Dajan-Phinn raised his arm to interrupt the doctor. After a brief hesitation, he said: “I alone committed an indiscretion. No one said anything to me. I overheard…oh, my master! However it was done, I am what you have made of me. I owe you everything. But you have always been good to me. Don’t leave me in ignorance…”
“It’s precisely out of goodness that I left you there,” Bro replied, rudely. “I wanted you to avoid the embarrassment, the shame, of feeling that you were on the margins of society, an exceptional being…”
Ruchard, who had been sitting in the drawing-room, had risen to his feet. The carpet muffled his footsteps. Bro did not hear them. The professor placed a hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t have the right to torture a poor human creature to this extent, for the sole satisfaction of your insane pride!”
Beneath the sudden weight and the rude interjection, Bro started and turned round. He directed the disquieting fire of his of his yellow pupils at the professor. At the same timed, his features expressed absolute amazement. Had he, until the very last moment, nurtured the certainty of bring his adversary round?
Ruchard continued: “Bro, in the name of our old friendship, in the name of all that is sacred to you, in the name of our children, I beg you to admit the truth.”
Bro straightened, rising up, so to speak, against his old companion. “What are you saying?”
Everyone—the two fiancés, César Bro and his wife—surrounded the two men. Dajan-Phinn had remained at the bottom of the steps, his face bright against the dark background of the garden.
“I’m saying,” Ruchard went on, forcefully, “and I’m affirming, that Dajan-Phinn is a human being like all of us here: that your entire story is nothing but an elaborate hoax.”
Bro folded his arms. The corners of his mouth were quivering. “Nothing can convince you, then—not the documents I have shown you, nor the proofs that I have put within your reach, nor the oath that I am ready to renew?”
Ruchard made a chopping gesture with his extended hand. “Nothing. And if you’re acting in good faith, it’s because you’re the dupe of your own imagination.”
“Not one word more!” howled Dr. Bro.
He was so terribly excited that Henri Ruchard drew nearer to his father. “Don’t insist, I beg you.”
“Come on, then!” Ruchard shouted. “It’s necessary to be done with this once and for all, to nip this legendary impiety in the bud, to annihilate this execrable lie.”
“Don’t challenge me, Ruchard—don’t push me too far!” Bro brandished his fist. He seemed to be suffering a paroxysm of exasperation. Saliva was running from his lips. His inflamed eyes were bulging from their orbits. Vainly, his daughter exhorted him to be calm, her gestures imploring.
The professor shrugged his shoulders. “Play-acting,” he murmured.
Bro took a step back. He gathered himself together. He put his hands in the pocket of his capacious jacket. “That’s it,” he hissed. “You won’t believe me?”
“No.”
In a firmer voice, all the more frightening in consequence, Bro went on: “You believe me capable of a deception?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t believe me capable of a crime?”
Ruchard did not hesitate. “No.”
“But you admit,” Bro continued, “that a sculptor has the right to smash his statue, that an inventor has the right to break up his machine?”
Ruchard made no reply, fearful of comprehension. There was, for all those watching, an interminable moment of absolute anguish.
Then, speaking and acting at the same time, Bro said: “Well, the proof that Dajan-Phinn is my work is that I am destroying him!”
Three gunshots punctuated this sentence. With a revolver withdrawn from his pocket, he had fired at Dajan-Phinn, standing at the bottom of the steps.
Amid the cries of horror and panic, Ruchard hurled himself upon his puny adversary, seized his wrist and disarmed him. Bro shouted full in his face: “Well, that’s what you wanted! That’s where it has led me, orthodox science! To destroy my masterpiece! Ha ha! Orthodox science!”
Dajan-Phinn suddenly collapsed, turning as he did so to fall face down. Aided by the servants brought running by the noise, Henri Ruchard and César Bro carried him to a settee in the drawing-room. Lamps were brought.
While the two women went up to calm the children woken up by the detonations, who were uttering screams of fright, the professor examined the wounded man. He shook his head. Dahjan-Phinn had received two bullets full in the chest. His condition seemed hopeless.
