He paused, seeming to forget her presence. He looked thoughtfully at the little silver box.
"But it can be made only in trivial quantities, at enormous expense and with exceeding labour; it is so volatile that you cannot keep it for three days. I have sometimes thought that with a little ingenuity I might make it more stable, I might so modify it that, like radium, it lost no strength as it burned; and then I should possess the greatest secret that has ever been in the mind of man. For there would be no end of it. It would continue to burn while there was a drop of water on the earth and the whole world would be consumed. But it would be a frightful thing to have in one's hands; for once it were cast upon the waters, the doom of all that existed would be sealed beyond repeal."
He took a long breath and his eyes glittered with a devilish ardour. His voice was hoarse with overwhelming emotion.
"Sometimes I am haunted by the wild desire to have seen that great and final scene when the irrevocable flames poured down the river, hurrying along the streams of the earth, searching out the moisture in all growing things, tearing it even from the eternal rocks; when the flames poured down like the rushing of the wind and all that lived fled from before them till they came to the sea, and the sea itself was consumed in vehement fire."
Margaret shuddered, but she did not think the man was mad. She
had ceased to judge him. He took one more particle of that atrocious powder and put it in the bowl. Again he thrust his hand in his pocket and brought out a handful of some crumbling substance that might have been dried leaves, leaves of different sorts, broken and powdery. There was a trace of moisture in them still, for a low flame sprang up immediately at the bottom of the dish and a thick vapour filled the room. It had a singular and pungent odour that Margaret did not know. It was difficult to breathe and she coughed. She wanted to beg Oliver to stop but could not. He took the bowl in his hands and brought it to her.
"Look," he commanded.
She bent forward and at the bottom saw a blue fire, of a peculiar solidity, as though it consisted of molten metal. It was not still, but writhed strangely, like serpents of fire tortured by their own unearthly ardour.
"Breathe very deeply/'
She did as he told her. A sudden trembling came over her and darkness fell across her eyes. She tried to cry out but could utter no sound. Her brain reeled. It seemed to her that Haddo bade her cover her face. She gasped for breath and it was as if the earth spun under her feet. She appeared to travel at an immeasurable speed. She made a slight movement and Haddo told her not to look round. An immense terror seized her. She did not know whither she was borne and still they went quickly, quickly; and the hurricane itself would have lagged behind them. At last their motion ceased and Oliver was holding her arm.
"Don't be afraid," he said. "Open your eyes and stand up."
The night had fallen, but it was not the comfortable night that soothes the troubled minds of mortal men; it was a night that agitated the soul mysteriously so that each nerve in the body tingled. There was a lurid darkness which displayed them and yet distorted the objects that surrounded them. No moon shone in the sky but small stars appeared to dance on the heather, vague night-fires like spirits of the damned. They stood in a vast and troubled waste, with huge stony boulders and leafless trees, rugged and gnarled like tortured souls in pain. It was as if there had been a devastating storm and the country reposed after the flood of rain and the tempestuous wind and the lightning. All things about them appeared dumbly to suffer, like a man racked by torments who has not the strength even to realize that his agony has ceased. Margaret heard the flight of monstrous birds and they seemed to whisper strange things on their passage. Oliver took her hand. He led her stead-
ily to a crossroad, and she did not know if they walked amid rocks or tombs.
She heard the sound of a trumpet and from all parts, strangely appearing where before was nothing, a turbulent assembly surged about her. That vast empty space was suddenly filled by shadowy forms, and they swept along like the waves of the sea, crowding upon one another's heels. And it seemed that all the mighty dead appeared before her; and she saw grim tyrants, and painted courtesans, and Roman emperors in their purple, and sultans of the East. All those fierce evil women of olden time passed by her side, and now it was Mona Lisa and now the subtle daughter of Herodias. And Jezebel looked out upon her from beneath her painted brows, and Cleopatra turned away a wan, lewd face; and she saw the insatiable mouth and the wanton eyes of Messalina, and Faustine was haggard with the eternal fires of lust. She saw cardinals in their scarlet and warriors in their steel, gay gentlemen in periwigs and ladies in powder and patch. And on a sudden, like leaves by the wind, all these were driven before the silent throngs of the oppressed; and they were innumerable as the sands of the sea. Their thin faces were earthy with want and cavernous from disease, and their eyes were dull with despair. They passed in their tattered motley, some in the fantastic rags of the beggars of Albrecht Diirer and some in the grey cerecloths of Le Nain; many wore the blouses and the caps of the rabble in France, and many the dingy, smoke-grimed weeds of English poor. And they surged onward like a riotous crowd in narrow streets flying in terror before the mounted troops. It seemed as though all the world were gathered there in strange confusion.
