Georges

by Alexandre Dumas

  Despite its perils, he decided upon the latter course. Even carrying Georges, Laïza was able to move fast enough to be almost out of range of the English guns; if the soldiers had been on their own in this unknown territory, he could have escaped them easily. But the Negro slaves were there, too; however regretfully, however propelled forward by the points of bayonets, they chased their human prey out of not zeal but fear.

  The hunters fired a few shots whenever they caught a glimpse of Laïza among the trees; the bullets sliced through the leaves around his head or tore up the earth at his feet but, as if by magic, none of them penetrated his body. Indeed, his speed seemed to increase along with the danger he faced.

  Finally they reached the edge of a clearing that was steep and almost bare of foliage, crowned with trees only at its summit. If Laïza could reach the top of the hill, he might hide behind some boulder or drop down into the shelter of a ravine, thus concealing him from his pursuers; but the fact remained that he would be an easy target during the climb. There was no time to decide; he thought fast. If he went to the right or the left he would lose precious ground.

  Fortune had been kind to the fugitives thus far; perhaps their luck would hold. Laïza darted forward into the open glade. His pursuers, seeing that they had a good chance of bringing him down, redoubled their fire. They came to the edge of the clearing when Laïza was about 150 feet up the slope. Halting and raising their rifles, they fired. Their quarry did not fall, but continued his desperate race to the summit.

  Hurriedly, before they lost sight of him, the soldiers reloaded. Laïza took advantage of the momentary pause to gain as much ground as he could. He was barely 25 feet away from the edge of the thicket now; his pursuers were fully 150 feet behind him. If he could manage to evade the second round of English fire as successfully as he had the first, he would reach the woods safe and sound. Everything seemed in his favor. Suddenly he disappeared into a small crevasse—but unfortunately he did not slide immediately to the right or the left. He followed its curves as best he could, trying to lose the enemy, but when he reached the end of the ravine he had no choice but to scramble up the bank that had momentarily protected him and reappear in view of the English soldiers.

  A dozen shots rang out at once.

  It seemed to the man hunters that they had won. Laïza staggered a few more steps, and fell to first one, then both knees. Gently, carefully, he placed the still-unconscious Georges on the ground. Then he rose to his feet and, drawing himself to his full height, turned toward the English soldiers. He threw out his hands to them in a final gesture of pride and supreme malediction—then, drawing a knife from his belt, he buried it up to the hilt in his breast.

  The soldiers rushed forward, whooping as joyfully as if they had brought down a prize stag, as hunters do when they celebrate a kill.

  For a few seconds more, Laïza stood erect. Then all at once he fell like an uprooted tree.

  When the English soldiers reached the prone forms of the two fugitives, they found Laïza dead and Georges nearly so. The mulatto, determined not to fall into enemy hands alive, had used the last of his strength to rip the bandage off his wound. Blood flowed from it in thick streams and soaked the dark earth.

  The knife had pierced Laïza’s heart. One bullet had struck him in the thigh. Another, passing through his back, had gone cleanly through his chest.

  XXVII

  THE REHEARSAL

  Georges barely remembered the two or three days following the catastrophe I have just related. In his delirium he remembered only vague, disjointed images, and was unaware of time or space. Suddenly, finally, he awoke as if from a nightmare-filled sleep to the bright light of morning—and found himself in prison. The surgeon of the Port Louis military garrison was at his bedside.

  Georges struggled to collect his thoughts. Memories came to him like lakes, mountains, and forests seen through thick fog. He could remember everything up to the moment when he had been shot, but his return to Moka and the departure with his father were a complete blank. His recollections of the time after his arrival in the Great Woods were vague and indistinct, like a dream.

  The only clear, incontrovertible fact was that he had, somehow, fallen into his enemies’ hands.

  Georges’s pride would not allow him to ask any questions or request any favor of his captors, so he would be obliged to remain ignorant—but deep in his soul, two questions raged. Was his father safe? Did Sara still love him? These thoughts consumed him, filled his whole being to overflowing. When one of them left his mind, the other took its place. They were like two tides, incessantly beating upon his heart. But as always, his pale face was as cool and inscrutable as a marble statue’s whether he was in view of visitors to the prison or alone.

  Once the surgeon had determined that his patient was well enough to be questioned, he lost no time in informing the authorities. The next day an examining magistrate and a clerk came into Georges’s room. The young man was not yet able to leave his bed but, greeting the men with dignified patience, he raised himself on one elbow and declared that he would reply to any questions the magistrate wished to ask.

  By now my readers are too well acquainted with Georges’s character to imagine that he would, for an instant, consider denying any of the charges brought against him. He replied to every one of the magistrate’s questions with complete truthfulness, and even offered to dictate a detailed account of the entire conspiracy the next day, when a little more of his strength had returned—an offer much too handsome to be refused.

  Of course, the motives behind Georges’s willingness to cooperate were twofold. First, he wished to hasten the process of his trial. Second, he was determined to take sole responsibility for the entire revolt.

