Monsieur Jonquelle

by Melville Davisson Post

  “She asked to see a manufactured ruby of about two karats. The clerk was not impressed to consider her as a possible purchaser. He thought she was one of the class of poor shop girls in Paris who endeavor by this means to satisfy their curiosity about jewels. The women of Paris who buy manufactured jewels do not have the appearance of this girl.”

  Here the prince paused and touched the cigarette to his lips.

  “But there was something about this woman,” he said, “that profoundly disturbed me. I did not know what it was. I do not now know. But it was something independent of her appearance, although her appearance was remarkable enough. Her hair was the exquisite mahogany of a horse-chestnut, with that incomparable gloss which the shell of the nut bears when it first escapes from the hull. Her complexion was pale, almost as pale as plaster, and her eyes were blue—the blue of a Delft plate.

  “I found myself wondering what race the girl was of. She seemed a sort of blend. I thought it was French or Italian and some other blood—some blood not of a tame, conventional race.

  “The clerk laid a piece of black velvet on the table, brought some manufactured rubies and placed them before her. The girl sat down at the table and I went over and stood beside her. She selected one of the stones and asked the price, which was more than five hundred francs. She seemed very much disturbed at this. She inquired if the stone could not be purchased for five hundred francs. She put her hand into the bosom of her blouse, took out a little purse and emptied it on the table. It contained five hundred francs in gold pieces.

  “For reply the clerk said that the stone could not be purchased for a less sum. But I interrupted him. I said she might have it at the price. It was then, it seemed, that she became aware of my presence for the first time. She got up and began to express her appreciation of my kindness. She seemed embarrassed, like a child who does not know precisely how to go about such a convention; and now that she spoke directly to me the charm of her personality was even more inconceivably impressive.

  “Then she made what we considered an extraordinary request. She wished to know if we could identify this stone. It was not clear why she wished to identify it. We got the impression that she intended to bring it in again later and she would like us to be certain to identify it. The clerk would have got rid of the matter in the easiest way he could, but I compelled him to consider it. It was a good deal of trouble to undertake to establish sufficient data for the identification of this manufactured stone. We had to make a very careful record of its exact measurements, the dimensions of its facets and so forth.

  “I explained this to the girl; she listened attentively. She then asked for a duplicate of our record of identification, and I had this given to her. She went out of the shop with the manufactured ruby wrapped up in the duplicate of the record which we had made out for its identification.”

  Again the prince stopped, and flicked the ash from his cigarette. He remained for a moment looking out over Nice, at the vast sweep of the Mediterranean wrinkled by the touches of the mistral.

  “I should have followed her,” he said; “it was stupid to permit her to escape out of my knowledge, but under the charm of the girl I seemed incapable of any practical measure. I think at the moment she did not seem precisely real. She was like a fairy woman—something one had longed for—appearing unexpectedly by virtue of an incantation.

  “A moment later, when I went to the door of the shop to look, she was nowhere to be seen. She had vanished, but the spell with which I was enveloped did not vanish. It remained. And I came every day to the shop in the Rue de Rivoli under the hope that she would return.

  “I had a strong basis for the hope, and I clung to it as a drowning man would cling to a life line. The stone would come back for identification some time, and by that clew I would find her again. I ought to have gone to Amsterdam on the affairs of the house, and I ought to have returned to my estates in Russia, but I would not have missed a day from the shop in the Rue de Rivoli for the redemption of the world.”

  He paused. The sun going down behind the black ridge of the mountains gilded the fairy city of Châteauneuf as though it were powdered over with gold dust. The wrinkles on the Mediterranean were breaking into little ridges whitened on their summits. The vague touches of the mistral seemed to approach.

  “It is of no use to undertake to explain the thing,” he said. “There is no explanation of it. Something like the odor of a blossom had reached deliciously to every fiber in my body. I was under the dominance of a sorcery that no sort of common sense could exorcise. I was written to in vain from Amsterdam and from Russia. I remained in the shop in the Rue de Rivoli.

  “And I was rewarded for that vigilance.

  “One evening, perhaps a month later, as we were closing the shop the girl suddenly entered. She welcomed me with a smile. And it seemed that all at once, by virtue of that smile, the blackness of the pit in which I had miserably dwelt was flooded with sunlight. She put on the table the ruby and the crumpled paper which bore our duplicate of identification. And she asked us to look again at the stone.

  “I did not look at the ruby.

  “The girl alone occupied my attention exclusively. I wished to impress forever on my memory every detail of her. The sheen of her hair, the deep vivid blue of her eyes, and her incomparable mouth, innocent like a flower.

  “It was some time then before I realized that the clerk was calling my attention to the jewel. He seemed to be very much astonished. What he was saying was:

  “‘But this is not a manufactured ruby; it is a real ruby.’

  “The girl sprang up at the word.

  “‘Oh,’ she said, ‘is it true? Is it real?’

