The Supreme Progress

by Brian Stableford

  The club in question participates in the delicate virtues of the modest locality. Industry and the arts are only debated very superficially by the members, who are voluntarily ignorant of the former and even more voluntarily weary of the latter. They have merely been led to adopt that respectable appellation in order to justify the express prohibition on talking politics or religion prudently imposed on the society members by article 375 of the statues. Honest people of all parties can thus meet one another on what is termed, in similar cases, “neutral ground,” around the green baize of a billiard table, without diplomacy, and play cards that were not at all electoral.

  The meeting-hall is very simple too, situated on the first and only upper floor of a house on the main square, offering little more luxury than an ordinary restaurant in the good old-fashioned North. The walls, lined to half way up with stucco painted the color of old oak, conclude in white plaster, on which are mounted, in frames, the usual brightly-colored advertisements by inventors of inventors of aperitifs, symbolizing the Bacchic ecstasy of their clients. The frantic recommendations of the texts conjoined with these images suppress any flicker of uncertainty regarding the choice of the most poisonous absinthe or the most corrosive “bitter.”

  At the back of the room is the aforementioned quadruped billiard-table, now immersed in shadow, but installed beneath a lantern-hood that pours a uniform light down upon the overly-frequent frustration of cannons. To the right, toward the foreground, stands the venerable counter, laden with scintillating glassware and equipped with a large beer-pump, like an altar consecrated to the so regrettably national cult of the god Gambrinus.52 Above this, its open battens pushed back against the side wall, is a sort of tabernacle in black wood filigreed with gold, where sparkling pewter beer-mugs hang, and a rack of seasoned clay pipes.

  The furniture is completed by square tables, wicker chairs, and a huge ceramic stove extending its sheet-metal flue toward the ceiling. The latter must be very cold, for we are in the shivery month of October and the furnace is not to be lit, according to article 411 of the statutes, until All Hallows.

  No poetic superfluity, therefore, bursts forth in the environment of this bourgeois rendezvous, except that, as the lights go out, certain livid gleams are projected from the billiard table and the shining mugs and crystal bottles, which allow the triangular neo-Greek summit of the Town Hall on the other side of the main square to be glimpsed through the windows, silhouetted in black against the blue moonlight: a fantastic transfiguration of that aediliatory edifice, the diurnal aspect of which is the acme of banality.

  In addition to these melancholy motifs, the room was chilled, as we have said, with the bitterness of the first shivers of autumn. The manager, costumed as a waiter, was drowsing behind the counter, protecting his head from the cold beneath an exceedingly unceremonious cloth cap. Sometimes, as he nodded off after serving a glass or a pint pot, he restored the circulation to his fingers with the aid of copper spirit-lamp whose flame was maintained for relighting pipes.

  In spite of the slow torpor of appearances, the Cub comprises the only decent place in Béthune where, at such an hour, a few recalcitrant citizens, differentiating themselves from the majority of indigenes who have already gone to bed, might persist in seeking some distraction. The laggards in question are widowers, bachelors and even a variety of husbands, all middle-aged, whom no prospect of amusement hastens back to their lodgings, or to whom the encroaching night truly seems to offer the piquancy of a slight disorder, or at least a little Platonic protest against the local customs of the excessively home-loving. There remain, in consequence, at a few tables around the big stove, four pairs playing piquet, impériale or bezique and a trio playing whist, with a group of spectators.

  Few words are spoken in the miserly light, but rather murmurs: the occasional exclamation, a few whistles of admiration at the play of a trump or the exhibition of an “86” or some other stroke of good or bad luck in the eternal farce of chance; then silence falls again and it would be difficult to describe the amplitude of the calm that extended thereafter.

  Thus had resumed, every evening at that hour for about half a century, the intimate pleasures of the club, which the subscribers, in their declining days, reproduced exactly, according to the habits of their deceased predecessors. Only at very rare intervals was some exceptional incident observed—for example, the unexpected visit of some unassiduous member, such as the two whose sudden entrance occurred that evening, exactly at the somnolent hour at which this story began.

