Monsieur Jonquelle

by Melville Davisson Post

  Monsieur Jonquelle put on his goggles and gloves; then he went round the car to make sure that the petrol tank had been filled. To see clearly into the opening of the tank he removed the goggles and held them in his hand. He was impatient and in no gentle temper, and there was presently a tinkle of broken glass. He looked down with an exclamation of annoyance. One of the eyepieces of the goggles had been shattered against the fender of the car.

  “Diable!” he said. “It is the only pair I have!” And he began to break the cracked glass out of the rim with his thumb.

  The Viscount came forward with expressions of regret. Now that he was using Monsieur Jonquelle for his own ends, he could afford to be good-humored. One would have said that the temperaments of the two men had changed about. The Prefect was now irascible and the Viscount suave.

  “Too bad!” the latter continued to say. “Perhaps you can get a pair from the innkeeper.”

  “No such luck,” replied the Prefect; “but if by chance there is a horloger in this village I might get a lens put in without delay.”

  “There is one at the end of the street,” said the Viscount. “I will show you.” And he began to walk toward the sign of the gilded watch that the Prefect had marked from the terrace of the château.

  The Prefect followed. He walked rapidly, like one dominated by ill temper.

  “Monsieur,” said the little workman when the two men were come into the shop, “a lens like this is not to be had outside of Paris.” And he turned the goggles about, shaking his head.

  “Well,” snapped the Prefect, “you can put in a piece of window glass then—it will keep the dust out of my eye.”

  “Oui, Monsieur,” replied the workman; “I can do that.”

  He measured the eyepiece, cut out a disk of glass and fitted it quickly into the rim. He worked swiftly and with little nervous glances at the Prefect. When he had finished Monsieur Jonquelle threw a five-franc piece on the watch case and the two men returned to the inn.

  The engine spun under the touch of the electric button and the great gray car glided out of the village, Monsieur Jonquelle driving and the Viscount in the seat beside him. They had taken the second crossing into the Rouen Road when Monsieur Jonquelle turned to his companion like one sharply seized with an important memory.

  “Diable!” he said. “I think only of myself!” And putting up his free hand he unhooked his goggles and handed them to the Viscount. “Pardon, Monsieur,” he said, “I had forgotten your injured eye. These will at least keep out the dust.” The Viscount began to refuse, saying there was little dust and that he was in no discomfort; but the Prefect would not hear him.

  “I have always heard that when one eye is lost the other is more susceptible to strain,” he continued as he helped the Viscount to adjust the goggles; “and it is this brilliant sun on the white road that plays the devil with one’s sight.… Voilà! We have the green lens over monsieur’s sound eye! That was a lucky accident to break the left glass. Monsieur le Vicomte will be protected in both eyes from the dust and in his good eye from the glare of the road.… And now, ma beauté!” And he pressed his foot on the throttle. The car shot out like a racer under a lash and the hedges along the roadside leaped backward.

  The car traveled without any sound except a low hum as of a distant beehive. It gained speed like an arrow and the dust trailed behind in a long rolling cloud. They traveled swiftly on the white road in the brilliant sun.

  It was at the beginning of a long descent toward Paris that Monsieur Jonquelle began to have trouble with his brakes, and he ducked down among his levers to see what the trouble was. As he took a turning on the steep hill, with his head a moment among his nest of levers, he called suddenly to his companion: “Is there a signal before us?”

  “Yes,” replied the Viscount.

  The Prefect sat up, with a volley of Parisian oaths, turned the car into the hill and, braking with a twist of the front wheel, stopped against a signpost by the road a hundred meters from the curve.

  “Nom d’un chien!” he cried. “Does the Department of Highways believe itself to conduct a tram that it puts up a signal like that!”

  “What’s the matter with it?” said the Viscount. “The letter A stands for the word to stop in your language and red is a danger warning.”