  The two officials returned to his sickroom the next morning, and Georges gave them the narrative he had promised. It was indeed complete, except for one thing—he did not mention the proposals Laïza had made to him. The omission did not go unnoticed by the magistrate, who informed Georges that it was not necessary to leave out anything in order to protect Laïza; since the Negro had been killed by British soldiers, his crimes were no longer imputable to anyone.

  This was how Georges found out that his friend was dead, and learned the circumstances of his demise for, as I have said, his memory of that time was cloaked in darkness.

  He was careful not to utter the name of Pierre Munier, and the officials did not bring it up; neither, for even more profound reasons, did he mention Sara. When he had finished relating the details of the conspiracy, there was no point in questioning him further. Except for the doctor, no one disturbed his solitude again.

  One morning, when the physician came in to check on his patient, he found Georges out of bed. “Monsieur!” he exclaimed. “You must not stand for a few days yet—you are still much too weak!”

  “Sir,” Georges said, “you do me a dishonor if you imagine that I am like an ordinary criminal, desperate to defer the day of my trial as long as I can. On the contrary, I am quite eager for this entire matter to be over. Besides, if we are being frank, what is the purpose in making sure that I am healthy enough to die? It seems to me that as long as I have enough strength to mount the scaffold, no man can demand more of me—nor I of God.”

  “But who told you that you will be condemned to death?” asked the doctor.

  “My conscience has told me,” Georges replied. “I played a game in which my very life was at stake, and I lost. I am ready to pay the price. That is all.”

  “Whatever the case,” said the doctor, “I believe you still need a few days more of rest and care before facing the difficulties of a trial—and the anxieties of a verdict.”

  But Georges wrote that very day to the examining magistrate to inform him that he was entirely recovered and at the disposal of the law. The trial began the next morning.

  When he entered the courtroom, Georges’s first act was to look around anxiously—and he saw, with relief, that he was the sole defendant. He gazed,
confidently now, around the chamber. It seemed that the whole population of île de France had turned out for his trial—with the notable exceptions of M. de Malmédie and Sara. A few of the spectators’ faces displayed pity for the accused, but most of them bore only hatred and satisfaction.

  Georges, as ever, was calm; even haughty. He wore his usual attire of a beautifully cut black frock coat and cravat, with white waistcoat and trousers. The double ribbon of honor given to him by the king of France was knotted in his buttonhole.

  The court had appointed an attorney to defend him, for he had refused to choose one of his own. He firmly believed that none should even attempt to plead his cause.

  When the time came for Georges to testify on his own behalf, what he said could not be considered an attempt to defend himself. Rather, it was the story of his life. He did not try to hide the fact that he had returned to île de France with the sole purpose of fighting, by whatever means necessary, the prejudice against men of color that had existed there for so long. On the subject of the specific events that had precipitated the revolt, he said nothing at all. When the judge put questions to him regarding M. de Malmédie, Georges asked permission to remain silent.

  Despite the defendant’s cooperativeness, the attorneys’ fondness for their own voices, a trait common to lawyers everywhere, stretched the trial for three full days. The leading prosecutor spoke for no less than four hours, haranguing Georges endlessly. The young man listened coolly, attentively, nodding from time to time in confession to charges that were leveled at him. When the barrage of words had finally ended, the presiding judge asked Georges if he had anything to say.

  “No,” Georges said. “The prosecutor has spoken very eloquently.”

  The prosecutor sketched a bow.

  The magistrate now announced that the trial was over, and Georges was taken back to his prison cell. The verdict would be determined privately, and the accused notified later.

  Upon his return to the prison cell Georges asked for paper and ink, to write his will. English verdicts did not extend to confiscation of property, so he could dispose of his fortune as he pleased.

  He left the surgeon who had attended him one thousand pounds sterling, and five hundred pounds to the warden. The prison guards received one thousand piastres each. For all of them, it was a fortune.

  To Sara, he bequeathed a gold ring that had belonged to his mother.

  Just as he was about to sign his name at the bottom of the document, a court clerk entered the room. Georges stood, still holding the pen, as the verdict was read.

  As he had predicted, he was condemned to death.

  Bowing to the clerk, he sat down again and signed his name to the will. His handwriting remained as smooth and steady as it had been before he heard the death sentence. Then, rising again, Georges went to the mirror and looked at his face—it was as pale, calm, and inscrutable as ever. Satisfied, he smiled to himself, murmuring: “I did think that hearing oneself condemned to death would be more emotional than this.”

  At length the doctor returned to check on his patient, routinely asking him how he felt. “Very well,” Georges replied. “You have treated me remarkably well. How frustrating it must be that you will not have time to complete the cure. Tell me, monsieur: Is the British method of execution here the same that was used by the French?”

  It was. Georges was pleased; he would suffer neither the indignity of the London gallows nor the horror of the Parisian guillotine. In Port Louis executions were conducted so as to be almost poetic, even picturesque—a fact that soothed Georges’s pride. A black man—a slave-executioner—would strike off his head with an ax. Thus had Charles I, Mary Stuart, the marquis de Cinq-Mars, and François-Auguste de Thou met their deaths. It would be a fitting end for Georges Munier.