  Monsieur Brunel Isidore made his entrance in the company of Doctor Fauber Théodule. Both took off their stiff black hats, low in form with very large brims—a style gladly adopted by the old people of the province, whose desire to seem important, stable principles and suspicion of changing fashions obtained obligatory external representation in that invariable severity of coiffure. Both removed their ample brown cloaks with velvet collars, according to the fashion of the legitimist opposition under Louis-Philippe. Then, when both had deposited these objects on chairs, they installed themselves next to the left-hand wall, at one of the tables least exposed to the glare of the last gas-lamps.

  They each used the spirit-lamp to light a long pipe brought by the manager, along with a pitcher of beer; having clinked their glasses, the emptied them by half—after which, sounding the gloom with his hard black gaze, beneath graying bushing eyebrows, M. Brunel said: “How is it that the Bonsor brothers hasn’t yet arrived?”

  “He probably won’t be long,” was Dr. Fauber’s reply.

  The irruption seemed at first to provoke a certain ill ease among the card-players; a tremor agitated the cards, from which eyes were turned away in order to examine the newcomers surreptitiously. It was as if the two old men had introduced an element of night-terror that they had brought from outside, or as if they emitted some mysterious effluvium of an inexplicable Satanism.

  They did, in fact, trace rather strange outlines in the semi-darkness: the long, thin face with a very prominent brow that Isidore Brunel framed with a tangle of white hair gathered into a forelock; and the strong head with the cunning features that Dr. Fauber rounded out beneath a cap of close-cropped grey hair. And did not both of them, with the carefully-shaven faces of scrupulous old egotists, seem to light up as the gleams of their narrow eyes scanned the audience with a premeditation of rascally joviality?

  In addition, it was soon observable that, without invoking too many considerations of superstitious diabolism, the club members were examining the newcomers with a rather aggressive interest, mingled with a strong dose of anticipatory irritation against the tendentious speeches with which Fauber Théodule and Brunel Isidore would doubtless excite their dialogue, according to their well-known custom.

  After all, it must be confessed that the Béthune Club only possessed legendary information regarding the title of doctor brought back by Fauber Théodule from a journey to America undertaken in his distant youth, by virtue of the marvelous surgical innovations that he had learned during that studious period from the principal Yankee pathologists. Nothing conclusive had ever been indubitably established regarding the origin and outcomes of M. Fauber’s superiorities. A similar veil of indecision clouded the functions of correspondent for numerous foreign periodicals of which M. Brunel Isidore boasted, and the profound philosophical articles that he supposedly addressed to those important publications. Sometimes, people even dared to call into question the authenticity of the multiple decorative diplomas to which the two gentlemen insinuated their entitlement, the respectable signatures of which—with a disdain more colored with ostentation than shaded with modesty—they always neglected to display, partially or totally, in public.

  It is to be supposed that the possession of a tidy fortune, inflated by individual supplements of annual income from unsecured loans, permitted the two old boys to wander over the summits of conveniently abstruse sciences without their being obliged to compromise their daily needs by any contact with any in
stitution or profession. Furthermore, the two friends closely guarded the secret of the essential nature of the absorbing project on which they were working—of which, during their rare chats in the Club, they only allowed glimpses of the most deceptive conclusions: generalities that were always excessively sardonic and funereal, which our bitter tricksters, giving the appearance of assuming a priori the credulous stupidity of the profanum vulgus, reeled off with the all-too-evident intention of troubling the serenity of listeners and sowing, in their candid optimism, derision, disenchantment and fear.

  Such was the inveterate grievance against these captious doctrinarians, which the present company attested by the severe absorption that they soon feigned to devote to the continuation of their card games, as if they were armored with intolerance against all nuisance.

