by Guy Endore
“Wait a moment,” the priest said. He left and returned with a magazine. He found the advertisement he was looking for. “Pierre-Paul Sgambati, advocate, 165, rue Saint Honoré, au premier. Correspondence bureau for all the Dicastery offices at Rome.”*
“Go see this man,” he said. “Look, see this list of things he does. Procures authorization to bless rosaries, crosses, medals with the indulgences of St Bridget. Secures permission for a bald priest to wear a wig when saying mass, for a priest to invest his personal fortune for profit, etcetera, etcetera. And here: Dispensation for missing left eye for ordination. It will cost you heavy, business with Rome always does, but you may secure what you want.”
“Why, that’s ridiculous,” cried Aymar. “Shameful!”
“Well,” said the priest and shrugged his shoulders. “Some priests here have objected, too. But Rome is big and complicated. It costs you money here too, no matter what you may want in the courts of justice. Think of the lawyer who has studied to know all the numerous offices at Rome and the secretaries and the paper and ink and whatnot. I guess St Peter didn’t dream of this. But then life is ever becoming more complicated. The simple splits, doubles itself, quadruples itself, becomes a maze.”
Aymar could not take the news so matter-of-factly. He thought the question over for many days, but unable to face the humiliation of obtaining a dispensation for his crippled legs, he ceased to go to see his friend the priest, and at last determined to drop the matter, for the time being at least.
He had had many bitter pills to swallow in his life. And more than ever recently. What was this world, anyhow, that delighted in mocking man for his ignorance? Was there mystery to it or was it all plain? Why was he a cripple now, and so many of his comrades at the barricades still alive and healthy, untouched by a single bullet? Why did his aunt wish him to be a priest, while the Church rejected him? Why, if he despised the Church, was he shocked to discover a streak of business in it? And finally, there was something a little more than coincidental in this priest telling him how to get around the law of the Church, a few days after the notary had told him how to get around the law of the State. Living and dead, sacred and profane, all were amenable to money and guile.
Despite his increasing melancholia, he managed to dispose of his apartment lease to good advantage and packed off the furniture to the country. One day he stood in the empty apartment and said good-bye to all that he had experienced within these walls. He was annoyed to discover that he was not so deeply impressed as he expected or even as he would have liked to be. The walls meant nothing to him. The window where he used to sit, deprived of its curtains and of its window-cushions, and without the chair, which had been his by virtue of adoption, seemed like any other window. A silly comparison came to his mind and caused him disgust: the impersonality of a skeleton. His aunt, too, would lose the habiliments of her flesh and would be like that window, meaningless to him. What happened to bodies when they died? Doctors must know, he cogitated, with all those gruesome autopsies they have to perform. The afterlife? Was that the afterlife?
As he ruminated on in this dismal fashion, his eye caught with a start a brass object. Half hidden behind one wing of the door, it had apparently escaped the eyes of the packers only at the last moment, for the ticket on it showed that it had not been entirely overlooked. This brass object, Aymar recognized it with strange emotion, was the vessel in which his aunt had kept her holy water. It was a small brass bowl, hammered into the shape of a seashell and provided with a cover depicting some indefinable Biblical scene. Attached to a ring at the side was a short length of chain and suspended from the chain a so-called goupillon, a fox-tail made of brass and shaped like a small scepter. The head drilled with many holes was intended to gather water and release it in a spray when the instrument was flicked with the hand.
And all the things that had almost taken on the mistiness of unreality, of things remembered from a dream, came back with all their colors and outlines sharp and fresh. His aunt sending Josephine around the corner to fetch some holy water and the storm and—what was the name of that priest?—Pitamont, yes, and Mère Kardec’s and the woman coming out of that room with her pail full of bloodied water, and that terrible night when the baby had howled and his aunt had died.