  “Precisely,” cried the Prefect; “but what danger is there if one knows of the curve? And why stop when the road is open? Does one take on and discharge passengers at this point as he travels into Paris, like a bus to the Gare du Nord? There should be here the usual signal indicating a sharp descent on a curve—and they put up a thing like that! … Well, they shall hear from me—and soon!”

  He got out and tightened the brake band of his car with a heavy wrench, and the two men continued their journey. The brakes held now and the car swept down the long descent, sped away on the great road and presently entered Paris. On his way to the Place de l’Opéra the Prefect stopped before the Department of Highways.

  It was strange how completely the trivial incident of a roadmark had dispossessed the great matter upon which the Prefect had set out. His mind seemed emptied of it. Placarded on the walls of Paris were the beautiful lithographs of Mademoiselle Valzomova, this idol of the opera, whose conspicuous generosity had so tremendously impressed him, and he passed them with no sign.

  Moreover, by a curious ironical chance he carried into Paris this mean old man, in his dirty coat, that he might prey upon her. And yet this bitter ending to his pretentious endeavor was hidden from before his eyes—screened off by the petty error of an official of highways. By such inconsequential incidents are the minds of mortals dominated!

  “A moment, Monsieur,” he said to the Viscount, bringing his car to the curb. “I wish to lay a complaint before the Department of Highways. Will you verify my statement?”

  “With pleasure,” replied the old man, glad to be a gadfly on any withers; and the two entered the building.

  A grave man with a long lean face sat at a desk in the private office of the Department of Highways; and behind him, nosing in a ledger, stood a big Italian, with bristling, close-cropped hair. The Prefect began at once with his complaint. He had hardly got it explained when the man at the desk stopped him.

  “Monsieur,” he said, “do you make this charge from your own knowledge or at the information of another?”

  “I saw it myself,” replied the Prefect.

  “And I saw it too,” said the Viscount, stepping up before the desk.

  The official looked up.

  “And who are you?” he asked.

  “The Viscount Macdougal, my fine sir,” snapped the old man.

  “Ah!” said the official, taking up his pen. He turned abruptly from the Prefect as though he were a person of no concern and addressed himself to the Englishman with grave courtesy.

  “Monsieur,” he said, “I shall be pleased to hear you.”

  He listened with the closest attention, as to a distinguished person whose every word was to be marked; and on a pad before him on the desk he wrote down precisely and with care the exact statement of the Viscount Macdougal.

  The big Italian, who had been deep in his ledger, now rose and came round the official’s desk. He stopped directly in front of the Viscount and slowly wagged his head.

  “So,” he said, “you saw all this through your goggles!”

  “I did!” snapped the Viscount. “What of it?”

  The Italian did not reply; but abruptly in the quiet and gravity of the room he laughed. The Viscount turned on him in a fury.

  “Why do you laugh, my fine fellow?” he snarled, his face turning livid.

  “I laugh,” replied the Italian, “because if the Viscount Macdougal saw a red letter on a black background through the goggles he now wears he saw it with his blind eye!”

  “My blind eye!” cried the Viscount.

  “Exactly,” replied the Italian—“your blind eye! You have a green lens over your good eye and it is a principle of optics t
hat red on a black field seen through a green lens is invisible!”

  The Viscount opened his mouth as though he would utter some awful invective, but for a moment he did not speak; then he said strangely, as though he addressed an invisible person:

  “Will you tell me who these people are?”

  And the Prefect, Jonquelle, replied to him:

  “With pleasure, Monsieur le Vicomte—the one who writes is the Magistrate Lavelle, and the one who laughs is the oculist Bianchi.”

  V.—The Haunted Door

  Early in April the Marquis Banutelli closed his villa at Bordighera, on the Mediterranean, and traveled to Geneva. He was in frail health, enervated by the sun of the Riviera and displeased with life.