  The hostility softened slightly, however, thanks to the fact announced by the two old quibblers regarding the probability of a visit from “the Bonsor brothers”—an individual whose bizarreries, however pronounced they might be, at least did not result in any acrimony with regard to the susceptibilities of the members of the Cub.

  Besides, “the Bonsor brothers” retained the sympathy of the honorable society, even though he had thus far foiled the ever-despotic exigencies of regional curiosity. He had been able to keep the secret of his biographical particularities under the eventually-sidetracked investigations of the little town, and no one, without being overly bothered about it, knew what kind of scientific or whimsical pastime the ex-banker had adopted since his retirement from business. The hints that he dropped regarding various machinations of occultism had not yet been accredited with anything outrageous of the indigenous prudishness. He seemed, on the contrary, only to seek out his friends Brunel and Fauber at the Club in order to make polite fun of their unbridled speculations, thus making himself the instrument of the prevailing rancor.

  Then again, there was a preliminary and almost mythical interest in the region In the very existence of the individual summarily indicated by the cooperative name of “the Bonsor brothers,” derived from an old social cause. Was it Évariste or Sébastien Bonsor who had formerly led their prosperous finance house? No one knew, and no one, in any circumstances whatsoever, had even clapped eyes on the “two brothers” simultaneously. A near-identity in age—for they had definitely taken care not to represent themselves as twins—a striking resemblance and a methodical mutual exchange of journeys and returns executed by night, favored a system of mystifying substitutions, which the alternating Bonsor brothers amused themselves by continuing, having made a fortune, in the isolated house that had been built for him on the outskirts of Béthune.

  The joke remained constant. Évariste finally became a chimera in the eyes of those did not believe in the implausibility of Sébastien, and—by a strange complication of the headache—Sébastien was only incarnate as the sum of an illusion that ceased to exist in the possibility of Évariste. Thanks to this skillful alter-egoism, the Bonsor duality avoided, at least by half, the annoyance of being “too frequently seen” that sojourns in narrow localities inflicts. They were only ever encountered “alone,” and the person who then passed for one of them was then hurriedly greeted by the celebrated name of “the Bonsort brothers,” which resolved synthetically, and politely, the suspicion that one might be talking to the other one.

  “He claimed, though, to have something curious to tell us,” said Dr. Fauber, observing in his turn the regrettable lateness of the authentic or supposed Bonsor. “Exactly what time is it, then?”

  M. Brunel took his large gold watch from his waistcoat and turned the face to the doctor. “Exactly what time?” he said. “Why, just the nothing at all of the present moment between the nevermore and the not yet.”

  The sentence, delivered in a slow and profound voice, burrowed into the silence of the club—whereupon the insistent chime of half past ten emerged from the melancholy belly of the big clock, marking like a knell the continual decease of duration between never and always.

  “Bravo!” applauded Dr. Fauber, putting on an apologist zeal somewhat in opposition to the audience’s opinion. “It neglects the trivial in favor of laughter, your philosophy!”

  “Yes, I confess, my philosophy will be joyful from now on,” M. Brunel let slip, in the wake of a long puff of smoke. He continued: “It has become cheerful, my philosophy, because I have finally been able, through the inextricable confusion of opposed facts and theories, to summarize it in a precise formula: in the accurate—or perhaps false, but at least explicit—expression of my own personal point of view.”

  “Formularization is everything!” Fauber stated, doctrinally.

  “But it also requires much obstinate research for its extraction,” Brunel complained.

  “Oh, we know what a hard worker you are,” Fauber joked.

  “And how much anguish that effort causes us,” Brunel sighed, again. “What disenchantments. On seeing one or other of the most celebrated theories falsified, what despairs arise in confrontation with the vain pursuit of the conclusive idea!”

  “Those are the true torments, utterly unknown to the vulgar,” M. Fauber emphasized, with a glance of utter scorn for the assembly deemed incompetent in such deductions.