Indifferent to his victim, Dr. Bro strode back and forth in the drawing-room, filling it with his gestures and vocal outbursts. He declared that he was going to surrender to the law, that the instruction of his trial and the sensation at the assizes would compel the entire world to recognize the truth of his affirmations, the excellence of his doctrines and finally render him justice.
The professor, who was listening, left Dajan-Phinn momentarily. He drew his son and the painter into a corner of the room. It was, on the contrary, necessary to avoid the scandal of such a trial. Bro had evidently acted in a fit of madness. He, Ruchard, would do his utmost to prove it—and he would use his influence to cut short any pursuit. He begged the two men to aid him in this plan. They would pretend to acceded to the murderer’s desire, but instead of accompanying him to the commissariat, they would take him to a nearby lunatic asylum kept by one of their mutual friends, where he would receive all the necessary case, and where the court would be able, the following day, to proceed with the customary inquiries.
A quarter of an hour later, Dr. Bro left the house with his two bodyguards, convinced that he would be turned over to the law and launching one final sarcasm and one final challenge at his adversary…
The hours went by, slowly, at Dajan-Phinn’s bedside, in the drawing-room from which they had not dared to remove him. Madame Bro kept watch, while Professor Ruchard took a little rest in a neighboring room. The celebrated physician still offered no hope. The unfortunate victim would doubtless soon take the secret of his origin away with him forever.
Meanwhile, he had recovered consciousness—and as the good Madame Bro, wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with a fingertip, Dajan-Phinn murmured: “Don’t cry. I don’t regret disappearing. Yesterday, in this room, I heard your fiancés. I became conscious of my real misfortune, my true destiny. Whether or not I was born like other men, I would always have lacked the only faculty that makes life worth living, that reveals its charm and attraction…”
“And that is?”
“Love.”
Jules Perrin & H. Lanos: The World Above the World
(1911)
I. In which we make the acquaintance of M. Goldfeller,
the Gem King
We had embarked on the special train at the station of Sommesous, and for 20 minutes we had been rolling along the line constructed with a view to linking the works to the Châlons-Troyes line.
It was a flat country, marshy and bare, the most wretched corner of Champagne. We were chatting without paying any attention to the landscape, whose sadness seemed infinite beneath a cloudy sky with rare clear patches; intermittent squalls twisted the already-leafless trees and spring, at its debut, was more sullen here than anywhere else.
“What’s that?” exclaimed little Luneau of the Informateur, all of a sudden.
“That,” said stout Blum of the Young Herald, with a clownish gravity, “is a reservoir.”
Stupidly, simply for the pleasure of tooting my horn in the concert of surprise and buffoonery that united us all—my colleagues and I—I said: “It’s the Tower of Babel.”
I represented the news syndicate of the viticultural press. I was young—scarcely 25—not an idiot, but still irreflective, and I let myself get carried away by the need for irony and denigration that superiority maintains over ignorance. We jostled for position at the windows of the carriage to in order to contemplate th
e prodigious construction whose mass extended out of sight beyond the grey horizon.
Its immediate appearance was that of a cylinder several kilometers in diameter, with a height that I heard estimated at 1800 meters by Baroux, the engineer-director of the steelworks at Saint-Dié. On a masonry foundation about ten meters high stood a mountain of steel, assembled, in a crazy multiplication of arches, cross-pieces, beams and metal joints, the succession of which, regularly-repeated, discouraged the eye. A large fortified ditch isolated the base of the tower, whose massive shadow darkened the countryside. In that endless plain, the spectacle was so colossal that we stopped joking in order to look at one another in amazement.
“It’s as big as Paris.”
“And it’s higher.”
The train increased its speed, which gradually became vertiginous, and the reason for that velocity became clear to us at the same time as the immense network of rails on which it was evident that we were in the process of making a tour of the base of the entire edifice.