The apartment that a moment ago had seemed to contain no meaning was now replete with memories. They seemed to peel off the silk-covered walls, they swirled around him. In the gathering twilight the shadows took on life, stepped out threateningly from their corners, reached at him from behind so that he turned around suddenly with a distinct feeling that someone was behind him. He grappled with a hostile atmosphere that surrounded him with menaces. There came the echo of distant baying, growing louder, reverberating through the empty halls, filling his ears.
Stricken with horror, he dashed out as fast as he could. Down two flights of stairs to the hall and out of the hall into the street where his fiacre was waiting for him with his bags packed for travel. His chest was filled with a wild cry for help which he did not dare utter. One more step and he would be in the safety of his cab. Instead, he found himself rolling over and over on the curb and grappling with an adversary.
It was Maître Le Pelletier, the stunted, sallow notary, who rose with his mouth full of dust and curses. Then he recognized his assailant: “You, Galliez?” and extended a brown, bony hand to help him up. “What the deuce has come over you? Are you gone quite mad?”
“I have only a few minutes to catch a train,” said Galliez breathless, brushing dust from his clothes. “Come with me?”
“No, thanks. Sorry but I’ve business elsewhere. You’d better hurry and not miss your train.”
“Well, then, a thousand pardons, friend,” and Aymar mounted into the fiacre. At the station he had a good hour to wait and wonder, before his train pulled out.
Truly he was going mad.
* Political clubs, severely suppressed at this point, nevertheless continued as casual café meetings.
* I must apologize to the reader for a possible anachronism. Who the advocate was to whom Aymar was referred, I cannot say. Pierre-Paul Sgambati did not open his office at the above mentioned address until some five years later. See l’Observateur Catholique, Paris, 1857. This is the nearest my research came to finding the advocate’s name.
Chapter Six
Says Galliez:
“There are mornings on which one wakes with the shreds of a dream cobwebbing the cogs of our daytime minds. One was asleep and in a different world. One was sunk in a different medium. Slowly one comes back to daylight and its world of daylight logic, but the taste of the dream lingers on, suddenly to make one conscious of a strangeness in our usual world, a strangeness that is so fleeting that no one has ever succeeded in analyzing it. But who is there who has not experienced it?
“In swamps one may sometimes witness a strange phenomenon: the dark, silent water, that seems too thick and oily to be disturbed by the breeze, appears in sudden agitation. The surface rises as if a body were in labor below, and out of the commotion comes an old waterlogged trunk that for years had lain at the bottom of the tarn, and now that it has risen to the surface, will slowly sink again to the bottom. On the ocean once a few sailors were privileged to witness a similar event.
“A spar was seen protruding from the water. Before the eyes of the astonished mariners on a passing bark, the spar rose higher, revealed itself to be the top of a mast. A cross-spar, hanging awry, now made its appearance with shreds of rigging clinging to it. Another followed with a bit of sail hanging in wet tatters. A lesser mast had risen and now the deck itself came up, first the high bow of an old-fashioned design ornamented with an angel, with the water cataracting from it as it cleft the surface of the sea. And the whole ship rose and floated for a while on the waves, water pouring from every crevice. The ship itself was readily identified as an old Spanish galleon, such as has not been seen on the seven seas for near a century. And slowly the ship that had risen, plunging and re
aring from the waters like the webfooted steeds of Old Neptune, settled into the waves again, and a moment later it was gone. And was as if it never had been.
“Many of the sailors on the bark doubted their very eyes, and one, stricken with a nameless fear, groveled on the teakwood deck. The wise ones debated the phenomenon with scientific plausibilities, while the more religious contented themselves with the sign of the cross and a prayer or two muttered under the breath along with a well-chosen oath. But the general verdict reached was that grain or other material, caught in a water-tight hold, had given rise to gas which had accumulated under great pressure and then breaking its confines with sudden force had propelled the ship to the surface, where it had floated until the gas had escaped and water had once more filled the hold of the ship and drawn it under.