  “Materialism, for example, seduced me for many years,” M. Brunel began to recount. “It satisfied me completely in everything concerning the observation of accessible nature—but how could I not accuse it, finally, of an absurd contradiction with its own principles when it strays beyond the firm ground of certainties and claims to determine analytically the unexperimentable unknown that predominates around us, and even within ourselves?”

  “It is certain,” M. Fauber agreed, “that the most ingenious assertions of that school leave us unable to explain anything of the speculative operations of the mind, to take account of even the simplest phenomena of intellectual initiative.”

  “No, Messieurs the Materialists,” said M. Brunel, rudely, “there is manifest within us a faculty creative of ideas, a conceptive life independent of sensory mechanism. Some of the abstractions of that reasoning power—that soul, if you wish—are not, whatever you might say, reflections or images, or repercussions of sensible facts. You will never—no, a thousand time no!—justify all that with your bundles of motor and sensory nerves and their attachment to the cerebral pulp, a simple inert mass to which, out of the pure expediency of affirmers short of proofs, you attribute some unknown intellectual energy, or some unknown interpretative automatism of sensation.

  “Your corporeal being, which you make into the perfect circulus of the psycho-physical assembly, only shows us an arbitrary aggregate of tissues, humors and saps, each able to vegetate independently, into which nature infiltrates nothing more that its properties of cohesion, reproduction and imperishability; and you advance nothing but a petition in principle—which is to say, a stupidity—when you declare the soul absent at the birth of an individual because the imperfection of the embryonic organs has not yet permitted that soul to become manifest. To say that that intellectual virtuality appears subsequently ex abrupto, among elements that only contain it in essence, is equivalent to the ultra-metaphysical absurdity of having it emerge from nothing.

  “You thus dispossess human beings of the original gift of continual and perfectible thought, which they believe their race to have and to transmit. It is in that hypothesis of an attachment to the human weave that people find a reason to exist, and you will never make them accept by preaching that problematic notion, in the ultimate depths of their consciousness, other than as a bitter and foolish derision for the suffering of living only to die, that they are not linked to anything anterior to them or succeeded by anything that surrounds them. Why, then, O too-exclusive materialists, do you refuse our organism accessory mentalities, which, in spite of their imperceptibility, are, after all, only material facts?”

  M. Brunel continued to reason in a rude and resounding voice, with that invective manner—perhaps a trifle provincial—whi
ch consists of impersonally but furiously ticking off imaginary individuals with opposed opinions.

  “Assuredly, assuredly!” exclaimed Dr. Fauber. “The senses and their annexes are only ever determined as the points of support of the vibrations or transmissions of the soul that haunts us and which conceives or expresses, through us, its ideative particularities. Of what importance to us, against that, are the rigorous denials of anatomists? Their microscopes have not encountered the soul. So what? Have the most exact descriptions of musical instruments, the most meticulous calculations of their sonority, the most limpid demonstrations of the rules of harmony and the most searching analyses of symphonic structure revealed any other origin for the lyrical emotions than the brain of the composer? There you are, then!”

  “Very good! Very good!” M. Brunel confirmed, “although it’s not the best argument to oppose to the detractors of animistic interference. I was forced, as you will easily understand, to fall back into the ancient groove of the spiritualists.53 But therein, instead of the blind fatality of things, there was the metaphysical illusion of words—nothing but the endless string of words proceeding to the obligatory consequences of their etymology: words that are both causes and effects and, by virtue of the artifice, drifting on a current of logic that has no source but the dictionary.

  “Materialism adapts us without restriction to organic agencies instituted by mere chance, by virtue of which everything that exists might be otherwise or might as well not exist at all. With spiritualism we are the tributaries of a heap of Absolutes that flow according to the signification imposed upon syllables, becoming the prisoners of a sequence of syllogisms and conclusions of which the brain is no more than the verbal keyboard. We find ourselves conduits—damn it!—with a mystical drive toward belief in eternity, divinity, finality, etc., which it is necessary to accept in themselves, for they have no other proofs and, more especially, no other relationships between them than the definitions of the names that are given to them.