“This,” said Scordel, the Undersecretary of State for Finance, who was a former journalist and had been gallant enough to make the journey with us, “is one of Goldfeller’s ideas; he’s giving us the honor of a tour, externally.”
Turning toward him, I said: “As you’re in the government, can you tell us why Monsieur Goldfeller has been authorized to construct this reservoir, as Luneau calls it. Is the intention to build a new Eiffel Tower on a larger scale? What’s the purpose of this…machine?”
Scordel adopted a prudent attitude, which contrasted with the good fellowship he usually professed in conveying official information to us. “But it’s interesting as a project,” he replied. “Nothing similar has yet been built as a metallic construction. Goldfeller is eccentric. Do you know him?”
He began to talk to his neighbors, thus avoiding any clearer response.
The explanations that Scordel did not want to give, Luneau—always well-informed—claimed to know. “Goldfeller is the savior of the Minister, Piérard. For several years work on the tower has taken up considerable manpower…no more unemployment…no one gives any more thought to the social question. Piérard governs as he wishes.” He lowered his voiced. “It’s said…it’s said that Piérard himself received a huge bribe before granting authorization for the commencement of the works. At any rate, every time he’s interrogated in the Chamber about the real purpose of the enterprise, he avoids explaining it clearly. It was only after a question from Gentilhomme—the député from Châlons—that the government decided to furnish vague explanations. Hence the invitation from Goldfeller, slightly forced, for this official visit. What are we going to see up there?”
He pointed a finger at the summit of the monstrous edifice, around which our course was continuing—beginning to decelerate, however, while our train described a curve through the network of rails criss-crossing the landscape. We went through several depots containing engines and wagons, a succession of buildings and hangars cluttered with trains and materials, finally emerging into the vast glazed hall of a station.
At the platform we got down from the train. Initially, there was a confused hubbub, due primarily to the joy of escaping the sight of the obsessive mass momentarily. There was a crowd there—an entire crowd gathered for the visit: the President of the Council himself, accompanied by the Minister of Public Works and delegations invited from all the great state bodies; military men, engineers and magistrates; personalities representing all the arts; curiosity-seekers, friends of anybody and everybody; and women, whose carefully-composed costumes were beginning to be powdered with dust while walking along the carpeted gangways garlanded with green plants and flowers by which we emerged from the station.
We saw a stone wall and, a few meters above our heads, the vertiginous rise of the metallic carcass that was lost to sight in the sky. Closer at hand, that iron trellis was confirmed in its boldness and lightness by the very enormity of the proportions of all those buttresses and superimposed beams. The dimensions were without analogy, the aspect formidable and mysterious, like a forest of needles sprung from a cube of steel that served as its base, a wintry forest devoid of foliage, the color of rust, whose thick iron branches hid in their depths the secret of the man who was advancing to meet us.
“Goldfeller,” murmured Luneau.
Of medium height, stiff and spry, with a hairless face and a gaze of steel, his hair thick and beginning to go grey, we saw him appear under the enormous arch of a doorway opening in the foot of the tower. An orchestra, which I had not seen, struck up the national anthem, and heads were spontaneously bared, while Goldfeller walked proudly toward the ministers.
Around me, people were whispering: “Goldfeller… Goldfeller… the gem king.”
The name ran from mouth to mouth, whispered and murmured—then, as if acclaimed by an audience that had decided on flattery, a truly enthusiastic welcome was offered to the man by Piérard, the President of the Council.
“Government of the Republic…metallurgy…great interest…bonds of an old amity…personally happy…official consecration…”
Piérard’s voice, which is weak, only brought us a few shreds of sentences, but that was sufficient to augur the highly flattering tone of the assembly. At any rate, Goldfeller seemed unmoved by it; he listening, nodding his head, with an air of approval rather than gratitude: Good, Good, you’re only saying what has to be said. His dry voice, forceful and authoritative, rose up as soon as Piérard’s had fallen silent, and he immediately set out to describe and explain his work.