Then all again was void and Margaret's gaze was riveted upon a great, ruined tree that stood in that waste place, alone, in ghastly desolation; and though a dead thing it seemed to suffer a more than human pain. The lightning had torn it asunder but the wind of centuries had sought in vain to drag up its roots. The tortured branches, bare of any twig, were like a Titan's arms, convulsed with intolerable anguish. And in a moment she grew sick with fear, for a change came into the tree and the tremulousness of life was in it; the rough bark was changed into brutish flesh and the twisted branches into human arms. It became a monstrous, goat-legged thing, more vast than the creatures of nightmare. She saw the horns and the long beard, the great hairy legs with their hoofs, and the man's rapacious hands. The face was horrible with lust and cruelty, and yet it was divine. It was Pan, playing on his pipes, and the lecherous eyes caressed her with a hideous tenderness. But even
while she looked, as the mist of early day, rising, discloses a fair country, the animal part of that ghoulish creature seemed to fall away and she saw a lovely youth, titanic but sublime, leaning against a massive rock. He was more beautiful than the Adam of Michelangelo who wakes into life at the call of the Almighty; and, like him freshly created, he had the adorable languor of one who feels still in his limbs the soft rain on the loose brown earth. Naked and full of majesty he lay, the outcast son of the morning; and she dared not look upon his face, for she knew it was impossible to bear the undying pain that darkened it with ruthless shadows. Impelled by a great curiosity, she sought to come nearer, but the vast figure seemed strangely to dissolve into a cloud; and immediately she felt herself again surrounded by a hurrying throng. Then came all the legendary monsters and foul beasts of a madman's fancy; in the darkness she saw enormous toads, with paws pressed to their flanks, and huge limping scarabs, shelled creatures the like of which she had never seen, and noisome brutes with horny scales and round crabs' eyes, uncouth primeval things, and winged serpents, and creeping animals begotten of the slime. She heard shrill cries and peals of laughter and the terrifying rattle of men at the point of death. Haggard women, dishevelled and lewd, carried wine; and when they spilt it there were stains like the stains of blood. And it seemed to Margaret that a fire burned in her veins and her soul fled from her body; but a new soul came in its place and suddenly she knew all that was obscene. She took part in some festival of hideous lust and the wickedness of the world was patent to her eyes. She saw things so vile that she screamed in terror, and she heard Oliver laugh in derision by her side. It was a scene of indescribable horror and she put her hands to her eyes so that she might not see.
She felt Oliver Haddo take her hands. She would not let him drag them away. Then she h
eard him speak.
"You need not be afraid."
His voice was quite natural once more and she realized with a start that she was sitting quietly in the studio. She looked around her with frightened eyes. Everything was exactly as it had been. The early night of autumn was fallen and the only light in the room came from the fire. There was still that vague, acrid scent of the substance which Haddo had burned.
"Shall I light the candles?" he said.
He struck a match and lit those which were on the piano. They threw
a singular light. Then Margaret suddenly remembered all that she had seen and she remembered that Haddo had stood by her side. Shame seized her, intolerable shame so that the colour, rising to her cheeks, seemed actually to burn them. She hid her face in her hands and burst into tears.
"Go away," she said. "For God's sake, go."
He looked at her for a moment and a smile came to his lips. He knew another victim was in his power.