  “The clerk asked me to examine the stone, and I did examine it. Every expert in the shop examined it. It corresponded precisely to every item of our data for the identification of the manufactured ruby. We compared the measurements with the most delicate instruments in our possession. They were all precisely correct. It was in every detail the manufactured stone which we had sold to her for five hundred francs. But the amazing, astonishing, inexplicable thing was that the stone was no longer a manufactured ruby, it was a genuine ruby. We applied every test of which dealers in jewels have any knowledge. There was no doubt about it. The stone was real. By some means a manufactured ruby worth five hundred francs had changed into a genuine ruby worth twenty thousand francs.

  “The girl seemed transported with delight when we told her the result of the test. But she made no explanation. She went at once out of the shop.”

  The cigarette had burned to his finger tips and the prince tossed it over the edge of the terrace into the vines.

  “But this time,” he said, “I did not propose that the girl should escape me; I followed her. She hurried down the Rue de Rivoli and turned into the Place de la Concorde. I continued to follow her. I don’t think I was very discreet about it. I was too anxious to be careful. Presently she seemed to be disturbed. She had seen me crossing the street and knew that I followed her. She hesitated, uncertain what to do, then she went on swiftly for perhaps a dozen paces. She stopped, and I thought she intended to turn and come back, but she went across the Rue de Rivoli through the gate into the garden of the Tuileries.

  “I followed through the gate.

  “She walked rapidly under the horse-chestnuts. I had lost all discretion about the matter now, and I went on hurriedly, fearful that I should lose sight of her for an instant. There is a bench, behind some shrubs, looking out toward the Seine. She went around the shrubs and sat down on the bench. I came up, parted the branches and looked through to see what had become of her. She was sitting huddled on the bench, her head on her arm, crying. I went around and sat down beside her. I did not say anything—I did not know what to say; there seemed nothing to say.

  “She continued to cry softly for a good while, her face on her arm. And the undulation of her shoulders, and the tremor of her hand that lost itself under the wealth of hair, affected me beyond
any possibility of speech. I suppose I should have sat there until morning—until the world wore out turning on its axis—without a word, without a motion, enveloped with the sorcery of something in this woman.

  “I don’t know how to describe it; there doesn’t seem to be any word in any language to describe it. It was as though every cell, every living, organic cell that made up the unit of my body, starved; had a desperate, primeval, animal sensation of hunger. And it was the hunger of panic; it was the hunger of long deprivation; a hunger unfed from the beginning of the world.”

  The man stopped and got another cigarette.

  “You will say that I was mad, of course. I was not mad. I was as sane and intelligent as I am now, as I shall be when I marry this Norwegian woman. The thing had nothing to do with any sort of madness. It was simply something that had awakened; something that by the gracious beneficence of God is usually kept sleeping in us. I don’t see how it could be explained to anybody. If a man were born blind, how could one explain color to him? If he were deaf from his mother, how could one explain music to him? It may be fortunate; it may be out of an inscrutable wisdom that the thing is dormant in most of us. I don’t know what would happen to the world if that thing awoke in everybody as it awoke in me on that afternoon in the garden of the Tuileries.

  “Of course, it did not awake there; it awoke the first time the girl came into the shop, and it was waiting when she returned. But it clamored now; it clamored like hungry cheetahs before the grating of a pit. And yet with all that hell going on inside I did not move and I did not say anything. Presently the girl sat up. She wiped the tears out of her eyes. I remember it perfectly. She had a little handkerchief wadded up in her fingers and she dabbed her eyes with it.

  “‘Oh, Monsieur,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to do. You will follow me—you will find out everything—and you will take it for the use of your big shop.’

  “She repeated it and the tears began again. I don’t know what I said; I must have said a good deal, and I suppose that it must have seemed impressive. I think it would have seemed convincing, for I was desperately in earnest. No one could have been in more deadly earnest about anything. It seemed to me that the most important thing in the world, the most important thing that would ever be in the world, was to convince this girl that she could trust me.

  “I did not know what it was she would need to trust me about—I had no idea what thing she feared would be taken away or what use the house, to which my name was attached, would make of anything she knew or had control of. But I labored to convince her that anything in which she was in any way interested was safe; would be made safe.

  “We must have appeared very curious to any one walking through the garden of the Tuileries—a girl crying on a bench and a man in this earnest appeal.”

  Here the prince paused and got another match for his cigarette.

  “And yet,” he said, “when one stops to think about it, that would be the one sort of scene in Paris having no element of strangeness. It would be simply a scene out of the oldest tragedy of the world, to be met with anywhere. There is no bench in the whole garden of the Tuileries upon which it has not been enacted.”

  He paused.

  “I don’t remember precisely how the thing ended, but it was all somehow concerned with what seemed to be a surrender to me—a capitulation. Women do things like that. We shall never understand the mental process by which they arrive at a conclusion to do them. Perhaps there is no mental process. I suppose the thing is a sort of feeling, or it is a sort of relaxation, or it is a sort of abandonment. I don’t know what to call it. She would come to-morrow afternoon to the shop and she would put everything into my hands; she would trust me—that is what it all summed up to.”