  He had intended to write a great opera at Bordighera, but he could not get the thing to go upon its legs. The Marquis blamed the commonplace times for this plague upon his opera. There was no longer anything mysterious or unknown in the world. A tram carried tourists to the Sphinx; the Americans had penetrated to the Pole—or pretended to have done so—and the English had entered Tibet.

  Moreover the whole race of men was tamed; the big, wild, barbaric passions that used to rend the world were now harnessed to the plow. Men no longer climbed to the stars for a woman or carried a knife a lifetime for an enemy. The tragedies of love and vengeance were settled by the notary and the law court. Romance and adventure had been ejected out of life.

  The Marquis was by no means certain he would find in Geneva what he had failed to find in Bordighera—that is to say, inspiration for his opera—though this city was the very realm of romance. It lay across the bluest lake in the world, beneath the sinister ridge of Salève; behind it was the range of the Jura; and beyond it Mont Blanc emerged on clear mornings from the sky. But he was sure to find there a bracing climate when the wind, like a curse of God, did not blow from the north.

  The Marquis went to the very best hostelry and sat down in a sunny room where he could see that sight of the faërie—the great two-pointed, rose-colored sails of the stone boats descending Lake Leman.

  It was early and there were but few guests—a Japanese, with a French wife; two or three English families, and a distinguished German. The German, alone, interested the Marquis Banutelli.

  He was perhaps sixty-five—a commanding military figure. It was clear from every aspect that the man was a person of importance. Italy and the German Empire were now in very close relations. The Kaiser was thought to be mobilizing his armies. England and France seemed about to be forced into the field. War was in the air; one saw soldiers on every hand, and all the fierce old hatreds had risen from the fields of Jena and Auerstädt, Metz and Sedan, as on the daybreak of a resurrection.

  The Marquis inquired at the bureau, learned that the German was the Prince Ulrich Von Gratz, and presented himself. The two sat over their coffee a long time that evening in the foyer of the hotel. The talk ran upon the necessities and barbarities of war. Von Gratz was a soldier; he had gone through the Franco-German War: and his vivid and realistic experiences, the experiences of a man of action in the deadly struggle of two infuriated peoples, fascinated the Italian, who was essentially a dreamer.

  The interest and appreciation of the Marquis seemed to inspire Von Gratz, and he entered into the details of that hideous barbarity by which the German armies crushed the provinces of France. The Marquis had read the La Débâcle of Zola and the tales of Maupassant, but he never until this day realized the stern implacable savagery with which the uhlan had forced the French peasant to remain a noncombatant while the German armies marched over his fields to Paris.

  The acquaintance ripened into a fine intimacy.

  During the day Von Gratz was not usually to be seen, and was understood to be concerned with one of those ponderous works on the science of war that engages the excess energy of the military German as a system of philosophy engages that of the scholastic. In the evening he smoked very black cigars from Homburg and talked with the Marquis.

  The conversation was in French—a language the Italian invariably used in every country but his own. The German also spoke it with fluency and something approaching a proper accent. The Marquis Banutelli remarked upon this accomplishment, and Von Gratz replied that it had served him when he had occupied the Valley of the Jura during the Franco-German War. He added that his headquarters had been at Ferney, but a few miles from Geneva; and he mentioned the further confidence that one of his objects in coming to Geneva was to go over again the scenes of his military occupancy there. But this thing he had hesitated to do. The war spirit in France had vitalized old memories. He had held the province with an iron hand. He would be remembered and not welcome.

  The incidents of this district, lying so close to Geneva, interested the Italian; and, as he was accustomed to walk in the afternoon, he determined to walk there. Von Gratz envied him this privilege, and deplored the fact that the present temper of France prevented him from accompanying the Marquis; but he got maps from the concierge and marked a route which he particularly wished the Marquis to go over.

  The following afternoon the Marquis took the tram out of Geneva, got down when he had crossed the hill toward Ferney, and, according to his map, set out on a little road into the country. This road, bordered part of the way by great trees, within half a mile entered France. The Marquis knew the border by the square stone, carved on the French side with a fleur-de-lis. He also knew it by the little hut of plaited twigs in which the gendarme who guards the roads out of France protects himself from the rain and the winds.