FREAKS
TOD ROBBINS
(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: 1932)
The director who probably played the most important role in the early days of horror-film making in Hollywood was Tod Browning, a former circus man who was almost morbidly obsessed with the macabre, the unusual and the off-beat. In his pictures he demanded the most incredible and painful disguises for his monsters and quite possibly introduced more genuine stomach-turning horror per yard of film than any other director before or since. Browning was responsible for directing Lon Chaney in some of his most tortuous and brilliant sequences and also created the first really outstanding version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi in 1931.
But all his achievements pale in comparison with Freaks, which so stunned some of the preview audience that several women ran screaming from the cinema, and the major distributors refused to handle it. The film was based on a story called Spurs by a moderately successful English fantasy writer, Tod Bobbins, and dealt grue-somely with the revenge of a circus midget and his friends on his normal size wife and her acrobat lover. The tale had been mentioned to Browning by a midget he had used in a previous horror film, and he determined to bring it to the screen—with real freaks.
Despite strong opposition to the project at M.G.M., Browning went ahead, employing his camera with incredible dexterity to make the abnormal seem normal and the ugly beautiful. The outcome was probably predictable: rejected as too gruesome, the picture initiated the decline in Brownings career as a film maker and was not shown in many countries for a great many years (in Britain it was on the banned list until 1963 and is even now only shown with caution). It may well be true to say that Freaks is the most horrific film ever made.
JACQUES COURBE was a romanticist. He measured only twenty-eight inches from the soles of his diminutive feet to the crown of his head; but there were times, as he rode into the arena on his gallant charger, St. Eustache, when he felt himself a doughty knight of old about to do battle for his lady.
What matter that St. Eustache was not a gallant charger except in his master's imagination—not even a pony, indeed, but a large dog of a nondescript breed, with the long snout and upstanding ears of a wolf? What matter that Monsieur Courbe's entrance was invariably greeted with shouts of derisive laughter and bombardments of banana skins and orange peel? What matter that he had no lady and that his daring deeds were severely curtailed to a mimicry of the bareback riders who preceded him? What mattered all these things to the tiny man who lived in dreams and who resolutely closed his shoe-button eyes to the drab realities of life?
The dwarf had no friends among the other freaks in Copo's Circus. They considered him ill-tempered and egotistical, and he loathed them for their acceptance of things as they were. Imagination was the armour that protected him from the curious glances of a cruel, gaping world, from the stinging lash of ridicule, from the bombardments of banana skins and orange peel. Without it, he must have shrivelled up and died. But these others? Ah, they had no armour except their own thick hides! The door that opened on the kingdom of imagination was closed and locked to them; and although they did not wish to open this door, although they did not miss what lay beyond it, they resented and mistrusted anyone who possessed the key.
Now it came about, after many humiliating performances in the arena, made palatable only by dreams, that love entered the circus tent and beckoned commandingly to Monsieur Jacques Courbe In an instant the dwarf was engulfed in a sea of wild, tumultuous passion.
Mademoiselle Jeanne Marie was a daring bareback rider. It made Monsieur Jacques Courbe's tiny heart stand still to see her that first night of her appearance in the arena, performing brilliantly on the broad back of her aged mare, Sappho. A tall, blonde woman of the amazon type, she had round eyes of baby blue which held no spark of
her avaricious peasant's soul, carmine lips and cheeks, large white teeth which flashed continually in a smile, and hands which, when doubled up, were nearly the size of the dwarf's head.
Her partner in the act was Simon Lafleur, the Romeo of the circus tent—a swarthy, Herculean young man with bold black eyes and hair that glistened with grease like the back of Solon, the trained seal.
From the first performance Monsieur Jacques Courbe loved Mademoiselle Jeanne Marie. All his tiny body was shaken with longing for her. Her buxom charms, so generously revealed in tights and spangles, made him flush and cast down his eyes. The familiarities allowed to Simon Lafleur, the bodily acrobatic contacts of the two performers, made the dwarf's blood boil. Mounted on St. Eustache, awaiting his turn at the entrance, he would grind his teeth in impotent rage to see Simon circling round and round the ring, standing proudly on the back of Sappho and holding Mademoiselle Jeanne Marie in an ecstatic embrace, while she kicked one shapely bespangled leg skyward.
