriously vindicated as perfectly intelligible sentences became ever more frequent, pledging the madman to a certain and complete recovery.
∗ ∗ ∗
At that moment a cry from Lucius drew us to the chamber, and soon we were all ranged again before the rusty gate with golden hinges.
On the tablet a fresh line of marks was to be seen, evidently, from their appearance and finish, the work of the point and the little fathom, aided by the lamp and the ace of diamonds.
In high excitement Lucius slid the point of the reproducing needle over the new line and, from the very bottom of the horn, on the vowel a, emerged a long, merry syllable which, while recalling the smiling first efforts of very young children eager to talk, bore a strong resemblance to the model provided by the end of the “O Rebecca . . .” motif.
The lunatic uttered a second cry, similar to that undoubtedly just called forth by a first hearing of the joyful tones. Bewildered at the thought of having achieved his aim, he murmured:
“Her voice . . . It’s her voice . . . my daughter’s voice! . . .” Then, as though she were present, he addressed her breathlessly with these tender words:
“It’s you, my Gillette . . . They haven’t killed you . . . You’re here . . . beside me . . . Speak, my darling . . .”
And between these disjointed sentences came, like a response, the first attempt at a word, which he constantly reproduced.
Speaking in a low voice, Canterel led us noiselessly away so as to let this salutary crisis peacefully run its course. He congratulated Malvina on having precipitated with her song a fortunate event likely to hasten the sick man’s recovery — then made us perform a rather long descent, by a different path.
* * *
* A notorious company of bandits who infested the county of Kent.
6
Night had fallen, and the moon, nearly round, shone magnificently in a cloudless sky.
On setting foot once more in the lower regions of the park, we observed, at some distance from a river bordered by rocks, an old beggar woman with a mop of gray hair working, seated at a cluttered table, between a slim Negress with bare arms and a twelve-year-old child dressed in rags. Canterel introduced these three characters to us from afar.
One Sunday evening in Marseilles, at the end of a recent sea voyage, the professor had noticed a certain renowned sibyl called Felicité engaged in practising the a
rt of divination in the open air, aided by her grandson Luc. While making allowance for an element of charlatanism, Canterel was often struck during the programme by some really curious practices which he longed to employ in various projects of his own. After the crowd had dispersed, he made a bargain with the fortune teller to secure for a time the wholehearted cooperation of herself and the child.
Brought to Locus Solus, Felicité and Luc fulfilled the professor’s hopes by their good offices and today, in our honor, he had instructed them to hold themselves in readiness for action.
The Negress was a young Sudanese named Sileis.
∗ ∗ ∗
Seeing us approach, Felicité put away a page that she had been covering mysteriously with diagrams and figures.
Next, she took from a basket four medium-sized eggs with very opaque shells that looked thick and hard; having set them in a line on the table, she opened the door of a big cage from which issued a bird with multicolored plumage.
This creature, having something of the majestic appearance of a miniature peacock, Canterel introduced to us as an iriselle — female of the iriseau, a gallinaceous bird from Borneo belonging to a little-studied species which takes its name from the thousand variegated hues of its tegument.
The prodigiously developed caudal apparatus, a kind of solid cartilaginous frame, rose vertically first of all, then spread out forward in its upper regions to create a veritable horizontal canopy over the bird. The inner part was bald, whereas from the outside grew long, tufted feathers, which pointed backward like some fabulous head of hair. The most anterior part of the frame was very sharp and formed a solid, slightly arched knife parallel to the table. Fixed horizontally to the back of the canopy by several screws piercing its edge, was a golden plate which, by some baffling magnetism, held a heavy mass of water dangling beneath it — perhaps half a liter — which, despite its volume, was behaving like a single drop on the tip of one’s finger when it is just about to fall.
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