  Calmly, almost indifferently, he engaged the surgeon in a discussion about whether one might continue to feel physical pain after decapitation. While the doctor insisted that death would be instantaneous, Georges was not so sure. Once, in Egypt, he had witnessed the execution of a slave. The victim had knelt down, and the swordsman had taken off his head in a single blow. The head had rolled several feet away, but the body had climbed to its feet and taken two or three clumsy steps, beating the air with its fists, before falling again—still in apparent agony; not absolutely dead. On another occasion in the same country, curiosity had led him to pick up the head of that day’s victim immediately after it had been severed from the body. Holding by the hair, close to his face, he had asked it in Arabic: “Are you suffering?” At the question, the eyes had opened and the lips moved, seemingly attempting to voice a reply. For Georges, this was certain proof that life did continue for some moments after decapitation—and the doctor ended by agreeing with him, for he had in truth believed the same thing all along, and had only wished to console the young man with the promise of an easy and painless death.

  The rest of the day passed for Georges just as the previous ones. He wrote to his father and his brother; once he picked up the pen to write to Sara, but before committing a single word to paper he let the pen drop and buried his head in his hands. He remained that way for a considerable time, and if anyone had been there to watch him raise his head, which he did with the haughty movement so habitual for him, they would have seen that his eyes were reddened, and that a single tear still trembled at the ends of his long black lashes. Since the day he had refused Sara’s hand in Lord Murray’s elegant parlor he had not seen her, or even heard her name mentioned—yet he would not, could not, believe that she had forgotten him so easily.

  Night fell, and Georges went to bed at his usual hour. He slept as soundly as he always had, and the next morning he asked to see the warden. “Monsieur,” he said when the man had arrived, “I have something to ask of you.”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “I should like to have a word with the executioner.”

  The warden frowned. “That will require the permission of His Excellency, the governor.”

  “Oh,” said Georges, smiling, “then please do ask it of him. Lord Murray is a true gentleman, and I am sure he will not refuse to grant this favor to an old friend.”

  The warden withdrew, promising to do as Georges asked, and as he left a priest entered the cell.

  Georges harbored the sort of religious ideas that many men have these days: They neglect the outer trappings of faith but remain at the bottom of their hearts profoundly affected by sacred objects. Thus it is that a somber church, a lonely cemetery, a passing casket make a far deeper impression on their souls than any of the coarser aspects of life to which they are so often exposed.

  The priest was a venerable old man, the sort who does not waste time trying to convert others but speaks with all the authority and force of true conviction. He had been brought up amid the majesty of nature, and believed that the Lord could be found in every aspect of its glorious scenery. His serene and godly nature attracted those who were suffering or downtrodden, consoling them and holding them up by selflessly sharing their burdens. Georges had an immediate rapport with the old man, and they impulsively clasped hands.

  The conversation that followed was intimate and friendly, with nothing in it of a confession. Georges was humbled by the priest’s gentleness. The young man reproached himself for his pride, feeling that—like Satan—it was the only sin he was guilty of, and that it alone had caused his downfall. Yet it was pride that, even now, sustained him, gave him strength, and made him great in the eyes of all who saw him—though grandeur is not the same thing to men as it is to God.

  He was tempted again and again to speak of Sara, but he stopped himself. His heart was a dark pit of emotion and his face, like a sheet of ice, concealed the depths of his soul.

  As the priest and the condemned man talked, the door opened and the warden appeared. “The man you asked for is outside,” he said. “He will wait until you are ready to see him.”

  Georges paled. A nearly imperceptible shudder ran through him. “Let hi
m come in.” The priest made to leave the room, but Georges stopped him. “Please, stay,” he said. “What I have to say to this man is nothing you may not also hear.” Perhaps, in his pride, he needed a witness to help him keep his strength.

  A tall Negro of Herculean proportions entered the room. He was nude except for his red loincloth, and his large, expressionless eyes were devoid of intelligence. He turned to the warden, who had escorted him to the cell, and jerked his head at Georges and the priest. “Which one?” he asked.

  “The young man,” the warden replied and withdrew from the room.

  “You are the executioner,” stated Georges, impassively.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Come, my friend, and answer a few questions.” The big Negro moved a few steps closer to Georges. “You are aware that you are to execute me tomorrow morning?”

  “Yes,” responded the black, “at seven o’clock.”

  “Seven o’clock, eh? Thank you for telling me; the warden would not when I asked him. That, however, was not my main question.”

  The priest’s heart sank.

  “I have never witnessed an execution here in Port Louis,” Georges continued. “I am anxious that everything should be conducted with decorum. That is why I wanted to see you—so that we could rehearse, as they say in the theater.”

  The executioner looked confused. Georges repeated what he wanted, slowly and clearly. The Negro, when he finally understood, fetched a stool from the corner of the room; it would serve as the “block.” He led Georges to it and had him kneel down, positioning him so that, he promised, the ax would strike off his head in one blow.

  The priest, distressed, rose to leave the room. He could not endure this macabre rehearsal in which the two actors remained so emotionless—the one thanks to his primitive spirit, the other to his strength of character. But the old man’s knees trembled as he stood, and he sank back into his chair.