“At an average speed of 100 kilometers an hour, M. President, you’ve just made a circuit of our works in 20 minutes, which implies a circumference of about 30 kilometers. That’s a little more than the periphery of the fortifications of Paris. You can judge the base of the operation; I shall, if you will permit, take you to the culminating point of the construction-work.
Turning around, he retraced his steps; Piérard followed him like a docile subaltern. It seemed to me that the imperious voice of the man, who held his head high, those grey eyes, the greyish tint and the precocious wrinkles in that overbearing forehead, were not unknown to me. Where from?
People clustered around him, staring at him curiously, while he advanced, pointing at the elevator-room that was descending along the bare frame of the tower. Through the windows in the vast iron cage one perceived the luxurious installation, the Persian carpet with glossy reflections, the comfortable armchairs, the internal panels covered with paintings by masters.
An idea—an abrupt memory—suddenly occurred to me, which it was impossible for me to contain. I leaned toward Luneau. “Do you know who he resembles?” I said, in a low voice. “Cauchois—my math professor when I was at the Condorcet. It seems to me that I can still hear him calling me, dryly: ‘Bayoud, to the board.’”
In crowds, one can speak in a low voice, counting on the preoccupation of the individuals who are the actors absorbed in those sorts of ceremony. The man had to be endowed with supernormal perceptive powers for a few words produced discreetly to reach his ears. He heard them and, continuing to advance with a firm stride, turned his grey-tinted and clean-shaven face toward me; the slightly hazy veil that had seemed to cover my eyes was snatched away, like the door of a lantern. I received full on, and from head to toe, the shock of fulgurant stare, under which I felt my legs grow weak. Then, indifferently, and with his eyes almost devoid of expression, Goldfeller stood aside, with an amicable gesture, to let the ministers and their retinue pass.
An electrical bell, an instant’s delay, and the enormous elevator rose into the air, to the strains of a military march, played by a brass band installed on the platform above our heads.
Two other elevators had been sent down to bring the guests up to the summit of three works. While we jostled one another to get in, Luneau, always inclined to mock, with his meager head bobbing like an irritated cat’s, whispered in my ear: “Whatever you say, Bayoud, Goldfeller or Cauchois, he’s n
ot a cold-eyed type—someone, at any rate, that it’s better not to have as an enemy.”
Confusedly, that was also my opinion, but I tried not to think about the incident, only conserving a slight resentment and a tendency to consider everything in the ceremony in an ironic and ill-humored light.
We reached the summit, and found ourselves on a sort of round road a large suspended avenue, perfectly macadamized. Goldfeller’s dry voice dominated all others, giving explanations:
“Our first platform,” he was saying, “is at 500 meters, the second at 1250….”
A whole crowd was swarming around us, coming and going: the population of workers harnessed to the cyclopean task, some in work-clothes, tools in hand or on their shoulders, others idling momentarily, taking a momentary breather, getting in the way of the select visitors and considering us with the slightly satirical eyes of workers that one has just seen at work. All nations came together there: northern blonds, pale and plaid; brown loquacious Levantines; thick-lipped Africans whose teeth sparked in slightly cruel laughter; Chinese; Annamites with skirts tucked between their legs; and little Japanese shivering in their black lustrine blouses, inflated by the wind—which was free and violent at that height.
Above our heads, on the iron framework rising from the original foundation of the edifice, immense cranes were turning, causing metal beams and girders to rotate. As far as the eye could see the motors were panting and skips coughing as they were emptied. The blaring of sirens and prolonged whistle-blasts punctuated the maneuvers, but only the sonorous song of hammers riveting iron rose clearly above the rumble into which all the other noises of the colossal city made of an infinite number of construction-yards melted.
“What do you think of it?” whispered old Bourdon, the doyen of reporters, impressed although he had seen a great many things during 30 years of service.
I shrugged my shoulders amid the crowd of people were jostling to get to the head of the procession. “You see,” I shouted to Bourdon, from a distance, “if whoever undertook this construction hasn’t got a secret objective…he’s a mere madman.”
The World Above The World Page 17