  Night was beginning to arrive—a sort of blue deepening, as though the Italian sky descended over the Riviera and hardened into sapphire. I got the picture and began to look at it again. I had not been mistaken. Something of the extraordinary charm which the man before me felt himself unable to describe was unquestionably present even in this strained photograph.

  The prince went on. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the Mediterranean rising to meet the descending Italian sky:

  “I was in the manager’s office of the jeweler’s shop, on the Rue de Rivoli, the following afternoon. I was there from midday until the moment she came in. It was very late when she arrived. The afternoon was nearly gone. The clerks were putting up the iron shutters, but they were not permitted to close the door. I would have kept the door open all the night and all of every other night; it should have stood open forever, like the doors to the churches of God, until she came in.”

  For a few moments he was silent. Then he continued, as though he had omitted a great chapter of description—of the physical description of a woman and the analysis of a consuming passion—a chapter that I would not understand, a chapter that perhaps nobody would understand:

  “She had a package under her arm wrapped up in an old newspaper. It was heavy and she carried it very gently. She put it down on the manager’s table and then she removed the newspaper and disclosed a copper box. When the lid was lifted the box was seen to have two compartments; one of these was of a whitish metal and the other some sort of composition. There was a glass plate between the two compartments and above it what seemed to be a reflector. She moved something in the box and a ray, ruby colored, descended on the plate.

  “She explained that her father was an Italian chemist. All his life he had been engaged in the study of the synthetic chemistry of jewels. He held that the manufactured ruby of commerce differed from the true ruby only in its atomic structure. And he believed that this atomic structure could be made to rearrange itself under the influence of the true ruby and a kinetic agent.

  “The device in the copper box was the result of this theory. If true rubies were heaped around a manufactured stone and subjected to the ray, the influence of the atoms in the true stones, under the light energy, would cause the atoms in the manufactured stone to arrange themselves in a similar order.

  “This was the explanation of the change that had taken place in the manufactured ruby. Her father was dead. He had left her this invention. She had wished to test it and she had taken the five hundred francs which she had received from the sale of his books and purchased the ruby. She had placed it on the glass plate under this device, surrounded it with the little fragments of genuine rubies which her father had been able to gather up, and the change which we had observed had taken place.

  “There had been a rearrangement of the molecular structure of the stone. She explained that her father had said that the change in the manufactured stone would be quicker if the true rubies around it were larger, but that he had had no money with which to buy large stones and she could only work slowly with the fragments which he had got. She now put the invention into my hands. It was a part of this surrender—this abandonment.

  “I called in the manager and the clerks. It seemed incredible to us. But all sorts of incredible inventions had come out of Italy. The discoveries of Marconi had put every man where he could no longer say that anything was impossible; and, besides, we had the concrete evidence in the manufactured ruby which had been transformed. We put the device into the safe with a manufactured ruby on the glass plate, surrounded with a heap of the best oriental stones in our possession.”

  He paused. In the thick light his body had a distorted outline. For a long time there was no sound. Then he went on:

  “I think, Monsieur Jonquelle,” he said, “that we are never quite prepared for the utter unreserved surrender of a woman to us, even at the end of our most elaborate arguments. The girl’s abandonment to my honor had not ended.

  “‘And now, Monsieur’, she said, ‘what are you going to do with me?’”

  He paused again.

  “I took her to the house of my aunt, the Countess Casseni, on the Bois de Boulogne.”

  He hesitated and his voice thickened.
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  “The third patriarch said that the days of his life had been few and evil; many and evil mine seem! But two moments of them outbalance the weight of the years: The moment in the carriage when she said ‘I love you!’ and the moment when my aunt, the Countess Casseni, took me, softly, into the bedchamber, with the balcony opening on to the Bois de Boulogne, and showed me the girl asleep in the great canopied bed—asleep like a worn-out child, her pale face gleaming like a flower.”

  Night had descended. It was suddenly dark. The man beyond me was only a voice speaking in the darkness:

  “I never saw her again!”

  “Never saw her again!” I cried. “Then where did you get this picture?”

  “I got it from the rogues’ gallery, of the Service de la Sûreté,” he said. “She belonged to the White Wolves, the most desperate association of criminals in Europe.”

  “But the invention?” I cried. “Was it a hoax?”

  He answered slowly in the darkness:

  “It was by no means a hoax, Monsieur Jonquelle. It would not change a manufactured stone into a ruby—the genuine stone the girl brought in had been cut in Amsterdam to match the manufactured ruby which she had purchased. But the invention was effective for its purpose, all the same. At three o’clock on that night it blew open the vault of our shop in the Rue de Rivoli; we lost five hundred thousand francs in jewels.”

  Then suddenly his voice strengthened:

  “But all this would not matter. Nothing would matter. If I should ever find her, and I were free, I would follow her through the slime of the world!”

  “And so,” I said, “you are arranging this marriage as protection against the girl.”

  His voice came softly, like a whisper. “Yes,” he said; “that is it—to bolt the door!”

  THE END