“There are such ships, there are such logs in the swamps of our minds, and they rise to the surface of our thoughts for a moment, only to sink again. There are such ships sunk in the wastes of our lives. The years have washed over them. They are forgotten. And yet they rise, ghosts of a past that is ended. They float before us for a while to our own great astonishment, then they settle down again and are as if they never existed.”
Thus writes Aymar Galliez in his minority defense of Sergeant Bertrand. And he continues:
“In the realm of nature, too, there are phenomena that have long ceased to be, and of which, yet, one example may survive. In the interior of Africa, some great monster of the past may still roam the forests. A mammoth may be wandering now over the frozen wastes of our Arctic regions: last lonesome representative of his great race. A dinosaur in South America, a glyptodon in some unexplored area of the earth. That that enormous bowl of water that covers nearly all our globe may conceal animals undreamed of, who would have the temerity to deny at least the possibility?
“In this terrible age of disbelief and gullibility, people will swallow any tale of monsters of the past, but unless we find the bones of a centaur, no one will credit that myth. What have the scientists done but replace dragons, mermen and sphinxes with a new line of beasts? The people found the transposition easy. Where once they thought of dragons, they will have mammoths and other extinct beasts to occupy the same mental pews: these never change.”
What shall one say to such language? One may be as skeptic as Thomas who had to see the stigmata, but there is so much in the Galliez script that can be verified by consulting old newspapers, etc., that one is tempted to believe at least the outward facts, reserving decision on the actual existence of a supernatural creature. While the following chapter relies almost exclusively on Galliez’ affirmations, there are other episodes which can be reconstructed in entirety from documents and records.
If you go to the little village of Mont d’Arcy on the Yonne, you may perhaps still hear tales of great wolf hunts. The old inhabitants will outdo each other in the hair-raising details with which they decorate their reports. Some of these details will conflict. That is inevitable. And must not be taken to mean that the whole story is an invention of country gullibles who found the winters too long, and started the wolf-hunt merely to amuse their leisure hours and give their imaginations fall play. There is a good central core of the tale which must be accepted.
Bramond, the garde champêtre, was the first to come upon traces of the wolf. He had found two recently dropped lambs dead, lying by the side of the forest trail. The animals’ throats were severed and the blood had evidently been lapped up, for the ground showed few stains. Or else the killing had been done elsewhere and the bodies dragged to this remote and lonely spot overhung with bushes.
One of the bodies had been dismembered, the other was otherwise untouched. The dry ground around showed a few indistinguishable traces of having been trampled.
The last wolf sighted in this region had been slain over twenty years ago, so that the appearance of a wolf in this quarter of the département was considered unusual to say the least. Bramond, stuffing his pipe, frowning and grunting with the effort of ratiocination, came to the plausible conclusion that the perpetrator of these misdeeds was a shepherd dog who had taken a taste for mutton. And at once he concluded that the felon was none other than César, the big shepherd dog owned by Vaubois, for Vaubois not only underfed his help, he actually starved himself.
Serves him right, he thought. But a slight grain of sand remained in that ointment: it might be a wolf, after all. Now if only he were as clever as those Indian trackers of whom his son read to him every night, then he would not be in doubt for a moment. He would pick up a hair and identify it at once. He would find a trace of claws and say that this or that animal was responsible. He would, in fact, reconstruct the whole scene. He would know from the state of the dead animals how long they had been thus, at what precise hour they had met their death and whether here or elsewhere. And he would conclude: “Now, friends, I invite you to a proof of the correctness of my observations and deductions. If I am right, the animal will appear on the third night from today, two hours after moonrise, at this very spot.”
Old Bramond enjoyed his triumph the while he could, and then prepared to enjoy the distribution of a real piece of news, in a land always hungry for a good story. And the first person he came across was Vaubois’ shepherd, Crotez.
They exchanged greetings and sat down on a rock to smoke together for a while. Then Bramond said: “Missing any lambs?”
“No,” said Crotez, “why do you ask?”