  This was an unkempt country road, and such are not usually under a sharp surveillance, but to-day it was sentineled like the main road into Geneva.

  The Marquis was not molested and continued on his way; but he felt that the military instincts of France were at this time particularly alert. The road continued westward toward the Jura, but the Italian turned into the long wood that lies in the low valley between Geneva and Ferney. On all sides the flowers were beginning to come out. The path the Marquis followed had once been an ancient road, but it was now overgrown and, in fact, no longer even a path. One had continually to clamber over logs and to put aside the branches of trees.

  Banutelli reflected that this had doubtless been a military road through the forest in the time of the Von Gratz occupation, and he determined to follow it. Presently it came out into a little meadow entirely inclosed by the wall of the forest.

  An abandoned farmhouse stood here where the road emerged. It was a big, old house with timbered gables and a farmyard inclosed by a stone wall. The house and premises, though heavy and of sound material, were ragged with age. And this deserted house, hidden in the wood and to be reached only by an abandoned road, inspired the Italian with a sense of remote and sinister loneliness. Thus in old tales were haunted houses environed or the venue of revolting crimes.

  He continued across the bit of meadow and through the fringe of forest, and found himself come almost immediately upon the main road from Ferney to Geneva. The Marquis crossed the border toward the environs of Geneva, where several gendarmes lounged on a bench in the sun before the bureau of police. And again he felt that all France was under a searching military surveillance.

  That night he described the ancient road and the abandoned house to Von Gratz. He had been quite right in his conjecture. The Prince had occupied this very house when he held the province, and he had cut this road through the wood. He listened with interest to every detail. And when the Marquis, having concluded his description, added the sinister impression he had received, Von Gratz very gravely shook his head.

  Some things had happened there.… It was no gentle work to hold a hostile district. He sat for some time silent, his face stern with the memory, but he did not disclose the reminiscence. Again he expressed the desire to revisit this district, and again he regretted that the hostile attitude of France made it unsafe to do so.

  He showed so keen an interest in all that the Marquis had observed that the It
alian continued to take his walks in that direction. And thus, through the medium of another, Von Gratz was, in a manner, able to revisit the province which he had held under his heel.

  He was interested in everything, but especially in the old road and the abandoned farmhouse, as—the Marquis sometimes thought—the criminal agent is interested in the place where he has accomplished a secret crime and would know how it has changed. It happened, for this reason, that Banutelli frequently chose this route; he remarked the trees that had failed across the ancient road, and the height and thickness of the bushes that had grown up in it.

  Von Gratz was especially interested in every change that had taken place in the abandoned farmhouse. Did the great nail-studded door still hang upon its hinges, and the like? He seemed to learn with relief that this door was closed; and one night, when the Marquis reported that it was open, he exhibited a marked concern, as though every ravage of time upon this deserted house was in some sinister manner correlated to his own destiny.

  The desire now to see this place for himself became a sort of obsession. He inquired precisely at what points on the route one was likely to meet the peasants. The Marquis replied that he would meet no one in the wood, and that the only peasants he was likely to pass were two big old men, who had recently come to spade up a potato field in the corner of the meadow beyond the farmhouse toward Ferney.

  The Marquis thought that Von Gratz was unduly concerned about entering this bit of French territory. He had only to go in civilian dress, follow the old road, and turn back before the farmhouse to avoid the peasants entirely. And when he went up to his rooms that night it was with a suspicion that there was something appalling and sinister lying back of the German’s anxieties. This impression was strengthened on the following day when he received a note from Von Gratz, saying that he had determined to visit the scene of his former headquarters, and closing with the strange request that if he did not return to luncheon the Marquis himself should come to search for him. The note prayed Banutelli, under no circumstances, to speak of the matter, and to come alone.