"Ah, the dog!" Monsieur Jacques Courbe would mutter. "Some day I shall teach this hulking stable-boy his place! Ma foi, I will clip his ears for him!"
St. Eustache did not share his master's admiration for Mademoiselle Jeanne Marie. From the first he evinced his hearty detestation for her by low growls and a ferocious display of long, sharp fangs. It was little consolation for the dwarf to know that St. Eustache showed still more marked signs of rage when Simon Lafleur approached him. It pained Monsieur Jacques Courbe to think that his gallant charger, his sole companion, his bedfellow, should not also love and admire the splendid giantess who each night risked life and limb before the awed populace. Often, when they were alone together, he would chide St. Eustache on his churlishness.
"Ah, you devil of a dog!" the dwarf would cry. "Why must you always growl and show your ugly teeth when the lovely Jeanne Marie condescends to notice you? Have you no feelings under your tough hide? Cur, she is an angel and you snarl at her! Do you not remember how I found you, a starving puppy in a Paris gutter? And now you must threaten the hand of my princess! So this is your gratitude, great hairy
Pig!"
Monsieur Jacques Courbe had one living relative—not a dwarf, like himself, but a fine figure of a man, a prosperous farmer living just outside the town of Roubaix. The elder Courbe had never married and so one day, when he was found dead from heart failure, his tiny
nephew—for whom, it must be confessed, the farmer had always felt an instinctive aversion—fell heir to a comfortable property. When the tidings were brought to him, the dwarf threw both arms about the shaggy neck of St. Eustache and cried out:
"Ah, now we can retire, marry and settle down, old friend! I am worth many times my weight in gold!"
That evening, as Mademoiselle Jeanne Marie was changing her gaudy costume after the performance, a light tap sounded on the door.
"Enter!" she called, believing it to be Simon Lafleur, who had promised to take her that evening to the Sign of the Wild Boar for a glass of wine to wash the sawdust out of her throat. "Enter, mon cheril"
The door swung slowly open and in stepped Monsieur Jacques Courbe, very proud and upright, in the silks and laces of a courtier, with a tiny gold-hilted sword swinging at his hip.
Up he came, his shoe-button eyes all a-glitter to see the more than partially revealed charms of his robust lady. Up he came to within a yard of where she sat, and down on one knee he went and pressed his lips to her red-slippered foot.
"Oh, most beautiful and daring lady," he cried, in a voice as shrill as a pin scratching on a window-pane, "will you not take mercy on the unfortunate Jacques Courbe? He is hungry for your smiles, he is starving for your lips! All night long he tosses on his couch and dreams of Jeanne Marie!"
"What play-acting is this, my brave little fellow?" she asked, bending down with the smile of an ogress. "Has Simon Lafleur sent you to tease me?"
"May the black plague have Simon!" the dwarf cried, his eyes seeming to flash blue sparks. "I am not play-acting. It is only too true that I love you, mademoiselle, that I wish to make you my lady. And now that I have a fortune, now that—" He broke off suddenly and his face resembled a withered apple. "What is this, mademoiselle?" he said, in the low, droning tone of a hornet about to sting. "Do you laugh at my love? I warn you, mademoiselle—do not laugh at Jacques CourbeT
Mademoiselle Jeanne Marie's large, florid face had turned purple from suppressed merriment. Her lips twitched at the corners. It was all she could do not to burst out into a roar of laughter.
Why, the ridiculous little manikin was serious in his love-making! This pocket-sized edition of a courtier was proposing marriage to her! He, this splinter of a fellow, wished to make her his wife! Why, she could carry him about on her shoulder like a trained marmoset!
What a joke this was—what a colossal, corset-creaking joke! Wait till she told Simon Lafleur! She could fairly see him throw back his sleek head, open his mouth to its widest dimensions and shake with silent laughter. But she must not laugh—not now. First she must listen to everything the dwarf had to say, draw all the sweetness out of this bonbon of humour before she crushed it under the heel of ridicule.
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