“Just wondered. Where’s your dog?”
“Must be around somewhere.” He whistled. “Here, César!” César came trotting out of a dip in the meadow and raced gleefully up to the shepherd. César was an ill-kempt specimen of that rather mongrel breed known as the chien de berger. They stand fairly high, have ears pointed forward, a bushy tail and a good coat of curly brown hair.
César’s red tongue lolled out of his jaws and gathered coolness. He nuzzled his head under his master’s arm, for that was his favorite position, with his human friend’s arm slung over his neck.
Bramond scratched his head.
“What’s this you said about lost lambs?” the shepherd inquired.
“There are two dead lambs up on the hill there. I was wondering whose they were.” Even as he said it, Bramond realized that he should have kept quiet. Events were to prove that he had indeed made an error.
“Two dead lambs?”
“Half eaten.”
“Half eaten?”
“Wolf.”
“Wolf?”
“Fact.”
“Jésus!” exclaimed Vaubois’ shepherd, at last finding a word of his own.
From Vaubois’ shepherd, Bramond proceeded down the gentle slope until he came to the Didier-Galliez place.
M Galliez, himself, was at the end of the alley of locust trees which concealed his house from the road, and was busied with his rose bushes.
After a few comments on the weather, Bramond shook his head: “Bad news, monsieur.”
“What’s the trouble, Bramond?” Aymar asked, scarcely looking up from his work.
“Wolves in this section. Found two dead lambs up there, half eaten. Couldn’t be anything but wolves, though there hasn’t been a wolf around here for years.”
“You must be mistaken,” said Aymar. “Wolves are extinct in this portion of the country. They say foxes will take new-born lambs.”
“Have you missed any lambs?”
“You’ll have to ask young Guillemin,” said Aymar, “he takes care of the sheep. Go right in,” he invited Bramond.
Bramond walked down the alley and went around to the back of the house. Josephine and Françoise were spreading linen out to bleach on the grass. Young Bertrand, now about nine years old, was wrestling with his big St Bernard dog. None of the Guillemins were around.
Bramond made his inquiries but could secure no information. Neither of the women had heard of any lost lambs.
“M Galliez thinks it might be a fox. He says they sometimes will steal newly dropp
ed lambs.”
“A fox it might very well be,” said Françoise. “We’ve missed a lot of chickens and ducks this last month. Young Guillemin has set traps but can’t get the thief.”
“I must get my boy to fix you up a trap. He makes good ones—” Bramond turned to Bertrand: “And you. How about some hunting again?” He chuckled. “Did he tell you how our last hunting trip turned out? He shot a squirrel and nearly fainted. You’ve got to learn to shoulder a gun if you want to be a man.”
Françoise laughed. But Josephine said: “He’s too delicate. And he won’t eat.”
“He looks robust enough to me. What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s always been in good health,” said Josephine, “and I never had any trouble with him until this summer. I don’t know what to make of it.”
“A touch of the heat,” suggested Bramond. “He’s a bit upset. But they grow out of it.”
Bertrand, meanwhile, the object of this conversation, appeared oblivious to everything but the dog whom he was teasing. Bramond excused himself and hastened on with his news. So far he had not met with the appreciation he had expected.
The next person whom he met was the mayor of the village, an important wine grower and dealer of the section.
“Monsieur le maire, I have a piece of bad news. I think that…”
“Yes,” said the mayor, “you’re precisely the man I’m looking for. Vaubois’ shepherd just reported to me that he had found two lambs half eaten and to judge by the remains, evidently attacked by a large pack of wolves. Monsieur Bramond, you don’t seem to be on the job.”
“Wolves…” Bramond stuttered.
“Yes, wolves. Where are you loafing these days that a pack of wolves can come into our village and steal lambs right from under our noses?”
“Why—”
“And when our citizens cry for help, no one can find Bramond.”
“But—”
“Vaubois has been looking for you everywhere!”
